What is Nakba Day?
Every year on May 15, Palestinians and their supporters mark what they call Nakba Day or the "Catastrophe". They claim that it is the commemoration of the displacement of the Palestinians as a result of the creation of Israel. According to UN sources between 472000 and 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled as a result of the 1948 war. In their eyes the re-establishment of the ancient Jewish homeland was a Nakba, or Catastrophe as they call it, akin to the Holocaust. This has been drummed into Palestinian culture and the media that promotes it for years, some people even saying from 1948. But is this correct?The fact of the matter is that there was no Nakba Day from 1948 to 1998 when it was inaugurated by Arafat. Since 1998 the Arabs have been commemorating Nakba Day on the 15th May. The absurdity of this date was this was barely four after signing the Oslo Accords which was to be the groundwork for peace. Sad but true.
But is this the real meaning of the Nakba or another propaganda attempt by the master of propaganda?
A Syrian professor, Constantine Zurayk who was vice-president of the American University of Beirut, in July 1948, used the phrase Nakba to describe the failure of the mighty Islamic armies to defeat a Jewish army. He said that it was the greatest military defeat in Islamic history. At this time the Nakba was not a catastrophe but disaster. He reiterated this in his book entitled, "The Meaning of the Disaster" which he published in 1955. Remember that in the eyes of Islam, their religion was created to replace Judaism.
However there was an even earlier use of the term Nakba. In a book entitled, "The Arab awakening: the story of the Arab national movement" written 1946 by George Antonius, he makes the claim that the ‘Year of the Catastrophe’ among Arabs referred to 1920, when European colonial powers partitioned the Ottoman Empire into a series of separate states along lines of their own choosing.
“The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe.... It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.”
So what is the Nakba Day? The division of the Middle East into countries such as Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel? Or the defeat of the mighty Islamic armies by a Jewish army? Or the creation of the Jewish State? Maybe it is just another reason to play victimhood?
