Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  These questions of reparation and return are massively complex, and have stuck in the throats of Palestinian and Israeli peace negotiators now for decades. Are Lily’s views naive and utopian, or a practical response to a longtime conflict symbolized for her by her kibbutz and the invisible village? “A refugee is a refugee,” Lily says, “and we must and can understand this better than anyone else.”

  * * *

  * “In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country,” Balfour wrote in 1919. “Zionism, be it right or wrong, … is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the seven hundred thousand Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” See Ahmad H. Sa’di, “Reflections on Representations, History, and Moral Accountability” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, ed. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 289.

  † The village was attacked by the rightist Etzel and Lehi militias, with support from the Haganah’s elite unit, the Palmach. Exactly how many villagers they killed is in dispute. Palestinian sources currently assess the death count at around one hundred, but at the time David Ben-Gurion, the Red Cross, and the Palestinian leadership thought it was over two hundred. Survivors were paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem.

  ‡ “Yigal Allon asked Ben-Gurion what was to be done with the civilian population,” wrote future Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in his diary. “Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture of ‘drive them out.’ ‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring. Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The people of Lydda did not leave willingly.” Service Diary, quoted by David Shipler, “Israel Bars Rabin From Relating ’48 Eviction of Arabs,” New York Times, October 22, 1979.

  § Partition and population transfer were also taking place in other parts of the fading British Empire. In 1947, the British ended their longtime colonial presence in India, and with their rapid and ill-prepared departure the territory, already fractured by rival nationalist interests, was partitioned into (Hindu) India and (Muslim) Pakistan. Soon-to-be Governor General of Pakistan (“Pure Land”) Mohammad Ali Jinnah declared that the minority Muslims of India were a nation, and must have “their homelands, their territory, and their state.” Some twelve million people, Muslim and Hindu, fled or were forced over the new borders. The Partition was marked by horrific levels of violence. No one knows how many died — estimates range from several hundred thousand to two million.

  ¶ While the Palestinians’ cause has served to unite Arab states against a common enemy, there has been little support for them as refugees. Dahoud Badr commented:

  My sister and brother have been in Lebanon since 1948. They were living in refugee camps for many years — they’re now in Sidon. They do not have equal rights with the Lebanese. There are many things that, as a Palestinian, you can’t do — buy land, own a house, run a taxi, buy building materials. The Lebanese government wants them to understand that they are refugees, and that they must return. The conditions for refugees there are very bad.

  ** On December 11, 1948, as the war drew to its end, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which spoke to the situation in the former British Mandate of Palestine. Article 11 states that:

  … the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

  Palestinians hold the implementation of this right to be foundational to the resolution of the conflict. Israel argues, inter alia, that Palestinian violence precludes the implementation of Article 11.

  †† Tamar’s views on the war, and indeed of Palestinian Arabs in general, are shared by many Jewish Israelis.

  ‡‡* Hillel cautioned me: “I am in a constant state of study, so all I say is temporary.”

  Chapter Two

  Catastrophe and Memory

  In July 2009, Israel’s Education Ministry decided to ban the one school textbook that used the term “Nakba.” The book, written for Palestinian-Israeli students, stated in its discussion of the 1948 War that “The Arabs call the war the nakba — a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation — and the Jews call it the Independence War.”[1]

  “After studying the matter with education experts it was decided that the term ‘Nakba’ should be removed,” a ministry spokesperson said to Haaretz, the country’s most prestigious daily newspaper. “It is inconceivable that in Israel we would talk about the establishment of the state as a catastrophe.”

  Two months previously, Yisrael Beytenu, then Israel’s third-largest political party, had proposed legislation “to ban marking Independence Day as a day of mourning.”[2] Their bill targeted Palestinian Israeli commemorations of Nakba Day, which take place while Jewish Israelis celebrate the state’s founding. Violators would face a jail term of up to three years. For Yisrael Beytenu, this act of remembrance is an act of treachery.

  Memorialization has been sown deeply into Israel’s national culture. Parks and forests are named after Biblical heroes, or Zionist leaders of the past. Secular shrines dot the country, honouring the sites of early skirmishes between Jews and Arabs and of the War of Independence. Independence Day is a national day of celebration, the culmination of a cycle of official remembrance: eight days before, there is a day of commemoration of the Shoah (or Holocaust), followed a week later with a day commemorating the fallen soldiers of the 1948 War. The next day is Independence Day, marked with public rituals* as well as street festivities and fireworks. Thus each year Israelis recapitulate a story of the nation’s founding: the trauma of the Shoah, and of the many soldiers who died in the War of Independence, leading chronologically to the birth of the state.

  In this chapter, we will explore the role that collective memory — specifically, traumatic collective memory — plays in forming the Israeli national idea. This will give us a lens through which to read the rest of the book.

  Remembrance is the door through which the past presses into the present. We are shaped by our memories, by how and what we remember, and that informs the ways we live. Indeed, memory plays a significant role in how we constitute ourselves as individuals. Anthropologist Allan Young argues that memory is “the proof as well as the record of the self’s existence, and the struggle over memory is the struggle over the self’s most valued possessions.”[3] Memory is the glue that holds together an ongoing sense of self.[4] Our personal history — at least, our partial and subjective remembrance of it — fashions who we are; and, crucially, how we understand who we are. This is true for nations (or nations-in-waiting, such as the Palestinians) as well: territorial boundaries may shift, but the shared sense of a common history can bind disparate groupings of people into a national community.

  While the memory often seems static, like a massive archive of facts waiting to be recalled, it is more fluid and fertile than that. What we remember, and how we remember it, shifts over time, dependent on the realities of our day-to-day lives. The cruel words thrown at us in an argument will augment or diminish in our minds, depending on whether that conflict is resolved. Similarly, we selectively remember the facts that fit the story we tell ourselves about a past event. Our own failures and shortcomings may loom large, repeating endlessly, or may be leached away by forgetting.

  Memory is yoked to loss, pulling back into our consciousness that which is no longer present. This is particularly true of national memory, which often gels around a lost paradise, or the ancient wound of its loss. The kingdoms of David and Solomon are a lodestone for Jewish-Israeli national memory, seen as drawing a significant proportion of the Jewish people back from diaspora despite three t
housand years of intervening history. Marked by more recent dispossession, Palestinians mourn the loss of the city of Jaffa, Bride of the Sea, and its fragrant orange groves, which are elegized in essays and memoirs.

  Memory holds us fast in what we are unable to forget — acts of violence or of disaster, personal and communal. The shared memory of violence, or collective trauma, is a particularly strong adhesive in the construction of a national identity. “Trauma” is Greek for “wound,” an invasive injury to the body. With the rise of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century the concept expanded to include psychological as well as physical wounding. In recent years that definition of an individual’s experience has been further expanded to encompass trauma experienced by a collective, or by an individual within an experience of collective trauma. Like a physical wounding, trauma leaves its scars. Avishai Margalit writes in The Ethics of Memory: “It makes the traumatized person react disproportionately to a present trigger on the strength of the injury from the past. Or it displaces that which brought the trauma about with a different object that is somehow associated with the object of the past.”[5]

  A shared memory of collective wounding, of the need to bind together against an antagonistic outsider, is often key to the formation of what Benedict Anderson calls the “imagined community”[6] of a nation. Such histories may become the tools of propaganda. In Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, Slobodan Milosevic played on present economic woes by repeatedly reminding ethnic Serbs of the abuses suffered at the hands of the fascist Croat Ustasa militia during the Second World War, and of the Ottomans during the conquest of the region in 1389. He conjured these newly planted memories into a potent Serb nationalism, now positioned to take revenge for the wrongs of the past on its Bosnian Muslim and Croat minorities.

  Manipulated or not, trauma is a volatile substance. How is a community to make sense of its shattering by a shared disaster? The myriad individual tragedies out of which it is constituted both bind and separate its members. Too terrible to be remembered, it is also too terrible to forget. New generations grow up, often in the anguished silence of their elders, trying to make sense of a trauma which they never experienced but yet has indelibly shaped and scarred them.

  Trauma gets stuck in the craw of the collective memory, half-digested, painful, refusing to be ingested or expelled. It shapes the climate of the everyday, a permanent frost. A traumatized people is a people frozen by the absolute imperative of “Never again!” for whom security, and the control it necessitates, is paramount. For those still trapped in ongoing trauma, such as the Palestinians — stateless, living under occupation or in diaspora, 1.4 million of them still in refugee camps — that freezing can turn into a numbed passivity, or into patterns of self-destruction.

  Trapped in the present but not of the present, trauma repeats. It lies close to the surface, within easy recall at the slightest provocation of memory, a touchstone against which present events are automatically tested. And, should the victim group become powerful, the trauma may repeat in other ways as, desperate to rid itself of an alien threat, real or perceived, the victim becomes the oppressor.

  The Hebrew word Shoah, generally used by Jews to refer to the Holocaust, translates into English as “Catastrophe” — as does the Arabic word Nakba. Both Israelis and Palestinians understand their national identities through the collective remembering of a traumatic past.

  For Palestinians, the national project of Zionism simultaneously displaced them from their land and created their national identity, an identity rooted in the loss of the very thing that defined it. Before 1948, the word “Palestinian” was not exclusively used to refer to the Arab inhabitants of Mandate Palestine.† Both they and the territory’s Jewish minority were variously described as “Palestinian.” But after Mandate Palestine ceased to exist, and the Jewish state of Israel was born, only one of those peoples could fully enter into an Israeli identity. Unlike their Jewish compatriots, the Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel were held under martial law until 1966. Now, the ambiguity of their role as an “Arab minority” in a Jewish state is played out daily in the radical dissonance of their holding two antagonistic national identities. This is something that we’ll return to in later chapters.

  Nakba memory is deeply complex for Palestinian Israelis. Not surprisingly, people who remember 1948 are reticent to talk about their experiences: I was introduced to them only after first meeting with younger relatives or friends of the family who acted as gatekeepers. This was a generation who had experienced the humiliation of violent expulsion and the loss of their homes, their land, and their society, as well as the private woundings of personal loss. Often their stories were partial, fragmented, the details too painful to recall. Hints of personal memories were obscured by the abstractions of political analysis, or anger at the half-hearted role played by the Arab nations, and by the British: there is a strong sense of betrayal. A man’s role as protector of his family is strong in Palestinian cultural identity — that, too, has been thrown into upheaval. The shame of living with the memories of this loss can seep in and refashion their telling. “I’ve found, gathering these testimonies, that Arab men lie about what happened,” Jaffa resident and local historian Sami Abu Shehadeh told me. “Not the women, but the men: they were all heroes. I think, if you were all heroes, why did you lose?”[7] The lie speaks to the impossible memory of the catastrophe and the social devastation it wrought.

  Sami’s grandfather Ismail is a tall man of gentle appearance, gaunt-faced and wary. He remembers the missiles falling on his village, and his family’s flight into Jaffa. Our conversation slides away from his experiences. “Sixty years ago, I was a child,” he says. “It is preferable to forget rather than live with these memories. I will be sick in bed for two days, having talked to you.”[8] His friend Gabi is translating for us. “It is very difficult for him to talk about the Nakba, because he lived it,” Gabi says. “What is a war? It’s something you see and feel. You lose your brother, your hand.”

  “Nobody talks,” Sami tells me. “You have to press them.”

  “We call this first generation the generation of fear,”[9] said Abed Satel. His father-in-law, Shaban Balaha, was one of many tens of thousands of Palestinian Arab civilians who lived through the shelling of Jaffa in April 1948. Most fled, by road or by sea, some drowning as their tiny boats sailed into the high waves beyond the harbour. Mr. Balaha was fourteen at the time. With his family sitting around him, he remembers the chaos in the city, the blood and flesh on the walls of a coffee shop on Jerusalem Road after a mortar had hit. Such memories were driven deeper into silence by the fear the remnant community experienced during the years after the war, living with the threat of expulsion for anyone who spoke out in dissent.[10] “Our memories stopped in 1948,” he says.

  For the third generation, these memories are precious artifacts to be salvaged from the silence of the past, and they press their elders for stories. Younger Palestinian Israelis tend to be much more politicized than their older relatives; unlike their parents, they didn’t grow up under martial law. Their sense of collective identity has been formed by the First Intifada, in the late 1980s, and the Oslo peace process in 1993, both of which gave greater visibility to Palestinian national aspirations. Now many identify themselves as “Palestinians in Israel” rather than “Arab Israelis.” For those I spoke with, the Nakba is not a traumatic event frozen in time but an ongoing political reality that continues to inform their lives. “The Nakba is the most important thing that happened in our recent history,” Sami tells me. “Most of our land and all of our property was confiscated, through and after the Nakba. Our families, our elites, our middle class — all of our society was destroyed. Now we live on the periphery of everything as a result.”

  The Nakba is foundational to Palestinian self-understanding. So, too, the nation whose founding caused this catastrophe: the creation of Israel as a Jewish state was profoundly shaped by political trauma. Most people are familiar with the basic facts
of Nazi Germany’s policy of demonizing, ghettoizing, and finally exterminating the Jews within its expanding territories, a brutally efficient system of killing that claimed the lives of some six million Jews and erased the culture and communities of European Jewry. What is less well known is how Zionism, the animating philosophy behind the founding of Israel, was moulded by fifteen hundred years of officially sanctioned persecution of Jews in Europe.

  The Christian Gospels tell a particular story of the Jewish people. Listening to the liturgical readings during Holy Week, it is easy to forget that Jesus was a Jew. The Jews, we are told, are responsible for the judicial murder of Christ. In the Gospel-writer John’s telling of the Passion story, Jewish priests incite the crowd and pressure Pilate to kill Jesus, and the Jewish mob bays for his death. The guilt of this action, which the Roman governor Pilate ritually washed his hands of, was embraced by the mob: “His blood be on us and on our children!”[11]

  The first Christians understood themselves within the larger context of Judaism, their religion and their culture. Jesus was the Messiah long-promised by the Hebrew Scriptures. Early believers in Jesus worshipped in their synagogues, and spread their “good news” to their fellow Jews. To the people around them, they were just another Messianic sect, one of many that flourished in Judea during the dangerous days of Roman occupation. As the years passed, and the numbers of converts grew, Christianity began to establish a discrete identity, and to proselytise among Gentiles as well as within Jewish communities. In different cities they were tolerated, or persecuted, or ignored.