Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Oslo had been a turning point for Ilan Pappé, who moved steadily further to the Left as the flawed peace process unfolded. He saw the very framework of the peace process as a coup for the Israelis.[31] The world’s attention was now focused on the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and the state boundaries created by the 1967 War; international concern over the rights and the suffering of the other Palestinians, those who had become refugees during the 1948 War, faded into the background.

  Increasingly, his position brought him into conflict with Benny Morris, his former fellow traveller. Their political divergence was reflected in their approaches to the writing of history. Despite the flak he had faced from both Right and Left, Morris was renowned as a meticulous scholar with a commitment to objectivity, who wrote that “the historian should ignore contemporary politics and struggle against his political inclinations as he tries to penetrate the murk of the past.”[32] His work on what he calls “the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem” is generally regarded as a benchmark. Ilan Pappé questioned whether it was possible to look at historical events removed from their broader political context. “You cannot commit a crime like 1948 and then continue the crime of occupation and not connect the two,”[33] he told one interviewer. For him, what happened in 1948 was “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” and his task, he wrote, was to “rewrite, indeed salvage, a history that was erased and forgotten.”[34]

  Commenting on what Morris called the “methodological discord”[35] between them, Pappé wrote:

  The debate between us is on one level between historians who believe they are purely objective reconstructers of the past, like Morris, and those who claim that they are subjective human beings striving to tell their own version of the past, like myself. When we write histories, we buil[d] arches over a long period of time and we construct out of the material in front of us a narrative. We believe and hope that this narrative is a loyal reconstruction of what happened.[36]

  After the Second Intifada broke out in September 2000, tolerance for hearing another side of the nation’s story quickly faded, as a Master’s student at Pappé’s university, the University of Haifa, found out. Teddy Katz focused much of his research on the expulsion of Palestinians in May 1948 from Tantura, the small coastal village where Nira Yuval-Davis later spent her childhood summers.[37] Katz interviewed forty people, both former villagers and veterans of the Haganah’s Alexandroni Brigade. Overall, their diverse testimonies led Katz to believe that mass killings had taken place after the Haganah took Tantura.

  Katz was awarded A+ for his thesis. Ma’ariv newspaper then picked the story up, and a few days later, veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade sued Katz for libel, saying he had falsified some of the testimonies. Despite his stellar academic record, the university refused to back him. Katz’s case came up for trial in December 2000, just three months after the Jerusalem riots that marked the beginning of the Second Intifada. Two days into the trial, under pressure from his legal team, Katz signed a statement recanting his thesis. The judge ignored his later retraction of that statement, some inaccuracies were found, and Katz was stripped of his degree.

  What happened at Tantura? Pappé and Morris have both investigated Katz’ claims: Pappé stands behind Katz’s work and his conclusions, Morris is skeptical. But Morris comments that his own investigations of what happened at Tantura leave him with “a deep sense of unease,”[38] and that “atrocities — war crimes, in modern parlance — appear to have occurred.”[39] What happened to Teddy Katz suggests a political climate in which such scholarly explorations carry a charge above and beyond the question of their academic merits.

  After 2000, post-Zionism was on the ebb. Its brief surge had provided a foil for Zionist writers to reformulate their own understandings of the Jewish state, and now a new neo-Zionism flowed into public discourse. Pappé came under increasing pressure for his political views as the decade progressed, and eventually decided to relocate to the U.K., where he is now a professor of history at the University of Exeter. Other left-wing academics have found it hard to get tenure, or are sidelined by their peers. Oren Yiftachel told me that he lost his position at the prestigious Technion for publishing work that was deemed controversial.[40] Several of his peers have received death threats, or have been physically attacked: one had blue and white paint thrown on him by students, another was injured by a bomb exploding at his home. “We receive hate mail all the time,” Oren says.

  Given this political climate, I asked Ilan, what impact has the work of the New Historians had on Jewish-Israeli society?

  I was very optimistic about its potential to impact society in the 1990s, when I thought it would open up an intellectual and a cultural movement. It was going that way in many ways until the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. And then in 2000 it was a U-turn back to the pre–New History version of history, and every aspect of Israeli society sort of conveyed this message of “we are at war again, and there’s no room for self-criticism of that kind — it’s harmful, it’s unpatriotic, and unacceptable.” It may [yet] be a precursor of a more fundamental change in the ways Israelis see themselves and Zionism, but there’s no sign of it now.

  In July 2006, I joined a bus heading south from Tel Aviv into the Negev for a walking tour of Be’er Sheva. The tour, organized by the primarily Jewish-Israeli NGO Zochrot, was unusual. The history we heard, as we walked through the desert town’s sandy streets, and sat in the grassy park beside its boarded-up mosque, was that of Be’er Sheva’s Arab past, the history of Bir al-Seba before the Palmach soldiers drove in and took the town in October 1948.[41] At the end of the day, two signs were posted, in Arabic and Hebrew, one giving the name of the mosque and the other of the al-Shawa Bank. By this simple gesture of naming, these signs located the landmarks of Bir al-Seba in present-day Be’er Sheva.

  Zochrot means “remembering” in Hebrew, and the group’s purpose is to foreground the missing history of the Nakba, to make it “visible in Hebrew.” The leaflet they passed out, in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, states:

  The Zionist collective memory exists in both our cultural and physical landscape, yet the heavy price paid by the Palestinians — in lives, in the destruction of hundreds of villages, and in the continuing plight of the Palestinian refugees — receives little public recognition….

  Zochrot works to make the history of the Nakba accessible to the Israeli public so as to engage Jews and Palestinians in an open recounting of our painful common history. We hope that by bringing the Nakba into Hebrew, the language spoken by the Jewish majority in Israel, we can make a qualitative change in the political discourse of this region.[42]

  Zochrot’s members made their first visit, to the abandoned village of Miske, in 2002. Since then, despite the political climate, their numbers have been growing. Out of a small, busy office in downtown Tel Aviv, Zochrot trains educators in teaching Nakba history, runs a database and an extensive website, and publishes a journal. Staff also collect oral testimonies from Palestinian survivors of 1948. The office houses a library, and hosts regular film screenings and lectures. The meeting room doubles as a small art gallery.

  But Zochrot’s most critical work is the commemorative tours it organizes, to villages or urban neighbourhoods that sixty years ago had thriving Palestinian Arab populations. Former residents or local historians walk participants through deserted ruins or busy city streets, conjuring architectural traces of a hidden Arab past into consciousness. Invariably, the tour ends with the prominent posting of a sign that gives place names in both Hebrew and Arabic.

  In a culture thick with commemoration of the past, Zochrot’s memorializing is similar to performance art: it is transient, and it demands work on the part of the viewer. A sign appears on a neighbourhood street, forcing a re-engagement with the familiar landscape.‡‡ A life-size photograph of an old Arab man bears witness that this busy city sidewalk was once part of his village. “You simply start to see the country at more than one level,”[43] Eitan Rei
ch, then board-chair, told a reporter; “I am no longer blind to the ruins along the roadsides…. That used to be transparent for me, but no longer.” Zochrot’s signs are always pulled down, sometimes immediately, and tours have been interrupted by the police.

  The gentle activism of posting such a sign is a disturbing and profoundly controversial act. “Most people don’t justify what happened in 1948 because they don’t think anything happened,” Zochrot’s Talia Fried tells me when we sit and talk in the organization’s little library.[44] Talia vividly remembers her first encounters with Palestinian memories of the Nakba as “traumatic — very new and very uncomfortable. There was nowhere to escape the sense of guilt.” Initially, she kept her distance from the new group: “When I heard that Eitan [Bronstein] and Norma [Musih] were posting signs, I thought, ‘Why?’ It seemed completely divorced from reality. I had a visceral feeling of fear — it was very extreme.” But Talia was drawn to Zochrot, partially by what she perceived as parallels with Holocaust memory in the remembering of, and witnessing to, suffering.

  For other Jewish Israelis, the raising of what Eitan Bronstein has called the “ghostly spirit”[45] of the Nakba also raises anxiety that the Palestinian Nakba will become a competing narrative of suffering. “There is Israeli fear that dealing with the Nakba will erase the memory of the Holocaust,”[46] Zochrot’s Tamar Avraham has commented. This fear animates much of the criticism of Zochrot’s work. Online responses to a Ma’ariv article on Zochrot included: “I call on you to go out and disrupt the traitorous activities.… You don’t understand, they are bringing the next Holocaust on us,” and “When will these traitors be put to death?”[47] Eitan Bronstein has faced death threats, as well as public abuse. A nationalist radio host called Bronstein “murderer” and “anti-Semite” on air, and told him, “I hope they throw you out of the country.”[48]

  But Zochrot’s challenge to Jewish Israelis has provoked very different responses, too. “I had never before met Palestinian refugees in person; I did not know about the Palestinian villages that were destroyed during the war. Confronting this fact was not an easy thing to do … [but] was an empowering experience; I face and deal with difficult and relevant issues, rather than let my fears control myself,”[49] volunteer Noa Kerem reported to Zochrot.

  Zochrot’s work is memory-work, which puts it on a collision course with the collective memory of Zionism. Unlike liberal Israelis, for whom the Occupation of the Territories in 1967 marks Zionism’s loss of innocence, for Zochrot and its fellow travellers, “there never was a golden age,” as Talia puts it; 1948 was the year that Zionist ideology became the unifying and univocal state language, when power relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel were solidified, inscribed definitively into both the political landscape and the land itself.

  Yet that land is melded into deeply personal memories. Zochrot cofounder Eitan Bronstein told me that he spent many happy hours as a child playing in the ruins on a nearby hill.[50] A click of the mouse led him to the shocked discovery that prior to 1948 his childhood haunt had been a market-village of some two thousand people.

  I was five years old when my family came to Israel from Argentina. I grew up in Kibbutz Bahan. When I was growing up we visited many times a barren hill nearby, and on the top of it there was the remains of a fortress. We went there many, many times, by bicycle, walking, by tractor that we took from the kibbutz. We packed suppers to eat up there. It was the place of my childhood, one of the things that I loved the most.

  I knew that it was called Qaqun, and that it was a crusader fortress. But then, when I became interested in the Nakba, some eight or nine years ago, I was looking on the Palestine Remembered website, and I saw the district of Tulkarem, and underneath it, in the centre of the district, I saw the name Qaqun. I was very surprised to see it there, and I said to myself, what did it have to do with the Palestinians? It was my own childhood, you know. So I clicked on the link and I was amazed to find that until 1948 this was a village, a rather big one, around two thousand people lived there, and there was an important battle there in 1948. I was really shocked to find this. It made me look differently at my childhood. It taught me how that history of 1948 is so hidden in our society that we can think we know a place while knowing nothing about its Palestinian past.

  His story speaks to that intimate engagement between memory and landscape — how landscape shapes our memory, and how what we know, or do not know, both forms and informs our reading of the landscape.

  Given the nature of Zochrot’s work, I asked Eitan, how important did he think the research of the New Historians had been?

  The work of the New Historians is very, very, very, important. It’s not a measurable thing. I would say that without their project, mostly Benny Morris but also others, we would have no foundation for a critical view of our history. They built the foundations.

  As the New Historians’ audience was primarily an academic one, he pointed out, it took a while for their work to filter through into the wider society. Now, however, things are changing.

  The main thing that happened after those first writings was the Oslo Agreement in 1993. By denying the issue of the refugees’ return, it provoked a reaction from refugees both internally [within Israel] and externally.

  Five years later, on the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s founding, Palestinian Israelis marched to al-Ghabsiya in ADRID’s first nationally co-ordinated march of return.

  Since then it happens every year, and it’s growing, the numbers, and in the last few years there are many Jews also participating in it, and this creates more and more responses. And also of course the work of Zochrot made some difference — I can’t exactly measure that, but I’m sure its part of the change, you know, the growing numbers of Israelis approaching us, and the references to us in the media. Also on the cultural level there have been novels, films, documentaries — there are many new things happening around the Nakba, and Israelis are learning about it.

  And then out of fear the government reacted with this stupid Nakba Law, and that made it huge, the exposure to the Nakba. It doesn’t mean Israelis really know much more about it, but I don’t think Israelis can deny it anymore, say that nothing like this happened.

  For Eitan, the shadowy presence of the Nakba is a central constituent of Israeli identity.

  I think that the Nakba is part of every Israeli Jew’s identity, a central part. This is our identity as colonizers of this country, because if the history of this state began by expulsion and the destruction of most of Palestinian life, this is the basis of our nature here, you know, our situation here: we are here and they were expelled from here. But all this history is suppressed, and we don’t know anything about it.

  He sees the militarized nature of Israeli society, the blurring between civilian and army life, as a consequence of the state’s founding.

  When I was eighteen years old I didn’t even question the issue of being drafted into the army, it was part of becoming adult in this society. For me it was natural for a citizen, for a Jewish Israeli, to do. In that sense I think the Nakba is a very important part of it. Knowing about the Nakba enables us to understand that conscription is part of its continuation, its assertion.

  In a letter “To My Palestinian Neighbours,” posted on Zochrot’s website, Nathan Shalva picks up the same thread:

  I remember that as a child we went hiking in an abandoned village beside us, Al Wayziyya. I remember that it looked strange, but that I did not have even that bit of necessary imagination to think about what happened to people there. “They ran away,” they always told us. “They just ran away.” As a child and a youth, I mainly absorbed the idea that the Arabs want to throw us into the sea. To kill all of us. And if we’ll be weak it will end in a Holocaust like Germany. When I reached drafting age, there was no option not to serve in the military. Not a legal option, not a practical option, not even in our imagination.… Just like we have to drink water, we also have to go to the army.[51]

  During
his army service, Nathan served in the West Bank, in Hebron and Ramallah. He began to question what he was doing. After it was over, he writes, “I started to try to piece together the shards. To return to life. I left my kibbutz in the north and moved to the city. With that transition I left most of the truths that I grew up with back there. I got to know more and more people who experienced similar things. I studied. I learned to appreciate my strength and abilities. Until one day, I reached the decision to no longer hold a weapon unless it was needed to defend my home.”

  “When a person reaches this decision, all the authority of the army evaporates as if it never was,” Nathan says. “After I was released from the army in practice, I started to get released from the army in my thoughts.” He believes that “the residents of Israel and Palestine” can one day establish a “co-operative and just state for all.”§§

  His belief that the way to peace is that of creating a single state for both Jews and Palestinians is shared by many of Zochrot’s members. Close engagement with the visible and invisible memory of the Palestinian Catastrophe has led them to conclude that if they are “to commemorate, witness and acknowledge”[52] the Nakba they must also “repair,” and that, sooner or later, must involve grappling with the right of return. This is their most controversial position, and, for the vast majority of Jewish Israelis, the most inaccessible. “It is almost impossible to speak about the Nakba without speaking about taking responsibility and repairing the historical injustice that was committed against the Palestinian people,”[53] Zochrot declared in a public “Nakba Day” statement in 2007. “Such repair must begin first and foremost with the recognition of the right of Palestinians to return.” That right, they say, should include all the 1948 refugees and their descendants. While many may choose not to return, for Zochrot the refugees will remain refugees until they have been given the freedom to make that choice. “Without a fair solution to the problem of return,”[54] Zochrot believes, “the conflict can never be resolved.”