The Day Most Important to Understanding the Israel-Palestine Conflict Is Here
The Holy Land and its syzygy of faiths has no natives, only interlopers. Nobody calls holiness home—although, ironically, doing so is an all-too-human habit. Of the millions of interlopers over millennia in what is today Israel-Palestine, two matter most to me: a pair of 12th-century brothers who lived a day’s trek from Venice and pilgrimaged—crusaded even, since it was during the Third Crusade—all the way to Bethlehem to serve as tarājmeh (interpreters) between priests and pilgrims at the Church of the Nativity.
Those brothers, their names lost to time, began my Palestinian family line: the Dabdoubs. For centuries, they were dutiful students of languages until the latter 1800s, when they flexed their polyglot powers and became internationally acclaimed merchants. Their journeys began on the backs of camels or donkeys and ended on the gangplanks of steamships in Hong Kong, Kingston, Manila, Melbourne, Mérida, New York, Port au Prince, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and Singapore. They exhibited at the U.S. Centennial in Philadelphia in 1876 and won a medal as exhibitors at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. They had a mother-of-pearl Bible cover commissioned by Czar Nicholas II. They owned shops on six continents.
They had a word— أميركا (Amerka)—that, yes, meant “America” but became a stand-in for the exotic possibilities of the far-flung world. When my great-grandfather visited New York for a few years starting in 1907, he saw construction of the world’s tallest building and Wilbur Wright showcasing his Flyer by zooming around the still-bronze Statue of Liberty. To be a Dabdoub in those days was a wondrous adventure. A British historian chronicling my family’s ascent was inspired to render his storytelling through magical realism.
Back home, Bethlehem built family palaces to rival Beirut. My grandfather became the founding director of a new children’s hospital. It was an amazing time to be Palestinian.
Then came the Nakba.
Suddenly, the backyard of my mother’s childhood home—once a brimming orchard—was a refugee camp. A zaarour shrub in the front garden is the lone survivor. I sorely miss the taste of its jam.
Nakba commonly refers to what is known in English as the Arab-Israeli War of 1947, which ended with Israel’s declaring its statehood on May 14, 1948, the day after which is recognized by Arabs as Nakba Day. After Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 200 hostages, the fallout of Oct. 7 has surpassed Hanukkah, Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan, Easter, and Passover. Now it meets the most sacred of secular days for Palestinians: Nakba, at once the most vital and least understood aspect of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Because Nakba and Shoah, the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, both mean “catastrophe” in English, and because both are rooted in the 1940s, they are often equated or conflated. More than 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes and were displaced in the Nakba, and it’s estimated that 15,000 were killed (less than half of the 35,000 Palestinian deaths since Oct. 7). Of course, death-toll matchups are a grim matter. The Holocaust’s 6 million deaths are dwarfed by Josef Stalin’s 20 million or Mao Zedong’s 45 million to 65 million. That doesn’t make them any less horrific or important.
Though the death toll of the Holocaust was far greater in number than that of the Nakba, the proportion of victims—and the weight of collective pain—is very similar. The U.N. counts nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees. Nearly 80 percent of Palestinian land was taken over by Israel in the conflict in 1947–49 alone. That percentage has only risen since.
Hamas’ hostages from Oct. 7 have been held for 221 days. Their families and many the world over have been understandably heartbroken and tortured by witnessing innocent people ripped from their homes and are uncertain if they will ever return. Hostages and other political prisoners are never justified. Many of the Nakba’s victims and their families have felt something similar for 27,759 days. As a matter of pride and resilience, many still keep the keys to their old homes.
But there is another crucial difference between Nakba and the Holocaust: The Holocaust ended. The Nakba continues to this day because, in another divergence from the Holocaust, nobody was ever put on trial for the Nakba’s crimes. For all the sanctity of Holocaust remembrance and “never again,” every day of Israel’s existence has been a remembrance for Palestinians of Nakba and its forever again trauma.
There is no war in Gaza. There is no occupation. There is only Nakba. Nakba today. Nakba tomorrow. Nakba forever. Nakba all the way down.
Literally.
“The first thing we encounter in most digs in Israel is a Palestinian village,” said Raphael Greenberg, of Tel Aviv University, to Israeli press in September 2023. Greenberg led the first archaeological dig dedicated to the Nakba.
The Nakba is the most important thing to understand if you hope to understand the current conflict. It is commemorated every year on May 15, today, coinciding with Israeli Independence Day, and its centrality to Palestinian life weighs enormously heavy this year, the first of the latest brutal war. Nakba is more than a historical event; for the Palestinian people, it’s a lived reality and generational trauma every day. For whatever military, terrorist, and political acts and errors by both sides of this conflict since 1948, Palestinians have been denied the right to call their home their home. If a cease-fire begins today without a broader solution to that problem, the conflict will go on interminably. Until this reality is redressed in some way that satisfies most Palestinians, the Nakba will go on forever, and so will the bloody conflicts in the land.
Israel, unfortunately, seems uninterested in change. Its leaders say they are fighting Hamas by bombing hospitals and universities, shooting at bread lines and journalists, and firing rockets into vans of aid workers and a civilian population that’s 50 percent children. The Western press reports this as a crisis in Gaza even as it acknowledges an uptick of Israeli mob violence against Palestinians in the West Bank too, including Israeli military agents who disguised themselves as doctors to infiltrate a hospital for an assassination. The reality is that Israel is fighting what it has always fought: Palestinian existence.
“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48,” trumpeted an October tweet by Ariel Kallner, a member of Israel’s Knesset within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. In November, Avi Dichter, Netanyahu’s agriculture minister and a member of his security Cabinet, proudly said Israel was “rolling out” what he called “Nakba 2023.” Netanyahu’s most radical Cabinet ministers have openly called for mass Israeli settlement of the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s champions crow about its “right to defend itself” or its “right to exist” without ever completing the thought: They’re talking about Israel defending itself against Palestinian existence and political power and claiming a right to exist on Palestinian land. Ask them about sumud, the Palestinian concept of steadfastness that dares to assert our own right to exist.
Anti-Palestinian critics flag that there has never been a nation called Palestine. That’s true. But it intentionally ignores many other truths, the foremost being that nation-states are a relatively new concept. For centuries, as occurred in a lot of the world, Palestinians were passed from empire to empire. (Fun fact: The originator of an independent Jewish state was Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, fresh from colonizing Egypt and eager to leverage Jewish allies in his quest to control Jerusalem).
So what if Palestine has never been a nation? Neither has Puerto Rico; does that deny its people their right to independence or self-determination? (If you think this is an imperfect comparison, there are several other examples to choose from.) Regardless, this doesn’t erase the fact and pain of dispossession and disempowerment since the Nakba. It hardly needs to be said that for millennia, Israel was not a nation either. For Jews and Israelis, of all people, to argue that Palestinians’ history of statelessness means they don’t deserve statehood requires a scale of hypocrisy that strains imagination. The great sweep of the Nakba’s catastrophe is that when national identity finally came to … Greater Jerusalem, let’s call it, it arrived without regard for empathy or equality for most of the people who were already there.
The Nakba forced Palestinians to wake up one day in a state that denied their existence. But the pain, then and now, is not merely about displacement; what happened in the 1940s was gruesomely violent. Survivors hadn’t just gotten kicked out of their homes—Prime Minister Golda Meir, who infamously said “The Palestinian people do not exist,” lived in one—or had their prized possessions stolen. Their homes had been bombed at night by the Haganah, the terrorist group that became the Israel Defense Forces. Haganah militants raped children. They tied together elders, shot them, and dumped them into mass graves. They severed fingers to loot jewelry.
It’s not only Palestinians who mourn this history. Prominent Jewish Israelis at the time were horrified by it too, and Jewish Israeli reporters have uncovered much of it.
“What happened in Galilee—those are Nazi acts!” read a 1948 report about a briefing given by Israel Galili, the former Haganah chief. The report, held in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva, the national education center of the Kibbutz Federation, was written by Aharon Cohen, a committee member of Israel’s left-wing Mapam party.
So vile was the Nakba that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, bemoaned, just two months into Israel’s existence: “It turned out that most of the Jews are thieves.”
Nakba survivors witnessed what kind of Israelis its founders chose to be and asked themselves what kind of Palestinians they would strive to become in response. They saw how overnight statehood ruined a stateless people, their leaders and many of their followers’ mission curdling Israel’s Jewish nationalism into a selfishness so systemic that Amnesty International has outed it as apartheid, the U.N. Human Rights Council has found “reasonable grounds” for genocide, and even a recent White House report concluded that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel has operated since Oct. 7 “in instances inconsistent with its [international humanitarian law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.” Palestinian statelessness is just a part of Israeli leaders’ soullessness.
Some Palestinians have chosen violence in response, and that’s tragic—a moral error, in my opinion—just as it’s a tragedy and moral error that some Jewish Israelis have turned their pain and fear into ethnic violence and hatred. But many others have responded with less vengeful and less vindictive forms of sumud.
In the pro-Palestinian protests that have electrified college students—and faculty—nationwide, a whole generation of Americans is experiencing Nakba by proxy. Protesters wanted solidarity with Palestinians and have endured weeks of surveillance, threats of expulsion, accusations of terrorism, goading by antagonists, lockdowns and checkpoints, police raids, arrests for exercising their rights, demonization in the press—even strictures on food, medicine, housing, and access to libraries. Palestinian solidarity doesn’t get more solid than that.
Similarly, the Irish prime minister resigned under political pressure after saying, of Israel’s overwhelmingly disproportionate response to the Oct. 7 attacks, “What I’m seeing unfolding at the moment isn’t just self-defense. It resembles something more approaching revenge.”
If there is any silver lining to Israel’s atrocities since October, it’s that the world is now seeing the daily Nakba that Palestinians have always known.
On my most recent trip to Bethlehem, in December 2019, I went on a date. We mostly sat in his car and talked. And kissed. “Promise me,” he said, gesturing at the separation wall, “that you will do everything out there that I cannot do in here.”
I promised. I’m living that promise now.
I wonder how many of October’s “I Stand With Israel” folks are still standing. They don’t stand with Martin Luther King Jr., who said in 1967: “I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.”
And they don’t stand with Nelson Mandela, who said in 1990: “We identify with the PLO because, just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self-determination. … We do not mean that Israel has the right to retain the territories they conquered from the Arab world, like the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. We don’t agree with that. Those territories should be returned to the Arab people.”
Peace cannot come from choosing sides. But it can come from choosing empathy and embracing the new truths that reveals. That’s the only way out of the Sykes-Picot “peace to end all peace,” which formed the Middle East more than a century ago.
The cure to the crisis is not the recognition of Palestine and the dignities that come with it. And it’s not the displacement of as many Israelis in a mass act of vengeance. That would just be a counter-Nakba. The fix is the undoing of the Nakba, not merely the mourning of it. Anything less is as unhelpful as Black History Month and Juneteenth without real policies toward racial equity, or driver’s licenses for unauthorized immigrants without fixing our immigration system’s doom loop. One-state or two-state, what matters is Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
Palestinian self-determination requires dismantling the status quo—not a destruction but a do-over. Israelis have a right to self-determination too, but Israel does not have a right to whatever existence it chooses. Last year, Israel’s finance minister gloated: “I may be a far-right person—a homophobe, racist, fascist—but my word is my bond.” Israel’s leaders and their supporters have chosen to exist as an apartheid, racist, theocratic military occupation; all the weaponry in the world cannot secure moral defense for it—though they keep trying.
The world must now answer a question it has avoided for 76 years: How much will it let Israel push the Nakba toward its ultimate conclusion?
