YOCHI FISCHER
The Palestinian writer Salman Natour, in the introduction to his literary memoirs, which are based on the stories of dozens of Palestinians who became refugees during the 1948 war, describes his generation’s fate:
We were born after the war, and therefore we became reluctant witnesses. Our bodies became a historic draft, written in black ink. We became historical witnesses, not because we saw things, but rather because we heard them. We were born after this war, and therefore carried its burden.1
Natour’s words, which uncover the footprints of the Nakba in the body of the generation of the historical witnesses, describe a familiar pain. The very same words could have been written by the generation of the Jewish historical witnesses to the stories of the Shoah, its refugees, and its pain. This generation carries the burden as well. A visit to Salman Natour’s dreams and to my dreams, the dreams of a daughter of a Shoah survivor, could reveal similar images of fear, empty houses, and death and exile. What is similar are the occasional memory flashbacks of danger and silence, not the events themselves.
There are fundamental differences between the events, and they are not symmetrical or comparable. There is also a major asymmetry in the responsibility of the Jews for the Nakba and the absence of responsibility of the Palestinians for the Shoah. Yet what matters is not the parallels between the events but their echo in the minds and bodies of Israelis and Palestinians, the pain of displacement, the annihilation of communities, and the exile and refugees.
This dual echo of pain raises anxiety and resistance. Lately, harsh criticism was evoked in the Israeli public arena regarding the publication of an academic book that offered a new perspective of the interface between the Shoah and the Nakba.2 Its theoretical starting point is based on the concept of “empathic unsettlement.” The public demonstrations against the book were just one recent example of the depths of fear, denial, and pain that are associated with any attempt to rethink together those traumas.3
Even if a willingness to embrace the other side’s pain exists at certain times, the thick boundaries of collective nationalistic sentiment and the fear of its trembling do not allow this willingness to develop. The existential fear and alienation cause the two communities to be trapped in a repetitive, nonprocessing traumatic mourning that excludes each from the other.
After all, as Walter Benjamin taught us, when one brushes historical memory against the grain the result is chaos and distortion,4 especially when it is associated with those perceived as enemies: there are no redeeming narratives in the realm of the processing of historical trauma. Instead, there are questions, blame, responsibility, separation, and rifts. Even if the willingness to take the risk and look together at denied, repressed memories exists, a joint, comforting, simple narrative would still not replace the painful, closed story of each party. Moreover, when one reopens the scars, there lies a problem within a problem. Because what greater threat exists for those who experience traumas than another instance of uncertainty and insecurity?
The denial and fear of the other side’s memories and traumas have their own history, which is not linear or one-dimensional. This chapter traces some of the transformations of affinity, proximity and distance, and closeness and fear associated with the two traumas in the Israeli Jewish consciousness.
The main argument relates to the process by which in the period around 1948 the intertwined connection between the Holocaust and the Nakba was deeply felt and acknowledged all over the atmosphere of the country, in multilayered personal experiences, in temporal proximity, and in geographical locations. Only years later was this notion consigned to the depths of oblivion and forgetfulness. This assertion will be demonstrated by means of a close reading of a number of historical examples taken from the political and cultural spheres of the 1940s and 1950s.
The chapter shows how the affinity between the two events was experienced around the year 1948 and how silencing and denial began to emerge years later through a gradual juxtaposition of the two traumas in competition for memory and victimhood. The two thus developed as mutually exclusive. However, repression and anxiety arose in the fissures and in the borders between the perceptions. From time to time, other voices were raised: “I am full of abandoned villages,” wrote the poet Haim Gouri.5 The chapter contributes to this tradition by attempting to raise, in an emphatic but trembling way, the repressed consciousness of Israel’s national narrative.
The chapter concludes with a personal account touching on the complexity of the Shoah and the Nakba in the Israeli consciousness as a manifestation of the responsibility to not continue to fear confrontation between each other’s national traumas.
During 1948 and in its aftermath, when the events of the Shoah were still fresh, when Jewish refugees filled the land and the absence of its Palestinian residents was felt all around, the link between the two sets of pain and wounds was much more visible, and one might even say it was obvious. Later, these things were relegated to the abyss of forgetting and oblivion, trying to break out once in a while, like denials tend to do, and manifesting in various forms.
“The memory of humiliation,” wrote Primo Levi, “is malignant…and spreads like a plague…. Insult is a constant source of evil…, immortalized among the survivors, and spins its web in thousands of ways against the general will.”6 Words and metaphors are also malignant and are adopted, whether one wants them or not, in language, quotes, and reflections.
One example is the term “ghetto.” Of course the term was not invented by the Nazis. It has been employed since the beginning of the modern era, especially to mark Jewish residential areas, neighborhoods, and quarters. Before the Holocaust, this concept belonged both to anti-Semitic and Jewish discourse, and the ghetto had additional spiritual significance as the sign of Jewish seclusion and exclusion, on the one hand, and of shelter, on the other. Gradually, alongside the development of the Nazi’s anti-Jewish ideology and policy, and especially from 1941 as the “Final Solution” proceeded, the Nazi regime made cynical and propagandistic use of the concept to mark not only areas of Jewish residence and places of restricted freedom of movement but also as spatial concentration areas for the imprisonment of Jews before their annihilation.7 Many of the Jews who were concentrated in the ghettos were tortured to death or murdered before they could be sent to death camps.
The ghetto, with its Holocaust connotation, still casts a shadow on the Hebrew language. It was definitely part of the language of the residents of Jaffa in late 1948 and in 1949. During this period, about 3,600 Palestinian residents of Jaffa, out of the seventy thousand who lived there prior to the war, were detained for a while behind barbed wire in the neighborhood of al-Ajami. Even before the act of the physical concentration there were people who worried about the application of the realistic-spatial concept of the ghetto to the self-perception of Jews and Arabs alike. In August 1948 Moshe Erem, a member of the Tel Aviv City Council, warned:
For some reason they…are going to surround the Ajami neighborhood with barbed wire that will separate strictly between the Arab neighborhood and Jewish housing. This arrangement will instantly compare Ajami to a closed, sealed ghetto. It is difficult to accept the idea that evokes in us associations of horror…. Barbed wire is not a one-time project; it will always be in their vision and will serve as an inexhaustible source of bubbling poison. Also for the Jewish residents the wire fence will not add social “health.” It will increase feelings of foul superiority, and perpetuate separations that we do not want to erect.
I also heard “original” explanations for justifying wire fencing: it is for the benefit of the Arabs so the Jews would not break into Ajami and harass them…. How much can you justify such callousness?…There was a time when we created an outcry, and rightly so, against bases in Cyprus that prohibited our children from bathing in the sea and now we repeat this kind of prohibition on about 4,000 poor residents…. We sow by full seed of poison…among the Arabs. Barbed wire ghetto, ghetto, cut off access to the sea…8
Indeed, the wire was not left just as a metaphor. The area in which the Palestinians were detained was different in many functional ways from the Jewish ghettos under the Nazi’s regime. Its residents were not tortured and were certainly not going to be annihilated. Yet the inhabitants of Jaffa in those days—Holocaust survivors, Jews from North Africa and the Balkans, and Palestinian refugees, speaking Hebrew, Yiddish, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and even Arabic—all called this place a ghetto.
Four years after the establishment of the Jaffa ghetto, although it had been physically dismantled and Arab and Jewish refugees lived together in the neighborhood, some Zionists authorities complained of the adoption of the term “ghetto” and the inability to break free of its meanings. In the cities of Jaffa, Ramla, and Lod, the term was and remains toxic. Instead of dealing with the memory of the ghetto as reflected by the mirror of the attitude toward Arabs, the authorities tried to impose oblivion. This attitude is manifested in a report written by Alexander Dotan, an official of the Foreign Ministry, who chaired the Advisory Committee on Refugees and who sought to promote his plan “Assimilation of Arabs” as
an important means of accelerating the reconstruction of ancient geographical names and the “Hebraization” of place names from those of the Arabs…. The most important task is to disseminate the practical use of the new Hebrew names. The process has run into difficulties even among Jews (Jaffa’s still common name is Jabaliya, although Givat Aliya is gradually disinheriting it). However, there is no Hebrew name for the Arabic “agh’mi,” which is the Arab neighborhood that some new immigrants still call by a name that lies to the ear: “ghetto” (or the “Arab ghetto”).9
The reason this “lie” of calling the places where Palestinian refugees where concentrated “ghettos” did not fade was not that the Ajami ghetto was identical to the Jewish ghettos; it was because this term intertwined the violence of the Holocaust and the fate of its refugees with the violence of the Nakba and its refugees. Language forces analogies from time to time. Are they imaginary? Should we detach ourselves from “deceiving” language, or does it reflect an initial, primeval understanding, which was lost over the years? I will return to Jaffa’s intertwinement at the end of the chapter.
It was not just in everyday language that intertwined concepts and pains dared to grow roots against the attempt to forget them. Poetic representations of events often reflected the duality. The poet Nathan Alterman, for example, was not afraid of confusing memory flashbacks when he published his poem “Al Zot” (On That) in the newspaper Davar in November 1948. The poem describes a cold-blooded murder of an old Palestinian by a Jewish “young lion.” The poem sought to stimulate awareness of injustice and war crimes committed by the Jewish forces during the fighting:
Across the vanquished city in a jeep he did speed—
A lad bold and armed, a young lion of a lad!
And an old man and a woman on that very street
Cowered against a wall, in fear of him clad.
Said the lad smiling, milk teeth shining:
“I’ll try the machine gun”…and put it into play!
To hide his face in his hands the old man barely had time
When his blood on the wall was sprayed.
We shall sing, then, about “delicate incidents”
Whose name, don’t you know, is murder.
Sing of conversations with sympathetic listeners,
Of snickers of forgiveness that are slurred.
For those in combat gear, and we who impinge,
Whether by action or agreement subliminal,
Are thrust, muttering “necessity” and “revenge,”
Into the realm of the war criminal.10
When Alterman invites readers to look into the mirror, he sees another iconic image, that of the attacks against Jews. This image is immortalized in the legend about the mother of Rabbi Shlomo Itzchaki (Rashi), who when pregnant was attacked by a rider on a horse in a narrow alley in Germany.11 This is described by the poet Shaul Tchernichovsky in his 1924 ballad “The Wondrous Wall of Wormaysha.” There, too, the helpless victims are pushed to the wall. There, too, is a young lion, the German rider. But whereas in Tchernichovsky’s ballad a miracle occurs and the wall opens up and saves the woman, there are no miracles in Alterman’s poem. The boy, the young lion, sheds the blood of the helpless man.
The analogy between pogroms against Jews and persecution of the helpless by Jews during the 1948 war is not accidental in Alterman’s poem, just as the use of the ghetto concept was not accidental in Jaffa. In 1949, the linkage between the events was fresh and personal. It was part of the landscape, the atmosphere, the repertoire, and the cultural sensitivity, which, at the time, were not limited by ethnic boundaries .It was a part of inner contradictions and denials.
There are scholars who claim that Alterman’s poem “Al Zot” was written from a Zionist point of view, one that was willing to condemn injustices and mistakes only in order to glorify, fortify, and justify the entire Zionist project.12 It is not by chance that the poem was adopted by the authorities and handed out to all the soldiers in the midst of the 1948 war in order to serve as “an honest and faithful voice of human conscience.”13 However, even if Ben-Gurion, who was a smart and cunning politician, adopted and accepted Alterman’s poem as nothing more than an attempt to allay his conscience, and even if Alterman and others preserve the identification with the Palestinian as an untreated trauma that will reopen again and again—it is still important. The willingness of Alterman to speak from the heart of Zionism to present the analogy without fear, echoing the violence toward Jews when it surfaces through their actions against others, should not be dismissed.
Poets were not the only ones to connect Jews’ and Palestinians’ pains of exile and of empty houses. Politicians recognized them too. Golda Meir, while visiting abandoned Haifa in May 1948, recognized other scenes of exile: “It’s a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses. There were houses where the coffee and the pita bread were left on the table. I couldn’t avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns.”14
Meir was not afraid of comparing the pains. She wrote those words not in her personal diary but in her report to the directorate of the Jewish National Council (JNC). Based on her accumulated memories as a Jew, she recognized the pain of the refugees faced with an empty house whose residents—elderly people, women and children—were forced to leave at a moment’s notice.
It is true that this observation of the pain and its internal resonance did not prevent Golda Meir from opposing the return of the refugees or from being part of a regime that destroyed villages and turned them into nature reserves. But the observation of the linkage between the sufferings was still there, legitimate and clear, at the heart of the Zionist discourse. As the poet Avot Yeshurun wrote in the most unsettling manner: “The Holocaust of European Jewry and the Holocaust of the Palestinians are one Holocaust of the Jewish people. They looked each other in the eye.”15
The purpose of pointing out the linkages that existed between the traumas in those formative years was not to mark the historical truth of this or that side, to clean any national conscience, or to trace the incarnations of the Nakba in the Israeli mind. It was aimed at pointing out the cultural, public, and unsettling presence of this linkage between the traumas in the Jewish public life of that time. While many Jewish inhabitants realized they had lost their families and their past, they also saw before their eyes familiar sights of loss and displacement. While those Jewish refugees from Europe were sent to a war without fully understanding its components or language, they were very familiar with scenes of violence. Thus, whether they thought they had no choice because this was war, because they were intoxicated by power, or because they were reacting to violence against them, they were almost “forced,” even if only in isolated moments, to see the sights. Those were synchronic moments of awareness and denial, of knowledge, blurred and confusing, flickering from time to time, reflecting and causing inner contradictions. Even if not looked at directly “in the eye,” as Yeshurun puts it, the connections among the pain, the guilt, and the sorrow were no secret. Then came the silencing, the fear of internal contradictions, and the denial.
The most powerful and disturbing aspect of the story came from a native, not a refugee: the handsome “Sabra,” the writer S. Yizhar (the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky), with his novella Khirbet Khizeh, written in May 1948 as Golda Maier was visiting Haifa.16 The novella tells of a combat squad which, toward the end of the war, receives orders regarding a village. The residents are all citizens, and the squad’s orders are to arrest the young and suspicious, gather the residents, drive them away, and burn their houses. Before the orders are carried out, the bored soldiers disrespect the residents, hurt them, and damage their possessions with violence, disrespect, and dehumanization. The hero, one of the soldiers, is crying out, trying to object, to raise moral questions about the deportation order and his comrades’ behavior, but he gets familiar responses that are still heard many years later: “What would happen if Arabs were to conquer a Jewish village?”; “They started it and it’s their fault they can’t fight”; and so on.
The narrator’s unease grows with the expulsion of the residents. He stops hinting at the linkage between the villagers and the Jews and starts declaring it clearly: “Then we saw in the distances several trucks…. I don’t know if they had been told before they left…where they were being taken…. Their appearance and their gait recalled nothing so much as a confused, obedient, groaning flock of sheep, unable to take stock of their situation.”17
While observing the expulsion of the women, children, and elderly, the narrator realizes that this image is quite familiar. It is the infrastructure carved into his Jewish mind: the image of exile.
Exile. This was exile. This is what exile was like…. I had never been in the Diaspora—I said to myself—I had never known what it was like…but people had spoken to me, told me, taught me, and repeatedly recited to me. From every direction, in the books, in the newspapers, and everywhere: exile…it had entered me, apparently, with my mother’s milk. What, in fact had we perpetrated here today?…An echo of tramping feet ringing in my ears, an echo of feet of other exiles, dim, distant, almost mythical, but wrathful like a jeremiad, rolling like thunder, distant and menacing, a harbinger of gloom, beyond which, an echo carrying dread—I couldn’t bear it any longer.18
S. Yizhar was mourning the wound at the heart of Zionism while it was being created. This was the repressed cry of the Jewish exile-veterans, who were disastrously creating a new exile for the defeated and becoming that exile’s prisoners. This is not a metaphor for exile. This is exile itself. This is the beginning of exile. And this wound, Yizhar warns, somewhat prophetically, will haunt the Jews in Israel for many years to come: “A day will come, and they will raise their voice.”19
Yizhar does not protest against the war itself, and he doesn’t believe that Jews have no place in the land. But for him, even the suffering Jewish refugees who came from Europe, those who were about to settle in the Arab refugees’ homes, would not be able to block forever the blame and denial of the other loss and exile, which the Jews now witness from the other side.
About a year passed between the writing of the novella and its publication. During this time, Yizhar had a growing feeling that in the future, the darkness of those days of war would be repressed and forgotten in favor of light and redemption. This is what he wrote in a prologue he added to the novella, which was published only years later by Uri S. Cohen:
When a man returns from the battles of the last year, knowing the equal aspect of both stories, it is as if he had already made up his mind about what happened…. A friend comes along and argues, justly, that this vision is distorted…and it’s not right to focus on small details, “to look specifically in the outskirts, to go through the garbage, to view the shadow as if it was reality, it is nothing but pettiness.” Personally…I don’t know. I can’t tell it in a different way. I can’t be silent, nor can I start it in any other way. And not because I haven’t witnessed great things as well, back then. I did see many who were glowing. But because, as it seems today, we will go back to those things, and discover many new aspects, brighter and darker….When the time comes for them and for us, when this feeling of shock at those events fades away, we’ll have no choice but to sober up, little by little, and view everything that happened more clearly. Things are collected, some are still vague, others are clear. You are telling things as they were, as they were seared, through and through.20
Through and through, like the High Priest on Yom Kippur, who would go into the Holy of Holies not knowing if he would come out alive. In this way, Yizhar guesses, the Jews in Israel will be haunted by exile, through and through, in the core of their being.
Four years after the war, in the midst of producing new national ceremonies for the young state, Oved Ben-Ami, the founder and first mayor of the city of Netanya, was troubled by what he noticed while watching his city’s Independence Day parade. In front of him Palestinian school students from the nearby villages were marching, while demonstrating “observance, discipline, organization, and order.”21 Instead of the vulnerability and weakness of the refugees of the 1948 war, the mayor noticed now strength and order. This sight caused in him confusion and contradictions that evoked the same links and analogies as before and during the war. But now, when the marching Palestinian youth seemed for a moment stronger, they appeared as in a continuous game of mirrors—as contemporary victims that might become the future oppressors. Ben-Ami expressed his concern in a letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion:
Here began my mental confusion. It was a feeling shared by many of us…. Will our display of justice and morals [toward the Palestinians] in the future obligate those who benefit from it today while developing their mental and physical capacities? Will a day not come when they will adopt for themselves and…[for] us Pinsker’s words: “What we get from you is a dismal and humiliating gift, we need to give ourselves emancipation”22
Ben-Ami invokes none other than Hovevei Zion, a founder, leader, and activist of the first Zionist movement, to warn against future oppressors who are the current victims. But Ben-Ami does not limit his use of Zionist logic to that comparison, which subtly makes the future demand of the Palestinians accurate and lawful, but goes on to equate the situation in the Sudetenland before and during World War II with the Jewish-Palestinian situation in Israel. Observing the nationalist, semimilitary parade in Netanya, Ben-Ami sees the strong and united image of the Nazi German youth as the future Palestinians:
Did not the Czechs educate the German youth in the Sudeten, the same youth that rose later to cut them off?…It is hard not to think that we are creating our own future problem that may take revenge on the Jewish children yet unborn.23
The image of those “unborn” Jewish children who will be threatened by the future “German” Palestinians—who will lawfully engage in autoemancipation, an enterprise learned by observation of the Zionists—portrays in a nutshell the echo of multilayered pain and fear that raises anxiety and resistance.
Indeed, as Ben-Ami’s letter demonstrates already in 1952, the sanity wished for by Yizhar in 1949 was not quick to arrive. On the contrary, over the following years, the recent past of the Holocaust and the Nakba, which were inevitably and clearly tied to each other, became a more distant memory, in which deportation and injustice were dimmed, pushed to subconscious and repressed layers, and the Nakba became a disaster only from the Palestinian perspective.24 The state felt that repression should also be expressed in changing the landscape and disproportionately inflating the nature of Arab-Nazi relations, to the point of rendering Arabs and Nazis full collaborators in the Jewish catastrophe. The Holocaust and its scars played a crucial role in the Nakba not just during the battles but also later, when the Nakba was silenced and denied—while also playing a role in the discourse of Holocaust denial in the Arab states.
The Holocaust and the Nakba, which, as Avot Yeshurun put it, looked into each other’s eyes and which cannot be understood separately, gradually became competitors for memory and victimhood, each excluding the other, to each side’s great horror. The silence and denial of the Nakba is also the mirror image of turning the Holocaust into a monolithic story of disaster, revival, and redemption. The Holocaust cannot be separated from the State of Israel, just as it cannot be separated from the question of Palestine.25 Anxieties, silencing, and repressions are not everlasting. They emerge in the cracks and break out in various forms.26
Once in a while, different voices continued Yizhar’s voice, Golda Meir’s pain, and Jaffa’s ghetto. This constitutes a kind of a cultural, literary, and artistic tradition. These voices, alongside growing recognition in Israel of the Palestinians’ continuous political catastrophe, and together with historical research that traces in new ways the 1948 war and expulsion, have been growing also in the Israeli public sphere since the 1990s.27 In this respect, the abovementioned recent and much-criticized book on the Shoah and Nakba continues a tradition. But it also paves new and courageous paths within that tradition by asserting that the joint discussion cannot be repressed any longer, even if it asserts the presence of the other’s pain. Using the image of the refugee, it considers the translation of empathic, unsettling elements into political terms and into a flexibility in the national dichotomies, so that these oppositions might stop producing constant, violent paranoia.
Even if there is no consensus regarding Jewish responsibility for the continuous suffering caused by the Nakba, and even if no consensus exists among Palestinians on the consequences of acknowledging Jewish pain and the legitimacy of Jewish Israeli identity, still the unsettling must go on.
The examples given here are taken mainly from the public discourse: from public figures such as Alterman, Meir, Yizhar, and Ben-Ami. But what could the Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors feel and see when they were faced with sights of destruction and exile? Some say that their repression was immediate and terrified.
I will end with Jaffa, from my personal archive of repression.
Epilogue
This is what my father told me when I tried to understand how it happened: “My mother was already on her way to Palestine,” he would say. “She was on the boat. We had to find her a place to live, somewhere she could come to.” “I came a year earlier,” he told me. “My brother was already an officer.”
When he related these things, I imagined the great barricade at the heart of Jaffa. Every time a large group of immigrants arrived, they evacuated parts of the camp. Anyone who found an apartment got it. When the Bulgarians came, about a month later, they grabbed apartments. When the Romanians came, they did it. Now my father’s mother was coming. It was their turn.
“Did I mention my brother was an officer?” my father continued. “He had his own Jeep; he drove it into the camp and grabbed one of the houses near the sea. The first and second floors were already taken, but the third floor was still empty. It had a huge balcony. Someone had to guard the apartment until my mother got there.”
“My brother gave me a gun,” he would say, “and I stayed there 24/7 to make sure no one grabbed the apartment. I was replaced for a few hours here and there.”
“Why did you need a gun, Dad?” I would ask him. “To shoot the Bulgarians?”
“Do you know where that was?” my mother would intervene. “In Jabaliya, over there, in the south of Jaffa? Today they call it Givat Aliya.”
And I would nod my head and make a mental note to maybe check it sometime. In the meantime, I imagine a hill with a big Arab house, my father standing in the door with a gun he does not know how to operate, and around him a hodgepodge of Arabs and Jews, various kinds of refugees. The house has beautiful blue tiles and no furniture. Only a big mirror with a wooden frame rests against one of the walls, occasionally revealing the image of a young man in an empty house. Voices in strange languages echo from the floors taken by others, and he is waiting for his mother, trusting his brother, and missing their own home.
“And it didn’t bother you?” I would ask. “How could you? You, who also…” I was relentless.
“What do you mean? It was a war,” he would answer.
“But you were also deported from your homes,” I would continue.
“How can you compare?” He would get angry. “How can you compare?”
When his mother, my grandmother, arrived, they grabbed another small half-apartment on the first floor. That’s where they put the aunt with her son. Her husband and another son stayed behind in the European crematoriums, together with my grandfather and the rest of the family.
On Saturdays, all the refugees from the village of Petrovaselo, on the bank of the Tisza River in Serbia, made the house in Jaffa their own.
This is what my father would tell me as a child.
Unlike Yizhar, my father, a Holocaust survivor and refugee who was only searching for a home again, was too afraid to see the connection between his trauma and the missing owners of the empty house in Jaffa, between his exile and theirs. It is time for us to see it, even if it is unsettling.
1. Salman Natour, Memory Talked to Me and Walked Away: The Chronicle of the Wrinkled-Face Sheikh, trans. Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2014), 7.
2. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, eds., The Holocaust and the Nakba: Memory, National Identity and Jewish-Arab Partnership [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute and Hakibutz Hame’uchad, 2015).
3. For the public controversy around the book’s publication, see for example: “Who Compares the Holocaust with Arab Defeat in 1948?” [in Hebrew], Y-Net News, August 24, 2015, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4693925,00.html; Reut Wilf, “New Book Compares the Holocaust to the Nakba” [in Hebrew], NRG, August 24, 2015, http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/719/831.html; Shirit Avitan Cohen, “Shocking, If You Will: Against the Book The Holocaust and the Nakba” [in Hebrew], NRG, September 7, 2015, http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART2/723/674.html.
4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968).
5. Haim Guri, Levantine Fair, Songs 2 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Mosad Bialik, 1998), 327.
6. Primo Levi, The Reawakening [in Hebrew], trans. Abraham Paska (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1979), 11.
7. See Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust, trans. Lenn J. Schramm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially chapters 2, 3, and 10 and chapter 12, 157–161.
8. IDF Archive 1950/1860/1. See also the memories of one of the residents of the Ajami ghetto in: Haim Hazan and Daniel Monterescu, A Town at Sundown: Aging Nationalism in Jaffa [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2011), 99–100.
9. Office of the Prime Minister, “The Policy toward Israeli Arabs 1950–1959,” Israel State Archive, GIMEL, 5592/43. See also Yitzhak Laor, “We Write You, Homeland” [in Hebrew], in Narratives with No Natives: Essays on Israeli Literature (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1995), 132.
11. On the connection between the two poems, see also Hannan Hever, “The Seventh Column and 1948 War,” The Public Space: Journal of Politics and Society 34 (2009): 9–34.
12. See Laor, “We Write You, Homeland,” 132; and Hannan Hever, ed., Tell It Not in Gat: The Nakba in Hebrew Poetry, 1948–1958 [in Hebrew] (Pardess and Zochrot), 9–53.
13. See Dan Laor, Nathan Aletrman: A Biography [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2013), 369.
14. Quoted in Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 310. See also Yair Auron, The Holocaust, Rebirth, and the Nakba [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2013), 119–120.
15. Avot Yeshurun, “Passover on Caves” [in Hebrew], in Songs (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1995), 104; Hannan Hever, “‘The Two Gaze Directly Into One Another’s Face’: Avot Yeshurun Between the Nakba and the Shoah—An Israeli Perspective,” in “History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature Facing 1948,” special issue, Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 153–163.
16. S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel, trans. Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
19. See Almog Behar, Tsimon Beerot: Shirim, 2000–2006 (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 2008), 146–47; Almog Behar, “‘A Day Will Come, and They Will Raise Their Voice’: S. Yizhar’s ‘Illness’ of Not Being Blind, upon the New Edition of Khirbet Khizeh” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, October 4, 2010, http://www.haaretz.co.il/literature/1.1142866; Amir Eshel, Hannan Hever, and Vered Karti Shemtov, “Introduction,” in “History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature Facing 1948,” special issue, Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 1–9; Anita Shapira, “Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 1–62.
20. See Uri Cohen, “On S. Yizhar’s Accused Apology” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, September 18, 2009, http://www.haaretz.co.il/literature/1.1281363; and Todd Hasak-Lowy, “An Incomplete Frame Narrative Revisited: S. Yizhar’s Introduction to ‘Hirbet Hiz‘ah,’” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 27–37.
21. Office of the Prime Minister, “The Policy toward Israeli Arabs 1950–1959” [in Hebrew], Israel State Archive, GIMEL, 5592/43.
22. “Policy toward Israeli Arabs.”
23. “Policy toward Israeli Arabs.”
24. Ariella Azulay, Constituting Violence, 1947–1950: A Visual Genealogy of a Regime and “A Catastrophe from Their Point of View” [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2009).
25. Amnon Raz Krakotzkin, “Walter Benjamin, the Holocaust and the question of Palestine” [in Hebrew], in The Holocaust and the Nakba: Memory, National Identity and Jewish-Arab Partnership, ed. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (Tel Aviv: Van Leer Institute and Hakibutz Hame’uchad, 2015), 172–181.
26. For more on Israeli literature and the 1948 war, see Haggai Rogani, Mul ha-kfar sheḥarev: Ha-Shirah ha-ʻivrit ve-ha-sikhsukh ha-yehudi-ʻaravi 1929–1967 [Facing the ruined village: Hebrew poetry and the Jewish-Arab conflict, 1929–1967] (Haifa: Pardess, 2006); Shira Stav, “Nakba and Holocaust: Mechanisms of Comparison and Denial in the Israeli Literary Imagination,” in “History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature Facing 1948,” special issue, Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 85.
27. The work of the NGO “Zochrot” (“remembering” in Hebrew), dedicated to promoting acknowledgment and accountability for the ongoing injustices of the Nakba, is a good example of this. Representative of the opposing attitude is the “Nakba Law,” see https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/496. For an example of recent new ways of conceptualizing the history of 1948, see Alon Confino, “The Warm Sand of the Coast of Tantura: History and Memory in Israel after 1948,” History and Memory 27, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2015): 43–82.