By Mark Goldfeder

On Tuesday evening House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) canceled an event that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was set to host today at the U.S. Capitol with the purpose of mainstreaming her antisemitic historical revisionist views. Tlaib may yet find another (less prestigious) venue and, of course, she has the right to say whatever she wants, however abhorrent, about Jews and the Jewish State. But the public should hold her accountable for the lies she is now spreading; they have been used to justify the murders of Americans and Israelis.

Tlaib's "Nakbah Day" commemoration was designed to "educate members of Congress and their staff" with a falsified Middle East narrative. But the modern history of Israel is not lost in the shrouds of time, and there are clear contemporaneous records that give the lie to Tlaib's words.

In 1922, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine officially established an area in the Middle East to be a national home for the Jewish People and entrusted it to Great Britain. Jewish people came from around the world to buy and cultivate land to further expand the existing Jewish communities that had remained in Israel as a continuous presence since Biblical times. As Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for the colonies, explained,

"When it is asked what is meant by the development of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, it may be answered that it is not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine... but the further development of the existing Jewish community... [I]n order that this community should have the best prospect of free development... it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection."

Britain was allowed to change the terms in the territory east of the Jordan: it did so, and gave 77 percent of the original area to what is now Jordan. When the United Nations was formed, it proposed a partition plan for the remaining 23 percent: Resolution 181 would have created two states, an independent Israel and an independent Palestine. The Jewish community accepted those terms, and declared the State of Israel. The Arab community refused, and launched a genocidal war that they then lost.

Over time, Palestinians developed the "Nakba" myth, in which the would-be ethnic-cleansing Arab armies (who had failed in their stated mission to kill all the Jews) are reimagined as the helpless victims of a horrible catastrophe (or "nakba," in Arabic). The Nakbah legend—that the Jews came in and violently expelled the majority of Arabs from their homes—fuels much of modern anti-Zionism. And it is also worth noting that the 'Nakbah' commemoration is not even ostensibly about any kind of settlement or post-1967 occupation claims: this is nakedly a demonstration against Israel's very existence.

It is important to correct the record, for two reasons:

First, because truth matters. Primary sources from around the world describe how the vast majority of Arabs who left their homes did so either voluntarily, or under orders from the invading Arab armies—not from the Israelis.

Just read the Jordanian daily Ad Difaa (September 6, 1954), for example: "The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So, we got out, but they did not get in." Or just look at the UN Security Council Official Records (Third Year N. 62, April 23, 1948, p. 14), in which Jamal Bey Husseini, representative of the Arab Higher Committee, explained that "The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce . . . they rather preferred to abandon their homes, their belongings and everything they possessed in the world and leave the town. This is in fact what they did."

Oddly enough, and almost as if to reinforce what the real disaster was, the official 'Nakbah Day' is May 15—the anniversary of the day on which the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq all invaded Israel in their doomed attempt to destroy it.

The second reason to correct the record is because this lie in particular has deadly consequences for both Americans and Israelis.

In March 1976, in a column for Falastin a-Thaura (the PLO's weekly), Mahmoud Abbas noted that "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."

Then 'Nakbah Day' was invented by Yasser Arafat in 1998, and by 2011 Abbas' memory had faded in direct proportion to its rising popularity. Abbas, now president of the Palestinian Authority, rewrote history in a New York Times op-ed claiming that "Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened." But even that was not enough.

Just last year, in 2022, Abbas used the annual commemoration of the nakba—the same events Tlaib was to be marking at the Capitol—as an excuse to reaffirm his government's ongoing commitment to "pay for slay," the Palestinian Authority policy under which terrorists who kill Israeli or American citizens are celebrated as heroes and financially rewarded.

Of course, it was a disaster for the Arabs to reject the U.N.'s Partition Plan; ignore the Jewish people's legitimate and indigenous claims; and resort to deadly violence. But that does not mean there cannot be hope for a better future. The continuing disaster is the 'leadership' of people like Abbas and Tlaib who engage in the same delegitimization and denial that led to the mistakes of 1948, and think that this time, somehow, their results might be different. Hopefully that will change, but in the meantime kudos to the speaker for not letting Tlaib share her ahistorical, antisemitic views under the false imprimatur and borrowed respectability of a congressional event.

Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder, Esq. has served as the founding Editor of the Cambridge University Press Series on Law and Judaism, a Trustee of the Center for Israel Education, and as an adviser to the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations. Read full bio here.