http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/pappe_nakbah.cfm
Demons of The Nakbah
by Ilan Pappe
Al Ahram
May 17, 2002
MIDEAST WATCH
As a Jewish child, born in Haifa in the early 1950s, I did not encounter
the term Nakbah (catastrophe), nor was I aware of its significance. Only in
my high- school days did the term make its first appearance. There were
three Israeli Palestinian pupils in my class, and we all participated in
joint and guided tours around Haifa and in its vicinity. In those days,
there was still evidence of Arab Haifa in the Old City: beautiful
buildings, remnants of a covered market later destroyed by the Israelis in
1948, mosques and churches.
These relics testified to the city's more glorious past. Many of these
residues of the past are gone now, demolished by the bulldozers of an
ambitious city mayor who has erased any urban characteristics that could
point to the city's Arab past. But in those days there were quite a few
Arab houses squeezed between the modern concrete buildings. The guides on
the school tours used to refer to them as Hirbet Al-Shaych, a vague
reference to an Arab house from an unidentified period. My Palestinian
classmates muttered that these were houses left from the 1948 Nakbah, but
they did not dare to challenge their teachers, nor did they expand on what
they meant.
Later, as a young doctoral student at Oxford University I chose 1948 as the
subject of my thesis. I wrote on British policy in that year, but
incidentally discovered evidence in the Israeli and British archives that,
when put together, gave me for the first time a clear idea of what the
Nakbah had been about. I found strong proof for the systematic expulsion of
the Palestinians from Palestine, and I was taken aback by the speed at
which the judaisation of the formerly Palestinian villages and
neighbourhoods was carried out.
These villages, from which the Palestinian population had been evicted in
1948, were renamed and resettled within a matter of months. This picture
contrasted sharply not only with what I had learned at school about 1948,
but also with what I had gathered as a BA student in Middle Eastern Studies
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, even though quite a few of my
courses dealt with the history of Israel. Needless to say, what I found
also contradicted the messages conveyed to me as a citizen of Israel during
my initiation in the army, at public events such as Independence Day, and
in daily discourse in the country's media on the history of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
When I returned home to Israel in 1984 to begin an academic career, I
discovered the phenomenon of Nakbah denial in my new environment. It was in
fact part of a larger phenomenon -- that of excluding the Palestinians
altogether from local academic discourse. This was particularly evident,
and bewildering, in the field of Middle Eastern Studies in which I had
commenced my career as a lecturer. Towards the end of the 1980s, as a
result of the first Intifada, the situation improved somewhat, with the
Palestinians being introduced into Middle Eastern Studies as legitimate
subject matter. But even then this was done mainly through the eyes of
academics who had been Intelligence experts on the subject in the past, and
who still had close ties with the security services and the IDF [Israeli
Defence Force]. Thus, this Israeli academic perspective erased the Nakbah
as a historical event, preventing local scholars and academics from
challenging the overall denial and suppression of the catastrophe in the
world outside the universities' ivory towers.
For a short while at the end of the 1980s, several academics, including
myself, caught public attention by publishing scholarly books that
challenged the accepted Israeli version of the 1948 War. In these books, we
accused Israel of expelling the indigenous population and of destroying the
Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods. Although our early works were
hesitant and cautious, and mine were not even translated into Hebrew, it
was still possible to gather from them that the Jewish State was built on
the ruins of the indigenous people of Palestine, whose livelihood, houses,
culture and land had been systematically destroyed.
Public response in Israel at the time moved between indifference to the
total rejection of our findings. Only in the media and through the
educational system did we succeed in directing people towards taking a new
look at the past. However, from above, the establishment did everything it
could to quash these early buds of Israeli self-awareness and recognition
of Israel's role in the Palestinian catastrophe, a recognition that would
have helped Israelis to understand better the present deadlock in the peace
process.
The struggle against the denial of the Nakbah in Israel then shifted to the
Palestinian political scene in the country. Since the 40th anniversary of
the Nakbah in 1988, the Palestinian minority in Israel has associated, in a
way that it never did previously, its collective and individual memories of
the catastrophe with the general Palestinian situation and with their
predicament in particular. This association has been manifested through an
array of symbolic gestures, such as memorial services during Nakbah
commemoration day, organised tours to deserted or formerly Palestinian
villages in Israel, seminars on the past, and extensive interviews with
Nakbah survivors in the press.
Through its political leaders, NGOs and media, the Palestinian minority in
Israel has been able to force the wider public to take notice of the
Nakbah. This re-emergence of the Nakbah as a topic for public debate was
also helped by the climax of the Oslo negotiations -- the Camp David summit
meeting between the then Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak and Arafat in
the summer of 2000. The false impression at the time, which had it that the
end of the conflict was about to be achieved, placed the Nakbah and
Israel's responsibility for it at the top of the Palestinian list of
demands. And, despite the collapse of the summit meeting, mainly due to an
Israeli wish to enforce its point of view on the Palestinian side, for a
while the catastrophe of 1948 was brought to the attention of a local,
regional, and to certain extent global, audience.
Not only in Israel, but also in the United States, and even in Europe, it
was necessary to remind those concerned with the Palestine question that
this conflict did not only entail the future of the occupied territories,
but also that of the Palestinian refugees who had been forced from their
homes in 1948. The Israelis had earlier succeeded in sidelining the issue
of the refugees' rights from the Oslo Accords, an aim helped by ill-managed
Palestinian diplomacy and strategy.
Indeed, the Nakbah had been so efficiently kept off the agenda of the peace
process that when it suddenly appeared on it, the Israelis felt as if a
Pandora's box had been prised open in front of them. The worst fear of the
Israeli negotiators was that there was a possibility that Israel's
responsibility for the 1948 catastrophe would now become a negotiable
issue, and this "danger" was, accordingly, immediately confronted. In the
Israeli media and parliament, the Knesset, a consensual position was
formulated: no Israeli negotiator would be allowed even to discuss the
Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the homes they had occupied
before 1948. The Knesset passed a law to this effect, and Barak made a
public commitment to it on the stairs of the plane that was taking him to
Camp David.
The media and other cultural institutions were also recruited to discourage
discussion of the Nakbah and its relevance to the peace process, and it was
in this atmosphere that I became involved in the Tantura Affair. This
erupted after an MA student at my university, Haifa, exposed an hitherto
unknown massacre, one of the largest yet known, carried out during the 1948
War by Israeli forces in the Palestinian village of Tantura. This student
was taken to court in December 2000 accused of defamation, and later, in
November 2001, he was expelled from the university for daring to add yet
further evidence of Israel's responsibly for the Palestinian catastrophe.
The court system, it transpired, thus willingly joined the denial process.
This year, as I look back over the attempts that I have made, together with
those of others, to introduce the Nakbah onto the Israeli public agenda,
what emerges is a very mixed picture. I can now detect cracks in the wall
of denial and repression that surrounds the Nakbah in Israel, coming about
as a result of the debate on the "new history" in Israel and the new
political agenda of the Palestinians in Israel. The new atmosphere has also
been helped by a clarification of the Palestinian position on the refugees
issue towards the end of the Oslo Peace Process. As a result, now, in
mid-2002, it is, after more than 50 years of repression, more difficult in
Israel to deny the expulsion and destruction of the Palestinians in 1948.
However, this relative success has also brought with it two negative
reactions, formulated after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
The first reaction has been from the Israeli political establishment, with
the Sharon government, through its minister of education, beginning the
systematic removal of any textbook or school syllabus that refers to the
Nakbah, even marginally. Similar instructions have been given to the public
broadcasting authorities. The second reaction has been even more disturbing
and has encompassed wider sections of the public. Although a very
considerable number of Israeli politicians, journalists and academics have
ceased to deny what happened in 1948, they have nonetheless also been
willing to justify it publicly, not only in retrospect but also as a
prescription for the future. The idea of "transfer" has entered Israeli
political discourse openly for the first time, gaining legitimacy as the
best means of dealing with the Palestinian "problem".
Indeed, if I were asked to choose what best characterises the current
Israeli response to the Nakbah, I would stress the growing popularity of
the Transfer Option in Israeli public mood and thought. The Nakbah -- the
expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine -- now seems to many in the
centre of the political map as an inevitable and justifiable consequence of
the Zionist project in Palestine. If there is any lament, it is that the
expulsion was not completed. The fact that even an Israeli "new historian"
such as Benny Morris now subscribes to the view that the expulsion was
inevitable and should have been more comprehensive helps to legitimise
future Israeli plans for further ethnic cleansing.
Transfer is now the official, moral option recommended by one of Israel's
most prestigious academic centres, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies
in Herzeliya, which advises the government. It has appeared as a policy
proposal in papers presented by senior Labour Party ministers to their
government. It is openly advocated by university professors, media
commentators, and very few now dare to condemn it. And, lately, the leader
of the Majority in the American House of Representatives has openly
endorsed it.
A circle has thus been closed. When Israel took over almost 80 per cent of
Palestine in 1948, it did so through settlement and ethnic cleansing of the
original Palestinian population. The country now has a prime minister who
enjoys wide public support, and who wants to determine by force the future
of the remaining 20 per cent. He has, as did all his predecessors, from
Labour and Likud alike, resorted to settlement as the best means for doing
this, adding the destruction of independent Palestinian infrastructure. He
senses, and he may not be wrong in this, that the public mood in Israel
would allow him to go even further, should he wish to repeat the ethnic
cleansing not only of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, but if
necessary also that of the one million Palestinians living within the
pre-1967 Israeli borders.
The Nakbah thus is no longer denied in Israel; on the contrary, it is
cherished. However, the full story remains to be told to the Israelis, as
there may still be some among that state's population who are sensitive
about their country's past and present conduct. This segment of the
population should be alerted to the fact that horrific deeds were concealed
from them about Israeli actions in 1948, and they should be told, too, that
such deeds could easily now be repeated, if they, and others, do not act to
stop them before it is too late.
* The writer is a professor of political science at Haifa University and a
notable member of Israel's New Historians.
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----Note from the editor As Dr Ilan Pappe notes in his article, written for Al-Ahram Weekly on the occasion of the anniversary of the Nakbah, an MA student at Haifa University in Israel was expelled from the university in November 2001 for exposing a hitherto- unknown Israeli massacre carried out against the Palestinian residents of the village of Tantura during the 1948 War. Now it is Dr Pappe's turn to be expelled, as the Israeli authorities crack down on freedom of speech, threatening academic freedom within the country's universities.
In a letter circulated last week, Pappe writes that the Dean of the Humanities Department of Haifa University has demanded his expulsion from the university as a result of the strong stand he took in support of the student and of academic freedom.
"Judging by the way things have been done in the past," Pappe writes, "the verdict has already been decided ... A fair trial does not exist, and hence I do not even intend to appeal against this McCarthite charade."
Dr Pappe, who holds a doctorate in history from Oxford University and is one of Haifa University's best-known and most-respected historians, appeals in his letter to the international academic community "not to prevent my expulsion, since Israeli academia has decided to support the government and help silence any criticism."
Rather, he calls upon universities worldwide to debate a boycott of Israeli institutions, given their contempt for basic principles of academic freedom and for dispassionate research.
"Many of you have access to the world's media," he writes in his letter, calling upon researchers and scholars everywhere to help "expose the already dismal picture and false pretence of Israel being the "only democracy in the Middle East."
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