A Point of View: Playing the 'Nakba' Card

As Israelis watched fireworks, went to barbeques and celebrated Yom Ha'atzmaut, American media coverage of Israel's 60th anniversary was overwhelmingly canned and formulaic. For every veteran of the Haganah featured, there was an accompanying interview with a Palestinian who left his home in Israel in 1948. For every examination of the significance of six decades of Israel's independence, there was a reference to what Palestinians call the "nakba," or catastrophe.

This symmetry, evident in features, articles, op-eds and interviews that appeared over the weeks leading up to the start of the 60th celebrations, may have made self-satisfied editors believe they were demonstrating their impartiality.  In fact, they established a false moral equivalency between the founding of Israel and a Palestinian "catastrophe," feeding into a dangerous misperception of what happened 60 years ago and what must happen today.

As Jerusalem Post readers well know, the story of the founding of Israel is more complex, and in many ways more simple. Sixty-one years ago the leaders of the Arab world violently rejected the United Nations partition vote that would have created an Arab-Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state. Sixty years ago, Arab armies invaded the newly created country of Israel with the goal of ensuring that no Jewish state exist in the Middle East. 

There is no denying that the fighting surrounding the War of Independence led to the suffering of the many Palestinian Arabs who left their homes in the new State of Israel. But missing from these symmetrical media features was an acknowledgement that Israel's founding did not cause this Palestinians misfortune. Rather, the featured Palestinian-of-the-day's narrative was written because of the choices made by the Arab and Palestinian leadership. Had the Arab leadership made a different decision at that time, there would have been an independent Palestinian state, there would likely have been no 1948 no war, and the situation for Israel, Palestinians and the Arab world would be very different today.

The "nakba" drumbeat is not limited to media. Anti-Israel organizations in the US and Europe have already spent months organizing and attending "nakba" commemorations. Full page advertisements in major newspapers by Arab groups are appearing renouncing any celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary. The message of these ads and commemorative events goes further than the moral equivalency of the media's profiles. Baldly stated it is: If Israel didn't exist, there would have been no catastrophe for Palestinians. Indeed, the implication is, the real catastrophe is Israel's very being.

The popularity of the narrative of the "nakba" has greater implications for Israel than just a nationalist slogan or a bid for supremacy in the war of public relations. It leads Palestinians and their advocates in a direction away from responsibility for building a nation and toward illusion and blame, twin illnesses which have haunted the Palestinians for decades.

Today there is real hope for a different result. Today, Israel's 60-year hope for peace is being heard by Palestinian and Arab leaders. Today, leaders of the Palestinians like President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayad are trying to pursue a path toward realizing the Palestinian dream of a state, while the forces of Hamas hold the Palestinian people's aspirations hostage to the false and destructive promise embodied in the concept of "nakba." Today there are pragmatic leaders in the Arab world who went to Annapolis and let the Arab League openly talk about normalizing relations with Israel.

Instead of looking backward and remaining anchored in the failed vision of a "nakba," the world should join with Israel and the elected leadership of the Palestinian Authority to bring a new vision of success and good fortune for the future of the Palestinians.