Israel Must Recognize Its Responsibility for the Nakba, the Palestinian Tragedy

[Purveyor]

For true reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel must recognize what it has done to the Palestinian people over the last 68 years.

Saeb Erekat May 15, 2016 10:41 AM

For the Palestinian people, the Nakba is a collective tragedy whose wounds have yet to heal 68 years later. What we call the ‘Catastrophe’ is not just the destruction of at least 436 villages or the forced displacement of 70 percent of our people, but of our ethnic cleansing at the hands of a colonialist strategy. For reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel must recognize what it has done to the Palestinian people.


It is time for Israelis to confront reality: when the Zionists came to Palestine, there were another people living here. Over 100 years ago, a Zionist mission was sent to Palestine and their report acknowledged this fact: “The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man.” And this: soon plans to displace Palestine’s population were unveiled. Millions of Palestinians still pay for the colonialist British promise referred to as the Balfour Declaration. No people on earth would have accepted such a clandestine deal, sealing their fate to a foreign power intent on wiping its presence and identity from the land they came from, tilled, and souls returned to.

Unfortunately, Nakba deniers throughout Israeli society continue to use neocolonialist nationalism to rejects the existence of the Palestinian people while redefining traditional constructs of colonialism to justify the systematic Israeli theft of Palestinian land and deprivation of Palestinian human rights.

Palestinians are Arabs who immigrated to Israel. We Jews fended off the attacks by seven Arab armies in self-defense. These declarations deny the very existence of the Palestinian people, continue to justify the atrocities committed against us, and deny Palestinian refugees’ legitimate right of return. However, if Israel aspires to live in peace in the region, it must face its own archival evidence attesting to the past that ties our two peoples together. Even 68 years after the Nakba, Jews are still the minority in historic Palestine while Palestinian Christians aren’t even recognized by Israel as Palestinian. Israel cannot continue to deny what it has done to the Palestinian people, and it’s time it understood that coexistence means acknowledgment.

Israeli historian Tom Segev described in eloquent, yet raw detail the pillaging of Palestinian homes at the hands of the so-called first Israelis in his well-regarded book 1949: The First Israelis. They found the remnants of Palestinian families forced out of their homes so recently that dust hadn’t yet settled on the letters, photographs, and toys left behind – the memories of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees never allowed to return home simply because they were not Jewish.

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