Nakbah Day: Commemorating the Greatest Humiliation in World History

Yesterday was Nakbah Day, and my email box is full of material from various pro-Palestinian groups about the tragedy, literally “the catastrophe,” that befell the Arabs in 1948, which they often like to compare with the Holocaust for gravity. Initially my response to this comparison was to dismiss it as a classic example of the rhetorical excess of the Arab world, compounded by their deep self-absorption: if it happened to them, it’s unimaginably painful; if they could have done it to the Jews it would have been glorious.

Obviously, death of several thousand people, the flight of half a million or so refugees is a tragedy, but compare that to 6 million civilians murdered and millions more driven from their homes? Indeed, this painful story pales even when compared to the kind of damage done in the Arab world of “Hama Rules,” from the 10-20,000 Palestinians killed in Black September 1970, to the more than hundred thousand civilian casualties in the Lebanese civil war (in which the PLO participated actively), to 10-20,000 Syrians obliterated in Hama in 1982, to the million killed by Saddam Hussein in his long career, to the current Syrian civil war in which over 70 thousand have been killed and nearly two million forced to flee their homes.

But rather than minimize the Nakbah, I’d like to take a different approach. I agree that the Nakbah was a unique event in the history of the Arab world, one who scale and whose staggering effect does compare with the Holocaust in terms of its impact on Arab memory and discourse. The catastrophe was not what happened to the refugees, who were a mere pawn and minor spinoff of the true tragedy. The real catastrophe was the humiliation of the Arab nations in the eyes of the entire world.

I challenge anyone to find an historical case that even approaches the magnitude of the calamitous failure of the Arabs in 1948, the greatest collective, global humiliation in World History. Japan and Germany may have been utterly defeated, but before that happened they had the whole world trembling at their military might. The Arab military, for reasons that have much to do with their passion for honor, was, after 1948, the joke of the world.

As anyone who studies honor and shame cultures knows, the “public” that sees the humiliation plays a key role. If a man is humiliated and no one sees it, then it didn’t happen. If the “public” thinks it happened and it didn’t, it happened. Daughters and sisters have been killed precisely because the rumor of their shameful behavior alone renders them guilty no matter what actually happened. So the Arab loss of 1948 was particularly devastating because it took place on a global stage in which virtually everyone who was anyone was watching.

Moreover, the global stage was further summoned to pay close attention by the Arabs themselves, who, fully confident of their coming victory, promised to show the world a historic massacre “like the Mongols or the Crusades.” William Miller makes a distinction between humiliation and shame in that humiliation occurs in response to a pretension. One is humiliated when one pretends to be capable of something one is not, when one tries to claim a status one does not deserve. In that sense, Arab pretensions to wipe out Israel in 1948 intensified the humiliation that ensued.

Finally, what made the humiliation particularly unbearable was the nature of the enemy. In the minds of Arabs, Jews were traditionally the weakest of the dhimmi (“protected”/subjected religious minorities), the most cowardly, the most despised. Their boasts of victory were informed by both their contempt for Jews and their outrage at the thought that this tiny group would have the nerve to defy their will. As the Athenians explained the the Melians:

One is not so much frightened of being conquered by a power which rules over others [i.e. other elites] as Sparta does, as one is frightened of what would happen if a ruling power is attacked and defeated by its own subjects.

To be defeated by Israel in 1948, and again repeatedly in subsequent decades was a catastrophe of literally cosmic proportions. It was not only a humiliation of the great Arab nation, but a blasphemy against Islam, understood as a religion of dominance. So when Arabs refer to the Nakba, take them seriously in terms of the magnitude of the damage done. But realize that it is not damage to the Palestinian refugees whom Arab leaders including “Palestinian” ones have continued to torment for almost two-thirds of a century now, but damage to their psyche, to their self-esteem, to their confidence. As Ahmed Sheikh, editor-in-chief of al Jazeera explained to a German journalist about why democracy has so far failed in the Arab world:

It’s because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.

Now the lesson that Sheikh wants the West to learn from this is:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most important reasons why these crises and problems continue to simmer [i.e. failure of democratic reforms]. The day when Israel was founded created the basis for our problems. The West should finally come to understand this. Everything would be much calmer if the Palestinians were given their rights.

I would argue the opposite. Just because the Arabs engage in systematic scapegoating and imagine that if only they could eliminate Israel everything would be fine, is no reason for the West to reinforce their immature fantasies. On the contrary, what the West should learn from this is that the “Arab collective ego” is a force they must reckon with in understanding why a two-state solution is not in the cards from their point of view, and why throwing Israel into this maw of self-indulgent projection and infantile rage is not going to solve anything.

On the contrary, only when the Arabs get over this will anything decent happen to them. The first Arab or Muslim leader to wean his people of their anti-Zionism, to acknowledge the public secret that the Israeli government treats their Arabs better than Arabs political elites do, will create the first political system in that world that will take care of and empower, rather than exploit, its people