Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Collective memories of the past may feel like the definitive truth, absolute and unchangeable, but they can transmute to accommodate the demands of a particular situation.†† Anita Shapira has described the workings of collective memory as a “constant dynamic reciprocity between the past and the present, manifested in memory’s transformations, not necessarily due to some template imposed from above — but rather to changing circumstances as they affect public consciousness.”[33] To me, the very nature of this process allows for a glimmer of hope, the potential for what Zerubavel calls “multiple narratives with multiple beginnings”[34] to tell the story of this contested land.

  The essence of the Zionist project was a people without a land staking their territorial claim for a nation-state. European Jews had a history of persecution stretching far back into the past — too often they had been at the mercy of the shifting political uses of anti-Semitism and the easy, murderous scapegoating of the outsider. In an era of burgeoning nationalism, it seemed obvious to the early Zionists that they suffered because they were stateless, and that the solution to their predicament was a return to the land of their ancestors; the land that, by its foundational place in their religion, defined them as Israelites, as a people. Nationhood, and specifically the territory that transforms a people into a nation, was seen as the panacea for the traumas of the past.

  But gaining a territory, and feeling secure in it, are two different things, and Israelis now find themselves living in a still-fragile relationship with that land. Sixty years after their nation’s founding, its borders remain in flux, and the territory of Israel, as well as the West Bank, is shared, historically and spatially, with the Palestinians.

  Whether the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is ultimately resolved into two states or one, the fact remains that these two peoples will continue to inhabit a common landscape. As Meron Benvenisti commented to Haaretz, “You can erect all the walls in the world here but you won’t be able to overcome the fact that there is only one aquifer here and the same air and that all the streams run into the same sea.”[35]

  Ultimately, the deepest healing of the wounds of this seemingly intractable conflict will come not through a political formula, necessary as that is, but through a re-imagining of the body politic, a reworking of collective memory, for both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. While the claims of nationalism pull so hard on these two antagonists, they are unable to acknowledge that they share a common geography, and a profound attachment to the land, and that their histories are too entwined to separate. Perhaps, rather than destroying the collective memory of the Other, those disparate strands of remembered pasts can be wound together to create a more unified whole. The late Edward Said, public intellectual and Palestinian-in-exile, called for a “basic agreement, a compact or entente whose outlines would have to include regarding the Other’s history as valid but incomplete as usually presented, and second, admitting that despite the antinomy these histories can only continue to flow together, not apart, within a broader framework based on the notion of equality for all.”[36]

  In a similar vein, Amos Schocken, publisher of Haaretz, has proposed “the creation of a new ‘national story’”[37] embracing the fact that the “Arabs in Israel are also children of this land.” Nakba memory in Israel is a volatile substance, released with unpredictable results, but Schocken sees it as a curative for some of his country’s ills, which acts not by purging what is perceived as alien, but rather by dissolving that very perception. He suggested acknowledging the Palestinian Nakba as a part of his country’s history, and commemorating those losses in street names and signage. His proposal went far beyond rhetoric. “If Israel were to behave toward the Arabs the way it expects other countries, in which Jewish property remains, to behave toward the Jews, then it would … set in motion a process of returning property to Arab citizens of Israel whenever possible, or of compensating the owners of such property, when returning it is not possible,” he wrote.

  Spoken or silenced, the Nakba reverberates through the landscapes of Israel — social, political, and physical. A national story that fully encompassed the pasts of both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis would make it harder to justify the current disparities in the value of their citizenship. It would signify the willingness to knit together a new social fabric in Israel, one in which Palestinian and Jewish Israelis were equal.

  “We can’t communicate if we won’t acknowledge the pain the Other is feeling,”[38] one activist said to me. Yet in Israel these days, such a possibility seems increasingly remote. The rising tides of ethnic nationalism leave precious little space for cross-cultural connection and interaction, and without them it is ever easier to dismiss and demonize Arabs — or Jews. The divide between the two is wide, and growing wider.

  As I travelled through Israel talking to people for this book, I would ask if they had hope for the future. After a while I stopped asking, because the responses were so grim. I feel that foreboding myself as I read the news reports of homes demolished in the Negev and a wall built in Lod, of the latest round of settlement construction and the latest failed peace initiative. Yet I also saw people continuing, despite their discouragement and exhaustion, to swim against the currents that threaten to overwhelm their society. I saw this over and over: in Muhammad Abu al-Hayyja’s stubborn efforts to secure justice for his village; in Daphne and Taghrid’s thirty-year friendship; and in the voices of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis crying out in a bleak political wilderness: voices like Zochrot, telling the Nakba in Hebrew as a precondition to “achieving reconciliation between all the peoples of this land.”[39] It is because of these voices that I have written this book.

  “I seize on this faint hope that maybe, after all, something shared will evolve here, …”[40] Meron Benvenisti mused to Haaretz. “That maybe, despite everything, we will learn to live together. Maybe we will come to understand that the Other is not demonic, that he, too, is part of this place. Like these cypresses. Like these bustanim, these fruit gardens. What the land brings forth.”

  That may seem an unlikely prospect in the current political climate, but most of the people I talked with share that same aspiration. As Muhammad Abu al-Hayyja reflected: “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.”[41] His words echoed those I had heard a week earlier. “I was born here, he was born here,” Yshay Shechter said to me. “I have no place to go, he has no place to go. We have to make good plans for the future, together.”

  * * *

  * For more on how these payments were viewed by the Israeli public, see page 149.

  † Adenauer made his speech six years after the death camps had been liberated, when the atmosphere in Germany was primarily one of victimhood and defeat rather than remorse and repentance.

  ‡ Palestinians too would need to re-examine the building blocks of their national identity; specifically, the sense among many Palestinians that the demand for full implementation of their right to return is inseparable from their identity as a people. The complexities of such a shift were well expressed by Nabil Sha’ath, the main Palestinian negotiator at Taba, in conversation with Akiva Eldar in 2002 (“The Refugee Problem at Taba: Interview with Yossi Beilin and Nabil Sha’ath, the Main Palestinian and Israeli Negotiators at the Taba Conference of January 2001,” Palestine-Israel Journal 9, no. 2): “Polls show that if you ask the refugees what is their preferable solution, most of them insist on going back to Haifa or Jaffa,” said Eldar. Sha’ath replied:

  This is their right. But when we come to a negotiated settlement and they have to make a choice, it’s a different matter. Nobody is willing now to renounce his right. In an opinion poll everybody would believe it is their duty to say; “No, I want my right to go back to my own house.” We have tried to deal with this issue by saying it’s a right and not an obligation. I addressed this in Rashidiyya Camp in Lebanon. I said anybody who tells you “return is an o
bligation,” not a right, slap him in the face. We do not want to drive people to become Israeli citizens in the villages they lived in before. I have also addressed the issue of returning to their homes. I said in Ramat Aviv, which used to be Sheikh Muwannis, you won’t find your home.

  You have to think about return in a much broader context because it is return within a peace process. That is why you have to reject two notions: that the Palestinians should get some subsidy from the World Bank and shut up about their rights, or that it is the obligation of every Palestinian to go back to the village they came from.

  § Nira’s use of the term “Palestinian” includes Palestinian Arabs living in the Occupied Territories and in Israel.

  ¶ Before he resigned because of a fraud indictment in December 2012, Avigdor Lieberman was foreign affairs minister and deputy prime minister. His now-mainstream party successfully fought the 2013 elections with Likud as Likud Beytenu.

  ** Yshay’s comments were made in a personal rather than an official capacity.

  †† The iconic role played by the ancient hilltop fortress of Masada in Jewish Israeli consciousness is a fascinating example. In 73 C.E., after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, a remnant of rebel Jews retreated to the desert, to Masada, where, besieged by the mighty Imperial army, they committed mass suicide: 960 people died. The incident, recorded by Romano-Jewish chronicler Josephus, was buried in the history books and never celebrated as part of Jewish history until the time of the Yishuv, when Zionist leaders saw in it an inspiring tale of Jewish heroism against great odds. Masada became a secular shrine — youth groups routinely made the arduous trek to its summit, and countless IDF soldiers were sworn in there. After the 1967 Six Day War, though, the symbolic power of Jewish resistance unto death was overshadowed by the sweeping victories of the recent past, and Masada lost its pre-eminent status. Many IDF units now hold their induction ceremonies at the Kotel, or Western Wall, in Jerusalem.

  Appendix

  The Balfour Declaration

  Foreign Office

  November 2nd, 1917.

  Dear Lord Rothschild,

  I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet

  ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”

  I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

  [signed] Yours,

  Arthur James Balfour

  (Spelling and punctuation here are as in the original.)

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Nira Yuval-Davis, “The Contaminated Paradise,” in Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation, ed. Nahla Abdo and Ronit Lentin (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 251.

  2. Any estimates of the number of Palestinian refugees who were unable to return after the 1948 War are necessarily imprecise. Numbers from 700,000 to 750,000 are frequently cited by historians, but other estimates range from 400,000 (Israeli government sources, cited by Elia Zureik) to over 900,000 (Salman Abu-Sitta).

  3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 6.

  4. Edward W. Said, “Palestine: Memory, Invention, and Space” in The Landscape of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Roger Heacock, and Khaled Nashef (Birzeit: Birzeit University Publications, 1999), 7.

  5. Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 4.

  6. Dan Bar-On and Saliba Sarsar, “Bridging the Unbridgeable: The Holocaust and Al-Nakba,” Palestine-Israel Journal 11, no. 1 (2004): 63.

  7. This concept originated with philosopher Ilan Gur-Ze’ev and historian Ilan Pappé in their jointly-written article, “Beyond the Destruction of the Other’s Collective Memory: Blueprints for a Palestinian/Israeli Dialogue,” Theory, Culture and Society 20, no. 1 (2003): 93–108.

  8. See further, Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  9. Yuval-Davis, “Contaminated Paradise,” 257.

  10. Eitan Bronstein, “Position Paper on Posting Signs at the Sites of Demolished Palestinian Villages,” January 2002, on Zochrot website www.zochrot.org/en/content/position-paper-posting-signs-sites-demolished-palestinian-villages (accessed September 28, 2011).

  CHAPTER ONE: 1948

  1. Dahoud Badr, in conversation with the author, al-Ghabsiya and al-Shaykh Danun, October 12, 2008.

  2. See “The Strangers,” Time (March 11, 1946).

  3. See “Dark Tide,” Time (August 18, 1947).

  4. See Asima A. Ghazi-Bouillon, Understanding the Middle East Peace Process: Israeli Academia and the Struggle for Identity (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), 136: “In his books, [Moshe] Zimmerman showed that immigration to Palestine had to compete with immigration to the US, and that the statistics show that only 2–3 per cent of Jews leaving Europe chose Palestine and Zionism between 1880 and 1914, even though the Zionist movement had been created in 1897.”

  5. See Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York: Owl Books, 2001), 41.

  6. Miki Cohen, in conversation with the author, Tel Aviv, September 24, 2008.

  7. Earl G. Harrison’s report can be found in full on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/dp/resourc1.htm (accessed September 28, 2011).

  8. “Refugees: In Palestine or Never,” Time (September 1, 1947).

  9. Ibid.

  10. Robert Verkaik, “Britain’s Holocaust Shame: The Voyage of the Exodus,” The Independent, May 5, 2008, reprinted in Martyrdom & Resistance 34, no. 5 (May/June 2009): 5, online at http://yadvashemusa.org/documents/MR/2008_May_June.pdf (accessed May 19, 2013).

  11. “Cue for a Communist,” Time (July 28, 1947).

  12. Ahmad H. Sa’di, “Reflections on Representations, History, and Moral Accountability,” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, ed. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 298.

  13. Gudrun Kramer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 308.

  14. Naftali Kadmon, in conversation with the author, Jerusalem, October 6, 2008.

  15. Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 1, Special Issue: Palestine 1948 (Autumn 1988), Appendix B: 29.

  16. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 591. Courtesy of University of Cambridge Press.

  17. Tuvia Friling and S. Ilan Troen, “Proclaiming Independence: Five Days in May from Ben-Gurion’s Diary,” Israel Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 188.

  18. Spiro Munayyer, “The Fall of Lydda,” Journal of Palestine Studies 27, no. 4 (1998): 94.

  19. Ibid., 96.

  20. Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 328.

  21. My thanks to oral historian Raneen Geries for use of this interview with Hazneh Sama’an, which can be found in full on Wajeeh Sama’an’s Suhmata website at www.suhmata.com/hazneh.php (accessed September 30, 2011).

  22. Lutfiya Sama’an, in conversation with the author, Haifa, October 3, 2008.

  23. That figure, of course, is contested. Israeli statistics from the 1950s say 360; different Palestinian researchers in the 1980s suggest between 390 and 472.
Walid Khalidi’s magisterial 1992 book on each of the destroyed villages, All That Remains (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), gives the figure of 418, and this is also cited by Noga Kadman in On the Side of the Road and in the Margins of Consciousness: The Depopulated Villages of 1948 in Israeli Discourse (Jerusalem: November Books, 2008) (in Hebrew). In his 2006 The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), Jewish-Israeli New Historian Ilan Pappé, following the work of Nakba historian Salman Abu-Sitta, says that 531 villages were destroyed.

  24. “It Belongs to Us,” Time, March 28, 1949.

  25. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 86.

  26. Michael Feige, “Introduction: Rethinking Israeli Memory and Identity,” Israel Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer, 2002): vi.

  27. These quotes are taken from Elie Podeh, “History and Memory in the Israeli Educational System: The Portrayal of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in History Textbooks (1948–2000),” History and Memory 12, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 65–100. Courtesy of University of Indiana Press.

  28. Benny Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948,” in The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, ed. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 38.

  29. Podeh, “History and Memory,” 89.

  30. Tamar Eshel, in conversation with the author, Jerusalem, October 10, 2008.

  31. Hillel Cohen, in conversation with the author, Jerusalem, September 25, 2008.

  32. My thanks to Eitan Bronstein of Zochrot for use of this interview. Eitan interviewed Lily Traubman in preparation for Zochrot’s tour of al-Lajjun on October 5, 2004.

  CHAPTER TWO: Catastrophe and Memory

  1. Reuters, “Israel Bans Use of Palestinian Term ‘Nakba’ in Textbooks,” Haaretz, July 22, 2009, www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1102099.html (accessed July 20, 2011).