MOSHE HILL OPINION COLUMNS MAY 10 2023
Starting on Wednesday night and going through Monday, May 15, the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), with the help of other groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), will be hosting a series of events to highlight the 75th anniversary of the Nakba. Their goal is to continue to spread their revisionist history to Congress and the rest of the world about what happened in 1948.
The first event is an educational seminar for members of Congress with special guest Rashida Tlaib, who has spouted Jew-hatred so frequently that she was barred from entering the State of Israel. One of Tlaib’s first acts as a Member of Congress was to re-label Israel as “Palestine” on a world map in her office. Tlaib regularly introduces anti-Israel legislation, like support for the BDS movement, which seeks to economically destroy the Jewish state, and seeks to defund the Iron Dome, a purely defensive piece of equipment, to ensure that rockets shot from Gaza hit their intended civilian targets.
The “About” section of the event says, “May 15 marks 75 years since the beginning of the Nakba, which means ‘catastrophe.’ Seventy-five years ago, Zionist militias and the new Israeli military violently expelled approximately three-quarters of all Palestinians from their homes and homeland in what became the [S]tate of Israel.”
This has become the narrative, as the truth has become too inconvenient for the world. When Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, six surrounding Arab nations attacked, seeking to murder every Jew who lived within the fledgling nation. When the Jews held their ground and did not get pushed into the Mediterranean Sea, the Arabs declared it a “nakba,” literally translated as a catastrophe.
However, radio broadcasts and newspaper publications from the era specifically show Arab nations telling Palestinians to leave, and they would be able to return after all the Jews are dead. The Nakba, in fact, was a self-inflicted catastrophe, because they left, and the Jews didn’t die.
Instead of being reintegrated into the countries that they escaped to, like the millions of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries did in Israel, the Palestinians then allowed themselves to be used as refugee props for almost four generations, until today. There was no demand from 1948 through 1967, when Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. The West Bank) for Jordan to make the Palestinian refugees citizens. There was no accusation of apartheid on the Jordanian government. Same is true for Egypt, which controlled Gaza until the Six-Day War. If the Arabs who lived in the newly founded Israel stayed, or returned immediately after the War of 1948, like 160,000 of their fellow Palestinians, they would have been made Israeli citizens with all the same rights as any Israeli Jew. They didn’t, and they are still being used today.
Yet this history doesn’t matter, and those who seek to rewrite it are making waves at every level of culture and government. A recent Gallup poll read, “After a decade in which Democrats have shown increasing affinity toward the Palestinians, their sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%. Today’s attitudes reflect an 11-percentage-point increase over the past year in Democrats’ sympathy with the Palestinians. At the same time, the percentages sympathizing more with the Israelis (38%) and those not favoring a side (13%) have dipped to new lows.” Independents still side more with Israelis at a rate of 49% to 32%, while nearly 8 in 10 Republicans favor Israelis, 79% to 11%.
The United Nations, which acts as though it has been trying to undo the Partition Plan of 1947 for the past three quarters of a century, is commemorating the Nakba for the first time this year. “This year marks the 75th anniversary of the mass displacement of Palestinians known as ‘the Nakba’ or ‘the Catastrophe,’” says the UN website. “The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) will commemorate the 75thanniversary of the Nakba at UN Headquarters in New York.”
“For the first time in the history of the UN, this anniversary will be commemorated pursuant to the mandate by the General Assembly.”
There will also be a rally in front of the Washington Monument on Sunday, put together by AMP. On their website, they have a series of webinars, podcasts, and other press releases. When there is an opportunity to show a silhouette of a map of “Palestine,” they do not show The West Bank or Gaza; they show the entirety of mainland Israel combined with the West Bank and Gaza. Literally “from the river to the sea.” Since the Palestinian territories are Jew-free (selling land to a Jew is a death penalty offense in the Palestinian Authority), this is a map declaring that they would like to have a second Holocaust in the land of Israel, which over seven million Jews call home.
The United Nations, Members of Congress, and many European governments are buying into these lies. It’s up to American Jews to take up the mantle of the previous generations, who rhetorically and financially defended our brothers and sisters in Israel when it was founded, and continue to defend Israel today. Our enemies do not rest; neither can we.
