What Was The Nakba?

In Arabic the word means "catastrophe"

I’m writing this a couple of days after Nakba Day 2026, as a result of comments that I saw across the Israel/Palestine ecosystem on that day, including in the comment section of my own piece on the unfortunate coincidence of Nakba Day with Jerusalem Day.

The term Nakba in Arabic means “catastrophe”. In current discourse this is generally talked about to mean the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 war, when hundreds of thousands were expelled or fled from their homes and were not allowed to return. Roughly 15,000 Palestinians were killed during this event, including in massacres such as the one that took place in Deir Yassin. These events have been chronicled by many historians, including Israelis such as Benny Morris.

NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani made a tweet this year for Nakba Day talking about the plight of a Nakba survivor who now lives in New York:

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@NYCMayor

Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed. Inea is a New Yorker and a Nakba survivor. She shared her story with us

9:40 PM · May 15, 2026 · 10.3M Views

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10.9K Replies · 41.9K Reposts · 185K Likes

A pushback I have heard a number of times is that the term “Nakba” originally referred to the Arab military defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1948 war, where five Arab countries tried to defeat Israel following the Israeli declaration of independence.

Indeed, the modern political use of the word is usually traced to the Syrian historian Constantine Zureiq. He published Maʿna al-Nakba—The Meaning of the Disaster—in 1948. Zureiq was writing in the immediate aftermath of the war, and his essay was addressed primarily to an Arab audience. His concern was the scale of the Arab defeat and what that failure revealed about Arab political, social, intellectual, and institutional weakness. In that sense, the “catastrophe” he was describing was not framed in the first instance as a Palestinian refugee commemoration in the way Nakba Day is understood today. It was a diagnosis of civilisational and political failure in the Arab world.

At the time, the Arab world by-and-large saw Palestine as an indivisible part of the Arab nation, and the defeat by Israel was seen as a collapse of Arab prestige. Arabs and Muslims had been a major force in the Middle East (give or take the Crusades, and the Mongol conquests) since the 7th century. That’s a vast timespan—more than a millennium.

To try and translate this into Western terms, this might be akin to if a native-American tribe declared independence from the United States of America, and subsequently defended that claim against the American military, winning a military victory over the United States. This would, it is true, most likely be seen as a kind of civilisational disaster for the United States.

And it is in these terms that the Arab loss in 1948 was seen across the wider Arab world. The displacement of Palestinian Arabs was a secondary matter.

This translated to a strange and often cruel contradiction. The Palestinian refugees became, rhetorically, the symbol of Arab humiliation and Israeli wrongdoing. But in practical terms they were rarely treated as people whose lives had to be rebuilt.

In many Arab states, Palestinians were not fully naturalised, not fully integrated, and not given the same pathway into citizenship that other refugee populations have often been given elsewhere. The prevailing belief was that resettling Palestinians permanently would mean accepting the finality of the creation of Israel, and therefore weakening the refugee’s claim to return. This is why UNRWA has operated in the way that it has done: not resettling Palestinian refugees, but allowing them to be left in limbo.

In some places they were able to work, receive education, and build a relatively stable life. Yet in others they faced severe legal restrictions, exclusion from professions, limits on property ownership, and precarious residency. Lebanon is probably the most obvious example of this. Palestinian refugees were long treated as a demographic and sectarian threat rather than as a population requiring incorporation. But the broader pattern was Arab government using Palestinians as a cudgel. The only acceptable solution for anti-Zionist Arabs was the dissolution of Israel.

Of course, in the years since, the meaning of “The Nakba” changed. The word has slipped away from its original register of pan-Arab humiliation and become much more specifically Palestinian. This itself reflected a wider political transformation. In 1948, Palestine was often spoken about as an Arab cause. It was treated as one front in a broader struggle between Arab nationalism and Zionism. But now, pan-Arab nationalism is a faded cause. Broadly, the Arab world has accepted Palestinian nationalism as a substitute for pan-Arab nationalism.

For many on the pro-Israel side, this is taken to mean that the pro-Palestinian side is being disingenuous. The argument is roughly: you tried to fight us in 1948, you lost military, and now you want to try to reverse your defeat via pity for the refugees.

And I can understand this line of reasoning. But just because the refugee issue has been weaponised against Israel, it doesn’t mean that it is not a real issue that needs a real resolution as part of a broader resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I believe that compassion for the displaced refugees is central to any solution. Whether that is a 2-state solution, or a 3-state solution, or a 1-state solution with a federation, or any other actual solution to the problem.

Remember that the war was between Israel and the leaderships of the surrounding Arab states. None of which at the time were democracies. The Palestinian people (neither Arabs, nor Jews) at the time never got a chance to vote in a referendum on what they actually wanted to happen.

And so the people were displaced, and those who were killed for the most part did not really have any say over the question of whether there was going to be a war. They were just in the middle of it.

This, in many ways, is quite similar to the situation relating to October 7th and Gaza. Most Palestinians prior to October 7th did not have any hand in governing Gaza. Gaza was being ruled by Hamas, in a theocratic dictatorship. October 7th was sanctioned by the leadership of Hamas, and carried out by in the region of 5,000 Palestinians, many of whom were Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants. For most of the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, they did not know what Hamas was plotting. They just woke up and found themselves in the middle of a war.

But I digress.

Maybe I am wrong, but I would say that between the Arab states that are part of the Abraham Accords, and the wider Arab world, and the Palestinian Authority, and the state of Israel it should be possible to work out a solution to the conflict through negotiations. I believe that this is the best possibility for all of the countries involved.

The status quo, certainly, has failed.

This will give us a chance to put the Nakba behind us.