Historical reckoning: The push for the US to acknowledge the Nakba

In a video conference this week, she explained that it was necessary to draw attention to the Nakba, given that the human rights abuses against Palestinians continue.

“Too many of my colleagues in Congress like to act like … the state violence against the Palestinian people began with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Tlaib said.

“We know that Palestinian history has been one of the ongoing Nakba and the ethnic cleansing campaign since the creation [of Israel] in 1948.”

All told, about 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled during the Nakba, displaced to refugee camps across the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring Arab countries.

About 400 cities and villages were depopulated, with massacres committed in Balad al-Sheikh, Saasaa, Deir Yassin, Saliha and Lydda, among others.

Like in past years, Tlaib’s latest legislative effort is largely symbolic, with little chance of progressing in Congress, which remains predominantly pro-Israel.

Still, the latest resolution comes amid signs of shifting public awareness, with polls showing increasing sympathy for Palestinians and a rise in negative views towards Israel’s government. Polls have shown tanking support for Israel, particularly among Democrats, amid the genocide in Gaza.

Attitudes in Congress have also shown significant, if more incremental, signs of change. Though support for Israel was once considered sacrosanct, legislation to block arms sales to the country has garnered growing support.

In April, 40 Democrats in the 100-member Senate voted to block the sale of military bulldozers to Israel, a tool in the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories. While legislation to prevent the sale did not pass, advocates hailed the tally as “historic”.

Thirty members of Congress earlier this month also challenged the longstanding US policy of “official ambiguity” towards Israel’s alleged nuclear programme, a subject that had been seen as off limits for decades.

“[Tlaib’s] resolution is not something that may necessarily pass today,” Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, told Al Jazeera.

“When it does pass — and I do think we will one day get to that point — it will be because of all the efforts that came to build the critical mass necessary, in the past, today and tomorrow and so on.”

‘Less than a generation to forget’

Even acknowledging the Nakba on the May 15 anniversary, however, remains controversial.

The United Nations held its first-ever commemoration of the Nakba in 2023, marking the 75th anniversary.

The US, the United Kingdom, Germany and 30 other countries had voted against a UN resolution recognising the event, though. The US subsequently did not attend the proceedings, with a spokesperson pointing to “longstanding concerns over anti-Israel bias within the UN system”.

That same year, a similar clash over the Nakba took place in the halls of Congress.

Tlaib held a first-of-its-kind Nakba commemoration at the US Capitol in 2023. Republican leaders, however, sought to cancel the event amid pressure from the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

While the arms-length approach has become typical for the US government, that was not always the case.

Elgindy pointed out that, in the 1940s and 50s, President Harry Truman “spoke out about the terrorism and terror inflicted by Jewish militias and underground groups”, even as his government was the first to recognise the state of Israel.

Truman’s administration, for instance, supported UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which established a so-called “right to return” for displaced Palestinian refugees – approximately six million are registered with UNRWA today.

The resolution also created the now-defunct Palestine Conciliation Commission, a panel tasked with mediating the conflict, upon which the US held a seat.

There is also ample evidence that the US government was aware of the violence facing Palestinians, even if officials didn’t have the “vocabulary and the lexicon to call it the Nakba, or even to describe it as an act of ethnic cleansing or genocide”, according to Josh Ruebner, the director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU).

“What’s very, very clear from the archives of the US Consulate in Jerusalem, the US Consulate in Haifa, other US diplomatic outposts throughout the Middle East [is that] they saw and described very accurately what Israel was doing to the Palestinian people,” Ruebner said.

“They recognised the systematic looting, the systematic despoliation of Palestinian property, the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, the systematic atrocities that they were subjected to, and above all else, the failure of Israel to repatriate Palestinian refugees.”

But efforts towards Palestinian repatriation were sporadic in the years that followed.

They sprouted up in the 1960s under President John F Kennedy, who first provided the US defensive weapons to Israel as part of a wider Cold War strategy. The question of repatriation resurfaced during negotiations on the Oslo Accords under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

More recently, in 2016, US Secretary of State John Kerry made a rare reference to the Nakba.

“When Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2018, the Palestinians will mark a very different anniversary: 70 years since what they call the Nakba or catastrophe,” he said.

But Elgindy explained that, broadly speaking, the US acknowledgement of the Nakba declined in parallel with an increasingly full-bore embrace of Israel, beginning most forcefully under President Lyndon B Johnson in the 1960s.

“The historical record on this is just indisputable,” Elgindy said. “What really surprised me in my research was how it took basically less than a generation to forget all of that in terms of American politics.”

‘A square peg into a round hole’?

Supporters of Tlaib’s resolution have argued that its significance is as much practical as symbolic.

“If policymakers don’t factor in the Nakba and remedying it to the extent that it can be remedied today, they’re simply going to be perpetuating an unjust status quo,” Ruebner said.

“Without understanding the crux of the matter, it’s almost like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

The Arab Center’s Munayyer agreed that recognition “sets an example for things that we should be doing, not just in terms of recognising the past but also recognising the moment”.

“It shouldn’t take us 80 years to recognise the Nakba in Palestine, and it shouldn’t take us another 80 years to recognise the genocide that’s taking place in Gaza,” he said.