At the Riyadh Arab-China summit on Friday, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas demanded that the UK and the U.S. apologize for the Balfour Declaration, and that Israel apologize for the nakba (i.e., the “catastrophe” that befell Palestinian Arabs in 1948). Of a piece with this rhetorical focus on past grievances was the UN General Assembly’s recent vote to mark May 15 as “Nakba Day.” Adi Schwartz comments:
Contrary to popular belief in the West (and in certain circles in Israel), Nakba Day was not intended to mark the alleged humanitarian disaster that befell the Palestinian people in the 1948 war. They do not mourn the dead, the wounded, or the exiled, but the very establishment of the Jewish state. They mourn Jews gaining independence rather than the human cost of the war.
The term nakba was coined by the Syrian Arab intellectual Constantin Zureiq in a book he wrote in the summer of 1948 titled “The Meaning of Disaster.” Analyzing the Arab response to their failure to prevent the establishment of Israel, he wrote, “Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism in Palestine, stop impotent before it, and turn on their heels.”
The thought that 600,000 Jews managed to defeat 60 million Muslim Arabs at the time was—and still is—unimaginable to the Arabs. This is the greatest humiliation, the source of the frustration, rage, and violence directed toward the state of Israel. This is the true meaning of “nakba,” the disaster of the Jews’ success to declare a state despite all the efforts by the Arabs to prevent them from doing so.
The fact that Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day on May 15 is a clear indication of this. If the occasion was truly meant to remember the casualties among Palestinians, they could have a day that had more meaning loss-wise, such as the fighting in the Deir Yassin village or the day when Arab Haifa fell to the Jews. These events had a great impact on the course of the war, and they reflect a real Palestinian loss. But on May 15, nothing happened but the very declaration of Israel’s independence.
Read more on Israel Hayom: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/palestinians-help-israel-when-they-focus-on-nakba-day/