The United Nations General Assembly voted on Wednesday to adopt a resolution to commemorate the “Nakba.” The Arabic term, meaning “catastrophe,” is used by Palestinians and their supporters to describe Israel’s creation and the resulting displacement of some 700,000 of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war initiated by Arab nations to destroy the nascent Jewish state.
The U.N. resolution calls for a “commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nakba, including by organizing a high-level event at the General Assembly Hall” in May of next year.
Abraham Accords signatories the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan all voted in favor. Australia, Canada, Germany, Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States were among the countries that voted against.
The vote came a day after Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan inaugurated an exhibit highlighting the expulsion of Jews from Middle East countries, calling the story of these Jewish refugees the “real Nakba.”
The launch of the exhibit also coincided with Wednesday’s Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from Arab Countries, which has been marked annually in Israel since 2014 and is running at the U.N. headquarters in New York City for one week.