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Erasing the Nakba

By Neve Gordon - posted Friday, 18 May 2012


During the Oslo years, new textbooks, which discussed the Palestinian refugee problem and mentioned, even if in passing, Israel's role in its creation, began to appear. In 2002, a group of Israelis created Zochrot (remembering), whose goal was to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public, to express the Nakba in Hebrew, and to create a place for the Nakba in the intellectual environment. As one of its founders explained: "This is in order to promote an alternative memory to the hegemonic Zionist memory. The Nakba is the disaster of the Palestinian people: the destruction of the villages and cities, the killing, the expulsion, the erasure of Palestinian culture. But the Nakba, I believe, is also our story, the story of the Jews who live in Israel, who enjoy the privileges of being the 'winners'."

These developments have led to a profound change in awareness among the Jewish Israeli public, so that, over the years more and more Israeli Jews have become familiar with the word "Nakba" and the historical events which it denotes. I see the difference among my students today. When I used to say the word "Nakba" in class in the late 1990s, hardly anyone knew what I was talking about; however, if I were to say "Nakba" today, there is hardly a student who would not know what I was referring to. This, it is important to emphasise, does not reflect a change in the views of Israelis towards the conflict, but the understanding of its historical origins is, nonetheless, less naive.

Nakba backlash

It is precisely within this context that one should understand the state's decision to reassert itself in an attempt to silence, once again, all talk of the Nakba. One strategy it adopted was the passing of the Nakba law, which was approved by the Knesset in March 2011. The law is actually an amendment to the Budget Foundation Law, and states that the minister of finance is entitled to reduce funds to any public institution, such as a school or university, if it commemorates "Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning... "

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The legislation process itself was covered by the media, provoking a lively discussion, which in effect rendered the Nakba visible to a much wider audience than ever before. Furthermore, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Adalah (The Legal Center for the Arab Minority in Israel) immediately filed a petition with the supreme court, arguing that the new law constituted a grave violation of the freedom of speech and was part of "a political persecution campaign that aims to de-legitimise an entire population of Israel's citizenry".

The two rights groups went on to claim that the commemoration of Nakba Day in no way denies the existence of the state of Israel, as the language of the bill attempts to suggest. Moreover, according to these organisations, the bill blatantly violates the rights of a minority to preserve its history and culture as well as to determine the stories it wants to tell about itself. They further argued that the bill seeks to single out and mark Israel's Arab citizens as dangerous and disloyal to the state, in that they seek to express their own narrative and interpretation of historical events (Independence Day/Nakba Day), a narrative that is frowned upon by certain political groups in the country.

This is a clear example of a "tyranny of the majority", where the political majority would violate the basic rights of the minority - in this case their freedom of speech - and consequently also their cultural freedom and freedom to interpret history in ways that offend the majority.

On January 5, 2012, the Supreme Court published its ruling, rejecting the appeal, and upholding the Nakba Law. President Dorit Beinisch and Justices Eliezer Rivlin and Miriam Naor concluded: "The declarative level of the law does indeed raise difficult and complex questions. However, from the outset, the constitutionality of the law depends largely upon the interpretation given to the law's directives." In other words, the court refrained from judging the constitutionality of the law before it was implemented in a concrete case.

In this way, as Dan Yakir from the Association for Civil Rights stated: "The court completely ignored the claims regarding the chilling effect of this law, which forces state-supported entities to risk a significant reduction in their budgets before the law will be considered for judicial review. In this, it limits free speech." Yakir's point was that the law harms both the freedom of expression and the civil rights of Arab citizens, even before its implementation, because the law's formulation is so broad and vague, many institutions have already begun to censor themselves so as not to risk incurring penalties.

Truth goes both ways

Despite the legal setback with respect to the Nakba Law, as well as the well-orchestrated attack against organisations like Zochrot, the Israeli government's concerted effort to reinitiate national amnesia is futile. As the great Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt once put it, the fact that Leon Trotsky does not appear in Soviet Russian history books does not mean that he did not exist. "The trouble with lying and deceiving," Arendt explains, "is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods."

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The Nakba is a truth, and while the efforts to expose the unfolding historical events have recently experienced a fierce legal assault, its primacy over falsehoods guarantees that it will prevail. Jewish Israeli society needs to confront the Nakba for what it was, as well as its ongoing ramifications, whether in the refugee camps across the Levant or in the hills of south Hebron, where Palestinians are under constant threat of expulsion; we need to recognise that the Palestinians have suffered - and still suffer - and that they have been stripped of basic rights by successive Israeli governments for more than half a century. This recognition is the condition of possibility for a better future.

But if there is any hope for this region, the recognition must be reciprocal. The Palestinians, who have no doubt been wronged, must concede, as the late Edward Said urged them to do, that two wrongs do not make a right. Only once there is mutual recognition of the two historical narratives will an opportunity for reconciliation truly emerge.

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About the Author

Neve Gordon is the co-author (with Nicola Perugini) of the newly released The Human Right to Dominate.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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