WASHINGTON (Al Jazeera) – U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has said she introduced a resolution to recognize the Palestinian Nakba, a term used to describe the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the lead-up to the creation of the Zionist regime in 1948.
Tlaib said she introduced the resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday, a day after Palestinians marked the Nakba’s 74th anniversary.
“The Nakba is well-documented and continues to play out today,” Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, wrote on Twitter. “We must acknowledge that the humanity of Palestinians is being denied when folks refuse to acknowledge the war crimes and human rights violations in apartheid Israel.”
The Democratic congresswoman said the resolution is cosponsored by her fellow progressives Betty McCollum, Marie Newman, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Palestinian rights advocates were quick to hail the measure as “historic”.
The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), a think tank that supports Palestinian rights, thanked Tlaib for “giving voice to this reality, and highlighting the pain and injustice Palestinians have suffered”.
During creation of the Zionist regime “nearly 75% of the Palestinian population was ethnically cleansed from Palestine and more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed,” IMEU said in a series of tweets. “These actions were deliberately planned and carried out by Zionist militias in order to steal Palestinian land.”
Millions of survivors of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – and their descendants continue to live in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in neighboring Arab countries.
The Nakba is rarely ever discussed in mainstream U.S. politics, as the occupying regime has enjoyed widespread support from legislators and successive presidents from both major parties for decades.
The occupying regime receives $3.8bn in U.S. military aid annually, and this year Washington added another $1bn in assistance to “replenish” the occupying regime’s so-called Iron Dome missile system after a May 2021 Gaza conflict.
Still, late in 2016, in the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency, then-Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged the Nakba in remarks on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.
“When Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2018, the Palestinians will mark a very different anniversary: 70 years since what they call the ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe,” he said at the time.