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News » December 24, 2009

Independence and ‘Catastrophe’?

An Israeli group tries to democratize memory by recognizing Palestinians’ ‘Nakba.’

By Robert Hirschfield

On May 18, young Palestinian men sit in front of a poster marking the 61st anniversary of Nakba. The poster hangs on the wall that divides the West Bank village of Azariya, near Bethlehem. (Photo by:Musa Al-Shaer/AFP/Getty Images )

In a country rooted in the Zionist narrative of how Israel was created, the organization Zochrot (Hebrew for “remembering”) says to its adversaries what the black nurse in Angels in America says to the dying Roy Cohn: “I am your negation.”

Founded in 2002 by activists, mostly Israeli Jews but a few from Palestinian political party Fatah, Zochrot is rooted in memory: the memory of the “Nakba,” Arabic for ‘catastrophe’, and how Palestinians refer to the creation of Israel on their land.

Zochrot tries to democratize memory. Each year on Israeli Independence Day, it holds its Nakba Day rally in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, where a monument to the Holocaust stands. In that square in 2005, it unveiled its Nakba Map, which restores the locations of Palestinian villages destroyed during the ‘47 War of Independence and afterwards.

“The Jews in Israel,” says Eitan Bronstein, the director of Zochrot, “know almost nothing about the Nakba.” That must change, he says, if “our responsibility for taking part in the Nakba” is to be understood. “In school, when we studied Israel’s War of Independence, we learned about Operation Gideon and Operation Danny, which conquered Ramle, but we never learned about who were expelled because of these operations.” Bronstein estimates that 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, and 500 villages and neighborhoods were destroyed.

Zochrot members regularly take groups of Israelis and Palestinians on tours of these villages and neighborhoods, sometimes accompanied by the Palestinians who once lived there. Tour participants are told of the lives and fate of the vanished inhabitants.

Zochrot is known for putting up in signs at the sites of the wiped-out villages with their original Arabic names. “The signs are usually removed after 15 minutes,” says Norma Musih, one of Zochrot’s founders. “At most, two hours.”

Early in 2004, Zochrot activists were prevented from resurrecting the names of the villages of Yalu and Imwas in Canada Park, a suburb north of Jerusalem. Zochrot took the town to court and in March 2006, the court ruled in its favor. A commemorative sign was posted that read in part: “The villages, Imwas and Yalu, existed in the area of the park until 1967. In the village of Imwas there lived 2,000 residents who now reside in and around Ramallah.”

Musih was both outraged and amused. “Nothing is written about what happened to the residents. It’s as if they just decided one day to move to Ramallah.” Most Israelis hold Zochrot in contempt for its identification with Nakba. This is especially true of older Israelis who cling to the traditional narrative of how the Jewish state was created. The younger generation, says Bronstein, is more cynical and open to hearing out heretical challenges to cherished beliefs.

While Dan Flesher, of the Israeli-Palestinian blog, Realistic Dove, stresses the importance for the Palestinian side of having their narrative presented unedited to Israelis, he questions Zochrot’s interpretation: “I am not sure it is entirely accurate. Each side has its own version. Each side committed atrocities, and were guilty of injustices. The narrative is not a simple one.”

This past Nakba Day, Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest newspaper, ran an op-ed piece by a Zochrot member explaining why she doesn’t celebrate Israeli Independence Day. Much of the response to the piece was nasty, said Musih. “People wrote: ‘You are traitors. You should be jailed.’ But we did actually get some very nice letters sent to our website.”

Bronstein was pleased with Yediot, but he remains fundamentally at odds with the Israeli press. “They get things twisted. They say we have the Palestinian narrative about the Nakba. It’s our narrative.”

The Knesset is currently considering a weak version of an anti-Nakba Day Law, first proposed last spring by MK Alex Miller of the right-wing Israel Beiteinu Party. Miller called for the criminalization of any observance of Nakba Day. Violators of the law would have faced up to three years imprisonment. The amended law, expected to pass shortly, would result in the denial of government funding for legislators in Israeli Arab towns that organize Nakba Day rallies. Zochrot responded with a statement, saying the legislation reflects the Israeli establishment fears “the inevitable encounter with the Palestinian Nakba, and the understanding that the Nakba is a foundational part of the Israeli identity.”

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Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based writer who covers Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. He has written for The Progressive, The National Catholic Reporter and Sojourners.

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  • Reader Comments

    It’s really important for both Arabs and Jews (especially in Israel, but throughout the world as well) to understand what happened in 1947-48. There was a catastrophe for the Palestinian Arabs and there was a hard-fought and costly victory for Palestinian Jews, resulting in Israel’s independence.

    The usual Jewish (or “Zionist”) narrative negates the Nakba, the Arab catastrophe. And the usual Arab narrative ignores the fact that their people could have had an independent state alongside a lesser Israel, and with a sizable minority population in the new “Jewish state” that the United Nations General Assembly endorsed in November 1947. Instead, the Palestinian-Arab leadership, supported politically and later militarily, violently rejected the UN resolution and attempted to destroy the Jewish community in Palestine.

    Both sides suffered heavy losses, with the Arabs enduring a bitter defeat and a less than total but still massive expulsion. We can only imagine the scale of massacre and human misery that would likely have occurred if the Arab side had won the war that they began in late 1947. 

    Both Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians should fully acknowledge the fateful decisions and malicious deeds committed by both sides historically. If they cannot do so, they should at least have the good sense to begin to forget the past and forge a new more peaceful future as neighbors (both within Israel and in a new Palestinian state alongside it).

    Posted by rseliger on Jan 2, 2010 at 1:09 PM

    While rseliger has attempted to couch his post about respective narratives in neutral symmetrical terms, imbedded therein are Zionist myths that must be pointed out.  For example, rseliger makes it sound as if the Palestinians had no reason to resist the Zionist project or the newly created Israel by starting hostilities, and having lost, must now live with the consequences (“the war that they began”).  But if I try to steal your land, and you fight me to keep it, who really “started” it?

    It amazes me when Zionists talk about how “grateful” the Palestinians should have been to get what was “offered” by the UN in 1947.  It’s the equivalent of me taking half your land without your consent, and when you fight me to try to get it back, I defeat you and take the rest, mocking that you should have been “grateful” for the half I had initially left for you.  What hogwash.  Can it really be said that your resistance, either before or afterwards, legalized my theft because you had the temerity to use violence? 

    Despite the Zionist myth that the nasty Palestinian resistance is to blame for the creation of Israel, it should be noted that most Zionists have always believed that the Jewish people had an inherent and inalienable right to Palestine.  Religious Zionists have stated this in biblical terms, referring to the divine promise of the land to the tribes of Israel.  Secular Zionists, on the other hand, have relied more on the argument that Palestine alone could solve the problem of Jewish dispersion and virulent anti-Semitism. 

    But, let’s be clear here, NEVER was the consent of the native population ever seriously taken into consideration by any of these Zionists or the Europeans.  Chaim Weizmann stated, in 1930, that the needs of 16 million Jews had to be balanced against those of 1 million Palestinian Arabs: “The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate have definitely lifted [Palestine] out of the context of the Middle East and linked it up with the world-wide Jewish problem…The rights which the Jewish people has been adjudged in Palestine do not depend on the consent, and cannot be subjected to the will, of the majority of its present inhabitants.”  It is this condescending treatment of the indigenous population by its primarily European architects that give the Zionist Project its aura of Colonialism and Imperialism. 

    While I am sympathetic to the plight of European Jews fleeing persecution, it does not change the fact that the Zionist project was primarily the brain-child of Europeans who wanted to create Jewish State on land that was not theirs without deigning to consult, much less securing the consent of the indigenous population.  It would have been just as wrong if these same Zionists had forcibly created a Jewish state in Europe, the US or Uganda without their consent.  Past persecution does not create a blank check to steal other people’s land.  To assert, as Zionists often do, that the Palestinians could have had half of their OWN state if they simply had acceded to such foreign dictation, is simply ludicrous.

    Posted by Imran on Jan 5, 2010 at 5:52 PM

    It isn’t that “Zionists” never “consulted” with Palestinian Arabs about Jewish needs for a secure homeland to escape persecution and eventually genocide, it’s that Palestinian Arabs (understandably perhaps) saw no need to accommodate these hounded people in any way. If they had, they would have at least made common cause with the bi-nationalist elements of the Zionist movement.

    Being awarded with nearly half a loaf by the United Nations, plus nearly half of the other half with 40% of the initial population of the state awarded by the UN to the Jews, wasn’t enough for them. Not to mention that Arab Palestine was never a sovereign state and has never existed accept as part of a larger empire. 

    It was certainly an “inconvenience” that these unwanted, persecuted alien people arrived in Palestine. And it’s perhaps understandable that they were perceived as a threat, but Imran is blind to the morality of the situation in apparently justifying the Palestinian and allied external Arab efforts to destroy the Jewish community in 1947-48.

    The tragedy is that once the dogs of war were unleashed, and the Jews managed at great cost and with the assistance of their enemies’ military weaknesses to triumph, the mostly innocent civilian Arab population paid the price of their leaders’ decision to choose violence.

    Posted by rseliger on Jan 6, 2010 at 9:32 AM

    “...it’s that the Palestinian Arabs (understandably perhaps) saw no need to accommodate these hounded people in any way.”

    I don’t understand why the onus of this should be placed exclusively on the Palestinians, and only on their land, to the exclusion of the very Europeans responsible for the persecution in the first place, the other European countries’ abominably restrictive immigration policies barring the entry of fleeing Jewish refugees into their own countries (including sadly the US as well), or the Zionists who were fanning the flames of fear in Palestine by openly advocating the forcible creation of a Jewish State. 

    The answer is simple.  Of the all the entities involved in this catch-22, the Palestinians were the weakest and easiest upon which to impose, despite having the least to do with the European pogroms against Jews.  This is this context in which Palestinians find “being awarded” half of their own land, by the Europeans responsible for the pogroms in the first place, not just hypocritical, but offensive.  No people, under such circumstances, would have been grateful, or found such an"award” “enough for them.”

    And in response to the implication that the Palestinians were simply being heartless or xenophobic to “these unwanted persecuted alien people,” it should noted that refugees do not normally openly declare that they intend to create a separate state in their place of refuge, with or without the consent of the indigenous population.  Regular refugee immigration to Europe or the US was not the same as the Zionist ideological immigration was to Palestine.  Nor was Palestinian resistance to such immigration simply a heartless xenophobic one, with no possible legitimate motivation.

    My problem with the Zionist narrative is that it seeks to obscure the main cause of the conflict, the unlawful land grab done without the consent of the indigenous population.  Whether this is done intentionally or to ease the conscience of well-intentioned Zionists, I don’t know.  But current attempts to criminalize talk about the Nakba are proof of this, and perhaps even a subconscious admission of guilt by Zionists of the sins of their project.

    Posted by Imran on Jan 6, 2010 at 1:46 PM

    The real “tragedy” did not begin when the “dogs of war were unleashed” in 1947-48 (for that was but the last act).  It all really started when Zionists decided to forcibly implement their project for a Jewish State in a land where the overwhelming majority of the indigenous residents were not Jewish.  Everything that has followed (nearly all of it unpleasant, to say the least) was a directly forseeable consequence of such act.  This is something that Zionists simply will not acknowledge, despite intuitively knowing it to be true (as evidenced by the vociferous attacks upon the Nakba narrative in Israel recently). 

    As stated by Ben Ehrenreich:

    “The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing.  Put simply, the problem is Zionism.”  For the full article, see:

    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/16-2

    Posted by Imran on Jan 6, 2010 at 5:03 PM

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Appeared in the January 2010 Issue
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