WASHINGTON, DC – For Palestinian survivors and rights advocates, it is an issue that comes to a head each year around this time. Can the U.S. government develop just policy in the Middle East without fully accounting for or recognizing Palestine’s history?
Thursday is the annual commemoration of the Nakba, which began in 1948 with the mass expulsion of Palestinians and the creation of the state of Israel.
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Since then, Palestinians have endured decades of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing.
But the US government has not recognized the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, even though it continues to assert its enormous influence in the region and maintains staunch support for the Israeli government.
Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, the United States has taken a more active role in the Palestinian issue, establishing a controversial “peace commission” to oversee Gaza reconstruction, even as it continues to take a tolerant stance toward Israeli atrocities.
Khaled Elgindi, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, believes that when faced with the question of whether the United States can responsibly address the Palestinian issue without recognizing the Nakba, the answer is simple.
“If we only acknowledge the humanity and suffering of one side, then we have no choice but to ignore the historical realities that still exist,” he told Al Jazeera.
Elgindi said “political amnesia” has long defined the US government’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For decades, the United States has supported Israel with billions of dollars in foreign aid and military aid, despite Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and a system of segregation that rights groups say amounts to apartheid.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians. Elgindi told Al Jazeera that the United States played an important role in underwriting the conflict.
“For better or for worse, mainly for the worse, the United States is closely tied to the Palestinian issue,” Elgindi said.
The fundamental corrective action, he said, would be to recognize the Nakba, even if it was delayed long enough. “It is a historical reality that Palestinians have a collective trauma that is part of their identity and part of their political psychology.”
“Nakba in progress”
On Thursday, U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution formally recognizing “the ongoing Nakba and the rights of Palestinian refugees.”
This is the fifth consecutive time he has introduced the bill, and the latest version has 12 co-sponsors, up from six when it was first introduced in 2022.
In a videoconference this week, he explained the need to draw attention to the Nakba given continued human rights violations against Palestinians.
“Many of my colleagues in Congress like to act like state violence against the Palestinian people started with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu,” Tlaib said.
“We know that the history of Palestine has been one of ongoing Nakba and ethnic cleansing movements (since the founding of Israel in 1948).”
Overall, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled and displaced during the Nakba conflict into refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring Arab countries.
Approximately 400 cities and villages were depopulated, and massacres were committed, particularly in Balad al-Sheikh, Sasa, Deir Yassin, Salih, and Lydda.
As in past years, Mr. Tlaib’s recent legislative efforts have been largely symbolic, with little chance of progress in Congress, which remains dominated by pro-Israel factions.
Still, the resolution comes amid signs of a shift in public attitudes, with opinion polls showing growing sympathy for the Palestinians and negative views of the Israeli government. Polls show that support for Israel has plummeted amid the massacre in Gaza, especially among Democrats.
Congressional attitudes are also showing signs of a more gradual but significant shift. Support for Israel was once considered sacrosanct, but legislation to block arms sales to the country is gaining support.
In April, 40 Democrats in the 100-member Senate voted to block the sale of military bulldozers to Israel, a means by which the occupation of Palestinian territory continues. A bill to block the sale failed to pass, but supporters hailed the tally as “historic.”
Earlier this month, 30 members of Congress also challenged the United States’ long-standing policy of “official ambiguity” over Israel’s alleged nuclear program, which has been off-limits for decades.
“(Tlaib’s) resolution is not necessarily something that could be passed today,” Youssef Munayer, senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington, D.C., told Al Jazeera.
“When it passes, and I think we will get to that point at some point, it will be because of all the efforts that have been made, past, today and tomorrow, to build the critical mass that is needed.”
“Less than a generation will be forgotten.”
However, even recognizing the Nakba on the May 15th anniversary remains controversial.
The United Nations held its first-ever Nakba commemoration ceremony in 2023, marking its 75th anniversary.
However, the US, UK, Germany and 30 other countries had voted against the UN resolution authorizing the event. The United States then did not attend the proceedings, with a spokesperson citing “long-standing concerns about anti-Israel bias within the United Nations system.”
In the same year, similar clashes over the Nakba occurred in the halls of parliament.
Tlaib held the first Nakba memorial at the U.S. Capitol in 2023, but Republican leaders called on the event to be canceled after pressure from the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Although the arm-length approach has become typical of the U.S. government, it was not always this way.
Elgindi pointed out that in the 1940s and 1950s, President Harry Truman “spoke of the terror and terror wrought by Jewish militias and underground groups,” even though the country’s government was the first to recognize the state of Israel.
For example, the Truman administration supported United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, which established the so-called “right of return” for displaced Palestinian refugees. Approximately 6 million people are currently registered with UNRWA.
The resolution also created the now defunct Palestinian Mediation Commission. The United States held a seat on the Palestine Mediation Commission, a commission tasked with mediating the conflict.
Josh Rubner, director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, said there is also ample evidence that the U.S. government was aware of the violence facing Palestinians, even if officials did not have the “vocabulary or vocabulary to call it a Nakba, or even to describe it as an act of ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
“What is very clear from the archives of the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem, the U.S. Consulate General in Haifa, and U.S. diplomatic posts across the Middle East is that they saw and described very accurately what Israel was doing to the Palestinian people,” Rubner said.
“They recognized the systematic dispossession, the systematic plunder of Palestinian property, the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, the systematic brutality to which they were subjected, and above all the inability of Israel to repatriate Palestinian refugees.”
However, in the years that followed, efforts to return Palestinians became sporadic.
They originated in the 1960s under President John F. Kennedy, who first provided U.S. defense weapons to Israel as part of a broader Cold War strategy. The issue of repatriation resurfaced during the Oslo Accord negotiations under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
Most recently, in 2016, US Secretary of State John Kerry made a rare reference to the Nakba.
“When Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2018, Palestinians will mark a very different anniversary: 70 years since what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe,” he said.
But Elgindi explained that, broadly speaking, U.S. approval of the Nakba declined in parallel with full acceptance of Israel, which began most strongly in the 1960s under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“The historical record on this is indisputable,” Elgindi said. “What really struck me in my research was that it basically takes less than a generation to forget everything about American politics.”
“A square peg in a round hole”?
Supporters of Tlaib’s resolution argue that its importance is both symbolic and practical.
“If policymakers do not take the Nakba into account and correct it to the extent that it can be corrected today, they will only perpetuate an unjust status quo,” Rubner said.
“If you don’t understand the core of the problem, it’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”
The Arab Center’s Munayyar agreed that recognition “sets an example for what we should do, not only in terms of recognizing the past, but also in terms of recognizing the present.”
“It shouldn’t take 80 years to recognize the Palestinian Nakba, and it shouldn’t take another 80 years to recognize the genocide that’s happening in Gaza,” he said.
