Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  I’d been in Hares for several weeks before it registered that the road sign at the bottom of the hill did not mention this Palestinian village of two thousand people, but only Revava, the settlement outpost a couple of kilometres beyond. In disbelief, I began looking for signs to the neighbouring villages, Kifl Haris and Marda. There were none. Remembering the tourist map, I was stunned at this exercise of power by an occupying force so confident in its domination that it would deny the physical reality of the land.

  Though that moment on the road outside Hares was pivotal in this book’s inception, this book is not about the Occupation. My focus is on Israel’s engagement with the Palestinian Nakba of 1948: how contested histories of the past press through into the lives of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel today;*and, ultimately, how they affect the possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. In examining the wounds and scars that defined the original conflict, and have defined its telling, I look through the lens of social suffering, an anthropological perspective that examines how, communally and individually, we experience and respond to social forces of catastrophic violence.† To me, this approach gives breathing room to the complexities of human experience, the fears and vulnerabilities of human suffering. Two devastating events, the Holocaust and the Nakba, marked Israel’s founding, and how each has been remembered and forgotten has infused both the political and the physical landscape of the country. I do not parallel the Nakba with the Holocaust. It is not logically possible to equate the uprooting of over seven hundred thousand people with the meticulously planned genocide of six million. Where echoes pass between these separate yet entwined catastrophes is in the unfinished trauma lived by the survivors.

  In writing this book I became more conscious of how vital an element in reconciliation and healing is the acknowledgement of another’s pain. I knew this — it was part of my motivation for writing — but being immersed in that dynamic in my research made me more aware of its workings in my own life. When I was heard, I was more open, and saw this also in the people around me. When I felt silenced or invisible, I saw myself close: become defended, hard. It is part of our human nature, this need to be heard, to have a witness to the testimony of our suffering; and this is as true communally as it is for an individual.

  From histories of social suffering come collective memories of trauma and displacement, so powerful that they overshadow present-day attempts at repair. The workings of collective memory can tell us a lot about the ways in which people make sense of historical suffering. Collective memory can, for example, be an essential component in the construction of national identity.

  Both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are driven by a strong sense of nationalism, all the stronger for being contested. A nation is, in the influential definition of political scientist Benedict Anderson, “an imagined political community…. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”[3] As such, a nation has need of shared self-conceptions, and shared creation stories, to bind its citizens into a cohesive whole. Collective memories of past events fill this need. Individual remembrances of a common experience are varied, contradictory, partial; collective memory, shaped by sources as diverse as mass media, state memorials and commemorations, and history textbooks, presents a comfortingly unified history of the past. Cultural critic Edward Said notes that collective memory works “selectively by manipulating certain bits of the national past, suppressing others, elevating still others in an entirely functional way … for sometimes urgent purposes in the present.”[4]

  Outside the boundaries of the nation lives the Other: the one who is different. The very presence of the Other gives form to the boundaries of the group. Just as a range of hills can mark a territorial boundary, so some perceived difference can act as a barrier to keep the Other out; it also forms the boundaries of the group by defining what the group is not. Jewish Israel, born, like most nation states, of war, has the Palestinians as a common enemy to hold its highly diverse population together. Globally scattered Palestinians are defined as a collective by the shared catastrophe of their 1948 defeat and dispersal by Jewish forces.

  Vital to the psychic construction of a nation, collective memory has a tendency to render things in black and white. Historian Peter Novick, who has written on collective memory and the Holocaust, describes how it “simplifies; sees events from a single, committed perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes.… [It] has no sense of the passage of time; it denies the ‘pastness’ of its objects and insists on their continuing presence.”[5] Shared perceptions of the past often stem from one specific memory which, as Novick says, “is understood to express some eternal or essential truth about the group — usually tragic.” For Israeli Jews and for Palestinians that foundational event is the catastrophe that each people suffered in the 1940s.

  Both peoples, crippled by an old, still-present pain, see themselves as burdened by a unique and permanent victimhood. Acknowledging the suffering of the Other might lessen the validity of their own, and comes laden with adverse political consequences. Psychologist Dan Bar-On and political scientist Saliba Sarsar note that:

  For the Palestinians, accepting the Jewish pain around the Holocaust means accepting the moral ground for the creation of the State of Israel.‡ For the Israeli Jews, accepting the pain of the 1948 Palestinian refugees means sharing responsibility for their plight and their right of return.[6]

  The war of 1948 welded into place an asymmetry of power between the Jewish-Israeli state and the stateless Palestinians. While both groups deny the Other’s historical suffering, that radical imbalance of power between them means that Israel can take denial a step further, and make good its felt need to “destroy the collective memory of the Other.”[7]

  The landscapes of the State of Israel — the Judean desert, the hills of Galilee, the ancient streets of Jerusalem — root the collective memories and the nationalist aspirations of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians. The Jewish people have finally returned to Israel as the place of their historical belonging, a refuge from the persecutions of diaspora. Simultaneously, Palestine is the stolen paradise of its longtime Arab inhabitants, for whom the Zionists are johnny-come-latelies, colonial settlers who rode on the coattails of the imperial British.[8] Both these narratives have at their beginning the same piece of land. As a concept, then, that land is highly contested: not only its borders, and its ownership, but also its landscape.

  History, as we know, is written by the victors: school textbooks in Israel either made no mention of the Palestinian Arabs, or simply stated that they ran away. Similarly, contested landscapes can be refashioned to make manifest the victors’ collective memory of the past. In Israel, as we will see, maps received new legends; Arab names were replaced with Hebrew by a Government Names Commission. Empty Palestinian villages were demolished and new forests planted over their ruins, ensuring that physical traces of centuries of Arab presence in the land became invisible. Those that remained became part of the landscape: ahistorical ruins, leached of their specific past.

  Years later, Nira Yuval-Davis returned to Tantura. The ruined houses had disappeared; the childhood paradise of her memories had been transformed into a tourist spot, and the prefab chalets now dotting the beach were the local kibbutz’s main source of income. The old mosque, though, was still there, and Nira went inside. Israeli law forbids the desecration of holy sites, but the building was a hollow shell, full of trash and stinking of urine. Her Tantura was gone, and so too was Rafiq’s village: its traces invisible to anyone who did not know to look for them, and its holy place profaned with visitors’ garbage. After this, she writes, “I was ready to view Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with somewhat more detached eyes.”[9]

  Nira’s difficult awakening involved not only stepping out of the collective memory, bu
t also renegotiating the memories of her own past. Bearing reluctant witness to the other, hidden, history of her land, she was able eventually to hold the realities of both.

  Eitan Bronstein writes of the need to “talk about the Nakba in Hebrew so that our language will be more peaceful and just.”[10] Eitan is the co-founder of Zochrot, a small, primarily Jewish-Israeli NGO based in downtown Tel Aviv, whose mission is to make their fellow Jewish citizens conscious of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. Zochrot creates pockets of resistance in the flow of Israeli political imagination through acts of public commemoration: organizing historical tours to the sites of demolished villages, or amending street signs so that they also include the street’s former Arab name. Its members accompany mourning Palestinian Israelis on their commemorative marches to the demolished villages on Nakba Day — commemorations that the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has recently taken punitive steps against.

  Zochrot makes visible the invisible past, the villages that lie beneath Tel Aviv or the hilltop ruins overlooking a thriving Jewish town. National identity and belonging are rooted in a place, and are destabilized by accepting that another people’s history is also rooted there. Zochrot’s highly controversial memory-work forces Jewish Israelis to look again at the familiar landscape, undermining the consensus of the past by bringing the hidden history of the Nakba into view.

  As Nira and many other Jewish Israelis have discovered, hearing the story of the Other’s suffering can initiate a painful process that peels off layers of identity, as much a part of us as our skin. This is a hard, risky thing to do. It’s also a sign of hope. The land of Israel/Palestine is small, and for a brokered peace to stabilize and hold there must be some degree of reconciliation between the two peoples, whether they live together in one state or side-by-side in two. Opening oneself to the Other’s story, and to the possibility that it may transform one’s own story, is an essential step toward reconciliation.

  * * *

  * Jewish and Palestinian Israelis are my subject, rather than Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, in refugee camps in neighbouring states, or elsewhere in diaspora.

  † This emerging discipline comes under the umbrella of medical anthropology. It suggests that suffering, while generally presented as a pathologised and individual concern, may often be a response to broader, structural issues, such as the violence of war, political oppression, or economic exploitation. While these sufferings are ultimately experienced by individuals, they are suffered collectively rather than singly. How to articulate or bear witness to suffering, one’s own or another’s, is a central concern; in their foundational work, Social Suffering, Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock describe the incapacity to acknowledge another’s pain as being “at the bottom of the cultural process of political abuse.” Social Suffering (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), xiii.

  ‡ Holocaust denial is rife in the Occupied Territories.

  Chapter One

  1948

  “Here,” calls Dahoud, “Here, this is where my home was.”[1] All I can see are a few piles of stones, almost lost under tall grass. These stones made up the walls of the house Dahoud Badr grew up in some sixty years ago, when this was al-Ghabsiya, an Arab village in the Galilee. Turning off from the highway that crosses northern Israel, Dahoud had driven me through farmed fields and woodland up onto this isolated hilltop, the track petering out beneath us. There’s a derelict mosque behind rolls of barbed wire a few hundred metres away from where we’re standing, the empty arches of its windows boarded up. The walls are intact, but grass grows on the roof and in the crevices between the sand-coloured stones. It’s the only building up here. Across the few acres of the hilltop, among the almond trees and the cactus, lies more rubble, small heaps of rock. Otherwise there is little to show that Dahoud’s village ever existed. “I was six,” he says, “when the soldiers came. They had guns. We had to leave.”

  The villagers were expelled on May 1, 1948, two weeks before the declaration of the new state of Israel. The Badrs and their neighbours became refugees in a land whose territorial boundaries were in massive flux, and whose inhabitants were living through the convulsions of an increasingly brutal war. These were, for some, the birth pangs of a new Jewish nation. For others, this agony was the end of Arab Palestine.

  The expulsion of the villagers of al-Ghabsiya was a microcosm of a much larger pattern; across the Galilee, and across the country, Arab villagers were fleeing their homes. At the same time, Jewish refugees in flight from the post-Holocaust chaos in Europe were pouring into the new state, the first Jewish homeland in two thousand years.

  In the aftermath of the Second World War, some 14 million displaced people found themselves in transit on the roads of Europe. Some were returning to their place of origin, to seek out what remained of their families, their homes and communities; others were heading as far away as they could, in hopes of starting a new life.

  Many of these migrants were Jewish, survivors of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Two-thirds of the Jews of Europe had been murdered, including 90 percent of the Jewish population of Poland, the Baltic states, Germany, and Austria. As the concentration camps and forced labour camps were liberated by advancing Allied troops, the freed survivors found themselves in alien territory, with no place to go. For most, returning home was not an option. The Jewish quarters of European cities and the rural shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe had been destroyed. And people were all too aware that, across the continent, many of their fellow citizens had assisted in the rounding-up and deportation of Jews: only in Denmark and Bulgaria did the local authorities simply refuse the Nazi demand. In places such as the Ukraine, Poland, and Estonia, many locals had willingly joined in the mass killing.

  Anti-Semitism was deeply entrenched in Europe, and it didn’t suddenly disappear with the end of the Nazi regime. Those Jews who did return home often faced hostility and even violence. Landlords in Paris banded together to prevent returning Jews getting their old apartments back.[2] There were even anti-Jewish riots in Britain.[3] In July 1946, forty-two Polish Jews returning home to Kielce were massacred by the local population, precipitating a mass exodus of Poland’s remaining Jews. Most survivors fled westward, into territories now administered by the Allies: Germany, Austria, Italy. There they were kept under military guard in Displaced Persons camps, run by the Allies’ United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

  Many Jews wanted to go to the United States.[4] There was a long tradition of persecuted Jews finding shelter in the U.S.: between 1881 and 1924, over two million Jewish émigrés had passed through Ellis Island from Russia alone. But in 1924, under the National Origins Act, quotas had been imposed. Fueled by racism, anti-Semitism, and fears of loss of jobs to foreign workers, these quotas had slashed immigration from Eastern Europe. Rising U.S. anti-Semitism in the 1930s and ’40s helped ensure that, despite the massive need, immigration quotas in the U.S. remained rigidly in place for the duration of the Holocaust. Increasing numbers of Jewish refugees saw Palestine as their only option: their ancient land, now home to a growing and politicized Jewish community.

  Ever since the 1880s, when systematic, state-sponsored persecution forced a mass migration of Russian Jewry, the small Yishuv, or Jewish population of Palestine, had been growing. From 1880 to 1923, some 115,000 new immigrants arrived, some from Yemen, but the vast majority from the Russian empire. These refugees were highly politically motivated. Driven from their Russian shtetls and towns by nationalist persecution, they wanted to re-establish in Palestine a Jewish homeland, their own nation, where Jews would no longer be a minority in danger of oppression. They called themselves Zionists, and immigration and settlement were crucial to the furtherance of their goals. The Yishuv developed its own culture and institutions, and even its own language — the revived Hebrew of the Jewish Scriptures. Knowing themselves to be still very much at the mercy of the imperial powers jockeying for position in the Middle East, they used the influenc
e of a few well-placed Zionist supporters in the diaspora to lobby foreign governments for support.

  In 1917, mired in the later stages of World War I, the British government was looking ahead to the likely collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which included the tiny backwater of Palestine. Wanting to preserve its strategic interests in the area, and inspired by both a desire to solve what he considered “the Jewish problem” and his Christian belief that the return of the exiled Hebrews to the Land of Israel would fulfill Biblical prophecy,[5] foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to prominent Zionist Lord Rothschild telling him that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object….” (see Appendix 1).* This ambiguously worded document, alas, was in direct conflict with the elusive assurances made as to the future of Palestine by Sir Henry MacMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, in his correspondence with Husayn bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca.

  After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Britain and France carved up the near Middle East into Mandates — territories with more autonomy than a colony, but still administered by a colonial power. Even before Britain’s Mandate over Palestine had begun, the stage was set for an escalating, inevitable conflict between two peoples whose nationalist aspirations were rooted in the same land.

  Britain’s Mandate was greeted with mixed feelings by the region’s Arab inhabitants. The previous sixty years had seen a transformation of the local economy: regular steamboat passage from Europe to the ports of Ottoman Palestine had meant an influx of Christian pilgrims and visitors during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. As these numbers grew, the Ottoman administration had realized that this overlooked corner of their empire could turn a profit. They invested in railways and roads, and turned the harbours of Jaffa and Haifa into thriving ports. Wheat and citrus, and olive soap and oil, made their way across the Mediterranean to the households of Europe. As Palestine became integrated into the world economy, so new immigrants came looking for work.