Palestine Nakba : Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern

The Palestine Nakba About the Author Nur Masalha is Professor of Religion and Politics and director of the Centre for Religion and History at St Mary’s University College, UK. He is also editor of Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal (Edinburgh University Press). The Palestine Nakba Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory nur masalha ZED BOOks London & New York The Palestine Nakba: D ecolo��nising H��istory, ��Narr��ating ��the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory was first published in 2012 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London n1 9jf, uk and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, usa www.zedbooks.co.uk Copyright © Nur Masalha 2012 The right of ��Nur Masalha�� to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Designed and typeset by illuminati, Grosmont in ITC Bodoni Twelve Index by John Barker Cover designed by www.alice-marwick.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available isbn 978 1 84813 972 5 eb Contents acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Zionism and European Settler-Colonialism 19 2 The Memoricide of the Nakba: Zionist-Hebrew Toponymy and the De-Arabisation of Palestine 88 3 Fashioning a European Landscape, Erasure and Amnesia: The Jewish National Fund, Afforestation and Green-washing the Nakba 120 4 Appropriating History: Looting of Palestinian Records, Archives and Library Collections, 1948–2011 135 5 Post-Zionism, the Liberal Coloniser and Hegemonic Narratives: A Critique of the Israeli ‘New Historians’ 148 6 Decolonising History and Narrating the Subaltern: Palestinian Oral History, Indigenous and Gendered Memories 205 7 Resisting Memoricide, Reclaiming Memory: Nakba Commemoration among Palestinians in Israel 229 Epilogue: The Continuity of Trauma 251 references 258 index 279 Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the intellectual and emotional support of my family and friends. First, I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have encouraged me over the years and help me, directly and indirectly, with ideas, conversations, criticism, material, logistics and moral support, including Ahmad Sa’di, Sherna Berger Gluck, Ilan Pappé, Isabelle Humphries, Oren Ben-Dor, Mary Grey, John Docker, Duncan Macpherson, Claire Norton, Mark Donnelly, Ghada Karmi, Isma‘el Abu-Sa‘ad, Seif D’ana, David Evans, Sari Hanafi, Saad Chedid, Keith Hammond, As’ad Ghanem, Abbas Shiblak, Ronit Lentin, Haim Bresheeth, Rahela Mizrahi, Bernard Regan, Colin South and Sam Kuruvilla. At Zed Books I am particularly indebted to editors Jakob Horstmann and Tamsine O’Riordan for their comments and practical help. Last but not least, I owe enormous gratitude to my wife Dr Stephanie Cronin, a highly original historian of the modern Middle East, and my daughter Maryam Masalha for their tremendous enthusiasm and emotional support. Stephanie, in particular, helped me with brilliant ideas and sharp comments without which this volume would not have been completed. Any credit for this book should be shared with Stephanie and the people above, but all shortcomings are mine alone. Introduction 1948 was the year of the Palestine Nakba (Catastrophe), the uprooting of the Palestinians and the dismemberment and de- Arabisation of historic Palestine. In the course of the 1948 war and immediate post-Nakba period the name ‘Palestine’ was wiped off the map. In 2012 Palestinians commemorate the 64th anniversary of the Nakba, which is a key date in Palestinian collective memory and the most traumatic event in the history of the Palestinian people. The rupture of 1948 and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine are central to both the Palestinian society of today and Palestinian social history and collective identity. Resisting ethnic cleansing and politicide has been a key feature of the modern history of the Palestinians as a people. In Politicide: Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (2003), Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling (1939–2007) defines the ‘politicide’ of the Palestinian people as the gradual but systematic attempt to cause their annihilation: ‘the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political and economic entity’. Politicide, Kimmerling asserts, has been present throughout Zionism’s struggle with the Palestinians before, during and after the 1948 Nakba. Politicide also epitomised the settler-colonial policies and actions of General Ariel Sharon against the Palestinians. Kimmerling writes: 2 The Palestine Nakba The Israeli state, like many other immigrant-settler societies, was born in sin, on the ruins of another culture, one which suffered politicide and a partial ethnic cleansing, even though the new state did not succeed in annihilating the rival aboriginal culture as many other immigrant-settler societies have done. (2003: 214–15) As Chapter 1 will show, for decades Zionists themselves used terms such as ‘colonisation’ (hityashvut) to describe their project in Palestine — a project which resulted in the creation of a state in 1948 by the destruction of a country. 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. The dismantling of Palestinian society was carried out as an integral part of the infamous Plan Dalet, a prime objective of which was the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages (Masalha 1992; Pappé 2006: 128; see also Khalidi 1988: 3–37). This plan was accompanied by a series of atrocities, of which the massacre of Dayr Yasin in April 1948 is the most notorious. From the territory occupied by Israel in 1948–49, about 90 per cent of the Palestinians were driven out — many by psychological warfare and/or military pressure and a large number at gunpoint. The 1948 war simply provided the op- portunity for the creation of an enlarged Jewish state on most of historic Palestine. It concentrated Zionist minds and provided the security, military-strategic and immigrant-settler-demographic explanations and justifications for ‘purging’ the Jewish state. The standard Zionist solution for the indigenous inhabitants of the land was predicated on the claim for monopolised Jewish ownership of and Zionist sovereignty over the ‘land of the Bible’ (Masalha 1997). As Chapters 1, 2 and 3 will show, much of the Palestinian material culture, landscape, toponymy and geography, which had survived the Latin Crusades, were obliterated by the Israeli state — a state created in the name of the Hebrew Bible by a New Hebrew Man and his European settler-colonial community (the Yishuv) that emigrated to Palestine in the period between 1882 and 1948. The Israeli state first took over the land of the 750,000 refugees, who were barred from returning; Jewish im- migrants were settled in homes and neighbourhoods belonging Introduction 3 to Palestinian refugees. In order to present European colonialism as a continuation of an ancient Jewish ownership of the land, the historic Arabic names of geographical sites were replaced by newly coined modern Hebrew names, some of which resembled biblical names. The invention and mobilisation of the ethnocentric paradigm of ‘promised land–chosen people’ — and the myth that the Hebrew Bible provides for the Zionists sacrosanct ‘title deed’ to the land of Palestine signed by God — became a key tool in Zionist settler-colonial and ethnic cleansing policies in Palestine. The myth of Jewish ‘return’ after two thousand years of exile and the deep-seated inclination among Zionists to see Palestine as a country without its indigenous inhabitants (the infamous Zionist slogan ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’) were always potent rallying calls for Zionist colonisation of Palestine (Masalha 2007). The Nakba is the turning point in the modern history of Palestine — that year over 500 villages and towns and a whole country and its people disappeared from international maps and dictionaries. This sudden shattering of Palestinian society (Falah 1996: 256–85; Abu-Lughod 1971: 139–63; Hadawi 1967; Khalidi 1992a; Kamen 1987: 453–95; Masalha 1992, 2003, 2005) is what made the Nakba a key date for the Palestinian people — a year of traumatic rupture in the continuity of historical space and time in Palestinian history (Masalha 2005; Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007; Matar 2011: 12). A society that had existed as far as human memory can go back disappeared during a few months; the homeland, the place of residence, the land — a major source of wealth, dignity and influence — and the physical and cultural environment, the validity and endurance of which Palestinians had never questioned, turned out to be most insecure. (Sa’di 2005: 7–26) The Nakba, in the words of French theorist of memory Pierra Nora (1996), has become the key Palestinian ‘site of memory’ (lieux . In All that Remains (1992: xvii–xx), Walid Khalidi, relying on the Palestine Index Gazetteer (1945) and the Village Statistics (1945), both compiled by the British Mandatory authorities, listed 418 depopulated and destroyed villages. However, Salman Abu-Sitta’s figure of 531 includes 77 destroyed Bedouin villages in the south (2004: 71). See also Pappé 2006: xiii. 4 The Palestine Nakba de mémoire) — a site of trauma, dispossession and anger. The two anniversaries of the Nakba Day on 15 May and (since 1976) the Land Day on 30 March are the most important days on the Palestinian popular calendar of commemorations, of strikes, demonstrations, defiance and resistance. In the words of Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim, the dismantling of Palestinian society in 1948 was a form of war crime, catastrophe and politicide: ‘to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence in Palestine’.

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