By Sol Stern
Thursday, February 23, 2023
Israel
will soon celebrate the 75th anniversary of its independence. Around the same
time, Palestinians will stage their annual Nakba Day, the official
commemoration held every year on May 15 to protest Israel’s creation. The
marking of this supposed “catastrophe” (nakba) will surely be a key
feature of the elite media discussion of Israel’s anniversary. As such, it will
represent an ongoing public-relations triumph for the Palestinians—and a
victory for deceit and disinformation.
For the
past quarter century, leaders of the Palestinian Authority have been insistent
that their people were innocent victims of a historically unprecedented crime
in 1948, a crime that is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the
Holocaust. Their account is an example of the phenomenon called the “big lie.”
Indeed, it is perhaps the most persistent big lie of the past 75 years. But
attention must be paid, since this putatively solemn act of national
remembrance will likely be used to launch violent demonstrations against the
Jewish state.
The
Nakba narrative depicts the founding of Israel as a catastrophe that resulted
in the dispossession of the land’s native people. Yasser Arafat, then the
president of the PA, invented Nakba Day on May 15, 1998, just as Israel was
celebrating its 50th anniversary. From his West Bank headquarters, Arafat read
out marching orders for the day over PA radio stations and public loudspeakers:
The Nakba has thrown us out of our homes and dispersed us around the
globe. Historians may search, but they will not find any nation subjugated to
as much torture as ours. We are not asking for a lot. We are not asking for the
moon. We are asking to close the chapter of Nakba once and for all, for the
refugees to return and to build an independent Palestinian state on our land,
our land, our land, just like other peoples.
Nine
Palestinians were killed that day. Hundreds more (including some Israelis) died
during Nakba Day riots over the subsequent quarter century.
Yet it
wasn’t the deadly violence that made the first Nakba Day historically
significant. Rather, at a time when the 1993 Oslo peace accords remained in
force and still offered an opportunity to achieve a “two-state solution” to the
conflict, Arafat decided to weaponize the Palestinian narrative into a
declaration of permanent war against Israel. The key element of his Nakba Day
speech was his claim that there were 5 million Palestinian refugees who had a
sacred “right of return” to their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and dozens of formerly
Arab cities, towns, and villages in Israel.
In
three-plus decades as Palestinian leader, Arafat failed to accomplish anything
constructive for his people. But Nakba Day did advance his goal of prolonging
the glorious struggle against Zionism. The PA now claims there are 7 million
refugees. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, is just as adamant that the
conflict must go on and on until all the refugees are granted the right to
return to their former homes in Israel. Abbas even offered an updated version
of the Nakba last summer when he publicly declared, in Germany,
that the Palestinians had suffered the equivalent of “50 Holocausts” at the
hands of the Jews.
Hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of Palestinians will express their rage over
Israel’s existence by joining Nakba Day riots in May. We can also expect an
upsurge of support for the 25th annual Nakba commemoration from the
international leftist coalition that celebrates the Palestinians as unique
victims of Western racism, colonialism, and Zionist perfidy. In street
demonstrations and on college campuses, activists will be chanting the slogan
that sums up the final goal of the Nakba narrative: “From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be free.”
The
Nakba has even entered the halls of the U.S. House of Representatives through a
resolution authored by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and endorsed by six of her
Democratic Party colleagues. The resolution calls on the U.S. government to
“commemorate the Nakba through official recognition and remembrance” and to
“reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise associate the United States
Government with denial of the Nakba.”
Their
fellow members of Congress need not worry about the danger of Nakba denial. The
problem is the reverse. All too many perfectly sensible people, including quite
a few liberal Israelis, seem willing to ignore the deadly implications of the
Nakba narrative for fear of being accused of insensitivity to another people’s
suffering.
If
“nakba” merely means catastrophe, then the word is a fitting one.
Unquestionably, Palestinians suffered a terrible human tragedy in 1948. Around
700,000 men, women, and children lost their ancestral homes, and Palestinian
civil society disintegrated. The refugees dispersed to the Jordanian-occupied
West Bank, the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, and neighboring Arab countries.
Ninety percent have since passed away, but around 2 million of their progeny
languish in dismal refugee camps. After 75 years, this giant remnant should be
resettled in new housing and compensated for their losses. Resettlement is
exactly how every other refugee catastrophe after World War II (including a
total of 13 million refugees in Europe alone) was solved.
But the
Nakba has more than one meaning. The version now promoted by Palestinian
leaders and their supporters assigns exclusive blame for the 1948 catastrophe
to the Jews, while proposing an absurd remedy that would mean suicide for the
Jewish state. And that is actually what the Palestinian narrative means now.
Supporters
of Israel are often asked to prove their decency by acknowledging the reality
of the Nakba. There’s no reason to shrink from that challenge. What’s needed is
a serious forensic examination of the various Palestinian narratives, their
truths, falsehoods, and their hatreds. The place to begin that inquiry is with
the very first Nakba text, published in Beirut 75 years ago.
II.
On August
5, 1948, not quite three months after the new state of Israel was invaded by
five Arab armies, a short volume titled Maana al-Nakba (later
translated as The Meaning of the Disaster) appeared in Beirut to
popular acclaim. The author was Constantine K. Zurayk, a distinguished
professor of Oriental history and vice president of the American University of
Beirut.
Zurayk
was the wunderkind of the Arab academic world. Born in Damascus in 1909 to a
prosperous Greek Orthodox family, he was sent off at 20 to complete his
graduate studies in the United States. Within a year he had obtained a master’s
from the University of Chicago. One year later, he added a Ph.D. in Oriental
languages from Princeton. He then returned to Beirut and the American
University.
Zurayk
soon became one of the leading advocates of the liberal, secularist variant of
Arab nationalism. After Syria won its independence in 1945, he was chosen to serve
in the new nation’s first diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C., and also
served with the Syrian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly.
Zurayk’s
book reflected the sense of outrage among the Arab educated classes over the
1947 UN partition resolution and the creation of the Jewish state. Zurayk’s
anger was even more personal, since he had participated in the UN deliberations
on the Palestine question. His 70-page book then became a reference point for
future pro-Palestinian historians and writers. Yoav Gelber, a prominent Israeli
historian of the 1948 war, cited Zurayk’s work when he told me he didn’t think
there was much new in Arafat’s 1998 Nakba Day declaration. “The Nakba was at
the basis of the Palestinian narrative from the beginning,” Gelber said.
“Constantine Zurayk coined the phrase in 1948.”
In
previous writings about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, I wasn’t able to
comment on Zurayk’s book. A limited-edition English translation of Maana
al-Nakba appeared in Beirut in 1956, but it was never published in the
United States. It was only recently that I found a rare copy in a university
library and finally read the real thing.
It was
not what I expected. The Meaning of the Disaster actually
isn’t about the tragedy of the Palestinian people. According to Zurayk, the
crime of the Nakba was committed against the entire Arab nation—a
romantic conception of a political entity that he and his fellow Arab
nationalists fervently believed in. And, it turns out, Zurayk was no champion
of an independent Palestinian state.
In an
introductory paragraph, Zurayk writes about “the defeat of the Arabs in
Palestine,” which he then calls “one of the harshest of the trials and
tribulations with which the Arabs have been afflicted
throughout their long history.” Zurayk’s only comment about Palestinian
refugees is that, during the fighting, “four hundred thousand or more Arabs [were]
forced to flee pell mell from their homes.” (All italics added.)
Zurayk
predicted that all Arabs would continue to be threatened by international
Zionism: “The Arab nation throughout its long history has never been faced with
a more serious danger than that to which it has today been exposed. The forces
which the Zionists control in all parts of the world can, if they are permitted
to take root in Palestine, threaten the independence of all the Arab lands and
form a continuing and frightening danger to their life.”
The
Arabs also faced the immense power of Western imperialism, according to Zurayk,
but this would prove merely a “temporary evil.” On the other hand, “the aim of
Zionist imperialism is to exchange one country for another, and to annihilate
one people so that another may be put in its place. This is imperialism, naked
and fearful in its truest color and worst form.”
Zurayk
not only insists that Jews have no national rights in Palestine, but he denies
the historic connection between the Jewish people and the ancient land of
Israel. “The Zionist Jews who are now immigrating to Palestine,” he writes,
“bear absolutely no relation to the semitic Jews.” To buttress this fake
history, Zurayk dredges up the discredited theory that the Eastern European
Jews were descended from Khazar tribes that converted to Judaism in the eighth
century.
Still,
Zurayk is left to wonder how the combined Arab armies, far outnumbering the
Jews, could have allowed the Zionists to achieve their military objectives in
Palestine. His answer, rife with anti-Semitic canards and conspiracy theories,
is worth quoting at length:
The causes of this calamity are not all attributable to the Arabs
themselves. The enemy confronting them is determined, has plentiful resources,
and great influence. Years, even generations, passed during which he prepared
for this struggle. He extended his influence and his power to the ends of the
earth. He got control over many of the sources of power within the great
nations so that they were either forced into partiality toward him or submitted
to him.
Zionism
does not only consist of those groups and colonies scattered in Palestine; it
is a worldwide network, well prepared scientifically and financially, which
dominates the influential countries of the world, and which has dedicated all
its strength to the realization of its goal, namely building a national home
for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Zurayk’s
liberal, secular version of nationalism was partly nurtured in the United
States, where he lived for several years. But there’s nothing liberal about
Zurayk’s understanding of Jews and Zionism. His observations about American
Jews might have been written in the 1930s by Henry Ford or Father Charles
Coughlin:
No one who has not stayed in that country [the U.S.] and studied its
conditions can truly estimate the extent of this power or visualize the awful
danger of [Zionism]. Many American industries and financial institutions are in
the hands of the Jews, not to mention the press, radio, cinema and other media
of propaganda, or Jewish voters in the states of New York, Illinois, Ohio and
others which are important in presidential elections, especially these days
when the conflict between Democrats and Republicans is at a peak.
Not
content with depicting Jews as devious manipulators of power and wealth, the
secularist Zurayk also ventures into the realm of theology to offer his readers
a grotesque slander of Judaism. “The idea of a ‘chosen people,’” he writes, “is
closer to that of Nazism than to any other idea and [in the end] it will fall
and collapse just as Nazism did.”
Zurayk
was celebrated by his academic peers as a great scholar who prophetically urged
the Arabs to modernize and embrace science. Those values supposedly
distinguished his views from retrograde Islamism. But it’s hard to see how an
Islamist could have gone much further in demonizing the Jews and Zionism.
Following
his Nakba book, Zurayk’s academic career prospered. He eventually became rector
of the Syrian University in Damascus and held appointments as a visiting
professor at Columbia University, Georgetown University, and the University of
Utah. Zurayk also served a five-year term as president of the International
Association of Universities. In 1988 the State University of New York Press
published a Festschrift in Zurayk’s honor, with essays by 18 leading Arab
scholars. The volume contained hardly a word about his scandalously
anti-Semitic book Maana al-Nakba—a book that is not about the
Palestinians at all.
III.
Constantine
Zurayk’s fiction that the “Arab nation” suffered the Nakba didn’t survive for
long. In the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war, three Arab states again attempted to
undo Zionism. When they failed and lost even more territory to Israel, the Arab
coalition to destroy Israel fell apart. Two of those countries eventually
signed a separate peace with the Jewish state. Pan-Arab nationalism was dead.
The
meaning of the Nakba had already changed as Palestinian activists and
historians began depicting the events of 1948 exclusively as a tragedy for
their own people. In the mid-1950s, Aref el-Aref, a noted Palestinian
journalist, historian, and mayor of East Jerusalem during the Jordanian
occupation, published a six-volume history of the Palestinian struggle
titled The Nakba of Jerusalem and the Lost Paradise. Many more
Nakba books with an exclusively Palestinian focus were published over the next
four decades, including several highly praised novels.
The most
influential of those volumes, particularly for audiences in the West, was
Edward W. Said’s The Question of Palestine, published in 1979. Said,
a popular Columbia University English professor and a member of the Palestinian
National Council, was something of an icon in liberal intellectual circles
because of his earlier book, Orientalism. In that work, Said
framed the history of colonialism in the Arab and Islamic world within a system
of Western racialist thought.
In The
Question of Palestine, the author argued that the game was stacked
against the native Palestinians in favor of the white Zionists, because of the
same dominant racist ideologies. Said denounced “the entrenched cultural
attitude toward Palestinians deriving from age-old Western prejudices about
Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient. This attitude, from which in its turn Zionism
drew for its view of the Palestinians, dehumanized us, reduced us to the barely
tolerated status of a nuisance.”
“Certainly,
so far as the West is concerned,” Said continues, “Palestine has been a place
where a relatively advanced (because European) incoming population of Jews has
performed miracles of construction and civilizing and has fought brilliantly
successful technical wars against what was always portrayed as a dumb,
essentially repellent population of uncivilized Arab natives.”
This was
a harsh and distorted view of the Zionist movement. Still, Said was somewhat
constrained relative to later declarations by Palestinian leaders comparing the
Nakba to the Holocaust. What the early Nakba studies did have in common was an
indictment of the Jews for dispossessing the Palestinians, while finding no
fault at all on the Palestinian side. Several Israeli revisionist historians
and “post-Zionist” pundits also endorsed aspects of the Nakba narrative.
Yet that
narrative was rebutted by other historians of the Israel–Palestinian conflict.
That is how scholarly controversies usually play out in open societies. In the
United States, for example, fierce debates have periodically erupted over
various revisionist interpretations of American history, including the work of
Charles Beard in the 1930s and of the radical historian Howard Zinn in the
1980s. More recently, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a new
counternarrative of the American founding, has set off a contentious scholarly
dispute.
It is in
totalitarian societies that national narratives are enforced by the ruling
government. Until the mid-1990s there could not have been an officially
endorsed Palestinian narrative, because the Palestinians had no governmental
institutions. Ironically, it was an audacious diplomatic initiative taken by
the Israeli government in pursuit of peace with the Palestinians that had the
unintended effect of creating an officially approved Nakba narrative.
In
January 1993, Israeli representatives made secret contacts with high-ranking
officials of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Oslo, Norway. The
discussions blossomed into what became known as the Oslo process, and by
September of that year, it culminated with the famous handshake on the White
House lawn between Yasser Arafat and the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
At the
time, Arafat was stranded in Tunis, far from Palestine and in a very precarious
position. Along with his PLO cadres, he had been expelled from Jordan in 1970,
thrown out of Beirut by Israel’s army in 1982 and then again kicked out of
Tripoli, Lebanon, by the Syrians. Arafat’s reputation was in tatters among many
Arab governments because of his decision to support Sadam Hussein’s invasion of
Kuwait. That led to a huge cut in the financial support the PLO was receiving
from the Gulf states.
In
signing the Oslo accords, the Rabin government threw Arafat a lifeline. Political
controversy later erupted in Israel and elsewhere over the wisdom and
practicality of the peace agreements. For the purpose of our argument here,
however, it’s sufficient to note that the document signed by Rabin and Arafat
represented a fairly straightforward political deal, a quid pro quo of sorts.
In part
one, Arafat was rescued from his Tunis exile and installed in the West Bank to
run a Palestinian government for the first time ever. That was the quid.
After an interim period of five years, final-status negotiations were expected
to bring the Palestinians an independent state that would in turn recognize
Israel. That should have been the quo.
Unfortunately,
Arafat pocketed all his benefits (i.e., his triumphant return to Palestine and
installation as PA president) up front. When he then reneged on his obligations
to Israel, there was no fail-safe mechanism to return to the former status quo.
Arafat’s weaponized Nakba narrative became a self-manufactured excuse to break
the Oslo agreements without suffering any penalty.
IV.
In the
spring of 1998, as Israel was preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of
its birth, Arafat and his lieutenants were holding conversations about that
upcoming event as well as another pressing issue for the Palestinians. The end
of the five-year interim arrangement was approaching, which meant final-status
negotiations were supposed to start.
Arafat
was under conflicting pressure from two internal factions over the refugee
issue. The dominant group was sometimes referred to as the “outsiders,” because
they had spent the years since 1948 in exile. Salman Abu Sitta, a member of the
Palestine National Council, an original refugee and one of the most active
members of the outsider faction, had been urging Arafat never to give up on the
right of return. In early 1998, Abu Sitta drafted a public letter to Arafat
about the refugee issue that was co-signed by dozens of prominent Palestinians.
It said in part:
We absolutely do not accept or recognize any outcome of negotiations which
may lead to an agreement that forfeits any part of the right of return of the
refugees and the uprooted to their former homes from where they were expelled
in 1948, or their due compensation, and we do not accept compensation as a
substitute for return.
One of
the signatories was Edward Said, by now a true believer in the most extreme
version of the Nakba narrative and the right of return. In an interview with
Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, Said berated Arafat for even thinking he “can
sign off on the termination of the conflict.” He went on: “Nor does he have the
right to do so on an occasion provided by Bill Clinton at Camp David.” The
distinguished university professor living comfortably in Morningside Heights
was now urging his fellow Palestinians trapped in miserable refugee camps for
the past half century to continue fighting in immiseration until victory.
Yet
there was also a more moderate faction within the PA, including those who had
never left Palestine as refugees. Some had served as local officials during the
period of the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank. One of their leaders was
Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University and Arafat’s principal
representative in Jerusalem. In his memoir, Once Upon a Country,
Nusseibeh describes a meeting with Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas on the issue of the
refugees’ right of return. Nusseibeh recounts the following exchange with
Abbas:
Nusseibeh: You have to level with us. What is it you want, a state or
the right of return?
Abbas: Why do you say that? What do you mean by either/or?
Nusseibeh: Because that’s what it boils down to. Either you want an
independent state or a policy aimed at returning all the refugees to Israel.
You can’t have it both ways.
No other
Palestinian leader has acknowledged in such stark terms that when the Nakba
narrative includes the right of return, it kills any chance for peace as well
as for an independent Palestinian state. The return of the refugees was a deal
breaker for Israel, but also for the Clinton administration that helped broker
the Oslo accords.
A
reluctant Arafat was finally dragooned by President Clinton to go to Camp David
in 2000 for the final-status negotiations, but the outcome was a foregone
conclusion. The PA president stormed out of the meeting after turning down a
generous offer for an independent state. According to Clinton adviser Dennis
Ross, in order for the Camp David summit to have succeeded, “the Palestinians
had to give up their ‘right of return’ to Israel.”
After
Camp David, the Clinton and Bush administrations continued to press Arafat to
reconsider his position. Instead, the PA president doubled down. In his 2004
Nakba Day speech, he made his commitment to the refugees’ right of return even
more explicit: “The issue of refugees is the issue of the people and the land,
the cause of the homeland and the cause of the entire national destiny, no
compromise, no compromise, no settlement, but a sacred right of every
Palestinian refugee to return to his homeland, Palestine.”
Another
round of peace negotiations took place four years later, this time directly
between Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the PA’s President Mahmoud
Abbas. They held 35 one-on-one meetings in Jerusalem over a span of seven
months. At the last session on September 16, 2008, Olmert offered Abbas an
independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. He showed
Abbas a proposed map of the borders of the two states that, through territorial
swaps, would give the Palestinians almost 100 percent of the territory of the
West Bank and Gaza held by the Arabs before the 1967 war. Olmert agreed to
allow a token number of refugees to enter Israel on humanitarian grounds but
said the agreement had to end all Palestinian claims about the right of return.
Abbas
said he would consider the offer and return in a few days with his answer. But
he never came back, and the negotiations abruptly ended. In an interview I
conducted with Olmert a few years later, the former prime minister made it
clear that the sticking point for Abbas was the right of return.
Abbas
refused to accept any responsibility for the failure of the peace talks. After
Olmert’s proposed map became public, Abbas claimed his hands were tied because
the refugees would settle for nothing less than the right to return. How, he
asked plaintively, could he turn against his own people? Left unsaid was the
fact that Abbas (like Arafat before him) was responsible for spreading the
Nakba lies and hatred into the refugee camps, which then sparked the militancy
among the Palestinian masses who, he claimed, prevented an agreement with
Olmert.
The
refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza have become the permanent places of
residence for more than 2 million Palestinians. They are administered by the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) established by the UN in 1949 to
take care of what was expected to be a temporary humanitarian crisis. Instead,
the vast network of UNRWA camps became permanent, a state within a state. After
the Oslo accords, Arafat’s PLO was able to take over the camps, albeit under
the continuing legal umbrella of UNRWA.
In a
video produced by the Center for Middle East Research, children at an UNRWA
summer camp can be seen singing martyrdom songs and praising suicide bombers.
An UNRWA teacher promises a classroom of children as young as 10: “We will
return to our villages with power and honor. With God’s help and our own
strength, we will wage war. And with education and Jihad we will return.”
Speaking to the camera, a teenage girl announces, “I dream that we will return
to our land and with God’s help [Abbas] will achieve that goal and we will not
be disappointed.”
Abbas
knows that day will never come. Instead, his government’s Nakba narrative
guarantees that the Palestinian teenager will remain trapped in her refugee
ghetto for decades to come. For the PA president, though, there are many
benefits in perpetuating the impossible dream. It provides him with a tale of
unprecedented victimhood and a seemingly just cause to champion in the
international arena. It also certifies his militancy within Palestinian
politics, where militancy is the coin of the realm.
To sum
up, Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas revised Constantine Zurayk’s original claim
that Zionism committed its crimes against the entire “Arab Nation.” But they
also revived Zurayk’s big Nakba lie that “the aim of Zionist
imperialism is to annihilate one people so that another may be put in its
place.” By continuing to promote this hateful narrative, the Palestinian
leaders signaled, and continue to signal, that the struggle is not merely about
the consequences of the June 1967 war. It also means that Israel’s struggle for
independence and legitimacy is not yet over.
V.
Israel
and its supporters have not been very effective in countering the Palestinian
war of narratives. To some extent this is understandable. The Jewish state
still faces existential threats on its borders—rockets from Gaza, long-range
missiles and underground attack tunnels from Hezbollah in the north, Iranian
drones from the Golan Heights, and, of course, a potential nuclear Iran.
Compared with those imminent physical dangers, the Nakba tends to be dismissed
by many well-meaning and patriotic Israelis as just words and a story. Yet
among all the nations of the world, it is the Jewish people who should have the
most acute understanding of the power, for good and evil, of words and stories
and, yes, national narratives.
On the
other hand, a considerable number of Israelis on the left do take the Nakba
seriously and literally, even going so far as to urge their government to accept
responsibility for the great injustices committed against the Palestinian
people in the 1948 war. Supposedly such an admission of guilt will help bring
about reconciliation and peace with the Palestinians. The most influential
purveyor of this apology approach to the conflict with the Palestinians
is Haaretz, Israel’s liberal newspaper, which enjoys an
international reputation that ignores its tiny readership in Israel.
Haaretz has been publishing a regular
series of articles endorsing various aspects of the Nakba narrative.
Subscribers to the digital English edition even receive special email alerts
whenever another story about the misdeeds of Israel’s army in 1948 appears in
the paper. And in a parallel to the New York Times’ 1619
Project, Haaretz also proposes that the Nakba be taught in
Israel’s schools as a counterweight to the flawed “patriotic history” in the
current school curriculum. Haaretz’s editor in chief, Aluf Benn,
made the argument in a lengthy article in January 2021.
Benn
begins in a mournful tone as he evokes the symbols and memories of the Nakba
that haunt the area where he now works and lives. “I drive through the land and
see the traces, the sabra hedges that marked the plot borders in the ruined
villages,” Benn writes, “the lone house that remained on the hill near Route 4,
the arches decorating the facades on Salameh Street near the Haaretz building.
I drive and wonder for how long will Jewish society in Israel ignore these
memories.”
Benn
then gets to the practical point: “It’s time to stop being afraid and to tell
the truth. Israel arose on the ruins of the Palestinian community that lived
here before 1948. We must talk about the Nakba, not only in Palestinian
memorial processions to the villages of their fathers and mothers … but in high
school classes and in university lecture halls.” Haaretz’s editor
justifies including the Nakba in the school curriculum with this high-minded
principle: “A country must not run from its past, even when it’s not pleasant
to deal with and raises difficult moral questions.”
There’s
quite a bit of moral arrogance in that declaration of moral principles. The
assumption here is that courageous Israeli journalists like Benn are prepared
to face the reality of the Nakba, whereas almost everyone else is afraid of the
truth. Actually, what Haaretz wants taught in the schools is
not the truth about the 1948 war, but rather elements of the
official Palestinian narrative about that event.
The
real-world effect of Haaretz’s proposed education reform would be
demoralizing for the Jewish state, without producing any of the benefits the
paper promises. Israeli teenagers would be taught to feel guilty about the
allegedly brutal acts committed by their grandparents and great-grandparents
during the 1948 War of Independence. At the same, time the Nakba narrative
force-fed to teenagers in the Palestinian refugee camps will continue to
produce revenge-seeking Jihadis. If that sounds like hyperbole, consider Haaretz’s
response to a recent Palestinian terrorist attack in the center of Tel Aviv.
On April
7, 2022, a 27-year-old Palestinian named Raad Hazem, born and raised in the
Jenin refugee camp, decided this would be the day to put his Nakba education to
use. He crossed the border into Israel, picked up some weapons on the way, and
managed to get to Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street by evening. He sat for a while on
a bench outside the Ilka Bar, where young Israelis were enjoying the night out.
He then stood up, pulled out two rifles, and started shooting indiscriminately.
Three Israeli Jews, including two young men almost exactly Hazem’s age, were
killed. Hazem got away but was later hunted down and killed by police in
neighboring Jaffa.
Haaretz’s editorial board saw nothing in
this incident that made them question their promotion of the Nakba narrative.
However, the paper’s leading columnist, Gideon Levy, weighed in three days
later to announce that because of Hazem’s lifetime of suffering in a refugee
camp, his murder rampage was actually understandable.
“Hazem
wanted to live the life of his victims,” Levy wrote. “He didn’t have even the
smallest chance. He too would have wanted to study neuroscience or mechanical
engineering, or to coach kayaking. He too would have wanted a happy hour…. But
he was born into a reality from which it is impossible to escape into the
worlds of his victims on Dizengoff. He couldn’t even get to Dizengoff the
direct way, imprisoned as he was in his refugee camp, prohibited from entering
Israel. He probably never saw the sea and certainly not a kayak.”
This was
written while the families of the three murder victims were still observing
shiva, the traditional seven-day mourning period. Levy tortured the families
some more by declaring that “there is no place as militant, armed and brave as
the Jenin refugee camp.”
Haaretz can’t excuse itself from
Levy’s obscenity with the standard claim that he’s just one writer among many
at a newspaper that’s famously tolerant of all opinions. In fact, Levy is the
paper’s star columnist. Twice a week he is featured in the premier spot on the
editorial page. And he also writes a long report every weekend chronicling the
latest injustices committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Haaretz’s editorial shrug about the murders
on Dizengoff Street finally made it clear to me (I was living a few blocks from
the murder scene at the time) that no one should take anything the paper says
about Nakba education seriously. Ditto for the other groups and individuals who
opine about the moral imperative to face up to the Nakba. All the Nakba truth
seekers should be ignored until they acknowledge the truths about the
intentions and actions of the Palestine and Arab leaders during the 1948 war.
A
process of real truth-telling might begin by paying attention to Constantine
Zurayk’s pioneering 1948 book, The Meaning of the Disaster. It’s
the Rosetta stone of Nakba rejectionism and anti-Semitism, yet almost no one
who now comments on the Nakba, including Haaretz journalists,
is aware of what that book says about the Jews. So if Haaretz really
wants Israelis to recognize the reality of the Nakba, I have a modest proposal
for the editors: Publish a Hebrew translation of Maana al Nakba (remember,
it’s only 70 pages) and distribute it widely, including to the country’s
teachers, instructional institutions, and age-appropriate students. Then let’s
see what effect this has on the national conversation Haaretz wants
to have about the history of the conflict with the Palestinians.
The
Israeli left’s version of the Nakba is all about one side, the Israeli side.
Rarely discussed are the wartime deeds of the two most notorious Palestinian
leaders, Haj Amin al-Husseini and Fawzi al-Qawuqji. Both were Nazi
collaborators who spent World War II in Germany providing political and
military services to the Hitler regime. In their 2010 book, Nazi
Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews, German historians
Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Kuppers documented that if the Nazis had
prevailed at the battle of El Alamein and conquered Palestine, al-Husseini
would have been flown home to supervise a Final Solution for the Jews of
Palestine.
Al-Husseini
was sought as a war criminal in Yugoslavia but escaped to Egypt in 1946 and was
then elected chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, the political body
representing the Palestinian Arabs during the postwar period. Al-Qawuqji was
appointed by the Arab League to the position of field commander of the Arab
Liberation Army, the Palestinian irregular military force that fought alongside
the five invading Arab armies. In the event of an Arab victory in 1948, the two
leaders planned to carry out a real Nakba for the Jews of Israel. Not just a
wave of refugees, but mass murder.
In early
1948, there was a foretaste of the massacres and expulsions planned for the
Jews. It was perpetrated by the British-officered Jordanian Arab Legion in the
area around Jerusalem. The most searing description of that episode of the war
was written by the late Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, a leader of the peace
movement. In his classic memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz
reflects on the War of Independence as he experienced it in Jerusalem:
All the Jewish settlements that were captured by the Arabs in the War of
Independence, without exception, were razed to the ground, and their Jewish
inhabitants were murdered or taken captive or escaped, but the Arab armies did
not allow any of the survivors to return after the war. The Arabs implemented a
more complete “ethnic cleansing” in the territories they conquered than the
Jews did…. The settlements were obliterated, and the synagogues and cemeteries
were razed to the ground.
Oz also
cites statements made by two Arab leaders promising a murderous ending for the
Jewish state. Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab
League, vowed in early 1948 that “this war will be a war of extermination
and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and
the Crusades.” And, according to Oz, “the Iraqi Prime Minister, Muzahim
al-Bajaji, called on the Jews ‘to pack their bags and leave while there was
still time,’ because the Arabs had vowed that after their victory, they would
only spare the lives of those few Jews who had lived in Palestine before 1917.”
As
Israel’s 75th anniversary and the 25th Nakba Day approach, we ought to be
highlighting Amos Oz’s words as well as all the documentary evidence revealing
the murderous intentions in 1948 of the Arab invaders and their Palestinian
allies. Israelis should never apologize for winning the War of Independence and
avoiding another Holocaust. While continuing to extend a hand of peace to the
Palestinians, we must honor those young men and women who served in that
unavoidable war and made the miracle of modern Israel possible.
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