Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  My father was a geographer, a mapmaker, and an educator, and what he did all his life was to indoctrinate (he didn’t use that word) into young people a love of the land and knowing the land — which used to be a central subject of the Zionist curriculum, textbooks, and tourist guides, hikers’ guides.

  Did he walk the land a lot?

  All his life, until he was ninety-three. First trip was in 1913, I have his diaries.

  Presumably he had a very deep personal love of the land and because of his work he was asked to be part of the Government Names Commission.

  Well, it was like a clique. It was just like a cabal with old friends. So …

  And they saw this as their task, very consciously, that it was a patriotic work that they were doing. Is that right?

  Yeah. Only recently I realised that they were not at all original. The same thing’s been done all over the world. The Italians changed the names of the German Tyrol area, and the Germans changed Polish names, and the Czechs changed German names in the Sudetenland, and so on … And I’m not talking about the Americans, and about the English and Ireland. It wasn’t even original. It’s in the genes of settler society.

  This is an important point. The work of the Government Names Commission is far from unique. States with no prior claim to colonized land tend to rename the geographical features of the lands they’ve occupied. A striking example is the systematic mapping of Ireland and renaming of Irish toponymy by the officers of the British Ordnance Survey in 1824. While most of the new names were transliterations of Irish names, they were standardized into English, a language many local people did not speak.

  Poland’s treatment of placenames in the lands it won from Germany after the Second World War is remarkably similar to the approach of the Government Names Commission, which would begin its work just three years later. At the post-war conferences of Potsdam and Yalta, Poland was granted parts of Germany’s eastern provinces, lands that had been considered part of Poland during the Middle Ages but which had been occupied for centuries by German-speaking peoples.[21] However, the Big Three (the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain) had been unable to agree on Poland’s exact borders. After the ravages of war and occupation, in which three million Polish gentiles had died and millions more had been expelled from their homes by German and Soviet forces, the newly independent and fiercely nationalistic Poles needed “facts on the ground” to cement their claim to their historic lands. Some three million Germans were expelled, and the project of renaming local geographic features was given the highest priority.

  In 1946, the Commission for the Determination of Names of Places and Physiographic Objects began its work. Wherever possible, ancient Polish names were revived.[22] Where none existed, a German name could be transliterated into Polish, translated into Polish, or used as a model for a Polish name. Otherwise a new name was created. Over five years, the academics and administrators of the Committee approved over thirty thousand “Polandized” names.

  Meron sees mapping as an integral part of an occupier’s claim to ownership:

  First thing they have to do is tame the environment by naming it, and making maps. This gives you a title, in your own eyes. Natives don’t need naming and don’t need maps. They know.

  Yes, it’s interesting how so many of the Arabic names seem to be descriptors. They were just “Little Tooth,” or whatever it was called. Did your father ever, before he died, shift his perspective?

  Really, he wasn’t a political person. He was just — “we are here, we have to educate the children to spring from the land being natives.” So he did the extraordinary thing of teaching people to be natives.

  This is really a reversed love of the land. You embrace the locals, the natives, and then you draw legitimacy from them, from knowing their life. It seems like you understand them but when you understand them it is to fulfill your own needs. There’s a purpose in this, it’s not that noble. You become an old-timer. You were there, you remember. You use the Arabic names, you are thrilled by seeing ruins and researching the history. Crying over spilled milk, which in a way seems to be repenting, but it’s not.

  Crying over spilled milk? I asked. What do you mean?

  Because you won, they are not here. Now you have the luxury of crying over them.

  Arabs also invented it [a love of the land], don’t misunderstand that. They invented it after the war. Palestinian intellectuals disdained, looked down upon the fellahin, the peasants. They couldn’t care less about the peasants, they couldn’t care less about the villages. That was part of their undoing, that was why they failed, because there was no solidarity. Because the city-dwellers, intellectuals and bourgeois of Jerusalem and Jaffa, couldn’t care less what happened to the [rural] Palestinians, unless they were their peasants.

  When you lose, then you discover your attachment to the land. When you own it, you don’t feel the need. I’m not telling you this is hypocrisy. I’m only saying that one must understand the love of the land in perspective.

  It was through his own work that Meron began to see that the land had another history.

  I remember the day when I began to understand the tragedy. I remember that precisely. I was working at the Geological Institute and my task was to check water levels of cisterns, water holes. And I came to a village, I think it was ’55 or ’56, that stood empty but intact. And I sat there and I started thinking about those who lived there, and then I understood what really happened.

  I asked him about his memories of 1948. He was fifteen at the time. He remembers standing on King George Street in Jerusalem watching as Etzel paraded the surviving villagers of Deir Yassin in open trucks through the city.

  You had many Arab neighbours in Jerusalem before …

  I had neighbours in my neighbourhood, yes.

  And then …

  They left.

  Was there a sense in which these people were the people who you’d been fighting against, so it was obvious and inevitable that they wouldn’t be there?

  Oh, they were just erased from the memory. Once they were removed, displaced, we forgot not only about them but about the war, too. The war was transformed into an inter-state war. Palestinians were totally erased from memory and from history. For nineteen years they were absent, became refugees.

  After the war, when you met Arab people, when you were walking around …

  Well, we didn’t see any Arabs. They were just there, a kind of marginal people. In Jerusalem, there were no Arabs. In Galilee, yes, there were Arabs, but we didn’t pay any attention to them, they were outside the pale. They were just under military government and we pretended that Israel is a homogeneous Jewish nation state. They came back [into our visibility] only in 1967.

  I wanted to ask Meron about the role that archaeology had played in shaping the identity of the young state. By the 1960s, it had become something of a national obsession. Journalist Amos Elon commented in 1971 on “the extraordinary appeal of archaeology as a popular pastime and science in Israel.”[23] He observed that “Israeli archaeologists, professional and amateurs, are not merely digging for knowledge and objects, but for the reassurance of roots, which they find in the ancient Israelite remains scattered throughout the country.” Archeological digs were never short of volunteers. They were supported by state funding and logistical help from the Israeli Defence Forces, and their finds were widely covered in the national press.

  There was a very strong urge for Israelis to substantiate the myth of return. It [archaeology] is the claim, the method. They are not just displacing a certain society, they are returnees. That’s very important, a major part of the Zionist enterprise — with the Bible as a type of title deed for return.

  Meron sees both the archaeological excavations and Israel’s decades of immigration-driven urban development as articulations of a collective Zionist desire to refashion the landscape:

  The Zionist approach was a contradiction. Preserve and change; build and excavate. Both come from the same
need: establishing a claim to the land. You can establish a claim to the land by tilling it, or developing it, and you can establish a claim to the land by excavating it. There is a need to unearth the origin of the land, the roots, so that is what you have to do, to remove the landscape and to go deeper. Ignore the existing landscape, and look for the things that lie underneath. The glory of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah and so on, two thousand years ago. Or, on the other hand, obliterate the landscape by building on it and creating a new landscape. The existing one was something that you had to erase. Either you dig or you build.‡

  So the Arabs stood in the way. As long as they were there, you couldn’t obliterate the landscape. First the way to go about it was to ignore, conceptually ignore the Arab landscape. They just created their own and left the Arabs alone, never ventured into their areas, and so on. And then, when they had the chance [with the founding of the state], they destroyed it.

  For Meron, the social meaning of knowing the land has shifted:

  Now the perception of attachment to the land is different. There are many people who love the land, not because of a political attachment to the land, their claim to the land, but just because they love nature. I had a father who made me a romantic lover of the land. Few people now have this attachment. Younger people don’t. Either they like nature or they don’t. They like Tel Aviv, or the pubs in Tel Aviv. What’s wrong with that? The whole idea of trying to instill in a person a love of the eagles and vultures and the wadis and the whole thing, and cults of the land and practising it through hikes in the desert — it’s something of the past. It was a phase in the history of Zionism that it was important.

  I asked Amaya Galili how she thought the context of youth hiking trips had changed over the years since David Benvenisti wrote his textbook. “I think back then there was a much clearer agenda,” said Amaya. “It was much more obvious that they had to rebuild their connection to the land. I didn’t grow up with that feeling — it was part of a culture of hiking, part of our life. I took it for granted; I didn’t understand the layers of why we were doing it. It was part of the youth movement, part of growing up in Israel.

  “You can see this in many different areas, not just with hiking. Now people are doing various things, but not necessarily knowing why — the ideology is much less strong.”

  “It’s as if it doesn’t need to be strong, because it’s become the culture,” I observed.

  “Yeah, definitely. In the thirties and forties they had to justify, to prove something, they had to build that connection. I grew up in a place that was a Jewish state, of course I grew up with the Holocaust and the denial of the diaspora and stuff like that, but it wasn’t part of my identity, I didn’t have to prove anything. For that first generation, I think, they had to, they felt that they had to, it was part of becoming a nation. I grew up in a place that was a nation already. I just had to practise it.”

  “It’s fascinating,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “It’s fascinating that it changes.”

  Amaya’s memories vividly convey the complexity of how we grow into the memory of the collective. “I remember,” she told me, “when I was in high school I often went to Tsfat.§ I had no idea this used to be a Palestinian town. No idea. I was walking there in the old city, which was the Arab city, and I remember I was really — it’s strange to tell about it today, but — I felt a lot of inspiration there. I liked that feeling, to walk in old places, connect to the oldness of the place. I didn’t think about which ‘old’ it was. It wasn’t that I thought it was Jewish-only, I just didn’t think it was anything else. It was obvious that it was Jewish. I didn’t have to hear about it.”

  She remembers the ruined villages the children passed by on their hikes. “We were hiking in many places where there were Palestinian villages. I didn’t have any idea of what was there, I didn’t question.… It was nothing, it was as if it was part of the landscape, something natural. The ruins of the houses are scattered here and there, it’s something beautiful and fascinating. It was, like, adding to the mystery of the land, to the layers of its ancient past.”

  I asked Amaya what she had heard about the Nakba in her childhood. Her response probed deeper into the transmission of collective memory.

  I didn’t hear anything. First of all, the word “Nakba” didn’t exist at all. I knew something about the War of Independence — it’s not something I remember someone sitting me down and telling me, but it’s some kind of knowledge that you suddenly have, probably through the national ceremonies, national days of remembrance, TV programs, songs, and suddenly you have that knowledge — the knowledge I had was that the Palestinians had just fled away, they just disappeared. I also heard that their leaders told them to leave, and that they believed that they were leaving for a few days, a few weeks, until the war was over, and then they would come back. But mainly, where I grew up, the knowledge was like, one day, they were gone. And it’s true, in the valley I grew up in, in the Galilee, there were no Arabs at all.

  When did you start to realize there was another story? I asked.

  It’s tricky, because it was a process, so like any process it was difficult to see the exposure time, the moment of discovery … it wasn’t like that. It was much more deep and slow, a hint here, a hint there.

  In my early twenties, I decided to find out about my grandfather. My grandmother had died seven years before I was born, my grandfather one year after. All my life I was curious about them. I was named after my grandmother, and I always heard I was like them, in what I did.

  He’d been involved in establishing a kibbutz in 1939. He was the mukhtar, the person in charge of relations with their Palestinian neighbours. There were all kinds of contacts — they were buying things from them, and in that area in 1945 they established a mutual health clinic. Not that unique, perhaps, but looking back today it seems unique. Anyway, I saw a photo of the opening of the clinic, and you see Palestinians and Jews at the opening ceremony.

  It’s nice to see this picture in rosy colours, coexistence and all that, but it wasn’t a relationship of neighbours or partners — the Jewish settlements were using the Palestinians for services, for agriculture, for products, for work they didn’t want to do. But I started from that image of coexistence, the ideal, that my grandfather was working with these people as friends, that he helped them a lot. Then when I was doing the research I found out that mukhtars were also intelligence agents, passing information to the Haganah about their Palestinian neighbours — it was part of the job.

  And I found that when I asked people about 1948 they didn’t really answer. They avoided the question, they were going around it. I didn’t know exactly what to ask, I just wanted to find out about him, but I do remember they didn’t really answer. They told me that one day the Palestinians weren’t there, suddenly they were gone.

  And there was another thing, besides the words — an uncomfortableness, a shame about what they did. It wasn’t clear, it wasn’t open, but there was something there, a feeling. This was when I started hearing about the Nakba, when something began to shift.

  Then I went to university, and it was there that I learned more — not necessarily the word “Nakba” but a more critical understanding of Israeli society. I studied sociology, so I laid all kinds of bases to start to see the role of the Holocaust in Israeli society, the immigrants from North Africa, the Palestinians, and at some point I heard about Benny Morris … so slowly, slowly, I learned about it.

  Al-Dawwara, the village close to Amaya’s family’s kibbutz, was destroyed, and so is no longer on the map. Recalling those days learning map-reading and navigation skills, Amaya too now sees the maps of her childhood with a more critical eye. “It leads you to see a map as a picture of reality, not a picture of ideology. It’s not that someone told me it was. It’s just that you take it for granted.”

  * * *

  * Nablus is a major city in what is now the northern West Bank; Samaria is the correct geographical na
me in terms of the region’s Biblical past. (For that reason, Jewish Israelis who refute the Palestinian claim to the West Bank always refer to it as Judea and Samaria.)

  † Ben-Gurion retired to Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev, on leaving public life. The kibbutz movement, a mainstay of Israel’s culture and economy for decades, was dealt a near-fatal blow by the end of Labour Zionism’s political dominance. The free-market policies in the years since Begin’s election in 1977 have led to the closure of many kibbutzes, and those that remain have had to radically adjust their economic model.

  ‡ This process continues. In Silwan, East Jerusalem, an archaeologically controversial dig in pursuit of King David’s ancient city has expanded under Palestinian homes. The project is funded by a right-wing nationalist group. See, for example, Adina Hoffman, “Archaeological Digs Stoke Conflict in Jerusalem,” The Nation, July 30, 2008.

  § Tsfat, or Safed (Arabic) was first mentioned in Jewish and Muslim sources in the late Middle Ages. Sephardic rabbis migrated there after their expulsion from Spain in 1492, and the town became a renowned and vibrant centre of Jewish mysticism. However, the Jewish community was decimated by plagues and earthquakes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and further diminished by a massacre and ensuing departures during Arab riots in 1929. In 1948, the town’s twelve-thousand-strong Arab community made up around 80 percent of the population. In May 1948 the Palmach surrounded Tsfat, leaving strategic exit routes open. Its Arab inhabitants left under heavy bombardment, and the Palmach took their emptied neighbourhoods.

  Chapter Six

  Ghosts of the Holocaust