On Nakba Day, Israelis Forced to Guiltily Confront a Secret
by alethoBy Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | May 15, 2014
For
66 years Israel’s founding generation has lived with the guilt of a
secret, one it successfully concealed from the generations that
followed. Forests were planted to hide war crimes. School textbooks
mythologised the events surrounding Israel’s creation. The army was
blindly venerated as the most moral in the world.
Once,
“Nakba” – Arabic for “Catastrophe”, referring to the dispossession of
the Palestinian homeland in 1948 – would have failed to register with
any but a small number of Israeli Jews. Today, only those who never
watch television or read a newspaper can plead ignorance.
As
marches and festivals are held today by Palestinians across the region
to mark Nakba Day – commemorating the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians
from their homes and the erasure of more than 500 villages – Israelis
will be watching.
In
fact, the Israeli media have been filled with references to the Nakba
for the past 10 days, since Israel celebrated its Independence Day last
week. The two anniversaries do not quite coincide because Israel marks
its founding according to the Hebrew calendar.
While
Israeli Jews were trying to enjoy guilt-free street parties last week,
news reports focused on the activities of their compatriots – the
Palestinians who remained inside the new state of Israel and now
comprise a fifth of the population. Estimates are that one in four of
these 1.5 million Palestinian citizens is from a family internally
displaced by the 1948 war.
More
than 20,000 staged a “March of Return” to one destroyed village, Lubya,
buried under a forest near Tiberias and close to a major Israeli
highway. Long tailbacks forced thousands of Israeli Jews to get a
close-up view as they crawled past the biggest Nakba procession in
Israel’s history.
For
others, images of the marchers waving Palestinian flags and massively
outnumbering Israeli police and a counter-demonstration by Jewish
nationalists were seen on TV news, websites and social media.
The
assault on Israel’s much cherished national mythology is undoubted. And
it reflects the rise of a new generation of Palestinians no longer
willing to defer to their more cautious, and traumatised, elders, those
who directly experienced the events of 1948.
These
youth see themselves as representing not only their immediate relatives
but Palestinians in exile who have no chance to march back to their
village. Many of Lubya’s refugees ended up in Yarmouk camp in Damascus,
where they are suffering new horrors, caught in the midst of Syria’s
civil war.
Palestinians
in Israel are also being galvanised into action by initiatives like
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to legislate Israel as a
Jewish state. They see this as the latest phase of an ongoing nakba – an
attempt to erase their nativeness, just as the villages were once
disappeared.
Palestinians
are making a noise about the Nakba on every possible front – and not
just on Nakba Day. Last week media around the world reported on one such
venture: a phone app called iNakba that maps the hundreds of destroyed
villages across Israel. Briefly it became one of the most popular iPhone
downloads, connecting refugees through new technology. iNakba visibly
restores a Palestine that Israel hoped literally to have wiped off the
map.
The
app is the initiative of Zochrot, an Israeli organisation that is
jointly run by Jews and Palestinians. They have been finding ever more
creative and provocative ways to grab headlines.
They
arrange regular visits to destroyed villages that a growing number of
curious Israeli Jews are participating in, often in the face of vehement
opposition from the communities built on the rubble of Palestinian
homes.
Zochrot
has created a Hebrew information pack on the Nakba for teachers, though
education officials ban it. Last year it staged the first Nakba film
festival in Tel Aviv. It is also creating an archive of filmed
interviews with Israeli veteran fighters prepared to admit their part in
expulsions.
Zochrot
also held last year the first-ever conference in Israel discussing not
just the principle but how to put into practice a right of return for
the millions of Palestinian refugees across the region.
Palestinian
youth are taking up the idea enthusiastically. Architects are designing
plans for new communities that would house the refugees on or near
their old lands.
Refugee
families are trying to reclaim mosques and churches, usually the only
buildings still standing. Israeli media reported last month that
internal refugees had been attacked as they held a baptism in their
former church at al-Bassa, now swamped by the Jewish town of Shlomi.
Workshops
have been arranged among refugee groups to imagine what a right of
return might look like. Youth from two Christian villages, Iqrit and
Biram, have already set up camps at their old churches, daring Israel to
hound them out like their grandparents. Another group, I Won’t Remain a
Refugee, is looking to export this example to other villages.
The
size of the march to Lubya and the proliferation of these initiatives
are a gauge of how Palestinians are no longer prepared to defer to the
Palestinian leadership on the refugee issue or wait for an interminable
peace process to make meaningful progress.
“The
people are sending a message to the leadership in Ramallah that it
cannot forget or sideline the right of return,” says Abir Kopty, an
activist with the Lubya march. “Otherwise we will take the issue into
our own hands.”
Meanwhile,
progress of a kind is being made with Israeli Jews. Some have come to
recognise, however reluctantly, that a tragedy befell the Palestinians
with Israel’s creation. But, as another march organiser notes, the
struggle is far from over. “That is a first step. But now they must take
responsibility for our suffering and make amends.”
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