An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba
Page 15
NOTES
1The oral narratives that provide the materials for this paper are drawn, with thanks, from the following sources: Palestine Remembered (http://www.palestineremembered.com); al-Jana – Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts in Beirut (http://al-jana.org; Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem (http://www.badil.org/en/); the Lifta interviews were collected by Mohammad ‘Adarba and Lena Jayyusi; Searching for Saris film by Jinan Coulter (2013).
2Interview by Jinan Coulter, Qalandia Camp, 2010, in the film Searching for Saris (2013), produced and directed by Jinan Coulter, co-produced by Enjaaz (a Dubai Film Market initiative), executive producer Tariq al-Ghussein. All translations of interviews are made from the transcript of the unedited rushes, and may therefore differ slightly from the translations that appear in the film.
3Rosemary Sayigh (1979: 107) notes very similar experiential expressions that refugees used of the Nakba.
4According to John Ruedy (1971: 134), on the eve of the proclamation of the state of Israel in May 1948, “88 [by British figures] to 91 per cent [by Zionist figures] of the cultivable soil was neither owned nor leased by Jews”.
5For example, Medding (1990); Blumberg (2013); Cavendish (1998); BBC news site, last updated 6 May 2008, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the state/the Nakba http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7381315.stm. There are scores of films, videos and other popular cultural sources which reproduce the same kind of narrative using similar kinds of devices, figures and silences.
6See Ilan Pappe’s (2006) critique of Morris.
7Hayden White (1976: 32‒33) writes that “The plot-structure of a historical narrative (how things turned out as they did), and the formal argument or explanation of why ‘things happened or turned out as they did’ are prefigured by the original description (of the ‘facts’ to be explained) in a given dominant modality of language use: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or irony.”
8Pappe (2006) draws on archival materials as well as oral testimonies to ground the relevance of this paradigm.
9Erskine Childers (1971) researched this much publicized claim, and found it to have no basis in fact. Benny Morris (2004) also confirms that he found no real evidence of this in his extensive research.
10Hence the constant talk among hardline Zionists, especially those of the settler movement in the West Bank, that the Palestinians are simply itinerants passing through.
11On the issue of the loss of gold jewellery, see Humphries and Khalili (2007: 213‒215, and 223‒224). See also Sayigh (2007: 151). They discuss the painful loss of gold in the events or aftermath of the dispossession; lost, taken, buried for safe keeping and never retrieved, sold for food etc. In the testimonies I am referring to, the gold is used as a means of raising money for arms: the act is experienced and recounted both as an index of need and of collective cohesion and solidarity, and at the same time of the harshness and extremity of the situation that demanded such a sacrifice.
12See for example, Landis (2001: 178‒205). Landis argues that the government of Shukri al-Quwwatli at the time had already become convinced that the Palestinian Arabs could not be rescued, and was trying to keep Abdullah of Transjordan from claiming “greater Syria”. The forces under the command of Fawzi al-Qawuqji as a result were not necessarily invested in defence of Palestine. This is interesting in the light of the repeated references in various narratives to “betrayal” by al-Qawuqji.
13The issue of asymmetry becomes more poignant when set against the powerful motif of betrayal and complicity in Palestinian oral histories. It is a theme whose rendition within the narratives awaits more detailed and sustained inquiry.
14Tirat Haifa held out until 16 July 1948, though the attack order against it came on 14 May (see Pappe 2006: 132, 155 and 161).
15The village of Deir Yassin was the site of a brutal massacre by Irgun forces on 9 April 1948, and is repeatedly cited in Palestinian memory accounts as being a focal point in the spread of terror among Palestinians. Tantura, a village in the Haifa region which also saw a massacre by the invading Alexandroni Brigade on 22 May 1948, is often cited by villagers from the Haifa area. For more on the Deir Yassin massacre, see McGowan and Ellis (1998). On the Tantrua massacre, see Pappe (2006: 133‒137).
16See for example the description in EyeWitness to History.com “Thousands of civilians fled before it. Traveling south in cars, wagons, bicycles, or simply on foot, the desperate refugees took with them what few possessions they could salvage. It wasn’t long before the roads were impassable to the French troops who were headed north in an attempt to reach the battlefield” (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/francedefeat.htm, 1). A wonderful literary text is Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise (2014).
17Personal communication, Shefa-‘Amr 1984.
18In her sharply honed demographic analysis of the Arab/Jewish population balance by the end of 1946 (practically the eve of the Partition Plan), Janet Abu-Lughod (1971: 154) shows that according to figures prepared jointly by the Mandate’s Department of Statistics and the Jewish Agency, Jews constituted a numerical majority in only one sub-district of Palestine, the twin-city area of Yafa (Jaffa)‒Tel Aviv. She concludes that “force of arms accomplished within little more than a year what decades of [Jewish] migration had decisively failed to do, namely, to effect a complete demographic transformation in the lion’s share of Palestine”.
19The film was shot in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, the UK and Germany between 1999 and 2003. Video, 54 min., Hebrew, English and Arabic. DVD subtitles: Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Polish. The excerpt quoted here is available at https://www.facebook.com/BDSBarkan/videos/1816167635290762/. The film is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upoACIfPIzs.
20Interview with Jinan Coulter in Searching for Saris (2013).
21This is an English transcript of the interview; provenance unknown, but most likely from Badil Resource Centre, Bethlehem. It is interesting that the transcript of the English translation (which is what I worked with) has the phrase “and the world was lost” instead of my retranslation here as “the people were lost”. The former translation connotes an even greater sense of loss and trauma. However, it does not accord as well with the likely idiomatic colloquial Arabic expressions that use the term “al-‘Alam”, which is usually a reference to “people” ‒ in the feminine ‒ rather than to “the world”.
22Interview by Jinan Coulter, Searching for Saris (2013).
23In Hearts and Minds, the award-winning film on the ravages of the Vietnam War, by Peter Davis, General Westmoreland says in interview, “the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the orient” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXjeQ8TEkc4). The juxtaposition of shots of Westmoreland saying this with scenes of Vietnamese mourning the loss of loved ones was criticized by some as manipulative. This criticism is perhaps itself an index of the discomfort of some with the “outing” of colonialism.
24For the productive reading of silences, elisions and conflation in oral testimonies, see the work of Alessandro Portelli (especially 1991, 2003).
25See, for example, Benny Morris’ (1995) inquiry into Israeli official records.
26Beinin (2005: 6) argues that “the exclusion of Arab voices and sources of evidence, especially in the work of Benny Morris, limited the extent of that revolution and situates some of the new history close to traditional Zionist categories of knowledge”.
REFERENCES
Abu-Lughod, J.L. (1971) “The Demographic Transformation of Palestine”, in I. Abu-Lughod (ed.), The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Beinin, J. (2005) “Forgetfulness for Memory: The Limits of the New Israeli History”, Journal of Palestine Studies 34(2): 6‒23.
Cavendish, R. (1998) “Foundation of the State of Israel”, History Today
48(5), http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/foundation-state-israel.
Blumberg, A. (1998) History of Israel. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Chanes, J. (2013) “One Nation Under God”, Forward, 5 February, http://forward.com/culture/170240/one-nation-under-god/.
Childers, E. (1971) “The Wordless Wish: From Citizen to Refugee”, in I. Abu-Lughod (ed.), The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Danizger, K. (2008) Marking the Mind: a History of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Humphries, I. and L. Khalili (2007) “Gender of Nakba Memory”, in A.H. Sa‘di and L. Abu-Lughod (eds.), Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory New York: Columbia University Press.
Karsh, E. and R. Miller, eds. (2013) Israel at Sixty: Rethinking the Birth of the Jewish State. Abingdon: Routledge,.
Landis, J. (2001) “Syria and the 1948 War in Palestine”, https://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/Joshua.M.Landis-1/Syria_1948.htm.
McGowan, D. and M.H. Ellis, eds. (1998) Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine. New York: Olive Branch Press.
Medding, P.Y. (1990) The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948‒1967. New York: Oxford University Press.
Morris, B. (1995) “Falsifying the Record: A Fresh look at Zionist Documentation of 1948”, Journal of Palestine Studies XXIV(3): 44‒62.
Morris, B. (2004) The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nemirovsky, I. (2014) Suite Francaise, translated by S. Smith. London: Vintage.
Pappe, I. (2006) “Preface”, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.
Portelli, A. (1991) The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Portelli, A. (2003) The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Meaning and Memory of a Nazi Massacre in Rome. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rogan, E. and A. Shlaim, eds. (2001) Rewriting the Palestine War: 1948 and the History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ruedy, J. (1971) “The Dynamics of Land Alienation”, in I. Abu-Lughod (ed.), The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Said, E. (1984) “Permission to Narrate”, JPS 13(3): 27‒48.
Sayigh, R. (1979) Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries. London, Zed Books.
Sayigh, R. (2007) “Women’s Nakba Stories: Between Being and Knowing”, in A.H. Sa‘di and L. Abu-Lughod (eds.), Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Stoler, L.A. (2008a) “Affective States”, in
Stoler, L.A. (2008b) “Epistemic Politics: Ontologies of Colonial Common Sense”, The Philosophical Forum 39(3): 349‒361.
White, H. (1976) “The Fictions of Factual Representation”, in A. Fletcher (ed.), The Literature of Fact. New York: Columbia University Press.
PART III
Archiving the Nakba through Palestinian refugee women’s voices
5
Nakba silencing and the challenge of Palestinian oral history
ROSEMARY SAYIGH
In making Zionism attractive ‒ that is, making it attract genuine support in the deepest sense – its leaders not only ignored the Arab; when it was necessary to deal with him, they made him intelligible, they represented him to the West as something that could be understood and managed in specific ways. Between Zionism and the West there was and still is a community of language and of ideology, and the Arab was not part of this community. To a very great extent this community depends on a remarkable tradition in the West of enmity towards Islam in particular and the Orient in general (Said 1979: 25‒26).
Late modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early modern occupation, particularly in its combination of the disciplinary, the bio-political and the necro-political. The most accomplished form of necro-power is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine. Here the colonial state derives its fundamental claim of sovereignty and legitimacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity. The narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right to exist; the narrative competes with another for the same sacred space. Because the two narratives are incompatible and the two populations are inextricably intertwined, any demarcation of the territory on the basis of pure identity is quasi-impossible. Violence and sovereignty in this case claim a divine foundation: peoplehood itself is forged by the worship of one deity, and national identity is imagined as an identity against the Other, other deities. History, geography, cartography and archaeology are supposed to back these claims. As a consequence, colonial violence and occupation are profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of truth and exclusivity (mass expulsions, resettlement of “stateless” people in refugee camps, settlement of new colonies).
INTRODUCTION
If the details of Zionism’s expulsion of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine in 19481 had not been transferred through family and community memories, the Nakba would be little more than a single event in the transformation of the Ottoman empire into a set of nation-states on the Western model. The Nakba’s disastrous consequences for the people of Palestine would be suppressed in well-oiled colonial terms such as “population exchange” or “re-settlement”. True, the documents existed from which to fill out the factors that crowned the Zionist movement with statehood in 1948 (Morris 1987; Masalha 1992). But entirely missing from this record is the experience for the people of Palestine of the 1948 expulsions, leading to collective consequences that I conceptualize as “damaged lives”. This concept has primarily been used in relation to health, family, sexuality and the individual, but I propose to extend its meaning to any collectivity displaced or expropriated by the international power structure. The expulsions of 1948 damaged the Palestinians by reducing them from potential citizens of a sovereign state for which Britain was assigned by the Mandate to prepare them, under article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, to a situation of disenfranchisement, partial dependence on international charity and host state toleration. Economic interventions by the Great Powers such as the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) merely reinforced separation from their homeland and entrenched their loss of national recognition (Pappe 1994). Around 156,000 Palestinians who remained inside the territory controlled by Israel were differentiated by sect and assigned second-class citizenship (Zureik et al. 2011).
The importance of the Nakba as rupture in Palestinian lives and history is incontestable. Displacement meant loss of homes and land, archives, libraries, public buildings, archaeological treasures, and the rupture of national institutions and identity under construction since the late Ottoman Empire. Whatever their class, residence or status, it damaged Palestinian lives to some degree, and none more than those who were forced by destitution to settle in camps. Their reaction to dispossession has been well described by Davis:
the destruction they experienced in 1948 has resulted in continuous assertions in writing, oral accounts, and everyday conversations of their indigenous presence on the land; of their connections to the surrounding cultures and heritages; and of the long history and ties to the land of Palestine, the land of their ancestors. (Davis 2011: 19)
NAKBA SILENCING
The violence used in silencing the Nakba is demonstrated both in the multiplicity of means employed, and the extent of institutional investment in them, stretching beyond the Israeli state to Zionist organizations worldwide, and to the United States. Among these means, a central one has been ensuring the commemorative primacy of the Nazi Holocaust. Holocaust remembrance is funded and supported by a host of sources, most prominently by Jewish organizations, Israel and the United States. The success of the campaign to keep the Holocaust
in the forefront of world consciousness is demonstrated by a number of signs: Jewish and international associations that have been established to secure Holocaust remembrance, for example the Shoah Foundation for education on the Holocaust and other genocides, the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.2 Holocaust denial is illegal in fourteen European countries plus Israel and Australia; criminalization of Holocaust denial has been discussed in the United States and the United Kingdom but not put into law; in some countries jurists consider that Holocaust denial is covered by laws against “hate speech”.3 A EU Framework Decision on Racism and Xenophobia says that Holocaust denial should be punishable by all member states, but leaves compliance open.4 All the countries of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have Holocaust memorials (OSCE 2015).5 The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the George Eckert Institute for International Text Book Research have undertaken a project to investigate world school curricula to assess if and how the Holocaust is dealt with.6