This Sunday, May 15, at 11:00 AM, at Tel-Aviv University’s Antin Square, the annual Nakba (Catastrophe) commemoration ceremony will be held by the TAU Arab/Radical-Left students. Our friends at Im Tirtzu will be holding a “Nakba Charta” (Nakba Nonsense) counter protest and will update our website during and after the protest.
Nakba Day is commemorated on May 15, Israel’s declaration of independence day in 1948. The Jewish State, which follows the Jewish calendar for its “bank holidays,” celebrated the day on the 5th of Iyar (although this year, out of respect for Shabbat, we celebrated it on Thursday, Iyar 4). For the Arabs, it is an annual day of commemoration of the first day when their bad move at the UN Nov. 1947 partition vote blew in their faces, resulting in their succession of losses in their attempt to destroy the Jewish state—although they keep on trying.
It should be noted that as long as Israelis were determined to hold on to their right to settle anywhere in the Land of Israel, commemoration of the Nakba was being practiced by very few Arab citizens of Israel. The memories of 1948 were largely personal and communal, without a driving political component. But in the wake of the 1991 Madrid Conference, the first time Israel acquiesced to the concept of “Palestinian independence,” the observance of the Nakba has grown stronger and often violent. The Oslo Accords, which signaled that Israel was ready to capitulate on the fate of the liberated regions of Gaza, Judea, Samaria and the Golan, helped turn the Nakba craze into a regular day of confrontation between Arab Israeli youths and police, reminding many Israelis of the Arab pogroms of the 1920s and ’30s.
On Nakba Day 2011, egged on by the “Arab Spring,” Arabs from Judea and Samaria, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria marched towards the 1949 armistice (green line) borders, to mark their continued rejection of the right of the Jewish State to exist. At least twelve Arabs were killed and hundreds were wounded when the IDF blocked the zombie-fashion advance on the border fences by thousands of Syrian protesters who tried to forcibly enter the Golan Heights. Arabs also threw stones at Israeli soldiers guarding checkpoints in eastern Jerusalem, and the soldiers fired rubber bullets and tear gas in response.
A 2011 law empowers the Israeli finance minister to cut or reduce government funding to any NGO that organizes Nakba commemoration events.