Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  You can say categorically that without Hitler, there would be no Israeli state. The vast majority were refugees, with nowhere to go. So, they made Zionism happen. Despite the murderous anti-Semitism in Europe, the world was incredibly hostile. And, it’s important to remember, half the Jews here came from the Arab world. They were driven out, totally expelled, from Yemen, Iraq, and Egypt; and more gently, but still pushed, out of Libya and Morocco.

  Why did the Arab nations do that? I asked.

  Because of friction with Zionism; a little bit before, but mainly after the foundation of the state, because of the war, and the Nakba. The Mizrahim, the Arab Jews, here in Israel are totally related to the Nakba.

  It’s complicated, it’s not just about refugees. Zionism was also a colonialist movement, with a planned, organized program to seize territory and power. But how Israel survived against incredible odds — all this would be incomprehensible without this context. The most important thing is, we had nowhere else to go.

  That sense of having nowhere else to go resonates deeply in the collective memory of Israel. Vulnerability is hardwired into the nation’s self-understanding. Israeli novelist and political liberal Amos Oz was asked by a New York Times reporter what was the most important thing that “the other side” should know about his “side.” Oz responded: they need to know that, though we appear strong, and are strong, we feel vulnerable, threatened, and weak.[27] In an echo of Avishai Margalit’s reflections on trauma, Oz has commented (to the New Yorker’s David Remnick) that Israelis see Palestinians “as pogrom-makers, Cossacks, Nazis, oppressors in kaffiyehs and mustaches playing the same ancient game of cutting Jewish throats for the fun of it. You will hear this in many synagogues: They are pharaohs, … and we are lambs surrounded by seventy wolves.”[28]

  With the West Bank occupied by settlers and soldiers, and Gaza under blockade, many Palestinians are unable to see Israelis as anything other than the all-powerful oppressor. Their own history denied, many engage in Holocaust denial and a bitter anti-Semitism.

  Anti-Semitism is not indigenous to Arab culture. Islam has no fundamental quarrel with Judaism: the two faiths do not share the same scriptures, and Muslims do not perceive Jews as practitioners of deicide. Arab rulers generally tolerated their Jewish minorities, at least by the standards of the day. Arab anti-Semitism as such really began with the ascendancy of Zionism in Mandate Palestine.

  Since 1948, Israel and its Arab neighbours have been embroiled in an ongoing enmity. Yet it is striking that images of Israel and Israelis, in political cartoons for example, often reference the crude anti-Jewish images of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, in which “the Jew,” hook-nosed and greedy, seeks global domination. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,** first translated into Arabic by Arab Christians in Jerusalem and Cairo in the 1920s, circulates freely in the Arab world, its veracity accepted without question. Even blood libel makes an appearance, vividly dramatized in The Diaspora, an anti-Semitic Syrian TV series.

  Such materials also circulate in the Occupied Territories. An Arabic translation of Hitler’s credo, Mein Kampf, has been a bestseller in the Palestinian Authority. Al-Aqsa TV, run by Hamas, has reported that David Ben-Gurion initiated the Holocaust to get rid of handicapped Jews, and that the numbers killed, and the role of the Nazis, are false. Hamas’s Charter cites the Protocols as a viable source of information on what it sees as the malevolence of Jewry.

  Palestinians may feel they need to grasp any weapon available to strike against Israeli domination, but Holocaust denial and the images of Christian anti-Semitism come trailing live wires of fear for Jews. They reinforce Israeli fears of past and future destruction.

  Ilan Pappé, one of the foremost of Israel’s New Historians, has written on the intricate dynamics of “Fear, Victimhood, Self and Other” that permeate both Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian self-identity. In an article of that title, published in 2001, he wrote:

  For the Israelis, recognizing the Palestinians as victims of Israeli actions is deeply traumatic. This form of acknowledgment, which recognizes the injustice involved in the death and displacement of the land’s native inhabitants, not only questions the very foundational myths of the state of Israel and its motto of “A state without a people for a people without a state.” It also raises a panoply of ethical questions with significant implications for the future of the state.… Losing the status of victimhood in this instance has both political implications on an international scale, but more critically existential repercussions for [the] Israeli Jewish psyche. It implies recognizing that they had become a mirror image of their worst nightmare.

  As for the Palestinians, recognizing the Israelis as victims implies not only acknowledgement of Israelis as a community of suffering whose victimization by European, namely German evil does not justify victimizing the Palestinians, but may explain a chain of victimization that would lead to a decrease in Holocaust denial on the Palestinian side. Palestinian reluctance to fully acknowledge the Holocaust and its importance in the constitution of an Israeli-Jewish psyche, stems from a fear of sympathizing with the other’s suffering, after years of demonizing and degrading this other, while portraying the self as the other’s victim.[29]

  Pappé describes this dynamic as the “destruction of the other’s collective memory.” For me, this concept is key — both as a tool in the creation of national identity, and, specifically, as a way of understanding how and why the Nakba has been silenced within the collective memory of Israel.

  Ilan Pappé’s work has landed in him hot water in his native Israel. His 2006 book in particular, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, did not go down well. After several death threats, academic disciplining, and seeing his face in the centre of a target in Israel’s most popular newspaper, he moved to Britain, where he now holds a chair in history at Exeter University. I wanted to hear more about “destroying the collective memory of the other,” and went there to meet him. An affable, thoughtful man, he developed his idea:

  This I think is part of the general experiment of nationalism all over the world; it’s not unique to Zionism. In order to create a new collective identity, to idealize it, to make it a positive one, you have to know also who you are not, and negate that Other in order to make your own collective superior. In the colonialist settler situation — as it was in the United States, and New Zealand, and Australia, not only in Israel — it begins by you not only redefining yourself against the societies which you have left for various reasons, but redefining yourself also against the societies you have found.

  The Palestinians are relatively lucky because in other places in the world settlers felt the need to genocide the population. Israelis were only quote-unquote “ethnically cleansing” the Palestinians. But it’s the same exercise; it’s an abuse of history. You reinvent yourself, which by itself is okay. But in these cases, you need to invalidate anyone who may question this reinvention, and sometimes that includes the genocide of peoples to make sure. In other cases, more benign, it means rewriting history, and obliterating someone else’s history.[30]

  Social suffering stems so often from one group’s need to demonize another in the creation of its own identity. We’ve already seen that in the development of early Christianity. Silencing a dissonant history is one aspect of that process.

  For Jewish Israelis, it is easier not to engage with the Nakba. The wounds of the past loom in the collective memory, obscuring the suffering of others; the land is a safe haven for Jews, not the site of Palestinian catastrophe. The history of Israel can only encompass the narrative of Independence Day, not of Nakba Day, even though this fissures Israeli citizens’ experience into two vastly divergent histories. With that gulf between them, it is hard for Palestinian Israelis to see themselves, or to be seen, as part of the national story of Israel. They are isolated and excluded, a marginalized population.

  What of the traumatic Jewish past? While the terrible details of Nazism’s Final Solution have become well known, the enormity of
the Holocaust has engulfed the longer history of Jewish suffering. Few gentiles know of the centuries of persecution that laid the groundwork for the death camps. This too is part of an occlusion of an unwanted past, at least within Christianity. Yet it is an integral part of the history of both Jews and Christians in Europe. The killing of six million European Jews would not have occurred if the ground had not been prepared by sixteen hundred years of Christian anti-Judaism.††

  Nor would the events of 1948, Israel’s Independence Day and the Palestinian Nakba, have occurred without that history. So I wanted to ask Ilan another question. Both in North America and Europe, much of the current debate within the Left around Israel is fueled by anger at Palestinian suffering. Zionism tends to be dismissed as an oppressive settler movement, period. Yet surely this just cycles back into the polarization inherent in the denial of another’s history. Did he think that Zionism could simultaneously be seen as a colonizing settler movement that dispossessed the Palestinians, and as a liberating movement in terms of persecuted Jews?

  Yes, there’s something in it. Edward Said said, very simply, Zionism was very good news to many Jews but the worst kind of news possible for the Palestinians, whoever they are or wherever they are. And I think that’s the tragedy of Zionism, this mixture of saving Jews and offering them safe haven on the one hand, and being almost genocidal toward the Palestinians, in order to achieve the first goal.

  In a landscape coloured by past trauma, destroying the Other’s collective memory becomes a way of building your own. We’ll explore this in more detail in the following chapters. Here, though, perhaps we can imagine the interplay of dynamics at work in Israeli collective memory as a series of three concentric circles. The outer ring is a generalized atmosphere, or cloud, of trauma, formed by centuries of persecution that culminated in genocide. This cloud becomes thicker during times of open threat: conflict with a neighbouring Arab state, or terror attacks by Palestinian militants from the Occupied Territories. In this murky atmosphere, the present enemy, the Palestinians, morphs into the enemies of the past, and all their domination and abuse. Any violent provocation demands harsh and unqualified retaliation.

  Inside that environment lies the second circle, where the fluid and ongoing process of national identity construction takes place. Israel is a Jewish state, a refuge for a persecuted people, and its borders are expansive enough to include any diaspora Jew who wants to “return” to the Land. Within that national concept, the presence in Israel of Palestinian Israelis can be seen as both a contradiction and an existential threat. Palestinian Israelis shared, and continue to share, the territory that has become Israel, but they do not share in the nation’s prevailing understanding of itself. Demographically, they threaten the Jewishness of the state.

  In the logic of a group identity forged in the crucible of suffering, survival and security are the imperative. There can be no space for the story that gives rise to another’s claim to the land. Or, indeed, for a dissonant articulation of suffering, one that may diminish the Jewish experience of trauma by superimposing the unimaginable identity of perpetrator. Destroying the collective memory of the Nakba is thus an aspect of the construction of Israeli national identity: it is the innermost circle.

  In later chapters we will see both the tenacity of this primary dynamic and the ways it is being challenged and disrupted from within. Each of the three rings is discrete, yet they are interrelated. There is a co-creative engagement between them. What takes place in one sphere will affect the others. The erasure of the collective memory of a minority, for example, may make it easier to remove not just their history but even their presence from the body politic.

  Which brings us back to Yisrael Beytenu’s move to ban Nakba Day. This antipathy towards Israeli citizens of Palestinian ethnicity extends far beyond denying them the communal right to remember the Nakba. Avigdor Lieberman, who heads Yisrael Beytenu, has given his name to a central plank of the party’s platform; “the Lieberman Plan,” which would excise around a third of the Palestinian-Israeli population from the state of Israel. As part of a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, the boundary line between Israel and the West Bank would be redrawn. Larger Jewish settlements would be incorporated into Israel, and the towns and villages of the Triangle, a district with a high concentration of Palestinian Israeli citizens that abuts the Green Line, would be shifted into the new Palestinian state. People born and raised in Israel would find that the border had been moved around them, that they had been dispossessed of their nationality in a kindler, gentler form of expulsion.

  However complicated their identity, the vast majority of Palestinian Israelis have no desire to lose their citizenship. Yet opinion polls and election results show that Lieberman’s attitudes are not unique to a right-wing minority. Palestinian Israelis are increasingly defined in Israel as dangerous outsiders, a menace to the future of the Jewish state.

  This fear may not be realistic, but it is very real. For many Jewish Israelis, the Holocaust casts its shadow over the future. Demographics override democracy — a secured Jewish majority is perceived as more crucial to Jewish survival than is the equality of all Israeli citizens.

  In this climate of fear and animosity, Palestinian Israelis feel increasingly vulnerable. The currency of their citizenship is failing, and their own collective memories of the catastrophe that befell them in 1948 are sharp. “We talk about the Nakba as if it was a discrete historical moment that ended in 1948,” Oren Yiftachel had said to me. “But the Nakba was not a historical event so much as a process. It’s still continuing. It’s an ongoing project.”

  * * *

  * These include a speech by the leader of the Knesset, a ritual march of IDF soldiers bearing the Israeli flag, and the lighting of twelve torches, signifying the twelve tribes of Israel. Jewish symbols, such as the menorah, are also prominently featured. Yael Zerubavel’s Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition examines such public memorialization in detail.

  † Arab nationalists began to use the term early in the Mandate era, once Britain’s signing of the Balfour Declaration had put their hopes for self-determination in jeopardy.

  ‡ Restored to power after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, Pius VII had the ghetto walls rebuilt.

  § In 1791, the newly independent United States of America extended to Jews the same rights of citizenship as the rest of the (free, male) populace. This no doubt increased its appeal for many migrating European Jews.

  ¶ Buber arrived in Mandate Palestine from Germany in 1938, and he continued to press for consensus with Palestinian Arabs, largely through Brit Shalom, the Jewish–Palestinian Arab peace alliance he had co-founded.

  ** Viciously anti-Semitic, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion chronicles an alleged Jewish plot for world dominance. It was fabricated a hundred years ago by the Russian secret police.

  †† Christian anti-Semitism is often distinguished from the political ideology of modern anti-Semitism, which was coloured by scientifically formulated notions of racial purity. However, as we have seen, the latter has its roots in the anti-Judaism of pre-modern Christian culture, and in that sense is part of an uninterrupted chronological flow.

  Chapter Three

  The “New Israelis”

  From Tel Aviv in August 1948, a Time correspondent reported on the phenomenon of the new Jewish state:

  The world — every corner of it — knew Jews, but the Israelis were not the Jews that most of the world knew. Two millenniums of sorrow and insecurity in a hostile world had put their stamp on the character of this people. In Israel, a few years of struggle to build a state, a few months at the center of the world stage, a few weeks of battle had superimposed another, bolder stamp. That the Israelis’ victory had come just after the worst of a thousand persecutions, that it had been won by those who survived the slaughter of 6,000,000, made the newly minted Jewish character gleam brighter.

  The new Israelis walke
d with a confident swagger along the beach front at Tel Aviv. They talked confidently — indeed, stridently — of a state of ten million, not necessarily confined to the present boundaries of Israel.… As they looked around them at a disorganized and unproductive Arab world, Israelis showed some of the reactions of the prewar Germans looking around a disorganized and unproductive Europe.

  Jewish traditions of peace and democracy run deep, but the Israelis had been transferred so quickly from the depths of Europe to the heights of superiority in the Middle East that they could not escape the political equivalent of deep-sea divers’ bends. The new blood of nationalism ran fast and hot in Israel; sometimes it seemed to be gushing out on the ground. Pleading for more understanding and tolerance of Israel, one sympathetic observer warned: “This could become an ugly little Spartan state.”…

  The old Jews of Europe had to wear long curls; many young Israelis of Tel Aviv favor crew cuts in the American — or Prussian — style. Israeli girls, who run to the buxom bucolic type, stride the streets in slacks or shorts. Many have gone into the CHEN, Israeli version of the WAC [Women’s Army Corps]. The young people turn their backs on sentimental, nostalgic, masochistic traditional Jewish art. Such plays as the great Yiddish drama, The Dybbuk, draw an almost unanimous “it stinks” from the sabras [native-born Israelis]. Their strong, bronzed young hands have no tendency to rend their open-necked sport shirts in grief.