Zohran Mamdani recently posted a video for Nakba Day centered around Inea Bushnaq, presented as a survivor of Palestinian displacement. But the story featured in the video leaves out key historical context and raises uncomfortable contradictions.
Bushnaq’s family were Muslim Bosnians who moved from Europe to Ottoman Syria in the late 1800s. Her family later settled in Tulkarem, which, after 1948, came under Jordanian, not Israeli, control. Records also show that her grandfather sold land to Jews, and her father ultimately chose to relocate back to England.
The video also prominently features the famous “Visit Palestine” poster, designed not by Palestinian Arabs, but by Austrian-Jewish refugee Franz Kraus in Tel Aviv in 1936 to promote Jewish tourism and Zionist return to the land.
More broadly, the video omits critical facts about 1948 itself. It leaves out that the war began after five Arab armies invaded the newly declared State of Israel. It ignores the roughly 150,000 Arabs who remained in Israel and became citizens, as well as the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries in the years that followed.
The issue is not commemorating Palestinian suffering. It is presenting a selective narrative that strips away historical complexity and reframes the creation of Israel as an unprovoked act of colonialism.
History deserves more than political storytelling.
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