Who in the Middle East has not been traumatized by the upheavals of the last century? We all treasure the places where our families have lived. Yet only the Palestinian leadership has weaponized the memory of displacement and transformed it into an ideology of genocide. Nakba Day, which falls on May 15 every year, was established in 1998 by Yasser Arafat to turn Israel’s Independence Day into a festival of grievance. The very fact of Israel’s existence was branded a “catastrophe,” but not the war that caused the displacement, and not the displacement that affected both sides.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, recommending the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish leadership accepted. The Arab Higher Committee rejected it. There was no counter-proposal, no negotiation, no attempt to secure the best possible deal for the Arab population. There was only refusal, followed by violence.

On May 15, 1948, the day after Israel declared independence, the armies of Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq invaded the newborn country. The Arab League’s secretary-general, Azzam Pasha, reportedly described the coming conflict as “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” This was not a war of national liberation. It was a war of annihilation against a newly established state and its Jewish population. The Arab armies lost. That is the Nakba.

The Nakba narrative presents 1948 as something that happened only to Palestinians. It erases the fact that in the same war, the Jordanian Arab Legion........

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