What Is the Meaning of “Nakba”?

The term “nakba” is in the news a lot these days. It’s often used as a way to describe the so-called “catastrophe” of the modern-day State of Israel’s founding in 1948. Here are six facts about this highly-charged and controversial term.

1. It means “catastrophe.”

The word “nakba” means a catastrophe or something disastrous in Arabic. Calling Israel’s founding a “catastrophe” implies that the founding of the world’s only Jewish country was a terrible mistake. For this reason, many find the term offensive.

2. Nakba originally meant the “tragedy” of being called “Palestinian.”

The term “nakba” as a political term dates back to 1920. Back then, Arabs in the present-day state of Israel, West Bank and Gaza used it as a way to protest the insult of being called “Palestinian.” The land of Israel, they pointed out, was for centuries governed as a province of greater Syria. “Nakba” was the tragedy of the breakup of greater Syria in 1920. “There is no such country as ‘Palestine’; ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented!” testified Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to Britain’s Peel Commission in 1937; “Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”

(A quick note about the historical background of the time: In 1920, France, Britain, and other Allied forces had recently emerged victorious from World War I, in which they defeated an Axis of interests made up of Germany and other central European regions, plus Japan and the Ottoman Empire. For centuries, the Ottomans governed Syria, the land of Israel, and other regions in the Middle East. After 1920, the victorious French and British seized Ottoman territory and carved up much of the Middle East between them: northern “Greater Syria,” including present-day Syria and Lebanon, became French. Modern day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and Jordan, became British-controlled “Mandatory Palestine.”)

Creating a new land of “Palestine” was commemorated by local Arabs as an Am Al-Nakba, a “Day of Tragedy” (quoted in The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement by Geroge Antonius, Allegra Editions, March 2015 edition).

3. Saying nakba in 1948 meant criticizing Arabs’ refusal to make peace with Israel.

By the time Israel was founded in 1948, “nakba” had been in use for a generation referring to the “tragedy” of losing the principality of Greater Syria and of now being called Palestinian instead of Syrian.

In 1946, Britain relinquished the larger part of its mandate, then referred to as Transjordanian Palestine, to create the Kingdom of Jordan. The remaining portion of the Palestinian Mandate (comprising modern-day Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza) remained under British rule. In 1947, Britain requested the UN to determine the area’s future. The UN proposed ending the Mandate and creating two independent states, one Jewish and one Arab.

Israel accepted this settlement and declared statehood on May 14, 1948, at the conclusion of Britain’s rule. Instead of accepting an independent Arab state in the region, Palestinian Arabs, along with the armies of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabian and Jordanian forces joined the fighting, as well. By the time a ceasefire was declared in 1949, Jordan had seized the West Bank and Egypt had taken Gaza. Dreams of an independent Palestinian state in Mandatory Palestine were at an end.

Dr. Constantin Zureiq, a Syrian professor at the American University of Beirut, was disgusted with Arabs’ insistence on eradicating Israel instead of building another Arab state alongside it. He wrote a pamphlet in 1948 called Ma’na al-Nakba, “The Meaning of the Catastrophe.” The catastrophe he was referring to was the Arab attack on Israel, not any actions on the part of Jews or Israelis.

“When the battle broke out, our public diplomacy began to speak of our imaginary victims, to put the Arab public to sleep and talk of the ability to overcome and win easily - until the “nakba” happened…. We must admit our mistakes…and recognize the extent of our responsibility for the disaster that is our lot,” he wrote.

In 1967, after Israel emerged victorious from the 1967 “Six Day” War, having gained the West Bank and Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria, Dr. Zureiq doubled down on his use of the term “nakba” to refer to backfiring Arab attempts to eliminate the Jewish state. To him and his readers, 1967 was a “nakba” as well, as was repeated Arab attempts to wipe Israel off the map instead of making peace.

4. The PLO’s founding charter doesn’t mention a “nakba” - and didn’t until the 1990s.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created at an Arab summit, with Soviet backing, in 1964. Its charter doesn’t mention the term “nakba” at all. It also doesn’t refer to refugees or use words such as “fled,” “forced,” “refugee,” or “massacre.”

It wasn’t until 1998 that PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat instituted the annual commemoration of “Nakba Day.” It was a way for Arafat to take his people’s minds off the stalled Oslo Peace Plan. (Launched in 1993, by 1998 its interim phase was coming to a close. Arafat refused to make the hard decisions to finalize a two-state solution, ramping up instead his nationalist rhetoric as he walked away from negotiations with Israel.)

Thus, in 1998, 50 years after the State of Israel was founded and the supposed “nakba” took place, the word became a foundational Palestinian Arab term.

5. It was Israeli historians in the 1980s who first called Israel’s founding a “nakba.”

The term “nakba” became popular in the 1980s when left-wing Israeli historians – dubbed the “New Historians” – began to write provocative histories reevaluating Israeli history. Many of their claims - such as the erroneous belief that Jews carried out a massacre of Arabs in the town of Deir Yassin - were later debunked. The inaccurate claims of the "New Historians" live on and continue to poison perceptions of Israel.

The first and most famous of these "New" historians was Benny Morris, a professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel, who documented cases where Israeli fighters, particularly in the midst of pitched battles near the towns of Lydda and Ramla during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, forced Arabs out of their homes. Morris was soon joined by other “New Historians” who were eager to rewrite Israel’s history and emphasized Arab suffering.

In time, Morris began to fight back against what he felt were the excesses and distortions of history of the New Historian movement. In a 2008 letter to the Irish Times he wrote “Israel-haters are fond of citing - and more often, mis-citing - my work in support of their arguments.”

He continued: “Let me offer some corrections… In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29th, 1947, they (Palestinian Arab forces) launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes…

“But, on the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities, as occurred in Haifa in late April, 1948. And Haifa’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, did, on April 22nd, plead with them to stay, to no avail.

“Most of Palestine’s 700,000 ‘refugees’ fled their homes because of the flail of war and the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders…

“The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became ‘refugees’ - and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country, which is the usual definition of a refugee, was not a ‘racist crime’...but the result of national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the Muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves.”

One of the most ardent proponents of using the term “nakba” to refer to the supposed “tragedy” of Israel’s founding is Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappe, a virulently anti-Israel figure who teaches at the University of Exeter in Britain. Benny Morris has called him either “one of the world’s sloppiest historians” or “one of the most dishonest.” Despite his shortcomings as an academic, Pappe has used his academic post and his fame as the darling of the anti-Israel left to popularize the term nakba and the erroneous idea that Israel’s birth was accompanied by horrific violence against local Arabs.

6. Descriptions of the “nakba” become more lurid with every passing year.

Since the New Historians of the 1980s, accounts of the “nakba” of Israel’s birth have become more and more lurid. In 2023, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (whose History Ph.D. thesis, written in the Soviet Union, is a denial of the Holocaust) issued a decree criminalizing any denial that a violent “nakba” took place. His decree defines the “nakba” as “a crime against humanity” perpetrated by “Zionist gangs.” Questioning Abbas’ version of history carries a two-year jail term.

Western news outlets have fallen into line behind Abbas’ views. A recent article in Time magazine cites an Abbas-controlled agency to assert that the “nakba” was an orgy of breathtaking cruelty supposedly carried out by Jews against Arabs throughout modern-day Israel and the West Bank. Time lists a number of long-debunked charges, including that Jews rose up to carry out “massacres of families,” “murders,” “rapes,” “biological warfare,” poisoning wells, “destruction of major cultural sites,” the shelling of homes, and other cruelties.

Many people base their (mis)understanding of the “nakba” on the popular 2021 Jordanian film Farha, which was bought by Netflix. In this wildly unhistorical account, Jews are shown murdering a whole family in cold blood, threatening to cut a fetus out of a pregnant woman, gleefully killing young children and leaving a newborn baby to die after massacring his family. The director told reporters that he wanted to draw parallels between the “nakba” and the Holocaust. It’s a horrible vision, and one that’s completely inaccurate.

Modern accounts of the “nakba” of Israel’s founding are never accurate, but that doesn’t diminish the impact they have on current debate. In May 2024, a UN official spoke for many when he lamented not only the “nakba” of 1948 but declared that “the nakba is still going on today” because of Israel’s continued existence.

Do not allow the misinformation about “nakba” to go unchecked. Learn about Israeli history. Speak out when you hear misinformation and anti-Israel propaganda. When the term “nakba” comes up, clarify the actual history of this dangerous, loaded word.