[Peace-discuss] Introduction to the film “Al-Nakba: The Palestine Catastrophe of 1948”

[David Green]

Introduction to the film “Al-Nakba: The Palestine Catastrophe of 1948”
   
  The purpose of this film and this event is not only to educate about the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians by Zionist and Israeli forces from 1947-49, but to challenge and explain the denial of the Nakba, and begin to understand the function of this denial in relation to the current political scene. This is not about forgetting and memory, or about catching up, as if we—that is, we who are not Palestinians—have somehow just not had time to learn about this, or had forgotten what we learned in grade school. This is about challenging overt denial, the conscious if implicit effort of our political culture and media to not only exclude these events from the record, but to replace them with a narrative in which victims become perpetrators and perpetrators become victims.
  I can think of no other recent ethnic cleansing that has provoked so much effort devoted to denial or gross distortion, although I will mention the Armenian genocide in passing. At a political level, denial is about power and domination, not least the power to determine who narrates, and to whose benefit. Denial is in fact too weak a word. As we shall see, this is about the literal burial of the truth.
  In his famous essay “Permission to Narrate,” the late Edward Said wrote that “this situation privileges a master narrative, highlighting Jewish alienation and redemption—with all of it taking place as a modern spectacle before the world’s eyes. Palestinians are expected to participate in the dismantling of their own history at the same time.” 
  ***
  I would suggest, following Noam Chomsky, that the purpose of the mainstream media and culture is not to tell us what to think, but how to think. I would like to suggest how to think about Israel and Palestine in general and the Nakba in particular, but first how not to think.
  First, this history is not one of conflict. A conflict is not what ensues when a colonialist movement decides that it wants to inhabit someone else’s land and will have to take it, by whatever means necessary, from the people who live on it. What Israel and Palestine are about is relentless and ultimately overwhelming domination and dispossession, well-armed and organized Europeans with European and American support, vs. largely peasant natives ultimately able to offer little resistance.
  Moreover, to follow the same line of reasoning, Israel and Palestine are not now or ever have been “at war.” Palestine has never had a military, while Israel has had its own military, and since 1967 the American military to supply it.
  How to think about Israel and Palestine is also not, at any fundamental level, about religion. In fact, religion entered in a serious way only when Israel funded Hamas in the early 1980s as a counterweight to the secular PLO, which was seen as a threat to Israeli expansionism because it pursued a diplomatic settlement. And briefly, it is also not about “ancient ethnic hatreds,” to anyone who knows anything about the history of relations between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East. If anything, however, the Nakba might be understood as the projection of ancient European religious and ethnic hatreds on to the Middle East, although European anti-semitism and the Holocaust also need to be understood in economic, political, and social context.
  A recent visitor to our campus, David Makovsky, began his talk at Hillel by summarizing over a century of Zionist and Palestinian history thusly: the Jews came to Palestine in peace, and the Arabs wanted war. He offered exactly one fact to support this argument, which I will not take the time to repeat. But again, this is not about either side wanting war, or promoting violence. Israel wants peace on its own terms of expansion and domination, and has always been willing to use violence to secure that peace. Palestinians want their right of self-determination, and have also been willing to use violence in their resistance to domination and dispossession. Everyone wants peace, and most everyone will resort to violence when deemed necessary, for good or ill. In any event, Makovsky was again telling his audience how to think about Israel and Palestine, and for the converted everything that followed fell into place: the white man comes in peace, trying to convince the little
 brown people, violent and corrupt by nature, to see reason.
  ***
  So how might we understand the Nakba? As I’ve already suggested, it is in general about another long-term, relentless European settler-colonialist movement, with its authority-driven nationalist-socialist ideology, militant organization, expansionist plans, European and American colonial and imperial support, and its violent culmination in the expulsion of the majority of natives, a process that is of course ongoing.
  Palestinians, typical of natives, were unable to comprehend the fate that awaited them until it was too late. They were in a weak and desperate position not only due to lack of organization, weapons, and training, but their inability to see the need to develop a strategy to aggressively maintain their existence on land that, without threat of expulsion, had been their home for hundreds of years. Plans to change the status quo through violence have an inherent advantage over those who would maintain the status quo by moving on with their daily lives. Palestinian political culture, its leadership decimated by the brutal British repression of the uprising of the late 1930s, was divided and reactive; forced to resort, at the village level, to pacts of mutual non-violence that proved to be worthless.
  But why Zionism, why Palestine, why Israel, why 1948? At one level, the answers lie in a consideration of European anti-semitism. I mean this in two ways. First, Zionism was a complicated Jewish response, and indeed one among many, to European racial anti-semitism; Zionists appropriated and adapted European nationalism and even fascism. An attitude of “us here, them there” was exported to Palestine and pursued there. What has been labeled the Revisionist aspect of the early Zionist movement, that is, those who challenged dominant Labor Zionism, openly identified in the 1920s with Benito Mussolini and his brownshirts, and boldly defined its solution to the Palestinian problem in terms of “the iron wall.” The heirs of that particular tradition were, most notably, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both Zionist terrorists eventually turned Israeli Prime Ministers. And now they have their wall.
  The founders of the dominant socialist labor tradition of Zionism also adopted the terminology of European anti-semitism, labeling the Jewish bourgeoisie as “parasites,” casting the Zionist movement in contrast as secular, agricultural, militant, self-sufficient, and exclusionist, ultimately instigating the Nakba in pursuit of a vision of a Jewish State with as few non-Jews as possible. The notion of “transfer” was deeply embedded in labor Zionist strategy going back at least to the 1920s, always justified in terms of “retaliation” until there was no longer a need to. During the early stages of the Nakba in February 1948, the language of retaliation was in fact discarded due to the lack of Palestinian provocation or resistance, especially in rural areas.
  A visitor to our campus last fall, Israeli historian Yosef Gorny, asserted the idealism of labor Zionism and its desire, but for the course of events, to live peacefully with the Arabs. But no colonizing movement has been without its idealism, and none has been able to avoid confronting the reality that in order to have a society dominated by settlers, the natives will have to be displaced or dispensed with, and violence will be necessary to do that. Gorny also used peculiar terms to describe the Nakba: he said that “some Arabs were pushed, others ran.” I find “pushed” a remarkable word to use in describing terrorism, and I find “ran” also a remarkable word to describe those who flee as a response to terrorism. If one were to consider the Jews who left Germany in the 1930s before the advent of systematic violence—like Gorny’s family—one would not be so careless to describe their plight in terms of pushing and running.
  To move to my second point regarding European anti-semitism, the birth of Israel was of course partly a response to the Holocaust, however unjust in terms of the demand that Palestinians sacrifice their land as reparation for European atrocities, and provide sanctuary for the remnants of Europe’s “Jewish problem.” After World War II, Jewish terrorism convinced Great Britain to hand over its mandate to the U.N. U.S. pressure on the U.N. for partition, Jewish-American pressure on President Harry Truman to allow partition to proceed and to recognize the state of Israel, and British and U.N. decisions to act as “innocent bystanders” both before and after Israel’s declaration of independence in May of 1948, all sealed the fate of the Palestinian people that had been planned for at least two years prior to 1948 by Zionist leadership, that of ethnic cleansing.
  ***
  The Holocaust has now been established, for crass and cynical reasons, as an essential and central narrative used in justifying American military adventurism—not of course in Europe itself (with the exception of Serbia), where the Holocaust actually occurred, but in the Middle East and beyond, wherever the next Hitler might be found, even in Panama. In this doctrinal context, the Nakba as a historical reality is not only shameful and inconvenient; it is potentially disruptive to what we like to call “vital national interests.” The symbolic political value and use of the Holocaust must not be challenged, and Israel’s purity must not be questioned.
  For Israel itself, denial of the Nakba is a more serious issue in relation to its national identity as a Jewish state. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, author of the recent but seminal work “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” describes Israel’s land policy as “memoricide,” the murder of memory. He describes the Jewish National Fund’s administration of 93% of Israel’s land. Israel’s national parks and resorts are built over the remnants of hundreds of Palestinian villages. Pappe writes “The true mission of the JNF has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by narratives it has created to deny their existence.” These narratives perpetuate the myth of Palestine as an empty and arid land before the arrival of Zionism.”
  ***
  (The following quotes are from Ilan Pappe, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” They were not read at this event)
  “Tantura was an ancient Palestinian village on the Mediterranean coast. On  22 may 1948, the village was attacked at night. At first, the Jewish commander in charge wanted to send a van into the village with a loudspeaker calling upon people to capitulate, but this scheme was not carried out.
  “Mashvitz  (commander of the battalion assigned to cleanse the zone on the Mediterranean coast that included Tantura – DG) went along with the local collaborator, hooded, and picked out individual men—again, in the eyes of the Israeli army, ‘men’ were all males between the ages of 10 and 50—and took them out in small groups to a spot further away where they were executed. The men were selected according to a pre-prepared list drawn from Tantura’s village file, and included everybody who had participated in the 1936 revolt, in attacks on Jewish traffic, who had contacts with the Mufti, and anyone else who ‘committed’ one of the ‘crimes’ that automatically condemned them.
  “These were not the only men executed. Before the selection and killing process took place on the coast, the occupying unit had gone on a killing spree inside the houses and in the streets. Joel Skolnik, a sapper in the battalion, had been wounded in this attack, but after his hospitalization heard from other soldiers that this had been ‘one of the most shameful battles the Israeli army ever fought.’ According to him, sniper shots from within the village as the soldiers entered had caused Jewish troops to run amok soon after the village was taken and before the scenes on the beach unfolded. The attack happened after the villagers had signaled their surrender by waving a white flag.
  “Most of the killing was done in cold blood on the beach. Some of the victims were first interrogated and asked later about a ‘huge cache’ of weapons that had supposedly been hidden somewhere in the village. As they couldn’t tell—there was no such stack of weapons—they were shot dead on the spot. Today, many of the survivors of these horrific events live in the Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria, coping only with great difficulty with life after the trauma of witnessing the executions.
  “What took place in Tantura was the systematic execution of able-bodied young men by Jewish soldiers and intelligence officers. One eyewitness, Abu Mashaykh, was staying in Tantura with a friend, as he originally came from Qisarya, the village Jewish troops had already destroyed and expelled in February 1948. He saw with his own eyes the execution of 85 young men of Tantura, who were taken in groups of 10 and then executed in the cemetery and the nearby mosque. He further testified how Jewish soldiers were watching the executions with apparent relish.
  “Mahmud Abu Salih of Tantura also reported the killing of 90 people. He was 17 at the time and his most vivid memory is the killing of a father in front of his children. Abu Salih kept in touch with one of the sons, who went out of his mind after seeing his father executed and never recovered. Abu Salih saw the execution of 7 male members of his own family. 
  “When the rampage in the village was over and the executions had come to an end, two Palestinians were ordered to dig mass graves under the supervision of Mordechai Sokoler, of Zihron Yaacov, who owned the tractors that had been brought in for the gruesome job. In 1999, he said he remembered burying 230 bodies; the exact number was clear in his mind: “I lay them one by one in the grave.” 
  “Most of the interviews with the survivors were done in 1999 by an Israeli research student, Teddy Katz, who ‘stumbled upon’ the massacre while doing his dissertation at Haifa University. When this became public, the University retroactively disqualified his thesis and Alexandroni (brigade) veterans dragged Katz himself into court, suing him for libel. But one of Katz’s interviewees, Shlomo Ambar, later a general in the IDF, admitted “I did not talk then, why should I talk now?””

       
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