An interesting about-face in acknowledging the Nakba (“catastrophe”) came this week from a journalist named Itamar Fleischman, a former spokesman for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. During a TV program on Channel 14 Fleischman said the following: “In the end what’s happening here is that the Arabs have forgotten the Nakba. And the time has come to begin reminding them of the Nakba.”
Even if the words are reversed (“The Arabs have forgotten … and they should be reminded”), it’s not every day that a Zionist Jew gets up and acknowledges the Palestinian tragedy so frankly.
The textbooks in the school system do not include acknowledgement of the Nakba, and present a superficial historical perspective that has educated generations of Israeli students to organized ignorance. The history of the Nakba is also blurred in the government’s perception and in the political thinking embodied in the model of “a Jewish and democratic state,” and involves tortuous justifications (“The Arabs started,” “They didn’t agree to the Partition Plan,” “They didn’t miss an opportunity,” “Their leaders ordered them to flee”).
The reason for the sweeping denial is the skeletons in Israel’s closet, skeletons that are threatening to be revealed and to upset its moral and righteous image. Denial of the Nakba is the mainstay of Israel’s government, and the skeletons it keeps in the closet are the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the massacres, the destruction of villages and cities and the theft of Palestinian land and property.
The word Nakba itself as a description of the Palestinian tragedy was almost unknown to Israelis until 2011, and thanks to a foolish law dubbed the Nakba Law, almost every Israeli home has been exposed to it as describing the Palestinian tragedy. At the time the specific use of the word “Nakba” refueled denial, which assumed a different face, for example in a vulgar manner in the ugly (and antisemitic) brochure called “Nakba Harta,” (Nakba Bullshit), which was distributed by Im Tirtzu.
It must be admitted that in the past two decades there has been a chipping away at the walls of denial, mainly thanks to revisionist streams in the historiography of 1948, new archival discoveries (including in Arabic) that describe the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the work of memorial organizations, most prominent among them Zochrot.
From these revelations we learned that even if we accept the dubious claim that in every war there is likely to be expulsion, in this case it is more than just a byproduct of the war, because even at the war’s conclusion, sovereign Israel prevented the return of the refugees to their homes, confiscated their land and looted their property. That’s why the concept of “ethnic cleansing” does not refer only to the 1948 war, but also to barring the refugees’ return after the establishment of Jewish sovereignty, and the erasure of Palestinian history. That is also one of the reasons for the claim that the Nakba never ended, and in Palestinian discourse it is dubbed “an ongoing Nakba.”
Fleischman’s words bring us a step forward in the recognition of the Nakba, and it is not surprising that the statement comes from the ranks of the far right. One of the fascinating anomalies in Israeli discourse is that the right always preceded the left on the question of acknowledging the Nakba, even if for the purpose of defiance and provocation.
About 10 years ago, when Itamar Ben-Gvir came to demonstrate in front of Tel Aviv University, claiming that it is situated on the ruins of Sheikh Munis, left-wing students and lecturers came out to remove the demonstrators. Bringing the 1948 question back for discussion undermines the idea of two states for two peoples based on a solution of the conflict without acknowledging the Nakba, and perceiving the conflict as though it began in 1967.
But to get back to Fleischman. Later on he doesn’t bother to tell us about the memory of the Nakba or its history. Instead, he presents us with his vision for the future.
“If they don’t come to their senses soon, and if they continue to try to murder our children, their next stop is to move to Jordan, or to the Al Yarmouk camp in Syria. That will happen if things continue this way. The great tragedy of the Arabs is … that we’ll simply take them in trucks, thrown them across the border, and that’s how it will end.”
Fleischman draws a straight line between the past and the future by means of the threat of expulsion, or by justifying the next expulsion. The threat of a second Nakba is the price tag attached to acknowledgement of the first Nakba. This threat of a Nakba has no expiration date. It will continue to accompany the Palestinians like the Sword of Damocles as long as they live and breathe. The only expiration date attached to the threat is the catastrophe. Israel’s recognition of the Nakba is the opportunity that will give rise to a discussion that will prevent the second Nakba.
The writer is a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University and editor-in-chief of Maktoob, a book series for Arabic prose and poetry in Hebrew, at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem