Israel to Mamdani: Palestinians can’t play victim in war they started

Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday lashed out at those who mark so-called Nakba Day, screenshotting an image from a video posted by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

“The Nakba was the result of the Arab rejection of the U.N. Partition Plan [of 1947] and decision to launch war to annihilate the State of Israel,” the ministry tweeted.

It added, “You can’t start war, openly vow to ‘throw the Jews into the sea,’ and then pretend being the victim of the conflict you started. The real forgotten victims are the 850,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries at the same time.”

The so-called Nakba Day is what Palestinians frame as the “catastrophic” consequences of Israel’s Independence War, which led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from land liberated by the Israel Defense Forces during Israel’s rebirth as a state, fending off seven invading Arab armies, as well as local Arab fighters.

Earlier on Saturday, Mamdani posted footage of a “Nakba survivor” named Inea, who today lives in New York.

The anti-Israel mayor wrote that Nakba Day commemorates “the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed.”

Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and up to 1970, approximately 850,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab countries.