Israel’s First Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (C) stands under a portrait depicting Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, as he reads Israel’s declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948, in this handout picture released April 29, 2008, by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO). Photo: REUTERS/Kluger Zoltan/GPO/Handout

In recent weeks, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked “Nakba Day” with the now-familiar claim that Israel’s independence itself constituted an original act of aggression against Palestinian Arabs.

Shortly thereafter, two Democratic senators advanced a similar narrative into mainstream American discourse. In a New York Times essay, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) portrayed decades of American support for Israel as morally corrosive while arguing that Israel is the principal obstacle to peace and to a “two-state solution.”

The implication is unmistakable: Israel is being cast as the original destroyer of peace, while the repeated rejection of any Jewish sovereignty by Arab leadership fades from view.

This pattern was established in 1937, when the British Peel Commission proposed partition.

The Jewish leadership accepted the principle of dividing the land despite being offered a very tiny state. Arab leaders rejected the proposal because they rejected Jewish sovereignty itself. Ten years later, the same thing happened again when the United Nations passed Resolution 181 recommending partition into Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish leadership accepted; the Arab Higher Committee rejected.

That distinction matters because it undermines one of the central myths surrounding the conflict. The dispute was not originally about settlements, checkpoints, occupation, or borders. It was about whether a Jewish state of any size could exist at all.

One of the least remembered episodes of this period occurred when future Israeli foreign minister Moshe Sharett and the Jewish Agency appealed to the UN Security Council, and later directly to both Washington and Moscow, to enforce partition and prevent war.

All three refused. But the fact that the Jewish leadership sought enforcement of the partition plan rather than war speaks for itself. They were clearly trying to preserve an internationally endorsed compromise, not expand beyond it.

Arab militias began attacking Jewish communities immediately after the partition vote. Then, following Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, five separate Arab armies invaded.

The invasion was a war of choice. The Arab states were not responding to an invasion of their territory. They were attempting to overturn partition by force because they believed their overwhelming size and a military victory would eliminate the need for compromise.

Instead, they lost.

The consequences were catastrophic for everyone involved. The war produced death, displacement, fear, expulsions, refugees, and suffering on both sides.

Roughly 1% of Israel’s entire Jewish population was killed during the conflict — proportionally equivalent to roughly 3.4 million Americans being killed today.

The Palestinian Arab refugee crisis emerged from that war. So did another refugee catastrophe largely absent from contemporary discourse.

Nearly one million Jews were displaced from Arab countries in the years surrounding Israel’s independence. Across much of the Arab world, centuries-old Jewish communities disappeared as more than 99% of Jews were expelled, fled persecution, or were forced out.

None of this erases Palestinian suffering. Nor does it absolve Israel of every action taken during a brutal war for its very existence.

But a side that rejects partition, launches a war to destroy a country, and then loses that war cannot honestly remove its own decisions from the chain of events that followed.

Yet modern Nakba discourse increasingly asks audiences to view 1948 as though the war itself never happened.

That inversion has become so normalized that American senators can portray decades of US support for Israel as morally suspect while devoting little attention, if any, to the fact that Israel has spent most of its existence confronting wars aimed at its destruction, terrorism campaigns, suicide bombings, rocket attacks, intifadas, and, most recently, the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The historical record is straightforward. The Jews’ leaders accepted partition in both 1937 and 1947. Arab leaders rejected both proposals and chose war rather than coexistence. When the UN endorsed partition, it was the Jewish leadership that sought international enforcement of the compromise while the Arabs’ leaders moved to destroy it.

This same false narrative continues to haunt the conflict today.

Every generation that is taught that Jewish sovereignty itself is the problem is a generation taught to search for peace in the wrong place.

Every political movement that treats the existence of Israel as the original injustice rather than an enduring reality reinforces the very rejectionism that has repeatedly sabotaged compromise.

And every effort to erase Palestinian Arab agency from the story deprives Palestinians themselves of the ability to learn from the decisions that helped produce their “Nakba” … their catastrophe.

The result is the perpetuation of the conflict itself.

Because as long as large numbers of people continue to believe that peace requires undoing Jewish self-determination rather than accepting it, Palestinian Arabs will continue to be promised outcomes that will never occur, Israelis will continue to be asked to defend themselves against movements that refuse to accept their permanence, and both peoples will continue to pay the price.

The tragedy of 1948 was real.

The greater tragedy is perpetuating the ideas that produced it.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.