What Is Nakba Day? Here’s the Truth the Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You

By Jeremy R. Hammond

The New York Times’ reporting on the meaning of Nakba Day shows how the major media systematically whitewash the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from history.

Today is “Nakba Day”, which commemorates the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine in 1948, a crime carried out by Zionist forces in order to establish there a “Jewish state”. But that’s not how the Western mainstream media explain it. Instead, Al-Nakba—Arabic for “The Catastrophe”—is whitewashed from history. The New York Times, America’s “newspaper of record” and arguably the most influential newspaper in the world, provides a useful case study.

The Times sometimes presents an explanation for the Nakba taken straight from Zionist propaganda, contending simply that Nakba Day is when Palestinians lament the establishment of Israel in 1948—as though Palestinians had no cause for lamentation other than an apparent hatred of Jews.

Sometimes in presenting the Zionist narrative, the Times does acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees in 1948, but this is characterized as simply a consequence of a war started by the Arabs against the newly formed state of Israel—thus again leaving readers with the same false impression that the Arabs were the aggressors and had no reasonable cause.

Sometimes, the Times acknowledges that many Arab villages were also destroyed, though the fact that these numbered in the hundreds is rarely if ever mentioned.

On extremely rare occasions in the past, the Times has used the term “ethnic cleansing” in the context of Israel’s founding and the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis that persists to this day. But the application of this term to what happened in 1948 is characterized as though dubious and controversial.

This is rather puzzling for a newspaper that in 1979 reported how former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had provided a firsthand account of how Palestinian civilians were deliberately expelled from their homes by Zionist forces.

It’s true, of course, that there are those who deny that what occurred was ethnic cleansing, but their denials are simply untenable. Israeli historian Benny Morris, for example, has argued that the term “ethnic cleansing” doesn’t apply, even though his own published research shows that ethnic cleansing is exactly what occurred.

As I relate in my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in 2011, an episode occurred that is particularly illuminating with respect to how the New York Times willfully deceives its readers.

On May 14 of that year, Ethan Bronner wrote in the Times, “After Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were also destroyed.”

A reader wrote to the editors to object to the Times omitting the fact that hundreds of thousands of Arabs had already been expelled from their homes before the Zionists unilaterally declared the existence of their “Jewish state” on May 14, 1948.

The public editor, Arthur S. Brisbane, relayed Bonner’s response that “space was limited in a short story and he wasn’t trying to recite the full history.”

In other words, neither Mr. Bronner nor his editors considered the fact particularly relevant, and due to space limitations, nothing could be done but mislead readers into believing that the flight and expulsions began only after the neighboring Arab states had sent their armies into Palestine.

We can demonstrate what a sorry excuse that was by simply rewriting the sentence to accurately communicate what happened in the same number of words: When the state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states were sent to stop the ethnic cleansing operations that had already been underway for several months. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.

There is only one purpose for the Times’ deception: to whitewash the ethnic cleansing from history. This is in keeping with the function that the major media serve of manufacturing public consent for government policies.

Just as the media spewed state propaganda to manufacture consent for the US government’s illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003, so do they spew propaganda to manufacture consent for the US government’s policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.

By whitewashing the Zionists’ crimes against the Palestinians, the media whitewash Western governments’ complicity in them.

Indeed, the ethnic cleansing was a crime that was facilitated by the victorious Allied Powers in the wake of the First World War, particularly Great Britain, which enforced a belligerent occupation of Palestine after the dissolution of the defeated Ottoman Empire precisely in order to deny Palestine’s inhabitants their right to self-determination so that the Zionist project could proceed apace to reconstitute the Arab territory into a demographically “Jewish state”.

The policy course instituted by Britain’s infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes in Palestine in order for Israel to be established.

By the time the Zionists unilaterally and with no legal authority declared the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, more than a quarter of a million Arabs had already become refugees. By the time armistice lines were drawn in 1949, more than 700,000 Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed. The reason this refugee crisis has persisted to this day is because Israel refuses to allow Palestinian refugees to exercise their internationally recognized right to return to their homeland.

There is an institutionalized bias in the Western mainstream media toward the Israel-Palestine conflict, such that the fact that ethnic cleansing operations were already underway before the neighboring Arab states militarily intervened in Palestine is deemed irrelevant. Disclosing such facts doesn’t lead readers toward the desired conclusions.

The New York Times’ treatment of what “Nakba Day” means to Palestinians illustrates how the media attempt to conceal important historical facts from the general public in order to legitimize the heinous crime by which the “Jewish state” came into being and thus also to whitewash Western governments’ complicity in it.

But the truth cannot be concealed from the masses forever. The historical facts, no thanks to the major corporate media, are becoming known to an increasing number of people, prompting many to become active in the struggle for a just peace.

The governments of the world aren’t going to get the job done. The mainstream media refuse to do it. It is up to us to effect the paradigm shift necessary for a just peace to be realized. It is to empower people with the knowledge they need to speak out and help effect that shift that I wrote the book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Without US support, Israel would simply not be able to sustain its oppressive occupation regime. Effecting the paradigm shift necessary so that it remains no longer politically tenable for the US to continue its policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians—or for the major media to continue deceiving the public about the fundamental essence of the conflict—should therefore be the primary goal of activists in the struggle for a just peace.

American activists in particular have a special responsibility in that regard.

Jeremy R. Hammond

The government perpetually lies to the public about important issues. The mainstream media dutifully serve to manufacture consent for criminal policies. I free people's minds by exposing state propaganda intended to keep them in servitude to the politically and financially powerful. My writings empower readers with the knowledge to see through the deceptions and fight for a better future, for ourselves, our children, and future generations of humanity. I'm an independent political analyst, journalist, publisher and editor of Foreign Policy Journal, and author of several books. I'm also a writing coach who helps bloggers and journalists communicate their ideas more effectively to make a greater positive impact.

The problem with normalizing the Nakba

Benny Morris’s recent interview in Haaretz has been summed up in one of his quoted statements about the 1948 Nakba, which he described as “a very clean war, all in all”. For Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from their lands and subsequent generations faced with perpetual dispossession, the Israeli historian’s words ring cruel, dishonest and untrue.

The metaphor of a “clean war”, however, goes beyond generalising the Nakba denial, which is nothing new in terms of Israel’s fabricated narratives. Morris has articulated a normalised Nakba, which is also one of the reasons why the international community has exploited the Palestinian cause for so long and will continue to do so, as long as the complicity in creating Israel’s colonial presence in Palestine remains intact.

This complicity goes beyond the 1948 Nakba. Morris gives an erroneous context to the Nakba, stating, “What happened to the Palestinians since 1948 is a certain oppression, which includes, here and there, a small number of crimes – but that happened within the framework of a war between two national movements, at whose door the blame can be laid.” From this false premise, Morris goes on to dispel arguments that Israel committed genocide and attributed usage of the term to purported “Palestinian propaganda”. According to Morris, it is the numbers that define genocide, not the intent.

Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly specifies the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”  Acts of genocide include deliberate killing, physical or mental harm, exacerbating humanitarian conditions to bring physical destruction, imposing birth control measures and forced transfer of children from one group to another. Contrary to Morris’s claims, statistics are not a determining factor in deciphering genocide.

The UN’s refusal to consider Israel’s genocidal intent and practices when it comes to Palestinians has resulted in a situation where the international community will not admit that the elimination of Palestinian rights is a direct result of Israel’s colonial violence. International politics is based upon compromising historic Palestine to the detriment of Palestinians – the two-state paradigm is the most obvious example of forcing a compromise to eliminate Palestinian rights.

This point is amplified by Morris when he speaks of the need, from an Israeli perspective to fake diplomatic intent to pursue the two-state compromise. “You have to look like you’re pursuing peace, even if you’re not.” The statement is reflective of how Israel has shunned all forms of accountability as long as the rhetoric satisfies the requirements of diplomatic engagement.

Morris exposes slivers of how Israel manipulates history to justify its present politics. Diluting Zionist atrocities has enabled Israel and the international community to alter perceptions in the aftermath of the Nakba.  While the international community has refrained from backing Israel’s denial of the existence of indigenous Palestinians, it has tacitly played along with the systematic dispossession of Palestinians.

The Nakba was diluted to a conflict, with the aim being to normalise Zionist ethnic cleansing into a series of events determined by two equal participants. In turn, the international community was also able to deflect attention away from the fact that it failed to judge Israel by its own conventions as regards to genocide. This has enabled it to pursue the politics of a hypothetical two-state framework with absolute impunity.

It is true that Morris’s interview contributes to the erasure of Palestinian history and collective memory. Yet isolating this process without ruminating about its implications on present-day politics is equally dangerous. Israel has relied on its historians to disseminate its narratives and it does so to further its political gains. For Israel, there is barely any need to justify its colonisation of Palestine due to the level of international complicity in Zionist endeavours.

For Palestinians, this erasure is an impediment not only to assert their historical narratives, but also to make the case for their anti-colonial struggle at an international level. It is important not to confine Morris’s words to the academic context which he speaks of; his words contain political significance that not only damages Palestinians’ prospects, but also reveals how the dynamics of collusion between Israel and the international community have utilised compromise to eliminate the implementation of Palestinian rights and, as a result, reduce the space to claim Palestinian narratives.

HOW THE MLI IS NORMALISING ISRAEL THROUGH SELECTIVE NARRATIVES

RAMONA WADI

The Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI) barely manages to conceal its agenda. Launched in 2013, it has strived to marginalise Palestinians through its programme that emphasises fabrications of “conflict” to justify the prevailing Zionist colonial narrative. The institute’s choice of manipulation tactics lies in how to apply selectivity and disseminate the results to a wide audience. While such tactics are unlikely to convince anyone with an understanding of the Israeli settler-colonial expansion and violence in Palestine, the MLI’s programme includes visits to Israel with the intention of communicating the Israeli colonial narrative. In keeping with its purported expansion of “participants’ critical understanding”, it defines the space and context of how Palestinians are represented by the institute. The tactic employed is to manipulate Palestinian aims by eliminating their expression and speaking over them. Palestinians’ function, in this case, is to build the coloniser’s narrative and exist as a mere appendage, rather than embody their own history and memory. “Serving Israel” is the foundation of the Shalom Hartman’s Institute. Through its programs, among these, the MLI, it invites “American Muslims to explore how Jews understand Judaism, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood.” The overt implication of religion obscures the ultimate aim — that of normalising Israel through selective narratives that serve the colonial project. Some weeks ago, Wajahat Ali’s article in the Atlantic, titled A Muslim Among the Settlers elicited furore and accusations of normalising Israel’s existence. Reading the article, it is clear how a very selective process was applied to document the settler narrative. Besides use of language that implied doubts as regards to Israeli violations, mere landscape descriptions contrasting Israel and the occupied West Bank were juxtaposed as orderly and disorderly without any context as to why territory inhabited by Palestinians is described in a crude manner, while labelling Palestinians “creative” for seeking ways to live with the absence of basic necessities, such as water. Earlier, on May 15, the Times of Israel published an article by Donniel Hartman, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute, titled “The Moral Challenge of Gaza”. Unlike Ali’s article, which plays with barely disguised nuances that normalise Israeli violence, Hartman openly justifies the IDF’s use of force against Palestinians demonstrating at the Gaza border:

“What is happening on the Gaza border is not a protest against the reality of life in Gaza, but an attack against the sovereignty of Israel and its right to exist.” Hartman says that “Palestinians have every right to their narrative of Nakba”, but the settler-population is also within its rights to “express joy at being in our home country, whose capital is Jerusalem.” From describing Israel’s presence in Palestine as a benevolent project to silencing Nakba memory through state-fabricated narratives of the homeland, it is easy to see that settler-colonialism takes precedence in both of these writing examples. It is not about eliminating Palestinian presence, but justifying the settler-colonial population defining its existence at the expense of Palestinians, their territory, and their memory. What purported understanding is the MLI, through the institute, seeking to impart? Similarly to the international political impositions, it employs normalisation through the two-state compromise. The coercion in such an agenda is concealed through references to “peace”, which makes it incumbent upon Palestinians to legitimise the violent colonisation of their land and people while getting fragments of territory in return. The international community uses the term “peace” as a euphemism for the acceptance of violence. Little differs with the Shalom Hartman institute and its programs, except for the fact that it finds willing participants in society that can further the Israeli agenda of oblivion when it comes to Palestinian narratives and history. Politics and propaganda can play its role in the normalisation of Israeli violence through the insistence of the two-state paradigm. Just as the international community is relying upon the obsolete imposition, declared so by the Middle East Quartet, the Shalom Hartman Institute’s evoking of the same turns the defunct into opportunities for Israel, through its programs and participants.

Ramona Wadi Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger specializing in the struggle for memory in Chile and Palestine.

Jerusalem is NOT the Capital of Israel

Zafar Bangash Even in a world gone mad, President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem is not only illegal, it proves beyond any doubt that he is a raving lunatic. It has already increased hatred for the US and Zionist Israel. To show how little regard Israel has for human life, especially Palestinian lives, its occupation forces slaughtered more than 60 Palestinians and injured thousands of others in Gaza the same day as the US “ceremony” to move the embassy was underway in Jerusalem. Here is why Jerusalem can never be the capital of Zionist Israel that claims to be a “Jewish” State. The overwhelming majority of Jewish people reject Israel’s claim to being a Jewish State, and for very good reason. The Jewish people are a religious not a national group, even though the Zionists insist on an ethnic identity. While Jerusalem is sacred to the Jewish people — as it is to Muslims and Christians — it is only in the religious and spiritual sense. People who have even limited knowledge of the Torah will confirm that by turning Jerusalem into a political issue, the Zionists are violating the teachings of the Torah. Observant Jews have stated this repeatedly although their voices are drowned out by the vulgar propaganda of the Zionists that has brainwashed or blackmailed many people into swallowing these nonsensical claims. Non-Jews are forced into silence by allegations of anti-Semitism if they criticize Israeli barbarism.

The time has come to state loud and clear that Zionist Israel and its backer, the US, are terrorist states. They are a threat to the entire world and need to be checked before they blow it up in smoke. Stopping them will not be easy but those with a conscience are left with no choice. The only thing America knows is how to kill innocent people. Since 9/11, it has slaughtered more than four million people worldwide. Even at home, some 36–40,000 Americans are killed each year in gun-related violence. That adds up to nearly 600,000 murdered at home in the same period. One would be hard-pressed to find a more accurate description for barbarism. And Zionist Israel has kept pace by slaughtering unarmed Palestinians with weapons provided by the US. It is revealing that on the day the Palestinians were observing the Nakbah, Israeli snipers perpetrated another blood bath of unarmed Palestinians. The Nakbah (Catastrophe) befell the Palestinians 70 years ago when Zionist terrorist gangs killed and ethnically cleansed them from their homes and villages. Zionist Israel was created in blood and Trump’s embassy move shed more innocent blood even while American officials and evangelical priests were blessing the opening of the US’ new embassy in Jerusalem as “God’s work.” One wonders what God do these demons worship that would take pleasure in the slaughter of innocents! Zionist Israel is an illegitimate entity; it has stolen the land of the Palestinians for settlement by illegal squatters from Europe, Russia, and North America. Like the European settlers in North America several centuries earlier, the same mentality is at work in colonized Palestine. The indigenous population has to be slaughtered, terrorized, and ethnically cleansed to make room for the marauders. This is being crowned by taking over Jerusalem to convey the message that the Palestinians have been totally defeated. But the Palestinians refuse to be defeated or go away silently to live on their Bantustan-type reservations. They are standing up and fighting back with their bare hands, like little Davids against the Zionist Goliath, and that day is not far when they will reclaim every inch of their land from the clutches of the Zionists.

This is the internal situation in Palestine. There is also another dimension to this tragedy: the external environment surrounding colonized Palestine. All Arabian regimes surrounding Palestine except Lebanon and Syria are in league with the Zionist colonizers, referred to as Israel’s “first line of defence” by David Ben Gurion. These regimes have to be dealt with in the same manner as Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi did more than 930 years ago when he confronted the Crusaders in Palestine. The great Muslim warrior first liberated the lands surrounding Palestine from the clutches of the tyrannical regime that had aligned itself with the usurpers before taking on the Crusaders. Before the liberation of Palestine can be realized, the Arabian regimes surrounding Palestine have to be reclaimed. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia top this list of traitors. The latter two are artificial entities carved out by European colonialists from the remains of the Ottoman Sultanate. These regimes have aligned themselves with the enemies of Islam and are acting as their praetorian guards against struggling Muslims. The situation is not as bleak as it may appear. The Palestinians have not surrendered; Syria has joined the resistance front after surviving the mercenary onslaught orchestrated by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and their henchmen. Zionist Israel is beginning to feel the heat in the colonized Golan Heights. How long will it be before these colonizers are driven out of there, opening the way for the liberation of the rest of Palestine? Zafar Bangash is Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT).

A 70 Year long Story in interview

Ramzy Baroud

He was born in a refugee camp in Gaza, his childhood friend was one of the four killed in the First Intifada uprising of 1987 and his father died under siege in Gaza. Ramzy Baroud looks back at the past 70 years and recounts why this Nakba is more important than ever.

During the First Intifada uprising of 1987, the Israeli military carried out what the residents of my refugee camp in Gaza referred to as the “Eid Massacre”. The killing of four young people in the camp, including my childhood friend Raed Munis, took place on the first day of the Muslim holiday.

Once the young men were buried and as we mourned in our humble refugee home, my father fiddled hopelessly with the radio, trying to find any news broadcast, anywhere, that reported on the terrible events that took place in our camp on that day. No one did.

It was then that I realised that the story of my neighbourhood needed to be told. With time, I also understood that my refugee camp was a microcosm of a larger phenomenon in which the Palestinian discourse is purposely marginalised and Palestinian voices are deliberately muted.

For nearly 25 years, I have undertaken a journey to reclaim the narrative of Palestine, on behalf of my neighbours, my friends and my people.

My recently published book, The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, is my latest volume that aims to provide a collective articulation of the Palestinian struggle, centred around the Nakba – the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 – and the millions of refugees that continue to live in exile since then.

One of the stories in the book is that of Ahmad Al-Haaj, an ageing communist living in Gaza. He escaped Palestine in 1948, when his village Al-Sawafir was attacked and then set ablaze by invading Jewish militias. These militias later became the Israeli army. To this day, Al-Haaj, 85, refuses to build a house in the besieged Gaza Strip.

I spoke to Al-Haaj as I conducted a series of interviews with Palestinian refugees in Palestine, the Middle East and around the world to try and understand what compels them to revere their “right of return” to their homes from which they, or their ancestors, were expelled 70 years ago.

Al-Haaj does not own a home in Gaza, because he fears that the moment he does he will resign himself to his exile. For him it is an emotional burden that he simply cannot afford to take on. He spent many years in an Israeli prison for his refusal to accept banishment to Gaza.

Throughout his life, Al-Haaj often thought of Al-Sawafir and told his family stories to anyone willing to listen: their happy lives before exile; the pain and loss after. The same sentiment echoes amongst many Palestinians, even those who were born after the Nakba.

I spoke to young people who feel so deeply connected to villages which all vanished long before they were born.

The Nakba – which in Arabic means “the catastrophe” – is not a mere date to be commemorated every 15 May; it is far more encompassing than a single event, however tragic. It represents the life that millions of Palestinians were unfairly denied; every day since has been a life of destitution, exile and want.

The Nakba, in some way, has thus become part of the collective identity for all Palestinians. It is now so ingrained into the consciousness of all Palestinians that it would be impossible to imagine a truly peaceful future without justly and carefully addressing that original crime.

Although I was born and raised in a Gaza refugee camp and then moved to the United States, strongly relating to a village that was erased from the map decades earlier is not, for me, an irrational act. My village of Beit Daras remains the single most important piece of earth that truly matters to me.

As a child, I learned from my grandfather to be proud: he was a handsome and strong peasant, with an unshakable faith. He managed to hide his deep sadness so well after he was expelled from his home in Palestine, along with his entire family. As he aged, he would sit for hours, between prayers, searching within his soul for the beautiful memories of his past. Occasionally, he would let out a mournful sigh, a few tears; yet, he never accepted his defeat, or the idea that Beit Daras was forever gone.

My political consciousness developed as a result of the misery of the refugee camps, the determination to redeem the painful past, which saw the demise of my village, and the perpetual destitution of my family. My parents and grandparents, along with siblings, friends, classmates and neighbours are all buried in the refugee camp. My father died under siege in Gaza and neither Israel nor Egypt allowed me to see him for a final goodbye. Our Nakba is ongoing.

Seventy years after the Nakba, the battlefield is still there, delineated most starkly at the Gaza border where tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees continue to rally, holding their  Great Return March, starting 30 March and ending on Tuesday, 15 May.

At both ends of this ongoing fight, Palestinians and Israelis champion a legacy that spans decades: Palestinian youth are carrying on with the same struggle that was espoused by generations of Palestinians since the onset of the Nakba. The Israeli army – which has killed scores and wounded thousands in recent weeks – is implementing the same bloody policies that armed Zionist gangs carried out when they ethnically cleansed the citizens of Palestine in 1948.

It is as if time has stood still, or that history has reproduced itself in a most profound pattern. For change to happen, a paradigm shift is required. This tragic and violent reality cannot be allowed to continue forever.

It is critical that we relate the present to the past. The settler colonial mentality of the past continues to control Israel’s actions today, as it will govern its future behaviour if apartheid is not demolished, the occupation is allowed to perpetuate and the Nakba is not reversed.

The current Israeli land grab in the West Bank and the mushrooming illegal settlement construction that is squeezing Palestinians out of Jerusalem is a repeat of an earlier episode, a perpetual drama that has lasted more than a century.

Zionist colonial settlement in Palestine began in earnest in 1881, when the leaders of the Zionist Movement in Europe eyed Arab Palestine as an exclusive home for Jews, paying little heed to the indigenous inhabitants of the land. These early ambitions culminated into a bloody but well-orchestrated terror campaign in 1947-48, resulting in the creation of the state of Israel atop the ruins of Palestine. Nearly 600 Palestinian towns, villages and localities were destroyed to make space for an exclusively Jewish state.

Since then, only names and titles have changed. Zionist militias that orchestrated the genocide of the Palestinians prior to the establishment of Israel merged together to form the Israeli army; and the leaders of these groups became Israel’s leaders.

At the end of his life, my grandfather’s only wish was to be buried in Beit Daras. Instead, he was crammed into the ever-bourgeoning Nuseirat Refugee Camp cemetery. However, he remained a Badrasawi – as the people of my village are called – to the end, holding so passionately onto the memories of a place that, for him – for all of us – remains sacred and real.

For the millions of refugees, and for the thousands of protesters at the Gaza border, Palestine is no longer just a piece of earth but a perpetual fight for justice – in the name of those who died along the dusty trails of exile and of those who are yet to be born.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His forthcoming book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’ (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a PhD in Palestine studies from the University of Exeter and is a non-resident scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara.