Between May 12 and 15, student chapters of the anti-Zionist parties Hadash and Balad marked “Nakba Day” with demonstrations at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Haifa.
Notably, this occurred during the ongoing multi-pronged war—a conflict that has dragged on until now in response to Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and continued aggression from Gaza.
These protests were little more than recycled performances of the familiar, yet deeply flawed, nakba narrative—complete with accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing directed at the State of Israel.
At Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, the event escalated into a disruptive occupation of campus grounds, where demonstrators blocked access to the university president’s office and demanded a campus-wide strike “until the war ends.”
At the Hebrew University, extremist student organizers invited HU’s former professor, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, to speak. The reason she was suspended in March 2024 was for publicly declaring, “The time has come to abolish Zionism, it cannot continue,” and “[Israel] is a necro-political regime that can survive only on the erasure of Palestinians. They will use any lie. They started with babies. They continued with rape. … We stopped believing them, and I hope the world will stop believing them.”
Though Shalhoub–Kevorkian recanted some of these statements to get her job back, there is little doubt that they constitute her true beliefs and were the specific reason why she was an invited speaker in the first place.
The absurdity of the Hebrew University Nakba Day organizers is glaring. Instead of mourning the “tragedy of the Nakba” as they claim, activists used their platform to downplay Hamas’s massacre.
It was more of the same at Tel Aviv University. Speeches and signs accused Israel of committing genocide while ignoring all evidence that suggested otherwise. Interestingly, voices in this community have been promoting this blood libel for years, long before the current war began.
This raises an obvious question: What, exactly, are they commemorating when they invoke the nakba?
At this point, it should be common knowledge in conversations related to the conflict that nakba means “catastrophe” or “disaster” in Arabic, referring to the establishment of modern-day Israel. The confusion lies in exactly which part of the Arab-Israeli sector the catastrophe references. Publicly, it is often understood as a reference to the Arab refugee crisis that followed the failed 1948 war of annihilation waged by a coalition of Arab states against the Jews of Israel.
The behavior of these activists reveals something different. It is not a coincidence that “Nakba Day” is marked every year on May 15, a day after the official date of the State of Israel was declared, nor is it unique for “Nakba Day” activists to focus their rhetoric on the supposed crimes of Israel while staying entirely silent on oppression of Palestinians left to rot in refugee camps across the Arab world and even in the disputed territories under the jurisdiction of their governments.
Not only does the nakba narrative hinge on the false charge that Israel’s Jews deliberately ethnically cleansed Arabs, but each yearly commemoration reveals its real aim: to legitimize calls for Israel’s destruction and to render Jews stateless refugees once again—or worse.
Linking this narrative to the current Palestinian suffering in Gaza may seem like a good idea to these activists and to those who view every IDF military action as unjust, but it actually does the opposite. Once again, a group of antisemitic Arab nationalists launched a violent attack aimed at killing as many Jews in Israel as possible, only to claim victimhood when Israel defends itself.
There are two issues here that make this topic especially interesting: Why is this happening in Israel? And what is the mainstream view of Palestinians toward the Arab-Israeli minority, whose existence as Israeli citizens negates their central nakba lie?
When you hear how Hamas or the Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria perceive Israeli Arabs, a deep disconnect is revealed. While Nakba commemorations in Israel are often framed as acts of solidarity between Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs, the relationship between the two groups is far more complicated.
Many Palestinians in the territories view Israeli-Arabs with suspicion and contempt, often labeling them as collaborators or traitors simply for holding Israeli citizenship. This was evident in testimonies from Israeli-Arab hostages and victims of the Oct. 7 massacre, as well as in polls showing a stark divide: Most Palestinians deny that Hamas committed war crimes while a majority of Israeli-Arabs identify with the Israeli state.
At the same time, many Israeli-Arabs feel caught between two identities —expressing empathy for Palestinian suffering while living as citizens in a country often vilified by those they seek to support. It seems that since “Nakba Day” events are primarily organized by Arab students and student groups, what appears to be irrational activism against their own country may actually be a form of overcompensation, an attempt to reconcile conflicting loyalties and identities.
During the Oct. 7 massacre, 24 Israeli Arabs were murdered and 8 were kidnapped by Hamas, and according to surveys released after the massacre, about two-thirds of Israeli Arabs see themselves as part of the State of Israel. In contrast, according to a Palestinian survey published in May 2025, 87% of the Palestinian population in Gaza and Judea and Samaria think that Hamas did not commit war crimes on Oct. 7.
In fact, the majority of the Palestinian public thinks that the “solution to the conflict” is simply to continue the violent confrontation until we surrender. This suggests that Palestinian nationalists have not relinquished the original annihilationist plan targeting the indigenous Jewish population of Israel.
“Nakba Day” protests perceive the very establishment of the State of Israel as a disaster and are far from addressing Palestinian suffering. Continuing to cling to one-sided narratives, disconnected from historical and factual contexts, not only does not bring the solution closer but deepens the rift, especially when it comes to academic campuses that are supposed to be a space for intellectual discourse.
This article was originally published in JNS.
