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

Wed Apr 16 23:06:04 CDT 2008

- heartfelt Ditto to Jennifer's comment, David.

Barbara

On 4/16/08, Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This is really informative, David, and pretty much how the US got its
> country. Thanks for posting it.
>  --Jenifer
>
>
> David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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?""
>  ________________________________
>  Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it
> now._______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
>
>
>  ________________________________
> Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it
> now.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>  Peace-discuss mailing list
>  Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>  http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
>