Negating the Nakba Narrative

In this celebratory season of the birth of Israel, there is another, much less traditional observance playing out. Palestinians and the Arab world are commemorating it as a nakba, or catastrophe.With this single word, Palestinian-Arab leadership has attempted to encapsulate the entire Palestinian narrative that goes like this: “if only the State of Israel had not come into existence, the Palestinian people would be thriving in a state of their own.” Put another way, the Jewish people, aided and abetted by the Western powers, bear responsibility for all Palestinian pain and suffering.Palestinian aspirations for a state have always been legitimate. The reason the Palestinians have yet to achieve that objective is their own failure. They have fallen short of their goal because of tragic choices made by their leaders dating back at least 60 years. And yet they still blame Israel.How elegantly simple their formulation of blaming Israel appears; how neatly straightforward and powerful the image conveyed by “catastrophe” seems. It conjures such recent devastating occurrences as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the recent cyclone in Burma, and the even more recent 8.0-magnitude earthquake that shook China, all of which brought death, destruction, and displacement.The tragic consequences of these natural disasters are indeed a catastrophe for their victims. Only those human beings who are cruel or indifferent could ignore such suffering. In invoking nakba, the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters want the world to believe that a Jewish tsunami or a Jewish cyclone is the root cause of Palestinian suffering.Sixty-one years after the leaders of the Arab world violently rejected the United Nations vote to create a Palestinian-Arab state that would have run from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and 60 years after Arab armies invaded the newly created country of Israel, there are events around the world promoting the idea that there would not have been a nakba if Israel didn’t exist.But the history of the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East is incredibly complex and cannot be reduced to a one-word slogan. And it dates much further back than the last 60 years.If we focus on the post-World War II era, we see that the Palestinian concept of nakba is based on the assumption that the establishment of the Jewish State was an illegitimate act. It negates the authority of the U.N. decision to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states; it ignores all of the multi-dimensional geopolitical decisions that came before the U.N. partition resolution, such as the Balfour Declaration, the creation of Trans-Jordan, the British Mandate, and the Peel Commission; it ignores the Holocaust as a factor in the creation of Israel — all in the pursuit of justifying their conclusion that the Jewish people have no right to live in their homeland.As much as it is being advanced in the Palestinian and Arab world, the nakba view should never be given legitimacy. Not only is it the source of the ongoing war against Israel, but it undermines the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.Adopting the narrative underlying the nakba terminology leads in a direction away from responsibility for building a nation and toward illusion and blame, twin illnesses which have haunted the Palestinians for decades. What is referred to as a catastrophe in 1948 was largely self-inflicted by the Palestinians, with the support and encouragement of the Arab world. There would have been no war and no refugee problem had the Palestinians accepted the U.N. two-state solution of 1947.Indeed, there would have been a start down a path toward celebrating the 60th anniversary of the State of Palestine. The real disaster is not what the Jews and the world are blamed for, but rather the decisions and leadership of the Arabs. The self-destructive errors first made in 1947 have been repeated over and over by successive generations of Palestinian-Arab leaders, causing pain to Israel and suffering to the Palestinians.Today there is real hope for a different result. Today, Israel’s 60-year hope for peace is being heard by Palestinian-Arab leaders. Today, leaders of the Palestinians, like President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayad, are courageously trying to pursue a path toward realizing the Palestinian dream of a state, while the forces of Hamas hold the Palestinian people’s aspirations hostage to the false and destructive concept embodied in nakba. Today there are pragmatic leaders in the Arab world who came to Annapolis and let the Arab League openly talk about normalizing relations with Israel.Instead of looking backward and remaining anchored in the failed vision of a nakba, the world should join with Israel and the elected leadership of the Palestinian Authority to bring a new vision of success and good fortune to the future of the Palestinians.Mr. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, is the author of “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.”

Negating the Nakba Narrative

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