الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract The catastrophe that befell Palestinian people in 1948 stands out in history as one of the colossal disasters to occur over a relatively short period of time. The Nakba is the Arabic name attributed to such calamity; it was first used by the Syrian intellectual Constantin Zurayk in a book that analyzes the event under the title Ma’na al-Nakba or The Meaning of the Disaster (Allan 1). The term later came to be used by other intellectuals and became widely disseminated, to the extent that it is no longer restricted to the use of the Arabic language solely, but entered the lexicon of other languages as well1. The Nakba refers to the deliberate expulsion of a large number of the native population of Palestine; “close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing xiii). Through many massacres coinciding with the destruction and mass evacuation of the deeply rooted inhabitants: “1948 saw not only the establishment of a settler-colonialist state on nearly 80 per cent of Mandatory Palestine, but also the destruction of historic Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians” (Masalha 2). The forced expulsion, whether internally to other parts of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or externally to the neighboring countries, resulted in one of the longest unresolved refugee problems in recent history, due to the fact that the newly established Zionist state barred their return. The total 2 number of refugees has mounted recently to around 5.9 million living across the Middle East, according to UNRWA official records; they are scattered in and around 58 official refugee camps throughout Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (UNRWA). Those camps suffer gravely from dire humanitarian conditions and grinding poverty. In addition, the Palestinian diaspora encompasses a considerable number of refugees widely dispersed around the world. The Nakba signifies the sudden dismantling of the structure of the Palestinian society, the erasure of many villages, and the wiping of the name of Palestine off the map, “a whole country and its people disappeared from international maps and dictionaries” (Masalha 3). According to Sa’adi and Abu-Lughod, “the Nakba meant the destruction in a single blow of all the worlds in which Palestinians had lived. For many, theirs was a dynamic, prosperous, and future-oriented society. The Nakba marked a new era dominated by estrangement, and often poverty” (9). It has thus become “synonymous with the annihilation of Palestinian society, culture and history” (Mattar 176). However, the Nakba and its traumatic aftermath is not just a historic past; in fact, it is still an ongoing experience. As Sa’adi and Abu-Lughod describe it, “the Nakba was not the last collective site of trauma, but what came later to be seen, through the prism of repeated dispossessions and 3 upheavals, as the foundational station in an unfolding and continuing saga of dispossession, negations, and erasure” (109-110). The second major blow for the Palestinian society came in the year of 1967, with the war that came to be called the Naksa or the setback. In this war, Israel took control of the rest of Palestinian lands, turning more people into refugees, many of whom were uprooted for the second time. Till this day, land appropriation, demolition of houses and uprooting of Palestinian inhabitants persists incessantly on a large scale across many areas of Palestine. Most recent of which is the forced dispossession and expulsion of the families of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Trauma forms an inevitable part of the Palestinian daily experience, and has become an intrinsic part of the their collective consciousness. This collective consciousness still harbors the traumatic rupture inflicted by the Nakba, and it is still deeply ingrained in the life and politics of the Palestinian society today (Masalha 13). The persistence of this traumatic collectivity fuels the will to speak up and remember, rather than to maintain silence and opt for forgetfulness. Narrating trauma, thus, acts as a unifying factor for all the community. However, the Zionist discourse attempts to silence the Palestinian one, and has endeavored since the beginning of their project to reinforce and promote the slogan formulated by Israel Zangwill that Palestine is “a land 4 without people to people without land” (Said, Question of Palestine 9). Following the Nakba, they deliberately sought to suppress the Palestinian voice, and obliterate all evidence of Palestinian existence. Such endeavors could be framed within the concept of “Nakba Memoricide” introduced by the Israeli new historian Ilan Pappé, which refers to “the systematic erasure of the expelled Palestinians and their miniholocaust from Israeli collective memory and the excision of their history and deeply rooted heritage in the land, and their destroyed villages and towns from Israeli official and popular history” (Masalha 10). Ilan Pappé admits the injustice committed against the Palestinians, “the deepest form of frustration for Palestinians has been that the criminal act these men were responsible for has been so thoroughly denied, and that Palestinian suffering has been so totally ignored, ever since 1948” (Ethnic Cleansing xiv). Nur Masalha also points to “toponymicide” as one of the primary means of the “de-Arabisation of the land”, which entails “the erasure of ancient Palestinian place names and their replacement by newly coined Zionist Hebrew toponymy” (10). The Zionist systematic eradication was not only confined to the land, people and language, but also of the Palestinian voice and story. The deliberate destruction and appropriation of “records, documentation and cultural heritage” of Palestinians, hindered them from imparting the truth of their documented existence to the world for over a period of twenty years |