Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity

Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity

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Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity Edited by

Meir Litvak

PALESTINIAN COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

Copyright © Meir Litvak, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61306-5 ISBN-10: 0-230-61306-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palestinian collective memory and national identity / edited by Meir Litvak.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-230-61306-3 (alk. paper) 1. Palestinian Arabs—Politics and government. 2. National characteristics, Palestinian. 3. Nationalism and collective memory—Palestine. I. Litvak, Meir. DS113.6.P33 2009 305.892’74—dc22

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A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: June 2009 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Collective Memory and the Palestinian Experience Meir Litvak

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1 The Evolution of a Founding Myth: The Nakba and Its Fluctuating Meaning Esther Webman

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2 The Memory that Never Dies: The Nakba Memory and the Palestinian National Movement Michael Milshtein

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3 Memory “from Below”: Palestinian Society and the Nakba Memory Michael Milshtein

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Constructing a National Past: The Palestinian Case Meir Litvak

5 Historical Discourse in the Media of the Palestinian National Authority Sariel Birnbaum

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Palestinian Women and Collective Memory Hanita Brand

7 A Dream of Severance: Crisis of Identity in Palestinian Fiction in Israel Mahmud Ghanayim

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Bibliography

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

It is my pleasant duty to thank those who have enabled this project to come to fruition; first and foremost, the contributors themselves, for their efforts and patience in the arduous process of producing the volume. The former director of the Moshe Dayan Center, Professor Asher Susser, initiated the project and relentlessly made sure that it would move forward. The current director of the center, Professor Eyal Zisser, provided crucial moral, financial, and organizational support, which made the publication possible. The Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offered me generous hospitality and a stimulating intellectual environment. Thanks are due to the members of the institute’s study group on nationalism and religion, which met in 2005, particularly Professor Emmanuel Sivan and Professor Yisrael Gershoni, for their constructive input and incisive advice in the editing process. My colleagues at the Dayan Center, Professor Ofra Bengio and Dr. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, read and commented on earlier drafts. The center’s administrative officer Ilana Greenberg was instrumental as always in the production process. Belina Neuberger successfully struggled with the nonnative English of various contributors to produce a unified style. Special thanks are due to the efficient team of Palgrave Macmillan, which was instrumental in producing the book, and to Rachel Kanz of Tel Aviv University, who prepared the index. I am indebted to all and of course take full responsibility for any errors. I owe a special debt to my brother Nathaniel, for his selfless support and immeasurable help, and last but not least my deepest gratitude to my wife, Nava, my son, Omri, and my daughter, Adi, who have endured the trials of my academic life. Meir Litvak Tel Aviv

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Note on Transliteration We have followed the standard rules of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. For the sake of simplicity, however, we dispensed with diacritical notes on the long vowels a, i, and u. For Anglicized names, such as Cairo or Yasser Arafat, we have used the standard American practice.

Introduction: Collective Memory and the Palestinian Experience Meir Litvak

he essays in this book analyze the evolution of modern Palestinian collective memory and its role in shaping Palestinian national identity. No group identity exists without memory as its core meaning; the sense of continuity over time and space is sustained by remembering, and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity. Every group develops the memory of its own past and so highlights its unique identity vis-à-vis other groups. These reconstructed images of the past provide the group with an account of its origin and development and thus allow it to develop a historical identity. The past the group prizes is domestic: the histories of foreign lands are alien and incompatible with its own past. National identity requires both having a heritage and believing it to be unique.1 While true for every nation, these observations are particularly appropriate for the Palestinians as a semidiasporic people still engaged in a struggle for statehood and a process of nation building. Moreover, while collective memory is the basis of every national identity, it seems to play a more substantial role in shaping the self-perception and culture of peoples that have suffered historical defeats (such as the Serbs, the Jews, and the Palestinians) than of victorious nations (such as the Americans). In the words of Ernest Renan, “suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.”2 Palestinian nationalism—the belief that the Arab population of Palestine forms a collectivity distinct from that of the surrounding states

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while being part of the broader Arab nation—is the product of modernity, modernization, and contingent political developments, like all other nationalisms in the Arab world. Under Muslim rule (638–1917), Palestine as defined by its present borders never constituted a single political, administrative, socioeconomic, or cultural unit. Geographically, it was part of Bilad al-Sham, or geographic Syria. Moreover, notwithstanding the country’s small geographical area, the local Arabic-speaking population (about 340,000 in 1850) was divided along religious, regional, economic, ecological, factional, and clannish lines, as was the case throughout the region. Islam served as the major focus of identity for the majority of the Muslim population, manifested in its allegiance to and support of the Ottoman Empire (1517–1918). The smaller Christian population was divided along various denominational lines. Clan and village served as additional pillars of identity, alongside religion.3 Concurrently, both the religious importance of Jerusalem, which served as the capital of a distinct district (sanjak), and the country’s sanctity to Christianity contributed to the creation of a vague regional identity in parts of Palestine, albeit without political ramifications. When nationalism emerged in Palestine prior to World War I, it was in the form of Arabism rather than as a distinct Palestinian identity. The few dozen nationalist activists from Palestine did not set up their own organizations, nor did they call for a separate Palestinian entity. Rather, they joined the secret Arab associations, al-Fatat and al-‘Ahd, alongside activists from (future) Syria and Iraq. These associations advocated Arab autonomy within the Ottoman Empire.4 Most scholars agree that a specifically Palestinian national identity emerged only in the wake of World War I as a result of several interlinked processes and political upheavals: the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire, the failure of an indigenous successor-state to unite ex-Ottoman Syria, the escalating Zionist challenge, the establishment of British rule over a territorially distinct Palestine, and the corresponding politicization of Palestinians due to unsettled conditions between 1914 and 1923. Historians differ, however, as to the relative weight of these factors.5 Although the establishment of the British Mandate and the struggle with Zionism intensified the evolution of a distinct Palestinian national identity, Palestinian society was less successful than the Zionist movement in building a political and socioeconomic institutional infrastructure. The first recognized leadership, the Palestinian Executive Committee, disintegrated after the death of its chairman, Musa Kazem al-Husayni, in 1934. Its successor, the Arab Higher Committee, was banned by the British following the outbreak of the 1936 Rebellion, and its leader, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, fled the country. The rebellion, which continued till 1939,

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ended in internal Palestinian strife, which cost the lives of approximately 3,000 Palestinians, more than the number killed by the British and the Jews. So divided were the Palestinians that the Arab League had to determine the composition of the newly established Arab Higher Committee in 1945.6 Two other important indications of the weakness of Palestinian national identity and cohesion were the sale of land to Jews by Palestinian landlords and the clandestine cooperation of a large number of Palestinians with the Zionists, mostly for financial benefit.7 The Palestinians’ failure at institution building and the internal social pressure brought about by Zionist immigration were important factors in their defeat in the war that they launched on the morrow of the adoption of the 1947 UN Partition Resolution, which stipulated Palestine’s partition into a Jewish and an Arab state.8 While the Palestinians were unanimous (aside from the very small communist party) in their rejection of partition and the establishment of the State of Israel, they did not fight as a coherent national movement. They failed to present a united front, and their armed militias hardly ever cooperated or even extended help to each other. Despite outnumbering the Jews—by 1.2 million to 600,000—they mobilized fewer fighters in most crucial battles. Equally important is the fact that the Palestinian social services, which depended heavily on the British administration, broke down when the British left the country, thereby accelerating the disintegration of Palestinian society and contributing to Palestinian military defeat.9 The defeat resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel on about 78 percent of historical Palestine and the uprooting of about 650,000 people—either during battle or by expulsion—leading to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.10 While the formation of a distinct Palestinian national identity was the outcome of a series of developments, there is no doubt that the 1948 defeat, or Nakba (catastrophe) in Palestinian terminology, is the major event or issue on which Palestinian identity now stands. According to Rosemary Sayigh, who conducted a sociological survey on Palestinian identity in refugee camps in Lebanon in the 1970s, most Palestinians would have defined themselves prior to 1948 either as Arabs or on the basis of their local regional origin, both identities superseding their Palestinian identity.11 ‘Aziz Haidar went even further when he wrote that until 1948 the Palestinians did not constitute a distinct group “that had any sort of ethnic identity,” adding that “the differences between the Palestinians and the bordering peoples of the region were less obvious than the differences within the Palestinian population itself.” Nor, he said, did the Palestinians note any distinguishing traits to differentiate themselves from other Arabs.12

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In contrast to other Arab states that engaged in concerted nation building after gaining independence, the defeat and displacement dealt a heavy blow to the Palestinian national movement, which remained leaderless and without any effective institutions. Palestinians were dispersed throughout four communities: those who had left Palestine altogether and resided in refugee camps, mostly in Lebanon and Syria; those who had remained in geographic Palestine—that is, both the original inhabitants and the refugees—and were divided among the Jordanian-ruled central area that became known as the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (about 700,000 people); the Palestinian community in the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip (about 200,000 people); and the Palestinian community in Israel proper (about 130,000 people). Two of these communities—those under Jordanian rule and those in Israel—experienced a systematic and coercive attempt at de-Palestinization, mainly through harsh political control and educational attempts to reconstruct their collective identity. The Hashemites imposed a “Jordanian” identity, while the Israelis created an “Israeli Arab” identity. Indeed, only with the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 and the official emergence of Fatah in 1965 did a national movement reemerge. Yet, it was the bitter encounter with, and rejection by, the neighboring Arab societies that finally fostered a distinct Palestinian identity among the refugees.13 The Palestinians were resented by other Arabs for a combination of political, social, and economic factors, and were considered intruders and disruptive outsiders, thereby revealing the disparity between the ideal and the reality of Arab unity.14 The crystallization of ethnic identity within the Palestinian communities throughout the Middle East was therefore, and to a large extent, the result of their inferior economic, social, and political status in the host communities, rather than of basic cultural differences between them and the other populations of the region.15 A Fatah publication in the 1960s boldly asserted that “the persecution of the Palestinians in the Arab lands” contributed to the “perpetuation of the Palestinian personality and prevented its assimilation.” Reacting to their treatment by other Arab societies, the Palestinians developed a sense of alienation from and hostility toward other Arab regimes and peoples. Moreover, their experience with Israeli rule and their status as a minority in a Jewish state sharpened the Palestinian identity of those who had become Israeli citizens.16 The major formative element of Palestinian identity, however, was the Nakba. Since language had never been a distinctive component of Palestinian identity, and the territory was partly lost and divided, the third constitutive element of national identity, collective memory, became the major force of preserving and cultivating Palestinian nationalism.

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Palestinian Identity in Light of the Literature on Nationalism As the study of nationalism has developed considerably in recent years, it raises the question of the extent to which the various theoretical approaches, ranging from the primordialist-perennialist to the radical modernist, advance our understanding of the birth and evolution of Palestinian national identity and of the role collective memory played in its development.17 As in most cases in the world, Palestinian nationalists too adopted the primordialist argument, asserting the existence of a distinct Palestinian-Arab people dating back to the ancient Canaanite period. The vast majority of scholars of nationalism do not subscribe to this type of primordialist argument, which does not take into account the dynamics of historical development and change. It can be shown that the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire retained the notion of a distinct identity based on language, on shared memories of an early Arab-Islamic past, and on territorial concentration. However, these feelings pertained to a much broader identity than the Palestinian one, pointing to latent Arab ethnicity, and encompassed greater territories and groups than the future political and national units of the Middle East.18 Considering the great historical upheavals that have taken place in Palestine, involving population migrations as well as linguistic, religious, and cultural changes, it is practically impossible to establish direct continuity from the Canaanite period to the present.19 Furthermore, aside from the periods of Jewish presence in the land, which the Palestinians exclude from this narrative, there is no historical indication that the inhabitants of Palestine developed a sense of distinct identity or acted politically upon it prior to the twentieth century. The Weaknesses of the Mechanistic Approach Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, who stand at the other extreme of the primordial approach, see national identity as a purely modern phenomenon, a product of social engineering, and a “contingent, artificial, ideological invention.” Gellner views industrialization and its related development of urbanization as the main force in the creation of nationalism. The modern state’s need for an industrial workforce and a modern military could only be met by the nation state whose centralized system of education would facilitate the creation of a uniform mass culture that is literate and specialized or, in other words, a “high” culture. These developments erode the traditional ties among people and bring about a new set of social relationships whose linchpin is nationalism. In Gellner’s words, “[Nationalism] invents nations where they do not exist.”20

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Hobsbawm goes further in describing nationalism as a fabrication of elite groups. According to Hobsbawm these elites seek to manipulate the masses by inventing traditions. They link the masses to the past, in order to legitimize their hold on power and to divert the social grievances of the masses against foreign states, thus foiling both revolutionary processes and democratization. However, whereas Gellner accepts the sociological reality of nations and nationalism once they have been formed, Hobsbawm dismisses this reality as purely artificial.21 Undoubtedly, modernization—and the spread of modern education following Ottoman reforms and foreign missionary activities—played a crucial role in the evolution of nationalism in the Middle East. Yet Gellner’s approach, as various historians have pointed out, is too mechanistic and leaves no room for human agency in history. Moreover, as far as Middle Eastern nationalisms are concerned, his emphasis on the creation of nationalism by states for the purpose of industrialization has little relevance to the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Middle Eastern agrarian societies. Ottoman centralization efforts during the nineteenth century were aimed at creating an Ottoman imperial identity, not a modern nationalist one. If they contributed to nationalism, it was only indirectly and unintentionally, by eroding the religious basis and raison d’être of the Ottoman Empire. But more importantly, reaction and opposition to Ottoman centralization and Turkification policies actually engendered an Arab, not a separate Palestinian, nationalism.22 Gellner’s approach may be more applicable to the postindependent era when various Arab states, most notably Iraq, sought to forge a uniform national identity out of disparate religious and sometimes ethnic groupings. However, it is of little use in the Palestinian case, since there is no Palestinian state as yet. Moreover, there is no need to forge an industrial workforce and an army of soldiers who are able to read training manuals for machines and weapons in one written language, instead of in a variety of vernaculars. Indeed, Palestinian industrialization is minimal and is in any case not supported by a state; nor are there any minorities that use different vernaculars. The common written language, literary Arabic, is not unique to the Palestinians but is shared by other Arab states, and emphasizing its role does in fact enhance a broader Arab identity over a distinct Palestinian nationalism. Hobsbawm’s emphasis on the artificiality of nationalism and on what he sees as a purely cultural artifact does not account for its success in inspiring the loyalty and self-sacrifice of a great many people—the Palestinians included. Nor does it account for the failure of authoritarian states like the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia to create a Soviet or Yugoslav nationalism that would bridge the cleavages between ethnically diverse populations.

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Ironically, the Marxist Hobsbawm portrays the masses as a purely passive collective, which lacks any clear perception of its culture, identity, or memories of its past, and is easily manipulated by the elites. Nor, maintains Anthony Smith, do Gellner and Hobsbawm explain why elites or people in general feel the need to refer back to “their” ancestral traditions or “invent” traditions that are linked with them. According to Smith, it is very likely because these traditions are still powerful, so that many people continue to follow them, however irrelevant they may seem to some scholars and to theorists of modernity.23 There is no doubt, as the various chapters of this book will show, that the past, real or imagined, plays a crucial role in Palestinian identity and nationalism. Whatever its roots, Palestinian national identity is genuine, and many Palestinians are willing to sacrifice their lives for it. Dismissing these feelings as mere products of manipulation not only reflects a patronizing attitude but also ignores the complexity of the historical processes that took place in the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine. The Palestinians as “Imagined Community” and as “Ethnie” The emergence of Palestinian nationalism is best explained by combining elements from the two seemingly opposing approaches to the study of nationalism advocated by Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith. Anderson, one of the leading advocates of the modernist school, focuses on the dynamic modes of identity construction and emphasizes the creative and contingent character of national identity as well as its adaptability to a myriad political and social contexts in the modern world. The process is intimately tied to modernity, secularism, and capitalism, all of which triggered the diffusion of the written word through what Anderson terms “print capitalism,” thus facilitating the development of collective political mobilization. The two major tools of print capitalism, namely, the newspaper and the novel, created new concepts of space and time, generating a new sense of community. The diffusion of print and the transformation of oral vernaculars into written languages coincided with a process of secularization, the declining sanctity of imperial dynasties, and the fragmentation of Europe. Both the people and their language gained in importance, and the printed word became the hallmark of the new communities.24 While Anderson emphasizes the centrality of the ceaseless process of identity building, “the imagining of the community,” he does not imply that nations are fictitious or imaginary. On the contrary, they are a genuine phenomenon rooted in historical processes. However, unlike the much smaller traditional communities, members of the modern nations will never know all their fellow members

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personally, and can therefore only relate to their nation through their imagination. Although there are some major differences between the Middle Eastern historical scene and Anderson’s description of the European one, his model contains some points that may be very useful for explaining the emergence of Palestinian nationalism. True, Arab nationalism did not evolve out of the breakdown of an older, sacred language (Latin, in the European case) and the transformation of oral vernaculars into written languages, but it came about through the vehicle of literary, not spoken, Arabic—that is, classical Arabic, which has always retained a significant cultural and symbolic role. Furthermore, unlike the vernaculars in Europe, the various Arab vernaculars never evolved into written languages. The central and sacred role of literary Arabic as the language of the Qur’an stands in the way of such a process, thereby slowing down the evolution of distinct identities within a broader Arab nationalism.25 Yet, the development of print capitalism produced a modern “middle Arabic,” which became the dominant vehicle of written cultural production in the Arab Middle East. Equally important, the Arab cultural revival provided the cultural and historical repertoire on which the twentiethcentury Arab nationalists could fall back when they were looking for new frameworks of identity to replace the Ottoman one. It is this cultural storage that explains why Arabism was chosen by these elites over other potentially competing ideologies and identities.26 While the development of the modern Arab press definitely facilitated the growth of Arab nationalism, the diffusion of the modern press in Ottoman Palestine fulfilled a particularly important role in laying the foundation of a distinct Palestinian identity. Newspapers create a sense of community and territory by focusing on issues especially relevant to a perceived community and by drawing a distinction between local, territorial, national, and foreign news. The most prominent example was the biweekly Filastin, which was founded by the Christian al-‘Isa cousins, ‘Isa and Da’ud, in Jaffa in 1911 and became the Arab newspaper with the largest circulation in the country. Although the boundaries of the geographical region envisioned by the name “Filastin” (Palestine) were not clear, the paper’s categorizations or distinction between local and foreign news, and particularly its vocal opposition to Zionism, played a key role in instilling the notion of Palestine as a geographical and sociopolitical entity, whose various social groupings were threatened by Zionism.27 Another major contribution of Anderson, based on the case of Latin America, concerns the role of colonial boundaries in shaping modern national consciousness. In postcolonial societies, territory carved by colonial powers often defines the nation.28 Under the Pax Ottomanica, the historian

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Haim Gerber maintains, the empire was subdivided into provinces whose names and borders kept changing over time. The borders did not hinder movements, and therefore no psychological barriers between areas were created.29 The situation changed drastically with the post–World War I colonial division, mandated by the Great Powers, which created new territorial entities with fixed borders under different foreign administrations and political centers, and governed by different political systems—monarchies in Iraq and Transjordan under the British Mandate, republican systems in Frenchruled Syria and Lebanon, and Palestine with its own distinct administration. These new entities, artificial as they might initially have been, shaped different political, social, and cultural communities, which gradually acquired lives of their own. The importance of colonial boundaries in shaping national identities is particularly pertinent to Palestinian nationalism. In the immediate post–World War I period, Arab nationalists and the Muslim population of Palestine opposed the separation of Palestine from the newly emerging Arab kingdom in Syria and adopted the identity and political program of southern Syria (Suriyya al-Janubiyya) as the best means to foil the looming Zionist threat. During Faysal’s short-lived rule in Damascus, thousands of Palestinian notables, teachers, professionals, and intellectuals signed petitions to the British government, asserting their conviction that the territory was a part of Syria. The First Palestinian Arab Congress, held in Jerusalem at the beginning of 1919, stated in its resolution: “We consider Palestine nothing but part of Arab Syria and it has never been separated from it at any stage. We are tied to it by national (qawmi), religious, linguistic, moral, economic, and geographic bonds.”30 Although the southern Syrian collective identity almost completely disappeared from the local political scene following the fall of Faysal’s kingdom, Palestinian writers continued, well into the late 1940s, to denounce the carving of the artificial border between Palestine and Syria as a negative byproduct of British imperialism and Zionism. Yet, in the course of time, the new border marked the distinctly different historical courses that the two societies experienced in Britishmandated Palestine and French-mandated Syria with all their concomitant administrative, economic, and political ramifications. Likewise, the carving of the Emirate of Transjordan from the territory of Mandatory Palestine, and the 1922 British White Paper, which excluded Transjordan from the area in which the Jewish national home was to be established, were the decisive factors in the creation of two increasingly different identities, Palestinian and Jordanian. Equally important is the fact that Palestine west of the Jordan River henceforth became the contested territory between the Palestinian and the Jewish national movements.31

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Another manifestation of the impact of borders on the evolution of consciousness is found in Mahmud Ghanayim’s chapter on the crisis of identity of Palestinians inside Israel as reflected in literature. The post1948 borders and subsequent political, administrative, and socioeconomic developments shaped the consciousness of Palestinian Israelis as a distinct subgroup of the Palestinian people. Using literary analysis as his main tool, Ghanayim shows the successive tribulations of that identity formation over the past 60 years—belonging to the Arab nation and the Palestinian people, while living as Israeli citizens and as a distinct minority within the State of Israel, itself in a state of nearly constant hostility with the Arab world and the Palestinian people. A corollary to the boundaries was the drawing of maps that transformed the new “imagined community” into a visualized and concrete reality. The importance of maps of Palestine with its mandatory borders is evident since they serve as the sole basis for the definition of the territory of Palestine for both the nationalist PLO and the Islamic Hamas, as shown by Meir Litvak and Sariel Birnbaum in this volume.32 Moreover, Birnbaum also illustrates that in the Palestinian case the map is designed to preserve the spatial reality that was lost in 1948. Hence, while the Palestinian discourse frequently refers to maps of Mandatory Palestine, even marking Arab villages that no longer exist, these maps patently ignore existing Jewish localities inside Israel. The continuous use of these maps signifies the gap between a political reality that requires territorial compromise and the Palestinians’ unfulfilled national aspirations. The Palestinian case provides a good example of Anderson’s observation that nationalist mythmakers sometimes engage in a process of “modular transfer” by ascribing to their own national movement the characteristics of other, previously successful movements.33 Not only did Palestinians adopt myths of ancient descent, borrowing from Western scholarship and models, but on occasions they even emulated Zionism. Most conspicuous on the symbolic level is the Palestinian 1988 Declaration of Independence, which exhibits substantial, and very likely intentional, resemblance to the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence.34 Another case in point, discussed in Esther Webman’s essay, is the application of the Holocaust discourse and vocabulary to the Palestinian national disaster, the Nakba. Illustrating the same process is the Palestinian institution-building effort, which—whether consciously or not—followed various Zionist models, apparently in the belief that these models played a key role in the success of Zionism and in the Palestinians’ own defeat in 1948.35 Anthony Smith accepts the modernity of nationalism as an ideological movement. However, he departs from the modernist camp by maintaining that there is an essential ethnic core to almost all modern nations.

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He borrows the French term ethnie and employs it to define specific populations with shared ancestry myths, historical memories, and common cultural traits, associated with a homeland and having a sense of solidarity, at least among the elites. He argues that modern political nationalisms cannot be understood without reference to these earlier ethnic ties and memories, and, in some cases, to premodern ethnic identities and communities.36 Smith’s approach is particularly helpful for analyzing the rise of Arab nationalism and explaining the Arab component in the various territorial nationalisms in the Middle East. Unlike in the European case, the old elite culture in the Arab provinces did not disappear with modernization, but was adapted, expanded, and spread to form the modern national Arab high culture. Likewise, the Arab past, particularly the association of the glorious early days of Islam with Arabism, played an important role in Arab political and national revival. However, these elements are less helpful in explaining Palestinian nationalism because they do not differentiate between the Palestinians and other Arabs. What sets the Palestinians apart are the more recent developments to which Smith points. The first is the evolution of a particular identity as a result of a conflict between two groups over territory; in Smith’s words, “the frequency, intensity and duration of wars between rival polities is itself a significant factor in crystallizing ethnic sentiments among an affected population.” Confrontation with an “other” always leads to enhancement of the “self ”—in this case a distinct Palestinian identity.37 Modern communication, in Glen Bowman’s perspective, could suffice to create a sense of community, but it is the matter communicated that transforms this abstraction into something one can identify with and fight for.38 The imagined community is, to use Anderson’s term, supraterritorial— that is, Arab. However, the immediacy and proximity of the Zionist challenge distinguished the Palestinians from other Arabs. Equally important, the Zionist challenge has politicized broader strata of society and driven them into a prolonged and incomplete process of developing and articulating a common sense of identity, manifested in aspirations for Palestinian-Arab statehood. The major goal of the newly formed Palestinian nationalism was to resist or expel the source of the threat. In a similar vein, the political geographer Oren Yiftachel shows how, due to the inconclusive struggle with Zionism over the land, Palestinian nationalism evolved as ethnonational in character in which territory became the main—though by no means sole—shaper of the nation. Taking the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence as a prime example, he argues that it places great importance in grounding Palestinian national identity and claims in a specific territory, which would embody its history, memories, culture, religion, and future.39

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In this context, an additional valuable point in Smith’s writings is his stress on the quest of every national movement to establish a common historical past, based on a sense of common identity and shared history. Smith cautions that this does not mean that this history is necessarily academically valid or cogent—indeed, he asserts, many nationalisms are based on historically flawed interpretations of past events and tend to overly mythologize small, inaccurate parts of their history. Nevertheless, while modernists like Gellner and Hobsbawm dismiss this search for the past as irrelevant or as an outright fabrication, Smith contends that the past does matter, as many people “appear not only to believe they have navels; they believe in the reality of the situation which gave them navels, and which their navels symbolize.”40 Primordialist claims, according to Levinger and Franklin-Lytle, function both to construct identity and to build a highly effective rhetorical strategy for popular mobilization. They serve as a critical element of a “common triadic structure of rhetoric,” which juxtaposes idealized images of the nation’s past and future conditions with a degraded present. This narrative pattern not only motivates political action but also diagnoses the causes of national predicament and prescribes the actions required for the community’s redemption.41 In view of the gloomy picture of the Palestinian present, this formula plays a central role in Palestinian national discourse. For Palestinian society, three periods of the past are relevant in the search for a golden age and for drawing inspiration and political motivation for present-day action: the ancient Canaanite past, highlighted by the PLO and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA); the golden age of Islam, to which the Islamist movement Hamas resorts; and pre-1948 Palestine, to which both parties cling. Significantly, as Litvak, Birnbaum, and Webman show, only the latter two periods serve mobilizational purposes; in other words, while Palestinian nationalism claims primordialist roots going back to Canaanite times, this past does not resonate with the masses, either because it is too mythical or because it goes against powerful religious sentiments. By contrast, the early Islamic past is much more deeply embedded in Palestinian Arab culture and religious life, while the pre-1948 past is still a living past, both because it is still part of some people’s personal biographies and because its effects, both the dispersion and the remnants of the lost villages, are still visible. Collective Memory and Palestinian Nation Formation Broadly defined, collective memory is “how members of society remember and interpret events, how the meaning of the past is constructed, and how it is modified over time.” It refers to the dissemination of beliefs, feelings, moral

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judgments, and knowledge about the past, both for self-understanding and for winning power in an ever-changing reality.42 According to Maurice Halbwachs, the first social scientist to provide a systematic analysis of this concept, collective memory is a social construction that develops and unfolds in specific social contexts, and as such is located within what he terms “the social framework (cadres sociaux) of memory.”While only individuals possess the capacity to contemplate the past, they do not know the past singly but as part of a collective, social group. It is a collective phenomenon, but it only manifests itself in the actions and statements of individuals. It is imbedded in the social structure and changes when social bonds weaken or dissolve, or when new bonds replace them. Consequently, the social group to which the individuals belong influences and conditions their memories of the past. The work of group memory, Halbwachs adds, is to respond to the needs of present action, and these needs function as a filter, which “chooses between forgetting and transmitting traditions, so that traditions are modified as groups change.”43 Each group or community develops a collective memory of its own past, which faces or confronts the collective memories of other groups. The social function of collective memory is to reconstruct the past as well as to legitimize the present and a much-coveted future.44 As such, it is “as much a result of conscious manipulation as unconscious absorption, and it is always mediated.”45 Although collective memories have no organic basis and do not exist in any literal sense, and though they involve individual agencies, the term is not simply a metaphorical expression. The decisions by individuals to act in public, by creating associations or by writing memoirs, are profoundly personal; nevertheless, they are not purely private matters, since they exist in a social framework of collective action. Collective memory originates from shared communications about the meaning of the past, anchored in the lives of individuals who partake in the communal life of a specific collective.46 This observation is particularly apt in the Palestinian case, where, in the absence of a state, first individuals and later on group agencies have played a key role in cultivating collective memory. In his influential study, Pierre Nora explains the preoccupation with memory in modern times as a product of rapid social changes that erode and all but obliterate genuine, spontaneous, and unpremeditated forms of memory that prevailed in the past. Nora maintains that modernity compels human societies to produce manufactured forms of memory, or “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire ), that serve as the reference points of collective memory to compensate for the elimination of more natural forms of remembering. Their purpose is “to stop time, to block the work of forgetting. They all share ‘a will to remember.’”47 Sites of memory are artificial and deliberately fabricated. They exist to help us recall the past, which

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is perhaps necessary in order to make living in the modern world meaningful. These sites include almost all social products and cultural artifacts such as archives, museums, cathedrals, palaces, cemeteries, and memorials; concepts and practices such as commemorations, mottos, and rituals; and objects such as inherited property, commemorative monuments, manuals, emblems, basic texts, and symbols.48 Israel Gershoni criticizes Nora for drawing too sharp a dichotomy between the environments of memory found in the past and the sites of memory that characterize the modern era. He further maintains that Nora is not sufficiently sensitive to the persistence of the past, in the sense that older memories do intrude into modern reality, and to the possibility that the manufacturing of modern memory takes place alongside the perpetuation of traditional memories.49 As this book demonstrates, the Palestinians are in a transitory phase as far as Nora’s categorization stands. On the one hand they have experienced major historical changes and dislocations in the past century, culminating in the 1948 Nakba, which has largely eliminated an old way of life. On the other hand, the living memories of 1948 are still alive—even though those who have actually experienced these events are gradually passing away. It is because of the current political status and living conditions of many individuals in the refugee camps and the proximity to the lost villages in what is now Israel that these memories are kept alive. Yet, in view of the increasing distance from the Nakba, the national struggle with Israel, and the continuing, albeit disjointed, process of nation building, the cultivation of collective memory has become a major Palestinian national enterprise. Nationalism is one of the most forceful agents for the construction and reconstruction of collective memories. The producers of nationalism shape collective identity by the recovery, reconstruction, or invention of a collective national past. Nationalism identifies the available repositories of the past and selects fragments or elements of past periods, events, symbols, or heroes from which it creates a new unified collective past. The national past is, in fact, memory rather than historical past. It is planned and constructed by the engineers of national identity, who pick from history those “great moments” in whose recovery or renewed identity the promise of national revival is found. The strong and interdependent links between nationalism, identity, and memory materialize in the sites and rituals of commemoration, where the national movement fuses and molds the collective memory into collective identity.50 Collective memory provides an overall sense of the group’s development by offering a system of periodization that imposes a certain order on the past. Like other aspects of this process, periodization involves a dialogue between the past and the present, as the group reconstructs its own

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history from current beliefs and needs. Its power does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.51 Collective memory highlights certain periods as representing important developments of the group while defining others as historical setbacks. Yet, as Wulf Kansteiner observed, collective memories often have a strong bias toward the present, inasmuch as they dedicate disproportionate amounts of time, space, and resources to communications about events that happened within the lifetimes of its producers and consumers.52 In the Palestinian case this periodization may be divided into three major periods: the pre-Islamic past, which the Palestinian elites have sought to promote and instill, ever since the 1970s, in the minds and consciousness of ordinary Palestinians as an integral and important component of Palestinian collective memory and of the dispute with Zionism; the Arab-Islamic period from the seventh century until the advent of Zionism; and finally, the modern period, overshadowed by the struggle with Zionism, particularly the 1948 Nakba. Societies preserve memory of the past mainly by means of chronicling and recording. However, although there is no trace left of the greater part of history, and only a fraction of what happened can be reconstructed, the fragments from the past that do exist are incredibly numerous, albeit only a small part of these reminders can be put to use. Hence, societies are engaged in a constant process of remembrance and forgetting, which is closely interlinked with the construction of collective memory.53 The events selected for chronicling, as Barry Schwartz asserts and as is shown in the following chapters, are not all evaluated in the same way. To some of these events we remain indifferent; others are commemorated, that is, invested with extraordinary significance and assigned a qualitatively distinct place in our conception of the past. Thus, commemoration serves as the active agent behind both memory and identity as it lifts from an ordinary historical sequence those extraordinary events that embody our deepest and most fundamental values. Public commemoration is also a medium for transmitting messages to a broader public. Participation in rituals of public commemoration reinforces a sense of shared national identity based on a common collective memory. New nations, which are fragile and feel that their national identity is threatened, tend to intensify the commemorative effort. Indeed, both new nations and old states require an ancient past.54 In revolutionary France and in the United States, the need to commemorate arose out of a desire to break with the past.55 For the Palestinians, the opposite is true: collective memory and commemoration have assumed particular importance in order to overcome the break with the past caused

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by the 1948 Nakba. In Europe, the dead were the subject of considerable efforts of commemoration. For the Palestinians, it was mainly the shattered old way of life that stood at the center of commemoration; rather than cemeteries or monuments for fallen soldiers, the ruined or abandoned villages were the main sites of memory, not only physically, but also in poetry, literature, and the fine arts. In recent years, however, partly in response to Jewish or Christian sanctification of cemeteries or due to the adoption of various Western modes of commemoration, the Islamic movement inside Israel has directed much effort toward rebuilding old cemeteries, an action quite foreign to Sunni Muslim tradition. Likewise, the glorification of the martyrs (shahid, pl. shuhada’) during the 1987–93 intifada and the 2000–2006 confrontation has assumed a major role in Palestinian commemorations, particularly with the advent of Hamas.56 Each act of commemoration reproduces, in Yael Zerubavel’s words, a commemorative narrative—a story about a particular past that accounts for this ritualized remembrance and provides a moral message for the group members. Each commemoration reconstructs a specific segment of the past and is, therefore, fragmentary in nature. Yet, taken together, these commemorations contribute to the formation of a “master commemorative narrative” that focuses on the group’s distinct social identity and highlights its historical development. It serves as a basic “story line that is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their past.” Since collective memory highlights the group’s distinct identity, the master commemorative narrative focuses on the event that marks the group’s emergence as an independent social entity. Through the construction of the past, the commemorative narrative creates its own version of historical time as it elaborates, condenses, omits, or conflates historical events. By using these and other discursive techniques, the narrative transforms historical time into “commemorative time.”57 The Palestinian master commemorative narrative is, according to Birnbaum, formulated as a cyclical process in which the Palestinian people inhabited its land, confronted foreign invasions and occupations, waged a struggle against the foreigners, gained its liberation, and subsequently faced other invasions, thus repeating the cycle. As Litvak shows, it seeks to mark the emergence of the Palestinians as a people during the Canaanite period, while reaching its apogee with the 1948 Nakba as the event that most conspicuously shaped modern Palestinian identity and memory. The mapping of the past through the construction of a master commemorative narrative also designates its “commemorative density,” that is, the importance that society attributes to different periods in the past: while some periods enjoy multiple commemorations, others attract little attention, or fall into oblivion. The commemorative density thus ranges

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from periods or events that are central to the group’s memory and are commemorated in great detail, to others that are left unmarked in the master commemorative narrative.58 Again, these differences are highly evident and significant in the Palestinian case. The period with the highest commemorative density is the modern one, culminating in the 1948 Nakba, for the obvious reason that this is the most traumatic event in Palestinian history, whose ramifications touch upon the life of every Palestinian. Concurrently, the lack of density in the earlier periods indicates the late emergence of a distinct Palestinian nationalism, as these earlier periods were either regarded as part of the broader Arab-Islamic history or, in the case of the pre-Islamic period, had little or no resonance for most Palestinians. The different density of various periods in the Palestinian master narrative points to an important issue in the study of collective memory, namely, its relationship with history. In his seminal study Halbwachs draws a sharp line between collective memory and historical memory, that is, the construction of the past by historians whose craft leads them to deviate from or question accepted values. Both collective and personal memory, he writes, are primarily a design of the present and its structure, composed of contents and symbols from the here and now. As such it is by virtue of its definition a “monumental” history, based on symbolic structures. In contrast to historical memory, collective memory “is completely insensitive to the differences between periods and qualities of time; it is shallow in terms of chronology; it is completely topocentric. In the collective memory of the past, people, events and historic institutions serve as prototypes and are not recognized for their uniqueness. They are links in an ongoing past.”59 Pierre Nora goes even further, describing memory as being in a state of permanent evolution, open to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant, and periodically revived. History, he says, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what no longer is. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present. Memory, insofar as it is affective, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic, responsive to each avenue of conveyance or, to use Nora’s terminology, “tangible” scene, to every instance of censorship or projection. History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism.60 In making such a sharp distinction between collective memory and the work of the historian, or historical memory, Halbwachs and Nora, espousing a rather crude positivist approach, disregard the influence of the

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period and society in which the historian is active, and even the impact of the his community’s collective memory upon his work. They also disregard the possibility that historians of various ideological persuasions may seek to shape or influence collective memory through their work. These factors often play a crucial role in the rise of national movements. Taking a more refined view, David Lowenthal maintains that when national identity is at stake, heritage supersedes history. The specific national quest and crisis supplant comparative insight. History, co-opted by heritage, overstates or denies accepted facts in order to assert a primacy, an ancestry, or continuity. It underwrites a founding myth to exclude others.61 For Yael Zerubavel, history and memory do not operate in totally detached, opposite directions; rather, their relationships are underlined by conflict as well as interdependence. “The past cannot be literally construed; it can only be selectively exploited,” as collective memory continuously negotiates between available historical records and current social and political agendas.62 Palestinian historiography and collective memory serve as a good test case for this discussion. As the Palestinians are still engaged in a struggle for statehood, Palestinian historiography, particularly that written in the Middle East, can be depicted as a mobilized historiography, devoted to promoting the national cause. In other words, it is still in the uncritical and unreflecting phase in which only those elements that serve the national cause are selected. Established maxims and truths remain unchallenged, and evidence that runs counter to the cause is often ignored, or dismissed, as false or hostile. This is not to claim that Palestinian historiography is groundless or based on fabrications, but that the dichotomy between history and collective memory, as elucidated by Halbwachs, hardly exists, as Palestinian historians are actively engaged in promoting collective memory and national identity. On the other hand, the evolution and cultivation of Palestinian collective memory, particularly as far as the modern period is concerned, are tightly linked to historical reality. Its major themes are clearly drawn from historical developments that shaped the history of the Palestinians as a collective and as individuals. This explains both the powerful influence of the recent past and the far less successful efforts to inculcate memories of images related to the more distant past—a past for which the empirical evidence is far less substantiated or, as in the case of the Canaanite period, is sometimes closer to myth than to actual history. At the same time, collective memory and politics are inextricably intertwined. According to Halbwachs, the way in which the past is recalled depends on the power of the group that frames its memory. Traditions reinforce present politics, and time is colonized through the traditions of

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national or local groups by way of locating significant dates within a commemorative chronology, just as space is colonized by way of commemorative architecture with which it shapes topography. Simply stated, the issue is “who wants whom to remember what and why.”63 In essence, there is no single collective memory, but rather a multiplicity of overlapping and interwoven communities of memories in any society. The coexistence of a multiplicity of memories is especially true in the case of large collectivities, such as the nation, which can be described as a conglomeration of opposing and at times contradictory memories. National identity is constructed through the interaction of these variants of collective memory. Different collective memories may be in conflict, but may also influence one another, maintaining a relationship of dialogue, negotiation, or exchange among different communities of memory. Commemoration of the past can become a contested territory in which groups engaged in political conflict promote competing views of the past in order to seize control of the political center.64 Within the multiplicity of conflicting memories, it is possible to speak of a hegemonic collective memory, cultivated and promoted by dominant elites and challenged by countermemories, that is, by the discursive practices through which memories are perpetually revised.65 Yet, even in dictatorships, it is not clear how long the state’s monopoly over the construction of memory can last. Like any other society, Palestinian society is also not immune to social and political divisions, which produce multiple opposing memories. Moreover, since 1948 and at least till 1967, Palestinian collective memory has evolved in the absence of a state, among a population dispersed between geographically separate communities. Still, from the early 1970s onwards, the PLO has played the role of surrogate state and fashioned a dominant, or even hegemonic, narrative. One can speak of several types of different Palestinian communities of memory or of rival and competing memories. The refugees and those who have become Israeli citizens formed two distinct communities of memory, as shown in Milshtein and Ghanayim’s chapters. As long as participants in the pre-1948 and 1948 events are alive, one can speak of distinct memories, or actually remembrances, of the past in different communities, such as villagers or urban dwellers, who experienced these events differently or in different rival political groupings. Moreover, as part of the effort to prove the antiquity and longevity of Palestinian identity and its chronological precedence over Zionism, various towns (both inside Israel and in the PA territory) also cultivate their local histories and heritage. As the Palestinians are still engaged in a national conflict, and their collective memory is formulated and constructed against the Zionist one,

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there is a concerted effort to shape a unified collective memory among all Palestinian communities. Thus, while many or most Palestinians did not experience displacement in 1948, this feeling has become the hallmark of modern Palestinian identity. In addition, as time passes and the distance between past events and the present increases, distinct memories of various groups tend to coalesce into one unifying collective memory. Thus, as Birnbaum’s and Litvak’s chapters show, there is a high consensus if not identity of opinion between the PLO and Hamas on the historical narrative of the past. Points of disagreement appear only when related to the more recent past, as they have a direct bearing on the current political struggle between the two movements. An important, though often neglected, area of dispute between the hegemonic and alternative narratives of Palestinian collective memory is the topic of Hanita Brand’s chapter, which deals with the evolution of a distinct female collective memory in Palestinian society, concomitant with the efforts of Palestinian women to incorporate their voice and role in the Palestinian collective memory. Brand follows the distinctive part of the Palestinian women’s collective memory, sometimes referred to as the “social” rather than the “political” story, tracing the various phases through which the women’s recounting of their history has gone: from a tacit acceptance of the general narrative with small variations of tone, style, and nuance to a more vigorous collective tale beginning after the start of the first intifada. Traditionally in Western countries, national commemorations were largely the preserve of male elites. It was only after World War I that they underwent democratization by encompassing acts or events related to all social groups, including a conscious effort to disseminate revised collective memories among them.66 As the traditional Palestinian elites were entirely discredited after the 1948 defeat, the cultivation of a distinct Palestinian collective memory aimed at nonelite groups from the start. Moreover, since Palestinian collective memory focused on the lost, pre-1948 way of life, and since most of those who were displaced after the war had been villagers, both villager and village became the focus of Palestinian memory. The only exception to the more democratic nature of Palestinian memory was women, who are to a large extent still excluded from the memorialization process. A crucial element in the interplay between the hegemonic collective memory and other conflicting memories is the question of their reception by the projected constituencies. To make a difference in society, it is not enough for a certain past to be selected; it must be capable of arousing emotions, motivating people to act, and being received favorably by the majority.67 The essays presented in this book seek to analyze memory and identity on both the promotional and the receiving ends. The chapters by Milshtein, Webman, Birenbaum, and Ghanayim demonstrate the broad

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endorsement of hegemonic memory, especially the two key components of Palestinian collective memory: the Nakba and the premodern Islamic past. Palestinian women, as Brand’s chapter shows, do not reject the hegemonic memory, but only seek to partially modify it by adding their particular voices to it. Litvak’s chapter argues for a more accurate perception of the rational-instrumentalist adoption of the pre-Islamic Canaanite past by most Palestinians, and its lack of success in steering a deep identification of emotions. Yet, no countermemory or myth has arisen to challenge this past. While Palestinian political divisions, mainly between Fatah and Hamas, have escalated since the outbreak of the violent confrontation with Israel in 2000, the continued national struggle served to preserve the unity of Palestinian collective memory and to discourage any challenges to it. As the Palestinian state-building effort suffered a severe setback during this period, collective memory has remained a crucial component in maintaining a unified national identity. Concurrently, these factors may also have inhibited critical self-reflection, particularly among intellectuals, on the shaping of a national historical narrative largely subordinated to present-day political considerations. Palestinian politics and memory continuously influence each other. The persistence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict continues to play a dominant role in shaping Palestinian collective memory and national identity. As long as the Palestinians remain stateless and the refugee problem remains unresolved, Palestinian collective memory will in all likelihood continue to be dominated by the memories of the 1948 trauma and by the narrative of struggle. At the same time, however, the memories of the past seem to impose certain limitations to the freedom of action accorded to Palestinian leaders. How the evolving relations between Palestinians and Israelis will lead to changes in the representation of the past remains an open question. Notes 1. John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 3; David Lowenthal, “Identity, Heritage, and History,” in Gillis, Commemorations, p. 47; Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 4. 2. Ernest Renan cited in, Lowenthal, “Identity,” p. 50. 3. Haim Gerber shows that the term “Bilad al-Sham,” which Arab writers used to denote greater or geographic Syria, encompassed Palestine. Biographical dictionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mentioned areas with the qualifier “land,” such as bilad Nablus (Muradi 1883, 1: 11, 2: 10) or bilad Safad (ibid., 2: 254), indicating their distinct identity and difference from “Filastin,” which referred to the southern part of the country. Haim Gerber, “The Limits

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

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of Constructedness: Memory and Nationalism in the Arab Middle East,” Nations and Nationalism 10, no. 3 (2004): 256–58. The great early-nineteenthcentury Egyptian historian ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti referred to the inhabitants of al-‘Arish in the Sinai Peninsula as Syrians; see ‘Asim Muhammad ‘Ali Hasani, “Judhur al-dawla fi al-ta’rikh al-filastini,” Ru’ya, no. 29 (February 2006), http://www.sis.gov.ps/arabic/roya/29/page10.html See C. Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Daniel Pipes, “The Year the Arabs Discovered Palestine,” Middle East Review 21, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 38. On the emergence of Palestinian nationalism, see Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Muhammad Y. Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Musa Budeiri, “The Palestinians: Tensions between Nationalist and Religious Identities,” in Rethinking Arab Nationalism, ed. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 191–206; Baruch Kimmerling. “The Formation of Palestinian Collective Identities: The Ottoman and Mandatory Periods,” Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 2 (April 2000): 48–81. On the politics and institutional weaknesses of the Palestinian national movement under the British Mandate, see Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977); Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). For land sale to Jews, see Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); for the depth of collaboration with the Jews, see Hillel Cohen, The Shadow Army: Palestinian Collaborators in the Service of Zionism, 1917–1948 (Jerusalem: Ivrit, 2004, Hebrew). For an analysis of these processes, see Khalaf, Politics in Palestine. For the Palestinian failure to mobilize and organize as a national movement, see Yoav Gelber, Palestine, 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2001). The origins and causes of the Palestinian refugee problem have produced a voluminous literature and polemics. Among these are Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Nur Masalha, A Land without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949–96 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). Rosemary Sayigh, “The Palestinian Identity among Camp Residents,” Journal of Palestine Studies 6, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 21. Aziz Haidar, “The Different Levels of Palestinian Ethnicity,” in Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State in the Middle East, ed. Milton J. Esman and Itamar Rabinovich (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 96.

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13. Palestinian frustration with and resentment against the rejection by other Arabs is amply reflected in fiction and memoirs. See Shimon Ballas, Arab Literature under the Shadow of War (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1978, in Hebrew), pp. 44–47. See also Fawaz Turki, The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian in Exile (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), which describes how he never regarded himself as a Palestinian or knew he was one, even though he grew up in his own village, and how he only realized this after his family had left their village and settled in Lebanon. 14. Hassan Hasan al-Yacoubi, The Evolution of Palestinian Consciousness (PhD thesis, Colorado University, 1973), p. 156. 15. Haidar, “Palestinian Ethnicity,” p. 118. 16. Haidar, “Palestinian Ethnicity,” p. 103; Fatah, The Link of the Palestinian Revolution with Arab and World Revolutions, cited in Yehoshafat Harkabi, The Palestinians and Their Awakening (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979, in Hebrew), p. 19; Ballas, Arab Literature, p. 52; Sayigh, “Palestinian Identity,” p. 21. 17. For useful analyses of these approaches, considering the ever-growing volume of theoretical literature on the topic, see Anthony Smith and John Hutchinson, eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Anthony Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); as well as the various sections of the Nationalism Project, http://www.nationalismproject.org/what.htm 18. Gerber, “Limits of Constructedness.” 19. The Canaanite language, which belongs to the northern Semitic languages, is closer to Hebrew than to Arabic, which is one of the southern Semitic languages. 20. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), p. 168; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 55–56. 21. Erik Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–14. Ironically, Hobsbawm’s theory could have been applied to Palestinian nationalism in claiming that the Palestinian landowners diverted socioeconomic tensions from themselves against the Zionists, or by “inventing” a national history. Yet, Hobsbawm supports Palestinian nationalism, primarily because he is more critical of Zionism. 22. For more salient works on the emergence of Arabism as a response to Ottoman policies, see Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism; Rashid Khalidi and Reeva Simon, eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1997). 23. Anthony Smith, “Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s theory of Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 3 (1996): 371–88. 24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), chapters 2 and 3. 25. Gerber, “Limits of Constructedness,” p. 261ff. For the role of the Salafi movement, see David Commins, Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

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26. For the role of this literary revival in facilitating Arab nationalism, see Albert Hourani,“The Arab Awakening Forty Years after,” in The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 193–215. 27. Rashid Khalidi, “The Role of the Press in the Early Arab Reaction to Zionism,” Peuples Méditerranéens , no. 20 (July–September 1982): 105–24; for the role of the Palestinian press, see Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, p. 119. 28. Anderson, Imagined Communities, chapter 4. 29. Gerber, “Limits of Constructedness,” (see note 3), pp. 264–65. 30. Muslih, Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, p. 181; Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, pp. 162–67. 31. For the creation of Transjordan and the evolution of Jordanian identity, see Muhammad Ahamd Sulayman Muhafaza, Imarat Sharq al-Urdun: nash’atuha wa-tatawwuruha fi rub‘ qarn, 1921–1946 (Amman: Dar al-Furqan, 1990); Joseph A. Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Linda L. Layne, Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 32. After its foundation in 1964, the PLO claimed Jordan as part of the Palestinian homeland. The radical PFLP and DFLP made similar claims after 1967, and well into the mid-1970s. 33. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 156–57. 34. For the Israeli declaration, see http://www.knesset.gov.il/docs/eng/ megilat_eng. htm. For the Palestinian declaration, see http://www.palestine-net.com/politics/ indep.html 35. The Palestinian National Fund (al-sunduq al-qawmi), both in its first failed phase in 1946 and its successful attempt in 1964, emulated the Jewish National Fund. Likewise, the national tree holiday was probably drawn from the Israeli holiday. 36. Anthony D. Smith, “The Problem of National Identity: Ancient Medieval and Modern?” in Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), particularly pp. 102, 105. See also his “Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations,” in ibid, particularly p. 164; and Ernest Gellner and Anthony D. Smith, “The Nation: Real or Imagined? The Warwick Debates on Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 3 (1996): 359–65. 37. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 38, and Smith, “Nation and Ethnoscape,” in Myths and Memories, p. 149. 38. Glen Bowman, “Constitutive Violence and Rhetorics of Identity: A Comparative Study of Nationalist Movements in the Israeli-Occupied Territories and Former Yugoslavia,” Social Anthropology 11, no. 3 (December 2003): 38. 39. Oren Yiftachel, “Territory as the Kernel of the Nation: Space, Time and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine,” Geogpolitics 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 216. 40. Smith, Ethnic Origins, p. 183; Smith, “Nation and Ethnoscape,” p. 151ff.; “Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism,” http://www.members.tripod.com/GellnerPage/SmithLec.html.

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41. Matthew Levinger and Paula Franklin Lytle, “Myth and Mobilization: The Common Triadic Structure of Nationalist Rhetoric,” Nation and Nationalism 7, no. 2 (2001): 177. 42. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 3, 5; Pierre Nora, “Mémoire collective,” in La Nouvelle histoire, ed. Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel, (Paris: Retz, 1982), p. 398; David W. Blight, “Historians and ‘Memory,” www. common-place.org, 2, no. 3 (April 2002). 43. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1925), p. 358. 44. Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), pp. 1–35. 45. Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41 (May 2002): 180. 46. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, “Setting the Framework,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 9; Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning,” p. 188. 47. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 19. 48. Odo Marquard, “Über die Unvermeidlichkeit der Geisteswissenschaften,” in his Apologie des Zufälligen , pp. 98–116. (Stuttgart: Ph. Reclam jun, 1986), cited in “Sites of Memory,” https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.6.html 49. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Commemorating the Nation: Collective Memory, Public Commemoration, and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2004), p. 4. 50. Israel Gershoni, Pyramid for the Nation: Commemoration, Memory and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Egypt (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2006, in Hebrew). 51. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 5–6. 52. Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning,” p. 183. 53. Ehud Toledano, “Forgetting Egypt’s Ottoman Past,” in Cultural Horizons: A Festschrift in Honor of Talat S. Halman, ed. Jane L. Warner (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), p. 151. 54. Barry Schwartz, “The Social Text of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory,” Social Forces 61, no. 2 (December 1982): 377; Gillis, Commemorations, p. 9. 55. Gillis, Commemorations, p. 8. 56. For the Palestinian cult of martyrs and martyrdom, see Meir Hatina, “Theology and Power in the Middle East: Palestinian Martyrdom in a Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Political Ideologies 10, no. 3 (October 2005): 241–67; and Meir Litvak, “Religious and National Fanaticism: The Case of Hamas,” in Fanaticism and Conflict in the Modern Age, ed. Matthew Hughes and Gaynor Johnson (London: Frank Cass, 2005), pp. 156–74. 57. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, pp. 6–7, 9. 58. Ibid., p. 8. 59. Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective , pp. 35–79. 60. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” pp. 8–9. 61. Lowenthal, “Identity,” p. 53.

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62. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, p. 5. 63. Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993), p. 128; Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1393. 64. Gershoni, Commemorating, pp. 11–12; Confino, “Collective Memory,” p. 1391. 65. Hutton, History, p. 113. 66. Gillis, Commemorations, p. 10. 67. Confino, “Collective Memory,” p. 1390.

1

The Evolution of a Founding Myth: The Nakba and Its Fluctuating Meaning Esther Webman

Introduction When Israel celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1998, the Arab world, and especially the Palestinians in the Palestinian territories and abroad, marked the commemoration of what is perceived as a parallel event in Palestinian history—namely, the Nakba (the catastrophe). In the Palestinian national narrative, the establishment of the State of Israel indicates the moment of defeat and displacement of the Palestinian people. Whereas the events of 1947 and 1948—the partition and the War of Independence, respectively—indicate a national rebirth after the Holocaust and a cause for national celebration for Israeli Jews, for Palestinians “the same events are seen as an unmitigated disaster and are the focus of national mourning.”1 “What has been a success for one party has been a failure for the other party,” explains Ibrahim Dakkak, a leading PLO activist from Jerusalem.2 For the first time since its occurrence, the Nakba was officially commemorated in 1998, in public assemblies, seminars, processions, and exhibits in the major towns of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, triggering a public debate on its meaning, and its significance for Palestinian national identity. These events and the many related publications and articles in the Palestinian and Arab press shed light on a process of change in the discourse on the Nakba and serve as a vantage point for our discussion of the term, and its evolution over the years. Although the Nakba had

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always played an essential role in the Palestinian public agenda, the barrage of writing in 1998 was unprecedented and denoted a crossroads in its perception. Epitomizing Palestinian suffering, the Nakba was reconstructed as a founding myth of Palestinian national identity. As such, it points to an inspiring and patriotic story, whether real or imagined, and has become a national symbol shaping national collective memory. Wittingly or unwittingly, a striking similarity to the role and perception of the Holocaust, the epitome of Jewish suffering, was established. This chapter contends that the discourse on the Nakba, which (like founding myths in other societies) was designed to serve national, political, social, and private interests, was manipulated and that different aspects of the discourse were emphasized at different times and in changing circumstances. It also argues that there has been no essential change in perception throughout the generational transition between “the generation of the nakba” (jil al-nakba), which experienced the trauma, eviction, and dispersion, and “the generation of the revolution” (jil al-thawra), which was born in the tragic circumstances of the nakba, whether in exile or in refugee camps. The antonymous motifs of pain and hope, longing and resistance, fantasy and revolution, surrender to despair and drive to rebuild, which are intertwined in the public discourse, do not constitute a generational dividing line, but emerge simultaneously at the outset. Leaders, intellectuals, journalists, writers, and poets who lived and were active in Palestinian population centers—in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria; in major cities in the West Bank; in other Arab countries, and in the West—took part in the reconstruction of the discourse. Israeli Arabs also contributed to the shaping of a general national Palestinian narrative, at the same time developing their own discourse based on a unique political, economic, and social situation; the Israeli-Arab narrative is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.3 The Origins of the Term and Its Meaning The coining of the term “Nakba” is attributed to the Syrian scholar Qustantin Zurayq, who used it in his book The Meaning of the Nakba, published in August 1948, that is, even before the real dimensions of the Arab defeat in Palestine had become evident.4 However, perusing Egyptian papers from 1945 reveals that Egyptian intellectuals were already using the term to describe the evolving political situation in Palestine. Indeed, Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini blamed British policy for the catastrophe befalling Palestine and other Arab countries,5 and

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Mahmud ‘Izzat ‘Arfa reflected on the evolving Palestinian tragedy, comparing it to the historical Arab Nakba in Spain—a comparison that was to be made frequently in the discourse of the Arab-Israeli conflict.6 In 1936, on the eve of the 1936–39 Arab revolt, Sulayman Taji al-Faruqi, the editor of the daily al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya, disseminated a leaflet warning Muslims that Palestine’s fate might be similar to that of Spain if they did not unite to confront the dangerous situation evolving there.7 Although words such as ma’asa, karitha, naksa, hazima were also used to describe the 1948 defeat, the term “Nakba” took root in the Palestinian and Arab discourse to mark the uniqueness of the Palestinian tragedy. It is perhaps symbolic that the term, which more than any other was to represent this tragedy, was not coined by Palestinians. The fact that Arab countries had expropriated the conflict in Palestine by declaring war against the nascent State of Israel determined the fate and national discourse of the Palestinians, reflecting the chaotic situation in which the Palestinians found themselves at the time. The Nakba represented the defeat, displacement, dispossession, exile, dependence, insecurity, lack of statehood, and fight for survival of the Palestinians. Traditionally, Arabs used the word “Nakba” in reference “to strong misfortunes caused by external forces they could not confront,” explains the Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim.8 The connotative significance of the term and its Arabic synonyms, adds the Palestinian columnist Hassan Khadr, is “firstly, a deference to nature, with all its latent violence and its impetuosity; secondly, resignation to the vicissitudes of fate; and thirdly, relinquishment of responsibility for the catastrophe.”9 Indeed, the term “Nakba” expresses the enormity of a disaster that was inexplicably and unexpectedly inflicted on the Palestinian people (and its Arab allies) by an outside force—a catastrophe or cataclysm that “led to the dual injustice of dispossession and exile,” thus exonerating the Arabs and the Palestinians from any responsibility for its occurrence.10 However, it also provided the ground for the development of a special Palestinian narrative and a vast body of literature of longing and return to a “lost paradise,”11 and played a crucial role “in shaping and expressing a separate Palestinian identity,”12 a process intensified by the sense of alienation the Palestinians had to cope with in refugee-hosting Arab countries. Attempts to clarify “the meaning of the catastrophe” are still continuing, as the Israeli Arab scholar and politician ‘Azmi Bishara wrote in 2004: “This is our stone of Sisyphus, and the task of pushing it has been passed on from one movement to another, and in each case no sooner has a movement’s ideologues exclaimed, ‘I found it!’ than the stone comes rolling down with a resounding crash . . . Our definition of the nakba has changed with every new ideology and every new definition that necessitated a change in means.”13

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From an All-Arab Nakba to a Palestinian Nakba The Palestinian Nakba was not confined to Palestine but was perceived as “a historical event of major importance to the Arab nation,” which “touches the core of the struggle—now as in the past—for Arab dignity, identity and justice in the face of power.”14 However, despite the continuous representation of the Nakba as a catastrophe of all Arabs, it gradually turned into an exclusively Palestinian tragedy, especially since the bankruptcy of Pan-Arabism in the mid-1960s. The trauma of 1948 “reinforced pre-existing elements of identity, sustaining and strengthening a Palestinian self-definition,”15 and created the proper conditions for the formation of a new kind of national imagining. According to the Palestinian historian Issam Nassar, within the framework of Palestinian national discourse the Nakba resulted in a rhetorical shift rather than the beginning or end of an era. “The identity that seemed so clear before 1948, finessed and expressed by the intellectuals of the city elite, was terminated with the end of cities. Further, the destruction of more than 400 Palestinian population centers led to the loss of old local traits and their replacement by a new kind of belonging.”16 The shared story helped reconstruct a collective identity that was expected to replace persistent old identities and loyalties such as family, religion, village, or region.17 It shaped the impoverished personal and national consciousness of an older generation of Palestinians, while the encounter with “other” Arabs in Arab countries that had given shelter to Palestinian refugees sharpened a unique Palestinian identity and exacerbated the feeling of “otherness.”18 The June 1967 War, a landmark in the development of Palestinian identity, further contributed to this trend by inflicting a defeat even worse than that of 1948 upon the Arab states. It led to growing Palestinian disappointment and disillusionment with the capacity of Arab countries to salvage Palestine, as well as with Arab culture and society. However, bolstered by the emerging Palestinian liberation movements, this awareness created a new sense of optimism and determination, which became a source of inspiration and pride for Palestinian refugees and intellectuals. Researchers agree that a deep sense of despair was emblematic of Palestinian literature after 1948. It frequently described the suffering and longing of refugees for their land and emphasized their depression, lack of identity, and moral decadence.19 The Palestinian writer Ghasan Kanafani claimed that in the first years after the Nakba, “there was muteness, as a result of the bewilderment and confusion, but then a thundering enthusiastic poetry burst in reaction to the popular conscience that had awakened from its sleep.” The fervor of this kind of poetry, which tended to deny the defeat, was typical of the early 1950s; later on, it gave rise to deep feelings

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of mourning.20 The preoccupation with the Nakba in those years was intensive, and the Palestinians, as the PLO activist Shafiq al-Hut described, were baffled by the question, “How should Palestine be liberated?”21 Gradually, however, despair was overtaken by resistance to a cruel fate, a call to take up arms, and dreams of victory. These were reflected in “the literature of return” (adab al-‘awda) that concentrated mainly on revenge as a way to retrieve a lost Arab dignity. After the establishment of the PLO, and especially after 1967, this type of literature was replaced by a “literature of resistance” (adab al-muqawama), and the dispirited refugee was replaced by the image of a fighting fida’i. In a play written in 1970, Acre my homeland [Watani ‘Akka] a middle-aged refugee urges the youngsters who are mourning the death of their friend in a guerrilla operation to wipe away their tears and resume their underground activity because the “new Palestine does not want your tears.”22 A number of motifs recurred frequently in the Palestinian discourse until the June 1967 War: Palestinians perceived as victims of an abominable crime and of a Western conspiracy; betrayal of the military in Arab countries; demonization of the Zionist enemy; the wish to return to lost homes; rage and a determination to take revenge and overcome humiliation; the glorification of Palestinian heroes such as ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni; aversion to mourning; a desire for actions that would dictate a new history; longing for and idealization of a Palestine lost, but remembered as a vibrant center of economic, social, cultural, and spiritual life. Alongside these motifs, a number of symbols—such as orange trees, olive branches, the key to a deserted house, or pillows— emerged, preserving both private and national collective memories. All these became intertwined in literature, poetry, publicist writing, and a vast amount of publications on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Israeli/Zionist enemy, the ultimate “other,” who helped crystallize Palestinian self-identity. Palestinian cinema also played a role in this process by preserving the past through a portrayal of Palestinian folklore and culture, describing the present through depictions of events in the “occupied homeland,” and projecting a future relieved of shame.23 The emphasis on a unique Palestinian identity gave rise to the ideal of “self-reliance” (al-i‘timad ‘ala al-dhat), which had been lacking in the previous generation. The “generation of the revolution,” claimed the Israeli scholar Mati Steinberg, “expressed intent to resume responsibility, to initiate and to become active instead of being activated.” Liberation is not only that from Israel, but the liberation of Palestinians and Palestinian identity from the Arab burden.24 This trend was reinforced after the October 1973 War, when Arab states became resigned to negotiating with Israel. The Arab-Israeli conflict became a conflict between states and governments,

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while the readiness to recognize Israel was perceived as forsaking the Palestinian cause. Still, the “generation of the revolution”, which raised the banner of activism and self-reliance, did not claim responsibility for the Nakba events. These continued to be considered a catastrophe and a historical injustice that befell the Palestinians and led to their expulsion and to the denial of their right for self-determination. In their attempt to deal with its consequences, the new revolutionaries had to construct a new revolutionary ethos into which the Nakba did not fit. It was hence removed from the PLO covenants, from the Palestinian independence declaration of 1988,25 and even from some Palestinian textbooks. The PLO declaration of 1965 referred to the landmarks of resistance and return to the homeland, but failed to mention the Nakba, as if it were a shameful event.26 May 15 was marked as “the black day of disgrace and shame” during this period, but ceremonies of commemoration went hand in hand with calls for the renewal of an “alliance of jihad” as a means to erase the traces of the Nakba. Many editorials in Jordanian and Egyptian newspapers between 1949 and 1967 avoided using the term “Nakba” altogether or placed it in the subtitle.27 They emphasized the idea that the refugee camps were only temporary and that the Palestinian refugees would eventually return to their villages or towns of origin; they retold acts of heroism and jihad of Palestinian heroes during the British Mandate, the Arab revolt of 1936, and even the 1947–48 revolt, but refrained from describing the misery, hardship, and humiliation of refugee life. The “generation of the revolution” was keen to stress the disparity between them and their forefathers, obscuring the fact that the latter had not limited the discourse on the Nakba to a mere listing of grievances. The outbreak of the first intifada in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on 9 December 1987 also contributed to the suppression of the emotive connotation of the Nakba, replacing desperation with resistance against the Zionist occupation. Ahmad Sidqi al-Dajjani, a member of the Palestinian Central Council of the PLO, wrote about “the time of uprising” (zaman al-intifad),28 and the intifada turned into a symbol of the Palestinian struggle, essential to Palestinian identity. The tension between the ethos of struggle and activism and the ethos of victimhood and exile may be seen as a reflection of the immaturity of the Palestinian national movement, and its inability to cope and come to terms with diverse aspects of the Nakba. From Nakba to Revival The Nakba made the headlines once again in 1998, with the clear goal of shaping it as a springboard to a better future. In the mid-1990s, in light of the peace process, the return of the PLO, and the establishment of the

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Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians entered a postrevolutionary era, which enabled them to take a new look at the Nakba and reassess its place and meaning in the overall framework of nation and identity building. Whereas the emergence of the concepts of revolution and armed struggle went hand in hand with the repression of a humiliating memory of the Nakba, reemergence of the memory came with political institutionalization and a certain degree of independence. Acceptance of a new reality and attempts to erase the negative effects of the Nakba resulted in a changed perception of both the Nakba and the Palestinian self, indicating a process of national recovery.29 The Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari described this process as the “demystification” of both ideological discourse and nostalgic narrative and their substitution by political realism and a new discourse of normalization.30 The first national commemoration of the Nakba in 1998 gave further impetus to the debate on its history, meaning, and significance for the future, simultaneously revealing continuity and change in its perception and themes. “Testimonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the nakba, the collective tragedy, in the spring of 1998 flowed in a manner that confounded both narrators and listeners. The former were perplexed at having kept silent for what seemed like an eternity before releasing their concealed stories. The latter were confused at having failed to explain those stories—whether they were expressions of divine retribution or because they demonstrated a collective inability to face a superior enemy.”31 In contrast to the past, political activity did not exclude preoccupation with the traumatic events of the Palestinian tragedy and with the question of responsibility for it. It was from this tragedy that Palestinians aspired to draw strength for a more promising future. The Nakba was being reconstructed as a founding myth to shape the memory of the past while serving as a springboard to a more hopeful future. However, it should be noted that from the very beginning the discourse on the Nakba incorporated motifs of grief and distress with hopes for national revival. The potential of the Nakba to turn into a cathartic experience leading to reform and reconstruction was already discussed by Qustantin Zurayq in 1948 as well as in Jordanian and Egyptian newspaper editorials (every 15 May, from 1949 to 1967) and in political and historical publications; it was also reflected upon by Arab leaders such as Egyptian President Jamal ‘Abd alNasir. Despite the rage, “there was an expectation that the disintegration [of Palestinian society], epitomized in the Nakba, would bring about recuperation and restoration through revolutionary actions.”32 Yasser Arafat’s address to the “march of the millions” on 14 May 1998 connected the return of refugees with the creation of a Palestinian state. “We ask only that the page on the Nakba be turned over forever, that the

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emigrant return to his homeland, and that we build our Palestinian state on our land,” he said, thus emphasizing the Palestinian search for normality and focus on reality.33 The official Palestinian People’s Appeal, issued on 14 May 1998 by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and read by the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish at the end of the march commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba, speaks for itself: “We do not seek to be captives of history or victims of the past. The Palestinian people have launched a redemptive journey to the future. From ashes of our sorrow and loss, we are resurrecting a nation celebrating life and hope.”34 Used in the Judeo-Christian religious sense, the term “redemptive” implies salvation and freedom from subjugation of an individual or a group of people. Like the Israeli discourse on the Holocaust, which perceives the transformation from a life of persecution in the diaspora to a life in an independent Jewish state as redemptive, Palestinians believe that after their suffering and struggle for liberation they are approaching statehood and the realization of their national hopes. “In the construction of identity, both Arabs and Jews have used the leverage of very similar arguments, projecting an image of themselves that refers to the same stereotypes and putting into practice strategies of the same kind,” wrote Ada Lonni.35 The comparison between the tragedies of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples became compelling from the Arab, and particularly the Palestinian point of view in the mid-1940s, when immigration to Palestine emerged as the solution to the problem of displaced Jews in Europe. The Palestinian activist Ata Qaymari admitted that many Palestinians perceived the Holocaust through the prism of their Nakba, “the counterpart of the Holocaust in Palestinian history, in which their whole social, economic and cultural fabric was destroyed and uprooted.” Therefore, there are significant similarities in the ways in which both communities address their catastrophe, in commemoration and historiography; “the Palestinians are trying, just as the Jews did and are still doing, to gather a kind of collective memory that preserves their own social, cultural and historical fabric.”36 Rashid Khalidi went even further, seeing the Holocaust as “our benchmark for man’s inhumanity to man,” claiming that if it has any universal relevance, ‘it teaches that we should not be allowed to forget or forgive wrongs committed against a whole people.”37 The discourse on the Holocaust highly affected the Palestinian debate on the Nakba. In the preface to the Arabic translation of the articles of the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, published in Beirut in 1988, the translator Majid Hillawi bitterly complained that the Arabs and Palestinians used the Holocaust terminology for much of their political, cultural, and artistic discourse. They appropriated “the Zionist lies in order

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to gain international sympathy,” and described the suffering of the Palestinian people in terms Hillawi claimed had been invented by the Jews—terms such as “Holocaust,” “massacre,” “victimhood,” “diaspora,” and “memory.”38 Even before 1948, the tragedy inflicted on the Jews by the Germans was used as a point of reference to the tragedy that might result from the establishment of a Jewish state. “The imposition of a Jewish state on Palestine is an act that supersedes the aggression of the worst crimes perpetrated by the Axis states,” asserted the Egyptian intellectual Muhammad ‘Awad Muhammad in April 1945.39 Zionist attempts to evict people from their homes, scatter them, and ruin their lives, the argument ran, cause “the same catastrophe (ma’asa) that the Jews experienced.”40 The analogy between what befell the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs was a major motif in the Palestinian and Arab discourse on the Holocaust. Whereas the wrongdoings toward the Jews were minimized, the injustice toward the Palestinians was magnified.41 The Nakba became a sanctified symbol of identity—a unique and “unprecedented historical experience” that is “a scar on the forehead of the world and a calamity for humanity.”42 In a virtual scale of suffering the Palestinian tragedy was graded higher than the Jewish suffering. “It is a mark of disgrace on the forehead of the twentieth century,” was a recurrent assertion,43 and Israel was accused of committing the “biggest crime history has ever known.”44 The Palestinian flight or exodus from Palestine in 1948–49 is defined as “emigration” (hijra)—a term charged with religious connotations, evoking the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and bearing the promise of subsequent conquests.45 With the changing meaning of the “Nakba,” other aspects of Holocaust terminology had been incorporated into the Palestinian discourse. Terms such as “destruction and redemption” (shoah u-geula) and “Holocaust and rebirth” (shoah u-tehiya) became “nakba and resistance” (nakba wa-muqawama) and “perseverance and resistance” (israr wa-nidal).46 The issue of victimization and victimhood, which was crucial for the representation of Jewish experience and identity, also became a major component of the Palestinian narrative. Scholars of history and memory point to the development of a “culture of victimhood,” as part of an ethnic and national identity that involves both the recognition of and the need to rectify past evils, among others by their inclusion in the national memory and by compensation for past and present suffering.47 The Palestinian discourse on victimhood preceded this trend, which had evolved in the 1980s and 1990s. The Palestinians considered themselves “the victims of the greatest act of horror of the twentieth century”48 and strove to gain recognition of their tragedy and of their “status of victimhood.” Hazim Saghiya, the liberal Lebanese editor of the daily al-Hayat,

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contended that the Palestinians were “envious” of the Jews, who had become a “model of victimhood,” and resented their “profitable” tragedy.49 A comparison between the sufferings of the two peoples became dominant in the discourse on German reparations to the Jews and the State of Israel. The Arab countries tried to link this with compensation to be paid to Arab refugees who had lost their property in Palestine. The demand was that German reparations be frozen until Israel pay her dues to the Palestinians according to UN resolutions, or at least be made over in part to the Palestinian refugees, considered to be more entitled to compensation than were the Jews.50 The Palestinian and Arab discourse on the ArabIsraeli conflict juxtaposed the settlement of the Jews in Palestine with the deportation of the Arabs. Writers and spokesmen argued that the Jews complained about the cruelty and oppression against them and the world compensated them with money and sympathy, while the Palestinians received neither fair treatment nor compensation. The London-based Palestinian scholar Ghada Karmi emphasizes the “striking contrast” between the moral attitudes and practical steps taken toward resolving the issue of compensation for Jewish victims of Nazism and those toward “rectifying outstanding Palestinian losses from 1948 onwards.”51 In her discussion of this issue, she raises another aspect of the problem: the denial of the Nakba. For the Palestinians, too, she asserted, the issue is a moral one, and material compensation is but one aspect of this. “The essence of the Palestinian grievance is not only that they lost their homeland, but that the perpetrators have consistently refused to make reparation or even to acknowledge their responsibility in the matter.”52 Rashid Khalidi also points to the “unremitting pressure from the Israeli side for more than 50 years to ignore, diminish and ideally to bury the whole question of the Palestinians made refugees in 1948,” and says that “the key requirement for a solution is not so much compensation (important as it is), as acceptance of responsibility and some form of atonement.”53 Denial of the Palestinian tragedy is similar to denial of the Holocaust, “with all the allowances necessary when making comparisons between situations which are inherently dissimilar,” he concluded.54 Joseph Massad compared the “obscene number games on the part of holocaust deniers” to Zionist Jewish denial of the Palestinian Nakba and to the continued Zionist effort to play down the number of Palestinian refugees. “While the nakba and the holocaust are not equivalent in any sense,” he contended, “the logic of denying them is indeed the same.” He claimed that the PLO and most Palestinian intellectuals have expressed their solidarity with Jewish Holocaust victims since the 1960s and have attacked those who deny it, contrasting this with the official and unofficial Israeli denial of the expulsion of the Palestinians.55 The argument that the Palestinian Nakba is being ignored by the

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international community while much attention is paid to the Holocaust was dominant in the Arab debate over the UN decision to commemorate (in 2005) the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps and the resolution to designate a Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January (the day Auschwitz was liberated).56 In the public debate on the Nakba in 1998, the general call was to turn the motif of victimhood into a worldwide appeal for recognition of the world’s responsibility toward the Palestinians, and for the Palestinians to be added “to the list of Holocaust victims,” and hence their entitlement to restitution. This recognition entailed the acknowledgment by Israel and by the West of their responsibility for the Nakba. The West was accused of relieving its conscience after the Holocaust by granting a state to the Jews. The Palestinian People’s Appeal called upon the world “to undertake not only recognition of guilt and admission of culpability in relation to the Palestinian people, but also to undertake an active and massive process of rectification to secure the implementation of Palestinian rights.”57 Moreover, an explicit apology by Israel and Britain to the Palestinians is anticipated, parallel to the apologies made to the Jews by Spain, France, and Portugal, and by Pope John Paul II in his 16 March 1998 document, “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.”58 More militant Palestinians called for the establishment of a special tribunal to sentence those they consider Israeli “war criminals” for crimes committed against Palestinians.59 A number of Palestinians were convinced that the ongoing discussions on the Nakba called for a revision of the Palestinian historical narrative in a more critical light, and for the deconstruction of the 1948 events, so as to rewrite Palestinian history, freeing it from its ideological burden and romantic aura. Reflecting on the Nakba, the Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh wrote about the “necessity of rethinking, de-coupling and reclaiming 1948,” whereas others spoke of the need to erase the traces of the trauma from national and political thought and pave the way for independence. This process, it was argued, should also entail asking difficult questions about the past, the causes of the Nakba and Arab policies, without shunning responsibility for the events leading to it.60 The narrator in the beautiful epic Bab al-Shams by the Lebanese author Elias Khouri, which was published in 1998 and thus coincided with the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba, urges a dying Palestinian warrior to tell him about “that black hole.” He does not want to hear about the deeds and the Arab military betrayals in the war of 1948, but to know “what you have done, and why you are here and they are there?”61 Hassan Khadr believed that “the backlash against the sign nakba is proof that the Palestinian narrative has reached the age of maturity,” and that “the way in which we narrate our stories is determined by the end we want to hear.”62

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The Palestinian approach to historiography and the creation of a national identity thus confirms the perception of historiography “as an arm of collective memory” and that “history writing, like other dimensions of state building, is a practice that is directed outward as much as inward.”63 The 1998 commemoration of the Nakba seemed to provide an appropriate point of departure for the documentation and memorialization of the Palestinian story. Both scholarly accounts on the 1948 war and personal testimonies of survivors were published during the early months of 1998 in a series of articles in Palestinian periodicals and dailies such as al-Hayat al-Jadida and al-Quds, and in the London-based independent dailies al-Sharq al-Awsat and al-Hayat in a special section entitled “alnakba.” Al-Ahram Weekly dedicated a page in every issue during the entire year to commemorate “50 Years of Dispossession.” Special sections on the Web sites of the PNA and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre were devoted to events and testimonies of 1948, and young Palestinians in refugee camps produced films and video diaries about refugee camp life.64 The historian Walid Khalidi, who was one of the first to embark on a project documenting Palestinian history, published a new book All That Remains—entitled Kay la nansa [Lest we forget] in Arabic—in which he surveyed 418 Palestinian Arab villages destroyed during the war. Although these efforts continued the post-1948 historical documentation initiative of Palestinian historians such as ‘Arif al-‘Arif and Mustafa al-Dabbagh,65 there was a clear shift in the publications and films of 1998 from collective memory and high rhetoric to more personalized recollections, which also typified Israeli historiography of the Holocaust. Cinema, for instance, reflected the shift from national to private memory as well as from a masculine to a feminine point of view.66 Oral history became part of a history recording that included personal accounts, especially of Palestinian refugees and even of Palestinian camp women.67 The idea of return to Palestine and the emphasis on the temporary character of life in exile (ghurba) have always been a central theme in Palestinian national narrative, despite a growing uncertainty as to the feasibility and extent of the return. The concept of “the right of return” (haq al-‘awda) is mirrored by its Jewish Israeli counterpart, “the law of return,” which recognizes the legitimate right of each and every Jew to immigrate to the ancestral homeland. “There is no authoritative Palestinian definition of what constitutes the right of return,” explained Rashid Khalidi. Since the expulsions of 1948, the right of return has been taken to mean many things, ranging from the right of all Palestinians or their descendants to return to their former homes and places of origin in Palestine, to a return of some Palestinians currently in exile to some limited parts of Palestine.68 Unlike the central place it was accorded in the revised charter

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of 1968, the right of return was not emphasized in the Palestinian National Charter of 1964. The objectives of the Palestinian struggle were defined as the liberation of the homeland and “the return to it.” The Provisional Political Program, adopted by the twelfth session of the PNC in 1974, for the first time used the formulation “right of return” and considered it at the forefront of the Palestinian people’s rights.69 The peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians intensified the preoccupation with this issue. The Palestinians feared that if it was left out of a negotiated settlement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it would be doomed to remain unresolved, especially in view of the Israeli consensual rejection of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.70 As a result, the right of return was presented as a sacred and legal human right, never to be relinquished. A center for Palestinian return was established in London, headed by Salman Abu Sitta. Its goals are defined as follows: to document and publish material on the legal and moral aspects of the refugee problem and the right of return, and to highlight the linkage between the suffering caused by the occupation and the suffering inflicted on the refugees since 1948. Only by understanding the centrality of the catastrophe of politicide [the destruction of a political entity] and expulsion that befell the Palestinian people . . . is it possible to understand the Palestinians’ sense of the right of return. For in an abstract sense, if this expulsion were an injustice to the Palestinian people in national as well as in humanitarian terms, and marked the beginning of a period of disasters for them, then it follows that as far as the Palestinians are concerned, the wrong done to them can only be righted, and the disasters ended, through a return to the homeland.71

Abu Sitta’s approach seems to reflect the predominant view among Palestinians. Yet, few believe that the question of return is a moral issue rather than one of legal rights.72 Palestinians are also aware that there is no museum or memorial that records their suffering, and are therefore seeking to build a national museum to restore the heritage and formulate the national ethos, both as a political tool for preserving the national entity and as an effective way to mobilize the people into a process of national struggle. Palestinians stress folklore, costumes, and marriage rites, and preserve symbols of the Nakba, such as the keys of what had once been the refugees’ houses and the original names of their villages and towns. “All of these and other forms of identification recall the Israeli attempts to create part of their national ethos out of the Holocaust,” according to Qaymari.73 Some writers suggested that a Palestinian center for the commemoration of the Palestinian

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catastrophe and heroism or an Arab museum for “Zionist victims” be erected as a suitable answer to the Jewish memorials, which are said to have been “used effectively by the Israelis and Zionists to keep the world’s conscience agitated and troubled.”74 A major effort was made by a group of Jews and non-Jews in 1995 to launch a project called Deir Yassin Remembered, aiming at building a permanent memorial at the site of the former village, and within sight of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center. “Deir Yassin Remembered has grown out of the voice and vision of those who, like Elie Wiesel, extol the virtues of remembering and never forgetting the suffering of any people,” wrote Daniel McGowan in the preface to his book Remembering Deir Yassin, in which he defined the goal of the project as “the resurrection of . . . [an] important piece of Palestinian history as a way to create a future where Israelis and Palestinians can live together in a just and equitable way.”75 Deir Yassin, which over the years evolved into a symbol of the Nakba and “a key element in the Palestinian transformation of the events of 1947–49 into a cosmic injustice,”76 became the focus of memorialization and one of the manifestations of a changing perception of the Nakba. The Palestinian Jordanian writer and commentator Rami Khouri considered the proposed venture as part of a necessary process of mutual rehumanization and of the transformation of a cycle of mutual denial into “a more morally responsible and historically constructive cycle of acknowledgement of the past, understanding, compassion and ultimately, forgiveness and reconciliation.”77 Al-Aqsa Intifada, which erupted at the end of September 2000, and the subsequent low-intensity war between Israel and the Palestinians, awakened the old myth of Deir Yassin and inflamed the memories of the 1948 Nakba. It created new symbols that recaptured the Palestinians’ status as victims and radicalized the discourse on the “other,” the Zionist enemy. The Palestinian media again criticized the impotence of the Arab countries, but unlike in the past they now emphasized that the Palestinians of 2002 were not those of 1948, and that even a dozen “Deir Yassins” would not break their will and national identity. “The first nakba’s memory returns, carrying the lessons of the past joined with the experience of the present,” wrote an editorial in al-Bayan. The fierce battle that took place in the refugee camp of Jenin in mid-April 2002 was presented on the one hand as a massacre and on the other hand as a demonstration of heroism and perseverance, “despite the climate of submission and the illusions of peace.”78 In the film Jenin Jenin, the Arab Israeli producer Muhammad Bakri described the trauma of the destruction of Jenin in terms taken from another trauma—that of the 1948 Nakba; the house, the street, and the environment of the camp became “a transparent window which reflects the old pre-1948 house.”79

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Conclusion The Arab Israeli author Anton Shammas wrote in his endorsement of Elias Khouri’s Bab al-Shams that the book breaks the silence that surrounded the Nakba—“the silence of those who felt ashamed during five decades to tell the story of humiliation,” and the silence of those who were not ready to listen to the story “raging in their sub-consciousness.” It is difficult to agree with this statement, considering the ongoing preoccupation with the Nakba in Palestinian discourse. In their research on the Palestinian cinema, Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi agree that there was no pervasive silence, yet the feeling among researchers and writers is that the history of the Palestinians after 1948 has not yet been told. Tamari points to “an astounding absence of an overall picture . . . Thus in these narratives, the siege of Jaffa and Lydda, the massacres of Deir Yasin and Dawaiymeh, and the exodus from Safad and Haifa—they happened as disparate incidents, unconnected to the general saga of war.”80 Several writers attribute the lack of historical narrative to the state of exile, in which all events are accidental and temporary. The problematic historical sequence is manifested in the Palestinian tendency to ignore the present and exchange it with the past, and a fixation with history, manifested along three axes: memory of a lost paradise, mourning of the present, and description of the forthcoming return. In this sense, the Palestinian history is no different from other histories of exile and displacement, in which life is experienced through nostalgia for the past, through the disassociation of the historical native landscape from the nation, and through the utopia of a homeland unaffected by the present. The history of traumas shows that “the trauma remains a vivid event, extant and unchanged, as if it is fully present and not represented in memory.”81 This is the reason why history cannot be told as a narrative, a chronology of events, or a rational sequence of cause and effect. The traumatic events of Palestinian history have, however, acted as a unifying national factor. It is the adhesive glue that has enabled the population to overcome differences, controversies, and segmentation, and create one history around one unifying shared memory.82 “The trauma of Al-Nakba, as Salman Abu Sitta concluded, is imprinted on the psyche of every Palestinian, on those that witnessed it as well as those that did not.”83 Notes 1. Rashid Khalidi, “Truth, Justice and Reconciliation: Elements of a Solution to the Palestinian Refugee Issue,” in Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cotran, eds, The Palestinian Exodus, 1948–1998 (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1999), p. 224.

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2. “1948–1998 in the Eyes of Two Peoples: A Roundtable Discussion,” PalestineIsrael Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture 5, no. 2 (1998): 24. See also Joseph Samaha, salam ‘abir. Nahwu madd ‘arabi lil ‘mas’ala al-yahudiyya’ [A passing peace: Toward an Arab extension of “the Jewish Question”] (Beirut, 1993), p. 28; al-Sharq al-Awsat, 7 April 1998. 3. For a comparison of the Arab Israeli and the Palestinian discourses on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba, see Hillel Frisch, “Ethnicity or Nationalism? Comparing the Nakba Narrative among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” Israel Affairs 9, nos. 1 and 2 (Autumn/Winter 2003): 165–84. 4. Qustantin Zurayq, ma‘na al-nakba [The meaning of the Nakba] (Beirut, 1948). 5. Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, “Nakbat Filastin,” al-Risala, 5 November 1945. 6. Mahmud ‘Izat ‘Arfa, “Nakbat al-‘Arab fi al-Andalus,” al-Risala, 19 August 1946. 7. The Zionist Central Archive, 525/22051, Jerusalem, Israel. 8. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Intelligentsia: Time to Give Up the Ghost,” Civil Society 7, no. 77 (May 1998): 4. 9. Al-Ahram Weekly, 2 April 1998. 10. Ibrahim Abu Lughud, “From the Nakba to the Defeat, Two Terms for Big Events,” in Y. Harkabi, ed., The Arabs and Israel (a collection of translations from Arabic), no. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1975, in Hebrew), p. 34. See also Ibrahim Abu Lughud, “The Nakba: This is What Happened,” Alpayim, no. 16 (1998, in Hebrew, Tel Aviv, Israel), pp. 152–57; Fawwaz Turki, “To be a Palestinian,” Journal of Palestine Studies 3, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 4; The Palestinian People’s Appeal on the 50th Anniversary of the Catastrophe “al-Nakba ,” http://www.pna.org/ mininfo/nakba. On the evasion of responsibility see also Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm, al-naqd al-zati ba‘d al-hazima [Self-criticism after the defeat] (Beirut, 1969), p. 20; for a Hebrew translation see Yehoshafat Harkabi, ed., Arab Lessons from their Defeat (Tel Aviv, 1969), pp. 71–115. See also Yehoshafat Harkabi, The Arabs’ Position in their Conflict with Israel (Tel Aviv, 1968, in Hebrew), p. 345. 11. A. L. Tibawi, “Visions of the Return. The Palestinian Arab Refugees in Arabic Poetry and Art,” Middle East Journal 17, no. 5 (1963): 507–26; Reuven Snir, “‘One Wound of his Wounds’—The Palestinian Arab Literature in Israel,” Alpayim, no. 2 (1990, in Hebrew), pp. 244–68; Ray Hanania, al-Nakba: The Reality of a Dispossession, http://www.hanania.com; Danny Rubinstein, The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home (Jerusalem, 1991). 12. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York, 1997), p. 19; Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (New York, 1993), p.182. 13. Al-Ahram Weekly, 13 May 2004. 14. Frisch, “Ethnicity,” p. 173, quoting Palestinian PM Abu ‘Ala’ in al-Ayyam, 13 May 1998; al-Ahram Weekly, 13 May 2004. 15. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, p. 22. 16. Issam Nassar, “Reflecting on Writing the History of Palestinian Identity,” Palestine-Israel Journal 8, no. 4 and 9, no. 1 (2001–2): 34–35. 17. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Landscape in Mist: Space and Memory in Palestinian Cinema (Tel Aviv, 2006, in Hebrew), p. 57.

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18. Mati Steinberg, “A Generation Goes and a Generation Comes: The Nakba and the Generation of Armed Struggle,” in Wars, Revolutions and Generational Identity, ed. Joseph Mali (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001, in Hebrew), p. 123. 19. Trevor Legassick, “Some Recent War-Related Arabic Fiction,” Middle East Journal 5, no. 4 (1971): 491–505; Avraham Sela, “The Jew and the Israeli in Modern Arabic Literature,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 125. 20. Ghasan Kanafani, Adab al-muqawama [The resistance literature] (Beirut, 1966), p. 10. 21. Yehoshafat Harkabi, ed., The Arabs and Israel 5 (Tel Aviv, 1970, in Hebrew), p. 65. 22. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, Watani ‘Akka [Acre my homeland] (Cairo, 1970), p. 191. 23. Gertz and Khleifi, Landscape, p. 55. 24. Steinberg, “Generation,” p. 124. 25. “Declaration of Palestinian Independence, November 15, 1988,” PalestineIsrael Journal 3, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 119–23. 26. See Y. Harkabi, The Palestinian Covenant and Its Meaning (London, 1979), pp. 113–24. 27. See for example al-Difa‘, 15 May 1949, 15 May 1957, 15 May 1960, 16 May 1965; al-Jihad, 15, 16 May 1963, 16 May 1965. 28. Ahmad Sidqi al-Dajjani, al-intifadha al-filastiniyya wal-tahrir [The Palestinian intifada and liberation] (Cairo, 1988). 29. “Reflections on al-Nakba,” Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 5–35. 30. Salim Tamari, “Narratives of Exile,” Palestine-Israel Journal 9, no. 4 (2002): 107–8. 31. Ibid., 101. 32. See for instance Zurayq, Meaning of the Nakba; Walid Qamhawi, al-nakba walbana`. nahwu ba‘th al-watan al-‘arabi [The Nakba and the construction: Toward the resurrection of the Arab nation] (Beirut, 1956); Nadim al-Bitar, al-fa‘aliyya al-thawriyya fi al-nakba [Revolutionary efficiency in the Nakba] (Beirut, 1965); Harkabi, Arabs’ Position, pp. 346–47; Harkabi, ed., Arab Lessons, p. 15. 33. Frisch, “Ethnicity,” p. 181. 34. “The Palestinian People’s Appeal on the 50th Anniversary of the Catastrophe ‘al-Nakba,”’ http://www.pna.org/mininfo/nakba. 35. Ada Lonni, “Parallel Strategies in Israeli and Palestinian Experiences,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 4 and 9 no. 1 (2001–2): 71–83. 36. Ata Qaymari, “The Holocaust in the Palestinian Perspective,” in Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue, ed. Paul Scham, Walid Salem, and Benjamin Pogrund (Jerusalem: Yakar Center for Social Concern, 2005), p. 149. 37. Rashid Khalidi, “Truth,” in Karmi and Cotran, Palestinian Exodus, p. 227. 38. Robert Faurisson, al-ukzuba al-tarikhiyya: hal fi‘lan qutila sitta malayin yahudi? [The historical lie: Were six million Jews killed?] (Beirut, 1988), p. 18; Hazim Saghiya, difa‘an ‘an al-salam [Defending peace] (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashar, 1997), p. 69. 39. Al-Thaqafa, 10 April 1945, p. 391. 40. Al-Ahram, 4 November 1945, 11 January 1946.

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41. For a discussion of the representation of the Holocaust in the Palestinian discourse, see Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, “Perceptions of the Holocaust in Palestinian Public Discourse,” Israel Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 123–41. 42. Al-Quds, 15 May 1998. 43. See for instance Muhammad Safwat, Isra’il al-‘aduw al-mushtaraq [Israel the shared enemy] (Cairo, 1952), p. 187. 44. See for instance Muhammad Fayiz al-Qasri, harb filastin, ‘am 1948. al-sira’ al-siyasi bayna al-sahyuniyya wal-‘arab [The war in Palestine: The political conflict between Zionism and the Arabs] (Cairo, 1961), p. 41. 45. Al-Hayat al-Jadida, 7 May 1998; Rosemary Sayigh, “Palestinian Camp Women as Tellers of History,” Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 46. 46. Al-Hayat, 19 April 1998; al-Quds, 15 May 1998. 47. Charles S. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial,” History and Memory 5, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1993): 136–37; Guli Neeman-Arad, “A History of Memory: The Changing Status of the Holocaust in the Conscious of the Jews in the United States,” Zmanim, no. 57 (Winter 1996–97, in Hebrew): 19; New York Review of Books, 8 April 1999, p. 6. 48. Rashid Khalidi, “A Universal Jubilee? Palestinians 50 Years after 1948,” Tikkun 13, no. 2 (March/April 1998): 54–56; Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 121; al-Ahram Weekly, 14 May 1998. 49. Saghiya, Defending Peace, pp. 67–68. A similar argument was introduced by Ata Qaymari in “The Holocaust,” pp. 150–51, 159. 50. Al-Ahram, 12 September 1951, 16 November, 15 December 1952. 51. Ghada Karmi, “The Question of Compensation and Reparations,” in The Palestinian Exodus, 1948–1998 , ed. Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cotran (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1999), p. 197. 52. Ibid., p. 201. 53. Rashid Khalidi, “Truth,” in Karmi and Cotran, Palestinian Exodus, pp. 221–22. 54. Ibid., pp. 225–26. 55. Al-Ahram Weekly, 9 December 2004. 56. See for example al-Hayat, 24 January 2005; al-Babil, 3 December 2005. 57. Palestinian People’s Appeal; see also al-Hayat, 20, 21 January, 15 May 1998; al-Ahram Weekly, 14 May 1998; Jordan Times, 9 May 1998; al-Sharq al-Awsat, 27 January (Mideast Mirror); 11, 18, 25 May 1998; al-Quds, 16 February, 15 May 1998; “1948–1998 in the Eyes of Two Peoples,” pp. 24, 31, 33. 58. Al-Ahram, 22 March 1998; al-Quds, 24 April 1998; Interview with Rashid Ghannoushi, MSANEWS, 10 February, 12 February 1998. 59. Al-Hayat, 28 April 1998; al-Hayat al-Jadida, 11 May 1998. 60. Yezid Sayigh, “Reflections on al-Nakba,” Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 23; al-Hayat, 17 February, 19 April, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18 May, 28 June 1998; al-Quds, 15, 20, 27, 29 May 1998; al-Hayat al-Jadida, 5, 13–19, 23 May 1998; al-Ahram Weekly, 15 April 1998; al-Bilad, 26 January 1998; Rashid Khalidi, “A Universal Jubilee,” p. 55. 61. Elias Khouri, Bab al-Shams (Tel Aviv, 2002, in Hebrew), p. 180. 62. Al-Ahram Weekly, 2 April 1998.

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63. Anita Shapira, “Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the ‘New Historians’ in Israel,” History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995): 33; Robert Vitalis, “Crossing Exceptionalism’s Frontiers to Discover America’s Kingdom,” Arab Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 25. 64. Al-Ahram Weekly, 19 February 1998; Rosemary Sayigh, “Dis/Solving the Refugee Problem,” Middle East Report, no. 207 (Summer 1998): 19–23. 65. On the early Palestinian historiography, see Beshara B. Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 13–17. 66. Gertz and Khleifi, Landscape, pp. 69–76. See also Qaymari, “The Holocaust,” pp. 150–59. 67. Rosemary Sayigh, “Palestinian Camp Women as Tellers of History,” pp. 42–58; “Reflections on al-Nakba,” Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 5–35; Palestine Times, no. 84, June 1998; Jordan Times, 20 April 1999; Haaretz, 16 November 1999. 68. Rashid I. Khalidi, “Observations on the Right of Return,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 29. 69. Ibid., p. 34. 70. For a Palestinian analysis of the right of return, see Badil Resource Center, The 1948 Palestinian Refugees and the Individual Right of Return: An International Law Analysis (Bethlehem, 2001). 71. For Abu Sitta’s views see http://www.al-awda.org; al-Ahram Weekly, 9 March 2000, 16 May 2002; al-Hayat, 11 July 2000. 72. See for instance Rahsid Khalidi, “Observations,” pp. 30–32. 73. Qaymari, “Holocaust,” pp. 151, 159. 74. Al-Hayat, 4 February 1998; al-Ahram, 27 May 1998; Rashid Khalidi, “A Universal Jubilee,” p. 56. 75. Daniel A. McGowan and Marc H. Ellis, eds., Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine (New York: Olive Branch, 1998). 76. Kimmerling and Migdal, Palestinians, p. 152; Walid Khalidi, “Deir Yassine: Autopsie d’un massacre,” Revue d’études palestiniennes 17, no. 69 (Autumn 1998): 20–58. 77. Jordan Times, 22 April 1997; Haaretz, 24 April 1997. 78. Al-Bayan (UAE), 15 May 2002 (Mideast Mirror). 79. Gertz and Khleifi, Landscape, p. 132. 80. Tamari, “Narratives,” p. 102. 81. Gertz and Khleifi, Landscape, p. 8. 82. Ibid., pp. 9, 56–57. 83. Al-Ahram Weekly, 22 September 2005.

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The Memory that Never Dies: The Nakba Memory and the Palestinian National Movement Michael Milshtein

Introduction The 1948 war—or the Nakba (the disaster, catastrophe) in Palestinian terminology—is the central event in modern Palestinian history and the core around which the Palestinians’ national identity crystallized.1 The Palestinians lost about 77 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine and witnessed the destruction of 418 Palestinian settlements2 and the displacement of 500,000 to 650,000 of their fellowmen, who fled or were deported.3 The Nakba embodies a bipolar symbol of concurrent destruction and building. It severely shocked the Palestinians and has, in their view, almost brought about their disappearance as a people. It did, however, also consolidate their fledgling national identity. The Palestinians describe the Nakba as a tremendous and startling explosion that has ripped up a deeply rooted Palestinian society, away from its natural and harmonious historical course, and imposed on it a life of displacement or exile. They view it as a national disaster, not only because it was accompanied by military defeat and loss of territory, but principally because it embodied an unprecedented threat to their existence as a people, resulting in the dispersion of almost half the Palestinian population. The Nakba also went hand in hand with loss of hope for national sovereignty; destruction of the social, economic, political, and cultural fabric; and above all, with the fading and near disappearance of Palestinian national identity. Consequently, the refugee problem is described as a “living site of memory” for

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perpetuating the reminiscence of the Nakba as the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. The memory of the Nakba evolved as a central national myth that elucidated three issues: the way in which their past evolved, the course in which their present is conducted, and the goals they must strive for in the future. It has become a powerful tool, shaping and disseminating Palestinian national consciousness and mobilizing the community. Hence, the memory of the Nakba was never merely the object of grief and longing, nor an idea encouraging passivity, but a means of stimulating Palestinian activism, inter alia, by enhancing the yearning for return (al-‘awda). The Palestinians never portrayed the Nakba as a story of the distant past, but as a living, continuous event, integrated into the present and spanning several generations, different sectors of the population, and geographic origins. The Nakba is thus presented as the culmination of a protracted historical movement, aimed at blurring the national identity of the Palestinians and dispossessing them of their lands. As a result, Palestinian society has crystallized as a “community of memory,” that is, a group that perceives its existence as part of a broad historical framework. This society has lived with a sense of constant threat and, for that very reason, has been committed to continue the struggle and correct the historic injustice that they suffered. The memory of the Nakba and the way it has been shaped reflect the uniqueness of the Palestinian national project in the Arab world, transforming the defeat, dispersion, and loss of territory into a core around which the Palestinian territorial bond and national identity have crystallized. The Nakba was perceived as an experience reflecting a common national fate, since it crossed every class, religious, political-ideological, and regional distinction that prevailed in Palestinian society. The Palestinian author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who went into exile in Iraq after 1948, described this complex situation as follows: “The sense of belonging to Palestinian soil, instead of fading, continued to grow stronger in the period of exile.”4 Thus, it became engraved in the collective consciousness of the Palestinian people, including those who did not experience displacement as the most prominent national symbol. Concurrently, it should be pointed out that in the Palestinian view, the Nakba was not a founding event of Palestinian national identity, which they maintain existed long before 1948. Rather, it is described as an unprecedented historical turning point that greatly enhanced Palestinian consciousness. Before analyzing the Nakba myth, it is necessary to elucidate the term “myth” itself. In this context, myths are usually defined as stories reflecting widely held beliefs about the history of a people, and explaining where it came from and where it is headed. As they are built on human memory, myths are created selectively and change according to the needs of the hour.

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Emanuel Sivan defines a myth as “a kind of political allegory which passes down in writing and orally from generation to generation.” Sivan maintains that a myth has a dramatic narrative structure intended to trigger emotions. Therefore, it motivates people to perform acts “of faith” rather than be moved by rational persuasion. On a practical level, Sivan identifies a double purpose in every myth: cognitive-interpretive and operational-behavioral. Initially, a myth interprets a specific experience a society underwent and places it on a wide historical continuum. A myth also contains a practical function, which is to mobilize people for a political goal and guide their actions.5 In this manner, people are moved to action by virtue of memory.6 According to these definitions, the Nakba can be defined as a myth. First, it provides an explanation as to the root or source of the reality in which Palestinians live today. This story is presented as a continuum between past and present, thus reinforcing the notion of continuity in the fate and destiny of the Palestinian people. Together with the interpretive dimension, the memory of the Nakba also contains a clearly operational dimension, as it consistently impels the Palestinians to action for the sake of a well-defined political goal, namely, return. Compared with political myths in other Middle Eastern countries— where states and political elites play the dominant role in constructing a collective memory that serves their political goals—the Nakba memory is unique.7 Having lacked a government for most of their existence as a national group, Palestinians identified themselves with the national leadership in exile, even though it had only an indirect impact on their lives. This situation created a unique situation in which various Palestinian groups—the “inside” (al-dakhil, Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) and the “outside” (al-kharij, the diaspora)—interacted with the political leadership and took part in shaping national memories. In other words, the memory was shaped and preserved from “above,” that is, by the armed Palestinian organizations and the PLO, as well as from “below,” as spontaneous activities of ordinary Palestinians. (For this aspect of the Nakba, see Milshtein’s “Memory from Below” in this volume.) This study will analyze the transformations of the Nakba memory in light of the changing needs and circumstances of the Palestinian national movement. Part I “Lost Paradise”: Shaping the Nakba Memory, 1948–1994 The historical roots of the Nakba memory The description of the 1948 war as the Nakba is usually attributed to the renowned Syrian intellectual Qustantin Zuraq, who in August 1948 first

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used the term as the title of his book, Ma‘na al-Nakba [The meaning of the Nakba]. This work assesses the roots of the Arab (though not necessarily the Palestinian) failure in the fight against Israel, and was published even before the war ended.8 Many have since posed the question why this specific term took root, rather than any of the others that also express disaster or defeat (for instance, naksa or hazima). Arab social critics emphasized the literal meaning of the term, which expresses submission to the raging forces of nature and fate. The Egyptian sociologist Sa‘ad al-Din Ibrahim maintained that the use of the term “Nakba” as a description of an unforeseen disaster stemming from external forces relieved the Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular, from having to take responsibility for the events, and thus maintained their status as passive victims.9 According to Nimer Sirhan, general director of the Folklore Department in the Palestinian Culture Ministry, “the Nakba emerged as a result of external political developments that took most Palestinians by surprise.”10 The majority of Palestinian writers do not describe the Nakba as a distinct historical event. Instead, it is interwoven with a broader narrative, which comprises a long series of events—such as the First Zionist Congress in Basel, the Sykes-Picot Accord, the Balfour Declaration and the 1947 Partition Plan—the overall aim of which was dispossessing the Palestinians of their soil and erasing their national identity. This version, which fits similar narratives prevalent in the Arab world, views Zionism as part of a European colonialism that exploits Western capital and technology for the purpose of depriving the Palestinians of their land. Arabs insist that this was done by making use of a false counternarrative, according to which Zionist pioneers found uninhabited land when they came to Palestine (“a land without a people for a people without a land”).11 According to the Palestinians, the Nakba was the result of a well-prepared plan for ethnic cleansing, going back to the end of the nineteenth century.12 Moreover, it is not perceived as a passing historical event but as an ongoing process, so that consecutive generations of Palestinians are compelled to face identical trials and challenges. Palestinians claim that the Nakba has brought about an exchange of historical roles, and that the Palestinians have been transformed into “victims of the victims.” Jabra, for instance, claims that “the wandering Palestinians have replaced the wandering Jews.” He sees irony in the fact that those who pushed the Palestinians into a life of wandering were the very same people who had suffered a similar fate not long before.13 From a mark of shame to a symbol of pride The 1948 defeat dealt a heavy blow to the process of Palestinian nation building. Not only had the Palestinians lost most of their land and the

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chance for sovereignty, but they also found themselves refugees lacking leadership, dispersed over a broad region and subject to alien regimes, two of which—Jordan and Israel—were hostile to the Palestinian cause and sought to blur Palestinian national identity.14 Adding to the fear of loss of national identity was the lure for young Palestinians of supranational ideologies that were prevalent in the Arab world in the 1950s, primarily panArabism, led by Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, the Ba‘ath party, Communism, and fundamentalist Islam.15 Also significant on the social-psychological plane were the feelings of despair, frustration, and alienation felt by Palestinian refugees, and caused by the rigid, arrogant attitudes of their Arab “hosts,” who accused them of having betrayed their land.16 These feelings of loss of identity and of being uprooted were particularly traumatic in light of the traditional village background of most of the refugees; indeed, in most traditional societies, attachment to the soil and a close social fabric are perceived as essential parts of an individual’s identity. Violating these elements produces a powerful psychological rupture, to the point that it prevents people from fully integrating elsewhere.17 Concurrently, the socioeconomic and political situation in the refugee camps contributed to the formation of a common national identity, as members of nearly all sections of Palestinian society were mingled together, thereby blurring traditional class lines, regional differences, and the rural-urban divide. Still, at that time, many Palestinians feared that the refugee issue would become a merely humanitarian problem, and that they would thereby lose their national character. Toward the end of the 1950s the Palestinians experienced a national awakening, initiated by a new generation of leaders who promoted new ideas and established new national institutions. The change allowed for a clearer definition of national goals than ever before, in which the Nakba memory and the idea of return played a central role. At the focus of the transformations stood Fatah (acronym of Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini; the Palestinian National Liberation Movement), up to the 2006 elections the largest and most prominent Palestinian organization. Fatah was a product of the 1948 defeat, and particularly of the desire to rectify its repercussions. Ever since its foundation in 1959, Fatah has stood for protest or, as the movement called it, “revolution” (thawra) against the existing order. That revolution was not manifested in a new social or cultural message, but in national-political goals. Fatah’s pioneering calls for the promotion of a particularistic Palestinian identity (wataniyya) stood out at a time when most Arabs, including the Palestinians, followed ‘Abd al-Nasser in advocating a pan-Arab nationalism (qawmiyya). Fatah’s opposition to the current situation was also reflected in

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its call for Palestinian self-reliance and for armed struggle against Israel, thus curtailing any expectations of salvation coming from the Arab world. In addition, Fatah’s contribution was also prominent in defining clear national goals: return and total liberation. Attaining these goals, according to the movement, could be carried out only by armed struggle. The emergence of Fatah symbolized a generational and social change in the Palestinian leadership. Most members of the new leadership were relatively young, had an academic education, and belonged to the middle or lower strata of Palestinian society. Almost all of them had personally experienced the 1948 war and the humiliation of refugee life. They replaced the traditional leadership that consisted mostly of members of prestigious urban families, highlighting the contrast between the two groups. Indeed, they called themselves “the generation of vengeance and revolution,” in contrast to the preceding “generation of defeat.”18 The turning point in Fatah’s rise to power and national leadership occurred in 1969, when it took over the Palestine Liberation Organization (Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya; PLO), which had originally been founded at the 1964 Arab League Summit as the new leading institution representing the Palestinian people. The memory of the Nakba and the idea of the right of return were powerful tools through which Fatah promoted the Palestinian cause and national consciousness. It fused individual longings with national aspirations, particularly in refugee camps in the diaspora. Fatah succeeded in taking the refugee’s private longing for a particular field, village, or tree, and reformulating it as a national yearning for a homeland and independence.19 The Palestinian national movement took the awareness of a common fate one step further by transforming the Nakba memory into a collective possession shared by the entire population, and the idea of return into a supreme national goal, even for those who did not experience displacement. A striking manifestation of Fatah’s success can be found in the words of the poetess Fadwa Tuqan of Nablus, who did not experience displacement personally: “I will return and then I will seal the story of my life.”20 The emphasis on the Nakba as the common fate of all Palestinians, and on return as a joint goal, helped transform these two concepts into the central axis of the Palestinian national movement. According to ‘Azmi Bishara, a former Israeli Knesset member for the Arab Balad party (National Democratic Alliance), the Palestinian effort to merge personal memories with a collective story creates a bridge between the individual’s feelings and the imagined notion of the nation. Today, Palestinian return, he adds, does not need to be directed toward a specific village or city, but should serve as “a return in ideas”—that is, to a sovereign state. This move,

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he says, would attest to national maturity and help consolidate a progressive national goal.21 Together with fostering national consciousness, Fatah used the Nakba to end the passivity that had been part of the trauma of the Nakba throughout the 1950s, and to transform its memory into a catalyst for activism. Sakhar Habash, one of Fatah’s leading ideologues, claimed that “the Nakba was the essence of the revolutionary activism which had pushed Fatah to set up an alternative to the flawed situation deriving from it and from the various plans that aimed at liquidating Palestinian existence.”22 The Nakba memory, in Fatah’s view, was no longer an object of grief and longing, but a constant reminder of shame and, concurrently, a stimulus to action. These measures helped Fatah develop a national narrative in which it was described as the heroic vanguard that saved the Palestinians from sinking into oblivion. The movement’s history and the nation’s history thus merged. Fatah’s military operations were crystallized into a national epic, reflecting the actions of the entire Palestinian people. For that reason, the Fatah founder and leader Yasser Arafat (d. 2005) often declared that by waging armed struggle the movement had transformed the Palestinians “from a people in exile into a revolutionary people.”23

Part II Memory in the Service of Power: How the Palestinian National Authority Shaped the Nakba Memory The establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) marked the first time in history that a ruling Palestinian administration had been set up—even if it did not possess full powers—on the “inside.” Never before had a Palestinian administration had the means—namely, control over the media and education system—to shape and disseminate Palestinian national consciousness in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The cultivation of the Nakba memory, which the PNA sought to infuse as a national symbol, even among those who had not personally experienced displacement, was an important component of these efforts. It became one of the central elements through which Arafat sought to perpetuate adherence to the “1948 goals,” even at this juncture of emerging statehood. However, not only state instruments but also historical chance, or “the cunning of history,” helped the PNA foster the Nakba memory. This refers mainly to the symbolic meaning of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba (May 1998), a sad mirror image, both searing and provocative, of the celebrations of Israel’s fiftieth anniversary of independence, which were held

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at the same time. This date carries powerful emotional connotations and has greatly intensified the Palestinian memory of a collective past. At the same time, the serious repercussions of the Nakba memory derived, among others, from the gradual realization of the Palestinian public that the solution to the refugee problem was still far away, in view of the growing popular understanding that a political settlement would not include full return of the refugees to their original homes. The PNA chairman Yasser Arafat was shrewd enough to exploit the changes in the Nakba memory in 1998, to tighten the bonds between his government and Palestinian society, and later on to mobilize the public and incite it to violent confrontation with Israel. A major PNA aim in cultivating the Nakba memory was to enhance the individual Palestinian’s perception of a continuing Israeli threat— identical to the one his forefathers had felt—and hence stimulate commitment to a continued national struggle. Although the message was not new, the PNA leadership now had better means at its disposal to inculcate it directly and persistently. Thus, senior PNA officials stressed that, although the Nakba was an integral part of the history of the Palestinian people and would outlast a settlement with Israel, it was also manifest in present-day Israeli attempts to dislodge and displace the Palestinians.24 ‘Imad al-Faluji, a descendant of a refugee family from the Faluja village and former Palestinian post and communications minister, maintains that in the last fifty years, the Nakba has remained part of the Palestinians’ experience since they are still contending with numerous existential challenges. The Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) continued this line of reasoning with a special announcement published on the occasion of the Nakba’s fiftieth anniversary, claiming that “the Nakba has a presence in our consciousness in all aspects of our daily lives and in every home in Palestine.”25 Mahmud Darwish provided the most striking expression of this position in the letter he composed on the occasion of the fifty-third anniversary of the Nakba: Today is the greatest day of remembrance. We will not look at yesterday in order to bring before us facts about the crime taking place, because the present of the Nakba remains open and spreads to all the winds of time. We do not need anyone to remind us of our human tragedy that has continued for fifty-three years now, since we are still living it here and now . . . We have not forgotten the beginning, nor the keys to our house, nor the lanterns of our journey lit with our blood . . . We will never forget the yesterday, nor the tomorrow, because tomorrow begins now, out of our determination to continue following this path.26

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Cultivating the Nakba as “sites of memory” The new means of communication and education also helped the PNA construct “sites of memory,” or lieux de mémoire , in the words of the French historian Pierre Nora. These sites include memorials, symbols, rites, and days of remembrance, which in Nora’s view sum up the national memory at a time when the original human memory has become blurred or even obliterated as a consequence of rapid changes over generations. They create a continuum between past and present, and anchor the memory of the individual in an illusory link with a past not based on personal experience.27 Of these new sites, a few stand out: (1) Commemoration activities: Most important of these was the establishment of the state museum Dar al-Dhakira in 1999 to commemorate the Nakba. The site, located at Kafr Ayn Siniya near Ramallah, exhibits numerous data based on the Nakba in general and destroyed villages in particular. Another official commemorative project named governmental institutions, streets, town squares, or schools throughout the PNA after places lost to Israel in 1948.28 (2) Official commemoration days: In 1998 the PNA set up May 15 as the official Nakba Day, marking the date on which the establishment of the state of Israel was proclaimed (the actual date was May 14). This was, in fact, the first time the Nakba was marked officially by the PNA. Since then, the PNA has taken pains to mark this day annually in a series of ceremonies, including speeches by Arafat and Darwish; mass processions in which boys carry signs with the names of destroyed localities and giant keys; siren soundings for two to three minutes during which people stand at attention; and military marches and art shows.29 The PNA educational system has played a central role in the promotion and inculcation of the Nakba memory. Like states that have experienced a transitional phase, from struggle to statehood, the PNA views education, including education to cultivate a memory of the Nakba, as an important agent in shaping national consciousness sympathetic to and supportive of the regime. Textbooks and teachers’ guides have served as the principal means of perpetuating the memory of the Nakba and steering young people toward action. In these books, particularly those published by the Palestinian Ministry of Education, the Nakba and its aftermath receive comprehensive treatment, while the existence of Israel is patently ignored.30 A number of geography books portray Palestine as one geographic-political unit, including all heretofore Arab cities that became part

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of Israel—Jaffa, Beisan (Bet She’an), Beersheba—while disregarding Israel’s existence or any of the cities founded by the Jews.31 Books for the lower grades contain poems by Darwish and ‘Abd al-Karim al-Karmi, particularly poems that discuss displacement and return.32 Similarly, history books abound with expressions of longing for destroyed localities, such as “Jaffa, your spilled blood is still sprayed on the ancient walls, and the locusts and the robbers finished off the desolate fields . . . Jaffa, we will return to you tomorrow with the harvest.”33 The teachers’ guides usually instruct teachers to arouse feelings of anger among the pupils over the Nakba and to foster hostility toward the enemy responsible for it.34 An especially interesting case of inculcation of the Nakba memory is found in the book Our Beautiful Language, published in 2000 for the sixth grade. It describes the flight of the Palestinian historian Mustafa Murad alDabbagh from Jaffa in 1948. The narrative emphasizes the fact that the draft of his life’s work, Our Land Filastin—on which he had worked assiduously for more than ten years, and which contained more than 6,000 pages—was lost. According to this tale, the draft was lost when it was thrown overboard, together with the briefcase in which it had been placed, in order to lighten the boat on which al-Dabbagh and other refugees fled the Jaffa port on a stormy day. Yet al-Dabbagh did not despair, and when he arrived in Lebanon he again took up his study, maintaining that it was aimed at serving the Palestinian people “so that they would not forget their stolen homeland and would act to redeem it.” The story serves as an illustration of the nature of Palestinian existence: on the one hand, loss and fear of the erosion of historic memory and identity (the lost work), and on the other hand, the determination to persevere by preserving the past and bring about correction of an “historic wrong.”35 The PNA also employ extracurricular measures to promote the Nakba memory, such as summer camps that devote a substantial part of their time to studying the 1948 war. Some camps are even named after localities abandoned in 1948, such as Safed, Yavneh, and Jaffa.36 In addition, the PNA publishes youth magazines, including Majallat al-Ashbal wal-Zaharat, which discusses the refugee situation at length, as well as the ruined localities and yearnings for return.37 The PNA media also serves as an effective agency in shaping mass consciousness, particularly in connection with events marking the Nakba’s fiftieth anniversary, both as a tool for disseminating its memory and as an instrument for mobilizing the masses and encouraging them to take part in the various memorial events. Both PNA TV and Voice of Palestine radio devote much of their broadcasting time to covering the Nakba Day events. These programs proceed according to the “open wave” format and include, inter alia, documentary films about the 1948 war, pictures of and

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commentary on the remnants of destroyed localities, and special spots dedicated to testimonies by “survivors of the Nakba.”38 The semiofficial dailies al-Ayyam and al-Hayat al-Jadida take a similar approach, publishing extensive articles covering the various issues of the Nakba. In February 1998 al-Ayyam started publishing a daily column, “In Order Not to Forget” (kay la nansi), which presents photographs from the Nakba period as well as articles about it.39 Fatah has also played an important role in the PNA promotion of the Nakba memory. The movement, which became the ruling PNA party and retained a stronghold on the PNA institutions and armed forces from 1994 to 2006, held public events, seminars, art exhibitions, and research studies focusing on the Nakba,40 partly in order to tighten the bonds between the people and the PNA but also as a means of mobilizing the population for violent action against Israel. The Nakba memory as a motive for activism In addition to its educational role, the Nakba memory served as a tool for mobilizing the population for action. In a sense, Arafat followed the course he had set in the 1950s and 1960s, during which Fatah transformed the Nakba memory from an object of grief and longing into an instrument for activism and combativeness. However, in view of the changing political circumstances, a different practical translation of this memory was required. The accords with Israel prevented Arafat, at least during the PNA early years, from using the Nakba memory as a stimulus for armed action against Israel. Consequently, he used the maneuvering room available to him, and encouraged an alternative type of struggle in the form of clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and the Israeli army. Also illustrating the concept of the Nakba memory as a stimulus to action is a statement by Ibrahim Abu Naja, deputy speaker of the PLC, who argued that the Nakba memory should be expressed with fewer displays of sorrow and self-criticism and with more of an eye toward realizing Palestinian national goals and undoing the Nakba’s outcome.41 The Nakba memory as “an operating code” for the Palestinian public is so effective because of the powerful emotional grip it has on the Palestinian consciousness. It is no wonder that the first public events organized by the PNA on the anniversary of the Nakba elicited a relatively large response from the Palestinian public. The commemorations, mostly organized by a commission especially created for the event, namely, the Supreme National Commission for Commemorating the Nakba, included a long series of processions, chief among them the “million persons’

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march” (masirat al-milyun), which took place simultaneously in several locations throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.42 That the Nakba commemoration days from 1998 onward elicited violent clashes with Israeli troops is a clear manifestation of its operational impact. The background of the first clashes in May 1998, which resulted in the death of eight people and in which hundreds were injured, was the stalemate in the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Arafat, who apparently sought to exert pressure on Israel, succeeded in mobilizing the Palestinian public for a violent popular struggle, taking advantage of the passions aroused on the Palestinian street during the Nakba Day commemorations.43 Similar events occurred in later years, particularly in 2000.44 Significantly, ever since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada (September 2000), which signified the Palestinian return to armed struggle against Israel, the Nakba days have stood out, mainly because of the large numbers of violent clashes and terrorist attacks they triggered.45 A closer look at various theories in social psychology and mass behavior might shed light on the power of the Nakba memory in motivating the Palestinians to action. In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) contended that the crowd is motivated only by the power of the subconscious and is captivated by visual symbols and emotions that arouse instincts.46 Georges Sorel (1847–1922) advanced this theory in Réflexions sur la violence by focusing on the capacity of myths to stimulate violence and self-sacrifice when they have penetrated the subconscious of the masses.47 Notwithstanding the problematic nature of Sorel’s theories, which constituted the platform from which Fascist thought evolved, they may supply at least a partial explanation for the consistent and impressive success of the Nakba idea in motivating the Palestinians to resort to violence. The Palestinian Islamic camp and the Nakba memory The Islamic opposition, which rejected the Oslo Accords, denied the legitimacy and legality of the PNA, and refused (until the parliamentary elections in 2006) to join its institutions, developed its own way of commemorating the Nakba. Hamas (an acronym for Harakat alMaqawama al-Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement), the armed political wing of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood and the leading Islamic opposition group, sought to become the political alternative to the nationalist leadership headed by the PLO. Consequently, it formulated an alternative political program and rejected the nationalist narrative propagated by Fatah and the PLO.48 The Islamists’ approach to the Nakba memory, and especially to the PNA attempts to shape it, reflects the ideological gap between the two

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camps regarding the desirability and price of an agreement with Israel. Essentially, members of the Islamic camp, like every sector of the Palestinian people, entertain deep-seated emotions on the Nakba. Most founding members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad experienced displacement and refugee life personally, as did the founding generation of Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It is no wonder, then, that both Islamic organizations were launched in the Gaza Strip refugee camps, where wretched living conditions and a powerful yearning for “the lost homeland” were merged with the growing despair over the political course pursued by the PLO leadership.49 The special emphasis the PNA puts on the Nakba memory confounds the Islamic movements. On the one hand, they value the preservation of the Nakba memory and aspirations for return, particularly as a means of propagating armed struggle against Israel; but at the same time, they recoil from participating in PNA activities, which might imply recognition of the legitimacy of the PNA, and consequently of the political accords with Israel, which they continued to oppose. As a way out of this dilemma, the Islamists, particularly Hamas, take part in the commemorative effort, which has encompassed the entire Palestinian people since 1998. Nevertheless, in contrast with the PNA’s nationalist presentation and interpretation of the Nakba, the Islamists emphasize the religious dimension of the 1948 tragedy. In Hamas’s view, the conflict is not just a struggle between Zionism and the Palestinian national movement, but rather a religious confrontation in which not only national territory has been lost but also, first and foremost, the holy endowed Islamic land (waqf). Thus, the Hamas organ Filastin al-Muslima has produced numerous descriptions of Islamic sites—mosques, cemeteries, and tombs of saints— that were either destroyed or put to other uses by Israelis after 1948.50 As a rule, the Islamists refuse to participate in Nakba commemoration events held by the PNA, organizing their own events instead. Likewise, they publicly ridicule the small number of participants in PNA events, compared with the larger crowds that they themselves draw.51 Following this course, the Islamist movements have managed to demonstrate the shared fate of the Palestinian people as a whole, while avoiding co-optation with the PNA or granting it any legitimacy.

The Nakba Memory and the al-Aqsa Intifada Precisely at the historic crossroads where it seemed to many that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was drawing nearer, the memory of the 1948 events came to the fore. All Palestinian factions presented the

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al-Aqsa Intifada as stemming from the Palestinian refusal to make compromises with regard to the refugees and from the adherence of the Palestinian leadership and public to the idea of return. This occurred at a time when serious discussions were held between Israel and the Palestinians on the refugee question. The failure of the diplomatic talks in the summer of 2000 and the eruption of the violent confrontation were viewed by many as the end of a decade in which the Palestinians had seemingly moved toward the goal of establishing a Palestinian state and had given up—albeit for a limited time only—on their long-term national goals, in the first place, return.52 In fact, many Palestinians viewed the resumption of armed struggle as national salvation, in view of their fear that return would be abandoned in favor of the goal of statehood. One of them, Salman Abu Sitta, director of the Palestinian ‘Awda Return Centre, London, had complained of abandonment of the 1948 goals for years, ever since the 1970s, in particular after the shifting of focus of activity in the Palestinian sector to the “inside.” According to him, this move produced “preoccupation with secondary goals, such as a port, an airfield, and secure crossing points.”53 The Nakba was the very center of the al-Aqsa Intifada. In many respects, this struggle reflected an almost complete identity between Palestinian society and leadership. Standing on the verge of a historic decision was like touching a painfully exposed nerve in the Palestinian consciousness. The occasion signalled to the Palestinians that they needed to take a much closer look at their aims and objectives, a situation that once again immersed them in the past, and led them down a path lacking any clearly defined goals. The direction followed by the violent struggle further intensified the Nakba memory. As on many previous occasions, the combat was viewed as a continuation of the past, and as the outcome of an unending effort to dispossess the Palestinians of their land. The destruction of houses in the Rafah refugee camp, for example, was described as a “second Nakba.” Likewise, the fierce battle in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 was described as the continuation of similar battles that had taken place in the area in 1948, and as additional evidence of Israel’s aim to expel and destroy.54 Conversely, the prolongation of the al-Aqsa Intifada, due to the steady erosion of power of the Palestinian administration, destroyed the political infrastructure that had been created with great effort while distancing the Palestinians from their historical goals—whether statehood or return. But the protracted intifada also led to the rise of other voices in the Palestinian camp, which called for sobering up from delusions about a close possibility of return and demanded instead that national sovereignty be promoted. A good many of these voices were of prominent personalities in the

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pragmatic Palestinian camp, who felt that the base of their strength, which rested on control of the political-diplomatic apparatus, was being eroded as the focus of power shifted from the Palestinian leadership to the common people. Mahmud ‘Abbas (Abu Mazen) stood out in this context. In the summer of 2002, he argued before a Palestinian audience in the al-Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria that there was no chance that the refugees would return to homes where generations of Jews had meanwhile been born and raised.55 Yasser ‘Abd-Rabbuh, the Palestinian minister of information and culture, claimed that as a reasonable politician he was “ready to take a painful diplomatic position” even though one should not expect him to forget his house in Jaffa.56 The Palestinian writer and journalist Hasan Khadr expressed the full acceptance of the idea of a state as follows: It is enough for me that I am in Palestine. I confess that I love Acre more than Khan Yunis, where I was born. Small things make me happy: raising a big Christmas tree in the Square of the Unknown Soldier . . . Besides, I wait impatiently for completion of work on the road linking Gaza and Deir alBalakh . . . It is no longer possible to recreate the lost paradise. The homeland is in our hands, crumbling and warped and looking forward to rescue. We have an ever-evolving identity; it will develop with every meter that we take away from the occupation, and every road that we pave, every book that we print, every woman that we embrace and every decision that we make in the domain of social and political organization, and of human rights.57

Conclusion The Nakba memory and its concrete representation—the refugee problem—constitute a central anchor of Palestinian collective identity and the chief political motivation of the modern Palestinian national movement. The Nakba memory, as Baruch Kimmerling has pointed out, is to a great extent similar to that of the Jewish Holocaust in that it contains elements that are at the same time debilitating and constructive.58 Thus, at its inception the national myth contained elements that induced passivity in the Palestinians. However, in view of a changed historical reality and of new needs, the Nakba has become the central axis of Palestinian national awakening, which has intensified the aspirations for change and channeled the Palestinians toward activism. Moreover, as it was unfolding, the Nakba memory became part of the public domain of all sectors of the Palestinian people, attaining the status of symbol or narrative for the entire population. It succeeded in unifying the dispersed communities of many subgroups (outside and inside, West Bankers and Gaza Strip residents,

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Muslims and Christians, nationalists and Islamists, city dwellers and villagers, and so forth). Following the establishment of the PNA and with the help of modern state mechanisms such as the state media and educational system, the status of the Nakba memory rose, both as a means of mobilizing public support for the PNA and as a tool for active struggle against Israel. The frequent and comprehensive use of memory in the Palestinian arena transformed the Nakba into a kind of “active past,” that is, a memory perceived by individuals and groups as a continuing experience. Those who carry this memory share with their fathers not only a common experience and a common sense of fate, but also a future destiny, which requires that they take action. The more problematic aspect of the Nakba memory is inherent in its role as “the Palestinian national complex,” which implies a lack of historical decision on the part of the Palestinians as to what their national goals are. In more practical terms, it refers to the vacillation between “the goal of statehood,” which entails painful national concessions but is realizable relatively quickly, and the goal of “revolution,” that is, return and full liberation, which calls for the Palestinians to be patient and determined for many years to come. In this context, the Nakba memory, as embodied in the past and the present, serves as “a historical ghost” that looms over the Palestinian community, embodying the humiliation of the past, aspirations for vengeance, and yearnings for return. Consequently, it tilts the Palestinians toward the goal of “revolution,” and against statehood. Concurrently, some Palestinians have sought creative solutions to the refugee problem, which is viewed by both sides as the very heart of the conflict. The historian Rashid al-Khalidi, the former PNA minister Ziyad Abu Ziyad, and Sari Nusseibeh, president of al-Quds University, proposed various solutions, based on an Israeli recognition of moral responsibility for the creation of the problem and acceptance of the principle of right of return for the refugees and their descendants. They stressed that realization of return would be to a Palestinian state and not to the original places of habitation, and called for a mechanism for financial compensations for the refugees: this would enable the resettlement (tawtin) in various Arab states of those Palestinians who do not want to return to the “inside,” as well as the limited return of several tens of thousands of Palestinians to Israeli territory in the framework of family reunification.59 The prevalent view in the Palestinian community, however, is that any solution other than full realization of the right of return, even at the price of postponing it for an indefinite period of time, should be rejected. This approach repudiates without discussion the idea of financial compensation, substitute real estate, or, in particular, naturalization in Arab states, which has become a pejorative concept among Palestinians.60

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At this point, it might be interesting to compare the Palestinian Nakba memory with that of other peoples in modern history who have experienced displacement and a life of exile—such as the Circassians and Chechens who chose to leave their homes, conquered by Russia, and migrated to the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century; the Turks and Greeks who were forced to leave their homes following the 1923 Turkish-Greek population exchange agreement; the millions of refugees on the Indian subcontinent following the 1947 partition; and the 15 million Germans expelled from their homes in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. In none of these cases did the group of refugees maintain such strong and long-lasting aspirations regarding a possible repatriation as did the Palestinians. One explanation may be the obvious religious-cultural background of the Nakba. Accordingly, the intensity of the Palestinian memory of displacement is an inherent part of the perception of loss of Islamic land in the heart of the Middle East with its scores of Islamic holy places. This is especially traumatic when the enemy has for hundreds of years been viewed as an inferior “protected” minority (ahl al-dhimma). In a culture characterized by the very tight link between political control and religion, the memory of humiliation and loss is intensified manyfold, as the memory of the loss of al-Andalus in the fifteenth century, for instance, is still engraved in the consciousness of the Islamic world. Another explanation relates to the traditional nature of Palestinian society, in which possession of land constitutes a central component of an individual’s identity and status. Therefore, losing one’s land is perceived as a deep mark of shame, constantly reminding the person of what is missing and rallying him to restore his honor. Still, these arguments do not explain why equally active “return movements” do not exist among the Muslim groups mentioned above. All the refugee groups mentioned moved to “mother states,” which were anxious to absorb them, and did eventually integrate into the host societies. By contrast, the Palestinians after the Nakba remained stateless and were rejected by their host countries. For the most part, they resettled in refugee camps, which perpetuated their tragic fate. Their wretched everyday lives and the feelings of alienation from the surrounding society provided a constant reaffirmation of the Nakba memory. Refugees from other states accounted for only a small part of the host nations and could therefore be absorbed more easily. In the Palestinian case, the number of displaced people constitutes about half the population. This uniqueness has implanted in the Palestinians a stronger loathing for the reality in which they are entrapped, and has stimulated them more resolutely toward changing the course of history. The Palestinians do, in any case, emphasize the uniqueness of their

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national experience as an uprooted people. Most of the German refugees accepted German guilt and the concomitant price they had to pay, whereas the Palestinians regard themselves as victims of a systematic plan to dispossess them from their land, and to blur their national identity.61 The Palestinian leadership, too, has played a crucial role in this regard. Until his death in 2004, PLO and PNA Chairman Yasser Arafat embodied “the national schizophrenia” of the Palestinians. He saw himself as a living symbol of the Nakba (even though he did not experience it personally).62 He was the one who brought the Palestinian case to the “stage of statehood.” He was the one who, in fact, set up the modern Palestinian arena and developed a Palestinian national consciousness. And he was also the one who brought it down to extremely low depths. It remains to be seen whether a Palestinian leader will arise who, like David Ben Gurion of Israel or Michael Collins of Ireland, will prefer the “goal of statehood,” limited as it may be, over a continued holding onto vague nationalist utopian aspirations. Will such a leader be able to withstand the power of collective memory engraved in Palestinian consciousness and enable a new shaping of the Nakba memory, neutralizing its explosive character? Following eight years of bloody struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, the al-Aqsa Intifada increasingly appears as a violent eruption that has resuscitated, for both Palestinians and Jews, ghosts of the past that had seemed to have at least partially faded away. Thus, Palestinian yearnings for return and fears of “transfer” intensified, just as was the Jewish fear that return would totally destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Notes 1. For historical analyses of the Palestinian defeat, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Yoav Gelber, Palestine, 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2001); Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). 2. The Israeli version is that 290 villages were destroyed, while Palestinian researchers, such as Mustafa al-Dabbagh and Salih ‘Abd al-Jawad, counted 470 destroyed localities. Walid al-Khalidi claimed that out of 418 localities, 292 (70%) were totally destroyed, 90 (22%) were mostly destroyed, and seven (2%) were settled by Jews and therefore not destroyed. See Walid al-Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), preface, pp. xvi, xix. 3. The number of Palestinian refugees is a subject of bitter dispute. United Nations estimates compiled shortly after the war put the number of displaced Palestinians at 700,000 to 875,000. Israeli estimates claim 550,000 to 650,000,

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while the Palestinians hold that the number is higher than 900,000. See Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 147; Danny Rubinstein, The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home (New York: Times Books, 1991), pp. 3–5; Salman Abu Sitta, “Palestinian Right to Return . . . Sacred, Legal, and Possible,” The Palestinian Return Centre (London, 1 May 1999), http://www.prc.org.uk 4. Jabra I. Jabra, “The Palestinian Exile as Writer,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 84. 5. Emanuel Sivan, Arab Political Myths (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1988, in Hebrew), pp. 9–11. 6. Harold Schimmel, “Treatise on Memory,” Teorya u-Biqoret, no. 4 (Fall 1993, in Hebrew): 20. 7. Edward Said, “al-Talfiq, al-dhakira, wal-makan,” al-Karmil (Ramallah), nos. 70–71 (Winter–Spring 2002): 95–96; Anthony Smith, “The ‘Golden Age’ and National Renewal,” in Geoffrey Hosking and George Schopflin, eds., Myths and Nationhood (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 37. 8. Ali E. Hillal Dessouki, “Arab Intellectuals and al-Nakbah: The Search for Fundamentalism,” Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 2 (May 1973): 187–89. See the essay by Esther Webman in this book, which shows that the use of the term Nakba to denote the Palestinian predicament began in 1945. 9. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Intelligentsia: Time to Give Up the Ghost,” Civil Society 7, no.77 (May 1998): 4. 10. Nimer Sirhan, “The Nakbah in Palestinian Folk literature,” Palestine-Israel Journal 5, nos. 3–4 (1998): 153. 11.This phrase was mistakenly attributed to the Zionist activist Yisrael Zangwill but was in fact coined by the Scottish minister Alexander Keith in 1843, who believed that the small Arab population of nineteenth-century Palestine would not pose a problem to mass Jewish immigration. See Diana Muir, “A Land without a People for a People without a Land,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2008, 55–62. 12. Ibrahim Abu Lughod, “al-Yawm al-akhir qabla sukut Yaffa” al-Karmil, nos. 55–56 (Spring–Summer 1998): 118–19; Fathiyya Nasro, “al-‘Ibar al-mustafada khilal khamsin ‘aman ila nakbat Filastin,” al-Siyasa al-filastiniyya (Nablus), no. 18 (Spring 1998): 48; Sharif Kan‘ana, “Hatmiyat tard al-sukan al-‘arab al-filastiniyyin wa-tadmir qurahim,” al-mujtama‘ al-filastini—arba ‘in ‘aman ‘ala al-Nakba wa-wahid wa-‘ishrin ‘aman ‘ala ihtilal al-Diffa wal-Quta‘ (Jerusalem: Matba‘at al-amal, no date), pp. 135–42; Walid ‘Ud in al-Quds, 14 May 2002; Samih Shabib in al-Majlis al-Tashri‘i, no. 4 (April 1998), p. 4. 13. Jabra, “Palestinian Exile,” p. 77. 14. The Palestinian sociologist Jamil Hilal contends that from 1948 until the mid1960s, there was no Palestinian national elite. The void created after the disintegration of the national elite in 1948 was filled by a local leadership that acted on a tribal-clan basis; see his Takwin al-nukhba al-filastiniyya mundhu Nushu’ al-haraka al-wataniyya al-filastiniyya ila ma ba‘d qiyam al-Sulta al-wataniyya (Ramallah: Muwatin–al-mu’asasa al-filastiniyya lil-darasat al-dimakratiyya 2002), pp. 29–32.

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15. “Reflections of the Nakbah” (compendium of testimonies, in English), Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): p. 7. 16. See for instance Fawaz Turki, who says that only after native Lebanese sneered, “Go back to the place from where you came,” did he become aware of his Palestinian identity. The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian in Exile (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 8–9. 17. Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 1979), pp. 124–26. 18. See Harkabi, “The Palestinians and Their Awakening,” pp. 261, 276–77; Matti Steinberg, “A Generation Goes and a Generation Comes: The ‘Nakba’ Generation and the ‘Armed Struggle’ Generation,” in Wars, Revolutions, and Generational Identity, ed. Yosi Mali (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001, in Hebrew), pp. 119–23; and Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 180. 19. Issa al-Shuaibi, “The Development of Palestinian Entity-Consciousness, Part I,” Journal of Palestine Studies 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1979): 77–79. 20. Rubinstein, People of Nowhere, p. 131. 21. ‘Azmi Bishara, “Fi al-dhakira wal-ta’rikh,” al-Karmil (Ramallah), no. 50 (Winter 1997): 45–48. 22. Sawt wa-Sura, no. 1, August 1998, p. 3. 23. See an example in Arafat’s remarks on the occasion of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the outbreak of the “armed struggle” of Fatah, ‘Risalat al-akh Yasser ‘Arafat—ra’is al-lajna al-tanfidhiyya li-munazzamat tahrir Filastin— al-qa’id al-‘am li-quwat al-thawra al-filastiniyya, fi al-dhikra al-rabi‘a wa‘l-‘ishrin lintalaqat al-thawra al-filastiniyya—1/1/89,” Shu’un Filastiniyya (Nicosia), no. 190. 24. See a good illustration of this claim in al-Sabah, no. 131, 18 May 1998. 25. Al-Karama, no. 173, 18 May 2000. 26. Al-Ayyam, 8 May 2001. 27. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 19. 28. Department of Geographic Information, Gaza Municipality, Urban Map of the City of Gaza (1998); Yedi‘ot Ahronot, Supplement, 26 September 1999; al-Hayat al-Jadida, 12 January 2000; al-Ayyam, 5 October 1996 and 3 July 2000. 29. The 1998 ceremonies were organized for the most part by the National Committee for Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, and headed by Yasser ‘Abd-Rabbuh, the PNA minister of information and culture. Regarding its various activities, see al-Hayat al-Jadida, 20 February 1998, 27 March 1998, 6 May 2001; al-Quds, 17 March 1998. For a description of the regular ceremonies that take place every year on 15 May, see Voice of Palestine, 12 May 2000; Palestinian State Television, 12 May 2001; Haaretz, 16 May 2001. Israeli Television, Channel One, 15 May 2001. 30. Although schools in the West Bank were under direct Israeli administration, the textbooks followed the Jordanian curriculum, and the Egyptian curriculum in the Gaza Strip. With the creation of the PNA, new Palestinian curricula were prepared by the Center for Developing Palestinian Curricula, headed by

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31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

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Ibrahim Abu Lughod, under the sponsorship of UNESCO and the Palestinian Ministry of Education. ‘Umar Musallam, Faysal Ghawadra, Hilmi Hasan, and Maha Halas, Lughatuna al-jamila lil-saff al-awwal al-asasi – al-juz’ al-awwal (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya—Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim, 2000), p. 7; Mahmud ‘Atallah, Safa' Bashir, ‘Abdallah ‘Abd al-Raziq, ‘Ali Dhiyab al-A‘war, Muhammad al-Sadiq, Yusuf Jum‘a, al-Tarbiyya al-wataniyya lil-saff al-sadis al-asasi (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya—Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim, 2000), pp. 8, 9, 42; ‘Abd al-Karim Abu Khushan and Jamal Yunus, Zaynab ‘Ayyash, Nabil Rumana, Yasir al-Mallah, Lughatuna aljamila lil-saff al-sadis al-asasi—al-juz’ al-awwal (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta alWataniyya al-Filastiniyya – Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim, 2000), pp. 115, 120. Muhammad Jawad al-Nuri, Amin Badr al-Kakhn, ‘Ali Khalil Hamad, Zaynab Talab, ‘Ali Shihada Manasira, Ahmad Muhammad al-Khatib, Lughatuna al-jamila lil-saff al-sabi‘ al-asasi – al-juz’ al-awwal (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya—Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim, 2001–2), p. 40. See The Book of Expression and Summarizing for Grade 8, p. 20, as quoted in Itamar Marcus, The New Textbooks of the Palestinian Authority for Grades 1 and 6 (Jerusalem: MICP, 2001, Hebrew). ‘Umar Mahmud Musallam, Ahmad Muhammad al-Khatib, Fatima Khalil Hamad, and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Isma‘il Abu Hinna, Lughatuna al-jamila lil-saff al-thani al-asasi – al-Juz’ al-awwal (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya—Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim (2001–2), p. 60. Itamar Marcus, The Palestinian Authority: Teachers’ Guides, March 2000 (Jerusalem: MICP, 2001), p. 12. Abu Khushan, et al., Lughatuna, pp. 110–12. See an example of such camps in al-Ayyam, 5 July 2000. Most summer camps were organized by the National Political Guidance Administration, a semimilitary institution of the PNA, which specializes in political indoctrination, especially among the Palestinian security. See examples in the “History of Palestine” feature in the same organ, which presents a comprehensive account of the village in Galilee, namely, Safuriyya (Sepphoris, Tsipori), and includes its own history and the story of its conquest in 1948, Majallat al-Ashbal wal-Zaharat, no. 18, March 2000, p. 8. Likewise, see the illustration of an old woman holding a key, which reawakens the memory of a lost house. Ibid., no. 20, May 2000, front page and last page. See for instance the program “Cities in Palestine,” broadcast on 10 August 1997 on PNA TV, and describing the transformation of Arab buildings in Acre, Haifa, Beersheba, and Jaffa into Israeli restaurants, business houses, and nightclubs. Toward the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba, both the Voice of Palestine and PNA TV produced numerous programs on the war, such as “From the Nakba Memory,” “Names That You Will Not Forget,” “Pictures from the Nakba.” See Sawt wa-Sura, no. 1, August 1998, pp. 11–15. In 1998, Yasser ‘Abd-Rabbuh, the chairman of the National Committee for Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Nakba, called for Palestinian newspapers to highlight the 1948 events in order to instill their memory in the

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40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

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younger generation, al-Hayat al-Jadida, 6 March 1998. For examples of detailed descriptions of abandoned localities, see: on the village of Dir Tarif (near Ramlah), the organ of the Palestinian Waqf Ministry, al-Minbar, no. 34, April 2001, pp. 39–43; on ‘Asqalan (Ashqelon), Watani (organ of the Palestinian General Security apparatus), no. 25, 1998, pp. 30–38; and personal testimonies of the Nakba in al-Sabah, 22 May 2000, p. 4, and Filastin al-Yawm, 19 May 2001, pp. 12–15 (both are organs of the apparatus for national and political guidance). Al-Karama, no. 174, 25 May 2000, p. 8; al-Quds, 25 March 2001; PNA TV, 27 April 2001. Al-Hayat al-Jadida, 13 May 1998. Al-Majlis, July 1998, pp. 43–44. Khalid Amayreh, “Nakba Day Ends with Bloodshed,” Middle East International, no. 575 (22 May 1998): 5–6. See for example the violent clashes on 15 May 2000, al-Karama, no. 173, 18 May 2000, p. 1. See for instance, Israeli TV, Channel One, 15 May 2001. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Viking, 1960), p. 52. Ze’ev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 57–68. For general studies on Hamas, see Ziyad Abu Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Meir Litvak, “The Islamization of the Israeli-Arab Conflict: The Case of Hamas,” Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 1(1998): 148–63. For a social analysis of the Hamas movement, see Michael Milshtein, The Green Revolution: The Social Profile of Hamas (Tel Aviv: Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2007, in Hebrew). For Fatah, see Idem, Between Revolution and State: Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority (Tel Aviv: Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2001) and Rex Brynen, “The Dynamics of Palestinian Elite Formation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 95 (Spring 1995): 31–43. On Islamic jihad, see Meir Hatina, Islam and Salvation in Palestine: The Islamic Jihad Movement (Tel Aviv, Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2001). See pictures of, among others, abandoned religious sites that changed their purpose, such as mosques in Ashqelon (al-Majdal), Beersheba, Safed, and others, in issues of the Hamas organ, Filastin al-Muslima, no. 9, September 1999; no. 10, October 1999; no. 3, March 2000; no. 4, April 2000; no. 5, May 2000; no. 7, July 2000; no. 8, August 2000. See for example claims in the organ of the Islamic National Salvation Party, which is identified with Hamas, that on Nakba Day in 1998 less than a tenth of the half-million Palestinians who had voluntarily attended the funeral of Yahya ‘Ayyash could be found on the streets of Gaza. ‘Ayyash was a senior Hamas activist killed by Israel in January 1996. Al-Risala, 21 May 1998.

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52. For an analysis of the failure of the Camp David summit, see Shimon Shamir and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (eds.), The Camp David Summit: What Went Wrong? (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2005). 53. Abu Sitta, “This Land Is Mine,” p. 22. 54. See descriptions in this vein in al-Hayat al-Jadida, 11 January 2002 (with regard to Rafah); al-Quds, 14 May 2002 (with regard to Jenin). 55. As to Abu Mazen’s remarks, see Haaretz, 5 September 2002; for Sha‘ath’s, see Akiva Eldar, “Interview with Nabil Sha‘ath,” Palestine-Israel Journal 9, no. 2 (2002): 22. 56. Haaretz, 13 December 2001. 57. Khader, “Was I Here?” p. 269. 58. Barukh Kimmerling, “al-Nakba,” Teorya u-Biqoret, nos. 12–13 (1999), p. 37. 59. In regard to al-Khalidi’s ideas, see Tamari, Return, Resettlement, p. 38; for Nusseibeh, see Sari Nusseibeh and Mark A Heller, Without Drums or Trumpets: An Arrangement for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1992), pp. 69–70, 76; for the ideas of Abu Ziyad, Haaretz, 23 July 2002. 60. Arafat called the Tawtin a crime, and claimed that he was not willing to discuss a solution of this kind: see Yotam Feldman and Aluma Solnik, “Palestinian Thoughts on the Right of Return,” http://www.memri.org/, p. 1. 61. See an example of this argument: Yezid Sayigh, “The Politics of Palestinian Exile,” Third World Quarterly 9, no. 1 (January 1987): 29. 62. Arafat often stressed that he was “a refugee of a people of refugees.” His image became a symbol of the continuing Nakba, after his personal ordeals of being hunted and exiled. See Rubinstein, Arafat: A Portrait (Lod, Israel: Zemorahbitan, 2001, in Hebrew), pp. 30–35, 84–85. Arafat attests to his belonging to “the Nakba community,” relying (as he said) on the expulsion from Jerusalem that his mother’s family—Abu Sa‘ud—experienced in 1948. See Yedi‘ot Ahronot, Sabbath Supplement, 8 February 2002.

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3

Memory “from Below”: Palestinian Society and the Nakba Memory Michael Milshtein

he evolution of the Nakba memory refutes the popular conception that national myths are instilled and passed on only by ruling elites. In this regard, the Palestinians—both “inside,” in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and “outside,” in the diaspora—are an exception, since they have never lived under sovereign Palestinian rule. (Palestinian refugees in Jordan in 1968–70 and in Lebanon throughout the 1970s lived under semisovereign PLO rule.) Under those circumstances, the way the Nakba memory is preserved by the common people and the dynamics between the society and the national leadership are of great importance. Throughout their daily lives, refugee communities have sought to preserve the Nakba memory and instill it in a younger generation that has not experienced it directly. This urge manifests itself in a system of practices and rituals, such as

T

1. keeping Ottoman land deeds or mandatory identity certificates as testimonies of ownership of property and real estate, and holding on to the keys to houses that were abandoned. These items are passed on from one generation to the next;1 2. naming schools and businesses after abandoned towns and villages;2 3. preserving primordial social and familial links, even in exile, including marriage ties, shared places of residence, and even separate, local burial plots. Ghada al-Karmi describes the practices followed by her parents, who had settled in London, claiming that “this was their

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4. 5.

6. 7.

means of reviving the lost homeland, as if the families and villages that they had known still existed, in the expectation that they would get them back”;3 establishing associations and clubs that bring together descendants of abandoned localities; fostering young people’s awareness of and attachment to the place of origin of their forefathers—indeed, young people born in refugee camps after 1948 often maintain that the abandoned town or village is their place of origin or even their birthplace, and not the camp in which they were born;4 preserving memories through nostalgic stories and popular folklore, which perpetuate a past, lost life;5 visiting the site of homes that were destroyed. This practice is often extremely disappointing, particularly when Jewish towns or villages with different, Hebrew names have been established there. The Palestinian-American writer Fawaz Turki, for instance, attests to such deep feelings of disappointment when he returned to his house in the Halisa neighborhood in Haifa in 1992, expressing his shock at the renewed encounter with Haifa, which, he said, “is not my home anymore!”6

All generations of refugees have therefore sought to perpetuate the Nakba memory in everyday life, closely integrating it into their lives. Many underline the temporary nature of their stay in exile, for instance, by refusing to improve their living conditions or to sign long-term work contracts, for fear that these acts might be interpreted as forsaking the dream of return. Al-Karmi relates that her parents consistently refused to learn English or to make local friends after they moved to Britain.7 Others, as Turki reports, tried to alleviate the pain of uprooting by mythologizing the past as a “paradise lost” (al-firdus al-mafqud )—they did this by creating the illusion that “time in Palestine had stopped,” and that no change had taken place in a world that was lost to them in 1948—or, according to Yehoshafat Harkabi, by suppressing the memory of the dark sides of Palestinian life before 1948. Nearly all refugees insisted that the younger generation carry on the commitment to return, instilling in them the feeling of being uprooted and a yearning for something missing—an awareness so powerful that the youth felt as if they themselves had experienced the Nakba.8 Various communities of refugees have thus developed as “communities of memory,” in which people take part in activities that reflect a strong commitment to both the memory of the past and dreams of return in the future. They have persistently refused to come to terms with the stark reality, and perpetuate the past as an open wound. The Palestinian national

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poet Mahmud Darwish describes how his mother refused to go to weddings and took part only in funerals after al-Barwa, the family’s village in the Galilee, had been destroyed.9 Another way in which the Nakba memory is shaped “from below” is through various projects that document life in the past, focusing on the lost localities and their histories before and throughout the 1948 war. The PLO has supported many of these projects, but many others, especially those launched in the 1950s and 1960s, were the products of independent initiatives. The various documentation initiatives included, among others, detailed descriptions of destroyed localities, their histories, land registers, and populations. During this period, Palestinians also compiled encyclopedic works on the lost homeland and its villages. Most prominent among them is the historian ‘Arif al-‘Arif ’s al-Nakba—Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis wal-Firdus al-Mafqud [The Nakba: The Nakba of Jerusalem and the lost paradise],10 Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh’s eleven volumes of Biladuna Filastin [Our country Palestine],11 and Hajj Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib’s Min athar alnakba [Remains of the Nakba]. Added to these were studies supported by PLO institutions, including a comprehensive memorialization research project, All That Remains, promoted by the historian Walid al-Khalidi. The project comprises detailed documentation of all the localities that were destroyed, including data about the principal families in each locality, the prevailing type of agriculture, the conquest of these localities by the Israeli army, descriptions of what remains of the villages, and their present use or settlement by Israeli Jews. Statehood or Return? The Nakba Memory in Palestinian Public Discourse since the Establishment of the Palestinian Authority Paradoxically, the peculiar circumstances of the Israeli occupation and the absence of an effective Palestinian government prior to 1994 gave the Palestinian “inside” (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) the rare opportunity to develop components of a relatively independent civic society. Even after the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was established, and despite the fact that it was a centralized government aspiring to exert maximal influence over society, the “inside” community—unlike most Middle Eastern societies—remained relatively independent vis-à-vis the PNA. One of the most striking manifestations of Palestinian civic society after the establishment of the PNA is the ongoing and lively debate over whether the Palestinian public space has reached a postrevolutionary stage. Those who initiated the discussion argued that, in view of the Palestinian progress toward their national goals—that is, first and

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foremost, an independent state—they should forgo the stage of national mobilization they had maintained for so many years. This “mobilization” approach, they contended, prevented internal criticism and stocktaking among the Palestinians, and thwarted efforts to advance any issue that was not part of a political or military effort. The central issue around which the discussion revolved concerned the Palestinian national goals: Should the Palestinians focus their efforts on achieving statehood, even at the cost of painful national concessions, or should they continue to adhere to the goals of return and total liberation? The increasing preoccupation with the 1948 defeat elicited a fascinating public debate, including the question of the correct approach to the Nakba memory, which demonstrated the ability of the Palestinian community to play a central role in shaping national myths, in conjunction with the government.

The Nakba discourse as a postrevolutionary signifier? The debate on the Nakba memory was led by a handful of intellectuals and public figures, but never directly involved the general public. Still, it reflected a process of change that took place in the consciousness of Palestinian society as a whole after the establishment of the PNA. The core issue was how the Nakba should be remembered, and whether, in view of the prospected attainment of statehood (or “semistatehood”), it was necessary to reexamine this national myth more critically and consider the lessons to be drawn from it. Those who led the debate wanted to divest the Nakba memory of the romantic and ideological components that had embodied it for years and had, in their view, prevented its critical scrutiny. Hasan Khader, a prominent journalist and writer, who served as director general of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, argued that “Palestine was never a paradise.”12 This statement was meant to dim the sanctity of the Nakba memory in a way that would grant the Palestinians a sharper perspective on their past and would help them understand where they had erred and how they could rectify the situation in the future. Similarly, the historian ‘Azzam Nassar asserted that despite the status of the Nakba as a formative pillar of Palestinian identity, research about it had been rather scant. In his view, this situation was mainly caused by the fact that most archives in the Arab states were closed to the public. Another reason was the heavily politicized public opinion regarding the Nakba. These factors made it difficult for Palestinians to evaluate the historical truth behind the event and, more importantly, extract from it vital lessons to improve their future.13

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Yezid Sayigh, a Palestinian historian based in Oxford, and Musa alBudayri, a political scientist at al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, tried to examine the Nakba memory from another critical angle. They asked in what ways members of the second generation of the Nakba continued to foster awareness of the event through their parents’ stories or old photographs, even though it was not part of their personal experience. Sayigh’s and al-Budayri’s skeptical approach became apparent in their assertion that the memory of the Nakba could never encompass the entire nation, because many sectors of the population had neither experienced it directly nor felt its outcome personally, and therefore felt its significance less intensely.14 Another problem related to memory and commemoration of the Nakba was the dominance of the nationalist-ideological narrative, at the expense of the individual dimension. Some argued that the very emphasis on a collective-nationalist narrative inevitably prevented the scrutiny of the Nakba from a more personal angle. Ghada al-Karmi, for one, underlined the need to highlight the mental state of individuals when investigating the Nakba.15 The debate over the Nakba legacy helped various groups promote social goals that opposed the government in a way seldom seen in other Arab states. Fatihiyya Nasro, a behavioral scientist from Bir Zeit University, argued that the Nakba reflected an ongoing crisis in Palestinian society that would only end in the event of profound social and cultural changes, and with the establishment of a civil society in the Palestinian arena.16 To a certain extent, this discourse embodied a desire to focus on optimal and realizable goals for the future, rather than, to use Mahmud Darwish’s words, remaining “prisoners of history and victims of the past.” This new discourse ended with the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, when Palestinian society promptly returned to earlier political and ideological conventions.

Perpetuating the Nakba memory at the popular level The public discourse on the Nakba memory drew much attention and generated a bitter polemic in the Palestinian intellectual world. However, it remained a small part of the activity surrounding the memorial events that swept Palestinian society in the late 1990s, including the broad endeavors of memorialization and documentation that developed from initiatives from “below.” These initiatives did not correspond to the critical spirit or the desire to dispel myths, which typified the discourse of the intellectual elite regarding the Nakba; instead, they paralleled the patterns

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of action and the goals the government was aiming for. Social activity thus reflected another facet of the symbiotic relationship between public and government that had traditionally characterized the Palestinian arena. Before discussing the handling of the Nakba memory at the popular level after 1994, a few words on the changing attitudes of the refugees are in order. Most refugees did not view the establishment of the PNA and the ongoing negotiations as implying a readiness for concessions and compromise, or as giving preference to immediate statehood over the realization of the dream of return. However, a rude awakening from the dream came fairly soon. As negotiations dragged on, a discussion of the refugee problem was repeatedly postponed. Moreover, the return from the diaspora to the PNA territory was not to be of large numbers of refugees, but of just a few tens of thousands of Palestinians.17 As a result, the Palestinians, and the refugees in particular, became involved in an intense discussion about which national goal they ought to focus on: immediate statehood or return to the homeland at some undetermined, distant future. The historian Rashid al-Khalidi, who lives in the United States, accurately defined this dilemma when he asked: “How will the Palestinians adopt the idea of conceding territories conquered in 1948, but which have always been considered part of Palestine?”18 Ibrahim Abu Lughod on his part wondered whether the Palestinians could draw consolation from establishing a Palestinian authority, where a minority would live under an autonomous government, giving up the right of return.19 Salim Tamari, a prominent Palestinian sociologist, defined this question as part of “the new dichotomy in Palestinian politics,” which distinguished between partisans of the “goal of return” and partisans of the “goal of a state.”20 The sweeping answer supplied by the Palestinian public to the question of the Nakba memory negated all concessions on return. This response reflected not only adherence to the memory but also a deep frustration with a diplomatic process that had initially seemed to implement the rectification of a “historical wrong.”21 Thus, paradoxically, the possibility of a diplomatic arrangement and statehood lessened all hope of return and intensified the fear of a continued exile. This further reinforced the longing and emphatic demand for return. Salman Abu Sitta, director of the al‘Awda (Return) Center in London, which focuses on elaborating plans to realize the right of return, clearly expressed the precedence of the idea of return. He challenged the possibility of finding a solution to the Palestinian problem in terms of statehood. Since the 1970s, the Palestinians’ right of return has lost its central place among the demands of the Palestinian people . . . A situation has been created according to which the Palestinian question is reduced to the results of

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the June 1967 war. And that’s not it. The Palestinian question has “existed for some one hundred years” . . . The chief road marker of the Palestinian question is the Nakba of 1948 . . . The solution offered in the framework of two states and an Israeli withdrawal to the borders of 4 June 1967 does not ensure that the rights of the Palestinian people will be implemented.22

The intensification of the Nakba memory since 1998, together with the Palestinian insistence on return, has found expression in a broad range of projects and public initiatives. The main ideas were identical to those of the PNA, although they contained independent features, including elements of a critical discourse, and very often a personal dimension. The following initiatives were put forward: 1. Documentation projects: Documentation projects, such as local initiatives to gather testimonies from Palestinians who had experienced the Nakba,23 and projects of nongovernmental institutions to document materials connected with the Nakba.24 A number of interviews with survivors were published in the nongovernmental press,25 and an extensive project launching new Web sites was devoted to memorializing the Nakba. These included files of testimonies, extensive information about destroyed localities, documents, photographs, and fiction.26 2. Academic research: Most academic studies did not strive for critical analysis of the Nakba memory or for a reexamination of its essence, but focused on detailed documentation of everyday life in the Palestinian localities prior to 1948 and their disintegration during the war.27 3. Communal activities bringing together people from localities destroyed in 1948:28 Families visited destroyed localities.29 Cultural and educational activities involving the youth were organized in refugee camps. These activities bolstered the participants’ knowledge of the localities their parents hailed from.30 Several community memorial books were published. Such “agents of memory” are common in societies of displaced persons, for example among Eastern European Jews (particularly Holocaust survivors), Armenians, and Germans uprooted from their towns and villages in Eastern Europe after World War II.31 Most of these activities were carried out inside the PNA territory, which had become the heart of Palestinian nationalist activity. The diaspora—sometimes labeled “the flame of the Nakba memory”—was temporarily devoid of leadership and became politically marginalized. However, it did not remain inactive: in various Arab countries, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan,

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refugee organizations engaged in a variety of activities—from informational seminars to mass rallies.32 In Western countries, the main activities centered on setting up organizations and Web sites for documenting the Nakba (especially on gathering personal testimonies) and on the dissemination of the Palestinian version of the 1948 war.33 Of these, the al-‘Awda (Return) Center was prominent in drawing up plans to implement return, seeking to persuade the Western public that these plans were feasible and would not bring about the destruction of the State of Israel.34 These public commemorative activities were aimed not only at preserving memory but also at drawing practical lessons and formulating modes of action. Their primary message, equivalent to the one advocated by the PNA, depicted the Nakba as a continuing past and as an experience that was part and parcel of the everyday lives of the Palestinians. Salih ‘Abd al-Jawad, a political scientist at Bir Zeit University, defined the Palestinian situation as sociocide, that is, “destruction of a society,” manifested, he claimed, by destruction and exile, which has over the years become more effective in debilitating the Palestinians as a society and national movement.35 As a consequence, the Palestinians were called upon to draw the right lessons from 1948, and to demonstrate endurance and perseverance rather than surrender to fear or the impulse to flee. Some called on the Palestinians to emulate the Jews by adhering to national goals, as they did. The PLO leader Shafiq al-Hut, for one, held that “we should not continue to lament and weep over the ruins; we must act as our enemy acted, patiently, so that Jaffa will return to us and we to it.”36 The U.S.-based Palestinian social scientist Hisham Sharabi wondered whether the Palestinians would become “the Jews of the twentyfirst century,” explaining that if the Jews could wait two thousand years in expectation of a homeland they had never seen, the Palestinians were capable of waiting five, ten, or even fifty years.37 As part of this discourse, Palestinians frequently equated the Nakba with the Jewish Holocaust, disregarding the profound differences between them. They claimed a cause and effect relationship between the two tragedies, portraying themselves as “victims of the victims,” often accusing Israel of emulating Nazi practices. They also underlined what they saw as a lack of symmetry between the memory of the Holocaust and that of the Nakba in world consciousness.38 The Nakba Memory in Palestinian Art Nearly all areas of modern Palestinian culture demonstrate the mobilization of the arts for the Palestinian cause. A substantial part of the cultural output was supported and guided by the PLO, the rest being the outcome

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of independent expression. Either way, both served as “agents of memory” and contributed to shaping the national consciousness. The Nakba has claimed a central place in Palestinian art since 1948. Various aspects of the Nakba memory have found expression in the arts, including descriptions of a vanished world, of yearnings for lost homes, and of the living conditions of the refugees, calls for armed struggle, and the creation of a vision of return. Poetry The Palestinian poetry of return, a literary genre that had already developed in the early 1950s, is characterized by a deep yearning for a lost world, together with a fierce determination to return to that world. Among the outstanding poets of this genre are Mahmud al-Tut, author of the famous lines, “O Lost Paradise, you were never too small for us, but now gigantic states are too small for us”;39 ‘Abd al-Karim al-Karmi (Abu Salama), who rose to fame in 1953 with his poem “We Will Return”; and the poets Mu‘ayn Basiso and Fadwa Tuqan. Still, the most outstanding figure among the poets of return is Mahmud Darwish (1942–2008), a native of Kafr al-Barwa, who went into exile in Lebanon with his family in 1948 and, like others, returned by infiltrating into Israeli territory, where he joined the Israeli Communist Party. Darwish stood out by using unequivocal Palestinian-nationalist motifs and style, which were regarded as daring in the 1960s. In 1970 he left Israel and joined the PLO; soon afterwards he won great acclaim both in the field of Palestinian poetry and in Arab poetry in general. Darwish’s works became so popular that he earned the title “Palestinian national poet.”40 The Nakba holds a central place in Darwish’s poetry—not surprisingly, since he experienced it personally. The sense of loss, together with a longing for return, is reflected in the poems “Passport” (jawaz al-Safar) and “My Mother” (Ummi). In the latter he writes: I long for mother’s bread . . . Restore to me my stars of childhood So that I can take part with the little birds in the journey of return To the nest where you await.41

Another famous poem that deals with Palestinian fate is “I Am Joseph, O My God” (Ana Yusef, Ya Rabbi), written in 1987, which presents the alienation from Arabs who deny responsibility for their Palestinian brothers: They [the brothers] cast me into a pit, And accused the wolf And the wolf was more merciful than my brothers42

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Among Israeli Palestinians, artistic representations of the Nakba coincided with the changes that occurred in the reception of art in the political and public spheres. For example, in the poetry and literature that developed in the 1950s, the fear of touching upon sensitive national issues was very conspicuous. Poems of love for the land, such as those of George Najib, overflowed with descriptions of landscapes and visions of nature, but lacked any mention of the war or displacement.43 Nevertheless, at the end of the 1950s, in fact preceding nationalist activity in the political domain, the literary work of Israeli Palestinians began to focus on the Nakba. The pioneers of the new wave were poets, including Jamal Qa‘awar, Najwa Qa‘awar, Mahmud Darwish, and Rashid Husayn.

Prose and literature Shim‘on Ballas, a novelist and expert on Arabic literature, argued that the Nakba constituted a crossroads in the history of Palestinian literature. From just another tributary of the general current of Arabic literature lacking distinctive features, he said, post-1948 Palestinian literature became an effervescent focus of unique creativity. Literary activity developed in two branches: that of the refugees and that of Palestinians who became Israeli citizens. Both were connected, said Ballas, to the social and emotional roots of a divided people striving to be rejoined and to return to their homeland.44 Like poetry, Palestinian literature was at first characterized by expressions of yearning and despair (a genre called Adab al-Nakba or Adab al-Ishtiqaq, that is, literature of yearning or longing). Over time and parallel with developments taking place in the Palestinian national movement, and in view of new political needs, this genre gave way to a literature of struggle (Adab al-Maqawamma), characterized by encouragement to activism. Another famous writer was Ghassan Kanafani, who, like Darwish, experienced the Nakba personally (he left Acre for Syria). In his works, in which the imprint of the Nakba is clearly evident, Kanafani examines various aspects of the 1948 experience: the fate of the refugees in the Arab states, depicted in the story “Men in the Sun”; the uprooting from the homeland, described in “Land of the Sad Oranges”; and the call to struggle and particularly the importance of emulating Israel’s determination, a step that would make the Palestinians worthy of their country, in “Return to Haifa.”45 The Nakba holds a prominent place among other writers as well, including Nasser al-Din al-Nashashibi in his book Return Ticket, which emphasizes the profound link between yearnings for return and directives

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for action: I will see the hatred in the eyes of my children and your children, I will see how they take revenge. And if they don’t know how to take revenge, I will teach them; and if they call a ceasefire or negotiate peace, I will fight against them as I fought against my enemies . . . I want them to immerse the 1948 Nakba in the blood of those who prevented them from entering the Land. The Homeland is dear, but vengeance is dearer.46 In the PNA, literature continued to focus on the yearning for return and the preaching of sumud (firmly holding onto the land). Among these, Bab al-Shams [Gate of the sun] stands out, even though the author, Elias Khouri, is a Lebanese Fatah activist, not a Palestinian. The story’s powerful plot, which deals with the life story of refugees and highlights their longings for the homeland across the border, as well as its timely publication on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba, made it a bestseller in the Arab world. It was translated into numerous languages, including Hebrew.47 The book includes a penetrating debate about possible future solutions to the refugee problem, while adhering to the traditional goal of return. Among the writings of Israeli Palestinians, Emile Habibi’s (1921–96) work includes some of the most striking descriptions of the Nakba. The protagonists of his stories are almost always bearers of the Nakba memory and represent Israeli Palestinians, who were viewed as “traitors” for years because of their readiness to remain under Israeli rule, but in fact served as “guardians of the national memory.” The Nakba fills a prominent role in the works of other writers as well: Muhammad ‘Ali Taha’s al-Maghrusun fi al-ard [Planted in the ground] describes a tragic attempt by refugees to return to their land;48 Tawfiq Fayyad’s “The Dog Samur” (al-Kalb samur) narrates the adventures of a dog who (unlike its masters who had fled their village) remains loyal to the soil;49 Hanna Ibrahim’s “Infiltrators” presents an often-repeated motif in Palestinian stories—the attempt by refugees to return to their villages or towns of origin,50 which usually ends in their death at the hands of Israeli military patrols, and in their subsequently being defined as fida‘iyun (Those who sacrifice redeem themselves) in the Israeli press.51 The Nakba continued to be the focus of later literary works, such as Arabesque (1986) by Anton Shammas and Dancing Arabs (2002) by Sayyid Qashu‘a.

Visual arts A quick glimpse at the collection of works by well-known Palestinian painters in the Palestinian Encyclopedia (al-Mawsu‘a al-Filastiniyya)

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leaves no doubt as to the place of the Nakba in modern Palestinian painting.52 Like poetry and literature, Palestinian painting is routinely enlisted in favor of the national cause. As such, it is mostly typified by its realism, distinctiveness and colorfulness, and its aiming at being clear to the simple observer and at making an immediate, visual and emotional, impact. To a certain extent, this tendency is reminiscent of the works of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, who transmitted Communist revolutionary messages to the masses through powerful, relatively simple visual impressions. Prominent among the works of Palestinian painters who experienced the Nakba are artists like Isma‘il Shamut (native of Lod, 1930) and Ibrahim Hazima (born at Acre, 1933), whose motifs represent the period before and following the Nakba. The same motifs appear in the works of a younger generation of painters who did not experience the Nakba personally, people like Taysir Barakat, who was born in the Jabaliyya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, and Sulayman Mansur from Bir Zeit. The works of these artists share a similar rendering of a harmonious and pastoral village life of the peasants before the Nakba, and the antithetical, wretched refugee life, alongside the “heroism of the struggle” and dreams of return.53 Another visual plane in which the Nakba is often represented is the highly popular and influential world of cartoons. Among these artists, the cartoonist Naji al-‘Ali is especially prominent. He gained his fame from “Hanzala” (the cactus fruit), a traditional and faceless image that represents the poor, hardworking refugee. Al-‘Ali was born in the Galilee village of al-Shajara (1937) and went into exile to Lebanon in 1948. Alongside Hanzala’s cactus fruit, which represents the yearning for return and the frustration of life in exile, is al-‘Ali’s image of a woman carrying a key. She stands for the pain of being uprooted and the determination to return to the homeland.54 Continuing the Naji al-‘Ali tradition are cartoonists Amia Juha of the daily al-Quds and Baha’ al-Bakhari of al-Ayyam, both of whom time and again highlighted the Nakba. Their works reflect a strong yearning for return, together with an adamant rejection of compromise, particularly of tawtin, the resettlement of refugees in Arab countries. Most figures in these illustrations are characterized by their tight hold on the key, which appears in some of the illustrations as the sole possession inherited by sons from their fathers, and in others as a lone lantern illuminating the historic road of the refugees.55 Among the Israeli Palestinians, quite a number of painting and plastic art exhibitions deal with Palestinian identity and touch upon the theme of Nakba. They were presented as part of the commemorative activities of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba, displaying common motifs of lost homes, including keys, bundles of cloth, and clumps of soil.56

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Cinema and theater Until 1967, Palestinian cinema barely existed. Thus, cinematic treatment of the Nakba was found mainly in films produced in Arab countries, particularly Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (and even this was rather limited in scope).57 The revival of the Palestinian national movement after 1967 went hand in hand with the development of a movie industry serving as a vehicle for propaganda and mobilization on behalf of various Palestinian organizations. The first films, produced in the 1970s, were mainly documentaries and were supported by the arts committees of various Palestinian organizations. Many dealt with the life of Palestinian refugees in the Arab states and with the idea of return. The film The Key, produced in 1976 and directed by Ghalib Sha‘ath, for instance, featured the widespread practice among the inhabitants of refugee camps in Lebanon of holding on to the keys to their lost homes.58 In the field of theater, al-Hakawati (which means popular folktale narrator), the Palestinian National Theater in Jerusalem, stood out. It was supported by local initiatives, unlike most other Palestinian theater activities that the PLO sponsored. Many of the plays that al-Hakawati produced dealt with the Nakba. Outstanding among them was The Story of Shuma Village, which was first presented in 1988. While emphasizing the subject of return, it also dealt with the equally poignant questions as to whether this yearning was realistic and what price the Palestinians were paying for it.59 The film Haifa, directed by Rashid al-Mash’harawi in 1995, surveys the mixed feelings of residents of a Palestinian refugee camp, shifting between despair and budding hope after the signing of the Oslo Accords. Significantly, it is the persona of the camp fool who plays a prominent role as the person who insists on adhering to the goal of return, constantly shouting “‘Akka, Yaffa, Haifa” (Acre, Jaffa, Haifa).60 The director of Haifa, Subhi Zabidi, a native of the Jalazun refugee camp (near Ramallah), imparted a personal touch to the Nakba memory in his film My Very Private Map (1998). In this film, the “private map” of the second generation of the Nakba comprises two worlds: the memories of places that they had never seen, and which the older generation instilled in them, and the environment in which they grew up.61 Films produced by the Israeli Arab community also focus on the Nakba as their central subject. Films like Ustura (Legend) by Nizar Hasan (1998), 1948 by Muhammad Bakri (1998), and Chronicle of a Disappearance by Ilya Sulayman (1996) all deal, in one way or another, with the uprooted people of the Saffuriyya village (Sepphoris or Tsipori in Hebrew) and with their lives before, during, and after the 1948 events.62

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“Refugee Women for Refugee Men”: Israeli Palestinians and the Nakba Memory Saeed, the hero of Emile Habibi’s novel The Pessoptimist,63 laments the dismal fate of the Palestinian refugees. He criticizes the local girls who are not willing to marry refugees, a situation Habibi describes as “refugee women for refugee men.” 64 The self-mockery mirrors the implied mockery of a sexist wisecrack that was widespread in Israel in the early 1960s: “The best men for the pilot corps, the best women for the pilots” (succinctly alliterative in Hebrew). Habibi’s statement accurately reflects the duality in the Israeli Arab public’s attitude toward the issue of identity: on the one hand, this community is an integral part of the Palestinian people and shares its sense of fate and destiny; on the other hand, they keep a close watch on the Israeli system, of which they are part, and are hence interested in advancing their particular goals, including civic equality. Therefore, while Israeli Palestinians share common aims with non-Israeli Palestinians, their very existence as a national minority in the State of Israel singles them out. This duality is clearly evident in the Israeli Arab community’s approach to the Nakba memory. Most Israeli Palestinians did not experience displacement in 1948, and the central trauma for them was the transformation from a majority in Mandatory Palestine to a minority in a non-Muslim state. Thus, only about 20 percent (30,000 to 35,000 people in 1948) of all Israeli Palestinians are defined as refugees or as descendants of refugees today.65 Most settled on the outskirts of other Arab localities in Israel, such as Nazareth and Kafr Kana, which took in many inhabitants of the Galilee village of Ma‘alul.66 Under the Israeli law of 1950 they were defined as “present-absentees,” which meant that their real estate assets were transferred to the State General Property Custodian, as was the property of the other Palestinian refugees.67 In fact, this community formed the central link that connected the Israeli Palestinians to the predicament of displacement in the Nakba memory, and is the most active group in matters of Nakba memory in Arab political life in Israel today.68 In the course of time, and similarly to other Palestinian communities, the Israeli Palestinians adopted the Nakba as one of their most outstanding national identifying symbols. The fact that Israeli Palestinians are grappling with the Nakba memory mirrors to a large extent the processes of political, cultural, and ideological changes that the community has undergone, and the way it defines its very identity. The growing preoccupation with the Nakba memory reflects the strengthening of the Palestinian component in their identity while simultaneously expressing a growing demand for recognition of the rights of the Arab community and its integration into the state.

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The Nakba memory until the early 1990s Throughout the early years of Israeli statehood, the prevalent inclination among Israeli Palestinians, who feared the new regime, was to avoid public discussion of the Nakba. The gradual change became apparent when the second generation, which had not personally experienced the 1948 defeat (at least not as adults) and felt freer to express its national identity, reached adulthood. A prominent expression of this change, though rather a late one, was the establishment of the Association of Forty in 1988, marking 40 years of displacement. The association represented people from the ‘Ayn Hud village at the foot of Mount Carmel, which was abandoned in 1948 and whose residents set up a new settlement not far from the original village. In 1953 the original village became an (Jewish) artists’ village, with the Hebrew name Ein Hod, while the new Arab ‘Ayn Hud remained a settlement unrecognized by the state.69 Today, people from the village spearhead the public campaign of the refugees within Israel, demanding the return of lost homes and villages, or alternatively for the state’s recognition of the new villages. The case of Ikrit and Bir‘am became prominent after 1948 as a symbol of the Nakba memory for Israeli Palestinians. The populations of these two Christian villages located in the Upper Galilee (Greek Catholics in Ikrit, Maronites in Bir‘am) were evacuated by agreement with the Israeli army in 1948, after being given the assurance that they would be allowed to return to their homes at the end of the hostilities. In fact, the residents were never allowed to return, and the villages themselves were completely destroyed in 1953. Since then, the inhabitants of Ikrit and Bir‘am—who meanwhile had settled in other villages in the Upper Galilee—have waged an uphill battle for public opinion and in the courts, demanding the right to return to their land.70 Despite an injunction by the Supreme Court in 1951 favoring the return of those villagers, every subsequent Israeli government has opposed the decision, asserting that such a return would serve as a precedent for demands by other Palestinian refugees.71 While the Nakba memory did not occupy center stage in the public discourse of Israeli Palestinians over extended periods of time, it has always been kept alive. First, the distinctive identity of the uprooted communities was maintained by the fact that they tended to settle as a group in new localities while preserving their former social fabric, such as the al-Safafari neighborhood in Nazareth, for instance, which is made up almost entirely of people from the Saffuriyya village.72 The estrangement of most of the refugees from the veteran residents, and the scornful attitude toward them as “outsiders,” helped perpetuate their outsider status and deepened their memory of and longing for the abandoned localities.73 Nonetheless, it

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should be stressed that there have never been Arab refugee camps within Israeli territory, which made it somewhat easier for the refugees to integrate into local society and politics.74 At the same time, this prevented the creation of “living monuments” to the refugee problem, as happened in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian diaspora. The Nakba memory was constantly expressed in the everyday lives of Israeli Palestinians, as it was in Palestinian society in general. It involved activities that anchored the past in people’s daily routine, such as naming stores after localities that had been destroyed (for example, the Ma‘alul Boutique in Nazareth),75 the practice of keeping keys to houses or making pilgrimages to the remains of villages (a practice that was easier for Israeli Palestinians than for residents of the Occupied Territories), and the establishment of youth summer camps, such as the al-‘Awda Society, a yearly summer camp for youngsters from Bir‘am that was first set up in 1987 by a society bearing the same name.76 These actions helped pass on the memory of the past to the younger generations and to preserve their longing to return to their former homes.

Revival of the Nakba memory in the shadow of diplomatic processes While the renewed preoccupation with the Nakba memory inside the PNA territories and the Palestinian diaspora since 1998 has affected Israeli Palestinians, other factors unique to their community are also at work. First was the rise to positions of leadership within the community of second- and third-generation Israeli Palestinians. These generations, which stressed their Palestinian national identity, viewed 1998 as marking not only fifty years since the 1948 defeat and displacement but also fifty years of life in the State of Israel. In other words, it brought to the fore much more sharply than in the past the question of how Israeli Palestinians could identify with the state’s celebration of its fiftieth anniversary—an event viewed in Palestinian national consciousness as an unremitting tragedy. The political philosopher ‘Azmi Bishara, who subsequently became a member of the Knesset, expressed this contradiction with the assertion, “I am a Palestinian Arab. This Israeli victory [the War of Independence] is my Holocaust.”77 Emphasis on the Nakba memory was thus meant not only to emphasize the past and longings for return but also as a way of protesting the associated feelings of discrimination and estrangement. In this light, the demands for return increased, both on the national and on the individual level, describing return as compensation by the state to its own, uprooted citizens. In addition, Israeli Palestinians demanded that the state

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acknowledge its responsibility for Palestinian suffering by setting up an official memorial day to mark the Nakba and by paying compensation to Palestinians within Israel.78 The organizations involved in these endeavors represented mainly Israeli Palestinians, chief among these being the Initiative Committee to Defend the Rights of the Uprooted of 1948—Citizens of the State of Israel, which also spoke on behalf of some unrecognized settlements.79 They monitored diplomatic negotiations, particularly those dealing with the refugee issue, seeking to link their cause with that of the refugee problem in general. Nevertheless, these organizations quickly realized that the PLO, for reasons of its own, was in no hurry to combine its own interests with theirs. Consequently, they decided to promote their interests independently, underscoring the demand for return as an expression of the state’s willingness to grant Israeli Palestinians full equality. Significantly, despite their contention with the PLO institutions, the Israeli-Palestinian organizations, particularly the Initiative Committee, maintained a policy of broad cooperation with nongovernmental Palestinian bodies that were active on the refugee issue, such as Badil and ‘A’idun.80 On the public plane, the revival of the Nakba memory was conveyed through initiatives that paralleled projects of the PNA, though some of them were fully integrated with projects promoted by the PNA. As elsewhere, the various initiatives were intended to create “sites of memory” and to underlie the notion that the Nakba is a living past, manifested in Israeli actions such as the confiscation of lands, destruction of houses, and discrimination. According to this conception, historic events such as the Kafr Qasem massacre (1956), Land Day (1976), and the October 2000 clashes constitute separate chapters combined into a single historical narrative of broader scope. The following are among the outstanding projects for memorializing the Nakba:: 1. Fostering awareness of the Nakba among the younger generation— “Return Tours” to the sites of former villages, organized for youngsters and guided by elders who recount stories of the 1948 war. Among these organizations, the Arab Culture Society of Nazareth, which coordinates tours throughout the country, stands out. The society’s chairperson Rawda ‘Atallah, ‘Azmi Bishara’s sister, contended that the Return Tours are not meant to foster hostility or a craving to return among the youth, but to teach them “how to behave in similar situations in the future.”81 2. Documentation and research about the Nakba—the crowning achievement of this phenomenon is journalist Wadi‘a ‘Awawda’s

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book The Memory that Does Not Die: Eyewitnesses Who Opened Their Sealed Hearts and the Cells of Their Memory to Tell What Happened to Them in 1948, the Year of the Nakba (published in Arabic in 2000), which contains twenty-five testimonies by Palestinians who experienced the Nakba. The book has become a bestseller among Israeli Palestinians and is distributed to Arab highschool students upon graduation.82 Also of note is a series of books by Jamil ‘Arafat that record destroyed villages in the Galilee region.83 Personal testimonies of Israeli-Palestinian public figures about the 1948 experience (for instance, the testimony of the historian ‘Adil Mana‘, which described his family’s flight from Majd al-Krum and their return to it) have also received considerable publicity.84 In addition, Palestinians and their descendants set up associations named after abandoned localities. 3. Marking Nakba Day as a national day—this observance was adopted following the PNA marking of Nakba Day as an official day of national remembrance in 1998. Until 2001, it was commemorated among Israeli Palestinians only symbolically, and the number of participants was relatively small. However, following the bloody clashes in October 2000 between Israeli Palestinians and Israeli security forces, the Supreme Monitoring Committee of the Israeli Palestinians, the highest leadership body of the Arabs in the state, decided to mark Nakba Day, coordinating some of the activities with PNA officials who were involved in the commemoration.85 Thus, many of the activities carried out on Nakba Day in 2001 reflected those promoted by the PNA, including dedicating classes to the Nakba, displaying Palestinian and black flags in Arab localities, instituting a minute of silence, and organizing “pilgrimages” to the ruins of abandoned localities.86 4. Demands for changing street names—a notable expression of the intensification of the memory of the past among Israeli Palestinians is heard regularly, particularly in mixed cities, where demands are made to change street names devoid of meaning for the Arab community to names bearing a cultural Arabic and national Palestinian significance. For instance, Iman ‘Awdah, a member of the Haifa city council, demanded that the name Mountain Street be restored to a street presently called Zionism Boulevard. Rif‘at Turk, deputy mayor of Tel-Aviv–Yafo, asked that streets in Jaffa (Yafo) be named after outstanding Palestinian and Arab figures, such as Ibrahim Abu Lughod, a historian born in the city; Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer who was also a spokesman of the PFLP; and Najib Mahfuz, the Egyptian writer and Nobel Prize laureate.87

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The Islamic movement in Israel and the Nakba memory The Islamic Movement (IM) in Israel, similar to the movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was founded in the 1980s. The IM is an offshoot of the universal Muslim Brotherhood and in many respects constitutes a “sister movement” to Hamas. The approach of the IM toward the Nakba memory is quite similar to that of Hamas, as both emphasize the Islamic dimension of the 1948 war and impart to it a religious interpretation. A major manifestation of this attitude is the IM’s effort to preserve and renovate abandoned Islamic sites—mosques, tombs of shaykhs, and cemeteries—throughout Israel. In addition, it frequently demands the restoration of Islamic waqf (religious endowment) property to Muslim hands by the state. The two factions also strive to document all Islamic sites in Israel, with the assistance of Turkish religious personalities, locating Ottoman documents that attest to Muslim ownership of various waqf properties.88 The flagship of these activities is the al-Aqsa Society, headed by Shaykh Kamal Riyan, whose publications decry the alleged desecration of abandoned Muslim sites, which have become places of entertainment and commerce.89 The fierce clashes in October 2000 between Israeli Palestinians and the police in the wake of the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Initfada in the PNA territories brought about the intensification of the Nakba memory. Reinforcement of the Palestinian national dimension in the identity of the Israeli Palestinians, together with an increasing alienation from Israel and its symbols, has deepened the notion of the unity of Israeli Arabs with the Palestinian people as a whole. In this setting, a fertile ground has been created for the Palestinian view according to which the ongoing struggle is a natural continuation of the 1948 events. For example, the journalist Wadi‘a ‘Awawda and Lutfi Mash‘ur, editor of the weekly al-Sinara, claimed that the October 2000 incident had clarified to the Israeli Palestinian community that the struggle would be a long-lasting one, especially the fact that the effects of the 1948 events are still tangible.90 Members of the younger generation, including the journalist Sayyid Qashu‘a and the artist Maruth ‘Isa, supplied a personal touch to this argument, saying that the events of the present have revived old fears, of sudden loss or uprooting, feelings inherited from their forefathers. In this light, according to them, their lives are shrouded in a deep sense of insecurity and fear of the future.91 These feelings were reinforced by the deepening tension between Jews and Arabs in Israel, manifested inter alia by polls that indicated a rise in the support of the Jewish public for expelling Arabs.92 Overall, and despite the dispersal of the population, the popular commemoration of the Nakba by various Palestinian communities

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demonstrates remarkable continuity, displaying both evolution— the development or introduction of new themes and techniques of commemoration— and common features. The major discrepancy is between refugee communities and Israeli Arab citizens. While they all shared similar attitudes, the refugees were the most active right from the start, launching a wide variety of ways to commemorate their loss. The Palestinian Israelis, on the other hand, joined the commemorative effort rather late, strengthening their Palestinian identity in contrast to their Israeli citizenship, sometimes through their own unique activities. Commemoration among the refugees combines personal experience with national narrative, whereas other communities emphasize rather more national themes. Poetry and the arts serve as a common arena for the various communities, combining all themes and thereby creating an overarching single community of memory. Technological developments have also helped pave the way for new means of commemoration. Overall, the unresolved conflict seems to ensure the continuity of commemorative themes. Notes 1. Ziyad ‘Abbas, “The Key and the Lost Gift,” Mitsad Sheni, no. 12 (May 1998, in Hebrew): 15–16. 2. Danny Rubinstein, The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home (New York: Times Books 1991), pp. 10–11. 3. Ghada al-Karmi, “Ba‘d al-Nakba: Tajriba min al-manfa fi Ankeltara,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya (Beirut), no. 37 (Winter 1999): 87–88. 4. See an example in Ilan Magat, Bir‘am: A Mobilized Community of Memory, Surveys of Arabs in Israel, no. 26 (Giv‘at Haviva: Institute for Peace Research, 2000), p. 27. 5. Nimer Sirhan, “The Nakbah in Palestinian Folk literature,” Palestine-Israel Journal 5, nos. 3–4 (1998): 156–57. 6. Sharif S. Elmusa, “When the Wellsprings of Identity Dry Up: Reflection on Fawaz Turki’s Exile’s Return,” Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1995): 102. See similar expressions of disappointment on Ibrahim Abu Lughod’s return to Jaffa: Akhbar Yaffa, no. 11, 31 May 2001, p. 5; and Ibrahim Abu Lughod’s “al-Yawm al-akhir qabla sukut Yaffa,” al-Karmil , nos. 55–56 (Spring–Summer 1998): 129; Hisham Sharabi, “The Palestinians: Fifty Years Later,” Distinguished Lecture Series, no. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, May 1998), p. 5; Edward Said, Haaretz, Sabbath Supplement, 18 August 2000; and Edward Said, “Fifty Years of Dispossession,” al-Ahram Weekly, 7–13 May 1998. 7. Al-Karmi, “Ba‘d al-Nakba,” p. 93. 8. Magat, Bir‘am, p. 5. 9. Adam Shatz, “A Love Story between an Arab Poet and His Land: An Interview with Mahmud Darwish,” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 72.

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10. ‘Arif al-‘Arif, al-Nakba—Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis wal-firdus al-mafqud (Beirut, between 1956 and 1964). 11. Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh, Biladuna Filastin, 11 vols (Beirut, 1965 and 1972–86). For further elaboration on these works and others, see “‘Alam al-Nakba,” al-Mawsu‘a al-Filastiniyya (Damascus) 4 (1983): 505; Walid al-Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), foreword, pp. xv–xvi. 12. Hassan Khader, “One Event, Two Signs,” al-Ahram Weekly, 2–8 April 1998. 13. ‘Azzam Nassar, “Khamsin ‘Aman ‘ala al-Nakba: I‘adat al-tafkir fi kitabat al-ta’rikh al-hadith,” al-Siyasa al-Filastiniyya, no. 18 (Spring 1998): 41–42. Nassar approved the openness of the Israeli archives, which, he claimed, helped create the trend of “new historians” after the revelation of new truths about the 1948 events. 14. “Reflections of the Nakbah” (compendium of testimonies, in English), Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): (collection of testimonies, in English), pp. 19–21, 31–33. 15. Al-Karmi, “Ba‘d al-Nakba,” p. 47. 16. Fathiyya Nasro, “al-‘Ibar al-mustafada khilal khamsin ‘aman ala nakbat Filastin,” al-Siyasa al-Filastiniyya , no. 18 (Spring 1998): 47. 17. According to the sociologist Salim Tamari, about 80,000–90,000 Palestinians returned to the PNA territory after 1994, “The Problem of the Palestinian Refugees Will Be Solved When They Are Assured the Right of Return,” An Interview with Salim Tamari, Palestine-Israel Journal 6, no. 4 (1999): 65. 18. Rashid Al-Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 205. 19. Ibrahim Abu Lughod, “The Nakbah (The Disaster): This Is What Happened,” Alpayim, no. 16 (1998, in Hebrew): 156. 20. Salim Tamari, “Return, Resettlement, Return to the Homeland: The Discussion on the Future of the Palestinian Refugees,” Palestinian Deliberations, no. 6 (Giv‘at Haviva: Institute for Peace Research, 1998 in Hebrew), p. 8. 21. See a striking expression of this feeling, as reflected in the statement by Ahmad al-Jarmi, a Palestinian policeman and native of Jaffa, who had arrived in Nablus from Lebanon when the PNA was established: “This whole peace process was a hoax and a swindle. What came out of it for us, if I cannot go to Jaffa?” Haaretz, Sabbath Supplement, 26 July 2001, p. 28. 22. Salman Abu Sitta, “This Soil Is Mine,” Mitsad Sheni, no. 19 (October 1999): 27. 23. See the documentation project by ‘Adil Yahya, an archeologist from the Jalazun refugee camp (Ramallah), who collected personal testimonies from 200 Palestinians, Haaretz, 16 November 1999. 24. The center was set up in 1979, see http://www.birzeit.edu/ourvoice/history; al-Sakakini Center (KSCC) was founded in 1997 and worked on gathering recordings, pictures, and testimonies about the Nakba, see http://www.sakakini.org. Documentation activities were also promoted by publications identified with the PNA or the PLO, such as “Watha’iq mukhtara `an harb 1948, adhar/ mars-ayar-mayu,” [Selected documents on the 1948 War, March to May] and “Dhikra al-tahjir ba‘d khamsin sana: shahadat,” [Memories of Deportation:

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25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

MICHAEL MILSHTEIN

Testimonies] in Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, no. 34 (Spring 1998): 10–86, 104–52 respectively. See for example testimonies of residents of the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza city, al-Umma, no. 24, May 2000, pp. 8–9; or testimonies published in Akhbar al-Khalil, 29 November 2000. See for example the site, http://www.alnakba.org/, which contains information in Arabic, English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, as well as a picture archive and links to other sites dealing with the subject of the Nakba, etc. See also http://www.deiryassin.org, which is operated on behalf of an organization memorializing the Deir Yassin village, and contains pictures and literature dealing with the Nakba. For studies on the 1948 War, see documentation on everyday life in West Jerusalem neighborhoods before the Nakba (al-Qatamun, al-Talbiyya, alBaq‘a, al-Musrara, ‘Ayn Karm, Lifta), as supplied by Salim Tamari, “al-Quds 1948, al-madina al-muhajira,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya (Beirut), no. 38 (Spring 1999): 139–50. See also a series of monographs about destroyed localities, such as Bayt Jubrin, Abu Shushah, Qaqun, al-Faluja, Deir Yassin, published at the initiative of the Center for the Study and Documentation of Palestinian Society of Bir Zeit University. On communal activities, see al-Ayyam, 23 January 1999. For examples of memorializing the Nakba, see the Palestinian-American Web site: http://www.cactus48.com/ See, for example, the activity of the Supreme Committee for the Return of Refugees in Nablus, which prompted youth activities in light of the understanding that most pupils in the Nablus refugee camps did not know the names of places from which their forefathers had been uprooted in 1948, Haaretz, 26 June 2001. See the comprehensive study by Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), which examined the publication of community books in Palestinian society from a sociological and anthropological angle. For theatrical activities focusing on dreams of return of Palestinian youth in Jordan, see Yedi‘ot Ahronot, Sabbath Supplement, 31 January 1997; for the commemoration of Nakba Day as “a day of Palestinian rage” in the refugee camps in Lebanon, see Radio Nur, 11 May 1999. A Web site devoted to realizing the right of return is operated in the United States, namely, http://www.rightofreturn.org/. Supporting this site is the organization CPRR (Council for Palestinian Restitution and Repatriation), which deals with aid for Palestinian refugees and spreads the idea of the right of return among communities in the West. See also http://www.aaah.org/, which is operated by Palestinians in Chicago, and deals, among others, with gathering testimonies from Palestinians who live in the United States and have experienced the 1948 events. The organization was founded in Britain in 1996 as an independent academic body, see http://www.prc.org.uk/; http://www.al-awda.org/. Salman Abu Sitta, who heads the al-‘Awda Center, is a native of Beersheba and has been working for

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36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

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thirty years at gathering testimonies and documents connected with the Nakba. The organization runs the Web site http://www.palestineremembered.com, which aims at preserving the memory of the past and transmitting it to the younger generation, while developing consciousness of the right of return. Saleh Abdel Jawad, “War by Other Means,” al-Ahram Weekly, 8–14 January 1998. Al-Jawad refers mainly to activities such as destroying houses, expelling Palestinian leaders from “inside” to “outside,” and the appropriation of land. ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif, “Filastin al-dhakira,” al-Karmil (Ramallah), nos. 55–56 (Spring–Summer 1998): 225; Shafiq al-Hut, “Yaffa—Madinat al-‘inad,” al-Karmil (Ramallah), nos. 55–56 (Spring 1998): 139. In this context he added that there was a need to improve the ability to mobilize historic memory for the purpose of realizing national goals. Sharabi, “Palestinians: Fifty Years Later,” pp. 15–17. See the essay by Esther Webman in this book for an elaborate analysis of this issue. On the Palestinians and the Holocaust, see Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, “Perceptions of the Holocaust in Palestinian Public Discourse,” Israel Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 123–40. Ali Tibawi, “Visions of the Return: The Palestine Arab Refugees in Arabic Poetry and Art,” Middle East Journal 17, no. 5 (Autumn 1963): 513. On Darwish, see Raja’ Naqqash, Mahmud Darwish: sha‘ir al-ard al-muhtalla (Beirut: Dar al-Hillal, 1972). These poems appear on a musical disk by Marcel Khalifa, the Lebanese (Maronite) singer who performs Darwish’s best work. “Marsil Khalifa—Ajmal Aghani.” See http://www.palvoice.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-5750.html. References to the songs appear in numerous Arabic language Web sites. Haaretz, 5 November 1999. On his poems, see Avraham Yinon, “Several Focal Topics in Israeli Arab literature,” HaMizrah HeHadash 15, nos. 1–2 (1965, in Hebrew): 75. Shimon Ballas, Arab Literature under the Shadow of War (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1978, in Hebrew), pp. 7–8. “Encyclopedia of The Palestinians: Biography of Gassan Kanafani,” http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Acre/Story168.html. For analysis of his work, see Muhammad Siddiq, “Man is a Cause”: Political Consciousness and the Fiction of Ghassan Kanafani (Seattle: University of Washington