THIS MONTH’S Nakba Day commemorations — marking 78 years since the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence — were supposed to be occasions for solemn remembrance. Instead, they produced two embarrassing episodes that, taken together, illustrate something more significant than mere carelessness: a systematic pattern of historical redaction in which the Nakba’s protagonists have been carefully erased from the story.
The first incident involves imagery distributed under the official imprimatur of the ‘State of Palestine’. Among the video and photographs presented as evidence of Palestinian ‘victimhood’, researchers identified images that on closer inspection, tell a completely different story — photographs depicting an Arab ambush on a Jewish road convoy, images of Yemeni Jewish refugees, and scenes of Arab armies surrendering — none of them depicting Palestinian flight nor Israeli aggression, all of them quietly subverting the very narrative they were meant to illustrate.
That such images could pass through an official communication apparatus without correction raises an uncomfortable question: were the facts simply unknown, or were they considered immaterial?
Mamdani offers up a Bosnian Settler as proof of ‘indigeneity’
The second incident was, if anything, more revealing given its public footprint. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a video on May 15, marking Nakba Day, in which he described a New York woman named Inea Bushnaq as a Nakba survivor, saying: “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.” The four-minute video, which racked up 10 million views on social media by Sunday evening, featured Bushnaq recounting how her family fled East Jerusalem because “the Zionists were coming into Jerusalem.”
The trouble, as critics were quick to document, was the provenance of the “survivor” herself.
Bushnaq’s grandparents were Muslim Bosnians who had departed Bosnia for Ottoman Syria in the late 19th century after Austria-Hungary took control of the region.
The family later settled in Tulkarem, which came under Jordanian control — not Israeli control — after 1948. Bushnaq’s father had worked in England in the 1930s, returned to Mandatory Palestine, and in 1948 the family chose to relocate back to England. “They were not expelled, and no one forced them to move to England,” critics noted, adding that both Tulkarem and the old city of Jerusalem remained under Jordanian Arab control thereafter.
Mamdani’s video featured someone who was, in essence, the descendant of a Bosnian community that arrived in Ottoman-ruled Palestine in the late 19th century, contemporaneous with early Zionist settlement. The irony is almost too tidy: the official face of Palestinian indigenous displacement turned out to be a European immigrant’s descendant whose family voluntarily relocated to England — and whose hometown never fell under Israeli control.
Some critics noted that while historians have documented cases of Jewish militias forcing Arabs from their villages, in Jerusalem specifically, Arab leaders are understood to have ordered Arab families to leave to facilitate more intense urban warfare. The narrative also ignores the fact that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter which had stood for thousands of years, was ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population under the Jordanian occupation.
Nakba mythology
But these incidents are symptoms of a deeper methodological problem in how the Nakba narrative has been constructed and curated. To understand what actually precipitated the displacement of 1948, one must reinsert the protagonists who have been systematically deleted from the commemorative, santised version of events.
The most consequential of these is a central figure, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had spent the Second World War years in Berlin collaborating with Nazi leadership and broadcasting anti-Jewish propaganda across the Arab world. Upon returning, Husseini became the most powerful force in Palestinian Arab politics and led the total rejection of the 1947 UN Partition Plan — a plan that would have granted Palestinians a state.
Ignoring Husseini’s role in the Nakba, is akin to removing Lenin from the Russian Revolution.
The Jewish Agency accepted Resolution 181 , but the Arab League and Palestinian leaders rejected it. The Mufti’s strategy was not compromise but annihilation, and it set in motion the civil war that preceded formal hostilities.
It is important to note here that UK abstained from voting on UN181, and reneged on the Balfour Declaration which had envisaged the creation of a Jewish state in land that was also subsequently carved out to create Jordan.
Here is an excellent history of the period from the “casual historian’ youtube channel.
Then came the armies, that are similarly airbrushed out of the story. On the day after Israeli independence was declared, Israel was attacked by five Arab states, sparking the first Arab-Israeli War.
The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory, some 750,000 Arab Palestinians displaced, and with some 850 000 Jews displaced from Middle East and North African states.
Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who would later make no secret of his goal of destroying the new state, was among the officers in those invading forces. The Arab League’s own statements at the UN cited events like Deir Yassin as justification for the armies’ entry — armies whose invasion, and whose defeat, directly produced the refugee crisis the world has been managing ever since, despite other examples, of displacement such as Korea, where refugees have been settled even though the partition remains.
A narrative which eats itself
None of the salient details appear in the commemorative imagery of the State of Palestine.
None of the actual facts feature in Mayor Mamdani’s video. The UN Partition Plan rejection, the five invading armies, the Mufti’s Nazi record, the Arab leaders who ordered civilians to clear the way for combat, all excised. What remains is the tragic outcome: hundreds of thousands of men, women and children converted into permanent refugees by a combination of war, expulsion, and the cynical calculations of Arab governments that found the refugee camps more politically useful than resettlement.
The tragedy of the Palestinian refugees is real. It does not require embellishment, invented survivors, or misattributed photographs. But the insistence on presenting only the aftermath, severed from the decisions and actors that produced it, is not memory — It is mythology. And mythology, as this Nakba Day has demonstrated, has a habit of undermining itself precisely when it reaches for the nearest evidence.