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The New York Times
Opinion
For Israelis, an
Anniversary.
For Palestinians, a
Nakba.
By Elias Khoury,
Op-Ed Contributor nytimes.com on the Web, May 18, 2008
IN 1948, during the war known to the
Israelis as the war of independence, the historian Constantine K. Zurayk wrote
the book “Ma’na al-Nakba,” later translated as “The Meaning of the Disaster.”
The title struck a resounding chord, and nakba (catastrophe) became the term
Palestinians used for the cataclysm that befell them that year.
I always considered the word “catastrophe” inappropriate. It rendered the
perpetrator anonymous, and it exempted the vanquished from bearing any
responsibility for their defeat. Like many members of my generation, born
around the time of the war, I tended to place the blame for our defeat on the
traditional Palestinian leadership under the sway of the mufti of Jerusalem, and
the Arab regimes of the day.
But Zurayk was neither guileless nor naïve, as we had believed. He coined
the term nakba deliberately to convey the impossibility of blocking the project
for the Jewish state after the Holocaust.
I didn’t grasp the true meaning of the word until I worked in Palestinian
refugee camps in Lebanon. In the alleys and passages of the Shatila camp,
I discovered the truth of the catastrophe. Villagers expelled from the
Galilee had suddenly found themselves living in huts set up hastily to provide
temporary shelter. But the temporary became permanent, and the people were
forced to construct a nation for themselves out of words and memories.
They gave the various sections of their camps the names of the villages they had
fled, and they lived, as they said, “waiting” in a suspended time. Even
when the waiting went on too long and became “exile,” they still refused to
believe that no one would recognize and authenticate their tragedy.
These peasant farmers, who made up the majority of the Arab population of
Palestine in 1948, did not discover that they had had a “nation” of their own
until they lost it. They had been living in a historical continuity for
hundreds of years, as a succession of invaders of different nationalities and
ethnicities took control of their lands and communities. But they were
astonished to discover that these new invaders did not wish to control the land
in the manner of the former invaders; instead they wanted it emptied of its
inhabitants.
The consternation of the Palestinians who told me the stories of their destroyed
villages derives, essentially, from the absence of the world’s acknowledgment of
them, the lack of credence given to what happened to them. After the
Holocaust, it became virtually impossible to condemn any action of the Israeli
state. In establishing the state of Israel, the West had found a solution
to its moral obligations and a release from the disastrous burden of Nazism.
No one wishes to hear the Palestinian story. Their history has been
written by the victors: Israel has thus succeeded in blotting out its
“original sin,” as the French author Dominique Vidal referred to the situation.
Were it not for the courageous voices of Israeli “new historians” like Ilan
Pappé, the world would not have come to admit that a people had been expelled
from their land in a comprehensive ethnic cleansing operation, given the name
“Plan D” by Israelis.
As Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its independence, it is pointedly
ignoring two truths: First, that there is another people, composed of the
previous inhabitants of the country, who consider that anniversary to be a day
of national disaster, and consider the nation of Jewish immigrants to have been
built on the rubble of another nation, Palestine.
Second, that Israel’s continued occupation of the remaining portions of
Palestine, in the West Bank and Gaza, has transformed the nakba from a historic
incident to a daily reality, experienced by Palestinians through the invasive
settlements, the wall of separation and the checkpoints that disconnect their
lands and sever the links between them, making their lives a hell on earth.
The peace process has failed, Yasir Arafat has died and the iron fist policy put
in place by Ariel Sharon has led to the nearly total defeat of the Palestinian
national movement. That defeat is also a product of the short-sightedness
of the architects of the Oslo Accords, a framework for future relations between
Israel and the anticipated state of Palestine, and the failure of the
Palestinian leadership to find new methods of confronting the occupation in
keeping with this two-state solution.
The defeat of the secular leaders of the Palestinian national movement has not
given Israel the “peace of strength” it has sought since its foundation.
Rather, it has brought the region to the brink of the abyss of fundamentalist
tendencies.
What successive Israeli governments pretend to forget is that pushing the
Palestinians to this destructive brink is not without a cost. Indeed, the
Palestinians could drag Israel to the brink along with them. This would
mean an open-ended state of war. Unfortunately, this is the direction in
which rapidly unfolding developments are now propelling us, as witnessed in Gaza
and now in Beirut, with Iran through its allies edging closer to a direct
confrontation with Israel.
Israel has depicted the problem as rooted in the Arab world’s refusal to
recognize Israel’s right to exist. But even after the majority of Arab
states demonstrated their recognition of this right by supporting the Saudi
peace initiative of 2002, nothing changed; in fact, things became worse.
To Palestinians, the true problem lies in Israel’s rejection of the Palestinian
right to an independent state, and in the prevailing Israeli culture’s refusal
to recognize that Palestinians were themselves victims of forced expulsion from
their lands.
Recognizing the sufferings of the victim, even if they are of the victim of a
victim, is the necessary condition for an exit from this long and tragic tunnel.
However, as the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci suggests, it is difficult to
maintain the optimism of the will in the face of the pessimism of the intellect.
Pessimism of the will is what we are living today in the Middle East. It
is a pessimism that warns not only of the danger of recurring episodes of
catastrophe as Arab societies break apart, but of the dismal prospect of an
endless war that will provoke future tragedies in the 21st century.
Elias Khoury, the editor of the literary supplement of the
Beirut daily An Nahar and a professor at New York University, is the author of
the novels “Gate of the Sun” and “Yalo.” This essay was translated from
Arabic by Michael Scott.
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