Friday, May 15, 2026, marks the 78th Anniversary of the Nakba.

We are asking UU congregations across the United States to bear witness by recognizing Nakba Day during service on May 10th or 17th.

“The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.” Between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed or fled from their cities and villages during the Nakba. Hundreds of towns and villages were destroyed by Israeli forces. Displaced Palestinians were never allowed to return.

The General Assembly of the United Nations first recognized Nakba Day in 2023. In 2024, the UUA General Assembly affirmed our “Solidarity with Palestinians” in an Action of Immediate Witness. Forced removal is a war crime, a denial of human rights. Today, as our US tax dollars support the continued killing and forced removal of Palestinians in Palestine—and their oppression by apartheid laws and systems in Israel and the occupied territories—UUs affirm the values of Pluralism, Interdependence, Generosity, Equity, Transformation, and Justice. We are bound by love to bring these values into the world, and make them a reality. 

You can find a version of the statement above that can be read from the pulpit during service, an appeal letter for your Minister or Worship Committee, and a flier to hand out after service on the Resource page of our website under "Worship Resources."

If you are planning an event to commemorate the Nakba, or incorporating into a service, please let us know by sending an email to [email protected]

UUJME is part of the global movement for solidarity with Palestinians, and our mission calls on us to support our allies in broader global justice and anti-oppression movements. As such we condemn the United States-Israel military attacks on Iran, attacks which have generated a war spreading across the region. We mourn the deaths resulting from this illegal attack, lifting up the more than 150 Iranian children and their teachers killed in bombing of a school in the first 24 hours, and support the people of Iran’s right to freedom and self-determination. 

We recall the connection of this attack to a long history of U.S. actions against the people of Iran, including the U.S. (and U.K) - orchestrated wrecking of Iran’s secular democracy in 1953, the imposition of life-destroying economic sanctions beginning in 1979, and trashing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, in 2018.

We support a world liberated from militarism, coercive control, state violence, and the abuses of imperialism. This will take an increasingly connected global movement that is clear about forming the necessary broad coalition that spans many philosophical differences and upholds international law as exemplified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Please join us in the discipline of praying with your body without ceasing. Attend protest rallies. Organize people in your congregation to support the Purge Palantir campaign. Mobilize other UUs to call Congress to stop state and federal tax money from supplying weapons for attacking Palestine and Iran, and also to stop funding ICE and DHS. Ask your congregation to join the growing numbers of UU groups pledging to be Apartheid-Free, because helping to dismantle Israel’s systemic violence is one key to ending expanded neocolonialism and apartheid in the region. 

We hope to see you on the front lines of social change and moral revolution inside and outside of your congregations, partnering broadly as you help to bend the arc of the universe toward justice.

Read and share the UUA and UUSC statements about the attack on Iran.

Photo: Booklet cover from the Balasan Institute, "The Hidden War on Palestinian Women."
Rev. Manish Mishra-Marzetti.

FROM REV. MANISH – UUJME DELEGATION UPDATE - January 18, 2026

A young Israeli soldier strides up and down our delegation bus, cradling in both hands an automatic rifle, with his fingers curled around the trigger.  We are required to show our passports at this Israeli military checkpoint, not for the first time.  The intentional intimidation is unmistakable – this is not a casual or friendly interaction.  Being a brown-skinned person, I get nervous during ordinary traffic stops in the U.S., so you can imagine the anxiety of a situation like this.  As our bus rolls away, having cleared the checkpoint, tears stream down my face knowing that the intimidation and fear tactics that our Palestinian siblings face is far, far worse than anything I will ever experience as a U.S. passport holder.  For a brief time, the momentary stress and my sadness at these circumstances overwhelms me.

Though in Palestine, my heart is also thousands of miles from here with siblings in Minnesota.  Similar tactics of fear and intimidation are being employed there right now, for seemingly no other reason than to cow people into political submission.  Our Palestinian contacts have remarked this week, multiple times, that everything the U.S. experiences is first field tested in Palestine – militarized border security, surveillance of the civilian population, the employment of fear and intimidation, the creation of an environment so hostile that those who can flee will flee and go elsewhere.  These connections – both direct and indirect – between Palestine and the U.S. are disturbing.

I am also unsettled by the emerging recognition of how little I have actually known about the day-to-day realities of Palestine.  As an undergraduate, I academically specialized in the Arab world.  I spent years studying Islam, Arab history, politics, and economics, and the Arabic language.  I have served our nation as a U.S. diplomat in the Persian Gulf, helping implement U.S. Middle East foreign policy.  I am not an average U.S. citizen when it comes to the Middle East – I have specialized academic training and professional experience in this region.  

Despite that, I have been humbled to discover significant gaps in my knowledge regarding Palestine.  I only knew a fraction of what we have been learning in-country during this delegation.  This has led me to wonder how it can be that someone with specialized training and experience, like myself, has in reality known so little about Palestine.  And if I – someone who has a modicum of ‘expertise’ in the region – have had huge gaps in knowledge, what might that mean for the average American, who spends far less time learning about this part of the world? 

A few years ago, I created and led a year-long Civil Rights seminar.  I chose to offer this seminar for some very specific reasons.  As I spent time independently learning about Black history it became clear to me that very little Black history is taught in our nation.  One has to actively seek out and learn this history, and even then it might not be easy.  This is the phenomenon of hidden histories – histories that for political and cultural reasons are marginalized and/or invisibilized.  There are many reasons why certain histories and experiences become invisible: they don’t support the dominant cultural narrative; they evoke feelings of shame; the facts and stories are politically inconvenient or unpalatable, etc.  For these and other reasons, histories get suppressed or hidden, and one has to do a lot of excavation work to uncover them.  That difficult work of excavation can be historical, cultural, and/or intra-personal – we may have to also excavate assumptions or acculturated norms and understandings.  University of Virginia Professor Mar Hicks notes that when important facts and experiences are hidden, “it can lead us to erroneous conclusions about why larger historical events unfolded the way they did.”

Palestine has been a reminder to me that oppression moves in familiar patterns across very different contexts.  The experiences of the oppressed are invalidated, denigrated, or hidden.  The oppressors justify their actions via narratives of superiority and/or exceptionalism.  That sense of superiority is then passed down culturally from one generation to the next.  Bellicosity, threats, and violence are used to shut down any critical examination of the oppressive situation.  There is often an extraction of resources - labor, money, property – from the oppressed to the oppressor.  Most critically, the oppressed are dehumanized, and through that dehumanization are understood to deserve whatever abuse they are suffering.  

The challenge in all this is that patterns of oppression can remain alive and undetected if we’re not looking at the full picture – if we’re excluding from our analysis histories and experiences that have been hidden from us.

Making that which has been invisible visible, and then factoring that additional information into our lives, takes effort.  It requires getting beyond the hubris of thinking that we already know everything that we need to know about Israel and Palestine.  (Unless we’re Palestinian, we probably don’t.)  It requires getting beyond the checked-out posture of viewing Israel and Palestine as an intractable problem with no solution.  (Checking out allows harm to continue unabated.)  It requires confronting the reality that the United States is Israel’s largest funder; if the government of Israel is causing harm, U.S. taxpayers are funding that harm.  

We have a moral obligation to learn more, to discuss more, and to effect change where we can.  As my delegation experience comes to a close, I, for one, am resolved to do that. I invite you to join me in that commitment.

From Palestine with love, Rev. Manish

Photo: Framed poster, "Dance of the landowners," depicting
a Native American and a Palestinian dancer.

Photo: Graffiti on the separation wall in the occupied West Bank;
Make Hummus Not War.

Photo: Building in the occupied West Bank with Palestinian flag.
Rev. Manish Mishra-Marzetti.

FROM REV. MANISH – UUJME DELEGATION UPDATE - January 16, 2026

Having been a U.S. diplomat at the time of the Oslo Accords, in 1993, I assumed for decades that the Accords’ two-state solution was the holy grail of peace in the Middle East.

But then a local Palestinian leader shocked me.  “Everyone in the West is obsessed with peace in the Middle East.  And, every conversation about ‘peace’ devolves into a conversation about ‘piece’ – which side is going to get which pieces of land.  What if a two-state solution is not possible?  What if that isn’t the answer?” he asked.

I had never considered this.  What if the two-state solution is a desert-like mirage?  An illusory vision that the West continues to fervently chase after?  History certainly demonstrates that there are mirage-like qualities to the notion of a two-state solution.  

In the 1940s, as the British were crafting the possibility of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state in the Levant, the composition of historical Palestine was approximately 70% Palestinian and 30% Jewish.  Despite those numbers, the partition plan that was eventually adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1947, at the behest of the British, disproportionately gave the Jewish minority 56% of the land, the Palestinians 43%, and designated 1% as an international zone (Jerusalem and its surrounding areas).  The Jewish Zionist movement, which at that time had no land, thought this plan was great and readily agreed; the Palestinians objected and did not agree to a partition.

The UN plan, though never formally implemented, provided the first iteration of two potential states in Palestine.  In the absence of UN implementation of the partition plan, Jewish Zionist militia begin to forcibly implement the plan in 1948.  Israelis call this conflict the War of Independence.  Palestinians call it the Nakba, “the catastrophe,” with the loss of life and homes and the forcible removal of Palestinians from their own lands being the catastrophe.  Between 1948-1949, under the pretext of “war,” Israel proceeds in taking over even more land than the United Nations had disproportionately allocated in its partition plan.  By 1949, Israel had taken over 78% of the land in historical Palestine.  By the conclusion of the Six-Day War in 1967, the remaining Palestinian lands (including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem) are occupied by Israel and subject to Israeli military control.

The subsequent 1993 Oslo Accords required Palestinians to accept that 78% of historical Palestine would forever be Israel, accepting permanently the outcomes of the Nakba.  In turn, Israel would eventually withdraw its military forces from occupied Palestinian lands (the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem) and potentially remove Jewish settlers from those lands.  These potential Oslo commitments got Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish settler who viewed Rabin as a traitor to the Jewish people due to his support of the Accords.  The assassination is credited with having killed not just Rabin but also the Oslo process: a more conservative Israeli government follows Rabin’s death, one that was not committed to the Accords.

What resumes in earnest after Rabin’s death is Israel’s settlement program.  In 1993, the West Bank and East Jerusalem held about 250,000 Jewish settlers.  By 2025, that number was 750,000.  Today, a two-state solution would require either the forced removal of three-quarters of a million Jewish settlers from Palestinian lands or for those Jewish settlers to accept living in a Palestinian-run state.  Both of those possibilities seem unlikely, and that very unlikelihood may have been the Israeli government’s implicit goal: to undermine the possibility of a two-state solution by robustly placing Jewish settlers in occupied Palestinian lands.

To my surprise, there are Palestinian leaders who openly wonder what it might be like for everybody to live together in a genuinely democratic state, one that embodies equality for all its citizens.  Our delegation met a Palestinian former member of the Knesset, whose political party advocates exactly this: an Israeli state with genuine equality for all.  He and his political party are considered “extremists” for harboring such views, because true political and social equality for all would undermine the identity of Israel as a state by and for the Jewish people.

What, then, is the solution?  Surely, genocide and apartheid can’t be the answer.  But perhaps here, as well, genocide and the brutality of apartheid have another implicit goal: to push Palestinians into voluntarily vacating their historical lands and living elsewhere – anywhere other than Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

One Palestinian activist shared with our delegation his West Bank Israeli settler neighbor’s idea of how the Palestine and Israel question could be resolved: “When all the Arabs leave, then there will be peace.”

Mainstream Israeli politicians find full equality within the state of Israel to be unacceptable.  The rest of the world finds genocide, apartheid, and forced removal to be unacceptable, yet has done very little to stop these realities from being thrust upon the Palestinian people.  

Might it be, that in taking little or no action, the world is de facto allowing a “solution” to slowly play out..?  It is a solution that represents the ongoing dispossession and suffering of the Palestinian people.

Holding the heartache of all this alongside you, Rev. Manish

Photo: Israeli flag by a fence in the occupied West Bank.
Rev. Manish Mishra-Marzetti