Wikipedia Describes Nakba As “Ethnic Cleansing”

The Wikipedia article on the Nakba, which is Arabic for “catastrophe,” describes the events of Israel’s war for independence in 1948 as being “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs.”

The opening sentence of the article states: “The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة an-Nakbah, lit.  ‘The Catastrophe’) was the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Mandatory Palestine during the 1948 Palestine war through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property and belongings, along with the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. The term is also used to describe the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel.”

Wikipedia operates by consensus, a combination of numbers and argument strength regarding site policy. Dating back to March of this year, an overwhelming majority of editors have argued on the talk page of the article it’s kosher under Wikipedia policy to use “ethnic cleansing” in a neutral voice (wikivoice) because it’s the mainstream academic view. It’s not until later in the article does the reader learn of the “Israeli national narrative” that “the Palestinian Arabs voluntarily fled their homes during the war, encouraged by Arab leaders who told Palestinians to temporarily evacuate so that Arab armies could destroy Israel, and then upon losing the war, refused to integrate them. This viewpoint also contrasts Jewish refugees absorbed by Israel with Palestinian refugees kept stateless by Arab countries as political pawns.” But Wikipedia editors know that the majority of their readers don’t read past the lead.

“It’s not the mainstream view,” Tel Aviv University Vice Rector Eyal Zisser told me regarding the history of the use of “ethnic cleansing,” pointing out that Wikipedia uses the term “expulsions” regarding Czechoslovakia’s deportations of Germans in the aftermath of World War II. The Czechs’ deportation of the Germans “were well-prepared and with a clean intention” but “this is not the case in 1948 when there was a war,” Zisser said. An editor who grew disillusioned with Wikipedia after making thousands of edits told me that while Zisser’s argument about the Czechs may be valid to those “outside Wikipedia,” it won’t be compelling to “an experienced editor” as “they can handwave away anything that’s not by a ‘reliable source’ and know how to focus heavily on the sources that say what they want the article to say.”

“The entire Nakba narrative is based on the destruction of Israel,” Middle East historian Asaf Romirowsky, who heads Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and North Africa, told me. “The Nakba narrative is basically to equate 1948 to the Holocaust … what they argue is very simple: They say that the state of Israel only exists because of the Holocaust, so if there wasn’t any Holocaust, there wouldn’t be a state of Israel. They go one step further to say that the Nakba [19]48 is the Holocaust and say, ‘How dare the Jews who experienced the Holocaust do something worse to the Palestinians.’ So that’s how the use of Holocaust inversion feeds into all this.” He added that “the fact of the matter is that the majority of the [Palestinian] population left because they were told to leave because of outside forces [from] Syria and Iraq and other places and that these forces promised the Palestinians that they could come back to their homes after Israel was destroyed, but that never happened. They had to make up a reality to justify the lack of a foregone conclusion.” Romirowsky argued that the consensus is that the cause of the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war is about “a third, a third and a third” attributed to forcible removals, leaving on their own volition and being told to leave by the Arab leaders. His read of the documents is that “the majority left because they were told to leave” and that the Arab leaders wanted “less Arabs in the area” so they “could come in and cleanse the area from Jews.”

“The entire Nakba narrative is based on the destruction of Israel. The Nakba narrative is basically to equate 1948 to the Holocaust … what they argue is very simple: They say that the state of Israel only exists because of the Holocaust, so if there wasn’t any Holocaust, there wouldn’t be a state of Israel.” – Asaf Romirowsky

The use of “ethnic cleansing” to describe the events of the 1948 war is “politicized terminology … that is not the academic terminology,” Romirowsky contended, as “a more honest conversation about the topic would be to look at the works that [Israeli historians] Benny Morris and Efraim Karsh did.” Morris’s work is widely cited throughout the article, though his views are only briefly mentioned. Karsh is not mentioned at all.

It has been argued on the Nakba talk page that because around three dozen scholars have stated that the Nakba was ethnic cleansing or that it’s widely referred to as ethnic cleansing, there needs to be another three dozen scholars to stating otherwise to move away from the use of “ethnic cleansing” in wikivoice, though there was some dispute over whether or not the cited scholars truly equate the Nakba with ethnic cleansing. Regardless, according to Romirowsky, “you could find dozens of Israeli scholars and other scholars who will deny any claim of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Anybody who adopts the ‘ethnic cleansing, genocidal’ narrative is an agitator who is taking things out of context.”

But even then, one editor pointed out to me that determining the weight of material in a Wikipedia article under the site’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy “isn’t a math problem, you should read all the sources [and] try to get a sense of what they’re about, and try to form a cohesive perspective on what are the most common things, what are the least common things, but it’s not a question of tallying them up.” The editor added that where editors might run into trouble is if “people aren’t prepared or they don’t necessarily know how to collect this, because you should be able to go on any database … and collect 10 or 12 [sources] and do a survey of the material … and you can do some simple back-of-the envelope type calculation perhaps.” The editor contended that a tactic from the anti-Israel editors is that “instead of doing a proper survey” of sources, they simply say “look there’s so many results here that say this, but the point of a survey is you’re supposed to comprehensively take a survey of everything that’s out there that’s reliable on the topic so that you get a strong sense of it and then group them into clusters … but if you only do it for one of the clusters, then you haven’t done it properly.” And that’s what this editor believes happened on the Nakba talk page.

Another editor told me that the lead to the Nakba Wikipedia article “should say something along the lines of some scholars say this is ethnic cleansing while others dispute that, perhaps with a couple of well-known names for each.” Only in the body of the article do you find the names of those who dispute the “ethnic cleansing” claim, like Morris. “It’s enough that significant academics (and others) dispute this for it being unacceptable to use the encyclopedia’s neutral voice,” the editor added.

The longtime editor who runs “The Wikipedia Flood” told me that when the anti-Israel editors “want to say something in Wikipedia’s voice, they say it. They find sources. Opposing sources are never enough. They argue you into unconsciousness if you try.”

And such changes on Wikipedia have real-word consequences. A viral video posted on X in May showed a person asking the Google Nest virtual assistant how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust and Google Nest is unable to answer, but when asked what the Nakba was, it immediately provided the “ethnic cleansing” definition and directly cited Wikipedia in doing so. Google Nest being unable to answer basic questions about the Holocaust doesn’t seem to be Wikipedia’s fault, but the fact that the virtual assistant was able to quickly cite the “ethnic cleansing” line is troubling. Consider that, according to data from Insider Intelligence, 33.7 million people in the United States used a Google Nest speaker, and that number is expected to increase every year through at least 2027.

Similarly, Sunnyvale City Councilmember Omar Din was criticized for calling Zionism a form of hate; The Bay Area Democrat defended himself by citing the Wikipedia article on Zionism, referencing the parts of the article saying that “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible” and that “anti-Zionism has many aspects, which include criticism of Zionism as a colonialist,^[26] racist,^[27] or exceptionalist ideology or as a settler colonialist movement.^[28][29] Proponents of Zionism do not necessarily reject the characterization of Zionism as settler-colonial or exceptionalist.”

WATCH: During Sunnyvale’s Sep. 10 City Council meeting, Councilmember @omarfdin made disparaging and inappropriate remarks by equating "Zionism" with forms of hate like racism, sexism, and Islamophobia.

He later defended his comments by referencing the Wikipedia article on… pic.twitter.com/9W2TKbZOFr

— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) September 26, 2024

I have previously delved into the myriad issues with the Wikipedia Zionism article, but the point is that what is written on Wikipedia eventually permeates into the culture at large. So when the Wikipedia article on the Nakba describes it as “ethnic cleansing,” the Jewish community should take note.