The Nakba Narrative: How An Arab War of Annihilation Became a Jewish Crime

Jun 3

“Nakba” is the Arabic word for “catastrophe” or “disaster.” The word was coined by Arab historian, Constantine Zureiq, not to describe Israel but to condemn Arab failure: when five Arabs countries rejected the U.N. Partition Plan and declared war on the newly established State of Israel, and lost. [1]

Since 1948, the facts surrounding that war have been systematically inverted and recast into a revisionist narrative. What began as an Arab war of aggression and annihilation against the Jewish people and newly formed Jewish state is now portrayed as a Jewish campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against innocent Arab civilians. This article examines the historical record.

A. The 1947 Partition Plan and Arab Rejection

From 1922 to 1948, prior to the establishment of the modern day State of Israel, the territory was governed as the “British Mandate of Palestine,” home to Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities under British administration. (See the Global Peace for Israel article titled Ottoman Empire to British Mandate of Palestine for additional background.) On November 29, 1947, the United Nations (U.N.) passed Resolution 181 proposing to partition the Mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state.

The Jewish leadership accepted the Partition Plan but the Arabs, through their leadership, the “Arab Higher Committee” rejected it entirely, refused to negotiate, and made no counter-proposal. [2][3] They refused to accept the existence of a Jewish State and all Arab member states at the U.N. voted against Resolution 181, the very same day it passed.

This was not a territorial dispute. Arab leaders made it clear. They rejected the existence of any Jewish State, regardless of its borders.

B. Pre-War Arab Declarations and Objectives: Annihilation, Not Negotiation

The language used by Arab leaders before and during the War leaves no room for ambiguity about their objectives.

The Arab League's General Secretary, General Azzam Pasha, declared shortly prior to the Arab invasion that if the Partition Plan were enacted, the Arabs would fight "a war of annihilation “ … “a momentous massacre in history that will be talked about like the massacres of the Mongols or the Crusades." [4] A CIA assessment concluded that “the Arabs agreed that a Zionist state could not be tolerated in the Arab world “ and the Arab coalition would prevent “the formation and functioning of a Jewish state.” [5]

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (“Grand Mufti”) and the most powerful political and religious Arab leader of the Mandate, rejected every proposed compromise. During World War II, he traveled to Germany, where he met with Hitler and urged the accelerated extermination of European Jews. When Arab armies invaded in May 1948, his war aim was unambiguous. Through his spokesman, al-Husseini declared that the Arabs' goal was "the elimination of the Jewish state." [6]

Calls to “annihilate" "massacre” and “kill Jews everywhere you find them” are not the language of territorial negotiation. They are the language of extermination or genocide.

C. Arab Displacement and Evacuation: No Ethnic Cleansing or Genocide

The historical record shows that large numbers of Arab civilians left their homes not because of Jewish expulsion but in response to directives from their own Arab leadership. Historian Benny Morris documented that the Arab Higher Committee "ordered the evacuation of 'several dozen villages, as well as the removal of dependents from dozens more" between April and July 1948. [7] In January 1948, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem told a delegation of Haifa Arabs that they should "remove the women and children from the danger areas in order to reduce the number of casualties," and continued to encourage evacuations in the months which followed. Contemporary reporting confirms that Time Magazine reported on May 3, 1948 that the mass evacuation was "prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders," and that Arab leaders hoped that the withdrawal of Arab workers would paralyze the city. [8]

Arab civilians were told that invading Arab armies would quickly defeat the Jewish forces - which had not even been formed as a national army yet - and that they could return home after victory. That promise proved catastrophically false. But the displacement which followed was a consequence of a war which the Arabs chose to start, and not a Jewish campaign of ethnic cleansing.

D. The Establishment of Israel and Arab Declaration of War

On May 14, 1948, the British withdrew from the Mandate and Israel declared independence, establishing the first and only modern Jewish State.

The following day, May 15, 1948, the Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded. What followed is known as Israel’s “War of Independence.” The War lasted more than a year before Arab states accepted defeat. It produced thousands of casualties and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, both Jews and Arabs, across the Region.

E. Acknowledgment of Nakba Defeat in Arab World

Zureiq, who coined the term “Nakba” wrote: "Seven Arab countries declare war on Zionism in Palestine… Seven countries go to war to abolish the partition and to defeat Zionism, and quickly leave the battle after losing much of the land of Palestine — and even the part that was given to the Arabs in the Partition Plan." Zureiq concluded: "We must admit our mistakes… and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot." [5]

There was no genocide or ethnic cleansing of Arab civilians in Israel’s War of Independence. This was a war, launched by Arab States, lost by Arab States, and whose costs fell on both Jews and Arabs.

Arab defeat and displacement were disastrous for the Arab People. But, the catastrophe was self-inflicted.

F. The Revisionist Inversion of Historical Facts and Erasure of Jews in Arab Countries

Today’s Nakba narrative inverts the historical record or evidence. It recasts a war of aggression and annihilation initiated by the Arab states and leadership who rejected the Partition Plan, and then threatened genocide and launched a military invasion, as a story of Arab innocence, and Jewish criminality. The Arab rejection of the Partition Plan is reframed as a Jewish campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Arab military defeat and the displacement it produced are reframed as unprovoked dispossession. And the existence of the State of Israel is presented as a catastrophe or crime in and of itself. A crime simply by virtue of its very existence.

The Nakba narrative also erases the forced displacement of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries in 1947 and 1948 which began simultaneously around the establishment of the Jewish State. In direct response to Israel’s founding, approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled from Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen, and billions of dollars of Jewish property was confiscated. [9]

These ancient Jewish communities, some predating Islam by a millennium, faced coordinated state-sanctioned persecution and violence: bank accounts were frozen, property was confiscated, livelihoods destroyed and communities dismantled by government decree. In Iraq, Zionism was declared a capital crime. In Syria, government tolerated pogroms erupted in Aleppo as Jewish assets were seized. In Egypt, bombs were detonated in Jewish neighborhoods, killing dozens. In Algeria, anti-Jewish decrees were imposed; in Yemen, there were bloody pogroms which killed Jews. The total land seized from Jewish communities across Arab countries was five times the size of Israel.

These incidents were not isolated and spontaneous; these were the deliberate dismantling of Jewish life in Arab lands which had previously existed for over 1,000 years, timed precisely with the founding of the Jewish state.

G. Conclusion

The Nakba is commemorated annually on May 15th, the anniversary of Israel’s founding, a framing which treats the mere existence of the State of Israel as an ongoing catastrophe. But the evidence points to a different conclusion.

The “catastrophe” of 1948 was not about the founding of Israel. It was not about a loss of “their” land. Rather, it was a direct consequence of a war of annihilation launched by Arab States whichrejected coexistence and pursued annihilation.

Catastrophic Arab failure has been turned into an indictment of Jewish self-determination.

Footnotes

[1] Zureiq, C. (1948). Ma'na al-Nakba. Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayeen, Beirut

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/res181.asp

https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/cwr/97178.htm

[3] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v05p2/d69

[4] Akhbar al-Yom, Cairo (October 11, 1947)(Interview with Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha)

[5] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v05p2/d69

[6] Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem, 1st ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972)

[7] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

[8] https://www.camera.org/article/contradicting-its-own-archives-new-york-times-expulsion-escape-of-haifas-arabs/

The Arabs of Haifa," Time Magazine, May 3, 1948