All American Jews should acknowledge Nakba Day — for Israel's sake, as well as Palestine's

This Forward published today an article by NJN President and CEO Hadar Susskind.

May 13, 2026—Many American Jews were raised with the word "Nakba" absent from our vocabularies. 

We were taught, correctly, about the miracle of Israel's founding; the refuge Israel provided after the Holocaust; and the flourishing of Jewish life in our ancestral homeland. What went unmentioned was the other side of that joy: the Nakba, meaning "catastrophe" in Arabic, the name by which the displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel is known through the Arab world. 

For Palestinians, the Nakba is the defining experience of their collective life — carried in family histories, in refugee camps and in the enduring statelessness of millions. It is living memory, not ancient history. The remarkable story of Israel's creation is real, essential and worth celebrating. But it's time that all Jews — Zionists alongside anti-Zionists — acknowledge that it was never the only story.

Read the full article at The Forward

Photo by Benno Rothenberg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons