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.

How Great Britain Facilitated the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Lord Arthur Balfour in Tel Aviv, c. 1925 (from the G. Eric and Edith Matson
Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress)

The significance of the 1917 Balfour Declaration is that it determined a policy by which Great Britain would facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

On this day in 1917, the government of Great Britain issued its infamous “Balfour Declaration” promising to support the Zionists in their project to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. While most people have heard of this document, what is never communicated in school textbooks or mainstream media reports is the Balfour Declaration’s true significance, which is that it set Great Britain on a policy course that ultimately facilitated the Zionists’ ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes in Palestine in order to establish a demographically “Jewish state”.

In 1917, the First World War was raging, and Britain was seeking the help of both European Jews and Middle Eastern Arabs in the war effort against the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the territory of Palestine. To gain Arab support, in July 1915, the British promised to support “the independence of the Arab countries”. Understanding that this would mean freedom from oppressive foreign rule, Arab volunteers from Palestine were among the first to join a revolt against their Turkish rulers.

Great Britain, however, had no intention of honoring its pledge with respect to Palestine. Instead, as outlined in a then-secret pact between Britain and France known as the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain aimed to carve up the Middle East and force an occupation regime upon the Palestinians.

To that end, the leadership of the Zionist movement by early 1917 were engaged in negotiations with the British government over how they could form a partnership to satisfy Britain’s aim of securing Jewish support for the war effort and the Zionists’ aim of reconstituting Palestine into a “Jewish state”.

While early drafts of an agreement explicitly stated that aim, the finally agreed text omitted the verb “reconstituted” and replaced “Jewish state” with “national home for the Jewish people”, in order to avoid offending anti-Zionist Jews as well as the Arabs. The Balfour Declaration also contained the self-contradictory language that British support for the Zionist project would not prejudice “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

The agreement was relayed to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a prominent leader of Britain’s Jewish community and an ardent Zionist, by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in a letter dated November 2, 1917. As British Prime Minister Lloyd George later explained, the Balfour Declaration was issued for “propagandist reasons”. The Zionist leadership had promised Britain that if the Allies would commit to facilitating the Zionist project to reconstitute Palestine into a Jewish state, “they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause.”

Just five weeks after issuing the Balfour Declaration, on December 9, 1917, British forces conquered Jerusalem with the help of Arabs who believed Britain’s promise that the outcome would be their independence from foreign rule.

This misplaced trust in the duplicitous British government was reinforced on November 7, 1918, when Britain and France issued a joint declaration again promising “the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks, and the establishment of National Governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiatives and free choice of the indigenous populations.”

It was yet another promise to the Arabs that British policymakers had no intention of keeping. Far from helping the people of Palestine to develop self-governing institutions in the wake of the war, Britain conspired with the Zionists and other Allied powers to deny self-determination to the Palestinians in order to fulfill the promise to facilitate the Zionist project of reconstituting Palestine into a “Jewish state”.

To this end, the Allied powers sought vainly to legitimize Britain’s belligerent occupation of Palestine through the newly established League of Nations organization.

Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant established the “Mandate” system with the express purpose of helping the people living in territories conquered by the Allies to establish self-governing institutions. The Covenant required member states to give “principle consideration” to the will of the inhabitants in selecting the “Mandatory”, which was just the League’s term for Occupying Power.

Of course, the Allied Powers had no authority to divvy up occupied territories according to their own whims and political interests. And when it came to Palestine, the Allies even violated their own Covenant by refusing to take the will of the Palestinians into consideration and establishing an occupation regime for the purpose of preventing them from exercising their right to self-determination.

The Arab leadership had rejected any kind of occupation regime altogether and insisted that Palestine’s independence be immediately recognized. Yet, recognizing that a belligerent occupation was going to be forced upon them against their will, they expressed their preference that it be administrated by the United States rather than Great Britain.

While the Arabs of Palestine were not consulted about the choice of the Mandatory Power, the European Zionists were, and so on April 25, 1920, in direct violation of the League of Nations Covenant, the Allied Powers adopted the “San Remo Resolution” appointing Britain as the Mandatory Power and stating that the extent of the territory in which Arab peoples would be permitted to exercise independence was yet to be determined. The text of the resolution incorporated the wording of the Balfour Declaration and charged Britain with “putting into effect” the promise to facilitate the Zionist project.

On August 10, 1920, the territory in which the Allied Powers intended to deny self-determination to the inhabitants became more clearly defined with the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, which stated that the independence of Syria and Iraq was to be recognized, whereas for Palestine the Occupying Power would instead be “responsible for putting into effect” the Balfour policy of facilitating the Zionist project.

The Arabs, naturally, were none too pleased by Britain rejecting their rights and acting to help the Zionists to “reconstitute” their homeland into a “Jewish state”, which remained the effective goal of the Balfour policy despite the change of wording of the final draft of the Declaration.

In June 1922, British Secretary of State for the Colonies (and later Prime Minister) Winston Churchill issued a policy statement affirming to the Zionists that Britain would continue to facilitate Jewish immigration into Palestine limited only by “the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals.”

To the upset Arabs, Churchill explained that their dashed hopes of independence were all just a big misunderstanding as the British had always intended to exclude Palestine from the areas in which the Allied Powers would permit Arab peoples to exercise self-determination.

Churchill further declared that the aim of British policy was to help establish self-governance in Palestine, but only after fulfilling the pledge made to the Zionists to facilitate their colonization project.

In other words, it was the effective policy of Great Britain to deny self-determination to the inhabitants of Palestine until the Jews had through mass immigration established a numerical majority—or at least until the Zionists had become powerful enough to carry on their project without the support of British guns.

With this policy already in place, it wasn’t until July 24, 1922, nearly five years after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, that the League of Nations formally adopted the Mandate for Palestine, which was drafted by the Zionists to serve their interests at the expense of the majority Arab inhabitants of Palestine. Like the San Remo Resolution, the Mandate incorporated the text of the Balfour Declaration and charged Britain with facilitating the Zionists’ colonization project.

The Arabs, however, were not going to take this sitting down and in 1936 held a general strike as an act of mass civil disobedience. It evolved into an Arab revolt that lasted until 1939, when it was ultimately put down brutally by British armed forces.

The British were cognizant of how their policy was causing conflict and began seeking a way out. To that end, the British government appointed Lord William Peel to chair the Palestine Royal Commission, more popularly known as the Peel Commission. In 1937, the Peel Commission report was published, acknowledging that British policymakers had erred by mistakenly assuming that the Arabs would come to realize the supposed benefits of being subjected to Britain’s supposedly enlightened rule and would therefore consent to it.

“It must have been obvious from the outset,” the Commission remarked, “that a very awkward situation would arise if that basic assumption should prove false.”

As a solution to the problem, the Commission proposed partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. But this in turn presented a demographic problem, which was that in the area of the proposed Arab state there were relatively few Jews, while in the area of the proposed Jewish state, there was a sizable Arab population. So, to solve that problem, the Commission proposed a “compulsory transfer” of populations.

In other words, the British proposed ethnically cleansing Arabs from their homes in Palestine in order to facilitate the Zionists’ aim of establishing a “Jewish state” there.

This was an idea with which the Zionist leadership was on board. “I am for compulsory transfer”, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency Executive in 1938. “I do not see anything immoral in it.”

After World War II, the League of Nations was dissolved and replaced with the United Nations organization, which took over responsibility for the Mandate system. Seeking to extract itself from the conflict situation it had created in Palestine, Great Britain requested the UN General Assembly to come up with a solution.

Consequently, the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was established in 1947. Its report contained two recommendations. The minority recommendation, which was in accordance with the solution the Arabs had been insisting upon since the beginning, was for Palestine’s independence to be recognized and a democratic government established under a constitution that would guarantee representation and protect the rights of the Jewish minority.

The majority recommendation, however, was to reject the democratic solution and instead to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants, who also owned most of the land.

Despite their best efforts, by the time the Mandate was terminated in May 1948, the Jewish community had managed to acquire less than 7 percent of the land in Palestine. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district, including Jaffa, which included the main Jewish population center of Tel Aviv. Arabs owned more land than Jews and, when the Bedouin population was counted, also constituted a numerical majority even within the proposed “Jewish state”.

The Arabs naturally rejected the UN’s racist, colonialist partition plan.

The gross inequity of the partition plan is simply explained by the fact that the majority UNSCOP recommendation was premised upon the explicit rejection of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. The committee’s report stated that the principle of self-determination “was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there.”

Of course, this placed UNSCOP’s majority recommendation in direct violation of the principle of the UN Charter to uphold the universal right to self-determination. Yet this did not stop the General Assembly from recommending the partition plan on November 29, 1947, with the adoption of Resolution 181.

Contrary to popular myth, Resolution 181 neither created Israel nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence on May 14, 1948. Rather, it merely referred the matter to the Security Council, where the partition plan was dead on arrival. As US representative Warren Austin observed, the only way the plan could be implemented would be through the use of force, and the UN had no authority to forcibly partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants.

On the other hand, the UN did have authority, Warren argued, to intervene to prevent a breach of international peace. Instead, the UN sat by and watched as the Zionists, with an army built up under the protective cover of Britain’s occupation regime, ethnically cleansed Palestine.

The Mandate expired on May 14, 1948—the same day the Zionist leadership unilaterally and with no legal or moral authority declared the existence of the state of Israel. By that time, 300,000 Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homeland in order for the “Jewish state” to be established.

By the time it was over, more than 700,000 Arabs had been ethnically cleansed, and the Zionist forces made sure they could never return to their homes by systematically wiping hundreds of Arab villages off the map.

That is the true legacy of the Balfour Declaration.

It was a propaganda document that had no legal authority or moral legitimacy, and which set the British government on a policy course that ultimately facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

It was this heinous violation of the rights of the Palestinians that is the root cause of the conflict that persists today, with the US having replaced Great Britain as chief facilitator of Israel’s ongoing crimes against the Palestinians.

For documentation and a more in depth look at the significance of the Balfour Declaration, see my 2017 Foreign Policy Journal essay written for the document’s 100th anniversary, “What Was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Why Was It Significant?”.

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. 

Why Israel Has No ‘Right to Exist’

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Palestinian refugees fleeing their homes in 1948, from the front cover of
"The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" by Benny Morris 

Apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians claim the state has a “right to exist” in an effort to legitimize the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Zionists taking it upon themselves to try to defend Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people frequently level the charge that its critics are attempting to “delegitimize” the self-described “Jewish state”. Israel, they counter, has a “right to exist”. But they are mistaken.

This is not to single out Israel. There is no such thing as a state’s “right to exist” , period. No such right is recognized under international law. Nor could there logically be any such right. The very concept is absurd. Individuals, not abstract political entities, have rights.

Individual rights may also be exercised collectively, but not with prejudice toward the rights of individuals. The relevant right in this context is rather the right to self-determination, which refers to the right of a people to collectively exercise their individual rights through political self-governance. The collective exercise of this right may not violate the individual exercise of it. The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect individual rights, and a government has no legitimacy without the consent of the governed. It is only in this sense that the right to self-determination may be exercised collectively, by a people choosing for themselves how they are to be governed and consenting to that governance.

The right to self-determination, unlike the absurd concept of a state’s “right to exist”, is recognized under international law. It is a right that is explicitly guaranteed, for example, under the Charter of the United Nations, to which the state of Israel is party.

The proper framework for discussion therefore is the right to self-determination, and it is precisely to obfuscate this truth that the propaganda claim that Israel has a “right to exist” is frequently made. It is necessary for Israel’s apologists to so shift the framework for discussion because, in the framework of the right to self-determination, it is obviously Israel that rejects the rights of the Palestinians and not vice versa.

And it is not only in the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory that Israel’s rejectionism is manifest. This rejection of Palestinians’ rights was also manifest in the very means by which Israel was established.

There is a popular belief that Israel was founded through some kind of legitimate political process. This is false. This myth is grounded in the idea that the famous “partition plan” resolution of the United Nations General Assembly—Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947—legally partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence on May 14, 1948.

Indeed, in that very declaration, Israel’s founding document, the Zionist leadership relied on Resolution 181 for their claim of legal authority. The truth is, however, that Resolution 181 did no such thing. The General Assembly had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants. Nor did it claim to. On the contrary, the Assembly merely recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, which would have to be agreed upon by both peoples to have any legal effect. The Assembly forwarded the matter to the Security Council, where the plan died with the explicit recognition that the UN had no authority to implement any such partition.

The Zionists’ unilateral declaration is frequently described as a “Declaration of Independence”. But it was no such thing. A declaration of independence assumes that the people declaring their independence are sovereign over the territory in which they wish to exercise their right to self-determination. But the Zionists were not sovereign over the land that became the territory of the state of Israel.

On the contrary, when they declared Israel’s existence, Jews owned less than 7 percent of the land in Palestine. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district of Palestine. Arabs also constituted a numerical majority in Palestine. Despite mass immigration, Jews remained a minority comprising about a third of the population.

Even within the territory proposed by the UN for the Jewish state, when the Bedouin population was counted, Arabs constituted a majority. Even within that territory, Arabs owned more land than Jews.

Simply stated, the Zionist leadership had no legitimate claim to sovereignty over the territory they ultimately acquired through war.

Notably, the acquisition of territory by war is prohibited under international law.

Far from being established through any kind of legitimate political process, Israel was established through violence. The Zionists acquired most of the territory for their state through the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population, more than 700,000 people, from their homes in Palestine. Hundreds of Arab villages were literally wiped off the map.

So when Zionists claim that Israel has a “right to exist”, what they are really saying is that the Zionists had a “right” to ethnically cleanse Palestine in order to establish their “Jewish state”.

Obviously, there is no such right. On the contrary, once again, under international law, ethnic cleansing is recognized as a crime against humanity.

Zionists charge that critics of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians seek to “delegitimize” the “Jewish state”, but it matters that the unilateral declaration by the Zionists on May 14, 1948, had no legitimacy. It matters that the crime of ethnic cleansing cannot be justified or legitimized.

When this charge is leveled at Israel’s critics, what is really happening is that it is Israel’s apologists who are attempting to delegitimize the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, along with the internationally recognized right of refugees of war to return to their homeland.

Regardless of the illegitimacy of the means by which Israel was established, it exists. This is the present reality. However, the demand by the state of Israel that the Palestinians recognize its “right” not just to exist, but to exist “as a Jewish state” is simply a demand that the Palestinians surrender their rights and accede that the Zionists’ unilateral declaration and ethnic cleansing of Palestine were legitimate.

And that is why there has been no peace. There will be no peace until the rights of the Palestinians are recognized and respected. The problem for Zionists is that for the Palestinians to exercise their rights would mean the end of Israel’s existence as a “Jewish state”.

But what would be wrong with ending a fundamentally racist regime that perpetually violates international law and Palestinians’ human rights? What would be wrong with replacing it with a government that respects the equal rights of all the inhabitants of the territory over which it exercises political sovereignty and rules with the consent of the governed?

To anyone with any honesty and moral integrity, the clear answer to both questions is: nothing.

For all those who take an active role in pursing peace and justice, it is therefore to that end that we must focus our collective efforts. It starts with gaining a proper understanding of the true nature of the conflict and helping to open the eyes of all those who have integrity, but who have been deceived by the lies and propaganda that have perpetuated the violence and injustice for so long.

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.