Worlds Apart: Nakba with a Vengeance

5 May 2022

“Israel realized three achievements as a result of the war of independence…The third is demographic.”

David Tal, “Historical – Geographic Look at Displacement and Settlement during the War of Independence and After”, 12 Studies in Israel’s Revival, p.605 (2002).

“It seems that David Ben Gurion’s central role in leading the war of independence is undisputed…Ben Gurion was almost the sole designer of the war’s strategy.”

David Tal, “The 1948 War: David Ben-Gurion’s War”, 13 Studies in Israel’s Revival, pp.115, 121 (2003).

“Golda Meir: What villages? Sand.”

Line of Life with Golda Meir, 1977.

“Seven times they tried to extinguish us, and we have always prevailed.”

Shimon Peres, Israel’s Independence Day speech, 2013.

Can understanding the Nakba be universal? Given that most peoples of the world, certainly those who are self-defined as “Western”, have a scarce idea about the notion and its meaning to Palestinians, the philosophical inquiry is marginal. The question is therefore posed internally to Palestinians, particularly those in Israel, with a sense of sociological actuality. The revelations of Nakba and preceding Palestine have been introduced by significant yet, for reasons of exile, incomplete historical studies that launched the framework to grasp the fact of ethnically cleansing more than two thirds of the Palestinian population by Israeli forces in their formative exercise of blatant violation of international law.

Palestinian researchers outside Israel not only had to endure Israel’s embezzlement during its 1980s invasion of Lebanon of valuable sources of information contained in the archives of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s research centre, but they are also distant from Israel’s own archives and unaware of the Israeli authorities’ manipulation and sabotage initiatives aimed at concealing contemporaneous evidence of Israel’s forces’ behavior. One would have expected that Palestinian academics in Israel, despite enjoying statistically and qualitatively a worse status in the academy than their own community generally, would initiate a more serious exploration in this field placing intellectual rigor and curiosity at a high priority, rather than opting to secure an obscure location, claiming universality, and engaging in the task of conference attending without stirring any recognizable debate.

The Israeli authorities and the vast majority of Israeli academics have maintained a persistent denial of the nature of Israel’s conduct in its formative years. It is a source of embarrassment that hinders the righteous self-image and further diminishes the country’s increasingly frail legitimacy. Some, however, selected to boast about Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity. True, Israel is not alone in the field of foreign communities colonially moving to a new land, claiming persecution, and causing severe and lasting damage and destruction to the natives. Nevertheless, at least in two aspects Israel is distinguishable from the other examples, hailed by a trend of critical Palestinian scholars as a superior theoretical framework or proposition (the settler colonialism argument). The first, and clear one, is the numbers. While in other countries the natives constitute a fraction of the population, Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, refugee camps, and in the diaspora, separately and combined, form real quantitative community/ies with ongoing realities, agendas, and rights. Their objectives have witnessed important shifts throughout the years, but they are not dignified integration or a marginal separate entity within the settling country. The second is Israel’s tremendous failure to realize the minimal threshold of liberal values advanced genuinely or otherwise in the comparative countries. Several Israeli academics would welcome this theoretical assumption, enhancing their limited progressive self- perception, while distancing the possibility to capture the concept of Palestinian rights in its entirety.

Transcending the clichés about fetish self-centered inquiry which is deconstructed by the non-existent will and capacity to learn about other societies, local Palestinian academics in Israel who are either contained by their Israeli supervisors, immediate academic environment, and institutions, or lack talent and rigor, need to reflect on their failures and insignificance. Since no genuine contribution to knowledge as such has been pursued or achieved, what purpose their presence in the Israeli academy and its repetitive conferences serves?

The lack of serious standing within the Israeli academy of much of these academics is evidence of Israel’s own perception of multiculturalism which appeared only in the social science and humanities academic arena in the late 1990s and since then has developed regressively. There are practically almost no “Israeli”- Palestinian academics in other fields of knowledge, and in any event their performance there renders them irrelevant for the purposes of this essay. The scope of tolerance here places inherent barriers on critically investigating the most important issues that affect Israeli society: military and foreign relations, history and memory, Israeli Jewish identities, Palestine, and how to be an underclass in an apartheid country. They can write about gaps and claim abundance of courage, male and female, when aligning with an Israeli pseudo version of feminism. Or they may engage in the arts, mimic their surroundings, and compromise independent creativity consciously or not.

The local environment of Palestinian academics in Israel is supreme within their epistemology. With no urban, suburban, or uninterrupted countryside life in the aftermath of the 1948 devastation caused by Israel, these academics reached the Israeli university from impoverished villages governed by the legacy of Israel’s military rule (1948 – 1966), and often return to their place of birth alienated from it as well as from their learning experience. The village’s local politics is exceptionally peripheral to the Israeli setting, confined to the relations with a dominating Ministry of Interior and Israel’s Land Administration. Familial in nature this politics is gravely de-politicising with respect to the Question of Palestine. It situates the ordinary academic in a frustrating condition unable to produce genuine scholarship or inflict any sincere influence over his or her students. The overwhelming excavated academic examinations persistently reflect their limited imagination often headed by titles ending with the phrase “in Israel”. Unable to transform the paradigms ranging from Elie Rekhess to Sammy Smooha reaching quasi critical, in Israeli terms, Iland Saban, several academics escape to the realm of the non-demoralizing space of the NGOs and public intellectualism, but no relevant public is in sight and the thought projected is abstractly incoherent.

In these circumstances, and given their produced scholarship, Palestinian academics in Israel are the least equipped and qualified to confront the role of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism used to counter and deter proponents of Palestinian rights, particularly in the United States and Britain. Other than absorbing the political and emotional extortion practised in Israel these academics have fragile comprehension of Israeli history and total ignorance of politics’ nature in Western countries, particularly the United States and Britain. They should return to their study rooms for more reading and less reflection.

Analyzed by endless studies and benefiting from hegemonic cultural representations in the “West”, the Holocaust should be perceived as an incidental, unfortunate, and diplomatically exploitative occurrence to Palestine. Palestinian academics in Israel should attempt theoretically and practically to contribute to an offensive intellectual effort aimed at side-lining the Holocaust from deliberating Palestine. Otherwise, silence.

Palestine is not present in the academic and public awareness of Israel and vast majority of Israelis. Although Israelis know, better than anyone else, who causes serious damage to them, the country has nevertheless been premised on the negation of Palestine militarily, geographically, and demographically. Indoctrinating myths define the Israeli educational system in high school. Studying Palestine without adhering to false balancing could be detrimental for Israeli Jews in the Israeli university generating unbearable costs, socially and financially. A key undermining aspect to genuinely understand Israel has been the traditional meetings of youth and studies about “Arab – Jewish” relations in Israel, each side participating and inquiring with totally diffirent charges of history and identity, yet reaching similar conclusions and recommendations.

Signing the Oslo accords reinforced Israel’s unjustified sense of moral superiority and exposed the inherent weaknesses of the Palestine Liberation Movement. From Israel’s perspective, the agreements were an exercise in crisis management, maintaining its legal and operational status as an occupying power while avoiding to acknowledge the severe injustices it has caused prior to the White House ceremony, let alone any of the advanced Palestinian rights. Israelis consider the Palestinians as a burden to ignore supremacistly. Most of them believe that the Palestinians, who at best generate a deniable existential dilemma, already have a state and their issues have been resolved permanently. A wish Ehud Barak attempted to secure manipulatively in 2000 and failed miserably. Indeed, it is a peculiar if not surprising phenomenon that a community of insurance and real-estate agents, stock brokers, bankers, endless hollow lawyers, and arms exporters that imagine itself as a hi-tech nation convey an idly and racist consciousness.

David Ben Gurion

Golda Meir