The Nakba as Libel: How a Narrative Engine Drives Antizionism

In 2021, Dara Horn published a book with the arresting title “People Love Dead Jews.” Her central claim was that the world finds Jews easiest to mourn when they are powerless, and, well, dead. Oct. 7, 2023 tested and inverted that proposition: the world turned against its living Jews in the immediate aftermath of the deadliest attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust. Anti-Jewish bigotry surged globally, and by 2025, the death toll among Diaspora Jews had reached its highest point in more than thirty years.

Something has gone terribly wrong, and the reason is hiding in plain sight. For decades, we have allowed a lethal worldview to go unnamed and unchecked: antizionism. At its center sits a specific narrative engine: the Nakba. The argument here is not that people have no legitimate grievances or no right to a national narrative. It is that the Nakba narrative, as constructed and weaponized since the 1990s, does not merely tell a story of displacement. It functions as a libel. Understanding that distinction is essential to understanding why the world reacted to Oct. 7 the way it did.

The urgency of that distinction becomes clear when we consider a recent intervention in the debate. In the July 2025 issue of Sources Journal, Michael Koplow urged Jewish educators to take the Palestinian narrative more seriously, to understand not only that Palestinians view Israel as carrying out a Nakba, but why they think that. He argued that acknowledging the apartheid charge does not normalize it, and that acknowledgment is not the same as acceptance. Koplow is a serious thinker, and he is right that understanding is not endorsement, and that Jewish educators who refuse to engage Palestinian Arab experiences impoverish their students. But his argument contains an unexamined premise: that the Nakba narrative and the apartheid charge are political perspectives to be engaged, rather than libels to be identified. Collapsing that distinction is precisely how the antizionist era has advanced so successfully.

To see why, consider an analogy. We do not treat the deicide charge, the ancient claim that Jews killed Christ, as a legitimate Christian narrative worth acknowledging on its own terms. We recognize it as a libel. A libel does not merely assert something false. It assigns fixed moral roles, villain, victim, savior and draws on fragments of truth to sustain itself, moving from the particular to the universal to render a whole group morally indictable. The Nakba narrative does exactly this, and tracing its origins helps reveal how deliberately that architecture was constructed.

Yasser Arafat invented Nakba Day on May 15, 1998. The term itself was coined by Arab thinker Constantine K. Zurayk, who originally used it to describe the Arab states’ own failure, placing blame squarely on Arab leadership, not on Israel. For Zurayk the catastrophe was that Israel won and Arabs lost. The subsequent transformation of the term into an indictment of Zionism was not organic; it was institutional. The “Zionism Is Racism” resolution at the United Nations came alongside the creation of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which has worked ever since to depict Israel as a colonial apartheid regime. Though Resolution 3379 was rescinded in 1991, the apparatus continued operating, laying the groundwork for Nakba Day as a global institution and slowly normalizing the libel embedded within it.

What the narrative systematically eclipses in all of this is causation. The Arab refugee crisis would not have occurred had the Arab Higher Committee accepted the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, which would have created both a Jewish and an Arab state. It would not have occurred had five Arab armies not invaded the fledgling Jewish state the morning after its declaration. And as Khaled al-Azm, Syria’s Prime Minister in 1948-49, later acknowledged: “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave.” The refugees were real. The suffering was real. But the libel performs a series of moves that transform those facts into something categorically different: erasing the initiating context, erasing Arab agency and importing the moral vocabulary of settler colonialism to describe a movement of Jewish national return.

That final move, from the particular to the universal, is the most consequential. It is the same operation the deicide charge performed: from one man’s act to the collective guilt of an entire people. The Nakba narrative moves from the particular suffering of 1948 to the universal guilt of every Zionist, everywhere, forever. This universalization explains why antizionists talk about the “ongoing Nakba” because the point is not to document a historic event, but to indict Israel forever. It also explains why the murders, rapes and kidnappings of Israelis on Oct. 7 could be celebrated or simply ignored by self-described human rights advocates. By the time October 7 occurred, two decades of campus organizing, United Nations programming, and cultural production had prepared the ground. The Nakba narrative was the engine of that preparation.

Comparative literature illuminates this point. Jewish historical memory is suffused with catastrophe. Consider Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, yea, when we remembered Zion.” Yet even this, one of the most achingly mournful texts in the tradition, is a memory of rupture that implies the possibility of return. And alongside the lachrymose tradition runs another equally persistent impulse: the drive to build. Wherever Jews settled in exile, they did not only mourn what was lost; they worked to create anew. This ethos is especially pronounced in early Zionist literature. In “How to Break a Heatwave,” a song by Naomi Shemer, the landscape is initially harsh and unyielding, a hill of dust, sun and thorns, but the pioneers respond not with despair but with ingenuity, draining swamps, laying pipes, planting trees. The catastrophe of exile is real; the response is generative.

One might argue that such optimism was easier to sustain in the context of return to an ancestral land rather than exile from it. But Isaac Babel offers a particularly telling illustration of an alternative orientation, because his experience of alienation was not chosen but imposed. A Russian-Jewish writer who lived through violent pogroms, Babel could have constructed his work as an extended indictment of Russian society. He did not. His early story “At Grandmother’s” explores the process of seeking acceptance within a culture that is hostile. Rather than reducing Russia to its violence, Babel gestures toward rapprochement through an enduring attachment to Russian literature and culture. The grandmother’s imperative, “Study! Study and you can have everything” is not a call to defy Russian society but to master its cultural world, to do whatever is necessary to endure and succeed within difficult conditions. This orientation is not naïve; it is a strategic relationship to history that allows for a future. It holds grief and forward motion simultaneously.

That simultaneous holding is precisely what is absent from Palestinian Arab literary culture as it has been institutionalized. Anton Shammas’ “Arabesques” (1986), written in Hebrew, is often celebrated as a gesture toward integration. But Shammas himself clarified that his purpose was something different: “What I’m trying to do is to un-Jew the Hebrew language, to make it less Jewish.” The act is not one of entering into a shared cultural space, as Babel entered Russian literature, but of attempting to redefine that space by stripping it of its Jewish particularity. Hebrew, here, is not embraced as the historical language of a people; it is reconfigured as a neutral medium that can be detached from Jewish identity. And where Babel’s grandmother urged mastery as a path forward, Shammas’ project implies that forward motion requires first evacuating the other’s presence. The contrast illuminates something important: what is at stake in Palestinian Arab literary culture, as institutionalized, is not the specific terms of a political settlement but the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state at all. Mahmoud Darwish, designated the national poet of Palestine, wrote “Intifada,” a poem that frames suicide terrorism as martyrdom, a canonical expression of nationhood that glorifies violence against civilians as its highest moral act, leaving no imaginative space for coexistence.

This is why Koplow’s call for acknowledgment, however well-intentioned, runs into a fundamental problem. We are not living in a moment of critical distance from the antizionist era: we are living inside it. Inside an ideological moment, acknowledgment is never neutral. Every institutional acknowledgment of the Nakba narrative as a legitimate perspective, rather than a libel to be analyzed, extends the libel’s reach. It signals to students, journalists and policymakers that the apartheid charge is a starting point for debate rather than the conclusion of a demonization project. Holocaust remembrance offers a useful contrast: that tradition condemns the Nazi regime without essentializing the German people as a whole, and institutionalizes through Yad Vashem’s Avenue of the Righteous the principle that evil is particular, not collective. The Nakba narrative does the opposite, reducing all Israelis to illegitimate usurpers and making it impossible to imagine a future not wholly defined by the past.

To ask Jewish educators to acknowledge the apartheid charge without first naming it as a libel is to ask them to participate in their own community’s demonization. The sincerity of a belief does not determine its moral status. Many Christians sincerely believed that Jews killed Christ; many people believed and still believe that Jews control the world. Libels are often sincerely held. Individuals like Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, and the 15 Jews killed in Bondi Beach, were targeted by an ideology that reduces living people to symbols of colonialism and illegitimacy. Naming that ideology clearly, refusing to dignify its central libel as merely a perspective worth engaging on its own terms, is not a failure of empathy. It is the precondition for any honest reckoning with what has happened, and what will continue to happen if we do not change course.

Naya Lekht is currently the Education Editor for White Rose Magazine and a Research Fellow for the Institute for Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.