{"id":121236,"date":"2025-05-19T17:05:03","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T15:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=121236"},"modified":"2025-05-19T08:41:21","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T06:41:21","slug":"19-05-107","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=121236","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018nakba\u2019 is not our problem"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The \u2018nakba\u2019 is not our problem<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ben Cohen<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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There is no reason why Jews should be troubled by the neurosis it projects. Their defeat was our liberation, and we should rejoice in that fact.<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

Palestinian protesters march during a rally marking the anniversary of the “nakba” in the West Bank city of Nablus, May 15, 2024. Photo by Nasser Ishtayeh\/Flash9<\/em><\/span>0.<\/p>\n

A smattering of Arabic words has entered the English language in recent years, the direct result of more than a century of conflict between the Zionist movement and Arab regimes determined to prevent the Jews from exercising self-determination in their historic homeland.<\/span><\/p>\n

These words include\u00a0fedayeen<\/em>, which refers to the armed Palestinian factions;\u00a0intifada<\/em>, which denotes successive violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel; and\u00a0naksa<\/em>, which pertains to the defeat sustained by the Arab armies in their failed bid to destroy Israel during the June 1967 war.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the top of this list, however, is\u00a0nakba<\/em>, the word in Arabic for \u201cdisaster\u201d or \u201ccatastrophe.\u201d The emergence of the Palestinian refugee question following Israel\u2019s 1948-49 War of Independence is now widely described as \u201cThe Nakba,\u201d and the term has become a stick wielded by anti-Zionists to beat Israel and, increasingly, Jews outside.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last Thursday, a date which the U.N. General Assembly has named for an annual \u201cNakba Day,\u201d workers at a cluster of Jewish-owned businesses in the English city of Manchester arrived at the building housing their offices to find that it had been badly vandalized overnight. The front of the building, located in a neighborhood with a significant Jewish community, was splattered with red paint. An external wall displayed the crudely painted words \u201cHappy Nakba Day.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The culprits were a group called Palestine Action, a pro-Hamas collective of activists whose sole mission is to intimidate the Jewish community in the United Kingdom in much the same way as Sir Oswald Mosley\u2019s British Union of Fascists did back in the 1930s. Its equivalents in the United States are groups like Within Our Lifetime and Students for Justice in Palestine, who have shown themselves equally enthused when it comes to intimidating Jewish communities by conducting loud, sometimes violent, demonstrations outside synagogues and other communal facilities, all too frequently showering Jews with the kind of abuse that was once the preserve of neo-Nazis. These thugs, cosplaying with keffiyehs instead of swastika armbands, can reasonably be described as the\u00a0neo<\/em>-neo-Nazis.<\/span><\/p>\n

The overarching point here is that ideological constructs like\u00a0nakba<\/em>\u00a0play a key role in enabling the intimidation they practice. It allows them to diminish the historic victimhood of the Jews, born of centuries of stateless disempowerment, with dimwitted formulas equating the nakba with the Nazi Holocaust. It also enables them to camouflage hate speech and hate crimes as human-rights advocacy\u2014a key reason why law enforcement, in the United States as well as in Canada, Australia and most of Europe, has been found sorely wanting when it comes to dealing with the surge of antisemitism globally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of the response needs to be legislative. That means clamping down on both sides of the Atlantic on groups that glorify designated terrorist organizations by preventing them from fundraising; policing their access to social media; and restricting their demonstrations to static events in a specific location with a predetermined limit on attendees, rather than a march that anyone can join, along with an outright ban on any such events in the environs of Jewish community buildings.<\/span><\/p>\n

These are not independent civil society organizations, as they pretend to be, but rather extensions of terrorist organizations like Hamas and\u2014in the case of Samidoun, another group describing itself as a \u201csolidarity\u201d organization\u2014the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. If we cannot ban them outright, we need to contain them much more effectively. We can start by framing the issue as a national security challenge and worry less about their \u201cfreedom of speech.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is also a fight that takes us into the realm of ideas and arguments. We need to stop thinking about the\u00a0nakba<\/em>\u00a0as a Palestinian narrative of pain deserving of empathy by exposing it for what it is\u2014another tool in the arsenal of groups whose goal is to bring about the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.<\/span><\/p>\n

When it was originally introduced in the late 1940s, the word\u00a0nakba<\/em>\u00a0had nothing to do with the plight of the Palestinian refugees or their dubious claim to be the uninterrupted, indigenous inhabitants of a land seized by dispossessing foreign colonists. Popularized by the late Syrian writer Constantine Zureik in a 1948 book titled\u00a0The Meaning of Disaster<\/em>, the\u00a0nakba<\/em>\u00a0described therein was, as the Israeli scholar Shany Mor has crisply\u00a0pointed out<\/a>, simply \u201cthe failure of the Arabs to defeat the Jews.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Zureik was agonized by this defeat, calling it \u201cone of the harshest of the trials and tribulations with which the Arabs have been inflicted throughout their long history.\u201d His story is fundamentally a story of national humiliation and wounded pride. Yet there is absolutely no reason why Jews should be remotely troubled by the neurosis it projects. Their defeat was our victory and our liberation, and we should unreservedly rejoice in that fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

The only aspect of the\u00a0nakba<\/em>\u00a0that we should worry about is the impact it has on us as a community, as well as on the status of Israel as a sovereign member of the international society of states. As Mizrahi Jews know well (my own family among them), the\u00a0nakba<\/em>\u00a0assembled in Zureik\u2019s imagination really was a \u201ccatastrophe\u201d\u2014 for us. Resoundingly defeated on the battlefield by the superior courage and tactical nous of the nascent Israeli Defense Forces, the Arabs compensated by turning on the defenseless Jews in their midst. From Libya to Iraq, ancient and established Jewish communities were the victims of a cowardly, spiteful policy of expropriation, mob violence and expulsion.<\/span><\/p>\n

The inheritors of that policy are the various groups that compose the Palestinian solidarity movement today. Apoplectic at the realization that they have been unable to dislodge the \u201cZionists\u201d\u2014and knowing now that the main consequence of the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom in Israel has been the destruction of Gaza\u2014they, too, have turned on the Jews in their midst.<\/span><\/p>\n

They have done so with one major advantage that the original neo-Nazis never had: sympathy and endorsement from academics, celebrities, politicians and even the United Nations. Indeed, the world body hosted a two-day seminar on \u201cEnding the Nakba\u201d at its New York headquarters at the same time that pro-Hamas fanatics were causing havoc just a few blocks downtown. Even so, we should take heart at the knowledge that\u00a0nakba\u00a0<\/em>is not so much a symbol of resistance as it is defeat. Just as the rejectionists and eliminationists have lost previous wars through a combination of political stupidity, diplomatic ineptitude and military flimsiness, so, too, can they lose this one.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Ben Cohen<\/strong> is a senior analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and director of FDD\u2019s rapid response outreach, specializing in global antisemitism, anti-Zionism and Middle East\/European Union relations. A London-born journalist with 30 years of experience, he previously worked for BBC World and has contributed to Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet and Congressional Quarterly. He was a senior correspondent at The Algemeiner for more than a decade and is a weekly columnist for JNS. Cohen has reported from conflict zones worldwide and held leadership roles at the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. His books include Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through 21st Century Antisemitism.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The \u2018nakba\u2019 is not our problem Ben Cohen There is no reason why Jews should be troubled by the neurosis it projects. Their defeat was our liberation, and we should rejoice in that fact. Palestinian protesters march during a rally marking the anniversary of the “nakba” in the West Bank city of Nablus, May 15, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121236"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121251,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121236\/revisions\/121251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}