Co-memory and melancholia: Israelis memorialising the Palestinian Nakba

Preface and acknowledgements

Writing this book between the 60th and the 61st anniversaries of the Nakba and the State of Israel, in the year of the Gaza war, the bloodiest of Israel’s bloody wars, has been both traumatic and liberating. In particular, the book is the result of a series of dialogues conducted with a group of people without whom it could not have been written. As always, my conversations with my soul sister Nitza Aminov have sustained me intellectually, politically and emotionally.

Nitza Aminov and Tamar Avraham have given me useful interviews quoted throughout the book, and both of them and David Landy read chapter drafts and their comments and suggestions were invaluable. David Landy and Anaheed Al-Hardan acted as my research assistants and their work informs parts of this book. Eli Aminov was inspirational, and as always made sure I got the latest books relevant to my research.

Other people who assisted me in the birth of this book, directly and indirectly, include Nahla Abdo, Ronit Chacham, Honaida Ghanim, David Theo Goldberg, Smadar Lavie, Yosefa Loshitzky, Ilan Pappe, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, Ahmad Sa’di, Yehouda Shenhav, Oren Yiftachel, Michal Zak, Raef Zreik and Elia Zureik. I am grateful to Wakim Wakim of ADRID and Salman Natour of the Emile Touma Centre for agreeing to talk to me, and to the organisers of Mada Al Carmel’s Nakba conference in 2008 for inviting me to present a preliminary paper. The work of Zochrot opened up the conversation about the Nakba in Hebrew – speaking to members, following the group’s activities and reading its publication was invaluable. Thanks to Louis who lovingly pulled me out of my Gaza abyss.

The translations of of the Hebrew works I cite are mine, unless published translations exist.

I dedicate the book to Alana Lentin and Partho Sen-Gupta and their daughter Noam, and Miki Lentin and Miriam Levin and their daughter Arielle.

1 Introduction: living in the shadow

All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one story in place of another story. (Hélène Cixous 1997: 178)

Each one of us, Israelis and Jews, has a shadow, the shadow of the 1948 Palestinian refugees. (Uri Davis 1994: 190)

Prologue: May 2008 – exile and last journey?

Feelings of doom have accompanied the preparations for my visit to observe the 60th anniversary of the Nakba and Israeli independence. It feels like my last chance to witness the contradictory rituals of the Israelis celebrating their independence and the Palestinians marking their catastrophe. I will be staying with my soul sister Nitza who persuaded me to extend this visit to encompass both ‘the march of return’, held, as in previous years on Israel’s Independence Day (this year falling on May 8 in Saffuriyya), and Nakba Day, held on May 15, the day the British officially exited Palestine in 1948.

I have been edgy for days before travelling, apprehensive about the paper I am to present at the Arab Centre for Applied Social Research Mada al-Carmel’s conference, ‘Sixty Years of Nakba Homeland and Exile – Loss, Alienation, and Forms of Resistance’, in Nazareth. I am the only Israeli participating, the only one speaking in Hebrew – a great honour, but very nerve racking. I don’t know as yet that there would be repercussions.

For several years now I have been making these trips to the other shore of my bifurcated life, navigating the choppy waters of my exiled existence. As I write in this book, I have opposed my Israel – mine not only because I was born and grew up there, but also emotionally – since shortly after the 1967 war. But ever since I remember I have always taken upon myself the duty to account, to take to account, as both my birthright and my mission. Yet for the first time, the journey feels ominous, almost terminal.

I feel a sudden pang of yearning for mother – her last few years in a home meant I was not free to immerse myself as I have done in the past four years since her death when I was staying with Nitza in Jerusalem. Here I have total freedom to indulge my politics openly. Louis’s parting words, ‘go to the Sea of Galilee, you might have a conversion’, said with a sad smile, make me think about the Road to Damascus – the moment of realisation, and about the attended melancholia that I write about in this book.

It takes me a few hours after reaching Nitza’s to relax and slide into our familiar, friendly political world, and for the ominous feelings to subside. I am gradually back in the Jerusalem of my youth and my estrangement gives way to the here and the now, as if I had never been away.

In the spirit of auto-ethnography (Ellis 2004) this book is interspersed with the personal narrative of my 2008 journey. I don’t mask my impressions in objective terms. I am encouraged by Ella Shohat’s discussion of the the exiled intellectual; evoking Edward Said’s words about the impossibility of writing ‘objectively’ about the conflict, she writes: ‘critics belong to a community, and act in certain circles. But there is a moral difference between the critic who belongs to the oppressors and the critic from the oppressed society’ (Shohat 2001b: 209).

Introduction

During her third visit to Israel in March 2008, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. ‘The Shoah’, Merkel said, ‘fills us Germans with shame. I bow to the victims. There is nothing like the human crisis created by the Shoah. Only if Germany recognises its eternal responsibility for the Shoah, would it be able to build a humane future’ (Ilan 2008).

Ever since World War II, German leaders have aspired to normalising Germany’s partnership with the Jewish state – former perpetrator seeking the forgiveness of its victims. However, though Merkel referred to the Iranian nuclear threat and stressed Germany’s historical commitment to Israel’s security, promising that ‘Germany will never abandon Israel’, and reminding her listeners that as she was speaking ‘thousands of [Israelis] are living in fear of Qasem rocket attacks’, she said nothing about Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinians under occupation.

A few days after Merkel’s visit, a group calling itself ‘Academics for Justice’ distributed an online call to ‘all Jews of conscience’ to join the ‘No Time to Celebrate: Jews Remember the Nakba’ campaign, organised by anti-Zionist Jews from the US and Canada to coordinate and make visible the Jewish response to Israeli Independence Day celebrations and Jewish participation in commemorating the Nakba (http://academicsforjustice.org). Merkel’s visit, just before the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel and of the Palestinian Nakba, epitomises and normalises the abnormality of the Israeli state, built from the destruction that was the Shoah on the disavowal of the dispossession of the Palestinians.

As Israeli ‘new historian’ Ilan Pappe argues (2008: 93), any discussion of the 1948 war, which Israelis call their ‘War of Independence’ and Palestinians their ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe, should begin ‘from the place of understanding the clear advantage of the Israeli military forces and the weakness of the Palestinians, and on the other hand the myth of the few versus the many dominating all public discussions’. Nurit Gertz (1995) outlines three Zionist myths or ‘ideological narratives’, aimed, through being repeated in a variety of textual articulations, at conserving the hegemonic power relations. The first myth is the ‘few against the many’ narrative, according to which a Jewish ‘David’ was attacked by an Arab ‘Goliath’, the second is the struggle between the enlightened (Jewish) Europeans and the backwards (Arab) Orientals and the ensuing myth about Palestine being a ‘desert’ which the Zionists made ‘bloom’, and the third is the struggle between the isolated Jewish nation and an uncaring world, a narrative strengthened by the indifference of the world in face of the Nazi genocide. A fourth myth is that of Israel as European. Yet as Shohat argues, Zionism, which claims to be the liberation movement of all Jews, equating ‘Jewish’ and ‘Zionist’, was in effect a liberation movement for European Jews only. According to Zionist discourse, Zionism ‘saved’ Mizrahi (Arab) Jews from their Arab oppressors, and from conditions of poverty, illiteracy and superstition. Mizrahi Jews, Shohat writes, were brought to Israel to serve Zionist-European purposes, and ‘were systematically discriminated against by the Ashkenazi Zionist establishment which distributed resources preferring Ashkenazi Jews over Mizrahi Jews’ (Shohat 2001b: 141).

Most Israeli historians, including ‘new historians’ (e.g. Morris 1987), are Ashkenazi and tend not to link the Palestinian refugee problem with the issue of Arab Jews despite the obvious connections. According to Yehouda Shenhav, this leads to an Israeli taboo against presenting the Mizrahi issue in political, rather than folkloric, terms, amounting to collective denial. Shenhav does not spare liberal Israeli Jews who, he argues, deal with the Palestinian issue not out of love for the Orient, but rather because of their wish to transfer the Palestinians across the fence, where they would no longer threaten western hegemony. Israel’s Mizrahi Jews, however, cannot be transferred: ‘recognising the Mizrahis as a collective, not merely as individuals, requires a reorganisation of Israeli society’ (Shenhav 2003: 12).

My starting point in this book is the deconstruction of these myths which enabled the denial of the destruction of Palestine. I am aware that the ‘we’ I represent is a middle-class Ashkenazi ‘we’. I am challenged by Smadar Lavie, anti-Zionist Mizrahi feminist academic and activist, to bear in mind that my viewpoint, and the viewpoint of many Israeli Jewish political activists is limited by a racial and class divide (see Abarjel and Lavie 2006).

In 2005, the British Council sponsored the Dublin production of the Tricycle Theatre’s Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry (Tricycle 2005: 1). The British Council’s support for this verbatim theatre show, which documents the inquiry into the worst act of state violence against civilians in the history of the British occupation of Northern Ireland, is a memorial enacted and sponsored by the perpetrators, not the victims. The show can be understood as what Pierre Nora (1989) calls Lieu de mémoire, but also as an attempt to incorporate this controversial murder of civilians into the British consensus for the benefit of British audiences. In recent years, with the proliferation of ‘peace processes’ and Truth and Reconciliation Committees, and in light of the increasing prevalence of what is becoming known as ‘memory studies’, discourses of memory of catastrophe are shifting from the margin to the centre, and from the realm of the victims to that of the perpetrators. This is despite the fact that war crimes tribunals have mainly served the interests and political and moral needs of the international community, rather than local needs (Amadiume and An-Na’im 2000: 5). Memory of catastrophe involves a lengthy process of remembering and forgetting, which often begins to be engaged with only one generation after the catastrophe, as demonstrated by studies of the legacy of the Nazi Holocaust (see e.g., Langer 1991; Felman and Laub 1992; Lentin 2000).

Zionism and Zionists are far from homogeneous and the long history of dissent within Zionism has its roots in the 1890s with thinkers such as the prominent essayist Ahad Ha’Am, whose 1891 article ‘Truth from the Land of Israel’ noted the maltreatment of the Arabs by Jewish settlers, attributing it, as Tom Segev points out (2002: ix), to psychological causes: ‘They were slaves in their land of exile and suddenly they find they have unlimited freedom … This sudden change has produced in their hearts an inclination towards repressive despotism, as always occurs when the slave becomes king.’ David Ben Gurion’s more militant Zionism won over the peace-oriented Brit Shalom, the group headed by the President of the Hebrew University J. L. Magnes and the liberal philosopher Martin Buber. However, political dissent, in the wake of the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Sinai, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, and in particular after the first Lebanon war (1982) and the outbreak of the first Intifada (1987), has been an ongoing feature of Israeli Jewish life, even though, as Segev (2002: xi) points out, it has been difficult to demonstrate its achievements.

Segev, and the book titled The Other Israel that his foreword appears in (Carey and Shainin 2002) deal mostly (though not exclusively) with dissent within Zionism, by the so-called ‘Israeli peace camp’ rather than with anti-Zionist Israeli Jewish dissent (for a discussion on the differences between post- and anti-Zionism see Chapter 5). Furthermore, the Israeli resistance movement tends to focus on the 1967 occupation, even though, as Shenhav argues, such resistance imagines pre-1967 Israel as a ‘lean and just republic’, erases the 1948 Nakba and assumes that before the 1967 war, Israel was ‘beautiful and just for the Palestinians living under martial law … and for the Mizrahi population who were sent to live outside the centres of urban power and became the backbones of what is called the second Israel’ (Shenhav 2008: 322–32; see also Yiftachel 2009).

Questions of guilt, responsibility and accountability are regularly debated in Israel in relation to Nazi culpability, yet my aim in this book is both narrower and broader. Against the background of recent developments in memory studies, which represent one of the latest ‘turns’ in the social sciences since the 1980s (Olick 2008), my specific focus is on one form of memorial practice by perpetrators – the co-memoration by Israeli Jews of the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe, when over 700,000 Palestinian civilians were expelled or escaped from their homes, leading, according to the UNHCR, to the existence today of over four million Palestinian refugees (Kuperman 2005). More broadly, however, and as most anti-Zionist Israeli Jews have their own ‘road to Damascus’ tale, this book attempts to explore how some Israeli Jews (and some non-Israeli Jews) keep returning to ‘the facts, the details which were never highlighted, and the chasm between them and the narrative we were brought up on’ (Pappe 2008: 94).

The process of working on this book led me to think of the obsessive preoccupation with Palestine and Palestinians by anti-Zionist Jews, but also by more mainstream members of the ‘peace camp’, as being affected by a deep melancholia for the Palestine they/we destroyed and the Palestinians they/we dispossessed. This obsessive melancholic preoccupation may be difficult for Palestinians to accept in view of their ongoing dispossession. However my object of analysis is not the Palestinians. I have a problem with researching the other from a powerful position, even though I agree with Edward Said (1980) that the Palestinian experience must be dialectically set against Zionism, which ‘has meant as much to us, albeit differently, as it has to Jews’ (Said 1980: xv). My project is rather researching ‘us’, anti-Zionist Israelis and the consequences of our melancholic longing for Palestine.

As an émigré Israeli middle-class Ashkenazi Jew – opposed to Israeli state policies since 1967 (Lentin 1980, 2004c, 2008a; Abdo and Lentin 2002) – I am very conscious of the problems of writing as an Israeli about the meanings of the Nakba. I acknowledge that awareness of othering in social research is never ‘directly soluble by methodological rules’ (Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002, 120). I remind myself that in researching Palestine, as in co-memorating the Nakba in Hebrew, the Palestinians often get erased, their voices subsumed by the voice of the powerful coloniser and that, regardless of our position and politics, all Israeli Jews are implicated in and must take responsibility for the colonisation of Palestine, even though I accept Lavie’s challenge that, as Shohat (2001a) argues, Mizrahi Jews were, and are, Zionism’s Jewish victims. In Chapter 4 I discuss my own responsibility – as the daughter of one of the pre-state Hagana soldiers who conquered Haifa. Set against the daily practices of the Israeli racial state, this study is a reflection on the contested relations between commemoration and appropriation from the standpoint of a member of the perpetrators’ collectivity, whose politics align her with the colonised.

Racial state and Nakba denial

Setting the object of analysis as the co-memoration of the Nakba by Israeli Jews necessitates giving readers some idea of the extent of the Nakba, though I do not intend to provide a comprehensive unfolding of the Nakba or of the history of the struggle over Palestine (there are many accounts, including Ilan Pappe’s comprehensive and readable The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006).

The notion that Nakba survivors have been silenced or have silenced themselves until very recently is very potent, but the truth is that Palestinians began engaging with their dispossession as ‘al-Nakba’ – ‘the catastrophe’, already in the late 1940s (see Masalha 2005; Pappe 2006: xiii). Earlier works by Qunstantin Zurayk (1948), Musa Al-‘Alami (1949) and ‘Arif Al-‘Arif (n.d.), discussed in chapter six, all named the dispossession as ‘al-Nakba’. That the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel resulted in the devastation of Palestinian society and the expulsion of at least 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the parts of Palestine upon which Israel was established is by now a recognised fact by all but diehard Zionist apologists. As Abu-Lughod and Sa’di (2007) write, between 60,000 and 156,000 Palestinians (depending on the source) who remained behind became nominal citizens of the State of Israel, yet were subjected to a separate system of military administration, land confiscation and second class entitlements (see e.g., Jiryis 1968; Sultany 2004). Palestinians who fled to other parts of Palestine, particularly the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, lived under the repressive Hashemite regime or the uncaring Egyptian administration until, in 1967, both came under Israeli military occupation. For Palestinians, the 1948 war led to catastrophe – ‘a society disintegrated, a people dispersed, and a complex and historically changing but taken for granted communal life was ended violently’ (Abu-Lughod and Sa’di 2007: 8). Importantly, in Palestinian history and memory the Nakba has become a demarcation line, after which the lives of Palestinians at the individual and the communal levels irreversibly changed.

Israeli Jews who attempt to grapple with Palestinian dispossession have to begin by confronting a pre-ordained Israeli ethos, overlaid by images of destruction and Jewish fears of another holocaust, and a version of the Jewish few facing a multitude of Arab enemies, intent, as Israeli Jewish children were repeatedly told, on ‘throwing us into the sea’. However, as Israeli historians Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim have repeatedly stressed, such descriptions of an Arab ‘Goliath’ intent on destroying the Jewish ‘David’ have no factual reality. ‘It is vital to link what we already know – about the expulsions, the destruction of villages, the bitter existence of the Palestinians, the IDF’s cruelty in relation to Arab civil society in Palestine, the slow destruction of Hebron, the drying up of East Jerusalem, the destruction of the Gaza Strip, with what we know today about the Zionist ambition to establish a Jewish state … a state for Jews only.’ Though uncomfortable, we must reread the events of 1948 in light of the central fact Israeli Jews have not been acquainted with, that ‘the Zionist leadership was always determined to increase the Jewish space … Both land purchases in and around the villages, and military preparations, were all designed to dispossess the Palestinians from the area of the future Jewish state’ (Pappe 2008: 94). The official Israeli narrative in relation to 1948 is that the Palestinian Arabs were not expelled, that they ‘escaped’. But, Pappe asks, ‘if they escaped, why were they not allowed to return? Why were their houses and their neighbourhoods destroyed immediately?’ Pappe’s project is to recast the narrative: the flight/expulsion of the Palestinians was not a miracle (‘a miracle happened to us, the Palestinians escaped’), it was rather a plan, whose ‘execution was deferred from time to time, but denial means agreement with atrocity’ (Pappe 2008: 95).

Not everyone agrees about the existence of a masterplan. Benny Morris, one of the pioneering Israeli ‘new historians’ who, having started his academic career as a left-wing draft resister, later changed his political stance with the onset of the al-Aqsa Intifada when he blamed the Palestinians for the collapse of the Oslo peace process. Morris has consistently argued that the state of Israel and the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) played a significant part in precipitating the flight of more than 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine. But despite his meticulous and well-documented account of the 1948 war, Morris persists in rejecting claims about a masterplan, dubbing the Arabs ‘barbarians’ and stresses the jihadi character of the Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine, echoing Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis (Shlaim 2008: 8). This is despite the fact that Morris’s own study refutes the Zionist myth of ‘the purity of arms’ of Jewish soldiers in contrast to Arab barbarity. ‘In truth’, Shlaim cites Morris as writing, ‘the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948’ (Shlaim 2008: 8). Ultimately, despite his learned contribution to the history of the 1948 war, and even though his work has been ground breaking in unearthing the realities of the war and the Nakba, Morris’s latest study (2008) perpetuates the mythologisation of that war.

What has become known in Israel as the ‘new historians’ debate in relation to 1948 (discussed in Chapter 6) is fundamental to understanding the contested histories of the dispossession of the Palestinians. For now, rather than retrace the unfolding of the Nakba, I outline the layers of denial the story of the Nakba encountered, not as a narrative encompassed within the pages of a book or the walls of a museum, but rather as ‘a space of legitimacy and understanding within which a pluralistic discourse that would include the multiple voices and experiences of Palestinians could find a hearing, and perhaps contribute to a solution in the future’ (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007: 297). While some would argue that the failure of the Palestinian narrative stems from the victims’ silences, Sa’di argues that this failure is due above all to the lack of desire by the western world and by Israeli and world Jewry to deal with the moral weight of the Palestinian catastrophe. This contrasts sharply with the way the postwar German state has assumed moral responsibility for the Holocaust, as expressed by Merkel’s address to the Knesset, and exemplified by the many memorials for deported and murdered Jews on German soil (see Young 2000).

Sa’di lists several factors in the erasure of the Palestinian catastrophe in the west. The legacies of Orientalism notwithstanding, the Nakba took place in the shadow of the Holocaust: Sa’di cites Ben Gurion as referring to western support for the partition of Palestine as ‘Western civilisation’s gesture of repentance for the Holocaust’ (Morris 2000b: 186). Furthermore, the ‘magisterial’ Zionist narrative includes elements which appeal to the western imagination: the return of the ‘people of memory’ (Nora 1996: 18) after 2000 years of exile, and their rebirth, and the depiction of the 1948 war, as mentioned above, as a war of survival of ‘the few against the many’. Moreover, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was paradoxically presented by the Zionist narrative as ‘a deceitful act of the natives themselves’, as the Palestinians, according to the accepted Zionist version, were called upon by their leaders to leave their homes to facilitate the advance of the Arab armies, despite appeals by the Jews to stay and live in happy coexistence. This narrative was successfully dismantled in studies by Israeli ‘new historians’; as Sa’di reminds us, ‘the most comprehensive evidence against the Zionist version of the War of 1948 has come from the Israeli archives’ (2007: 299).

It is important to remember, however, that the construction of a narrative of the birth of the nation, what Bhabha (1990) calls ‘the narration of nation’, is one of the characteristics of David Theo Goldberg’s (2002) Foucauldian theorisation of the racial state. Foucault (1990) argues that when life becomes included in mechanisms of state power, politics turns into biopolitics, the territorial state becomes a ‘state of population’, and the nation’s biological life becomes a problem of sovereign power, which he terms ‘biopower’. Through a series of governmental technologies, biopower creates ‘docile bodies’ and the population – its life, welfare, longevity, health – becomes the ultimate object of government. In Society Must be Defended (2003) Foucault charts the transition from sovereignty’s power to kill undesired people to the regulatory modern state which directs its biopower at living beings. Put simply, Foucault posits a transition from the sovereign power of the old territorial state, ‘to make die and let live’, to modern biopower, ‘to make live and let die’. The duty to defend society against itself (and ‘the nation’ from its others) means that the state can scarcely function without racism, which Foucault sees as ‘the break between what must live and what must die’ (2003: 254). According to this analysis, racism has two functions, the first is separating out the groups that exist within a population, the second is making it possible to establish ‘a relationship between my life and the death of the other … the more inferior species die out … the more I – as species rather than individual – can live, the stronger I will be’ (Foucault 2003: 255). Rather than serving one group against another, race – understood in classificatory rather than biological terms – becomes a tool of social conservatism and of state racism, which society practices against itself. Foucault sees racism as an ongoing social war, nurtured by biopolitical technologies of purification. This sheds light on the various and ongoing plans, since before the establishment of the state of Israel, to ‘transfer’ Palestinians outside the state’s borders so as to construct a Jewish state with as few Palestinians as possible (see e.g. Pappe 2006).

In Goldberg’s (2002) theorisation of all modern nation-states as racial states, the state is a state of power which excludes in order to construct homogeneity. Modern states, each in its own way, employ seemingly innocuous governmental technologies such as constitutions, border controls, the law, policy making, bureaucracy, population census, but also, significantly for my project in this book, invented histories and traditions, narratives, ceremonies and cultural imagining, to exclude and include in racially ordered terms. The racial state’s aim is to produce a coherent picture of the population by keeping racialised others out and by legislating against the ‘degeneracy’ of indigenous minorities.

In line with Goldberg’s theorisation of all modern nation-states as racial states, and Foucault’s view of racism as intrinsic to all modern, normalising states, there is little doubt that Israel must be theorised as a racial state par excellence, where what Giorgio Agamben (2005) terms ‘the state of exception’, constructing some lives as ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1995; see Ghanim 2008) was instituted prior to its establishment in relation to its Palestinian citizens. This state of exception has been supported through military power and a series of emergency laws, as outlined by Yehouda Shenhav: ‘In Israel there is a constant state of emergency. The state inherited the British Mandate’s Emergency Regulations under which it continued the anomalous suspension of the law, within the law … We must remember what this system enables: one rule (life) for the majority of the state’s citizens, and another (death, threat of death, threat of expulsion) for the state’s subjects, whose lives have been rendered bare’ (2006: 206–7).

Following Foucault’s general idea about the need to defend society, and remembering that Zionism was articulated as the imperative to protect the nebulous body dubbed ‘the Jewish nation’ from antisemitic persecutions, we begin to understand the inevitability of theorising the State of Israel as a racial state from its very inception, unpalatable as such theorisation is for a state arguably