What is Nakba Day commemorating 'the catastrophe'?

The Nakba is a day marked by Palestinians and their supporters around the world to commemorate the seismic shift that happened on May 15, 1948.

On that date, Israel declared independence from British rule, and the surrounding Arab armies immediately attacked the newborn state. Around 850,000 Arabs in the land either left or were forcibly expelled, never to return again.

While Independence Day is marked in Israel on the date according to the Jewish calendar (on Iyar 5), Palestinians have declared the anniversary on the Gregorian calendar, the "Nakba" (النَّكْبَة) meaning "catastrophe" or "disaster," on May 15 each year.

The consequences of that date have been devastating for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees, but shorthand versions of the Nakba often gloss over some of the most important facts. 

Reading some accounts, you would be forgiven for thinking Israel declared independence and then set upon the Arabs living in the land, turfing them out, and precipitating the war. However, key details have been omitted, leading to a mischaracterization of what happened.

The war was initiated by a coalition of Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan (then Transjordan), Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, determined to prevent the Jewish state from forming on what was considered Muslim land.

A decade earlier, the Arab Higher Committee reacted to the recommendations by the 1937 Peel Commission to partition the land, saying: “This country does not belong only to Palestine Arabs but to the whole Arab and Muslim Worlds.” The creation of an autonomous Jewish state on what was considered Muslim land, therefore, was an anathema that had to be stopped.

And here’s the kicker. The original context of the word “Nakba” came from Constantin Zureiq, the man credited with coming up with the word to describe the Arab failure to dislodge the Jews when it was incumbent on them to do so. 

In his 1948 book, “The Meaning of Disaster,” Zureiq wrote:

“The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is no simple setback or light, passing evil. It is a disaster in every sense of the word and one of the harshest of the trials and tribulations with which the Arabs have been afflicted throughout their long history—a history marked by numerous trials and tribulations. Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism in Palestine, stop impotent before it, and then turn on their heels.”

In other words, the disaster was not the displaced Palestinian Arabs but the failure of the combined forces surrounding them to prevent Israel’s establishment.

“The representatives of the Arabs deliver fiery speeches in the highest international forums, warning what the Arab states and peoples will do if this or that decision be enacted. Declarations fall like bombs from the mouths of officials at the meetings of the Arab League, but when action becomes necessary, the fire is still and quiet, the steel and iron are rusted and twisted, quick to bend and disintegrate. The bombs are hollow and empty. They cause no damage and kill no one," he continued.

Shortly afterward, Zureiq expresses his concern both for the Palestinian Arabs who were displaced and also those left to live in the new Jewish state: “Four hundred thousand or more Arabs are forced to flee pell-mell from their homes” (the footnotes point out that the number of refugees was later estimated to be well over 900,000 according to UN estimates in 1955). 

“They have their wealth and property stripped from them and wander like madmen in what is left of Palestine and in the other Arab countries. They do not know what fate has in store for them, nor what means of livelihood they should seek. They wonder whether they will be forced to return to their homes, there to live under the Zionist shadow and to bear whatever abuse or scorn, assimilation or extinction the Zionists may impose on them,” he laments. 

However, the fate of Arabs living in the “Zionist shadow” in Israel today is considerably more comfortable than for many living in those very nations that attacked in the first place. 

While hundreds of thousands were either forced out or fled by choice, many stayed and today there are approximately two million Israeli Arabs living with equal rights.

To give some context, there are proportionally three times as many Muslims in Israel as there are in the UK, constituting at least 18% of Israel’s population while representing just 6% in the UK. These Israeli Arabs enjoy high life expectancy, good health, education and employment opportunities, have democratic representation and serve at the highest levels of society. Not so disastrous really. 

For those who left, however, it has been a different story.

1948 witnessed expulsions, massacres and forced marches at the hands of Israeli soldiers, notably from Lod and Ramle, predominantly Arab cities just south of Tel Aviv. There are also terrible stories from many believers that chill the bone – the grandmother of a friend of mine was forced by Jewish fighters to walk to her death into the sea. She somehow escaped and ended up in Lebanon. Needless to say, the family is not fond of Israel today. 

An Arab pastor named Yousef Daqwar told his story to Julia Fisher in her book “A Future for Israel” about how his father had watched children die from exposure and starvation after being displaced from their homes in the Galilee. There has been wholesale slaughter and expulsion of entire villages, witnessed and experienced by Christians and Muslims alike. For many thousands, 1948 really was catastrophic. These events are tragically part of the historical landscape, and they should not be minimized or ignored. 

But while these stories are part of the reality, it is also true that Arab armies were ordering people to evacuate and that many obeyed, assuming they could soon return.

In a police report from Haifa from April 26, 1948, the superintendent describes the large-scale evacuation carried out by Arab leaders: 

“Evacuation was still going on yesterday and several trips were made by 'Z' craft to Acre. Roads too, were crowded with people leaving Haifa with all their belongings. At a meeting yesterday afternoon Arab leaders reiterated their determination to evacuate the entire Arab population and they have been given the loan of ten 3-ton military trucks as from this morning to assist the evacuation.”

https://x.com/Isaac_Halevi/status/1924221532751962422?s=20 

Similarly, Syrian Prime Minister Khaled Al-Azm wrote in his memoirs in 1973, “We made them leave Israel.” The book was published after his death and includes the admission, ”Since 1948, it is we who made them leave… We brought disaster upon Arab refugees; by bringing pressure upon them to leave Israel… We have rendered them dispossessed … We have accustomed them to begging… We have participated in lowering their moral and social level… Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon… men, women, and children – all of this in the service of political purposes.”

Abdul Rahman Azzam, the first secretary-general of the Arab League, had high hopes that the Jewish aspirations for autonomous rule would be quashed and told a British reporter that he expected the land to be given not to the Palestinian Arabs but to the Arab nations around it.

Their plan was for Transjordan “to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza” while “the Egyptians would get the Negev. The Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to Lebanon,” he said. Not even a whiff of a free Palestinian state then.

Azzam boasted that there would be “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre” against the Jews that would be spoken of “like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” Instead, the 1948 war resulted in a Nakba for the Palestinian Arabs. Many Arabs living in the land had little agency in the decisions that led to the war and ultimately suffered from the Arab League’s determination to destroy the nascent State of Israel before it could fully emerge.

Despite the overwhelming odds, however, Israel was victorious. Zureiq’s self-reflective book suggested that the Arab defeat was due to a lack of preparation and an underestimation of the adversary. Perhaps he has a point, as Israel was not fighting alone.

And for all his confident assertions, perhaps Azzam would have benefited from reading the promises of Israel’s restoration in the Bible to understand what they were up against, and also from the wisdom of Job, who acknowledged in the end: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2).