by Jo Roberts
The killings marked a further divergence between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. As the Second Intifada intensified in sickening waves of suicide attacks, for many Jewish Israelis the boundaries of national identity hardened and contracted, and the distinction between Palestinians and Palestinian Israelis blurred. For the latter, as the conflict between their two national identities grew stronger and their Israeli-ness became more suspect, their Palestinian Arab identity became more and more important. Even the 2006 Lebanon War, when close to half of those killed by Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on the Galilee were Palestinian Israelis, did not reverse this trend.
In a country where national belonging is increasingly understood in ethnic terms, the collective memory of the Nakba is becoming increasingly significant for Palestinian Israelis. It sharpens Palestinian national identity, and it implicitly reminds Jewish Israelis of what New Historian Benny Morris has called the “original sin” of the state’s founding.
Going back to one’s lost village is both a personal act of remembrance and the commemoration of a collective loss. It is also, increasingly, a political statement. “Marches of return” have been growing in recent years. In 1998, Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat announced that Israel’s fiftieth anniversary would be commemorated as Nakba Day, and since then, as on Land Day, the villagers and their families are joined by other Palestinian Israelis, many waving Palestinian flags, and by a handful of Jewish-Israeli supporters as they process together to one of the ruined villages.
The enormity of the Nakba as political disaster can eclipse the private griefs of those whose lives it broke apart. “Down through the years, people talk about the Na[k]ba, the ‘catastrophe,’ but not about its pain and its trauma,” psychologist Mustafa Kosoksi has said. “Arab society in Israel is a post-traumatic society without having the right to deal with this trauma, without having the luxury of defining itself as a post-traumatic society. It finds itself in the situation, and that’s it. The Na[k]ba is talked about as a political event, without dealing with the personal pain.… It is a question of survival because speaking is likely to provoke the aggressive instinct of Israeli society.”[8]
In returning to their ruined villages, internally displaced refugees like the Sama’ans try to come to terms with the personal fallout of the Nakba.§ Going back is a stark reminder that the village is gone, and that this return is only a visit that will end in another parting. But it is also an opportunity for renewing a relationship with the land, “smelling the moon,” as Lutfiya put it. Long before such commemoration became more politicized, individual families or groups of neighbours would come back to their village to sit among the ruins, tend to family graves, walk among the remaining trees, and gather fruits and herbs to carry carefully home.[9] For some, that sensual re-encounter with their ancestral land can offer a kind of healing, by integrating the ruins of the remembered past into the present day.
Dahoud Badr, whom we met in Chapter 1, was expelled from his village of al-Ghabsiya as a boy. He now lives just a few kilometres away. He and other villagers used to gather in al-Ghabsiya’s derelict mosque for Friday prayers, until one day they found it had been boarded up. Undeterred, they erected a tent outside and continued their worship there, but the tent was destroyed.[10] The mosque is now surrounded by a fence and rolls of razor wire.
Dahoud is the co-ordinator and only full-time employee of the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID). Founded in 1992 after the Madrid peace talks, when it became clear that Palestinian Israelis had no place at the table, ADRID acts as a national umbrella organization for the numerous small, localized groups of internally displaced refugees. Members do what they can to restore communal and religious sites in the villages and organize talks and panel discussions, passing on to second and third generations the history of their heritage. ADRID’s work both cherishes the land and analyzes the reasons for its loss: a potent mix. One of its projects is facilitating “Roots and Belonging” summer camps for children. Young people camp out in the ruins, living for a brief moment on the land of their ancestral villages. Elders recreate traces of village life long past, in a visceral transmission of collective memory. The young people cook together with the older women and listen to traditional songs under the night sky. Wedding ceremonies are staged. These resurrected memories carry a strong political charge: enacting return, however fleetingly, solidifies the next generation’s commitment to that collective aspiration.
Unlike the broader Palestinian right of return, giving land back to the internally displaced refugees would pose no “demographic threat.” They have been living in Israel since the state’s inception. It might, however, be seen as a precedent, opening the door to wider Palestinian demands. Some villagers have been legally successful in pressing their claims: Israel’s High Court has ruled in favour of the former residents of al-Ghabsiya, Kafr Bir’im, and Iqrit, deciding there was no reason to prevent their return. But the state disagreed, trumping the High Court’s decisions with security concerns. That was sixty years ago. Many abandoned villages are now categorized as closed military areas.
Nakba Day marches of return are also seen as a security threat. They challenge the founding story of Independence Day and bring to the foreground the unresolved issue of Palestinians’ U.N.-endorsed right to return, which is anathema to the vast majority of Jewish Israelis. ADRID’s 2008 march to Saffuriya ended in violence. Sixty years ago, Saffuriya was a prosperous Galilean town — now its houses have disappeared and its lands are planted over with pine trees. Raneen Geries, a vivacious oral historian and activist in her early thirties, described to me what happened there on Nakba Day:
Each year we decide which village to visit, we publish the details and invite people to join us. That year we decided to march to Safurriya, near Nazareth. We went, several thousands of people, into the woods. There were speeches, and we sang, and when we finished and wanted to come back, we found dozens of police waiting for us. When I saw the policemen on horses, with their faces covered, I knew they would attack us.[11]
Behind the police stood counter-protestors, waving Israeli flags. Somebody started throwing stones, and mounted police waving batons charged the fleeing marchers, while tear gas canisters and stun grenades exploded around them. “People were injured and went to the hospital but no one was killed. The people who went on this march were peaceful, there were families and children.”
Jafar Farah of the NGO Mossawa (“Equality”), who had gone on the march with his two young children, was caught in the chaos. He later reflected to a reporter: “We started to believe that Israel was finally mature enough to let us remember our own national tragedy. Families came to show their children the ruins of the villages so they had an idea of where they came from. The procession was becoming a large and prominent event. People felt safe attending.” It was his belief that “the authorities were unhappy about the success of the processions, and wanted them stopped.”[12]
He may be right. To some in government, even mourning the Nakba is seen as a threat: Public Security Minister Avi Dichter has stated that “Whoever cries of the Nakba year after year, shouldn’t be surprised if they actually have a Nakba eventually.”[13] In 2009, MK Alex Miller of Yisrael Beytenu proposed that commemorating Israel’s Independence Day as a day of mourning should be a criminal offence, punishable by up to three years in jail. A watered-down version of his bill passed the Knesset in 2011. Under the new law, groups that “deny Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state”[14] are not eligible for government funding and face fines if they mark Nakba Day.
The Nakba rent the fabric of rural life in Arab Palestine. Villages were emptied and most villagers became refugees, in camps abroad or within the boundaries of the new state. But Palestinian Arabs lost their cities, too, and with them the political and cultural life that helps build a distinct national identity. Arab Palestine’s middle classes, intellectuals, and political elite had congregated in the cities: nearly all
of them went into exile. For many Palestinians, perhaps the greatest loss of all was the city of Jaffa.
Jaffa, “Bride of the Sea,” was the epicentre of Arab life in Mandate Palestine and much of the Middle East. It was home to the largest Arab daily, Filastin, and many other newspapers; to dozens of presses printing books for the Arab world; to seven cinemas; and to the offices of Britain’s Near East Radio. The natural harbour, in use since the Bronze Age, was Palestine’s gateway to the Mediterranean and to the sea routes beyond, from which millions of crates of Jaffa oranges and other citrus fruits from the orchards around the city were shipped out to Europe. Under the U.N.’s Partition Plan, Jaffa was to remain an Arab enclave within a much larger Jewish portion of the divided territory. But as hostilities escalated the map could be redrawn, better to protect the security of the new state. “Jaffa will be a Jewish city,” wrote David Ben-Gurion in his diary after the fall of the city; “War is war.”[15]
“At 4 A.M. on April 25, 1948,” writes Shukri Salameh, “almost three weeks before the termination of the British mandate over Palestine, Jaffa was subjected to an intensifying barrage of concentrated mortar bombing….” The assault, by Menachem Begin’s Etzel militia, went on for three days. “People scurried for their lives,” Salameh continues, “cramming into cars, pickups, trucks, buses, and a large number fled on foot. Many of them sailed out in small boats, some of which capsized in stormy weather, resulting in substantial loss of life.… The vast majority of the refugees, including us, left with only a few pieces of clothing.”[16]
Many of the city’s notables had left before Etzel began its bombardment, and most of those remaining left as soon as they could. In a society attuned to social hierarchy, the bleed of Jaffa’s higher-ranking citizens demoralized those who remained and hindered the organization of effective resistance. On May 14, the last day of the British Mandate, Jewish forces formally occupied the empty streets of Jaffa. Of its seventy thousand inhabitants, only thirty-five hundred remained.
For Palestinian exiles and their children, scattered across the globe, the loss of Jaffa and its orange groves symbolizes the personal and communal devastation wrought by the Nakba. This is powerfully conveyed by novelist Ghassan Kanafani as he describes his exodus from the city with a friend’s family:
It was somewhat cloudy and a sense of coldness was seeping into my body.… One after the other, orange orchards streamed past, and the [truck] was panting upward on a wet earth.… In the distance the sound of gun-shots sounded like a farewell salute.
Rass El-Naqoura [on the Lebanon border] loomed on the horizon, wrapped in a blue haze, and the vehicle suddenly stopped. The women emerged from amid the luggage, stepped down and went over to an orange vendor sitting by the wayside. As the women walked back with the oranges, the sound of their sobs reached us. Only then did oranges seem to me something dear, that each of these big, clean fruits was something to be cherished. Your father alighted from beside the driver, took an orange, gazed at it silently, then began to weep like a helpless child.…
When in the afternoon we reached Sidon we had become refugees.[17]
Palestinian memoir is often haunted by the loss of Jaffa. Raja Shehadeh writes of growing up in Ramallah with his exiled grandmother Julia, for whom Ramallah is but the backdrop to her vivid memories. Julia would stand with her grandson and watch the far-off lights of her beloved city, silently teaching him of what was lost; Raja says that he, too, “learned to avoid seeing what was here and to fix my sight on the distant horizon.”[18]
Walking through a supermarket in a North American city, Souad Dajani experiences a flash of proprietary indignation when she sees Jaffa oranges on sale — her grandparents had lived in Ajami and owned orchards near the city. “How could the scent of these oranges take me back to a time I have never known?” she asks. “Are the sights, sounds and smells of Jaffa encoded in my genes? … How is it I can close my eyes and feel the breeze, know exactly how warm it is, and how gently or urgently it blows?”[19] Such writing often is elegiac, the tragic nostalgia of a people with no ongoing physical experience of their homeland. Separated from their city, it remains static in the mind’s eye, frozen in time. As in a faded photograph, much becomes invisible, outside the focus of attention: Jaffa becomes a lost paradise, and the complexities and frictions of urban life in Palestinian society under British rule disappear.
But for those who remained, and the rural refugees who joined them, the elegance and prosperity of Jaffa sixty years ago has long been eclipsed by the harsh realities of survival in an abandoned and occupied city, and the ongoing poverty generated by those conditions. Their daily struggles, and their own hopes for the future, are very different from those of their exiled compatriots. Visiting Palestinian exiles, and their descendants, find themselves in a city that has lived sixty years of Arab and Jewish history since their departure. It is utterly different from the Jaffa they hold in their imagination.
Exiled from Jaffa in 1948, Salim Tamari lives in the West Bank — he’s a professor of sociology at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. In a fascinating account of his return visit to Jaffa, he recounts how Murjana, a young Palestinian Israeli born and raised in Jaffa, connects with him on the Internet and offers to show him around her hometown. They make arrangements to meet, and Salim invites two friends along: his colleague Rema Hammami, and Liza Bouri, a diaspora Palestinian staying with him. Liza was born in Jaffa, and this is her first visit since the 1948 Catastrophe. Salim tells us that she is “crying all the way in anticipation of the encounter with her lost city.”[20]
Murjana, “blond and wearing high heels,” is waiting for them by Jaffa’s most distinctive landmark, the clock tower. As they walk together through the streets, Salim notes the buildings of his past: the French Hospital where he was born; the local pharmacy; his family home. But Murjana isn’t able to offer much assistance as he negotiates his way through the changed environment of the run-down and largely rebuilt city. Salim is startled by the disconnect between his Jaffa and Murjana’s: “Freedom to her meant Haifa, where she had an occasional job, and a place away from family oppression.” His guide, he says, “had no feeling of locality for the place. She could not identify the landmarks … Her main interest was to take us to the Hinawi brothers ice-cream shop where they had 22 flavors. But tears were still pouring from Liza’s eyes.”
For Salim, the return is a re-engagement with the streets of his birthplace, and it is the landmarks of his personal history that he wants to see. To Murjana, that history, and the political catastrophe that terminated it, are invisible — the landmarks in her own landscape of memory are very different ones. Liza, experiencing her first return, says nothing. Her grief for a lost and long-imagined place overwhelms her.
Such divergences open a window into the workings of collective memory. From the fractured memories of a dispersed community, unified and unifying narratives help tell that community into being. But collective memory is more than an accretion of individual remembering; it is formed through the process of defining the boundaries of the collective. Experience that doesn’t fit with the dominant perception is rejected and marks those who lived that experience as marginal to or beyond the boundary of the group.
Yearning for some kind of geographically rooted belonging, visitors from the West Bank often position themselves both as “real” Palestinians and “real” Jaffaites. Contemporary Jaffaites then are outsiders, their presence merely part of the fallout of the national catastrophe. Salim’s friend and co-author Rema was keen to join the expedition “because I so rarely get to meet contemporary Jaffaites — people many of the originals do not even consider as being really of Jaffa but as latecomers who are just posing as Yaffawiin [Jaffaites] while the authentic ones are in exile.”[21] Her comments shed light on the hierarchy of experience within Palestinian memory: the past is so demanding that it can blind returnee visitors to the reality of the present, and to the Palestinian Israelis, also displaced from their homes in 1948, who have been living in J
affa for the past sixty years.¶
As Jewish forces advanced on Jaffa, people living in the surrounding villages fled before them into the city. These refugees, and Jaffa’s few remaining inhabitants, were rounded up into the Ajami neighbourhood, their movements strictly controlled by the military administration. Many ended up having to share their homes with Jewish immigrants until these new arrivals were moved on into hastily constructed housing developments. Over the next three decades, much of the emptied city of Jaffa was demolished, and its remaining mansions, once elegant, grew shabby and derelict.
Caught in a holding pattern of poverty and municipal neglect, Jaffa, and Ajami in particular, became known as a slum, a place of violence and shady drug deals. Its residents lived a ghettoized existence: traumatized by displacement and military defeat, and fearful of further crackdowns by the Israeli authorities, they were scorched from within by memories of the Nakba and the slow burn of its political fallout.
“Imagine you live near your old house,” says Sami Abu Shehaheh. “You did not sell it — in your mind it is still yours. You pass it daily; someone else is living in it. Or, you go begging the new immigrant to give you your family album, or your contract of the house, or a pillow, or a chair — out of your house. Some people worked in their orchards as workers, or in their businesses as workers. The owners of the place were being dealt with as guests or immigrants, and the immigrants saw themselves as owners of the place.”[22]
Sami, one of two Palestinian Israelis on the Tel Aviv–Jaffa city council, is working on a doctorate from Tel Aviv University on Jaffa’s history as an Arab cultural centre during the British Mandate. Now in his late thirties, he’s lived in Ajami since he was a child. Sami’s grandfather Ismail helped pull the bodies out from the remains of Jaffa’s municipal building in 1948, after it was blown up by a Zionist militia group. For Sami, the ongoing struggles of Palestinian Israelis are intimately connected to the Nakba his grandfather remembers but doesn’t want to talk about: “[Palestinian-Israeli former MK] Azmi Bishara described it as ‘the biggest armed robbery of the twentieth century.’ You have to live in this situation for decades.”