rethinking the nakba

8/22/2019 Rethinking the Nakba

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Rethinking the NakbaAuthor(s): Elias KhouryReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 250-266Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662741 .

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Rethinking the Nakba

Elias Khoury

In The Orchard(1972), the Israeli writer Benjamin Tammuz reformu-

lated the image of the land as the arena of the struggle in Palestine.1 In this

symbolic novella, the Israeli writer tries to go beyond the image of the Arab

in the Israeli literature as a mute shadow. The mute in this novella is Luna,

the woman who symbolizes the land, and the struggle between the two

brothers who are her lovers results in their deaths and her sons appropri-ation of the motherland.

The highly symbolic style in Tammuzs work overshadows the magic

elements in the tale. The memoir of the narrator shows the limits of sym-

bolism and how the story of pain in the Palestinian theater is erased by a

poor imitation of the Old Testament myth of Abraham and his two wives

and sons. In the novella Ishmael and Isaac take the names of Obadiah

(Abdullah) and Daniel, two brothers born to a Russian German father, the

first from a Muslim Turkish mother and the second from a Jewish Russianmother. Both meet in the orchard of Mahomet Effendi, a Turkish land

owner in Jaffa, who has an adopted girl whose origins are vague: was she a

Jewish or a Muslim Arab? No one knows. The fight between the two broth-

ers for the woman, who takes the shape of a mythical character, ends with

their deaths, and their mother becomes pregnant by her Palmachi son.

One can read this novella as a new version of A. B. Yehoshuas story

Facing the Forests.2 The same dream of fire and the same ambiguities veil

the story of the indigenous Palestinians. In Facing the Forests not only is

the nameless Palestinian called an Arab but the name of his original village

1. See Benjamin Tammuz, The Orchard, trans. Richard Flantz (Providence, R.I., 1984).

2. See A. B. Yehoshua, Facing the Forests, in The Continuing Silence of a Poet: TheCollected Stories of A. B. Yehoshua (Syracuse, N.Y., 1998).

Critical Inquiry38 (2012)

2012 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/12/3802-0007$10.00. All rights reserved.

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disappears with the village itself under the forest, whereas in Tammuzs

novella the Palestinian is not even an Arab. Rather, he is the son of a

Turkish mother, and the identity of his people is vague. But the interesting

development here is the woman who resembles the orchard, or the bayyara

in Arabic. This woman is mute, and she refuses throughout the novel to

speak with her husband, a Russian immigrant, though there are signs that

she speaks with her Muslim lover. What is sure is that she speaks with her

son, a new Jew, an Israeli kibbutznik and soldier, who inherits his two

fathers by his sword.

The Arab or Muslim is not mute in The Orchard, and he is not the ghost

of the Arab twins Khalil and Aziz, haunting the dreams of Hanna with rape

in My Michaelby Amos Oz (1968). He is a partner and an enemy, and his

death declares the new Jew the legitimate heir of the mother and the land.3

The twins in Ozs novel are ghosts of a vague childhood memory of a

gloomy and dark Jerusalem, whereas the Arab in Facing the Forests is

represented as a man whose tongue was cut and whose memories can only

express themselves through the fire that will eat the trees, an agent for the

young Jewish scholar to discover the land and appropriate it.

In Tammuzs novella, the land is mute. Luna cannot speak for her-

self, and her appropriation by the son, who will become her true lover, is

accomplished by the fire of two consecutive wars: the war of1948 that theIsraelis call the war of independence and that the Palestinians view as their

nakba, or disaster, and the invasion of Egypt by the Israeli army in 1956

with the British and French troops in the Suez campaign.

The question of muteness is not only a literary problem; it is an integral

part of a literary paradigm. One must note that this way of seeing the

struggle in Palestine was also loaded with direct symbolism in Palestinian

literature. The first Palestinian novella narrating aspects of the nakba was

written by Ghassan Kanafani and published in1963

, the same year Yehosh-uas novella was published. It was loaded with a similarly heavy allegorical

aspect. Men in the Sun relates the story of three Palestinian generations

in search of individual salvation, who die tragically before obtaining the

3. See Amos Oz, My Michael(London, 1972).

E L I A S K H O U R Y is a Lebanese novelist and the editor of the Journal of

Palestine Studies. He is Global Distinguished Professor in the Department of

Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University. Novels that have

been translated into English include Little Mountain (1977), The Gates of the City

(1981), The Journey of Little Gandhi (1989), The Kingdom of Strangers (1993), Gate

of the Sun (1998), Yalo (2002), and As Though She Were Sleeping(2011).

Critical Inquiry / 2012 251


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chance to escape the water tank in which they were hiding in order to be

smuggled to Kuwait.4

How can one understand this similarity in both literatures? One can

argue that this allegorical weight was not the case in Israeli literature. I will

refer to the major novella of S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh (1949), as a realistic

testimony of the war of 1948.5 I have argued that this novella is a very

important and impressive work, and it is a rare demonstration of the abil-

ity of literature to cross the walls of dominant representations. On the

other hand, Khirbet Khizeh respects lines that cant be crossed. The Pales-

tinian peasants who were driven out from their village are voiceless; they

are a part of a landscape that was in violent transformation during the war,

and their role in the story is limited to biblical paradigm, where they re-

mind the Jews of their need for redemption and give them the possibility ofhaving their own Jews.

This literary work was unique in Israeli literature of the war generation,

and when the story is related by the next generation of writers they keep the

limits and lines drawn by Yizhar. One can argue that relating the story of a

human tragedy in such an indirect way is a demonstration of the muteness

of language facing the cruelty of history. But let us try to define this notion

of muteness. Is language mute? What is the meaning of a literature written

without a tongue? I will try in this paper to read the Palestinian nakbathrough this situation of muteness that creates the status of post-1948 Pal-

estinians as Jews of the Jews.

Literature is not and cannot be a historical reference, and all the novels

and poems, both Israeli and Palestinian, that relate fragments of the nakba

cant be treated as documents, but they can be conceived as mirrors of

trends in the ideological scene. Knowing that these mirrors are part of the

history of the genre, one must not neglect literary tendencies and schools

of thought. In this sense we cant study the early works of Oz and Yehoshuaand Kanafani without understanding the huge impact of French existen-

tialism on the world literary scene. On the other hand the ideological

approaches, the Canaanite movement in Israel, and the revival of Marxist

realism in the Arab world give us a better understanding of the works of

Tammuz, Kanafani, and Emile Habibi.

I suggest that The Orchardplays a major role in clarifying the mute-

ness of language. First, we have the binding of Isaac (the akeda) as a

theme of sacrifice and victimization. Second, the reference to Luna, the

moon goddess, is essential. She is the ageless mother who embodies the

4. See Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (Cairo, 1991).5. See S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh (London, 2011).

252 Elias Khoury / Rethinking the Nakba


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histories of the two brothers, an archetype. Third, the feud between the

two brothers covers real history with myths. Questions like who the real

lover and father are, who is right and who is wrong are rendered mean-

ingless the moment the Palmachi son kills his uncle/father and makeslove to his mother.

The new Israeli is the issue, not the Jew. Daniels words at the end of the

novella are a hopeless scream. The Jew dies in the orchard hoping to meet

the shadow of his dead Muslim brother, but his voice echoes emptiness.

You see that the orchard serves as a cover and hiding place for all

sorts of things that have no justice in them, said Daniel. . . . Yes, no

justice in them, he repeated his words firmly. I came to the land of my

fathers so that I could live a life of justice and honesty, and look, whathave I done? I have made a dark orchard, a sanctuary for wrongdoers.

I murdered my brother in the orchard. . . .

Perhaps burn it, Daniel whispered. If we burn it, bare trunks will

remain, and it will be possible to see from one end to the other, and

everything will be completely transparent and clear again.6

The orchard does not burn, as in the case of Facing the Forests, and the

fire of Yehoshua purifies no one. On the contrary, it becomes part of theconquest of the land through appropriating it and inheriting a map with

the traces of fire.

The allegorical nature of this novella gives the narrator a kind of free-

dom that permits him to erase the Palestinian from the map of the land.

Obadiah is not a Palestinian; he is half Jewish, half Turkish. And the dis-

pute with his brother is demonstrated in the frame of the Canaanite ap-

proach about the Hebraic people. The nonexistent Palestinian is not a

small detail here; it is the issue that dominates the whole approach.The Palestinian writer Anton Shammas was obliged to redraw the twins

Khalil and Aziz in My Michaelas the deaf-mute sons of Surraya Said in his

novel Arabesques.7 The struggle between the victor and the defeated be-

comes about which of them will be the storyteller.

The irony of deafness is a metaphor of the muteness in the Israeli story.

Oz frames the conflict as a struggle between two absolute justices: As I see

it the confrontation between the people that returns to Zion and the Arab

inhabitants of the country is not like a western film or saga, but like a

6. Tammuz, The Orchard, p. 84.7. See Anton Shammas, Arabesques (Berkeley, 2001).



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tragedy. Tragedy is not a conflict between light and darkness, between

justice and crime; it is a clash between total justice and total justice.8

This definition of the struggle erases the notion of crime, and, instead of

producing a human image of the enemy, it falls into stereotypes and makesthe other into a window to inner psychological worries on one hand and a

mere part of the landscape on the other. Khalil and Aziz become night-

mares, and their inability to speak leaves the story incomplete. Hilmy in

The Smile of the Lamb, by David Grossman, is different. He is nature in-

carnated, but this difference does not take him far from the paradigm of

Israeli literature. He plays the role of the agent in the story of the lamb. Yuri

becomes his son, and Katzman pays the price.9 Although Grossmans

novel is written in the frame of the occupation of the West Bank after theSix Days War and has very little to do with the deep questions of justice

and justifying the creation of the Jewish state, it couldnt escape the

template of the akeda and was unable to give the Palestinian his own

distinct voice.

The muteness of literature is part of the muteness of history or, in other

words, part of the inability of the victim to write the story. Anton Shammas

formulated the struggle as a struggle related to the storyteller. Whoever

owns the story and the language will own the land because, in the words ofthe great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, land is inherited like lan-

guage.10

The journey from Tammuzs The Orchard to The Land of Sad Or-

anges, as Palestine is named by Ghassan Kanafani, was long.11 The Pales-

tinian story suffers the trauma of the nakba and tries to find its own voice

through symbols, metaphors, and parody. I want to single out the major

role of poetry in this process, especially the poems of Darwish. Darwish not

only unearths the invisible Palestinian name from under the rubble of thenakba, he also tells its story. In his long autobiographical poem Why Did

You Leave the Horse Alone, the poet is a storyteller who structures the

narrative of the nakba by creating the epic of the defeated.

But we can also argue that the Israeli is not represented in the Palestin-

ian story. Here we have to admit that in the majority of this literature this

8. Quoted in Gilas Ramras-Rauch, The Arab in Israeli Literature (Bloomington, Ind., 1989),p. 149.

9. See David Grossman, The Smile of the Lamb (New York, 2003).

10. Quoted in Amal Jamal, Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel: The Politics of Indigeneity

(New York, 2011), p. 104.

11. See Kanafani, The Land of Sad Oranges, in Men in the Sun and Other PalestinianStories.



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is true, but there are three elements that will challenge this assumption

profoundly.

1. The infiltration of biblical myths in Palestinian poetry.

2. Kanafanis major novel Returning to Haifa (1969), in which frag-ments of the nakba are narrated and in which the Arab reader

meets the Holocaust survivor Miriam, who embodies the Jewish

tragedy.12

3. The emergence of Rita as a stable figure of the lover in the poetry

of Darwish. An Israeli girl thus occupies the love myth in modern

Arabic poetry.

What I want to point out here is that literature is also an arena of

misunderstanding. The absence of the Palestinian in modern Israeli liter-ature and his presence as a ghost embodies all the problems of this long

conflict.

The Palestinians call this conflict the nakba or catastrophe. The term

was coined by Constantine Zurayk, a Syrian historian and one of the in-

tellectual father figures of the Arab national movement. The term was very

problematic; its philological root has the connotation of a natural catas-

trophe. Many intellectuals refused this term, arguing that it liberates Pal-

estinian leadership and Arab governments from direct responsibility forthe defeat. The critics of Zurayk had a major point, but words have their

own histories, and when a word becomes an untranslatable proper name,

we have to try to understand the wisdom of language.

In The Meaning of the Nakba, published in 1948 before the end of the

war in Palestine, Zurayks idea was that the creation of Israel was the major

and most dangerous challenge facing the Arab world in the twentieth cen-

tury. His modern and rational approach was an early alert to the Arab

elites, declaring that facing the nakba could only be possible through rad-

ical changes in all aspects of Arab life.13

Zurayks approach was part of the discourse of al-Inqilab, a term fre-

quently used by Arab nationalists under Ottoman rule that became pop-

ularized by Michel Aflaq in Fi Sabil al-Bath.14 This ambiguous term means

something between a coup and a revolution and took the form of contin-

uous military coups following the Egyptian model of1952. The creation of

military dictatorships led the Arab world to a situation of political misery.

12. See Kanafani, Returning to Haifa, in Palestines Children: Returning to Haifa and Other

Stories, trans. Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley (Boulder, Colo., 2000).

13. See Constantine K. Zurayk, The Meaning of Disaster, trans. R. Bayly Winder (Beirut,1956).

14. See Michel Aflaq, Fi Sabil al-Bath (Beirut, 1963).



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The disastrous defeat of1967 led Zurayk to publish a new version of his

book, leaving the questions of the first book without answers. 15

Zurayks analyses, with all their prophetic elements, neglected the na-

ture of the nakba. His hypothesis was built upon two elements:

1. The nakba was the outcome of backwardness that must be replaced

by modern rationality.

2. The nakba is a historical event that happened once in 1948. It is a

national catastrophe, and the nation (that is, the Arab nation) is

responsible for finding an adequate answer to it.

Although Zurayk analyzed the Zionist movement as a colonial project,

his understanding of the Jewish problem and the impact of the Holocaust

was schematic. He did not understand that the new world order after theSecond World War and the interests of the two emerging super powers

gave the Zionist project many elements of superiority and made it possible.

But the main point in Zurayks analysis was the hypothesis that the nakba

was a moment in history and that after 1948 the Palestinians and the Arabs

began their new awakening in order to face this challenge. Although Zu-

rayks book was written during the Palestinian War of1948, it did not take

into consideration the fact that the Zionist victory in 1948 was the begin-

ning of the process and not its end.Arab nationalist thought stayed under the influence of this book, and

the nationalist strategy led by Egypts Gamal Abdel Nasser concentrated

upon accepting the borders of the cease-fire in the hope that one day the

Arab military force would solve this problem.

That day never came. On the contrary, the spectacular defeat of Egypt,

Syria, and Jordan and the occupation of all of Palestine in 1967 demon-

strated that 1948was the date of the new beginning of the Israeli project and

that the national discourse understood this major turning point in the

history of the Arab world with the tools of the past. Edward Saids The

Question of Palestine can be seen as part of this lineage of thought that

began with Zurayks small book.16 But Saids book must be understood as

a radically new approach to the question of Palestine. Zurayk understood

the nakba as a historical event that must be the base for a new Arab aware-

ness of history. The author ofOrientalism analyzes it in a global perspective

and reads it in the context of the colonial movement of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries and as a point of departure for what Said used to call

the idea of Palestine.

15. See Zurayk, Mana al nakba Mujadadan (The Meaning of the Nakba Once Again)

(Beirut, 1967).16. See Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York, 1979).



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The Question of Palestine is a concrete political application of his Ori-

entalism. Putting the idea of Palestine in the heart of world history gives it

a universal dimension and makes it a reference point for justice and free-

dom. The Zionist conquest, according to Said, is part of a global European

colonial project, in which the Zionist movement adopted the colonial dis-

courses and practices.

Palestine is a field of struggle between presence and interpretation. The

Palestinian presence is a victim of Israeli interpretation. The victory of

interpretation through military force led to the catastrophe. The negation

of Palestinian presence in the land was a reincarnation of Orientalist dis-

course, covered by a progressive and socialist terminology built around the

myth of the kibbutzim.

It is one of the major ironies of history that the victims of Europeanracism and anti-Semitism have adopted the racial discourse of their vic-

timizers to the extent that the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who was a

leading figure in the New Historicist movement in Israel, identifies with

the Roman Empire, comparing the struggle of the Romans against the

barbarians to Israels struggle in the so-called war on terrorism.

In his novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, Emile Habibi uses

parody in order to forge a popular personality with a combination of

intelligence and stupidity that incarnates the experience of the Palestinianminority in Israel.18 The Palestinian individual has to defend his pres-

ence in his country against the Israeli assumption of his absence. Most

of the critical readings of this book have given Saeed the central role. He

is the Palestinian Israeli par excellence. All his attempts to adjust and

collaborate are in vain. He is a tragic hero, and his humor is black, a

Palestinian Candide who mixes optimism with pessimism in order to

rationalize an irrational way of life.

In the mosque of al-Jezzar in Aka, Saeed meets the refugees from dif-ferent demolished villages in upper Galilee. The women and their children

who are waiting deportation in the mosque become the shadows of the

atrocities of the nakba that frames the three women of the novel: Yaad the

first, Yaad the second, and Bakia. These three women incarnate the process

of the nakba. The attempts to return by the two Yaads and the relationship

between Bakia and her secret blur the frontiers between the Palestinian

past and present and put the story in the context of an open tragedy.

How can we read the nakba today, and what is the place of memory in

17. See Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).

18. See Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist(Northampton, Mass.,2003).



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this reading? The realities of the nakba as an ethnic cleansing can no more

be neglected or negated after the works of the Palestinian historian Walid

Al Khalidy and the works of the Israeli New Historians. The ethnic cleans-

ing as incarnated by Plan Dalet is no longer a matter of debate among

historians, even when the new Zionist historians in Israel justify it as in-

dispensable.

On 14 February1948 during the 1948 war, the Palestinian village Sasa

was invaded by the Palmach, the elite unit of the Haganah, precursor to the

Israel Defense Forces, whose commander was Yigal Alon. The villagers did

not resist, but thirty-five houses were destroyed and sixty to eighty people

were killed. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe describes the incident, drawing on

a report by the commander of the battalion responsible for the attack,

Moshe Kalman.

The order was very clear: You have to blow up twenty houses and

kill as many warriors [read: villagers] as possible. Sasa was at-

tacked at midnightall the villages attacked under the Lamed-Heh

order were assaulted around midnight, recalled Moshe Kalman. The

New York Times (16 April 1948) reported that the large unit of Jewish

troops encountered no resistance from the residents as they entered

the village and began attaching TNT to the houses. We ran into an

Arab guard, Kalman recounted later. He was so surprised that he

did not ask min hada?, who is it?, but eish hada?, what is it? One

of our troops who knew Arabic responded humorously [sic] hada

esh! (this is [in Arabic] fire [in Hebrew]) and shot a volley into

him. Kalmans troops took the main street of the village and system-

atically blew up one house after another while families were still sleep-

ing inside.19

Are we speaking here about misunderstanding? Why did what in Arabicand fire in Hebrew become so essential in the events of the nakba?Were

the Palestinians unaware of the realities of the Zionist movement? Or were

they weak and unable to understand the difference between fire and lan-

guage? Most probably it was both a mixture of unawareness and weakness

and a feeling of betrayal and hopelessness.

The facts about 1948 are no longer contested, but the meaning of what

happened is still a big question. Was it a struggle between two absolute

rights, as Oz formulated it? Before tackling this issue, I want to point out

that I am questioning the approach of dealing with the nakba as a historical

event that happened in the past and once for all. My hypothesis is totally

19. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford, 2006), p. 77.



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different: what happened hasnt stopped happening for sixty-two years. It

is still happening now, in this moment.

In 1948, the Palestinians lost four main aspects of their lives:

1. They lost their land, which was confiscated by the newborn Israelistate. Eight percent of the Palestinian population was peasants who

became refugees, living in camps in the outskirts of different Arab

cities, in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Even in

Israel, the peasants of destroyed Arab villages became refugees in

other villages and had no right to return to their original homes,

although they had become citizens of the new state.

2. They also lost their cities. The three major coastal citiesJaffa,

Haifa, and Akawere occupied and their citizens evacuated. Jaffa,the biggest Palestinian harbor on the Mediterranean and the cul-

tural center of Palestine became a small, poor suburb of Tel Aviv.

Jerusalem was divided along new borders in 1948, and the Palestin-

ian neighborhoods of west Jerusalem were evacuated. Haifa faced

the implementation of the first Palestinian ghetto in Israel. Israeli

historian Tom Segev gave a full description of this process in The

First Israelis.20Aka became totally marginalized, and the historical

old city became the home of many Palestinian refugees. The de-

struction of the Palestinian cities left the Palestinians without anycultural reference and created a huge cultural vacuum. We had to

wait until the 1960s to witness the emergence of a new Palestinian

culture that arose in Haifa and Nazareth in the milieu ofAl Ittihad

newspaper (the organ of the Israeli Communist Party edited by

Habibi) and in Beirut with the emergence of a new Palestinian

consciousness and Kanafani as its leading figure.

3. They lost their Palestinian name. Suddenly a whole people became

nameless and had no right to use their name and refer to their na-tional identity. This was one of the most painful elements of the

1948 war. One can argue that Palestine has never existed as an in-

dependent state. This is true not only for Palestine but also for

most of the countries of the region. But this land was known to

every one as the land of Palestine. Even in the Zionist documents,

this name was used. The people who inhabited this land are known

as Palestinians. Suddenly the name has vanished. The small Pales-

tinian minority in Israel were renamed Arabs of Ertz Israel by thenew authorities. The Palestinians of the West Bank that was an-

nexed to Jordan after the war of1948 became Jordanians, and the

20. See Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York, 1998).



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others who were scattered in Lebanon and Syria became simply

refugees.

Appropriating the name became a major issue with the emergence of a

new Palestinian literature in the 1960s. Darwishs Lover from Palestine(1966) insists on the name when the woman, who is also the incarnation of

the land, is called Palestinian several times, as if the name incarnates the

identity and will become the precondition of a political revival. This insis-

tence upon the name has become a major element in Palestinian literature

and takes many forms, for example, the voices of the peasants (Darwish),

the refugee (Kanafani), the intellectual (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra), the story-

teller (Shammas), and the popular hero (Habibi).

The name was totally regained after the Arab defeat of 1967, when thepan-Arab nationalist ideology began its agony and when the Palestinian

political movement found its homeland in exile with the Palestine Liber-

ation Organization.

4. They lost their story or the ability to tell their story. I want to refer

to the replacement of muteness by deafness in Yehoshuas Facing the

Forests and Kanafanis Men In the Sun. The narrator of the Israeli story

begins with the hypothesis that the Arab (this is how the Israeli Palestinian

is named) is mute, and his tongue was cut. On the other hand, the narratorof the Palestinian story ends his novel with the water-tank driver Abul

Khaizaran shouting, Why didnt they knock?

We know that the narrator of the Israeli story doesnt know Arabic.

What if his ignorance led him to suppose that the Arab is mute? The

muteness of the other who does not speak our language was part of a long

tradition in classical languages. The Arabs used to name someone who

doesnt speak Arabic a jami, or mute. Maybe the inability of the Israeli

to understand the Palestinian led him to call him the other mute. While in

Kanafanis story there is no reason to believe the narrator; he is sure of

something he cant prove. Who told him that the three poor Palestinians

didnt knock? Even if they did knock, he was unable to hear them because

he was inside a closed room with the heavy sound of air-conditioning,

trapped in a silly investigation by a Kuwaiti policeman about his sexual

adventures in Basra. The impotence of Abu Al Khaizaran will take on its

full meaning with this last trap of deafness.

The Egyptian filmmaker Tawfic Saleh in his adaptation of Men in the

Sun changed the ending of his film The Dupes (1972). In the last part of

this interesting film, we see the knocking. Saleh justified the change he had

made with the changing political reality and the emergence of the Pales-

tinian resistance movement. The reading by the film director was very



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faithful to the novel, and this film, with its realistic structure and the flu-

idity of the flashbacks, was considered the beginning of a new wave in

modern Arabic film production. What Saleh missed was the possibility of

interpreting the symbol through the realities of the present; thus, we can

introduce the hypothesis that the Palestinian became mute in the story

because the Israeli narrator didnt want to hear him and/or because the

Kuwaiti policemen and the Palestinian driver developed deafness as a re-

sult of their impotence.

The two stories written by Kanafani and Yehoshua echo each other.

Symbolism that dominates the two works is a sign of the difficulties facing

the unfolding of the story of Palestine not because the story is not there but

because there is nobody to hear it. The misunderstanding in the village of

Sasa was based upon one word, Eish; it was both the question and theanswer. The astonished peasant didnt realize that answering him with his

own question was not a sign of misunderstanding but a sign of death.

Death will cover the stories of the nakba with silence. The symbolic repre-

sentation of the Palestinian in Israeli literature and/or his status as a

shadow or a young boy or a Bedouin will make his story invisible and will

destroy his or her ability to find an audience. This absent audience is due to

the major fact that the Palestinian is the victim of the victim. His tragedy is

covered by another tragedy, and his victimizer is the victim of Europeanracism, who was taken to the gas chamber in a special historical moment of

madness when the Nazis were trying to impose the Final Solution.

We can argue that the Zionist movement has nothing to do with the

Holocaust victims and survivors; it is a colonial movement, based upon

combining modern nationalism with a mythical story. This is true but not

reasonable. Historians of Zionism tell us that the movement dominated

the Jewish consciousness only after the Holocaust and because of it. The

Western world found that washing its hands of Jewish blood with Pales-tinian blood was the easiest way to break with the atrocities of the Second

World War. The Palestinians were alone. Nobody was ready to hear the

story of their pain. Even the voices of Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt,

who defended the idea of a binational state and protested the transfer of

native Palestinians, were neglected and not accepted.

Segev relates the story of Deir Yassin, the Palestinian village that was

massacred on 9 April 1948 by the Ergun. Buber tried to convince the Israeli

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to keep the village empty as a memorial

site, but the demand of the Jewish philosopher was refused, and today one

finds an Israeli mental hospital built on the site of the crime.

When Jean-Paul Sartre visited the refugee camps in Gaza in 1967, he

gave Arab intellectuals a major lesson on the meaning of silence. In the



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fifties and sixties, he was the model of the engaged intellectual. His popu-

larity among Arab intellectuals was huge, especially after he took a position

against the French war in Algeria and wrote an introduction to Frantz

Fanons The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre refused to speak; no one can

forget that he visited Egypt under the condition of the release of all the

leftist intellectuals who were imprisoned by Nassers regime. But when the

time came to criticize Israel, he was unwilling or unable to speak.

No one was ready to hear. Even in the Arab world, where Palestinian

refugees became a reminder of defeat, the Palestinians were silenced.

There, the nakba took new forms.

The Palestinians rebuilt their lives through imagination; they renamed

the alleys of miserable refugee camps after their destroyed villages. Their

silence was their secret way to make a way of life from their loss. The

occupation/unification of all of Palestine, that is, the West Bank and Gaza

in 1967, witnessed the emergence of the Palestinian national movement

and the major role of Palestinian literature in creating a new image of

Palestinian identity, with which fragments of the stories of1948 begantobe

told and heard.

The specificity of the Palestinian nakba lies not only in the loss of the

four major elements of Palestinian life that I tried to analyze briefly but in

the fact that it is a continuous tragedy, a catastrophe without borders inspace or limits in time. The nakba is taking place now in Palestine; it is not

history to be remembered but a present threatened by interpretation, to

use the words of Edward Said.

We can suggest a typology of this continuous nakba and speak about

its ways inside Palestine and in neighboring countries, thus presenting

a history of the region with its wars and civil wars, occupation and

oppression.

I want to suggest an outline that permits us to read the different pages ofthe nakba from the expulsion of1948 to the Wall and settlements in the

West Bank and the expulsions that are taking place nowadays in Jerusalem.

1. When we think of the confiscation of Palestinian land from 1948

onwards, two villages, Akrat and Birim, are an example of the des-

tinies of those who stayed as strangers in their homeland and lived

under military rule as second-class citizens in the democratic Jew-

ish state of Israel until 1965.

2. As the infiltrators were limited by Israelis, Palestinian peasants

tried to return across the borders in order to rejoin their house-

holds or to collect their harvest. Habibi gave us examples of these

cases in The Secret Life of Saeed, and Darwishs autobiographical



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text In the Presence of Absence relates his personal story as a boy of

eight when he crossed the Lebanese border with his parents and

siblings to discover that their village al-Birwa was demolished.

3. The refugee camps were structured as a combination of slums and

ghettos, and the Palestinians suffered various kinds of oppression

in different Arab countries (in politics, work, education, travel, and

so on).

4. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and the new

structure of settlementsincluding the Wall, the continuous con-

fiscation of land and property, the uprooting of trees, laying siege

to villages, and so onmake the occupation a continuation of the

war of1948. Even the retreat from Gaza became a way to create a

ghetto under siege and fire.

5. The massacres in Palestinian campsJordan (1970), Lebanon

(1975), Tal Al Zaatar camp (1976), and Shatila and Sabra (1982)

are a continuation of the massacres of1948.

This schematic outline is full of stories of pain and loss; thus, the idea

that when we speak about the nakba we are dealing with the events and

atrocities that happened in 1948 is misleading. The nakba is not only a

memory; it is a continuous reality that has not stopped since1948

. Dealingwith it as a history of the past is a way to cover up the struggle between

presence and interpretation that has not stopped since 1948. Memory can

be a trap, and the nakba as only a memory is the biggest trap that can

mislead rational analysis of the Palestinian present.

We dont need to prove what is now considered a historical fact. What

two generations of Palestinian historians and their chronicles tried to

prove became an accepted reality after the emergence of the Israeli new

historians. There is no longer any point in negating the nuanced facts

revealed by Morris in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947

1949 (1987). These nuanced facts became solid ones through the works of

other historians, mainly Pappes master work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Pal-

estine (2006), in which he proves that there was a master plan of expulsion,

takes us to the Red House, and reveals the details of Plan Dalet. No one will

argue about names like Operation Dani or Operations Hiram and Dekel.

Many stories of massacres, rape, and expulsion are known, and many other

stories are still to be revealed: Tantura, Safsaf, Ein al-Zeitun, Sasa, Shaab,

Kabri, Abou Shousha, Ailaboun, and so on.

Al Khalidy said in 1961 that Plan Dalet was a master plan of the conquest

of Palestine; Pappe led us in his book to the Red House in Tel Aviv, which

became the headquarters of the Haganah by the end of1947. In a meeting



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held in this house on 10 March 1947, the final touches were put on Plan

Dalet for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and in six months the mission

was completed. The Red House is not there anymore, but traces of what

happened in those six months are everywhere in the land of Palestine.

The memories of 1948 that were covered by the cynical negations of

official Israeli historiography are unveiled now, but there are signs that a

new wave of Israeli historiography is trying to justify what happened by

putting events in the frame of historical memories. Justification is prob-

lematic on an ethical level; nothing can justify ethnic cleansing and crimes

against humanity. The only possible justification, which is also immoral, is

to put these crimes in the realm of history. Who can judge history? One can

argue that we can learn lessons from history, but judging it morally has no

political implication.What we are witnessing now is the emergence of what one can call the

new Israeli Zionist history. Pappe analyzed this major transition based

upon a collective work entitled (in Hebrew) Israels War of Independence

1948 1949, which was edited by Alon Kadish, a former head of the history

department at the Hebrew University. What is interesting about this book

is its ethical approach. The atrocities of1948 are read in a theological ap-

proach that justifies the ethnic cleansing as a necessity to avoid a new

Shoah.Benny Morris has made a political revision to his revisionist history of

Israel. In an interview in 2004 he not only justified the ethnic cleansing of

1948 but also spoke about the possibilities of a new wave of Palestinian

transfers not only from the West Bank but also from Israel. His justifica-

tion was simple: I dont think that the expulsions of1948 were war crimes.

You cant make an omelet without breaking eggs; you have to dirty

your hands. . . . A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it.

When the choice was between destroying and being destroyed, it isbetter to destroy.21

This assumption contradicts another assumption, which Morris clearly

declares: expulsion was a precondition for the declaration of a Jewish state.

This has nothing to do with a threat but is the outcome of an offensive act

by the Israeli leadership: Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist . . . . If he

hadnotdonewhathedid,astatewouldnothavecomeintobeing.Thathas

to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Pal-

estinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

Morris goes a little further and criticizes the first Israeli prime minister

21. Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, and Interview with Benny Morris, Interview byAri Shavit, Haaretz, 9 Jan. 2004, www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Articles/Story1117.html



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for not accomplishing the job: I think he made a serious historical mis-

take in 1948. . . . If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and

cleansed the whole countrythe whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan

River. . . . this place would be quieter and know less suffering.22 The most

important idea in this interview is that the Israeli historian understands

that what he is dealing with is not the past but the present; this is why he

suggests putting the Palestinians in cages and predicts the coming transfer

that will finish the work Ben-Gurion left behind in 1948.

What Morris told us while defending the ethnic cleansing is that we are

not only speaking about the past but mainly about the present and the

future. The old Zionist discourse that interpreted the Palestinian presence

by negation is now in a new phase, admitting that this negation was a

planned act with a structured rationale and that this rationale clarifies whypeace, or what was called the peace process, was an illusion.

The justifications can vary between the fear of a new Holocaust and the

Islamophobia that treats Arabs and Muslims as the new barbarians threat-

ening Rome. But they arrive at the same conclusion: The nakba is simul-

taneously an Arab memory and an Israeli continuous action. Although by

new Israeli law the native Palestinians are forbidden from commemorat-

ing their nakba, the world must admit that what has happened and what is

happening now is a memory of the past that must be forgotten. The majorPalestinian error in the Oslo agreement was that the Palestinian surrender

presupposed that the nakba wasinthepast.Thisiswhythesurrenderofthe

Palestinian leadership was without any horizon and took the shape of a

trap. The nakba is a continuous process. Its major event was 1948, but it

never ended. It has gone through different phases and taken different

shapes. The Palestinians are absent, and/or both absent and present,

and/or barbarians dreaming of bloodshed and rape.

The image of Khalil and Aziz in My Michael is not the product of thehallucinations of Hanna but rather an archetype of the absent, mute Pal-

estinian. One can ask, what is the meaning of two absolute justices if one of

the two has no tongue? What is the meaning of the words when the voices

of the two brothers in The Orchardare melting inside a symbol that tran-

scends reality and heads towards myth and allegory?

My personal relationship with the nakba began through the long pro-

cess of work on my novel Gate of the Sun.23 I discovered that the love story

I wanted to write needed the background of events that took place in

northern Palestine in 1948. I felt that my job was to collect memories and

22. Ibid.23. See Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun, trans. Humphrey Davies (New York, 1998).



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write stories never written before. In this huge personal journey, I discov-

ered Palestine, a land I had never visited. But the secret that was revealed to

me, as it is the case with literature, in which the writer and the readers

discover the generosity of lifemy secret in Gate of the Sunwas that 1948

is not a year but a long period of time that began in that year and was

disguised in the names of the years that followed.

My novel was published in 1998 to narrate fifty years of the nakba, and

twelve years after the publication of my book I see the nakba as a process

without an end. I tried to create mirrors instead of allegories and meta-

phors; the allegory pretends to reflect reality, while mirrors reflect other

mirrors. My stories were mirrors of stories, and pain mirrored pain.

My hypotheses were that once we write the pain we push it to the realm

of memory and make from it a past that we can transcend in order to builda future. But the story betrayed my presuppositions; the protagonists did

not reveal their memories. On the contrary, they were living their present;

their stories were not the past but the present, and their pain was not the

memory of pain but the experience of their daily lives. This is why my

feeling is that GateoftheSun is an unfinished novel, and it will remain open

until the moment when this wound is healed.

I am neither a nihilist nor a pessimist. I think that the moment will come

when the peoples of the Mashreq will wake from this nightmare to discoverthat life is possible without wars and massacres and madness. Man is not

the slave of myths and ideologies, and the rights of minorities will only be

guaranteed in the region and by its peoples through democracy and the

respect of human rights.


rethinking the nakba

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