An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba
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Svirsky, M. (2012) Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine. Abingdon: Routledge.
The Nakba Files (2016) “Archives Week on the Nakba Files”, http://nakbafiles.org/2016/05/26/archives-week-on-the-nakba-files/.
Weiss, P. (2016) “‘We wasted 40 years talking about nothing, doing nothing’ ‒ Pappe demolishes peace process”, http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/we-wasted-40-years-talking-about-nothing-doing-nothing-pappe-demolishes-the-peace-process/.
14
“Besieging the cultural siege”: mapping narratives of Nakba through orality and repertoires of resistance
CHANDNI DESAI
Besiege your siege, there is no other way. (Mahmoud Darwish, quoted in Barghouti 2011)
In the documentary On the Side of the Road (Tarachansky 2013), the film opens with a scene on the streets of Tel Aviv on 15 May, where Israelis are found celebrating their so-called “Independence Day”. On the same day Palestinians commemorated the Nakba (known as the “catastrophe”), marking the ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948 whereby 750,000 people were expelled from their homes, lost their lands and became internally displaced or exiled refugees (Masalha 2012; Pappe 2006). The film shows Palestinian commemoration events in various parts of the Occupied Territories, especially in the form of protests. In response to acts of collective mourning of the Nakba, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his remarks to the Knesset two days later, said the following:
I have to say that, from the perspective of the rioters, the 63 years Israel’s been existing haven’t changed anything. After all, what did the protestors in Gaza say? They yelled they want to return to Jaffa [Yafa]. What did the protestors in Syria say? That they want to return to the Galilee. […] The most interesting is the thing that happened in Bil’in. Because at the protests in Bil’in two days ago […] a little girl was walking with a big, symbolic key in her hand. Now, every Palestinian understands what key we’re talking about here. It wasn’t a key to their houses in Bil’in, or in Nablus, or in Ramallah, it was the key to our houses, in Jaffa, in Akko, in Haifa, in Ramle. (Netanyahu speech and translation in Tarachansky 2013)
I begin this chapter with this lengthy quote to demonstrate the settler-colonial narrative and national mythologies that are produced to tell stories of land and (non-)belonging about Palestine/Israel. Settler-colonial societies use national mythologies to erase the genocidal history that led to a settler nation’s founding. These national mythologies are profoundly racialized and spatialized stories. Sherene Razack (2002: 3) argues that “although the spatial story that is told varies from one time to another, at each stage the story installs Europeans as entitled to the land, a claim that is codified in law”. The legal doctrine of terra nullius – empty, uninhabited lands – describes territory that has supposedly never been subject to the sovereignty of any nation. In his speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu follows this logic. First, Palestinian land is rendered terra nullius by its so-called “rightful” (new) owners – the Zionists – who discovered “a land without a people, for people without a land” and made the “desert bloom”. This settler story transforms the Indigenous people of the land who had/have lived there for centuries into “uncivilized rioters”, erasing and conflating their mourning and refusal to accept “Israeli Independence Day” as acts of violence that need to be contained through the use of force and law. In evoking the words “our houses”, Netanyahu’s narrative erases the Zionist conquest and land theft of the Palestinian cities of Yafa, Akka, Haifa, Ramle and the Galilee in 1948 by claiming these cities as Israeli. The significance of the act of commemorating the Nakba and the cultural symbols that evoke Palestinian indigeneity and land claims is evident in his speech, as Netanyahu is bothered by a little girl’s gesture of walking around holding a symbolic key. Netanyahu’s settler anxieties are revealed when he speaks about this little girl to the Knesset because she represents the continuity of an anti-colonial Palestinian history that each Palestinian generation, inside the country and in exile, will continue to pass on through the oral stories, symbols (such as keys, olive trees, oranges and citrus groves), memories and cultural production (resistance poetry, literature, music, dabke ‒ folk dance) transmitted across time and space.
In this study, using critical race and anti-colonial theory, I outline how the Israeli/Zionist settler-colonial project engaged in the systematic erasure of the material culture of Palestine, with a specific focus on toponymicide. I argue that Palestinian cultural producers rupture and reconfigure Zionist toponomy and national settler-colonial mythologies of land and belonging. I argue that they provide a counter-hegemonic and anti-colonial narrative of 1948 (Nakba) and its afterlife,1 and claim place and belonging to Palestine through their resistance repertoires. In doing so, I propose that various cultural producers partake in allegorically besieging the cultural siege on Palestinian/Israel history, following Darwish’s call to “besiege your siege”.
DESTRUCTION OF PALESTINIAN MATERIAL CULTURE CENTRAL TO ZIONIST CONQUEST
I situate this work within a historical understanding of the politics of Israel‒Palestine and of Zionism as a political ideology and a settler-colonial regime characterized by the establishment of the state of Israel (Abdo 2011). In particular, core to the Zionist settler-colonial project’s endeavour of claiming the land, the destruction of Palestinian material culture was necessary to erase the Palestinian presence. The war of 1948 had the premeditated purpose of expelling as many Palestinians as possible. Baruch Kimmerling (2003: 3–4) defines this systematic attempt at Palestinian annihilation as politicide: “a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity”. Another method that has been used by the settler state to erase Palestinian cultural memory and identity was toponymicide, which was a key tool used to de-Arabize the land. “The Zionist Yishuv’s toponomy project was established in the 1920s to restore biblical Hebrew and to create new Hebrew-sounding names of symbolic meaning” (Ra‘ad 2010: 189). The Jewish National Fund (JNF) naming committee was used to replace Palestinian Arab toponomy with Zionist-Hebrew toponomy. As such, “thousands of names were given to streets, public squares, and the landscape, with signs in Hebrew everywhere” (Masalha 2012: 100; and see Troen 2007). For example, the Arab village Mahloul was renamed Nahlal, Jibta was changed to Kibbutz Gvat, Mlabbis was named Petah Tikva (Masalha 2012: 102). Renaming through mapping enabled the settler-colonists to geographically overhaul of entire country, transforming and rewriting Palestinian and Jewish histories according to Zionist dicta. In renaming places and symbolic cultural images of land Nur Masalha (2012) suggests that Israel partakes in the “memoricide” of Palestine. Also, appropriation of the Palestinian heritage and its voices was central to Zionist colonial practice. These practices have attempted to erase and silence the Palestinian narrative of history and replace it with a dominant Zionist narrative. In doing so, Ghassan Kanafani (1968) argued that the Palestinian people inside historical Palestine experienced not only a military siege but also a cultural siege. Thus, for Israeli settler-colonialists to maintain power and Jewish exclusivity, anything that offers knowledge on a different history, temporality and spatiality of Israel/Palestine had/has to be demolished and erased.
In 2011, the attempts at memoricide were yet again made evident when the Israeli Knesset passed the Nakba Law.2 This discriminatory bill cuts state funding to any organization that commemorates the Palestinian Nakba, studies, mentions or produces knowledge about it, as the historical facts of the Nakba tell the story of the founding of the Israeli settler-colonial state. Haneen Zoabi (a Palestinian member of the Knesset) suggests that “behind this law is a fear, a fear of the victim. Behind this law is the ability of the memory of the victim to threaten the legitimacy of Zionism” (Kestler-D’Amours 2011: para. 30). In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor (2003: 17) argues that histories are written to “suit the memorializing needs of those in power”. Similarly, referrin
g to the context of Palestine, Nur Masalha (2012) suggests that Israeli archives say very little about the Palestinian narrative of what happened in 1948 from the side of the victims who experienced the Nakba. Ilan Pappe (2006) also makes an important point regarding the “new Israeli historiography” of 1948 and argues that the alternative historical narratives provided by the “new historians” is largely macro-historical due to the nature of Israeli archival material. When the archive is considered the only legitimate source of valid information, Taylor (2003: 193) asks whose experiences and “memories, whose trauma, disappears if only archival knowledge is valorized and granted permanence?” In Acts of Transfer, Taylor (2003: 20‒21) suggests that the repertoire is a form of knowledge that “transmits communal memories, histories and values from one group-generation to the next. Embodied and performed acts generate record and transmit knowledge”. The repertoire includes enactments embodied in memory, performance(s), orality, movement, singing, dancing and gestures which are ephemeral knowledge. The repertoire “holds the tales of the survivors, their gestures, the traumatic flashbacks, repeats, and hallucinations” (Taylor 2003: 193), which are embodied forms of thought and memory that should be considered valid forms of knowledge, especially for those often marginalized and silenced. In the case of Palestine, the repertoire – music, songs, stories, dance etc. ‒ is how Palestinians have preserved and transmitted memory about Palestine and its history, specifically the Nakba, across time and space. Amidst the fragmentation of the Palestinian population, the lack of a state, the Zionist destruction of Palestinian material culture and the constant attacks on archives and centres of culture and knowledge production, Palestinians continue to preserve and pass on knowledge about their history across the generations.
In the next section I draw from data collected during my doctoral research, specifically on the oral history interviews and cultural texts of exiled (third-generation) Palestinian spoken word and hip hop artists, an interview with the El-Funoun Dance Troupe’s choreographer, and Ghassan Kanafani’s short story The Land of Sad Oranges, to show how Palestinians reconfigure Zionist toponomy through their repertoires of cultural resistance.
REMEMBERING AND ARCHIVING THE NAKBA THROUGH ORALITY
In Ghassan Kanafani’s well-known short story The Land of Sad Oranges (1958), a child narrator tells the story of the Zionist militia attack on Akka in May 1948, and the journey of dispossession from Akka to Ras al-Naqoura.3 Along the way, the narrator describes seeing fields of oranges. At one point in the story, as they are fleeing, the van stops at an orange grove. The child narrator’s aunt hands her husband an orange, and he “started looking at it silently, then his cry exploded, like a desperate child” (Kanafani 1958: 62). One of the most significant moments in the story is the family’s arrival in Lebanon. The narrator says:
I started to cry; your mother was still looking at the orange silently and in the eyes of your father, the orange trees that he left for the Jews was sparkling in his eyes. All the clean orange trees that he bought, tree by tree, all were being drawn on his face. He couldn’t hold in his sparkling tears, in front of prescient police officer. When we reached Saidon [South Lebanon], in the afternoon, we became refugees. (Kanafani 1958: 65)
Another important scene in the story is when the child narrator recalls what a peasant once told him about the oranges of Yafa (Jaffa): “it wilts, if the hand that waters it changes” (Kanafani 2013). At the end of the story, as the child narrator enters the room they were staying in, like an intruder, and touches his uncle’s face which is shaking in destructive anger, he concurrently sees a “black pistol on the table and next to it was an orange, and the orange was dry, and wilted” (Kanafani 1958: 73).
Kanafani’s short story is a very significant piece of resistance literature, as he narrated Palestine back into existence through his own memories, and through oral stories about the exodus that were shared with him. This simply written yet detailed story describes the Palestinian Nakba, and the routes that thousands took as they escaped the attacks of Zionist militias that were given orders for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians through Plan Dalet in 1948 (Khalidi 1988). More specifically, the story centres around the orange, as this fruit was central to the Palestinian economy and culture. Before 1948 the people of Yafa had cultivated citrus groves, specifically oranges, as there was a global demand for Yafa’s oranges. The city of Yafa therefore had an important place in the global economy as millions of crates of oranges were exported from the city to major commercial centres across the Mediterranean and Europe (Abu Shehadeh and Shbaytah 2009). According to Sami Abu Shehadeh and Fadi Shbaytah (2009: para. 3), Yafa experienced enormous economic growth because of the citrus exports:
from banks to land and sea transportation enterprises to import and export firms, and many others. As the city grew, Jaffa’s entrepreneurs began to develop local industrial production with the opening of metal-work factories, and others producing glass, ice, cigarettes, textiles, sweets, transportation-related equipment, mineral and carbonated water, and various foodstuffs, among others.
Despite this rich economic and cultural history of Palestine, Zionist settlers appropriated the orange, fetishized it and began to use the image of the orange to produce the story “of taming the land with the arrival of Jewish settlers” (Sela in Sivan 2010), producing the narrative of Zionist pioneers who cultivated the so-called deserted, barren land. Rona Sela, a researcher and curator in Israel, “demonstrates how early photographs of the region deliberately portrayed it as desolate, inviting conquest and cultivation” (Parsons 2011: para. 11). Also, the Citrus Marketing Board of Israel adopted the Jaffa orange and branded it as Israeli on the world market. Israel appropriated one of the most significant Palestinian symbols, and not only transformed it into its own emblem, but in claiming the lands and citrus industry that Palestinians had cultivated also erased the Palestinian people’s presence from their lands. According to historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Through the orange, you unfold the story of the Zionist seizure of the country in every way” (Parsons 2011: para. 13).
Kanafani’s novel provides a counter-narrative to this seizure of land by highlighting the significance of oranges to the Palestinian economy and culture. The wilted orange described at the end of the short story provides a narrative of the Palestinian relationship to the land, especially of the peasants (fallaheen) who cultivated it. The wilted orange symbolizes Zionist invasion, conquest and the material erasure of Palestine, claiming Palestinian existence and belonging to the land. Stories such as these are an important part of Palestinian resistance culture as they are passed on to subsequent generations, especially to those that did not experience the Nakba.
In oral history interviews with spoken word/hip hop artists Remi Kanazi, Excentrik (Tarik Kazaleh) and Rafeef Ziadah, who all live in exile, they describe the process of what Diana Taylor (2003) calls “acts of transfer” – transmitting social knowledge, memory and a sense of identity through the repertoire. Tarik shares that his grandparents and uncles had a tremendous influence on him, particularly as he heard about Ghassan Kanafani from them. He was influenced by Kanafani’s resistance literature, and describes his stories as beautiful and creative. Tarik says, “you just read all the compassion in all his stories, they are really sad stories” (Tarik Kazaleh, in Desai 2016: 213). Similarly, when I interviewed spoken word poet Rafeef Ziadah, she explained the significant influence Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Fadwa Tuqan and Naji Al-Ali – artists who produced the radical tradition of Palestinian cultural resistance ‒ had upon her while she was growing up during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Rafeef explains how these resistance artists influenced her consciousness at a young age, as these cultural figures “were our identity, they weren’t just poets and writers, they spoke us, they spoke our history” (Zaidah, personal interview, 2015). This is significant as younger generations are taught about place and belonging to land through repertoires of resistance by their families. The oral stories produced in t
he resistance repertories such as that of Kanafani, Darwish and others, reflected a collective narrative of what happened in 1948. Tarik shares:
So when I learned about the real history of Palestine, and started to see how things really went down and how the Nakba worked, and how that affected my family and how it affected generations and how the occupation still affects my family that still lives back home, it’s a deep personal wound. (Kazaleh, personal interview, 2015)
Oral histories, memories and repertoires such as Kanafani’s are significant because they pass on and provide history to various aspects of the Palestinian question: the Nakba, exile, refugees, armed struggle, right of return, internal social struggle. In doing so, these stories memorialize Palestinians’ experiences of Zionist violence and dispossession and repudiate the primary settler-colonial narratives that dominate Israel and the global public sphere. Such narratives are important pedagogical tools used to teach various generations about Palestine, cultivating their consciousness of resistance across time and space. This was certainly evident for Remi Kanazi, as he recalled that his teta (maternal grandmother) had the greatest influence on his life and cultural work. He shares that his “first entry into Palestine was through his teta” (Kanazi, personal interview, 2015). In his spoken poem “Nakba”, he rhymes
Her home
Mandated, Occupied, Cleansed, Conquered,
Terrorizers sat on hills, sniping children, neighbours fled on 10 April,
Word came of massacre,
They stayed,
Didn’t fight, didn’t flee, shells and bombs bursting in the air like anthems …
Looking over shoulders of the Irgun and the Haganah,
She’s a warrior,
Had birth from Palestine,
Whispered Yafa till her final breath. …