Published May 26, 2019, +972 Magazine http://972mag.com
(Israel) https://972mag.com/israels-nakba-palestinians-conflict/141627/
By Sam Freed*
Israelis tend to view the expulsions of the 1948 war as a small,
local affair that was quite restrained compared to the Nazi genocide. For
Palestinians, it is an ongoing dispossession.
(Palestinian refugee children seen
in a makeshift school in Nablus, West Bank, 1948. (Hanini/CC BY-SA 3.0)
To large portions of the Jewish
Israeli public, the Nakba was small event — an historical side note. To most
Palestinians, on the other hand, it is a huge, exceptionally brutal, and vastly
important part of their history. In order to understand why there is such a
vast disparity in the way the Nakba is perceived by Israelis and Palestinians,
despite very little contention as to the objective size of the event — 700,000
people were deported and dispossessed, which today we would call ethnic
cleansing — one must look back
several hundred years.
Nothing
motivates wars like ideas on paper. The printing press was invented in the mid 1400s in Germany. Rebellions
against the Catholic Church were not infrequent during that period, but after
the printing press was available such rebellions spread much faster. The most
prominent of those was the Protestant Reformation, which led to centuries of
internal religious and ideological wars in Europe, ending only in 1945. The
number of victims is estimated at around 100 million.
Meanwhile in the Ottoman Empire the
situation was quite different. Most of its military efforts were in the
Balkans, directed towards Catholic Austria. In 1485, Sultan Bayzid II banned
the printing press because the Arabic letters of the Qu’ran were
considered too sacred to be used mechanically. The result was 500 years of
relative peace in the Muslim world – quite a contrast to the constant
bloodletting of religious wars in Europe.
The Ottomans controlled the Middle
East by granting the local population maximal self-government. This included
having a mukhtar (chief) run each village according to its own traditions. The
result was that the Ottomans were able to control the entire area between the Mediterranean
Sea and the Jordan River with only a few hundred soldiers. While in Europe tens
of millions were being killed in Christian-on-Christian violence, the first
wars amongst Muslims involving over one million deaths happened quite recently:
the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1970 and the Iran-Iraq War in 1979.
The Zionist leadership that created
Israel was virtually entirely of European origin. In the first half of the
20th century, the numbers of deportees and the dispossessed in Europe was
high: in 1923 there were massive “population exchanges” between Greece and
Turkey, in 1947 the British arranged for the partition of India, and after the
Second World War eastern and central-European states expelled eight million
ethnic and cultural Germans who lived in those countries for centuries. As a
culturally European society, it is unsurprising that the Israelis did not see
the expulsion of 700,000 people as exceptional or even uncivilized.
On the other hand, prior to the
Nakba — the worst disaster in the collective memory of Palestinians — was the
punitive exile of 10,000 men to Egypt in 1834. This was occasioned by the
Palestinians refusing to join the Egyptian Army during the Egyptian revolt
against the Ottomans. In contrast to the the European vantage point, the
expulsion and dispossession of 700,000 people, including women, the elderly,
and children, was seen as an act of barbarism of unprecedented magnitude. The
disaster of 1948 was 70-times larger than the largest calamity in local popular
memory at the time.
Additionally, Israelis and
Palestinians view the Nakba differently when it comes to the dimension of time.
As far as Israel is concerned the expulsions were over by the end of the war
and cemented with the refusal to return refugees after the war. For the
Palestinians, the Nakba is ongoing. The presence of the refugee camps is an
ongoing tragedy, as is every time a Palestinian is dispossessed of land or a
settlement for Jews only is set up on previously Palestinian land.
Palestinian citizens of Israel take
part in the Return March, held at the destroyed village of Khubbeiza, to mark
Nakba Day, May 9, 2019. (Mati Milstein)
This ongoing Nakba peaked in during
the war of 1967 but has continued in waves since 1948 through the expropriation
of land in the Galilee and in the Negev, the ongoing tragedy of the
“unrecognized villages,” and the ongoing construction of Jewish-only
settlements in both the West Bank and Israel
proper. For Palestinians, all these processes are the same Nakba: an
ongoing dispossession and exile of Palestinians from their ancestral land.
For many Israelis, the Nakba was a
small, local affair that was quite restrained in comparison to the mass murder
of the Nazis in Europe. No matter what you call it, the Nakba is a founding
event of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Seeking a mutual understanding of
how the two sides see it so differently is a prerequisite for any rapprochement
between the two nations.
*Dr. Sam Freed is a researcher at the University
of Sussex, and teaches at the Hebrew University. He is also an occasional human
rights activist. This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read
it here.
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