The Real Nakba Was Jewish Naïveté

They told us they wanted peace. We brought them olive branches. They brought AK47s and GoPros.

Let’s get this out of the way: I am not here to downplay anyone’s tragedy. War is ugly. Displacement is real. Suffering isn’t a competition - though if it were, the Jews would medal every century. Maybe not always gold, but sometimes a healthy bronze.

I don’t like seeing other people suffering and yes, I get uncomfortable, for example, with reports about starving Palestinian children in Gaza. It is an unimaginable situation, for which I am sympathetic. I want the war to end - who doesn’t? But the Palestinians hold 58 Israelis, and they must be returned home. Now.

I’m also tired. Tired of the word Nakba being tossed around Canadian campuses like it’s a magic spell that ends all debate. “It means catastrophe,” they say solemnly, as if that translation is supposed to shut your mouth and make you feel guilty for being alive.

Here’s the truth they don’t want you to say out loud, and that (respectfully) my friends with faded Peace Now stickers on their walls are probably going to be uncomfortable reading:

The real Nakba—the actual, undeniable catastrophe—wasn’t in 1948. It was the delusion, still rampant today, that our enemies ever wanted peace.

We Believed Them

That was our first mistake.

Our community, and the Israeli left - then with far more power and influence than today - saw young Palestinian children in scarves and thought, “Ah, future peace partners.” We sent aid. We built universities in the West Bank. We trained their police forces. We gave them a seat at the table. Hell, we built them the table.

And for what?

So they could build tunnels instead of towns. Rockets instead of roads. Paragliders instead of playgrounds.

The “moderate” Palestinian Authority pays terrorists monthly salaries (i.e. pay for slay) that go up with the body count. And the West calls it a “nuanced conflict,” with a penchant for moral equivalency at every turn.

Let me put this bluntly: You can’t make peace with people who think your very existence is a crime.

The Peace Process: A Never-Ending Cycle of Jewish Guilt and Terrorist PR

I’ve gotten really into studying Israeli history recently, and the same words and locations always come up. Oslo. Camp David. Taba. Road Maps. Annapolis. Every few years, the Israelis and/or the Quartet dusted off the same tired formula: Israel offers land, security, dignity. In return, we got rockets, murdered children, and a UN resolution blaming us for not doing more. Wash, rinse, repeat.

We gave the Palestinians Gaza. Entirely. Not a single settler left. The IDF pulled out. Jews expelled Jews. We even left the greenhouses behind so they could grow crops and not grievances. What did we get?

Jewish police removing a Jewish settler from Gaza, August 2005

An empowered Hamas.

Elected, celebrated, handing out candy, and now livestreaming Jewish slaughter like it’s an Instagram reel. Not like, but rather actual Instagram reels of atrocities against Jews. A Hamas terrorist called home on October 7, from within Israel, beaming, “Dad! I killed 10 Jews with my own hands! Dad, 10 with my own hands!” His parents were filled with pride. That’s our son, the light of our lives.

Nakba? Let’s talk about the catastrophic tragedy of Israeli parents finding their babies’ cribs filled with blood, not blankets. Let’s talk about the kibbutz mothers who hid in safe rooms while their children were butchered next door. These same families who lined up at the Gaza border, with their car engines warm, ready to transport needy Palestinian patients to Israeli hospitals for care. Those are the people who then returned to Gaza, healthier on account of Israeli medicine, who plotted the brutal murder of their caregivers. That’s a catastrophe. That’s horror. And frankly, I have no desire to hear about “root causes” while 58 hostages - dead and/or alive - are still being held underground. Starved, beaten, raped, hanging onto life.

Read about what happened on October 7. Read about the rapes, about women having their breasts chopped off while they were being raped, or about being shot in the groin immediately afterwards. Read about the delight with which the Palestinian terrorists who infiltrated Israel killed, mutilated, burned, and maimed. Read about their joy at doing such. Read about the murder of Tzeela Gez, a 30 year old woman, who was shot to death by a Palestinian terrorist while on her way to the hospital to give birth to her son. Her newborn son remains in hospital, in critical condition. This didn't happen on October 7, but May 14, 2025.

Tzeela Gez z”l

These are our partners in peace?

But What About 1948?

The original sin to many is the birth of Israel. Or as the anti-Zionist poetry majors like to call it, “the colonization of Palestine.”

Just 77 years ago, on May 14, 1948, Israel was established. So let’s review:

For over 70 years - from the 1860s to the late 1940s, the indigenous Jewish population grew in the Land of Israel, supported by the British through the Balfour Declaration, as returning to their ancestral homeland. They drained the swamps, brought foreign investment, and made the desert bloom. But the local Arab inhabitants, the neighbours, could not live with this. Despite the prosperity, despite the warmth offered by the outstretched Jewish hands, and despite the Jews even accepting the smallest possible Jewish State through various partition plans offered by the British and the UN, the Arabs said no. No, no, no. “We refuse to have our own state if the Jews get a state of their own too. We choose an eternal displacement, as long as the Jews get nothing too.”

Well, that’s not how Jews work. Afterall, we have no alternative. Ein brera. Displacement was in the Jewish past. We supported the UN Partition Plan in 1947, and planned to declare a state one erev Shabbat, in May 1948.

Outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (now Independence Hall) on May 14, 1948

Five Arab armies declared war on the Jewish state literally the day it was born. We pleaded with the local Arabs to stay, to become Israeli citizens, to contribute in the upbuilding of this oasis in the desert; there was room for everyone. Yes, it is true, some who posed an immediate threat to the State of Israel were forced out. But, most Arabs who left did so because their own leaders encouraged them to. They thought the Jews would be defeated, and they’d return soon to their homes, when the war finished with an Arab victory, the defeated Jews pushed into the sea. Some Arabs stayed, and today their descendants serve in Israel’s parliament, military, Supreme Court, and civil society. They do not want to live in any other country in the Middle East, because Israel is, without compare, the best country in the region for Arabs.

That’s not apartheid.

Meanwhile, 850,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries, their assets stolen, their communities destroyed. One-third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish. Their wealth - estimated at the equivalent of $300 million in today’s dollars - was stolen by the Iraqi state. They were expelled. You rarely hear about their Nakba, or even the Farhud.

At home in Canada

It would be cute if it weren’t so sinister. Canadian universities hold “Nakba Day” events hosted by student unions that couldn’t pass a basic history quiz if you offered them free weed and a participation ribbon. They misunderstand and misinterpret colonialism to a fit a woke narrative they learned online, and allege that Jews “wash” whatever we can to distract from the innate evils of Zionism: pinkwashing, greenwashing, rainbow-washing, I could go on.

Encampment at the University of Toronto, June 2024

They don keffiyehs (likely manufactured by Uygher slave-labourers in China), chant “From the river to the sea,” and post infographics made by 22-year-olds who think that Winston Churchill is the cause of the West’s problems. They claim they’re “anti-Zionist, not antisemitic”—while graffiti’ing synagogues, calling to “globalize the intifada”, the “uprising” that slaughtered thousands of Israelis, most of them Jewish civilians.

But freedom of expression, right?

Paging McGill. Paging Concordia. Paging York (my alma mater). Paging U of T.

Wrong. When one group’s “freedom” includes chanting for the eradication of another, that’s not protest. No context is required. That’s incitement.

The Truth Hurts

And so, the fantasy of the peace process is a comforting lie we told ourselves. I think it let us feel morally superior while our enemies grew stronger, better armed, and more shameless. We believed in a future they never wanted.

They didn’t dream of a state. They dreamed of conquest.

And instead of taking them at their word, we clung to this imaginary world where dialogue was going to save us. And it breaks my heart. I actually distinctly remember sitting on my grandmother’s couch with her on September 13, 1993, when I was just eight-years-old, watching CNN. I was holding her hand as she squeezed mine, elated that Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was shaking hands with Yasser Arafat, allegedly welcoming in a new era of peace.

PM Rabin, President Clinton, and Chairman Arafat

She had tears of joy in her eyes, and told me that peace would soon come to the Land of Israel. She believed it, and I believed her. And boy am I glad that she was not around to witness the atrocities of 10/7, the true zeal and intentions behind Arafat’s fake overtures, what he actually said in Arabic to his people, laid bare, for the world to see.

Too bad the world blamed/s the Jews.

Let’s be honest: The real Nakba was Jewish naïveté.

So What Now?

Now, we get real. No more fairy tales. No more moral gymnastics to justify self-erasure. No more comparing Hamas to a “resistance movement” or quoting Edward Said while kibbutz families bury their dead. No more giving the benefit of the doubt, or thinking that replacing textbooks alone will change the outlook of a generation.

I recently attended a talk by Matti Friedman, who said that what left-wing and right-wing means in Israel is far different than what those terms mean in America, or Canada. In Israel, it basically refers to your approach to the two-state solution: You’re left wing if you’re pro, and you’re right wing if you’re anti (more or less). But today, in a post-10/7 world, surely that entire paradigm has flipped on its head. How many Israelis still believe in peace with the Palestinians? How many think a Palestinian State, today, one that can live alongside the Jewish State in peace, without the Jews ALWAYS having to look over their shoulders, is possible? Few, if any. And Palestinian leadership did this to themselves. So how do you now define left versus right in Israel? What is the new paradigm? Are you left wing if you’re anti-Netanyahu? Are you right-wing if you want to see the Gaza War continue? Things have changed.

What hasn’t changed is this fundamental truth:

Israel didn’t create the Nakba.

It created a future.

A refuge.

A miracle.

It gave the Jewish people a spine, a language, and an army. And I’m OK if that offends your political sensibilities. I am not, frankly, saying anything overly controversial if you open your eyes and see the world today for what it is.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, they once said. You may remind me to consider the Abraham Accords. But we must approach any such overtures with caution. Not every member of those Accords is the same. Not all peace is a warm peace. Just look at Israel’s cold peace with Egypt. Yes, today you are likely perfectly safe as an Israeli, or Jew, walking through the souk in Dubai. But watch your back in Khartoum. And if Syria joins, don’t go exploring the Damascus Bazaar just yet.

We’re done apologizing

In our history, we have shed plenty of tears on catastrophes brought upon us. But unlike others, we don’t immortalize them in protest signs. We build. We fight. We survive. That’s our story.

And in the meantime, Israel has averted countless terror attacks on the streets of Western Europe, and likely North America. It has given the world technological marvels, medical enhancements, and has removed the risk of Syrian and Iraqi nuclear weapons. It ships doctors around the world to help in conflict zones, helps develop agricultural projects in Africa to feed millions, and has never stopped contributing to making the world a better place. You’re welcome, world.

So go ahead. Shout Nakba from your arts faculty megaphone.

But we’re done pretending we don’t know what it really means.

Agree/disagree? Feel free to comment below.