Rashida Tlaib’s Nakba Denial

By Seth Mandel

Monday, May 18, 2026

 

Every year around this time, Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib introduces a resolution mourning the failure of the combined Arab armies to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews.

 

The term “nakba” was initially coined by Arab intellectuals after the Israeli War of Independence to give a title to the Arabs’ defeat at the hands of the Jews. Over time, it has been changed to mean the “catastrophe” of the flight of some Arab Palestinians, eviction of others, and internal displacement of still others in 1948 and 1949.

 

This evolution of the term followed the embrace by Palestinian Arab nationalists of a strategy of coopting Jewish suffering, first and foremost the Holocaust. The belief was, and is, that by mimicking the Jews, their maximalist cause will gain legitimacy. (Their minimalist cause doesn’t need any such shenanigans to gain legitimacy, for if they wanted their own state alongside Israel they could have it. But their greater cause of kicking out all the Jews is much less sympathetic.)

 

But the nakba’s newer definition was intentionally elastic, and now it has come to mean: Israel bad.

 

As is always the case, an ideology that puts Israel’s harm first puts Palestinian welfare lower on the list, if it makes the list at all. And thus we have this year’s nakba resolution, a bizarre document that undercuts supposed “pro-Palestinian” advocacy.

 

First of all, the choice of Nakba Day itself is revealing: May 15, the day the Arab armies invaded the state of Israel to try to drive the Jews out of their homeland. May 15 is a commemoration of a declaration of total war against the Jews. This attempted war of annihilation cost the Arab Palestinians dearly. It was catastrophic, you might say.

 

In reintroducing her annual Israel bad resolution, Tlaib repeats a common talking point: “The Nakba did not end in 1948, but continues to this day.” This, of course, diminishes the intended gravity of the nakba; no one claims, by comparison, that the Holocaust continues to this day, even if there is violent anti-Semitism in Germany.

 

The nakba certainly does continue to this day if we use its original meaning. The attempt to annihilate the Jews in their homeland has never let up.

 

But we have a growing list of grievances attached to each year’s nakba resolution, too. That list now includes Lebanon, which gives the game away. Just as “War Criminal Netanyahu and his cabinet” threatened the Hamas terrorists of Gaza, Tlaib claims, so too are they “extending these same threats towards southern Lebanon.”

 

Some Palestinians fled to southern Lebanon, but it is worth pointing out that the crimes committed against them were and are committed by the state. Palestinians have been expelled from Lebanon, but the ones that remained are also subject to discriminatory treatment. Tlaib claims Israel is bombing Palestinian refugee camps. The only reason there would still be anything called a “refugee camp”—even if this moniker is false—is that Palestinian Arabs weren’t granted citizenship by the Lebanese. They are also kept out of certain professions and have other restrictions on their freedom.

 

Israel would like this is to be rectified. The Arabs would not.

 

As for what’s actually happening in Lebanon, the current war is between Israel and Iran’s occupation forces, Hezbollah. It is that vicious terrorist organization that controls southern Lebanon on behalf of a foreign Persian capital. Israel is trying to dislodge Hezbollah and help the state regain its Arab sovereignty.

 

That Tlaib would side with the Iranian satrapy over the native Lebanese and the Lebanese-born children of Palestinians is not too surprising. That she includes an Israeli defensive war against Iranian troops as part of the “Palestinian nakba” is hugely important context for her gripes against Israel.

 

Tlaib pays lip service to the Palestinian cause, but let’s review what she has revealed about her own worldview: The nakba, to Tlaib, is not some massive collection of crimes against humanity but in fact an ongoing expression of what she perceives as bias against Palestinians combined with Arab collective military defeats at the hands of the IDF. Moreover, it has almost nothing to do with the wellbeing of Palestinians.

 

The nakba, as Tlaib makes crystal clear, is the survival of the Jewish state. She regards any particular suffering by Palestinians as tangential and overstated. Were she anyone else, she’d call this “nakba denial.” It is a profound and unintentional admission of her true motives.