Each October, Columbus Day and its attendant controversies loom overhead. While there are some Americans who celebrate that day, there also are many who oppose the idea that the Columbian legacy is worthy of celebration. “His discovery” of the Americas led to the decimation and uprooting of the native population. Fortunately, on our campus, it seems we have the moral fortitude to side with the second group.

Yet, when it comes to Israel’s “Independence” Day, we aren’t so circumspect. Each year, many Zionist student groups mark the day, filling the campus with so many Israeli flags that you forget that you are on an American campus. The main reason for the ostentatious display is to negate the disastrous effects of the state of Israel’s creation on Palestinians. The Nakba (“catastrophe”) led to more than 13,000 Palestinian deaths and to the creation of over 750,000 refugees, according to U.N. statistics, who to this day cannot return to their ancestral homeland. That amounts to two-thirds of the country’s indigenous population, conveniently erased from Israel’s historical imagination.

The erasure of Palestinians takes the form of several myths, three of which we will dismantle below, relying on Israeli sources, especially the “New Historians.” Much has been written about the Nakba by Palestinian writers, but we decided to stick to sources whose conclusions cannot be dismissed on the grounds of a perceived ethno-national bias. Our intention is to make it easier for Zionist student groups to reconsider what they are endorsing. Hopefully, this will also help the “disinterested” or uninformed reader think about the situation in a new light.

Myth 1: The Zionists wanted to be part of a peace agreement in 1948 by accepting the November-1947 U.N. Partition Plan. Fact: David Ben-Gurion, then Prime Minister of Israel, declared to the U.N. that non-Jews remaining as even 40 percent of the population was still unacceptable: “There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.” As Ilan Pappé notes, this line of thinking crystallized in Plan Dalet, which aimed to transfer as many Palestinians as possible out of Jewish-controlled territory and place those who remained under Israeli military rule.

Myth 2: Not only did the Arabs reject the Partition Plan, but they also started the war. Fact: Massacres of Palestinians carried out by pre-state Zionist armed groups started well before the Partition Plan. Attacks carried out between 1938 and 1946 by the Irgun, militant Zionists considered terrorist by the British Mandatory authorities, were especially heinous. Most of the surrounding Arab states were either under some form of colonial rule or reeling from its effects. It was impossible for the Arab states to even articulate a unified position given the constraints and weaknesses of their neo-colonial governments (see Avi Shlaim).

Myth 3: The Palestinians were not forced by the Zionists to leave Palestine; Arab leaders told them to leave. Fact: Even right-leaning historian Benny Morris admits that fear of atrocities committed by the Zionist militias and armed forces, consistent references to transferring Palestinians by Israeli leaders such as Ben-Gurion (see the Peel Commission report) and orders from Israeli military leaders concerning the expulsion of Palestinians led to their displacement and dispossession. Indeed, Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader, admits: “There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population” (1969).

None of the above is at all controversial, as it can easily be supported with exclusive reference to Israeli scholarship. We hope that Binghamton University’s Zionist organizations will recognize that their narrative of 1948 is grounded in the ongoing expulsion, discrimination and suffering of the Palestinians. Perhaps they will even feel a measure of shame at the thought of cheerleading the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Perhaps, too, we all need to stop and consider if displacement and dispossession are triumphs to be celebrated or, as on Columbus Day, horrors to be mourned.

—Shehryar Qazi is a third year graduate student studying sociology
Kelvin Santiago-Valles is an associate professor of sociology