r/JewsOfConscience • u/untrue67 Jewish Anti-Zionist • Jul 06 '26
History / Education What do Zionists think the Nakba is/was?
In Canada, there has been a lot of controversy over a new exhibition at the Canadian Human Rights Museum titled "Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present". Before the exhibition even opened, various Zionist groups tried for months to remove it, delay its opening, or subject it to additional external consultation. The main point raised by critics is that the exhibition's discussion of the Nakba does not present adequate historical "context", meaning it doesn't sufficiently discuss/highlight Arab states' aggression toward Israel or Arab states' expulsion of their own Jewish residents. This has been all over the Canadian news for the past few weeks.
While there's a lot of discussion to be had about how a human rights museum should present history, etc., the controversy has gotten me interested in how Zionists understand the Nakba. I understand that the "context" critics of the exhibition point to is true--although I'm not super well-versed in the details. Still, much of the online discourse seems to suggest things like, for example, that the "Nakba" only refers to Arab states' failed attempt to destroy the Israeli state and/or all Jews in Israel, and that it is somehow false to say the "Nakba" refers to the forced displacement of Palestinians from Israel. I've even seen Zionists suggest that the term "Nakba" itself is anti-Semitic, presumably because (in their view) the whole of the Nakba is a biased misrepresentation of history.
What I don't understand is how the Zionist worldview justifies or accounts for the central facts of the Nakba, which as I understand it includes the facts that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed of their homes and forcibly removed from their lands, that this was orchestrated by Israeli Jews and the Israeli state, that it created an enormous population of stateless people that persists to today, and that the Israeli state continues to prevent that population and its descendants from returning to or making any claims for the land they inhabited. How is it that Zionists believe it is factually incorrect or biased to say that these things happened? Even if there is important context to these events (obviously, there is always context to any historical event), how do Zionists account for these central facts?
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u/Ashamed-Stuff9519 Jewish (but secular) Anti-Zionist Jul 06 '26
It was taught to me as a “sore loser” situation and that the Jews were more than willing to live “alongside” the Palestinians in Israel, but they fled because they hated Jews and didn’t want to live near them. Ugh.
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u/Real_Asparagus4926 Non-Jewish Ally Jul 07 '26
There are documentaries that refute what you were taught..they often include interviews with retired Israeli soldiers who gleefully recite their experiences terrorizing, graping and pillaging Palestinian villages in what is currently called Israel.
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u/Ashamed-Stuff9519 Jewish (but secular) Anti-Zionist Jul 08 '26
I am aware, hence the anti Zionist subreddit we are currently posting in.
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u/Suitable-Buy-1923 Jewish Jul 06 '26
1945-1950 saw the largest exchange and mass displacement of populations worldwide ever recorded in human history.
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u/benfunks Bundist anti-zionist Jul 06 '26
so far
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u/andorgyny Anti-Zionist Ally Jul 07 '26
oof climate catastrophe is going to result in billions of people being displaced. I can't really wrap my head around it.
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u/Ashamed-Stuff9519 Jewish (but secular) Anti-Zionist Jul 08 '26
HBO has a new documentary about climate refugees, it’s called The Welcome Table. I haven’t watched it yet so can’t exactly recommend it personally, but it’s probably something everyone needs to watch.
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u/Usernameoverloaded Atheist Ally with Muslim Heritage Jul 06 '26
The Partition of India a big element of displacement in that timeframe too
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u/Direct_Appointment99 Jewish Anti-Zionist Jul 06 '26
A "refugee problem" that could be sorted out if only the Palestinians moved to Jordan to make way for the rightful inhabitants, the industrious Jewish immigrants.
Source: Abba Eban
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u/Ambitious_Grab6495 Anti-Zionist Jul 06 '26
A lot of great comments here. I want to add that this is a part of a larger effort to erase the existence of Palestinians. Anything that mentions Palestine or Palestinians at all outrages these people. You could put an exhibit on Palestinian boots at the National Footwear Museum and they’d be launching a campaign to cancel it.
This is to say that many of the opponents of the exhibit MUST know that the Nakba was real and devastating. They may even agree that it was cruel. But they have a mission: to bend reality into a world where there is no Palestine, was no Palestine.
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u/FriendlyBelligerent Jewish Atheist Jul 06 '26
The story I've heard, that was taught to me in Hebrew school, was that Israel offered equal citizenship to the Palestinians, but the Palestinians rejected it and fled because they were falsely told by the surrounding Arab states that Israel planned to massacre them
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u/4g-identity Christian Jul 06 '26
The discourse analyst in me finds the verb "offer" so interesting with regard to this conflict. The Jewish population of Palestine, many of whom had been there no more than a few years, are "offering" citizenship to people who were almost all born there?
Thanks guys, how generous of you!
Then the arguments going around on Reddit, "independence was declared, then Israel was randomly attacked by racist Arabs, and some people mistakenly chose to flee".
After Balfour, the years of escalating violence between the various religious groups, the British pulling out and this declaration that starts with about five paragraphs of how this place is now a Jewish state ... and the fact that hundreds of thousands had already been displaced at this point, I have a feeling I too might be a little worried about just chilling in my rural home and hoping the paramilitaries that have spent the past years blowing up trains and hanging soldiers and booby trapping their corpse choose not to hurt me and my kids...
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u/benfunks Bundist anti-zionist Jul 06 '26
they were still telling this whitewashing of history when i went on the birthright trip. We went to an “arab israeli” town to be shown how nice the apartheid was for those who didn’t run when the arab leaders said to. only years later did i learn that a large number ran from people with ak-47’s chasing them.
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u/OliveNo6451 Jewish Communist Jul 06 '26
I had always heard the narrative that Palestinians didn't want to live among the Jews and tried to kill them.. so the ones that left either did so because they hated Jews so much or because they were directly trying to kill Jews just because they were Jewish and therefore their expulsion was justified,
I'd be curious to ask some Zionists I know who think of themselves as progressive what their current take is
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u/Lost_Paladin89 Judío Jul 06 '26
I guess here is maybe an answer from one such Zionist. Though he and his movement do not represent the majority of “progressive Zionists”. https://youtu.be/DDRM5bWZIz4
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u/CooolMan2000 Anti-Zionist Ally Jul 06 '26
What's interesting is when they say something like:" yes it was bad and unfair but can you please just get over it already" just to then go back the next day and say they deserved it.
Have see both Bill Maher and Ethan Klein do this.
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u/Moon-Foraging Dessalinest-Sinwarist Anti-Zionist Jul 06 '26
You know how an abusive individual uses tactics like DARVO (deflect, attack , reverse victim offender), gaslighting, etc? Israel is not interested in factual reality. Reality harms Israel’s existence and victim role. Zionists are anti facts. Anti solidarity. Anti humanity.
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u/shroomino Mizrahi Anti-Zionist Jul 07 '26
i don't know about other zionist institutions but in the school system within the occupied territories it is just mentioned as the independence war where zionists fought "arabs" (that is how it's described, ambiguous arabs) at least in my school we never even hear of palestinians until the 9th grade, again schools in israel may vary, but they kinda just gloss over it, so short answer: they kinda don't
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u/echtemendel Jewish Communist Jul 07 '26
Just a small addition to what others wrote: I was also taught growing up in the settler-colony that the Nakba means "the disaster of the establishment of the state of Israel". I.e. not the expulsion, death and erasure - but the fact that the Jews finally have a state is a reason for "the Arabs" to be sad.
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u/andorgyny Anti-Zionist Ally Jul 07 '26
Every liberal zionist I have talked to about it is "shocked" to find out that Palestinians didn't just choose to leave lmao
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u/untrue67 Jewish Anti-Zionist Jul 08 '26
Thanks everyone for your comments. I'm struck by the inconsistencies and incompleteness of the Zionist responses you've shared:
"They were not forced to leave; they left of their own accord." As mentioned, this doesn't explain why they weren't allowed to return, when so many demanded and have continued to demand a right to return. And of course, it isn't even just that Palestinians would have to re-enter Israel by normal means, as would be the case for any regular citizen who decided to emigrate; Israel actively prevents them from returning, even as tourists.
"They deserved it." This one only begs questions for me. Do Zionists really believe a civilian population can DESERVE to be displaced? I don't see how this can be the case, regardless of the actions of that population's political representatives. And even that's assuming the Arab states that attacked Israel were the Palestinians' political representatives, which seems dubious.
I wonder if some Zionists believe that, in the same way it was right for Israel to expel the Palestinians, it was also right for Arab states to expel their Jewish citizens. In that sense, they might think it was proper for Israel and for the Arab states to 'collect' their diasporic populations, so to speak, and that the Arab states were derelict in their duty, thus making them the cause of Palestinians' suffering. The problem is that this explanation is mostly inconsistent with the demand that the Nakba should only be mentioned alongside the "context" that Jews were expelled from Arab countries around the same time, which I think is based on the idea that it's anti-Semitic to talk about bad things Israelis did without talking about bad things others (especially Arabs and Muslims) did.
"There never were any Palestinians, they were all immigrants from other Arab states." I guess this is the Zionists' most airtight response, in the sense that it's virtually impossible to prove a negative, i.e., you can't really prove that the Palestinians who were expelled DIDN'T have roots elsewhere. So Israelis can justify colonization by insisting that the people they replaced were secretly also colonizers.
Probably, I'm just looking too deep for logic behind stories that were never supposed to make sense anyway. I'm reminded of the Israeli taxi driver who told me "there was only desert here before Jews came" when he'd literally picked me up in old Jaffa, an Arab downtown centre older than the state of Israel. It's not supposed to make sense; it's only meant to be repeated, specifically when people who would actually dispute it aren't listening.
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u/croakce Palestinian Jul 08 '26
They'll say "the Arabs" started a war and lost, and somehow that justifies mass ethnic cleansing.
Or they'll say "the Arabs" that left did so on their own accord, or that the other "Arab leaders" told them to do so. They'll conveniently ignore the countless writings and statements of Zionist leaders explicitly expressing intent to literally replace the Palestinian Arabs and even acknowledging then as "the natives."
Or, they'll say it was the result of a "civil war" between "Arabs and Jews" because the Palestinians were so antisemitic they just couldn't stop killing Jews for no reason at all.
They'll even say the ethnically cleansed Palestinians actually aren't refugees because they're Arabs who simply moved to other Arab lands, because obviously all Arabs are the same and interchangeable. Old school colonial mentality.
All of their claims never hold up under even the most minimal scrutiny, so ground should never be ceded to them.
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u/cat_boss1549 Anti-Zionist Ally Jul 07 '26
Ultimately Zionists are ethno-supremecists, who see themselves as more-than-human, and others as sub-human, like most colonial/imperial projects.
This creates jarring contrasts when one compares their reality to actual reality. They are force fed propaganda since before they can remember, so it doesnt occur to them that it even matters 'if' there were people there before.
They see their colonialisation of Palestine as a 'return', so not only see the nakba as not bad, but rightious and just. Even the mass slaughters and rapes of the people of the land is seen as justified because they (the indigenous people) are foreign invaders.
Most dont hear the word Nakba until adulthood. It doesnt occur to them why it would even matter. It's collective psychosis.
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u/Didudidudadu737 Non-Jewish Ally Jul 07 '26
They claim it didn’t happen, but if it did it’s because they wanted to frame them and a complete voluntary basis under support by Arab leaders
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u/Hasjojo Arab Anti-Zionist Jul 06 '26
I have to say as an Arab we also bare some responsibility. It's like qe throw the Palestinians under the bus. Im talking about the elites. Nakba is about 800k who were displaced and never allowed to go back home. To this day Palestinians are still facing issues in the host countries.
Let's say it is a problem literally created by the newly formed international community, pretreated by the most persecuted people at that time and with huge mismanagement from the newly independent arab kingdoms.
The biggest tragedy was the Nakba for the Palestinians. It's sad
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u/echtemendel Jewish Communist Jul 07 '26
There's A LOT of fault at the hand of the Arab comprador bourgeoisie. The Jordanian ruling class, for example, is one of the most complicit non-western groups in this entire story.
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u/directaction Shi'i Muslim Anti-Zionist Jul 06 '26
The go-to cop-out among most Zionists has been to say that the Palestinians left of their own accord at the behest or recommendation of Arab leaders and that they weren't forced out at gunpoint by the Haganah and other Zionist militias. They tend to ignore and not engage with even Israeli scholarship that shows (via Ben Gurion's diaries and the Haganah's operational reports, etc.) that this wasn't the case. When one cedes this ground to them for rhetorical purposes and then points out that, even if all Palestinians left willingly, Israel still has an obligation under international law to allow them to return to their homes, they throw out a litany of irrelevant excuses such as the fact that this would upset Israel's demographic balance, or the ridiculous idea that most current Palestinian refugees aren't really refugees because they weren't born in what Zionists now consider to be Israel (and thus that they don't have any such obligation to allow them to return), unfounded claims that allowing them to return would present a security issue and that this overrides their legal obligations, etc.