Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  The ethnic and economic divisions between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israelis that we explored in Chapter 3 have not gone away. The inhabitants of Kfar Shalem have experienced this particularly harshly. In 1949, a small community of newly arrived Mizrahi Jews from Yemen were settled by the government in Salameh, an abandoned Arab village close to Jaffa, to claim the village for the new state and deter former Arab residents from returning. Decades passed: their village, now Kfar Shalem, slowly became a neighbourhood of Tel Aviv–Jaffa. As city real estate became a precious commodity and house prices soared, the villagers started receiving eviction notices. Although they have official documentation confirming the legality of their original settlement, they were in public housing, on limited leases; the ILA has sold part of the village land to private developers, and despite their organized protests, the villagers are being cleared out.[15] The thirty-two families evicted in December 2007 were not rehoused and received no compensation. More homes were demolished in 2009.

  The parallels with the situation of Palestinian Israelis in Jaffa are striking: eviction without compensation from state-owned property for the benefit of developers. Some Ajami residents even joined the residents of Kfar Shalem for their demonstrations. Despite the similarities of evacuations and failed protests, though, the struggle in Kfar Shalem breaks the mould in that the evicted tenants are Jewish. But Kfar Shalem’s Jewish residents are poor, and they are Mizrahi, and thus they are more easily sacrificed to the demands of the market than a more wealthy Ashkenazi community might be.

  Within Israel’s paradoxical political identity as an ethnically defined democratic state, and indeed because of it, Mizrahis have remained in an ambivalent position. It’s the way of the world that children growing up in marginalized and underfunded communities, such as the development towns, don’t generally end up with prestigious or professional careers. Some do, but most work in blue-collar jobs. In a highly stratified society, sixty years on, Mizrahis still make up the lower classes of Jewish Israelis.

  These longtime inequities can play out with unforeseen consequences. Mizrahis make up close to 50 percent of Israel’s electorate, and in the 1970s they began to make their political presence felt. Menachem Begin courted the Mizrahi vote in his 1977 election campaign, and after decades of being sidelined by the Ashkenazi-dominated Labour party they flocked to his standard. Three out of four Mizrahi voters backed him,[16] and with their support Likud ended Labour’s thirty years in power.

  But in the development towns, where unemployment was high, things didn’t change that much under Likud. Mizrahi workers felt threatened by both Palestinian Israeli workers and Palestinians trucked in daily from the West Bank, with whom they vied for low-paying jobs.[17] In the 1980s two new parties drew their inhabitants’ support: Shas, created by and for Sephardic and Mizrahi ultra-Orthodox but garnering support from the wider Mizrahi religious community, and Kach, Meir Kahane’s ultra-right party, which advocated the transfer of Israel’s Arab citizens. Both parties, in different ways, forcefully equated Israeli national identity with being Jewish: Shas by pressing for an increased role for Judaism in political life, and Kach by demonizing the Palestinian Other. Both political models finally gave Mizrahis a place at the table.

  This explicit mobilization of ethnicity continued with the arrival in the 1990s of close to a million mostly Jewish Russian immigrants,[18] whose several parliamentary parties now play a formative role in Israeli politics. Ethnically identified parties such as Shas or the right-wing Russian-Israeli Yisrael Beytenu have held the balance of power in the Knesset, playing kingmaker roles and being rewarded with ministerial positions in return.¶

  In the heat of this increasingly racialized atmosphere, Palestinian Israelis are branded as the intruding strangers in the Jewish homeland. This perspective is particularly widespread in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox communities. The ultra-Orthodox have a profound attachment to the Land of Israel as the divine patrimony of the Jewish people, and many live as settlers in the West Bank. While some ultra-Orthodox groups, such as Shas, participate in electoral politics, others have an uneasy relationship with the secular, democratic Israeli state, whose legitimacy they question. They aspire to a Jewish theocracy in the Land of Israel, and use their growing political power to further that end. Their rising demographic — the average ultra-Orthodox family has 8.8 children — puts them on a collision course with secular Israeli society, and with Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. Their political hopes contribute to Israel’s rightward surge: in a 2012 poll, 70 percent of ultra-Orthodox participants supported barring Palestinian-Israeli citizens from voting, and 71 percent supported transfer.[19]

  The ghosts of the Nakba haunt Israel’s political discourse. Sixty years on, Israel’s Palestinian citizens still feel their reach, and their phantom presence hovers over the future.

  Carlo Strenger, a psychoanalyst and philosopher who contributes regularly to Haaretz, has written on the ongoing trauma of the Nakba for the Palestinian people as a whole. He believes that:

  The Palestinians have never been able to mourn what they call the Nakba. Their ethos of national liberation was based on the idea that all refugees would be able to return to their homes in Jaffa, Ramle and Lod. Letting go of this dream, a precondition for the two-state solution, requires a process of mourning that has been made almost impossible by the ongoing humiliation of the occupation and the force of Israeli retaliation, culminating in Cast Lead [Israel’s attack on Gaza in December 2008].[20]

  For Palestinians the humiliation of 1948 was compounded by the 1967 Occupation, which both reinforced and obscured the trauma of the Nakba.[21] Living in the refugee camps of their grandparents, in diaspora, or as unwanted citizens of Israel, their loss has never been a past event, over and done with. There has been no closure, the death that allows for a funeral.

  Strenger sees the suffering of the Palestinians as being intimately connected to Jewish trauma. He continues:

  Trauma is not the Palestinians’ alone: Israel’s Jews live under the fears of annihilation that overshadows any consideration of compromise. I know that many critics of Israel believe that such a statement is a cheap ploy to justify colonial ambitions; but right or wrong, this is the reality of the Israeli collective psyche. The attacks by Arab armies in 1948, 1967 and 1973 were experienced as moments when Israel could have been wiped out, and this fear is very much revived by the possibility of Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. On top of that, hope for peace was dealt heavy blows by the suicide bombings of the 1990s, during the heydays of the Oslo process, by the second Intifada after its breakdown, and the increase in rocket attacks from the Gaza strip after Israel’s disengagement in 2005. Behind all this lurks the shadow of the Jewish memory of the partially successful attempt to exterminate European Jewry in the Holocaust.

  I asked Benny Morris how the memory of the Holocaust had affected Jewish Israelis’ understanding of their place in the world. He agreed that it cast a very long shadow:

  The Holocaust certainly aggravates Israeli fears and insecurities, fears of the goyim [Gentiles], of the Arab goyim. And it can be possible that the world will not intervene and save you. And this is still at the back of many Israelis’ minds when they think about Iran, whose leaders deny the Holocaust happened, but are preparing the second Holocaust, so Israelis feel. It’s very much in Israelis’ minds, and has been through these fifty years.

  And don’t forget that everybody who was here in ’47–’48 , all the Jews who were here, lost brothers, mothers, fathers in the Holocaust. Literally, every Ashkenazi Jew who was here, which was 90 percent of the Jewish population of Palestine in 1947, had people who were murdered. So they were affected by it. It couldn’t be otherwise.

  How deep this sense of past trauma as present danger runs was starkly illustrated during Cast Lead, a three-week operation in which 1,387 Gaza Palestinians and 13 Israelis lost their lives.[22] In March 2008, Israel’s deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai had warned that rocket fire from Gaza risked
provoking a “holocaust”: “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”[23] Despite the disproportionality of the IDF’s retaliation, Israelis backed Cast Lead. Two weeks into the campaign, a Tel Aviv University poll showed public support at a massive 94 percent.[24] In a radio debate with a former IDF pilot who was speaking out against the attack on Gaza, Lieutenant Colonel Ye’ohar Gal stated:

  I think we should go at it more strongly. Dresden, Dresden. Devastate a city.… I tell you that we, as sons of Holocaust survivors, must know that this is the essence of our lives, coming from there: no one throws a stone at us. I’m not talking about missiles. No one will throw a stone at us for being Jews.… Make it crystal clear: no one is going to fire at us.... I will not agree to a single bullet shot at us by the enemy. As soon as the enemy opens fire on me my survival instinct tells me to destroy the enemy.[25]

  In Gal’s mind the Holocaust is an immediate experience, vivid and real, and it completely obscures the present reality on the ground in Gaza. His invocation of the Shoah as an animating force for Israel’s military strategy illustrates the argument made by Avraham Burg in his controversial book, Defeating Hitler (published in English as The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from its Ashes). Burg, a prestigious member of the Israeli establishment, underwent something of a sea change around 2003. Rather than turning to the right, as many Jewish Israelis did during those hard years, he found himself re-examining both his own political beliefs and the basic tenets of his society. Holocaust memory, Burg says, traps Israelis between “two conflicting worlds: … power and victimhood, success and trauma.”[26] Formerly chair of the World Zionist Organisation, and then speaker of the Knesset, he has alienated most of his fellow citizens with a passionate critique of what he calls “the absolute monopoly and the dominance of the Shoah on every aspect of our lives”:[27]

  As time passes, the deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz past, the more difficult it becomes to be free of it. We retreat from independence to the inner depths of exile, its memories, and horrors. Israel today is much less independent than it was at her founding, more Holocaustic than it was [in 1948,] three years after the gates of the Nazi death factories opened.

  In his book, Burg argues that “Israel’s security policy, the fears and paranoia, feelings of guilt and belonging are products of the Shoah. Jewish-Arab, religious-secular, Sephardi [Mizrahi]-Ashkenazi relations are also within the realm of the Shoah. Sixty years after his suicide in Berlin, Hitler’s hand still touches us.”[28] Many Jewish Israelis are burdened with an ongoing sense of threat, and with the need to retaliate and destroy that threat; and “[l]ife in the shadow of trauma does not allow room for a bigger picture to emerge,”[29] says Burg. He cites his mentor, university professor and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana, who said that “Two people emerged from Auschwitz, a minority that claims ‘this will never happen again,’ and a frightened majority that claims: ‘this will never happen to us again.’”

  Burg’s challenge to the hold traumatic memory has on his community can echo in unexpected places. I met with Yshay Shechter, then director of strategic planning of the Jewish National Fund,[30] ,** prepared for a possibly tense discussion about the JNF’s role in planting over the sites of demolished Arab villages. But then we began talking about how the ways we remember the past shape the future.

  Many organizations in the last ten years focus on memory. Zochrot is an example. I’m sure they think they are doing the right thing. And the 1948 generation is now old, in a few years they will be gone, and they also start to remember the 1948 War. As I’m a planner, it’s ironic, because both sides want to post signs, and they come to my office. The Palmach came, they gave me a map, and on the map they have marked all the Arab villages, and they want to post signs there, to show where they fought. And in the same week people from Zochrot came with the same map, and they also want to have signs for the Arab villages as well. I tell both that I don’t like to work with remembering. Everyone wants the same result, but with very different meaning.

  I think that we should change our minds to think about the future, not the past.

  Assuming he was simply referring to 1948, I found myself thinking: that’s all very well, but surely only those who have been affected by that traumatic past can make the decision to forget it. But then he continued:

  I understand why they do it, it’s like the Holocaust; the last generation, they have to write their history. And, like Holocaust memory, it will change in the next generation.

  I’ve thought about these things. I paid the price of remembering, because my father came from Romania and my mother came from Czechoslovakia. They tried to build a new life here, but they were very unhappy because of what they lived through during the Holocaust. All their life came from that.

  It’s not popular in Israel to say that you need to forget the Holocaust. I’m second generation, I can say it — we need to forget so that we can think about the future. I don’t want my child to remember the Holocaust, like me. It’s hard to grow like that. I don’t ask my parents to forget, but we can. We are the next generation. What is the reason to remember? Every year children go to Auschwitz. We send them there to remember. They come back, they say: we have the right to Israel, we can throw the Arabs into the sea. Is that the purpose? I’m not sure we need those trips, to have our children remember, nor I think do Palestinians need to build the future from the Nakba. We all live here.

  This pragmatic focus on letting go of the past to move into a shared future may be what finally draws Israelis and Palestinians together into peace. Yet without the acknowledgement and reparation of past injustices, that letting go cannot happen. The Nakba hangs unresolved between them, tipping the scales of power far in one direction and determining the political landscape they now inhabit. For a true peace to take hold and flourish, there will need to be much more of a level playing field. Without it, as we have seen, second- and third-generation Palestinian Israelis are actually more apt to remember the Nakba; it becomes a flag around which to rally for their rights. When I put this to Yshay, he responded:

  It’s good they want their rights — not historical rights, but future rights. You can use history, but only to help understand and shape the future.

  It doesn’t matter to me who lives in this space. We have to know the history, and I know the history very well. It’s easy to stay in memories, but we have to work to make a better future for the next generation. We should be thinking about how to give an equal chance to all who live here, not using the historic land conflict to perpetuate conflict.

  We have to know the other side’s history; erasing the history isn’t good. But I don’t think we should make the conflict the issue. When there is no adaptation of that story, then you are making it easy for the politicians, who thrive on these divisive polarities. It memorializes the conflict, makes that the main issue, rather than finding a solution.

  Yshay’s observations fly against the prevailing winds of Israeli collective memory. He raises hard questions for Jewish Israelis about the nature of belonging, and the challenge of letting go an identity sculpted by past oppression and violence. These are questions, too, for Palestinians. Both peoples are dealing not only with their own trauma, but also with the fallout of the historical suffering experienced by the Other. Marzuq Halabi, the journalist we met in Chapter 6, has meditated on what the legacy of the Holocaust, as well as the legacy of the Nakba, means for Palestinians. He commented:[31]

  How can you change the Other without using violence? How to get them to re-examine their policy? This is a significant issue for Palestinians — how to challenge the Other without raising that fear. I support nonviolence because of the Holocaust experience of the Jewish people. I think it can influence the Other, the Jewish people, more than violence.

  Every conflict between two people can become a violent event. But if you use violence, it becomes par
t of your mentality, your daily behaviour, the psychology of your society. [The exiled Palestinian Israeli poet] Mahmoud Darwish wrote poems about what the enemy does to us, what we are doing to ourselves. He saw Palestinians as still perceiving themselves as victims. What must we do to change that? Can we step out of our victimhood, or are we still there?

  In different ways, Marzuq and Yshay both hint at the mutability of collective memory and the possibilities of moving beyond trauma-driven accounts of the past — histories of belonging and expulsion that become more necessary, more entrenched, as the political situation deteriorates, and lock both sides into a holding pattern of violence.

  Such histories arc much farther back than the Holocaust and the Nakba of the twentieth century. Zionists assert a three-thousand-year-old claim to the Land of Israel, a claim rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures that lies at the heart of their religious and cultural identity. Many Palestinians react by positioning themselves as the indigenous descendents of the Canaanites, the first dwellers in the Land of Canaan, who were displaced by militaristic Hebrew settlers three thousand years ago. Thus “each side basically tries to outpast the other — as if somehow claiming that ‘my past is longer than yours’ — by essentially invoking earlier ‘origins,’”[32] writes Eviatar Zerubavel in Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Original existence is seen as bestowing an absolute right that undercuts the legitimacy of any who came after, regardless of the length of their history and their current presence.