Today is May 15: Nakba Day. Today, Palestians and their allies around the world will commemorate the Nakba (“Catastrophe”): the forcible expulsion and dispossession of roughly 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Today, the UN reports that there are more than 4.75 million registered Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. Of these, nearly 1.4 million live in 58 UN-operated refugee camps. The total number of Palestinian refugees worldwide is estimated to be 5.5 million—the largest population of refugees in the world. Yet Israel has consistently refused to recognize the Palestinians’ right of return, as expressed in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, Article 11. Moreover, Israel’s expulsion and internal displacement of Palestinians continues to this day, albeit on a much smaller scale than in 1948. In a very real sense, the Nakba never really ended.
Facts and figures such as these reflect the enormity of the refugee crisis, but they can hardly convey the intensity and brutality of the Nakba itself. Statistics cannot illustrate the extent to which the Nakba persists as an agonizing and oppressive trauma in the lives of the Palestinians who experienced it, as well as their descendants. Nor can numbers reflect the Nakba‘s incredible influence on modern Palestinian social, political, cultural and intellectual identity. It seems that there is simply no aspect of Palestinian life that remains untouched by the Nakba.
For a more intimate appreciation of the Palestinian experience of the Nakba, I would recommend Al Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948 (1997), an hour-long documentary directed by Benny Brunner and Alexandra Jansse. Featuring interviews with Palestinian survivors of the Nakba, as well as Israelis who participated in the expulsion operations, the film humanizes the Nakba in a way that statistics never can.
This film is based on The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 by Israeli “New Historian” Benny Morris, who appears frequently in the film to provide historical context. In this book, Morris challenges the official version of Israeli history, which presents the Palestinian exodus as an overwhelmingly voluntary affair initiated after Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, at the urging of the neighboring Arab countries. On the contrary, Morris reveals that the Palestinian exodus began months earlier in December 1947, and that it was driven by a combination of attacks on Palestinians, fear of additional attacks and forced expulsions.
Unfortunately, the film exhibits many of the same flaws as Morris’ work, namely his insistence that there was no coordinated plan of expulsion devised by the Zionist leadership and carried out by its military forces. However, Ilan Pappé refutes this claim in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which argues that the expulsion of Palestinians was an intentional campaign, sanctioned (if not always explicitly ordered) from the top down. As such, the Nakba represents not an accidental side effect of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (as was long asserted) but rather a classic example of ethnic cleansing, which Pappé defines as “an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogeneous by expelling a particular group of people and turning them into refugees while demolishing the homes they were driven from…. Later on, the expelled are then erased from the country’s official and popular history and excised from its collective memory.”
Another problem is that the film makes only passing reference to the Deir Yassin massacre: the murder of roughly 100 Palestinians villagers by Zionist paramilitaries on April 9, 1948. The film never describes the massacre in any detail or addresses its significance—a severe and surprising oversight. As Morris writes in Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001:
Deir Yassin is remembered not as a military operation, but rather for the atrocities committed by the IZL and LHI troops during and immediately after the drawn-out battle: Whole families were riddled with bullets and grenade fragments and buried when houses were blown up on top of them; men, women, and children were mowed down as they emerged from houses; individuals were taken aside and shot. At the end of the battle, groups of old men, women, and children were trucked through West Jerusalem’s streets in a kind of “victory parade” and then dumped in (Arab) East Jerusalem.
According to Jerusalem Shai commander Levy (reporting on April 12), “the conquest of the village was carried out with great cruelty. Whole families—women, old people, children—were killed, and there were piles of dead [in various places]. Some of the prisoners [who had been] moved to places of incarceration, including women and children, were murdered viciously by their captors.” In a report the following day, he added: “LHI members tell of the barbaric behavior… of the IZL toward the prisoners and the dead. They also relate that the IZL men raped a number of Arab girls and murdered them afterward (we don’t know if this is true).”
Morris notes that reports of the massacre had a “profoundly demoralizing effect on the Palestinian Arabs and was a major factor in their massive flight during the following weeks and months. The IDF Intelligence Service called Deir Yassin ‘a decisive accelerating factor’ in the general Arab exodus.”
Deir Yassin, and other massacres like it, cannot be divorced from the general process of expulsion. As the quotations above indicate, the Deir Yassin massacre was part of a deliberate effort to liquidate the village’s inhabitants and, more generally, to spread terror throughout the Palestinian populace in order to coerce them to abandon their homes. Not surprisingly, Deir Yassin remains a powerful symbol of the Nakba in Palestinian memory and discourse.
To learn more about the Deir Yassin massacre and its role in the Nakba, I’d recommend this excellent 30-minute documentary produced by Deir Yassin Remembered in 2006:
Given all this, it should be clear why Palestinians wish to memorialize the Nakba. However, the truth of the Nakba is frequently denied by many Israelis, and attempts to publicly commemorate Nakba Day are met with harsh resistance. In May 2009, for instance, the right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party proposed a bill that would ban the observance of Nakba Day and authorize prison terms of up to three years for violators. This controversial bill was watered down (now, groups that receive government funding can have that funding cut if they observe Nakba Day) and was subsequently approved by the Knesset in March 2010. Arab Israeli Knesset Member Taleb El-Sana stated:
[The bill] proves the failure of Zionism, which needs to legislate a law in order to force the Zionist narrative and to rewrite history during which the Zionist movement committed crimes against humanity on the Palestinian people…. The Palestinian people will continue to unify around [this] disaster, which is identical to the destruction of the First and Second Temples for the Jews, and will hold marches in full force until the Zionist movement recognizes its responsibility for the Nakba, until the Palestinian people realize their aspirations for liberty and independence, and until the refugees return to their towns.
Many American Jews are also resistant to formal acknowledgement of the Nakba. On his blog, Sixteen Minutes to Palestine, University of Chicago student Sami Kishawi reports that Hillels Around Chicago began circulating a memo around DePaul University last week, warning of Students for Justice in Palestine’s plans to host a die-in on May 13 in remembrance of the Nakba. The memo states, “In light of the upcoming Palestinian ‘Die-In’ protest tomorrow, it is critical that you be aware of the disturbing events scheduled to take place… in an effort to delegitimize the state of Israel. For many of you, this event may be offensive, upsetting or hurtful as there will be inflammatory language and literature on display. Please know that we are available to provide you with factual information about the history of and current situation in Israel.”
How is it possible that so many American Jews and Israelis could be so desperately opposed to any public recognition of the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948? Why do public displays of mourning and resilience pose such a threat? Ilan Pappé eloquently captures precisely what is at stake:
The inability of Israelis to acknowledge the trauma the Palestinians suffered stands out even more sharply against the way the Palestinian national narrative tells the story of the Nakba, a trauma they continue to live with to the present…. [W]hat the Palestinians are demanding, and what, for many of them, has become a sine qua non, is that they be recognized as the victims of an ongoing evil, consciously perpetrated against them by Israel. For Israeli Jews to accept this would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood. This would have political implications on an international scale, but also—perhaps far more critically—would trigger moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche: Israeli Jews would have to recognize that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.
The Keys, by Anne Paq (www.annepaq.com)
[...] Beitenu was also responsible for introducing legislation in 2009 that would have criminalized the observance of Nakba Day by Israeli [...]