Nakba Day still largely ignored in the public forum

Today, May 15, is Nakba Day in Palestine. It commemorates the 'Catastrophe' when roughly 750,000 of 1,900,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland before and after Israel’s 1948 declaration of statehood. In addition to those 750,000 Palestinians, over 500 Palestinian villages disappeared. Over 15,000 Palestinians were killed. Israel claimed 78% of Palestine and since 1967, has militarily controlled the remaining 22%. The US has long advocated for a ‘Two State’ solution to create a sovereign Palestinian alongside Israel. However our policies supporting Israel’s inexorable annexation of Palestinian land for Israeli settlements has made that worthy goal largely impossible.

Back in 1952 our second grade class learned current events from ‘My Weekly Reader’, a small version of our parents’ newspaper geared to us newbie readers. The title of the one such edition that May intrigued me: "Israel celebrates 4th birthday". I was stunned. How could a country be three years younger than me? I assumed every country was a natural geographic entity that existed since the beginning of time. The article began to answer that question with discussion of European Jews setting up a new country following the Holocaust in WWII. There was no mention of the 750,000 expelled Palestinians, the 500 villages that vanished, or the 15,000 dead Palestinians. Today, as Palestinians worldwide commemorate the Nakba, there is still virtually no mention of that catastrophe in today’s My Weekly Reader for adults. But every May 15th I’ll pause and think about what should have been taught to me 68 years ago.