There’s been a lot of talk in some mainline circles lately about the nakba, the “catastrophe” that was the founding of the state of Israel that resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. For example, at the World Council of Churches you can read about an occasion of observance by the WCC’s “Ecumenical Accompaniers”:
On the 15th May, EAs participated in a silent commemoration of the 1948 “Nakba” (catastrophe) in which over 700,000 Palestinians were exiled and their homes and properties turned over to the immigrants of the newly established State of Israel.
Then there’s this from the United Church of Christ, as part of their acknowledgment of the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel:
The events celebrated in these days in Israel, though, are remembered differently by another population. The Palestinian people remember these events with the term al-Nakba, or “the disaster.” Over the same course of weeks in 1948 in which Israel was established and expanded, more than 700,000 Palestinians became refugees, fleeing to the West Bank and Jordan, Gaza and Egypt, and Lebanon and Syria. Land changed hands, homes changed owners, and people’s lives were changed.
While Israeli actions undoubtedly created some of these refugees, many–probably most–fled their homes on the urging of the invading Arab governments, which wanted a free-fire zone to kill as many Jews as possible while minimizing Arab casualties. In the 60 years since, those governments have kept the Palestinian refugees (who are ethnically indistinguishable from the bulk of the populations of Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and most of North Africa) in makeshift, squalid camps, as a propaganda tool that can be utilized at will in a multitude of international fora.
Then there’s the side that never, ever gets heard in the mainline Middle East advocacy industry, from today’s New York Times:
Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.
Jews were once a wealthy and politically active part of the spectrum of Iraq. In a fading red volume of the Iraq Directory of 1936, the “Israelite community,” then numbering about 120,000, is listed along with Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and Sabeans. Rescued from a Baghdad library, this book lists Hebrew among the six languages of Iraq and describes a country in which “the mosque stands beside the church and the synagogue.”
However, the directory predates decades of trauma: the 1941 Farhud pogrom in which more than 130 Jews were killed during the Feast of Shavuot, World War II, the Holocaust, the anti-Zionism of Saddam Hussein and the post-2003 rise of Islamic militants.
That’s just one country, of course. Jews were also expelled (or made so insecure as to have to flee) from Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, and Algeria. Altogether, over a million Jews were forced to leave their homes, and resettled in Israel, the United States and Europe. Remember that the next time the WCC or the UCC Justice and Witness Ministries talk about the nakba.
