The resolution calls for the U.S. to “commemorate the Nakba through official recognition and remembrance.”
By World Israel News Staff
Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich) introduced a resolution Monday calling for recognition of the Nakba – Arabic for ‘catastrophe,’ referring to the Israel Declaration of Independence on May 15, 1948.
“This Sunday was a day of solemn remembrance of all the lives lost, families displaced, and neighborhoods destroyed during the violent and horror of the Nakba,” Tlaib stated in a press release.
“The scars bourn by the close to 800,000 Palestinians who were forced from their family homes and their communities and those killed are burned into the souls of the people who lived through the Nakba.”
The resolution calls for the U.S. to “commemorate the Nakba through official recognition and remembrance.”
House Representatives Betty McCollum, Marie Newman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar joined Tlaib in supporting this legislation.
The resolution was endorsed by the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP Action), Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, Project48, and the United States Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).
The resolution was submitted a week and a half after Israel celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut, or Independence Day, which the country observes annually on the fifth day of the Hebrew month of Iyar. Indeed, the day ended with a Palestinian terror attack in the central Israeli city of Elad that left three men dead.
“As the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh last week made all too clear, the violence and war crimes are an ongoing and ever-present assault on the existence and humanity of the Palestinian people,” the press release said, despite the fact that no evidence has been provided to support the Palestinian claim that the IDF fired the shot that killed the Al Jazeera reporter. Nor did it mention the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to cooperate with a joint investigation with Israel into the incident.
“The Israeli apartheid government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing seeks to degrade Palestinian humanity and break the will of the people to be free,” it continued.
“Fortunately, as Palestinians and their allies prove time and time again, we will persist no matter the circumstances until peace, freedom, equity and respect for all people are secured and protected.”
The resolution also calls on the U.S. “to continue to support the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides social services to a large number of the over 7 million Palestinian refugees and to support the implementation of Palestinian refugees’ rights.”
Former president Donald Trump cut funding to UNRWA in 2018. In his final week in office, Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said that UNRWA inflates the number of Palestinian refugees to five million, calling it a major obstacle to peace.
“We suspended funding to UNRWA, which is riddled with waste, fraud and concerns of support to terrorism. UNRWA is not a refugee agency; it’s estimated 200,000 Arabs displaced in 1948 are still alive and most others are not refugees by any rational criteria,” he said.
According to Jewish Virtual Library, “Many Arabs claim that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1947-49. The last census was taken by the British in 1945. It found approximately 1.2 million permanent Arab residents in all of Palestine. A 1949 Government of Israel census counted 160,000 Arabs living in the country after the war. In 1947, a total of 809,100 Arabs lived in the same area.
“This meant no more than 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become refugees. A report by the UN Mediator on Palestine arrived at an even lower figure — 472,000 — and calculated that only about 360,000 Arab refugees required aid.”
Furthermore, according to Jewish Virtual Library, “The beginning of the Arab exodus can be traced to the weeks immediately following the announcement of the [UN] partition resolution,” which would create a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine. The Arabs refused to accept a Jewish state and began a war to destroy the fledgling Jewish state.
Meanwhile, Jewish leaders urged the Arabs to remain in Palestine and become citizens of Israel.
“All of those who left fully anticipated being able to return to their homes after an early Arab victory, as Palestinian nationalist Aref el-Aref explained in his history of the 1948 war:
“’The Arabs thought they would win in less than the twinkling of an eye and that it would take no more than a day or two from the time the Arab armies crossed the border until all the colonies were conquered and the enemy would throw down his arms and cast himself on their mercy.’”