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NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani opens his four-minute video to recognize Nakba Day with this stark, dreadful lie: “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.”
These twin steps – recognizing the ridiculous notion of a Nakba and accusing Israel of expelling all the Arabs who were displaced – can go far to embolden supporters who might harass and physically attack Jewish New Yorkers and vandalize and burn synagogues and other Jewish facilities.
The New York Times ignored the aforementioned quote in a lengthy article, as if such an incendiary remark only qualifies as a minor sideshow. Source of the quote is the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Mamdani created his first s— hits the fan moment with his 960,000 Jewish citizens last Friday night – as the Jewish sabbath began – when he released the Nakba Day video (Nakba is the Arab word for “catastrophe”). At that time, the five Arab armies went down to a humiliating defeat after attacking the new sovereign state of modern Israel.
“For the first time in the history of the Great City of New York, its mayor names and remembers the Nakba,” Mamdani ally Asad Dandia wrote on social media, according to the Times. “And I get to be alive to see it.”
Dandia was “alive to see” a four-minute, documentary-style video – created by City Hall employees – that centered on an interview with a woman identified as Inea Bushnaq, who was 9 years old when she was displaced with her family during the 1948 war.
The Times did report these words of the mayor in the video: “Inea is a New Yorker and a Nakba survivor. She shared her story with us – one of home, tradition and memory over generations.”
Nakba Day is the silliest, most childlike excuse ever created to explain away defeat in war. Most nations and peoples who are vanquished take their losses in a saddened, subdued manner. The less said the better. The Arabs would proclaim it from the highest of their tall, looming minarets, where Muslims make the call to prayer five times a day. Here are the basics of what gave us Nakba Day:
In late November 1947, the United Nations voted for a partition plan that would give both the Jews and the Arabs half the territory that comprises Israel today. Jewish leaders accepted the plan and the Arabs rejected it, following up with an invasion of five armies. Israel emerged from the war with control of 78 percent of the land, all but Gaza, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
The 700,000 Arabs who were displaced left Israel’s land area for a variety of reasons – one of them being their leaders’ call for them to leave space so their soldiers to drive the Jews into the sea. Arab author Susan Abulhawa declared in a newspaper piece that Israelis expelled 80 percent of her brethren. If anything, it was probably the other way around. Once the war ended, Israeli leaders would not allow the Arabs to return. Why should they? Those who followed their leaders’ orders to leave were colluding with the attempted extermination of the Jews.
Arabs created their own Nakba – the loss of most their allotted territory and displacement of large numbers of their own people. This is what our college-graduate mayor of America’s most populous city is commemorating.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who is Jewish, offered Mamdani an opportunity to prove he was committed to protecting Jewish New Yorkers by proposing buffer zones for synagogues and schools after an anti-Israel mob harassed Jews trying to enter a Manhattan synagogue. Council passed a veto-proof law to authorize buffer zones for the synagogues, but legislation for schools fell short of a veto-proof vote.
Activists complained that the laws impeded their freedom of speech – at the top of their lungs targeting Jews.
Mamdani could have sent a firm message that Jews were as important to him as all other New Yorkers. He could have endorsed buffer zones for synagogues even though that would not be necessary. He did nothing. He could have permitted the school buffer zone legislation to pass. He vetoed it. He also assailed the activities at the synagogues which hosted fairs to provide housing information for American Jews who are considering a move to Israel.
How can Mamdani instill confidence in Jewish constituents that way?
Then the mayor honors his absurd Nakba Day.
“You are responsible for endangering the Jewish community with your rhetoric,” state Assembly member Joey Saban wrote in a tweet, referencing the mayor. “Arabs rejected peace, invaded to annihilate Israel, and lost. You deliberately make no mention and erase the 850,000 Jews violently expelled from Arab lands, stripped of everything and denied any ‘right of return’ – my family being one of them.”
Saban’s tweet exemplifies the outraged reactions of other Jewish leaders.
We can hope that in three years NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani will learn what Nakba Day really means – if and when he seeks renomination during the Democratic primary.
