by Jo Roberts
And the thing is, it’s a vicious cycle. Because of the fear and the superior feelings of the Jewish population, they look down on the Arab population. They’re considered uneducated, not clean, dishonest — oh, I could mention so many stereotypes. The Jewish population wants nothing to do with the Arabs, and this alienation creates more fear and more hatred and more stereotypes, and those two, you know, nurture each other.
Daphne fears that the shadow of fear cast over Israel by the Holocaust may lead to rising violence against Palestinian Israelis.
Three years ago, my friend Taghrid went to a park near Hadera — Taghrid’s family and another family from Tira, the family of a professor at Beilinson Hospital. They were altogether three couples with their children, and they had a picnic there in the park, and people heard them speak Arabic and said, “Why do you speak Arabic?” And they said “We’re Arabs.” And the people said, “Get out of here; we don’t want you here.” And they didn’t go. So the people attacked them. They stabbed Taghrid’s husband in his belly. This professor from Beilinson, they broke his arm. The police were very delayed in arriving, and when they arrived, they made no arrest. They didn’t do anything about it.
I have many Arab friends, and I hear so many stories about violence and aggression. The saying “Death to Arabs” is very, very common, especially in football. In soccer, it’s all the time. And there are no educational programs in school to try and understand the Other, try and know the Other.
I think what happened in Acco will be just the beginning of terrible attacks on Palestinians in Israel, because the hatred is tremendous. It’s scary, and I don’t find peace in myself. I haven’t been sleeping the last few nights because it’s so upsetting. Not what is happening there: those are right-wing hooligans. What is really so difficult for me is, where are all the other people who don’t think that way? Why isn’t there a big rally in Tel Aviv saying, “We do not agree with it! We don’t want it”? Where are all the liberals, the academics, the artists? Why isn’t there an outcry protesting … I mean, there were neo-Nazi events in Germany in the last decade and in other places, but immediately after that, there were huge rallies of people who came out and said, “Stop that! We are against it. You’re not talking in my name.” And when I see those rioters running around with the Israeli flag on them, I say, “This is not my flag. I’m not one of them.” Why aren’t people going and shouting, “We went through the Holocaust. We know what it’s like to be attacked for what we are”?
Daphne believes that, rather than spurring Jewish Israelis to be vigilant against injustice, Holocaust memory has the opposite effect. In the climate of fear it evokes, a frightened people are easily shepherded into supporting policies that allegedly bolster security by prioritizing an ethnic definition of statehood over civil rights.
I think the whole Holocaust is being manipulated. Every time that somebody criticizes, with justice, Israel’s policy of occupation and colonization and disregard of human rights or international law, et cetera, et cetera, they’re anti-Semites. They’re the new Holocaust. Not we. They are. This fear and collective memory is being manipulated terribly.
I had an argument yesterday with a close friend of mine who’s left-oriented, and I said, “You know, I feel like in the thirties in Germany.” And she said, “You can’t compare it to the Holocaust! Don’t mention the Holocaust. You can’t use Holocaust terms.” Yes, I can. I think that if we don’t learn from the process that led to the Holocaust, we don’t know where this is going to end. This is racism, and these are riots, and we should be very, very careful not to reach the places of those people who did this to us. And she was very upset that I said that I feel like in the thirties in Germany, because then people thought that Hitler was this crazy man, and those around him were an incited mob: they were uneducated, they were nothing. And people let it happen when it could have been stopped. And I believe we’re in that stage. I don’t see us sending people to gas chambers and things like that, but we are on a very, very slippery and dangerous road.
“The very existence of democracy is endangered when the memory of the past’s victims plays an active role in the political process,” argued Yehuda Elkana, renowned scholar and Holocaust survivor, in an article for Haaretz. The Holocaust dominates the nation’s self-understanding, shaping its perceptions of who is enemy, and how they should be retaliated against. Elkana sees “no greater danger to the future of Israel than the fact that the Holocaust has been instilled methodically into the consciousness of the Israeli public.” The Holocaust stands so tall in Israeli collective memory that it is hard to step back from it. While it is spun into political rhetoric and the easy demonizing such rhetoric allows, the stones that smashed through the windows of the young Knesset still threaten the democratic foundations of the State of Israel.
As Daphne noted, ever-increasing military dominance does not guarantee future security, and nor does narrowing the circle of national identity. She sees little sign of hope in her native land for peace between Jews and Palestinians. Yet perhaps her own journey offers a glimmer of possibility. Her thinking has been transformed by her willingness to push through the barriers of fear and stereotyping by seeking out the “enemy.” By engaging with Palestinian Israelis who were previously invisible to her, she opened herself to being changed by what they had to say, and in the process the fear-driven nationalism of her youth sloughed away.
“I do think it’s very important to teach the Holocaust,” Daphne said to me. “But it’s important to teach it in a way that kids will learn what has caused the Holocaust and to beware of it — that it’s racism, that it’s hatred of the Other. It’s to teach humanistic values to prevent another Holocaust, and not to teach people how to be stronger and meaner and so afraid.”
* * *
* Reparations payments for the impact of Nazi persecution of Jews and for stolen property without heirs were to be paid to the State of Israel. Individual compensation payments for suffering and stolen property were to be paid to surviving German-Jewish Israelis.
† It is worth noting that in 1951, when the Labour government was mulling over the idea, Begin had argued forcibly in favour of reparations and challenged the government for its tardiness in acting.
‡ This invocation of the collective suffering of the past is intrinsic to the creation of a national identity, as we saw in Chapter 2.
§ The Reichstag, Germany’s legislature, was burned in an arson attack in 1933. It remains unclear whether or not the fire was set at Hitler’s instigation, but his party certainly benefitted from the political turmoil that ensued.
¶ The too-present history of the Holocaust has afforded other comparisons: the maverick and highly respected Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz coined the term “Judeo-Nazis” in response to Israel’s actions in Lebanon in the early 1980s.
** Israel is a highly militarized society: the boundaries between the army and civil society are blurred. Nearly all prime ministers are former generals, their mindset inevitably shaped by army culture. All eighteen-year-olds are expected to serve in the IDF, men for three years and women for two; men may be called up annually for a month of reserve duty until they are forty-five. Some Jewish religious groups are exempt, and (unlike the Bedouin and Druze) Palestinian Israelis are barred.
†† “‘The one suitable monument to the memory of European Jewry … is the State of Israel,’ editorialized the popular Davar newspaper in 1950.” James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 209. The same year, the government considered granting posthumous citizenship to the Holocaust dead.
‡‡ Iranian president Ahmadinejad taps into the same logic, denying the Holocaust as a means to delegitimize the State of Israel.
§§ This is why Israel refuses to consider either a one-state solution to its conflict with the Palestinians, or a Palestinian right of return as a part of a peace settlement.
¶¶ Where the delays faced by waiting Palesti
nians seem unwarranted, or the soldiers behave aggressively or abusively, the Jewish-Israeli women of Machsom Watch, present in teams of two or three, intervene — either directly, or by phoning the appropriate military or civilian authorities. Their detailed reports are made public on their website.
*** I was stunned by this story, which captures both how very difficult it was for Holocaust survivors to make their way in the alien culture of Israel, and the potency of a refugee’s yearning, despite great fear, to return home.
††† In the 1980s and 1990s, about 55,000 Ethiopian Jews emigrated to Israel. During the 1990s, some 950,000 immigrants arrived from the former Soviet Union, around 250,000 of whom are not Jewish. Political scientist Ian Lustick now describes Israel as a “non-Arab” rather than a Jewish state. See “Israel as a Non-Arab State: The Political Implications of Mass Immigration of Non-Jews,” Middle East Journal 53, no. 3: 101–117.
Chapter Seven
“All this is part of the Nakba”
“I miss the smell of the moon,” Lutfiya Sama’an tells me. “Now I live in a town full of light, I cannot experience it.”[1] She was sixteen when the planes came and bombarded Suhmata, her village in the Galilee, and she fled clasping a blanketful of leaves from the tobacco harvest. She is eighty-one now. She lives with her brothers Wajeeh and Hanna in Haifa, in an apartment looking towards the sea, but the inner landscape they inhabit is that of Suhmata. Lutfiya can recall every detail of her life there, and when she speaks of the land her yearning is palpable. She and her brothers live in Haifa “for now,” she says, but they long to return to Suhmata.
Wajeeh administers a website dedicated to the village, where he writes: “Who among us, the displaced, does not mention his village one hundred times per day, who has not dreamt of it one thousand times? Who among us does not choke back tears every time he passes near his village but cannot reach it? Who among us does not long for a handful of their soil or water from its springlet?”[2]
Two moshavs were built on the village lands and the rubble of the dynamited houses is fenced off, now a grazing area for cattle. But three times a year the Sama’ans and other internally displaced Suhmatans ask permission to be let through the iron gate and go back to the village: on October 28, the anniversary of its destruction; on Nakba Day; and on Land Day.
Land Day commemorates the events of March 30, 1976. Against a backdrop of ongoing land expropriation, the government had announced a plan to confiscate thousands of dunams of land belonging to Arab villages in the Galilee. Palestinian Israeli leaders responded with a call for protests and a general strike. A curfew was imposed on the impacted villages, and in the clashes between demonstrators and security forces six Palestinian Israelis were killed and a hundred wounded.
For Palestinian Israelis, especially those like the Sama’an family who were internally displaced, remembrance of these days of mourning is a political act. The land Suhmatans lost during the Nakba is under further threat: Wajeeh tells me that the development town of Ma’alot plans to extend eastward, building thirty-five hundred new units on what remains of Suhmata’s lands while “we are forbidden a square metre to come back home.”[3] But remembering Suhmata is more than a political act; it is also an act of psychic survival. The village from which they were forced to flee is embedded deep within their understanding of who they are. They are rooted in the land their ancestors planted and ploughed, and the remembrance of that belonging plays an almost existential role. As Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán puts it, “Those who have memory are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none don’t live anywhere.”[4]
Palestinian citizens of Israel find themselves torn between the past and the present, trying at different times to remember or to deny the history that continues to mould their world. The Nakba lives on in them: in their conflicted political identity, in their second-class citizenship, in their awkward place as a minority in an ethnically conceived state, and in all the ways these play out in their daily lives.
After the 1948 War, broken by the multiple losses of the Nakba, the traumatized remnant community was placed under martial law and segregated from the rest of Israeli society. Scattered and confined, they were unable to begin the task of rebuilding their shattered social infrastructure. They retreated into the silent hope that somehow things would change, that their lost Palestine would be restored and their separated relatives and neighbours could return home. A collective political response to their situation was not yet conceivable. But when the military administration ended in 1966, and travel restrictions were lifted, things began to change. Arab citizens could access the Jewish-Israeli economy to look for work. As literacy and education rates slowly increased, and more Arab-owned small businesses opened, the fabric of their society slowly knit together. On Land Day, in resisting the steady expropriation of their remaining land, Palestinian Israelis found their political voice.
Palestinian Arab society was traditionally structured around the hamula (or clan) system. After the 1948 exodus, coalitions of remaining hamula leaders were courted by the ruling Mapai party to field affiliate MKs,* and in return hamula members voted Labour in the elections. Individual political activism in the fifties and sixties took place mainly under the umbrella of Maki, Israel’s communist party, the only Knesset caucus to embrace Arabs as well as Jews as members. After Land Day, identity-based political organizing began to move from the margins of Palestinian Israeli society to the mainstream. In the decades that followed, secular politicians of communist and Palestinian-nationalist stripes, well as leaders of the growing Islamic Movement, vied successfully with Jewish Israeli parties, winning the lions’ share of the Arab vote.
Yet Palestinian nationalism came with its own complications. Before 1967, Palestinian Israelis had been cut off from the West Bank and Gaza, which were then part of enemy territories.† But after the Six Day War, and the end of the martial law mobility restrictions, Palestinian Israelis were able finally to make contact with their separated relatives and friends. After Land Day, it was easier to identify with the struggles of those living under occupation. When West Bankers and Gazans rose up in a wave of strikes and protests during the First Intifada, Palestinian-Israeli leaders declared the Land Day anniversary a national day of commemoration and solidarity with Palestinians across the Green Line. Belonging to a wider post-Nakba Palestinian collectivity was a new and at times uncomfortable relationship for Israel’s Arab citizens. Their aspirations didn’t always dovetail with those of Palestinians under occupation, whose leadership denied that the State of Israel had a right to exist. Palestinians, for their part, could look askance at these fellow nationals, who they saw as living and collaborating with the Zionist occupiers.[5] In the black-and-white polarity of Arab versus Israeli, Palestinian Israelis fell in the middle, outsiders to both.
“My country is at war with my people,”[6] mourned the late Emile Habibi, novelist and politician. This has been the defining experience of Palestinian Israelis, trapped between their warring national identities in a conflict that threatens to subsume them. Habibi’s friend Marzuq Halabi explained to me:
All those years from the Nakba til now, Palestinians in Israel have been in the shadow of the Palestinian elites and in the shadow of the Israeli elites. We stand between the Palestinian collective and the Israeli state, and we are caught in the middle. We all the time understand ourselves from the outside, and see our relationship as being with the conflict between them. We think our problems will resolve when the Palestinian issue is resolved.[7]
Yet as the Oslo Peace Process began to take shape in Madrid in 1991, it became clear that the internally displaced did not factor into the PLO’s bargaining position on refugees and the right to return. About a quarter of Palestinian Israelis fell into that category. The realization that the PLO, the official representative of the Palestinian people, was not prepared to negotiate for their return to their villages forced a reappraisal of the ever-shifting ground of their political identity. Civil societ
y flourished in the following years, as people came together to advocate for their rights as Israeli citizens. These new NGOs focused on different areas of social inequity, but primarily on land rights. As they became more confident in articulating their political needs in the language of Israeli democracy, so their understanding of being Palestinian shifted; they were of one people with Palestinians living elsewhere, but their struggles were different ones, specific to their experience as ethnic minority citizens of the Israeli state.
As the nineties progressed, many Jewish and most Palestinian Israelis were united in the hope that the Oslo Process would bring a permanent peace. Under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian Israeli politicians had for the first time been courted into the oft-changing governing coalitions in the Knesset, and more funds had started flowing towards Arab communities. But after Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing radical, this new warmth cooled and frustrations grew. On September 28, 2000, Likud chair Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount kick-started the Second Intifada.‡
Two days later a terrified twelve-year-old was shot in Gaza, allegedly by the IDF, and the footage of his death, played and replayed on Israeli television, ratcheted up the tension. At the beginning of October, as violence escalated in the Occupied Territories, Palestinian Israeli youth took to the streets, clashing with Jewish Israelis in Nazareth. The lethal response of the security forces mirrored that in the West Bank and Gaza: thirteen Arab youth were killed and over seven hundred people wounded.