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The "Nakba" Was a Catastrophe for Sephardi Jews

(JNS) Ben Cohen - On May 15, a date which the UN General Assembly has named for an annual "Nakba Day," a cluster of Jewish-owned businesses in the English city of Manchester found the building housing their offices badly vandalized overnight and splattered with red paint with the words, "Happy Nakba Day." The culprits were a group called Palestine Action, a pro-Hamas collective whose sole mission is to intimidate the Jewish community in the UK in much the same way as Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists did back in the 1930s. Ideological constructs like nakba play a key role in enabling the intimidation of Jews, with dimwitted formulas equating the nakba with the Nazi Holocaust. It enables these thugs to camouflage hate speech and hate crimes as human-rights advocacy. These are not independent civil society organizations, as they pretend to be, but rather extensions of terrorist organizations like Hamas. We need to stop thinking about the nakba as a Palestinian narrative of pain by exposing it as another tool in the arsenal of groups whose goal is to bring about the elimination of Israel. When it was originally introduced in the late 1940s, the word nakba had nothing to do with the plight of Palestinian refugees. The late Syrian writer Constantine Zureik popularized the term in a 1948 book titled The Meaning of Disaster, describing it simply as "the failure of the Arabs to defeat the Jews." He saw it as fundamentally a story of national humiliation and wounded pride. As Mizrahi Jews know well (my own family among them), the nakba really was a "catastrophe" - for us. The Arabs compensated for their defeat by turning on the defenseless Jews in their midst. From Libya to Iraq, ancient and established Jewish communities were the victims of a spiteful policy of expropriation, mob violence and expulsion. The writer is a senior analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
2025-05-20 00:00:00
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