Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MICH) introduced a resolution to Congress calling for the US to officially recognize Nakba Day.
Today, I introduced a resolution recognizing the Nakba (catastrophe), where 400 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, over 700,000 Palestinians uprooted from their homes, and made refugees.
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) May 16, 2022
“The Nakba is well-documented and continues to play out today,” Tlaib wrote on Twitter. “We must acknowledge that the humanity of Palestinians is being denied when folks refuse to acknowledge the war crimes and human rights violations in apartheid Israel.”
The resolution was co-sponsored by Betty McCollum, Marie Newman, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Nakba Day is recognized by Palestinians as commemorating the “catastrophe” of Israel surviving the genocidal onslaught by seven Arab nations in the 1947 War of Israeli Independence. It is generally commemorated on 15 May, the Gregorian calendar date of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948. Yasser Arafat officially inaugurated the day in 1998.
Tlaib’s resolution called for national recognition of the day and better education about its origins. The resolution also called to condemn “the efforts of Nakba denialists to enlist the US government’s support for their deeply bigoted historical revisionism.
“The resolution also calls on the United States to continue to support the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), “which provides social services to a large number of the over 7 million Palestinian refugees.”
It should be noted that according to international conventions, a refugee is defined as a person who has been forced to leave their country to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees adopted this definition; however, in 1948, it adopted an exception to that definition to establish UNRWA to aid the refugees from the newly established state of Israel. The definition was expanded to include people who voluntarily chose to leave Israel in 1948 and included all their descendants in perpetuity. The original refugees totaled about 700,000, approximately equal to the number of Jews who were forcibly expelled from Arab countries. Even by UNRWA’s artificially inflated definition, there are currently about 5.3 million Palestinians and their descendants. Less than 200,000 of the actual original refugees remain.
Last week, Tlaib accused Israel of “murdering” Shireen Abu Akleh, an Al Jazeera reporter, killed in the crossfire between IDF troops and Palestinian terrorists in Jenin. It is still unknown who shot the bullet that killed Abu Akleh.
When will the world and those who stand by Apartheid Israel that continues to murder, torture, and commit war crimes finally say: “Enough”?
Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered by a government that receives unconditional funding by our country with zero accountability. https://t.co/c2yLpM7UC1
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) May 11, 2022
Tlaib was born in Detroit, Michigan. Her father was born in Jerusalem, and her mother was born in Beit Ur al-Fauqa in Samaria. Tlaib has called for the establishment of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea, effectively a call for the genocide of Israel.
