I have just come back from Jerusalem, where I joined Palestinian and Israeli friends and colleagues commemorating the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, while Israelis were celebrating their 60th Independence Day.
Readers know by now that I am Israeli – I was born before the state (here’s giving away my age) and spent my youth in Israel. Yet at some stage I have shifted from what is described as a ‘normal Israeli childhood’ – complete with faith in the cause of Zionism – to oppositionist politics and support for the Palestinians under occupation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex and multifaceted, yet politicians often hide behind this complexity, shrugging their shoulders and saying that this is an ‘endless conflict’ with no easy resolution in sight. I joined a ‘march of return’ organised by Palestinian citizens of Israel (where they constitute 20 per cent of the citizenry) to the Galilee village of Saffuryya, which was destroyed in 1948, its inhabitants ‘cleansed’ by the Israeli forces and expelled. Saffuryya was one of the first Palestinian villages Israeli forces bombarded from the air.
Like other villages in the vicinity of Nazareth, the people of Saffuryya fled to the city – today 60 per cent of Nazareth’s residents are internal refugees who were made to watch Jewish settlers emptying their houses, occupying them and slowly turning their village into an Israeli collective agricultural settlement that they called Zippori. Among the participants in the march of return were the old refugees from Saffuryya, their children and grandchildren. It was an uplifting yet sad experience. But it was an orderly march. The young carried placards and chanted slogans vowing never to forget and to return, the old shed tears, while the children donned T-shirts with the Palestinian flag and waved symbolic keys, all listening to the speeches and songs. On the way back, the Israeli police were waiting for the marchers, alongside some right-wing Israeli counterdemonstrators, and within minutes the quiet, dignified march turned to chaos as the police beat the marchers, with the pretext of preventing them from marching on the highway. Palestinians cannot forget the loss of their lands and property.
That land and property – taken over by Israeli Jews (since 1948 no new Arab settlement has been established, as Palestinians own a mere three per cent of public lands, which are administered for the entire ‘Jewish nation’, including Jews who have never set foot in Israel) – stares them in the face, reminding them of their loss. Remembering catastrophe is seen as healing the pain. But memory is a double-edged sword when the memory of the victims counteracts the memory of the victors who were themselves victims of antisemitism and Nazi extermination only a few years before the 1948 war.
But the Palestinians are not mere victims. They are determined to keep the memory alive, and vow to return. Indeed, the right of return remains a contested issue even in practices of commemoration by those Israeli Jewish sympathisers with the Palestinian cause. This June, a conference will be held in Haifa by a group of Palestinians and Israelis w o r k - i n g towards a one-state solution – a secular democratic state, which will no longer privilege the Jewish state and will unmask its claim to be both ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic’.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann.
