Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Despite their outsider status, most second and third-generation Palestinian Israelis, even those who feel a deep connection with their Palestinian identity, feel increasingly comfortable with their identity as Israeli citizens, and less fearful of asserting their civil and political rights. Their lives overlap much more with Jewish Israelis than in the past,[63] and they want to be recognized as equals, not to be part of a Palestinian state. Israel has a higher living standard than the Palestinian Authority, and however flawed its democracy it is more effective than that on the other side of the Green Line. “Many Palestinian leaders say that they think the status of Palestinians in Israel is better than that of all Palestinians living in the Arab world,” Marzuq Halabi told me.

  The killing of thirteen young men in the October 2000 protests again forced the Palestinian Israeli community to reassess their position in the political landscape of Israel. Marzuq remembers: “People thought their citizenship was fully established, then the police killed thirteen youths, so they began to think, ‘We are not a part of the Palestinian issue solution, and we are not exactly citizens of Israel, so we must do something to change this situation.’”

  Marzuq was involved with Adalah, one of a number of NGOs that had appeared in the community’s burgeoning civil society in the 1990s. Adalah successfully uses strategic litigation to challenge longtime inequities through the courts. As relations between the Jewish state and its Arab minority deteriorated, Adalah’s legal experts began drafting a Democratic Constitution for Israel,*** one that would establish equal rights for all citizens. Their project was completed in concert with two other documents: The Future Vision for the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, which was commissioned by the National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel, and The Haifa Declaration, drafted by a team from the Arab Center for Applied Social Research.[64] Together these three documents, published in 2006–07, present a framework for Israel as a “democratic bilingual and multicultural state,” cutting it loose from its explicitly Jewish moorings.

  Unsurprisingly, the documents have not generally been well received in Jewish Israel.[65] Within their own society, however, they have helped shape a consensus around the Palestinian Israeli community’s understanding of itself as a national minority in Israel, demanding equal rights within their own country that are entirely independent of whatever final settlement the State of Israel negotiates with the Palestinians.

  The Haifa Declaration, which Marzuq also helped write, clearly states how the Nakba, with its ongoing economic and political repercussions, continues to frame the experience of Palestinians in Israel:

  Our citizenship and our relationship to the State of Israel are defined, to a great extent, by a formative event, the Nakba, which befell the Arab Palestinian people in 1948 as a result of the creation of the State of Israel. This was the event through which we — who remained from among the original inhabitants of our homeland — were made citizens without the genuine constituents of citizenship, especially equality. As we are a homeland minority whose people was driven out of their homeland, and who has suffered historical injustice, the principle of equality — the bedrock of democratic citizenship — must be based on justice and the righting of wrongs, and on the recognition of our narrative and our history in this homeland. This democratic citizenship that we seek is the only arrangement that guarantees individual and collective equality for the Palestinians in Israel.

  Here, as in ADRID’s summer camps and marches, remembrance and political action come together. The “righting of wrongs” is paired with a demand for acknowledgement of the Palestinian catastrophe, staking a claim to both a past and to a future in the State of Israel. “In these documents,” Marzuq tells me, “this issue of the past, of memory, takes a legal form, something that you are asking the government to do. For example, to let the internal refugees return to their villages, or to give money to the citizens who lost their land.” By itself, commemoration isn’t enough to move beyond the traumatized silence of the past. As Marzuq says, “Memory is not enough to be a way of dealing with our political situation or to build a nation. Memory is not enough today.”

  For some, the need to know their past is a double-edged sword. The Nakba so utterly transformed the lives of the first generation that it is often understood as a catastrophe that ended a world and swallowed any hope for the future. That’s what finally drives Ibtisam, in Paradise Lost, to leave her village: “I don’t want to keep looking back, chained to the past that has no way out. I want to look forward, ahead….”[66] When used by Arab politicians, the potent force of Nakba memory can be channelled into a nationalism that feeds off old hurts or nostalgia for a lost past. For people like Muhammad Abu al-Hayyja, this turning backward just seems like a dead end:

  We, the Arabs, all the time speak of the past. I do not speak of the past. I struggle to go forward, not to go back. I can’t speak about the Nakba. I can’t say I want Ein Hod back. What can I get? What can I get? Not Ein Hod back, and not Ein Hod anew. Every year the Arabs are making something, Nakba, Nakba, Nakba — OK, what are you doing, what do we want, as Arabs here in Israel? We can live with Jews here. Why not? But we should make a solution acceptable for all of us, and we should be equal, to find these solutions.

  But, given the way it has so forcefully chiselled the present, forgetting the Nakba isn’t a viable option either. “The Nakba is not just a historical event,” Sami says. “Its results still influence every part of our lives.”

  Commemorating and forgetting both carry their own perils. But Palestinian Israelis aren’t really free to choose, when their own half-repressed collective memories are drowned out by the loud, insistent voice of the state’s creation story. Memory and politics are so tightly wound together in Israel that without a voice in its founding narrative, their citizenship is incomplete — that absent history another marker of their second-class status. Though the Palestinian catastrophe is unacknowledged, its aftershocks continue. Arab communities are still confined, encroached upon, even unrecognized, and a march of return or the signing of a master plan are skirmishes in an ongoing contest over territory.

  * * *

  * While not formally Mapai MKs, they voted in support of the party. Mapai morphed into the Israeli Labour Party in 1968 — the system collapsed after Labour’s electoral defeat in 1977.

  † In the 1948 War, Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied the West Bank.

  ‡ Opposition leader Ariel Sharon, together with a handful of other Likud MKs and hundreds of police, entered the grounds of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, home to Islam’s third-holiest site, the al-Aqsa mosque. Sharon contended that “Jerusalem is under Israeli sovereignty, and I don’t need anyone’s permission” (see Joel Greenberg, “Unapologetic, Sharon Rejects Blame for Igniting Violence,” New York Times, October 5, 2000). The ensuing riots sparked the Second Intifada.

  § Outside the borders of Israel, Palestinian refugees must remember their past in different ways. Scattered villagers contribute to “memorial books” of their villages, containing photos, factual descriptions, songs, poems, recipes, and family trees. Historian Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 is an encyclopedic testament to every lost village; similar work is done online at www.palestineremembered.com.

  ¶ Another hierarchy is at work here, too. In May 1948 most of those sheltering in Jaffa were themselves refugees, fleeing from the villages around the city. Nearly all its wealthier residents had already left. Contemporary Jaffa residents don’t appreciate being looked down on by visiting émigrés, whose precipitate departure may have sealed the fate of the city. See Salim Tamari, “Bourgeois Nostalgia and the Abandoned City,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23, no.1–2 (2003): 173–180.

  ** “Mixed” cities are urban spaces shared by both Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. Jaffa, Haifa, and Acco are all mixed cities — unlike, say, Netanya, which is Jewish; or Jerusalem, which is
ethnically divided into East (Arab) and West (Jewish).

  †† As architect and scholar Roi Fabian pointed out to me, the post-war desire to clear the city and build anew dovetailed with the ascendancy of modernist urban planning — abandoned Jewish areas in 1950s European cities also fell victim to the destruction of “urban blight.”

  ‡‡ Yudit, a Jewish Israeli living in Ajami, is a housing activist who chronicled on her blog the ongoing evictions, demolitions, and protests in her neighbourhood.

  §§ Jewish settlements in Gaza were dismantled in 2005 by then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as part of the ongoing peace process. The settler movement and its supporters, including the National Union party, saw this “disengagement” from Gaza as a betrayal. National Union holds four Knesset seats, and is considered the most right wing of Israel’s elected political parties.

  ¶¶ On July 31, 1963, Moshe Dayan, then Minister of Agriculture, told Haaretz: “We should transform the Bedouins into an urban proletariat …. Without coercion but with government direction … this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear.” Other governments with nomadic indigenous populations — Canada and the Soviet Union, for example — have followed similar policies of concentration and sedentarization. In September 2011 Israel’s government approved the Prawer Commission’s recommendation that the Bedouin of the unrecognized villages be relocated to townships within five years, forcibly if necessary.

  *** Israel has no formal constitution.

  Chapter Eight

  Ghosts of the Nakba

  In May 1949, just a few months after the fighting was over, S. Yizhar wrote a short story chronicling the expulsion of the inhabitants of Khirbet Khizeh, a fictional Arab village. The story is written from the ambivalent perspective of a young Jewish soldier, a man who is shocked by what he sees and partakes in but not enough to act against it. Projecting that disquiet into the future, he begins: “True, it all happened a long time ago, but it has haunted me ever since.”[1]

  As the day and the details of the villagers’ removal unfold, Yizhar’s protagonist wrestles with his conscience, and voices his concern to the officer in charge. “Just you listen to what I’m saying,” Moishe, his company commander, tells him: “Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet whats-its-name, you hear me, and they’ll take this land and work it and it’ll be beautiful here!”[2] But before the refugees from Europe can be settled here, the inhabitants of Khirbet Khizeh must be sent away. “This was what exile looked like,” the narrator reflects. “What, in fact, had we perpetrated here today?”

  … [W]hen a stone house exploded with a deafening thunder and a tall column of dust — its roof, visible from where we were, floating peacefully, all spread out, intact, and suddenly splitting and breaking up high in the air and falling in a mass of debris, dust, and a hail of stones — a woman, whose house it apparently was, leapt up, burst into wild howling and started to run in that direction, holding a baby in her arms…. One of our boys moved forward and shouted at her to stand still. She stifled her words with a desperate shriek, beating her chest with her free hand. She had suddenly understood, it seemed, that it wasn’t just about waiting under the sycamore tree to hear what the Jews wanted and then to go home, but that her home and her world had come to a full stop, and everything had turned dark and was collapsing; suddenly she had grasped something inconceivable, terrible, incredible, standing directly before her, real and cruel, body to body, and there was no going back. But the soldier grimaced as though he were tired of listening, and he shouted at her again to sit down.[3]

  Here, as elsewhere in his story, Yizhar delineates in his dense, idiosyncratic prose the soldiers’ refusal to acknowledge the suffering of the dispossessed villagers. “Everything was for the refugees … our refugees, naturally. Those we were driving out — that was a totally different matter.… We were the masters now.”[4]

  Yizhar’s story dealt with difficult themes of witnessing and perpetrating violence that echoed the wartime experiences of many young Israelis. It became a bestseller, debated not only in the pages of newspapers and journals but also at kibbutz gatherings, and at youth movement and scout troop meetings — Ram Loevy remembers how, when he was fourteen, his scoutmaster sat the boys down during an outing in Tel Aviv and read them Khirbet Khizeh.[5]

  A primary concern for many of Yizhar’s wide readership was how Jews as a people could have fallen short of their own high ethical standards. “When the time came for us to be different, we weren’t,”[6] wrote Yaakov Fichmann in the popular newspaper Davar. Everyone, including Yizhar, was convinced of the necessity of the war. But, “Overnight, those who suffered injustice over centuries became themselves its perpetrators,” said M. Roshuld. The disregard of Palestinian suffering was a sign of moral failure. As A. Anavi put it, “Isn’t our own humanity forfeited when we fail to see it in another?”

  Yizhar and most of his comrades-in-arms had shared the land with the Palestinian Arab population, and however tense and divided that relationship had become, not all encounters between the denizens of neighbouring villages and settlements were negative ones. In 1948 they had fought against each other in what had begun as a civil war. But as the years passed, the immediacy of those encounters faded. The demographics of the state were permanently shifted by the massive immigration that followed its founding, and the new arrivals didn’t share that history. “In their perception, the Arabs were an evil, threatening presence lurking beyond the ceasefire lines, eager to undermine the new life that they had slowly and laboriously begun to build in Israel,”[7] notes historian Anita Shapira in her masterful essay on the novella’s impact; Palestinian Israelis, segregated away under military administration, were perceived no differently.

  As time passed, and peace seemed permanently postponed, the role Israel’s soldiers had played in the displacement of the Palestinian refugees diminished in the collective understanding of the war. The emergent narrative blamed the Arab enemy: the refugees had fled under orders from Arab leaders, who promised they would soon return victorious. Israel’s own part was subsequently minimalized. Yet although the memory of the expulsions faded, Khirbet Khizeh was still a visible part of Israel’s cultural landscape; it entered the canon as a classic of Hebrew literature, one of the books studied by high-school students for their matriculation exams. The historical context of the plot, however, was no longer in the foreground — the actions of the soldiers were seen as a deplorable but isolated act of wartime brutality. In examination questions, students were asked to discuss the moral conscience of the narrator, along with Yizhar’s descriptions of the natural landscape and his writing style.

  The young scout, Ram Loevy, never forgot Yizhar’s story. After his military service he went on to become a director and screenwriter, making documentaries and feature films for Israel’s (then-sole) television channel from its inception in 1968. Much of his work gave a rare forum to the perspective of Palestinians; his first film, I Ahmad, focused on the experience of a Palestinian-Israeli day labourer in Tel Aviv. Ram is now in his seventies: a courteous man, with a gravitas about him that he carries lightly. “I was regarded as a pain in the neck but a needed voice,” he told me as we talked on the Tel Aviv seafront. “And I knew deep in my heart that I must do a film about Khirbet Khizeh.”

  But wasn’t the story of the Nakba being suppressed? I asked him.

  It’s true, it’s true. But it depends on the times. In 1954, and later on, during the sixties, because of the people who took part in the 1948 War, everyone knew of what happened in 1948. So it was not a revelation. They considered it regrettable but as something that happens in every war — it should not be neglected, but not stressed too much.

  And the Arabs continued to be our enemies. It was part of our victory. The question, which is raised in the film also, is, “What if the Nakba hadn’t meant sending into diaspora hundreds of thousands of people, but they had stayed in Israel?” That was the question that everybody asked — not too loudly, but…

  Th
e Israeli establishment regarded it as one of the cornerstones of its explanation of the history, that the Arab leaders called on Palestinians to leave their houses, promising they’d return victorious very quickly. Gradually, Khirbet Khizeh and the like were put aside, as an exception to the rule.

  Ram approached Israel Television with a script for Khirbet Khizeh in 1970, and was turned down “on the grounds that there are sacred cows which should not be slaughtered.” The station’s drama productions had tended toward the mainstream, dealing with universal themes rather than issues specific to Israel, “partly for fear of political criticism.” Six years later, when he approached them again, things had changed.

  The idea was, “We need to have issues which are the heart of the conflict.” The managers of Israel Television took it upon themselves to broaden the limits of public debate. So, when I came again with a new script written by Daniella Karmi, they decided to accept it, which was a very, very brave move. The head of Israel Television at the time, Arnon Zuckermann, lost his brother in the 1948 war. Nevertheless, he decided to put the biggest amount of money ever given to a television drama to this film.

  We knew there was going to be a big public debate, so the filming was not made public. We finished shooting a week before the Upheaval of ’77, when the right-wing Likud party came to power. So we knew we had to be very quick. Unfortunately, an MK who had vigorously opposed the book when it was first published found out about the filming, and wrote a very angry letter to all MKs and to the governing body of the Broadcasting Authority,* demanding the film not be shown.