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A
Palestinian photographer standing during a minute of silence commemorating the
Nakba, during a ceremony held by Palestinian and Israeli students in the
entrance to the Tel Aviv University. Rightwing vigil protesting the ceremony
and policemen are seen in the background. May 13, 2013 (photo: Yotam Ronen /
Activestills)
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Despite efforts to erase it, the Nakba’s memory is more present than ever in Israel. By Noam Sheizaf. +972, May 14, 2013.
Toward a Common Archive/Video testimonies of Zionist Fighters in 1948. Exhibition opening event with the curator
Eyal Sivan, Prof. Ilan Pappe and Raneen Jeries. Moderator: Areej Sabbah-Khoury. Zochorot.
Palmachic Testimony: We Expelled, We Bombed, We Killed. By Amon Lapid.
Yedi’ot Hakibbutz, February 15, 2013. English translation by Ami Asher. Zochorot.
Testimony of Yerachmiel Kahanovich, Palmach Soldier at Lydda in 1948. Filmed in Kibbutz Degania Alef on July 23, 2012. By Eyal Sivan. English version by Ami Asher. Zochrot. Video at YouTube. Towards a Common Archive, YouTube.
Sheizaf:
Yedioth Hakibbutz is the
weekly magazine of the United Kibbutz Movement. It is delivered every week to
hundreds of Kibbutzim as part of the weekend edition of Yedioth Ahronoth, the best selling paper in Israel. Even at a time
of diminishing political influence – there is not a single representative of
the United Kibbutz Movement in the current Knesset – the Kibbutzim remain both
a symbol and a stronghold of conservative Zionism, and the mainstream tone of Yedioth suits them well.
Three
months ago, there was an unusual story on the cover of Yedioth Hakibbutz. The front page read: “We expelled, blew up and killed.” Inside the magazine was a three-page interview with Kibbutz Degania
member Yerachmiel Kahanovich, a former fighter in the Palmach (the Jewish
underground that preceded the IDF), in which Kahanovic confessed to his part in
the expulsion and murder of Palestinians during the war of 1948.
Several
months earlier, Kahanovich was interviewed as part of a project by Zochrot (“remembering”), a non-profit
that deals with the Nakba from an Israeli perspective (an English translation
of his testimony can be found here), and his testimony drew the attention of Yedioth reporters. Zochrot exists mostly
in the margins of the Israeli discourse. Getting such a follow-up in the
Kibbutz magazine was unique but not unheard of: in October 2012 the same paper
ran a story on a Nakba tour book published by Zochrot.
Kahanovich’s
testimony touched on one of the most awful events of 1948 – the intentional
murder of Palestinian civilians who sought refuge from the fighting inside the
Dahamsh Mosque in Lod. He also confessed that he had been ordered to shoot each
Palestinian who tried to escape the procession of refugees marching out of the
region. At time he sounded regretful – but he also felt that, “we had no
choice.”
Q: Did
you let the [Palestinians] residents get away?
YK: At
first, yes. The intention was to expel them, these were the orders of the
bosses, Yigal Alon and Yitzhak Sadeh. Sometimes we had to shot one or two, and
then the rest got the message and left on their own. You need to understand: if
you didn’t destroy the Arab’s home, he will always want to come back. When
there is no home, no village, there is nowhere to return.
Q: Do
you remember the battle for Lod and Ramleh?
YK: I
don’t like to remember this so much… we shot shells into a mosque where many
people were hiding. There was no choice.
Q: We
shot?
YK: I
shot with the PIAT [anti-tank weapon]. It has an enormous shock wave.
Q: And
what were the results?
YK: Not
pretty. They were all scattered on the walls.
Q: How
many?
YK: I
don’t know. Many. I didn’t count. I opened the door, saw what I saw, and closed
[it].
Q: What
did you feel?
YK:
What can you feel after a thing like that? But if we didn’t do it, we might
have been fighting to this very day. Then I stood with the Browning [machine
gun] over the creek through which the remaining residents escaped. Anyone who
strayed off track, got a shot.
Q: From
you as well?
YK:
From me too. I felt really bad but I was a good marksman, and there were times
when they only asked me to fire a single bullet. At the village next to Ramleh,
two shots were enough. In 45 minutes the village was empty. They got the
message.
The
Lod-Ramleh region was one of places where a massive, intentional expulsion of
the Palestinian population took place. Controversies surround the departure of
Palestinians from other areas; whether they were forced to leave or whether
they escaped on their own. It’s not that important. The Israeli decision not to
allow refugees to return to their homes – sometimes as early as two weeks after
they fled or were forced to leave – is what made them refugees. Later came the
confiscation of the entirety of “unclaimed” Palestinian property, which leaves
no doubt about what happened in 1948. Intentional or not, this was ethnic
cleansing.
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Cover of
Yedioth Hakibbutz featuring a story
with a former Palmach fighter who confessed to his part
in killing Palestinians
during the 1948 war.
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***
Another
Kibbutz story: a few years ago, some “internal refugees” (Palestinians who were
displaced during the war but ended up within Israeli borders; they weren’t
allowed to go back to their homes, but they did become Israeli citizens)
planned a weekend trip to the hill where their village once stood. The news
somehow reached members of a nearby Kibbutz – one of the pillars of the
Kibbutzim movement and a Meretz stronghold – who were immediately alarmed. The
Kibbutz email list came to life, with members suggesting that they form a
counter-delegation and capture the hill before the Palestinians arrive. Others
demonstrated a more hospitable approach. I don’t know how the story ended. I
heard it from one of the Kibbutz’s members, a guy my age who has since left the
country.
The
tiniest symbolic action or gesture relating to the Nakba can unleash
disproportionate panic among Jews, since the Nakba is not just the ghost of the
Zionist project – it’s a very real and political problem. Both Israelis and
Palestinians understand this. An Israeli-Palestinian leader once told me that
he would not support building Nakba museums. “You put monuments when the story
is over,” he said. “We are not there.”
In
recent years, a trend of Nakba-denial has emerged in Jewish-Israeli political
circles, a sort of conservative counter attack to the post-Zionism of the
1990s. Im Tirzu, a conservative group whose claim to fame was a campaign
against the New Israel Fund, which included anti-semitic images, a couple of
years ago published a propaganda booklet titled “Nakba-Bullshit” (it rhymes in
Hebrew) which repeats many of the Israeli talking points on the refugee issue:
from “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” to “they fled of their
own will” to “Jews from Arab countries also became refugees.” Activists from Im
Tirzu urged students to avoid classes that mention the Nakba, distributed the
booklet at university gates and staged counter-protests against memorial
ceremonies on Nakba Day.
At the
same time, the Israeli government initiated the Nakba law, authorizing the
finance minister to withdraw funds from organizations commemorating the Nakba.
One in every five Israelis is a Palestinian, and the law basically means that
their public institutions are not allowed to deal with their own history. A petition
against the law was rejected by the Supreme Court, demonstrating how threatened
Israelis feel – that even the institution which is considered, and certainly
considers itself the guardian of civil liberties, was ready to put such a limit on free speech. Since 2009 Palestinian schools have not been allowed to discuss
or even use the term Nakba as part of their curriculum.
***
All
these acts had a strange effect: while dealing with the ethnic cleansing of
1948 is still considered a “confrontational” and even “subversive” act, the
term Nakba itself has become part of the mainstream discourse. The Arabic word
“Nakba” (“disaster”) has been used to describe the Palestinian catastrophe as
early as 1948, but I never heard the word until the nineties. Now I seem to
hear it every other day.
Naturally,
it’s not just in Israel. Google has a cute tool which allows you to see the
number of times a term is used in the books in its databases. I searched the
four common ways the word Nakba is spelled, “Nakba,” “Naqba,” “naqba” and
“nakba” (the tool is case sensitive) and the same pattern emerged each time: a
tiny surge in the mid-seventies and a skyrocketing rise at the end of the
nineties.
Compare
this, for example , to the word “Israel,” which is mentioned more frequently
but its peak seems to have been in the eighties (the correlation of all those
graphs with historical events is an interesting story in its own).
The
Microsoft Word 2010 spellcheck software I use has yet to recognize the Nakba.
***
Last
year, cops besieged activists who tried to distribute leaflets about the Nakba on Independence Day. This year’s events seem less tense. As I write this text,
an outraged report on Israeli public radio opens the evening news broadcast
with:
It
happened today: at the entrance to Tel Aviv University some people marked the
Nakba day and nobody did anything about it.
In
fact, there was a small Im Tirzu vigil against the Nakba Day ceremony at Tel
Aviv University, but except for some insults shouted into the air, the ceremony
went on without interruption. Here is a video of the event:
The
editor of Yedioth Hakibbutz told me
that the interview with Yerachmiel Kahanovich went viral on Facebook but that
at the same time, it hardly generated any hostile responses from kibbutz
members. She sounded slightly disappointed.
A
strange, bitter recognition of the Nakba seems to have settled in to the
mainstream, incomplete yet undeniable. Israelis are beginning to acknowledge
the past, although we are far from addressing its present consequences or its
possible political implementation. However, one thing is clear: the war against
history has failed. The Nakba will not be forgotten – not by Palestinians, nor
by us.
