It should surprise no one that the devastating impact of the events
of 1948 on the Palestinian people was, with a few grudging
exceptions, generally forgotten in the rush to observe the fiftieth
birthday of Israel. Indeed, this latest episode fits well into the
larger pattern of the repression of history which, since the
beginning, has characterized the struggle between the two peoples,
each trying to come into being at the expense of the other. Such a
pattern was natural given that Zionism was struggling to establish
a Jewish state in a land with an Arab majority, and to impose the
fact of Israel's existence on the stubborn reality of Palestinian
peoplehood in Palestine. While Israelis and their friends have much
to celebrate in 1998, which marks their victory in this struggle,
Palestinians and those who know their history have much to mourn.
For them, the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's establishment marks
what since 1948 has been universally known in Arabic as al-Nakba -
the Catastrophe - meaning the disappearance of Arab Palestine in
1948.
The year 1948 has many meanings for Palestinians. It means the year
in which they lost their country. As the entity called Palestine
disappeared, for several decades the Palestinians' hopes for
self-determination and statehood receded. It means the year in
which about 750,000 Palestinians - out of the total population of
1.4 million - became refugees, some fleeing the violence and chaos
of war, others driven out of their homes by the forces of the
nascent Israeli state. Of these, many ended up in refugee camps,
although the majority of them have left the camps over the past two
and a half generations, achieving prosperity, mobility and success
elsewhere. It means the year in which the two cities with the
largest Arab populations in Palestine, Jaffa and Haifa, the centers
of the country's Arab economic and intellectual life, together with
many other cities and towns, as well as a total of 418 villages,
were overrun and emptied of most of their Arab inhabitants. It
means the year in which the vast bulk of Palestine's land and huge
amounts of other property passed out of the hands of the country's
Arab population and into that of the new State of Israel. Finally,
it means the year in which the Palestinians disappeared from the
world stage as a people, instead becoming a "refugee problem,"
losing their voice to the Arab regimes, which purported to speak
for them, until the Palestinians wrested back the right to
represent themselves in the 1960s.
Collective Trauma
Clearly, Palestinians have little cause to celebrate anything in
1998. Indeed, it marks a collective trauma in their national
history of the order of the defeat of Sedan in 1870 for France, or
Pearl Harbor in 1941 for Americans. Of course, both France and the
United States eventually turned the tables, and overcame the
humiliation of defeat on the battlefield. This is highly unlikely,
to say the least, in the Palestinian case. In this respect, the
trauma of the Palestinians is much more akin to that of the
Armenian and Kurdish peoples, who, like the Palestinians, were
victims of brutal campaigns of what we have learned to call ethnic
cleansing. For these two peoples, to the injury of losing their
respective national homelands, and with them the prospect of an
independent national existence, was added the insult of decades of
non-recognition of the hurt that had been done to them. The denial
that the Armenians were the victims of genocide, and the curtain of
silence drawn over several generations of repression of the Kurds
by three different Middle Eastern governments, those of Iraq,
Turkey and Iran, constitute close parallels to what has happened to
the Palestinians.
For the Palestinians, this non-recognition of their national agony
has been in some ways the unkindest cut of all, as they felt, not
incorrectly that they were the victims in 1948, losing their
country, most of their property, and seeing 13,000 of their fellow
citizens killed. (It is worth noting parenthetically that 6,000
Israelis died in the conflict, and in each case these death tolls
amounted to about one percent of the respective total populations.
The differences were that most of the Palestinians killed were
civilians, while most of the Israelis were combatants, and, most
importantly, that the Israelis won the war, got their nation-state,
and ended up with all that property.) Beyond this, because the
Palestinians were the victims of victims, and were defeated and
dispossessed by the survivors of the modern era's greatest human
atrocity, the Holocaust, their own suffering was forgotten or
ignored. Even worse, as the history came to be written, they were
depicted as the villains, the latest incarnation of a sequence of
tormentors who have persecuted the Jewish people throughout their
history.
Jewish Trauma
In light of the enormity of the evil done to the Jews - albeit
elsewhere and at the hands of others - the specificity of
Palestine, and of what had actually happened in this small
Mediterranean country in the years leading up to 1948, quickly
faded in the international imagination. This specificity was
replaced by a narrative in which Israel and the Jewish people
figured predominantly, and in which the centerpiece was not the
tragedy of the Palestinians, but rather the greatest trauma in
Jewish history, and one of the greatest in modern human experience:
the Holocaust. This powerful narrative, which described what was
happening in Palestine in terms of Jewish national redemption and
resurrection, firmly reoriented Jewish history on a completely new
axis, with the birth of Israel serving as the bright counterpoint
to the black horror of what had happened in the death camps of
Europe only a few years before. In this grand scheme of things, the
Palestinians could only be an annoying complication, to be written
out of the history, painted out of the pictures, the names of
hundreds of their ancestral villages erased as new Hebrew names
were concocted or resurrected, and their very name and that of
their country becoming almost epithets in polite company.
As if all of this were not enough, an insidious process of blaming
the victims ensued, ensuring that even if a few inconvenient facts
about what had happened in 1948 did come out, they could be laid at
the door of the Palestinians themselves, or of their fellow Arabs.
Thus the scandalous canard that "their leaders told them to leave"
was concocted, which assiduous research has shown to have been an
essentially false story devised and propagated by Israeli
apologists, and which untold multitudes in the West have come to
believe to be gospel truth in the intervening decades. Thus, we had
the self-deluding but comforting argument that, while the Zionist
leadership was willing to share Palestine and live in peace with
the Arabs before 1948, it was the Arabs who refused accommodation,
started the war, lost it, and deserved all the consequences. From
this premise followed logically the conclusion that 1.4 million
Palestinians and their descendants unto the third generation and
beyond somehow deserved everything that happened to them in 1948
and afterwards because of the sins or the stupidity of their
leaders.
Like all successful big lies, each of these embodied some element
of truth, however small. Thus, in beleaguered Haifa in the spring
of 1948, some Arab League representatives did tell the population
to leave, although other Arab leaders told them to stay. In fact,
the Arab leadership all over the country futilely tried to keep the
Palestinian population from fleeing their homes. They did this as
the refugee tide turned into a flood as defeat turned into rout in
the spring of 1948 under the hammer blows of Plan Dalet. This was
the Zionist master plan for the conquest of the coastal strip,
including Jaffa and Haifa, and other key strategic regions of the
country, which was implemented before the Mandate ended on May 15,
1948.
Winning the Whole Country
Thus, while a very few important individuals of integrity and
courage, like Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, sincerely called for
sharing Palestine with the Arabs, the hard pragmatists who led the
Labor Zionist parties, like Ben-Gurion, and their even harder
rivals among the Revisionists, like Jabotinsky and Begin, knew from
at least the 1930s onwards that this was a fight to the finish over
who would dominate the country. These leaders intended to win the
whole country for the Jews exclusively, and knew from the mid-1940s
onwards that the big battalions were on their side.
By the time the Arab armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948, the
miserably disorganized Palestinians had been crushed by the
victorious military forces of the nascent Jewish state, which had
already turned into refugees perhaps half of the 750,000
Palestinians who ultimately fled their homes. The Palestinians and
the Arab states were hamstrung by crippling internal divisions and
appallingly bad leadership at the local and national levels. This
is not to speak of scrupulously respected secret commitments to
restrict the sphere of action of his forces made to the Zionist
leadership before and after May 15, by King Abdullah, who
controlled the two best Arab armies in the field, Jordan's Arab
Legion and the Iraqi contingent. There is much still to be told of
the events of 1948, and little of it will reflect favorably on any
of the actors on the Arab side.
The 1948 war was nonetheless a closely fought affair, at least at
the outset, and was very costly to the new State of Israel. Coming
in the wake of the Holocaust, the losses which the nascent Israeli
state incurred were particularly painful. But these losses,
combined with the sweet intoxication of victory as a new Jewish
national polity arose in the ancestral homeland of the Jews, and
with the vindication of the central premises of Zionism which the
atrocities of the Nazi era appeared to provide, blinded Israelis
and those who sympathized with them to the losses involved in the
dispossession of an entire people.
From the celebratory frenzy that seized Israel, the United States
and other Western countries in 1998, it was clear that little has
changed since 1948, as far as the international representation of
this event is concerned. We were told that this was Israel's
jubilee birthday, a holiday, an occasion for universal rejoicing.
We did not hear the heads of state or governments the world over
phoning one another to commemorate the simultaneous passing of
Palestine in 1948, nor were there plans anywhere in the world
(outside of Palestine and a few Arab capitals) for a solemn
observance of the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Just as
they have been for the past fifty years, the Palestinians are
forgotten in all the festivities.
Confronting 1948
But a genuine celebration, one which would commemorate the
establishment of a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors, cannot
take place until two things happen. The first is a realization that
in the zero-sum terms in which both communities understood reality
in 1948, the birth of Israel necessarily involved the bloody
infanticide of Palestine. The second is the righting of the wrong,
insofar as this is possible, via the much-delayed birth of an
independent, sovereign state of Palestine. This state will not be
born, and peace will not come, until the reality of what happened
in 1948 has been confronted. For there can be no progress towards
the reconciliation which is necessary to resolve this conflict
unless we can get out of the closed box which posits Israeli
innocence regarding what has happened to the Palestinians, and
which places the primary onus for their own victimization on the
Palestinians themselves.
In other words, history - meaning history which is not obsessively
self-reflexive as so much of Israeli and Palestinian history is -
has to be let back in. While neither people should be expected to
change its national narrative, it will be necessary for both to
take account of elements of that of the other. For Palestinians,
this does not require acceptance of the idea of Israeli innocence.
It requires rather coming to understand the oppressive weight of
the European context which drove Jews to Zionism - and drove many
of them to Zion - and to doing what they did in Palestine to the
Palestinians. We know, or should know, of the direct impact of
these events in Europe on the balance of power in Palestine: thus,
the proportion of Jews in the total population of Palestine had
grown from under 10 percent in 1918 to 19.4 percent by 1926;
however, from 1926 until 1932 this proportion actually declined to
18.3 percent. After the rise of Hitler in 1933, the number of
Jewish immigrants shot upwards, until only five years later Jews
were a full 30 percent of the population. Over 60,000 Jewish
immigrants arrived in Palestine in 1935 alone, more than the
country's entire Jewish population in 1918. Thus this post-1932
exodus from Europe provided the critical demographic mass which
made Jewish statehood in Palestine possible, a critical mass which
very possibly would not have been reached but for the rise of the
Nazis to power.
Edward Said stressed recently that if the Palestinians are ever to
comprehend and come to terms with what has happened to them over
the past half century and more, they must understand fully the
European context which drove Jewish refugees to the shores of
Palestine, and then drove them to do grave deeds here. Palestinians
must understand why a narrative centered on the Holocaust is so
compelling, which they cannot do unless they understand in detail
the history of the Holocaust, and how it affects Israelis, Jews and
others in the West. I agree with Said, and as I have argued
elsewhere, in order to come to terms with their own history, it
will also be necessary for the Palestinians to accept some
responsibility for their people's failures in the 1930s, 1940s and
afterwards, as a few Palestinian historians have begun to do.
Specifically, Palestinians must confront sensitive issues like the
mistakes of their leadership in the 1930s and 1940s, and why their
society fragmented so rapidly and so totally under the blows of
Plan Dalet in 1948. This means doing something Palestinians have
thus far been reluctant to do: accept at least partial
responsibility for their fate. For, however powerful were the great
powers, Zionism and the hostile Arab regimes before 1948, it must
also be accepted that the Palestinians were an independent actor,
one which had agency and had choices in the difficult circumstances
of the 1930s and 1940s.
Victims by Definition
On the other hand, taking account of elements of the narrative of
the other will require Israelis to do a number of things. Foremost
among them is the need to accept and atone for the fact that,
however pure their motives and intentions may or may not have been
in the 1930s and 1940s, and however pressing their circumstances at
the time in view of the looming Nazi threat, in the process of
constituting their nation-state they did grievous harm to a weaker
people which had done nothing to them before this conflict began,
harm which has continued and multiplied in the succeeding
half-century. This will require confronting a potent and
well-entrenched reading of Jewish history (one embodying profound
distortions of Palestinian history) which is relatively new, but
which will not surrender the hegemony it has attained over the past
fifty or sixty years without a struggle.
None of this will be easy. Both Palestinians and Israelis are
accustomed to viewing themselves as victims, and to seeing the
other as no more than one of a series of accessories involved in
inflicting suffering on them. Rather than granting the Palestinians
agency and accepting that they may have had honorable, or at least
rational motivations for their actions, many Israelis and Jews see
the Palestinians as motivated by the same blind hatred which has
driven so many persecutors in Jewish history. There is no room in
such a scheme for the idea that Israeli actions may have some
bearing on, or could even cause, Palestinian behavior: by
definition, Israelis are victims, no matter what they do, and their
adversaries are oppressors, no matter how weak they may be in
contrast with Israel.
Similarly, for Palestinians, Israel and Zionism are only part of a
vast concatenation of forces including Britain, the United States
and the Arab regimes, which has conspired throughout this century
to deprive them of self-determination, and ultimately of their very
land and homes in many cases. And since the Palestinians are by
definition victims, they are not responsible for their actions, and
these actions are invariably justified, even if they cause great
suffering to Israelis, since the suffering the Israelis have
inflicted on the Palestinians has generally been even
greater.
Stronger and Weaker
The fact that there is some truth in the world view of both only
makes each more stubborn. To underline these similarities, however,
is not to say that the two are the same: historically, in the
conflict between the two sides in Palestine over the past century,
one side eventually grew far stronger and became the winner, while
the other grew far weaker and ended up the loser. In this conflict,
one became the victimizer and the other the victim. And yet this is
not the way in which these two peoples are regarded by the world,
or at least in the United States. As I was writing this paper in
the spring of 1998, a debate was raging in the United States about
whether Yasser Arafat should, or should not, be invited to visit
the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and learn
about a crime committed against the Jewish people on another
continent by another people when he was a 13-year-old boy.
Completely different though the events were in scale, scope and
universal historical importance, there is no museum, no memorial,
no notice anywhere that records what Israel did to the Palestinians
in 1948. Nor would Binyamin Netanyahu visit one if it were to
exist, even though he is head of government of a state which stands
today on the ruins, and in the place, of Palestine.
While the fiftieth anniversary of 1948 therefore does not mark a
universal jubilee, it could still provide a valuable occasion for
reflection on the differing meanings of the events of that
climactic year for these two peoples, which in turn could be a
stepping-stone to something else more substantial. However, if
instead of sober reflection, this anniversary continues to be used
by Israel and its friends for the kind of triumphalist crowing of
which we have already heard so much, and which rubs more salt into
the wounds of the Palestinians, it will take us further away from
the possibility of peace and reconciliation between the two
peoples.
Nor is it acceptable that this occasion be used solely to mourn the
sad fate of the Palestinians. In fact, after fifty years, it is
time for the Palestinian people to put mourning behind them, and to
move on to attempting to achieve restitution for the wrongs done to
them. Certainly, if the Palestinians are ever to put forth a
credible demand for recognition of the injury they have suffered,
and atonement and restitution for it, they will have to do two
things. The first is to shed the passive attitudes associated with
mourning, and the second is to see their own history in a broader
context. Specifically, they must attempt to understand why the
awful course of Jewish history in Europe led Zionism to do what it
did in Palestine, unjust though this was to the Palestinians, and
why that same history might lead some to celebrate this outcome,
tragic though it was for the Palestinians. Moreover, it is vital to
understand fully why and how recognition, atonement and restitution
were achieved in the case of the Holocaust, since, as the most
horrific crime against humanity in modern times, this is the
paradigmatic case for all offenses directed against an entire
people.
Restitution
If there is ever to be a universal celebration which Palestinians
and Israelis can share, much will have to change in the way of
attitudes, and it is clear that today we are very far from such
changes - much farther away today than we were five or six years
ago. Among many other things, the Palestinian historical narrative
will have to be explained more fully and less apologetically and
diffused more widely, and the Palestinian attitude towards Jewish
history will have to evolve. However, such an evolution is
exceedingly difficult to expect today, while the Palestinian people
rightly feel themselves to be oppressed by the overwhelming power
of the Jewish state, more than half of them living in exile from
their homeland, and the rest under military occupation or living as
second-class citizens within it.
Most importantly, however, if such a celebration, such a jubilee,
is to be truly universal, the Palestinians must have something
concrete, such as independent statehood and national
self-determination, to celebrate alongside the Israelis. For this
to happen, Israelis and their supporters must recognize and make
restitution for the grievous harm that was done to the entire
Palestinian people in creating the State of Israel in 1948. After
half a century, such a process is long overdue.
This lecture was given at a conference organized by Sabeel, at
Bethelehem University 10-15, 1998. The lecture will also be
published in book due to appear in London in October 1998. Printed
by permission.