I remember those days in which I used to sit in the trenches and think through our problems. Al-Faluja was under siege, and it came under concerted and horrific tank fire and warplane shelling at the hands of the enemy. During those times, I repeatedly told myself that “here we are besieged in this hole, we have been deceived, our fates have been determined by greed, machinations and secret desires, and in the end we were left here with no weapons and under fire.” When these thoughts would cross my mind…I would then tell myself “our homeland [Egypt] is here, it is another Faluja. What is happening to us here is a microcosm of what is happening over there. Our homeland has been besieged by problems and enemies as well, and has been deceived. It has been pushed into a battle it wasn’t prepared for, and its fate was also determined by greed, machinations and secret desires, and it too has been left over there under fire with no weapons!”
GAMAL ABDEL NASSER, FALSAFAT AL-THAWRA ([1954] 2005: 12–13)
Our planes, tanks and artillery will raze your village, bombard your houses and break your backs…. If you want to avoid a catastrophe [nakba] and a disaster [musiba], and to survive inevitable death, surrender as the noose has tightened around your necks.
PAMPHLET DROPPED BY ISRAELI ARMY WARPLANES ON THE PEOPLE OF AL-TIRA, HAIFA, JULY 1948
The notion of 1948-as-catastrophe is as old as the Nakba. The Nakba, however, did not necessarily always embody the meanings today associated with 1948. An understanding of the conceptualization, articulation, and transformation of 1948-as-catastrophe comes from placing the notion in its “universe of discourse” (Foucault 1991, 2005; Said [1978] 2003, 273). Here, “discourse” conveys a structured system of meaning, embodied in and reinforced by language implicated in nondiscursive practices of power. Accordingly, to be understood, the Nakba’s universe of discourse needs to be examined within the context of the historical and political changes that took place in the Arab East in the first two decades following 1948. These decades saw Arab nationalist thinkers, pre-1948 Palestinian leaders, early historians, officers who took part in the battle for Palestine, and nationalist leaders and activists write about the cataclysmic events that shook the Arab East. They also collectively theorized and gave meaning to 1948-as-catastrophe in light of the ascendant Arab nationalist liberation project and its related modernization discourses.
1
This Arab Nakba’s universe of discourse was gradually eclipsed as a result of the defeat of the June War (1967). The new defeat briefly took precedence as the new Nakba/Naksa (setback), before the Nakba in both its old and new Naksa guises disappeared from the literature altogether. The discourses around the Arab Nakba were then eventually replaced by the emergence of yet another universe of discourse, one concerned with the Palestinian Nakba that we are more familiar with today. This change took place as a result of the transformation of the Palestinian national liberation movement, the declassification of Israeli government archives pertaining to the 1948 war on Palestine (Kabha 2007; Masalha 1991, 2011; Said 1998), and Palestinians’ own attempt to revive memories of destroyed places, communities, and worlds in a process accelerated in the wake of the Oslo Accords (Abdel Jawad 2007, 2008).
Today there is a body of interdisciplinary multilanguage literature on the Nakba that is also growing.
2 This literature largely sees the Nakba in its contemporary a priori meaning, as the 1948 war for Palestine and the resulting mass dispossession and destruction of the major part of Palestinian society. In this literature, the universe of discourse of 1948-as-catastrophe is also largely ignored, with a few token references to the first use of the term “catastrophe” to describe the 1948 war or the first multivolume Arabic-language history of the events that unfolded during the Nakba. One of this literature’s shortcomings is therefore in its treatment of Palestinians specifically and Arabs more generally as mere objects of knowledge. As such, they are studied and analyzed without serious consideration of their intellectual output as subjects of history and theory.
In this chapter, the Nakba is interpreted in a way that goes against the grain of contemporary understandings of 1948 and challenges the writings on contemporary colonized and neocolonized societies that lack serious consideration of their intellectual and theoretical production (Dussel 2000). This approach does not, a priori, accept that the Nakba has consistently or universally implied the subjection of the Palestinians to a catastrophe in 1948 (see, e.g., CPE 1984b). It is also neither a historical nor a historiographical overview of the 1948 war on the Palestinians, a subject on which there is an abundant and wide-ranging English- and Arabic-language literature (see, e.g., Kabha 2006b; Pappe 1999; Rogan and Shlaim 2007; Shlaim 1995). Rather, it presents a limited review of Arab intellectual discourses that circulated in the aftermath of 1948 and the political and historical realities that made these possible and to which these discourses, in turn, also responded. This analysis provides the backdrop for the subsequent examination of activists’ memory discourses and mobilization practices, which are a response to these same changed political realities. It also provides the backdrop for the subsequent examination of Nakba lived and transmitted histories, memories, and narratives that in part constitute an engagement with the different meanings of the Nakba that have circulated since its making.
CONCEPTUALIZING THE PALESTINE WAR: AL-NAKBA, THE ARAB CATASTROPHE
Constantine Zurayk is often credited with first using the term
nakba to describe the then-ongoing war on the Palestinians and its outcomes in his
Ma‘na al-Nakba (The meaning of the catastrophe) ([1948] 2001, 1956). Zurayk was a historian, an educator, and an interwar-generation Arab nationalist thinker whose intellectual legacy includes a large number of books, edited collections, translations, and articles. He received a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1930 and took up the position of assistant professor of history at his alma mater, the American University of Beirut (AUB). Upon the independence of Syria, he served as the first envoy on the first Syrian delegation to Washington, D.C. (1945–1947), and on the Syrian delegation to the UN Security Council in the critical pre-1948 years (1946–1947). He was also the rector of the University of Damascus (1949–1952) and vice president, acting president, and dean at the AUB during the 1950s. In 1950, he was elected to the executive board of the UN Educational Cultural and Scientific Organization, where he served for four years. He also served on the executive board and later as the head of the International Association of Universities (1955–1970) and was a founding member and head of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut until 1984 (al-‘Azma 2003, 5–6; Kassab 2010, 65–74; W. Khalidi 2009, xiii; Steppat 1988, 12–19).
3Given this background, Zurayk’s analysis of 1948 is grounded in his experience as an educator, his pan-Arab nationalist commitments, and his intricate knowledge of Arab politics in the pre-Nakba years. These factors combined shed light on the different ways in which Zurayk’s reflections on 1948 in his small book were particularly important. In addition to influencing a new generation of nationalist activists and students in the wake of the Nakba, Zurayk was probably also partly privy to the politics of the Arab states as they formulated their wartime policies against the backdrop of their own interests and rivalries. These were formed with an eye to the spoils of Palestine and the balance of power in the region. This was an important reason for the catastrophic defeat of the Arab states in Palestine in 1948 (Rogan and Shlaim 2007).
In his brief foreword, Zurayk ([1948] 2001, 197) begins by telling the reader that his examination of the calamity of the Arabs in Palestine is an attempt to think through “the suffocating crises” that has enveloped the Arab nation. His foreword frames the rest of his mediations in an explicitly pan-Arab framework, and it is within this context that his mediation on the war-as-catastrophe unfolds in the rest of his small book. In the first part, Zurayk sets out what he sees as the “gravity of the catastrophe” (199), and it is here that he first uses the term nakba when he states: “The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is neither a mere setback nor a simple passing evil. It is a catastrophe [nakba] in every sense of the word, and a calamity that is greater than any other that has afflicted the Arabs in their long calamity and tragedy ridden history” (201).
Zurayk ([1948] 2001, 201–204) uses
nakba to describe the war on the Palestinians, in the first instance, in relation to the performance or lack thereof of the seven Arab states that entered Palestine after the Zionist movement declared the establishment of the state of Israel. The term is also used in relation to the Arabs’ consequent colossal failure and the human and material losses and loss of morale as manifested in, inter alia, the dispossession of the inhabitants of Palestine. The gravity of the catastrophe for Zurayk is further compounded by the Arab states’ inability to thwart the Zionist movement despite the justness of the Palestinian cause. He does recognize, however, that the enemy the Arabs faced was the Zionist movement not only in its physical colonialist manifestation in Palestine but also in its alignment with imperialism. In light of this, Arabs must look inward, he contends, toward their own weaknesses and failures, accept their share in the making of the Nakba, and learn from their mistakes. This response is all the more urgent, given that the establishment of the state of Israel is the beginning of what Zurayk projects to be a long-term battle with colonialism in Palestine.
It is this call for introspective critical self-reflection that Zurayk ([1948] 2001, 207-209) diligently carries out in The Meaning of the Catastrophe, making the case for the special duty of the intellectual in this regard, especially in times of national calamities and disasters. With this sense of urgency and duty, Zurayk sets out both short- and long-term fundamental solutions to the catastrophe. He argues that the short-term remedies include raising immediate awareness of the real and imminent danger that Zionism poses; an immediate investment in state-based military, economic, and political capabilities; Arab unification; the enlistment of popular forces as a resource for the struggle against Zionism; and, finally, bargaining with the “Great Powers” in the greater interests of the Arab nation (213–224).
Despite these immediate solutions, however, Zurayk ([1948] 2001) argues that the battle with Zionism is ultimately a long-term one because the root cause of the catastrophic defeat is based on the regressive pan-Arab condition. Of paramount centrality to this condition is the continued lack of the political Arab nation despite its existence in both the geographic and the linguistic sense. As a result, the only way for the resolution of the war-as-catastrophe is through “a total and fundamental change in the Arab condition, an all-encompassing revolution in all our ways of thinking, working and living” (221). This is a process that encompasses short- and long-term modernization plans. These include industrialization, separation of state and religion, scientific training, and learning from the achievements of other civilizations. The goal of these plans is a unified Arab national progressive entity. Ultimately, Zurayk concludes, “the catastrophe [nakba] that has befallen us today is thus a marker of our internal state of affairs” (238).
The Meaning of the Catastrophe is a remarkable text of its time. This is because it appeared with a clear future-oriented vision when compared with other contemporaneous texts that were the last echoes of the world that the Nakba itself had destroyed. Zurayk places the Nakba’s making at the doorstep of the Arab states while being acutely aware of the collusion between Zionism and European and American imperialism. He also sees the eventual resolution of the Nakba as ultimately a pan-Arab affair predicated upon the Arab states’ ability to radically transform and modernize their social, economic, and political systems and to unite. The meaning of the Nakba for Zurayk ([1948] 2001, 227) is not “the superiority of one nation over another, but rather, the distinction between one system and another.” Thus, for him, the Zionist movement is part of the modern world, while the Arabs still lack the most basic modern political necessities such as a unified nation-state, national economy, and military.
It is within these parameters that Zurayk first argued that the 1948 war on Palestine and the Palestinians was a nakba. His book therefore sheds light on the discursive dimensions within which the 1948 war-as-catastrophe was first conceptualized and articulated in 1948. This conceptualization of 1948-as-catastrophe would become implicated in the changes that resulted from the end of direct French and British colonial rule and the deposition of the post-“independence” regimes they left behind. These political realities, in turn, allowed for the articulation and rearticulation of the Nakba in different ways in the first two decades of its aftermath.
Before turning to these post-1948 political realities and the shifting meanings of the Nakba, I examine the different ways in which the 1948 war was articulated and understood in its aftermath through texts that were contemporaneous with Zurayk’s own. These are the texts of the pre-1948 generation of Palestinian leaders that constitute their attempts to come to terms with the consequences of what were ultimately their colossal failures in Palestine.
EARLY WORKS, 1948–1967
PALESTINIAN EVALUATION AND HISTORICIZATION OF THE DEFEAT
The post-1948 era saw the reality of an Arab Nakba materialize through successive military coups that overthrew the ancien régimes that presided over the catastrophic Arab defeat in 1948. It also saw the publication of Palestinian Arab texts that belonged to a pre-1948 experience and worldview. These were texts of men who were mostly either directly or indirectly involved in the pre-1948 Palestinian national movement. These texts, broadly speaking, attempted to explain the reasons for the Nakba (see, e.g., Alami 1949a, 1949b; Darwaza 1959, 1960; al-Ghuri 1955, 1959; Hanna 1948; al-Hawwari 1955; al-Husayni 1956; Tuqan 1950; Zua‘iter 1955, 1958). Two of these men also published early histories of the war on Palestine (al-‘Arif 1956–1962; al-Khatib 1951, 1967).
What the majority of these men also shared was the fate of banishment or exile that their thirty-year failed direct or indirect leadership had wrought upon the Palestinians. Despite this shared context, these texts—especially those of a reflective or explanatory nature—reveal very little, if any, introspective critical reflection on Palestinian Arab policies and actions, rather than those of the Arab states, which allowed for and led to the Nakba. The self-criticism that does exist is mostly general and limited. This can be seen, for example, in Musa Alami’s ‘
Ibrat Falastin (The lesson of Palestine) (1949a, 1949b). Alami worked in the British colonial administration and as a result played a limited political role under British colonial rule (Hourani 1988). In his small book, he argues that there were two phases to the battle of Palestine:
In the first phase the burden of defense was thrown on the shoulders of the Palestinians…. The fundamental source of our weakness was that we were unprepared even though we were not taken by surprise…that we proceeded along the lines of previous revolutions…[and] that we worked on a local basis…. Our arms were poor and deficient…. Our aims in the battle were diverse.
(Alami 1949b, 374)
According to the historian Mustafa Kabha, Muhammad Nimr al-Hawwari, was the first and perhaps only member of the pre-1948 generation to point the finger of blame directly at the man who was at the helm of the Palestinian national movement under the British, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Perhaps he was able to do so as his
Sir al-Nakba (The catastrophe’s secret) was published in 1955 in Nazareth after he was allowed to return by Israel.
1 Kabha (2006a) argues that the book’s implications are that the secret of the Nakba, or its cause, is al-Husayni himself. Others have argued that “social auto-criticism permeates Palestinian and Arab discussion of the [1948] war…[like] criticisms of disorganization, disunity, self-interest, and ‘backwardness’” (Hasso 2000, 491). Self-criticism did indeed exist, and it ranged in scope from Alami’s and others’ more general assessments of the causes of failure to al-Hawwari’s more direct assigning of responsibility for this failure. It can be argued, however, that these early texts lack a thorough and systematic Palestinian Arab self-criticism of the leadership’s failures rather than the more prevalent and general Palestinian or Arab criticism. This is not a lack in terms of who the author of a text in question was but who or what the object of criticism was. As a result, what the pre-1948 generation of men did not produce was a thorough analysis of the failures of the Palestinian national movement during its brief thirty-year leadership under British colonial rule in Palestine (see, e.g., R. Khalidi 1996, 192–201; 2007).
The degree and quality of Palestinian Arab self-criticism shed light on what could and could not be articulated immediately after the 1948 catastrophe. This is because while the Nakba may indeed have been partly the result of the Palestinians’ own failed leadership under British rule (R. Khalidi 2007), it was also the outcome of inter-Arab disunity, rivalry, and alliances against Transjordanian regional ambitions in particular (Al-Rasheed 2007; Gerges 2007; Landis 2007; Rogan 2007; Shlaim 2007; Tripp 2007). These texts were therefore also constrained within this particular historical moment and its associated intellectual, geographical, and political limitations. In light of this, these texts shed light on the milieu of the major capitals of the Arab East, where most of the texts were published, and the discourses circulating in these capitals in the years immediately after 1948. Rather than examining these texts for the degree and quality of the pre-1948 Palestinian leadership’s self-criticism, it is therefore more instructive to focus on what they tell us about the discourses that the authors were engaging.
Of particular importance in this regard is Muhammad Amin al-Husayni’s Haqa’iq ‘an Qadiyyat Falastin (The Question of Palestine facts) (1956). This is because al-Husayni was at the helm of the pre-1948 Palestinian national movement in Palestine until an arrest warrant issued by the British during Thawrat Falastin al-Kubra (1936–1939), the Palestinian uprising against the British (Swedenburg 2003), forced him to leave Palestine. Al-Husayni’s book is a collection of ten extended essays that initially appeared as responses to a series of questions put forth by the editor of the Egyptian al-Masri newspaper. In his foreword to the first edition of the book, published in 1954, al-Husayni (1956, 6) states that the colonial and Zionist “lies and fabrications” were successfully spread in the Arab world. This was particularly the case during the first year of what he calls the “disaster” (al-karitha) and “the Palestinian migration” (al-hijra al-falastiniyya) to the neighboring Arab states. The lies and fabrications that al-Husayni alludes to can in part be discerned through the editor’s questions, especially those with a more accusatory tone. They point the finger at Palestinian leaders, including al-Husayni, and the people of Palestine more generally, for bringing the disaster upon themselves.
This finger-pointing includes accusations that the people of Palestine willfully gave up their homeland, especially through land sales to Zionists. It also implies that they did not defend their homeland during British rule more generally and in 1948 in particular, and were working for the Zionists to whom they sold Arab military interests (al-Husayni 1956, 8). The accusations also underscore that factional and local disagreements engendered disunity among the Palestinian leaders, which led to their inability to compromise with the British and accept any of the solutions they put forth, the cause of the eventual disaster (27). Furthermore, the Nakba is portrayed as having resulted from the Palestinian leadership’s passivity and its rejection of Britain’s offers, including partition (46). Further implied is that it was the 1946 Arab League–created and al-Husayni–headed Arab Higher Committee, the Palestinian representative to the Arab League (al-Hut 1981, 531–545), that ordered the Palestinians to leave after adoption of the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947 (al-Husayni 1956, 59).
5In the last essay, al-Husayni puts forth what he argues are the main reasons for Palestine’s disaster and suggests ways in which to resolve it. He also divides these reasons into “external” (the Zionists, the British, colonialism) and “internal” causes. Here, a serious reckoning with the faults and errors of the national movement by a man who was at its helm prior to his exile in the aftermath of the destruction of half of Palestinian society is nonexistent. The role of the British and the Zionists and the mostly ambiguous criticism of the Arab states for their roles notwithstanding, one must conclude that self-criticism is nowhere to be found because al-Husayni still had hopes to lead the Palestinian national movement after the Nakba. Thus, his Question of Palestine Facts seems to be an attempt to vindicate the defeated former vanguards of the Palestinian national movement rather than to present a thorough reflection on their failures.
Beyond this lack of self-criticism, the series of questions and al-Husayni’s defensive responses throughout shed light on the various meanings associated with the Nakba and the discourses on 1948 that were circulating during the early 1950s. To begin with, the term nakba for 1948 was not universally used when the book was first published in 1954; al-Husayni’s preferred term is karitha. Second, the case can made that the idea of the 1948 war on the Palestinians as a Zionist-inflicted catastrophe was not universally accepted in the years immediately following 1948. In fact, what seems to have been associated with the Nakba is the notion that the Palestinians brought the catastrophe upon themselves through either selling land to Zionists, not putting up a fight, or instructing their own people to leave.
The political scientist Saleh Abdel Jawad (2006a, 75) has argued that the historical Arab “narrative categorically rejects Israeli allegations that Arab leaders ordered Palestinians to evacuate their villages, even if, in some cases, residues of this myth remain in the popular discourse, mainly because Palestinian refugees listened to Israeli-sponsored, Arab-language radio, which was used to wage psychological war.” Nevertheless, when reading al-Husayni’s text, these accusations seem to have formed a part of the meaning of the Nakba, or
karitha, in some Arab circles during the early years. The thorny question of leaving (or remaining in) Palestine is an issue still alive in the Palestine generation’s memories and the post-Palestine generations’ narratives. Moreover, the Israeli state has used these accusations in order to deny its role in the expulsion of the Palestinians. These accusations and their enduring importance, however, do not absolve Israel from its primary responsibility for the mass dispossession of Palestinians or the atrocities it committed in 1948 (Masalha 2003).
There were also two early attempts to historicize the Nakba by two individuals who belonged to the same pre-1948 generation of leaders (CPE 1984a; al-Samadi 2007). The first is Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib’s Min Athar al-Nakba (The catastrophe’s aftermath) (1951), republished in 1967 as Ahdath al-Nakba aw Nakbat Falastin (The events of the catastrophe or Palestine’s catastrophe) in the wake of the June War. There has been a recent revival of interest in the latter book, given that al-Khatib provided what was probably the first written account of the Tantura village massacre in the Haifa subdistrict. This was one of approximately seventy documented Nakba massacres (Abdel Jawad 2007; al-Khatib 1951, 118–120), whose notoriety happened to come to light in English because it was the subject of a lawsuit in Israel in 2000 (Esmeir 2003; Pappe 2001). The other book is ‘Arif al-‘Arif’s six-volume al-Nakba: Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis wa al-Firdaws al-Mafqud (The catastrophe: The catastrophe of Jerusalem and the lost paradise) (1956–1962). This book is an encyclopedic documentation of the military, political, and diplomatic events that shook Palestine, covering the period from the passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 181 until the last armistice agreement between Syria and the Israeli state on July 20, 1949.
In al-‘Arif’s early attempt to historicize the war, he also defines the Nakba, when he argues: “How can I not call it [the book] ‘The Nakba’? We have been afflicted by catastrophe, we the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular, during this period of time in a way in which we have not been subjected to a catastrophe in centuries and in other periods of time: our homeland was stolen, we were thrown out of our homes, we lost a large number of our sons and of our young ones, and in addition to all this, the core of our dignity was also afflicted” (al-‘Arif 1956, 3).
The title of al-‘Arif’s book therefore derives from the idea of the Nakba as a catastrophe for the Palestinians and Arabs, the details of which he documents in the first four volumes.
6 However, the emphasis is clearly not only on the Palestinians but also on the Arabs, for both groups have been afflicted. The pan-Arab link remains important and the Nakba cannot be understood outside this context. Thus, as early as 1956 the term
nakba had already encapsulated various, competing meanings—as a catastrophe to pan-Arab nationalism, as a catastrophe brought about by Zionist and imperial collusion, and as a catastrophe self-inflicted by the Palestinians’ own leaders or the people themselves. The Nakba was also referred to as “the disaster” and “the Palestinian migration.”
Thus, when read together, texts that circulated in the aftermath of 1948 shed light on the multiple and at times even contradictory significations of 1948 as a
nakba. These multiple significations were articulated within discourses circulating in response to the changing realities of the time. The changes in the political map of the Arab East, realized through successive military coups in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, were arguably the most important and defining features of the new post-Nakba Arab reality. These coups allowed the pan-Arab dimension of 1948-as-catastrophe to gain further prominence, particularly in the first two decades following the Nakba.
THE DAWN OF A NEW POST-NAKBA ARAB ERA
In a seminal study of the reemergence of the post-1948 Palestinian national movement, the political scientist Yezid Sayigh (2004, 25) argues that the Nakba coincided with the beginning of three significant historic processes in the Arab region: “the formation or consolidation of independent national states, the emergence of a distinct Arab-state system, and the replacement of colonial domination with US-Soviet rivalry.” The Nakba was therefore both the end and the beginning of two distinct chapters in the history of the post-Ottoman Arab East. These were the end of direct colonial rule through the League of Nations–sanctioned mandate system, on the one hand, and the beginning of U.S. imperial domination and Soviet influence in the region, on the other hand.
Coming at both the beginning and the end of these critical historical junctures, the Nakba sent tremors across the Arab East. Understood in retrospect, one of the most important aftereffects of these tremors was the institutionalization of militarism in the Arab world. Although this institutionalization allowed for the further articulation of the pan-Arab nationalist significations of 1948-as-catastrophe, it also gave these significations yet another dimension that departed from Zurayk’s Arab Nakba in significant ways. This is because “the tension and conflicts between the civilian-military leadership during the Palestine War were partly responsible for the armed coups d’état that shook the Arab world to its core after 1949” (Gerges 2007, 156). Within this context, the texts to emerge during the dawn of this new post-Nakba era reflected this schism and were grounded in the various political currents and movements rising to prominence, hand in hand with the military men, after 1948 (see, e.g., al-Bitar [1965] 1973; G. Nasser [1954] 2005; Qamhawi 1956; al-Tal 1959).
One of the Nakba’s most significant political tremors shook Egypt, where as early as 1952 the Free Officers led a military coup dubbed the “July Revolution” and deposed the British era monarchy (Y. Sayigh 2004, 25–26). Gamal Abdul Nasser emerged as the leader of the Free Officers and eventually Egypt (Badeau 1959; Gunther 1959; Kirk 1959; R. Robinson 1959). He had been a major (
sagh) in the Egyptian army brigade under siege in the village of al-Faluja in the Gaza subdistrict from October 1948 to February 1949 (al-Tal 1959, 434–435). Syria, in contrast to Egypt, would see more than one military coup by the time of the July Revolution in a pattern that would mark its politics for the next two decades (Hinnebusch 2002, 25). In 1958, Iraq followed suit with a military coup that overthrew the British era monarchy, led by Abdul Karim Qasim, among others. Qasim, an officer in the Iraqi army, would later emerge as the leader of the 1958 Iraqi Revolution and would lead Iraq until 1963. King Abdullah of Transjordan, which eventually became Jordan, was assassinated in Jerusalem as early as 1951. Though he was succeeded by his son, his grandson, King Hussein, became de facto leader in 1952 and foiled a failed military coup in 1957 (Y. Sayigh 2004, 26–33).
One text to emerge during this era that demonstrates the extent of the changing ideological and political realities in the Arab world is Abdullah al-Tal’s
Karithat Falastin: Mudhakkarat ‘Abdu Allah al-Tal, Qa’id Ma‘rakat al-Quds (Palestine’s disaster: Memoirs of Abdullah al-Tal, leader of the Battle of Jerusalem) (1959). Al-Tal was a colonel in Transjordan’s Arab Legion during the war on Palestine and was appointed military governor of Jerusalem in October 1948 (al-Tal 1959, 355–358). He also took part in the Transjordanian and Zionist secret meetings and negotiations that began at the end of 1948 (437–544). After learning of King Abdullah’s intention to send him away as a military attaché to a foreign embassy, he resigned in June 1949 (586). He secretly left Jordan five months later, eventually arriving in Egypt, where the authorities, according to him, granted him political asylum (598). While in Egypt, al-Tal was tried in absentia for his alleged role in the 1951 assassination of King Abdullah (Rogan 2007), a topic mentioned only in passing in his book (al-Tal 1959, 587–599).
7Although al-Tal (1959, 599) began publishing what he knew of Transjordan’s collusion with Zionism as early as March 1950, it was nine years later, according to the date of his foreword, that he would finally publish what he intended to be the first part of his memoirs.
8 This book’s most important contribution is al-Tal’s disclosure of the secret negotiations and agreements between Transjordan and leaders of the Zionist movement prior to the entry of the regular Arab armies into Palestine. He also discloses those he personally took part in before the formal Rhodes Armistice Agreements between Israel and neighboring Arab states in 1949. Crucially, he supports his claims with a collection of personal and secret letters, correspondences, and telegrams that he had access to as King Abdullah’s trusted military governor (see, e.g., al-Tal 1959, 64–74, 437–466, 467–486, 487–544).
The publication of al-Tal’s book at the height of the 1956 Suez War and in Egypt
9 demonstrates the extent of the rupture with the ancien régimes that presided over the Nakba and the subsequent centrality of Nasser and Nasserism (Kerr 1965, 1971; Torrey and Delvin 1965).
10 His exposing of Transjordan’s duplicitous role in the making of Palestine’s Nakba is also testament to the ways in which the various discourses associated with the Arab Nakba were being molded by the changing political visions brought about by the military coups. Al-Tal’s foreword captures the relationship between the Arab world’s changing political realities and the parameters of its discourses on 1948, when he tells the reader:
When I wrote those memoirs, some ten years ago, the Arab nation was passing through one of the most dangerous periods of disintegration and disunity…. [It was] a period during which some Arab leaders helped the colonists establish a criminal state in the heart of the Arab homeland…. There is a stark difference between the period during which these memoirs were written and the period during which these memoirs are being published…. [We are now in] a stage which allows for reassurance and hope for comprehensive Arab unity.
(al-Tal 1959, ii)
Al-Tal’s book is thus part of the clear demarcation line that was being drawn between those who allowed for—indeed, colluded in bringing about—the Nakba and those who now promised a new dawn of Arab unification, decolonization, and independence. For Nasser, his supporters, and Arab nationalists of various creeds, what this dawn meant in practice was that “the liberation from colonialism and its collaborators…[came to be seen as] the correct path towards the liberation of Palestine…. ‘The path to Tel Aviv passes through here’ [was a] banner for ‘Arab revolutionaries’ in every Arab capital beginning in the mid-1950s” (al-Jabiri 1982, 122).
Nasser’s own meditation on the July Revolution in his
Falsafat al-Thawra (
The Philosophy of the Revolution) ([1954] 2005, 1959) demonstrates how the meaning of the Nakba came to encapsulate, in the first instance, the need for Arab unification and liberation, the path toward the liberation of Palestine. In the English language translation of his book, Nasser (1959, 26) argues that “it is not true that the revolution of July 23rd started on account of the results of the war in Palestine.” He refers to the “myth, now completely refuted, that the Egyptian army in Palestine was defeated because it had been equipped with defective arms by corrupt politicians” (Abdel Jawad 2006b, 79). He does this in order to underscore his unequivocal rejection of the Nakba as cause for the revolution. He argues that “had the officers endeavored to avenge themselves because they were cheated in Palestine or because the defective arms strained their nerves and because they suffered…the whole affair would not have deserved to be called a revolution” (G. Nasser 1959, 27). For Nasser, Palestine and its Nakba, among other factors, “may have accelerated the flood but they could never be the original source” (31).
The revolution, Nasser (1959) argues, was the cumulative result of the Egyptian people’s aspiration for independence and self-determination. Where Palestine and its Nakba do figure for Nasser are in terms of their encapsulation of the political pan-Arab space of the revolution. As he puts it, “The fighting in Palestine was not fighting on foreign territory. Nor was it inspired by sentiment. It was a duty imposed by self-defense” (G. Nasser 1959, 63). This self-defense makes Palestine a part of what Nasser refers to as the “Arab circle” (62), of which Egypt and its revolution are also a constitutive part.
In view of this, Palestine’s Nakba was therefore a catastrophe to the project of the becoming of the Arab nation in the political sense, or independence and unification. Reflecting on the relationship between his experiences in the Egyptian army in Palestine and the subsequent Egyptian revolution, Nasser tells us that after the siege in al-Faluja, “I came home with the whole region in my mind one complete whole…. one region, the same factors and circumstances, even the same forces opposing them all” (G. Nassar 1959, 65). Rather than bringing about the July Revolution, Palestine’s Nakba brought home the extent to which 1948 was a pan-Arab Nakba, and its resolution was therefore possible only through unification and decolonization. In other words, this was the liberation, in the first instance, of the Arab circle.
Nasser clearly conceived Palestine as integral to the pan-Arab political sphere of the revolution and of the Nakba as brought about by imperialism and its Zionist ally—the same forces to which the revolution responded. This shares similarities with and yet departs from Zurayk’s 1948-as-catastrophe. The similarities lie in the pan-Arab nationalist vision of liberation. The significant departure is the discrediting of the old social and political classes while legitimizing the military as the new saviors of the Arab world (Gerges 2007, 157). Thinking about the Nakba therefore also became part of building the necessary military force capable of eventually decisively defeating Israel (al-Jabiri 1982, 116–135). Thus, the discursive dimensions within which the Nakba was articulated as early as 1954 were shifting yet again, to contain yet more meanings, as they responded to the quickly changing political realities and currents on the ground.
These early years also saw Palestinians politically organize as part of the emergent Arab nationalist movements of the time. The two most significant of these were the Arab Nationalists Movement, greatly influenced by Zurayk’s ideas, and the Ba‘th Party (Gordon 1969; Y. Sayigh 1991b; al-Sharif 1995, 48–56). The Nakba, as central to the Palestine question, occupied an important place in these different movements and their political literature, but only as part of the broader question of Arab liberation (al-Sharif 1995, 48–56). This was still the case when calls began to be made to organize Palestinians qua Palestinians for the battle of liberation through the emergence of Palestinian armed groups against the backdrop the “Arab-Arab conflict” (al-Sharif 1995, 83; see also Y. Sayigh 1998). This is because these calls were still made within the context of a broader Arab struggle for liberation. As Naji ‘Allush, a member of the Ba‘th Party who would later join Fatah, put it in his Al-Masira ila Falastin (The march to Palestine) (1964), “The establishment of a revolutionary movement, the organization of the Arabs of Palestine, and the release of their energies is important and necessary for the liberation of Palestine as long as this organization remains aware of the parameters of its struggle, and comprehends that it is first and foremost a struggle for [Arab] unity and liberation” (‘Allush 1964, 222).
Only with the emergence of the Palestinian Patriotic (National) Liberation Movement, or Fatah, in 1957 were calls made for “a total Arab battle that takes a regional Palestinian face as a cover for itself” (al-Sharif 1995, 91). This call to bring Palestinians on board as Palestinians to the battle of liberation and to focus on the liberation of Palestine as the path toward Arab liberation would realize itself only in the aftermath of the June War. The outcomes of that war, “by discrediting Arab authority and weakening state control, created the opportunity for the rise of the Palestinian guerrillas as regional actors” (Y. Sayigh 1992, 244). This second defeat also led Palestinians to assume the task of Palestinian liberation and resulted in the eventual eclipse of the 1948 Nakba in Arab thought.
THE JUNE WAR AND THE NEW NAKBA/NAKSA
The years immediately following the June War led to a wave of critical works, articles, and lectures that attempted to come to terms with the new defeat and were written by nationalists, Marxists, and Islamists (e.g., al-Azm 1968, 2011; al-Bitar 1968; al-Hafiz 1979; al-Munjid 1968; Zurayk [1967] 2001). This new defeat was seen as yet another catastrophe or disaster, one with the same root causes as the Nakba of 1948. Nasser referred to the outcomes of this new round of fighting as a
naksa, a setback, to the project of pan-Arab unity and liberation (Abu-Lughud 1972). Although the works that emerged in the aftermath of 1967 assessed the new defeat in different ways, what they shared in common was linking 1967 and 1948.
Thus, thinking about the new defeat would come to subsume and eventually eclipse the Nakba of 1948. Once the Palestinian guerrilla groups took over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and eventually the task of liberation, preoccupation with the 1948 Nakba, even if only as part of the new Nakba/Naksa, conspicuously disappears from post-1967 literature. By the early 1970s all eyes were fixed on the Palestinian Revolution, the site where the guerrillas were actively participating and determining the ways in which the liberation of Palestine was to unfold (see, e.g., CAUS 1993, 1996). Eventually the resolution of the Nakba via the liberation of historic Palestine would itself take secondary place, with the Palestinian guerrillas’ focus now aimed at reversing the Israeli gains made in 1967 (R. Khalidi 1992). These political changes also signaled the beginning of the disappearance of the Arab Nakba’s universe of discourse, which would eventually lead to the reemergence of the 1948 Nakba in a new and exclusively Palestinian discursive guise.
Zurayk’s Ma‘na al-Nakba Mujaddadan (The meaning of the catastrophe anew) ([1967] 2001) was one of the texts to emerge in light of the second Arab defeat by Israel. The title of his book, as well as his main argument, link to his first book on the Nakba. He begins the sequel by explicitly making this link, stating that whereas the first disastrous battle took place in 1948, “today, after nineteen years, the second battle has erupted and the new disaster [al-karitha] is no less horrific than the first, and its anticipated outcome will be no less severe for the Arab people; the event and its outcomes seem to be greater and more detrimental” (Zurayk [1967] 2001, 996). Quoting from his first book, he insists that he described the first defeat as a Nakba because it was indeed “a catastrophe [nakba] and not a setback [naksa], and like it, and indeed more vicious than it, is what we have now been afflicted with” (996). In his insistence on 1948 and 1967 as catastrophes rather than mere setbacks, Zurayk seems to be directly contesting Nasser’s response to the latest defeat.
Zurayk ([1967] 2001) summarizes what he wrote about the meaning of the defeat of 1948. He also uses the sequel to emphasize yet again the scientific and state-based transformations that Arabs must undertake to transform their societies and, ultimately, their abilities to confront Zionism. Thus, the central thesis of the second book is that the reasons for the new catastrophe are the same as those for the catastrophe of 1948. For Zurayk, the outcomes of both wars are fundamentally tied to Arab societies’ ongoing lack of modernization and unity. Once again, he argues that the core of the problem in 1967, like the core problem he analyzed in 1948, is based on Arab and Israeli societies belonging to “two different civilizational epochs” (997). The former is “premodern” and “backward,” whereas the latter is modern, unified, and technologically, scientifically, organizationally, and industrially advanced. In conclusion, Zurayk quotes from his first book in order to underscore the “old meaning [of the Nakba] anew” (1031), without which there will be no resolution of the new Nakba.
Another important book written as a response to the new defeat was the Marxist philosopher Sadik Jalal al-Azm’s Al-Naqd al-Dhati Ba‘d al-Hazima (Self-criticism after the defeat) (1968, 2007), published in English translation in 2011. This book provides grounds for comparison with Zurayk’s nationalist position on the new Nakba/Naksa. Al-Azm’s (2011, 38) central thesis, like that of Zurayk, is that the defeat of 1967 is “tied directly to the prevalent economic, cultural, scientific and civilization conditions in the Arab nation, i.e., it was a reflection and expression of those conditions.” He advances this argument by comparing the reasons for the Russian defeat during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) with those for the Arab defeat during the June War. For al-Azm, the main difference between the two, which is also the most telling manifestation of the regressive civilizational condition of the Arabs that led to their defeat, is the Arabs’ evasion of responsibility.
This insistence on the prevalent evasion of responsibility extends to the naming of the new defeat a nakba. Rather than singling out Zurayk, al-Azm names the then-head of the Department of Philosophy at the Lebanese University, Kamal Yusif al-Hajj. He argues that the very use of the term “catastrophe” constitutes an evasion of responsibility because “whoever is struck by a disaster [nakba, plural nakabat in the original] is not considered responsible for it…. [T]his is why we ascribe disasters [nakabat] to fate, destiny and nature” (al-Azm 2011, 40). In addition to rejecting 1967 as yet another nakba, al-Azm also rejects Nasser’s naksa and singles Nasser out for criticism. In his June War fortieth-anniversary edition foreword, he argues that when initially publishing his book, he insisted on using “defeat” in opposition to “setback.” His was an attempt to name “the defeat by its name publicly and clearly, without any attempt to hide or dilute the effect of the fire and napalm on its victims” (17).
Thus, the main task of
Self-Criticism is to engage in the far-reaching autocritique that, according to al-Azm, the Arabs had not only failed to do but remain incapable of doing, given their cultural, social, and political state of affairs. The self-criticism in the book is far-reaching. It ranges in scope from his analysis of the myriad ways in which the evasion of responsibility took place (al-Azm 2011, 45–72), to a psychosocial analysis of certain Arab social characteristics that were responsible for the defeat (72). He also provides an assessment of the importance of the Vietnamese model and modernization to the Arab struggle against colonialism and imperialism (including Zionism) (87–91). Finally, he critiques the “socialist Arab revolutionary movement” in general and Nasserism’s “middle roadism” in particular (110). In conclusion, al-Azm ties the defeat of 1948 to 1967, foregrounding the role of class and its relationship to the Arab elites responsible for both defeats. It is this emphasis on class as well as his clear critique of Nasser that distinguishes his book from that of Zurayk. Looking to the emergent Palestinian guerrillas, al-Azm concludes that only a leadership committed to the cause of its people will be able to translate the sacrifices of the guerrillas into mass popular mobilization. This mobilization’s purpose would be to engage in a comprehensive armed and cultural struggle in order to transform the Arabs’ condition during a decisive historical stage (136).
In an interview given in the late 1990s, al-Azm argued that intellectually, “the Arab World witnessed the emergence of a strong leftist wave immediately after the 1967 defeat, which extended to the 1973 October War” (Talhami 1997, 117).
11 This wave also coincided with the short-lived preoccupation with the new Nakba/Naksa, before thinking of the Nakba and its meanings conspicuously disappeared from the literature. This disappearance can be understood through linking the opportunity that the June War provided for the emergent Palestinian guerrillas to take an independent military course in relation to the liberation of Palestine.
Thus, the changing political reality’s relationship to the intellectual terrain was first translated through the outcomes of the June War understood as a new Nakba/Naksa. By the mid-1970s, however, this intellectual preoccupation with the Nakba, if only as part of the new defeat, would become subsumed by the guerrillas’ revolution. This is because the Palestinian Revolution, especially for Arab nationalists, itself subsumed the struggle for Arab unity and liberation and came to encapsulate the hopes previously appended to the latter struggle and its related discourses. As the Palestinian movement’s emphasis on liberation and return gradually transformed, and as the regional order within which it operated also changed, the Arab Nakba would become a discourse of the past. The Nakba would eventually reemerge in the intellectual and activist response to these changed political realities, but under a different Palestinian guise.
THE PALESTINIAN NAKBA
Whereas the June War saw the eclipse of the Arab Nakba and its eventual disappearance from Arab thought, the 1980s saw a renewed intellectual interest in the Nakba. This took place in two ways. The first was through Palestinians’ own attempt to revive memories of their communities and ways of life in the Palestine the Nakba had destroyed (Abdel Jawad 2007; Farah 2006; R. Sayigh 2015). This interest in memories of historic Palestine was accelerated further by the Oslo Accords, taking place within the context of the threat the Palestinian leadership posed to refugees’ right of return to their homes and lands (Al-Hardan 2012a). It also took place alongside the partial declassification of Israeli government archives in the 1980s (Abdel Jawad 2006a, 2007). Moreover, it occurred within the context of the general rise in political, popular, and scholarly interest in memory that began in the 1980s and mushroomed after the collapse of the former Soviet Union (Klein 2000; Olick 2008). In view of these different factors, this renewed interest in the Palestinian past led to a particular emphasis on Nakba memories, specifically in refugee communities. Renewed interest also led to an emphasis on the generation of Palestine, the sole surviving witnesses to the Palestine now threatened by the Palestinian leadership. It is within this context that the Nakba today exists with radically altered significations and in a Palestinian universe of discourse.
In an article that maps six decades of Palestinian oral history, the anthropologist Rosemary Sayigh (2015) notes that early informal attempts to record the pre-Nakba past by Palestinians in the wake of 1948 have ironically been lost to the record.
12 The institutional development of Palestinian attempts to memorialize their communities and the catastrophe are usually traced to Birzeit University’s research center in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) (R. Davis 2007; Slyomovics 2007). In the mid-1980s, the center published its first anthropological monograph in The Destroyed Palestinian Villages book series. The aims of the series, summarized in its first volume and replicated in subsequent volumes on different communities, was to ethnographically reconstruct the annihilated communities of pre-1948 Palestine (Kanaana and al-Ka‘bi 1986, 59, cited in Slyomovics 1991, 386). There was therefore from the beginning an emphasis on “how respondents [from the community in question] perceived events…[through] oral testimonies” (Abdel Jawad 2007, 62). Shut down in the late 1980s by an Israeli military order, the research center resumed its work in 1993. The new director of the center and the series, Saleh Abdel Jawad (2007), historicized the otherwise anthropological monographs. He foregrounded the use of oral histories of the Nakba as well as the 1980s declassified Israeli government archives in order to cross-check oral testimonies with archival material and secondary sources (62–63). Books on the destroyed villages also took on popular semi- and nonscholarly forms written by activists and individuals in exile and have become a topic of scholarly research in English (R. Davis 2010; Khalili 2004, 2005; Slyomovics 1998).
The publication of these books took place alongside Palestinian oral history initiatives within historic Palestine and beyond, with an emphasis on pre-1948 Palestine as well as the Nakba (R. Sayigh 2015). Even the Palestinian Authority mobilized memories in 1998 during its official commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba through print sources, public events, and official radio stations (Hammami 2010; Hill 2005). In addition, these oral history initiatives took place through non-PA-affiliated organizations in the OPT, like the Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Center (Shaml) and the Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (BADIL). It also took place through the Right of Return Movement in Syria and elsewhere as well, as through individual efforts (R. Sayigh 2015).
These Palestinian attempts to revive memories of the pre-1948 past and the Nakba were also followed by a scholarly interest in Palestinian memories, in English and Arabic, as well as more recent oral history works on the 1948 Nakba (El-Nimr 1993; Kabha 2006b; Masalha 2005; Slyomovics 1998; Swedenburg 2003). However, not until 2007 did scholarly interest in Palestinian memories lead to a groundbreaking collection on the social memory, rather than oral history, of 1948 (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007). Today, there is a small but growing body of interdisciplinary literature on the Nakba.
13Concurrent with these developments, the renewed intellectual interest in the Nakba in the 1980s also resulted from the Israeli government’s partial declassification of archives that pertain to the war on the Palestinians. This spurred an ideologically and methodologically varied group of so-called Israeli “new historians” and “sociologists” to reconsider the received Zionist narratives about what happened in Palestine during the Nakba (e.g., Morris 2001, 2004; Pappe 1992, 2006a; Shlaim 1988). The main conclusions that this group brought to the English-language academic sphere have been examined through the Arab Nakba’s universe of discourse. These include the Arab coalition’s heterogeneous, uncoordinated, and competing war aims; the Zionist movement’s knowledge and full exploitation of this reality; and the movement’s military advantage over the Arabs throughout the official phase of the war (Shlaim 2007, 80; 1995). In short, this reconsideration of both the politics and the military operations during the war demolished the myth of Israel standing alone against the combined might of the Arab states against all odds. It underscored the convergence between the interests of the Zionist movement and the Transjordanians at the expense of other coalition members and Palestinians in particular (Shlaim 2007, 100). There is, however, nothing new or remarkable about such claims, except that it is Israelis, rather than Palestinians and Arabs, articulating them and being heard when doing so.
Thus, the Nakba of 1948 became plausible in English only after it was articulated by the colonizers. Their scholarship, designated “new,” was merely articulating what Arab intellectuals, historians, and political leaders and activists had been saying all along. The reception of their scholarship as “new” is therefore telling of the constellation of colonial power relations that underpin when the history of the vanquished is finally allowed to enter its annals, under whose terms, and with which form and with what content. It is also indicative of the inherent power in who is allowed to determine what events are deemed historical and which routes the history of the vanquished must traverse to finally be considered plausible, if only partly so. This is because the Israeli state’s Zionist ideology continues to be fundamentally predicated on the denial of the Nakba and thus of Palestinians’ existence (Massad 2000).
As a result of the “new” Israeli scholarship, what is today no longer debatable in English-language scholarly circles is that the mass dispossession of at least four-fifths of the Palestinian Arab population did indeed take place in the conquered territories in 1948. In addition, this dispossession unfolded with the destruction of at least eleven urban quarters and the obliteration of at least 531 villages (Pappe 2006a). Apart from collectively shedding light on the events surrounding the Nakba, however, these historians disagree on the moral and ethical implications of their endeavors insofar as acknowledgment and restitution are concerned.
It has in consequence been argued that given the Zionist ideological grounding of these historians, with the exception of Pappe, their work is informed by a “profound contradiction” (Said 1998; see also Lentin 2010; Masalha 2011). It is true that their work has collectively challenged the dominant Zionist narratives about an “empty land,” from “time immemorial,” “independence,” and “redemption,” especially in English-language scholarship (Finkelstein 2003; Said and Hitchens 2001). However, the profound contradiction lies in the implications of their arguments. These range from those who, despite their own findings, argue that the expulsions were born of war and not design (Finkelstein 1991; Masalha 1991; Morris 1991) to those who argue that “while it was morally wrong to expel Palestinians, it was necessary to do so” (Said 1998). The most notorious of the Israeli historians, Benny Morris, is for example contemptuous of the testimonies of Palestinian Nakba survivors and Palestinian and Arab historians’ work on 1948 (Whitehead 2002). He has also argued that it was necessary to inflict a catastrophe on the Palestinians in order to ensure the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 (Shavit 2004).
Pappe, in contrast, is both an ideological and a methodological exception among these historians. He has written what is the most vivid construction of the Zionist onslaught against the unarmed civilian population of British-ruled Palestine. He uses declassified Israeli government archives, and to a lesser extent Palestinian oral testimonies, to argue that what transpired after the Zionist leadership adopted Plan Dalet in March 1948 amounted to a concerted policy and campaign of the “ethnic cleansing” of the country. He has called for the political and moral confrontation of the (ongoing) Nakba through Israel’s acknowledgment of its war crimes and its crimes against humanity and the implementation of the refugees’ right of return (Pappe 2006a, xiii).
Most recently, genocide scholars have taken up the subject of the Nakba by building on Morris’s and Pappe’s scholarship in particular. For example, Martin Shaw (2010) problematized Pappe’s use of ethnic cleansing to characterize Zionist policies and actions in 1948, given the notion’s deployment of perpetrator language and its ambiguous relationship to the legal notion of genocide. This ambiguity, Shaw contends, can serve to narrow genocide to only one of its possible outcomes—that of total human extermination. Shaw (2010, 1) argues for an “international historical perspective” on genocide that focuses on genocide’s aims rather than means and distinguishes genocidal violence from other types of violence in its targeting of civilians and its pervasive destructiveness. Within this broadened scope, he argues, the widespread destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 is partly genocidal. This is not because Zionist leaders had, in a narrow definition of what constitutes genocide, a master plan to exterminate Palestinians, though the intent to remove the population was there. Rather, it is because “its specific genocidal thrusts developed situationally and incrementally, through local as well as national decisions…a partly decentered, networked genocide, developing in interaction with the Palestinian and Arab enemy, in the context of war” (19).
Shaw’s article led to an email exchange with Omer Bartov (2010), an Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholar, that was published in the
Journal of Genocide Research. Put briefly, Bartov argued that while some form of ethnic cleansing may have taken place in Palestine in 1948, he took issue with Shaw’s broad sociological definition of genocide. He questioned its implications for juridical utility and Shaw’s conflation of ethnic cleansing with genocide. Bartov concluded that the ultimate goal of Shaw’s argument is to delegitimize the state of Israel and to foreground the Palestinian right of return to their homes and lands (see also Beckerman 2011).
14 Shaw’s arguments have also been taken up by politically sympathetic scholars, who have argued that he focuses on 1948 as a singular event at the expense of ongoing Israeli policies that can be characterized as genocidal (Rashed and Short 2012). He has also been criticized for his exclusive focus on European nationalism for his genocide framework, taking an international historical perspective at the expense of the inherent relationship between settler-colonialism and genocide (Docker 2012). Shaw has responded to his critics, and the conversation has continued (Shaw 2013; Rashed, Short, and Docker 2014).
Regardless of how the Palestinian Nakba has been conceptualized, what is certain is that the debates over the nature of the war crimes that took place in 1948 are still ongoing in English. This is because the mass forcible dispossession that set the Palestinians apart from other colonized people in the post–World War II decolonization era is yet to be morally or politically acknowledged and resolved. The consequences of the Nakba, or the ongoing Israeli system of settler-colonial rule over historic Palestine, are therefore realities of the present and not merely the past. They are manifested in Palestinian communities’ ongoing violent subjugation by the Israeli state and their dispossession from their lands to make room for Israeli Jewish settlers (Gordon 2008; Masalha 1997; Roy 2007). Finally, the Palestinian activists and community members whose visions, aspirations, memories, and narratives are examined in the subsequent chapters of this book did not need this scholarship to become aware of the atrocities inflicted upon them and their families by the incipient Israeli state. It took six decades for the Nakba to undergo transition from (ongoing Israeli) denial to an Anglophone scholarly acceptability, minus its moral and ethical implications in relation to the right of return. This is therefore a fact to be framed in terms of the relationship between global power, colonialism, and knowledge production.
CONCLUSION
In the six decades since 1948, first Arab nationalist and later Palestinian patriotic discourses on the Nakba have been entangled with and produced within the context of Arab regional politics and history. The defeat of the Arab nationalist liberation project in 1967, as encapsulated in Nasser and Nasserism in particular, gave way to a short-lived preoccupation with the new Nakba/Naksa that the defeat was seen to embody. This was followed by a marked retreat in the Arab Nakba’s two-decade-old universe of discourse, the disappearance of the Nakba from Arab thought, and its eventual reemergence as part of a new discourse. This reemergence was largely the outcome of changes in the Palestinian liberation movement, Palestinians’ memorialization of their past, and the partial opening of Israeli archives that pertain to 1948.
The notion of 1948-as-catastrophe’s appearance, disappearance, and later reemergence in a different guise has been examined in relation to discourses. This was considered through the reading of different texts and a brief discussion of contemporary Palestinian efforts to commemorate the lost homeland and the Nakba. It is therefore important not to conflate this discursive reading of the transformation in the various meanings of the Nakba with memories and narratives of 1948 by Palestinians. A catastrophe responsible for the wholesale destruction of societies and communities does not simply “appear” and “disappear” for those who were massacred, terrorized, raped, taken as prisoners of war, or expelled and turned into refugees. This is especially the case when these refugees still lack acknowledgment and restitution for the crimes committed against them by the perpetrators. The issue at stake is thus one of power, and the question that needs to be asked is why it has taken so long to listen to Nakba memories and testimonies in an alleged age of “never again” for anyone after World War II. In addition, we must ask, how and why can this listening continue to take place without the moral and ethical implications enshrined in international humanitarian law?
Finally, this discursive reading of the Nakba provides the starting point from which to examine how Palestinian refugee activists have taken up the Nakba, understood in its exclusively Palestinian guise, in order to further specific political goals in their communities post-Oslo. It also provides the starting point from which to understand Nakba memories, histories, and narratives of 1948 in Syria. This is because memories of the Nakba circulate, not in a social vacuum, but against the backdrop of the six-decade-old Arab nationalist and later Palestinian patriotic discourses. These discourses have implications for what Palestinians choose to remember and even forget. There is, however, another important and equally necessary starting point for understanding the memories and histories of the Nakba in Syria. This is the Palestinian refugee community’s historical, political, and social experiences in the country. These experiences continue to play an important role in the different articulations of the Nakba in light of the Syrian war today.
