Nurturing a New ‘Nakba’?

The UN partition plan was resisted by the Palestinians who initiated the 1948 war. The decision did not emanate purely out of a sense of revulsion for Jews or discontentment with the plan itself. The primary reason for resistance was their reluctance to consent to an existence of exile, alienation and exclusion to gratify a collective arriving from beyond its borders, asserting a home, from which they had ostensibly drifted in times gone by. Recognition of the Zionist assertion inevitably implied expulsion of the Palestinian population. In 1948, Jews did not constitute a majority in Palestine. For the establishment of a Jewish democratic state, it was imperative for the Jews to constitute a majority. This in turn, connoted the expulsion, displacement and dispossession of the 750,000 Palestinian inhabitants of the land. This would have been the case even if they had approved the partition plan and had not proclaimed war on the newly created Jewish state of Israel. (Siegman, 2018:17)

Thus 1948 came to be recognized as the year of the Palestine Nakba (Catastrophe), the displacement of the Palestinians and the fragmentation and ‘de-Arabisation’ of what used to signify ‘historic Palestine.’ The process of ‘de-Palestinisation’ was a corollary of the war of 1948.  In the words of Elias Sanbar, “That year, a country and its people disappeared from maps and dictionaries … ‘The Palestinian people does not exist’, said the new masters, and henceforth the Palestinians would be referred to by general, conveniently vague terms, as either ‘refugees’, or in the case of a small minority that had managed to escape the generalized expulsion, ‘Israeli Arabs’. A long absence was beginning.”(Masalha, 2012:4) Sanbar was responding to the comment made by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, “There was no such thing as a Palestinian people … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people considering itself as a Palestinian people  and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” (Masalha, 2012:4-5)

Israel habitually contends that it has a right to exist, a claim that is founded on the presence of a powerful army and backed by a robust equation with a geographically remote power, the United States. Nonetheless, it is not supported by both the people inhabiting within the boundaries on which the state has been instituted and those who have a genuine claim to live within the frontiers. In the case of Israel the word ‘democracy’ thus becomes, in the opinion of many, a fabrication, not merely on grounds of intolerance towards and bias against Palestinians residing in the state or due to the deprivation/denial of basic rights to the Palestinians inhabiting  the lands grabbed in 1967.  It is a misrepresentation for the reason that in 1948 the first step of the Israeli government was the eviction of the bulk of the populace residing on the land it had captured. They were deprived of their right to vote and reside on the territory upon which they had an innate and legitimate claim.

Israel’s claim to be a ‘democracy’ is a highly contested one and it is perceived as an unusual example. It was an exception, to some an aberration from its inception. It symbolized a ‘settler-state’ created/instituted not in the background of ‘imperialism’ but in an epoch of ‘decolonization and self-determination.’ (Salt, 2018)   The terms commonly used to describe the state by its critics are, “‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘settler-colonisation’, ‘Apartheid/Separation Wall’, ‘de-Arabisation’, ‘ethnocracy’, ‘memoricide’, ‘politicide’ and ‘toponymicide’.” (Masalha, 2012:11)

Kimmerling observes, “The Israeli state, like many other immigrant-settler societies, was born in sin, on the ruins of another culture, one which suffered politicide and a partial ethnic cleansing, even though the new state did not succeed in annihilating the rival aboriginal culture as many other immigrant-settler societies have done.” (Kimmerling, 2003: 214–15) Therefore despite attempts by the state at creating a homogeneous political space, a Hebrew and Israeli culture, the native/indigenous way of life persisted notwithstanding the dispersal and disintegration of the Palestinian society and populace across the Middle East and the world at large, in the aftermath of the Nakba.

An illustration of the determined effort to resist the obliteration of the indigenous presence is the commemoration of the Nakba by way of the observance of the Nakba day.  2018 marks the 70^th anniversary of the Nakba and May 15, as is the case each year, was observed as the Nakba day. The difference this year was that this remarkable day also witnessed another remarkable event, the ‘display’ of the US embassy being opened in Jerusalem (Al Quds), considered as an ‘occupied city under international law.’   Simultaneously, as the festivities marking 70 years of the creation of the Israeli state and the transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem took place, Palestinian protestors  were bearing the brunt of the mighty Israeli state  on the ‘other side of the Gaza fence line’ as they proceeded with the  ‘Great March of Return.’ (Amjad, 2018)

An important aspect that needs to be highlighted in this context is the real fact of the Gazan situation.  The use of the term border to designate the 1949 cease-fire line that separates Gaza from Israel is fiercely contested by the Palestinians.   It is this separation that the Palestinian protestors seek to eradicate through the ‘Great March of Return’ wherein they attempt to cross the fence despite obvious jeopardy to their lives. Israel categorizes it as a border and as such adopts a ‘policy of open-fire’ towards the demonstrators of the march on the grounds of safeguarding its independence and for reasons of security while contending that as it has no settlements in the territory since 2005 and no longer occupies it, consequently it has no obligation towards it. The reality, according to Palestinian opinion is that the so-called border consists of an armed web of “‘naval ships, barbed wire, electronic barriers, lethal no-man zones, and surveillance systems that function as the fence of an open-air prison.” (Amjad, 2018)  In other words, Israel continues to regulate the everyday existence of Gaza’s population as it manipulates the flow of people and goods. The occupation thus continues behind the veil of preservation of the territory of the Israeli state. In turn, overt and hostile protests gain momentum as old ruptures are reinforced and new fault lines emerge.

Priya

27/5/2018

References

Alqasis, Ahmad. “Challenging the ongoing dispossession and displacement of the Palestinian people on the 70th commemoration of the Nakba”, Mondoweiss, May 15, 2018. See: http://mondoweiss.net/2018/05/dispossession-displacement-commemoration/

Iraqi, Amjad, “The Myth of the Gaza Border”, May 17, 2018 +972, See: https://972mag.com/the-myth-of-the-gaza-border/135392/

Kimmerling Baruch, Politicide: Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London, New York: Verso, 2003)

Masalha, Nur. The Palestine Naqba: De Colonizing History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, (London, New York, Zed Books 2012, pp.1-18)

Salt, Jeremy, “Celebrations in Jerusalem, Slaughter in Gaza”, Palestine Chronicle, May 15, 2018. See: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/celebrations-in-jerusalem-slaughter-in-gaza/

Siegman, Henry. “The Two-State Solution: An Autopsy”, London Review of Books, (Vol. 40 No. 10 24 May 2018, pp. 17-18)