As might be expected, the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of Israel is being treated as an occasion for universal jubilation, whether in Israel, in the American Jewish community, in the American political sphere, or among world leaders who have been involved in symbolic celebrations of this event.
It should surprise no one that the devastating impact of 1948 on the Palestinian people has been generally forgotten in the rush to observe the fiftieth birthday of Israel. Indeed this latest episode fits well into a larger pattern; in the course of the struggle between these two people, history is repressed as each tries to come into being at the expense of the other. Such a pattern was natural given the Jewish attempt to establish a state in a land with an Arab majority, and to impose the fact of Israel’s existence on the stubborn reality of Palestinian peoplehood in Palestine. While Israelis and their friends have much to celebrate in 1998, which marks their victory in this struggle, Palestinians and those who know their history have much to mourn. For them, the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s establishment marks what since 1948 has been universally known in Arabic as al-nakba--the catastrophe--meaning the disappearance of Arab Palestine in 1948.
The year 1948 has many meanings for Palestinians. It means the year in which they lost their country, the year the entity called Palestine disappeared from the map; with it disappeared for several decades the Palestinians’ hopes for self-determination and statehood. It means the year in which about 750,000 of the total Palestinian population of 1.4 million became refugees, some fleeing, others driven out of their homes by the forces of the nascent Israeli state. Of these, some ended up in refugee camps; over the past two and a half generations, the majority of these have clawed their way out of the camps to prosperity, mobility and success elsewhere. It means the year in which the two cities with the largest Arab populations in Palestine, Jaffa and Haifa, the centers of the country’s Arab economic and intellectual life, together with many other towns and 418 villages, were overrun and emptied of most of their Arab inhabitants. It means the year in which the vast bulk of Palestine’s land and huge amounts of other property passed out of the hands of the country’s Arab population and into that of the new State of Israel. It means the year in which the Palestinians disappeared from the world stage as a people; instead, they became a “refugee problem,” losing their voice to the Arab regimes which purported to speak for them until the Palestinians wrested back the right to represent themselves in the 1960s.
Clearly, Palestinians have little cause to celebrate anything in 1998: indeed it marks a collective trauma in their national history on the order of Sedan in 1870 for France, or Pearl Harbor in 1941 for Americans. Of course, both France and the United States eventually turned the tables and overcame the humiliation of defeat on the battlefield: that is highly unlikely--indeed virtually unimaginable--in the Palestinian case. In this respect the trauma of the Palestinians is much more akin to that of the Armenians and the Kurds, who like the Palestinians were victims of brutal campaigns of what we have learned to call ethnic cleansing. For these two peoples, to the injury of losing their respective national homelands, and with them the prospect of an independent national existence, has been added the insult of decades of non-recognition of the hurt which had been done to them. The denial that the Armenians were the victims of genocide, and the curtain of silence drawn over several generations of repression of the Kurds by three different Middle Eastern governments, (those of Iraq, Turkey and Iran) constitute close parallels to what has happened to the Palestinians.
For the Palestinians, this non-recognition of their national agony has been in some ways the unkindest cut of all. Not only did they feel that they were the victims in 1948, losing their country, most of their property, and seeing 13,000 of their fellow citizens killed (6,000 Israelis died in the conflict, in each case about 1 percent of the respective total populations: the differences were that most of the Palestinians killed were civilians, while most of the Israelis were combatants, and, most importantly, that the Israelis won the war, got their nation-state, and ended up with all that property). Beyond this, because the Palestinians were the victims of victims, defeated and dispossessed by the survivors of the modern era’s greatest human atrocity, the Holocaust, their own suffering was forgotten or ignored. Even worse, as the history came to be written, they were depicted as the villains of the piece, the latest incarnation of a sequence of tormentors who have persecuted the Jewish people.
In light of the enormity of the evil done to the Jews--albeit elsewhere and at the hands of others--the specificity of Palestine, of what had actually happened in this small Mediterranean country in the years leading up to 1948, quickly faded in the international imaginary. This specificity was replaced by a narrative in which Israel and the Jewish people figured predominantly, and in which the center-piece was not the tragedy of the Palestinians, but rather the greatest trauma in Jewish history and one of the greatest in modern human experience: the Holocaust. This powerful and inspiring narrative of national redemption and resurrection firmly reoriented Jewish history on a completely new axis, with the birth of Israel serving as the bright counterpoint to the black horror of what had happened in the death-camps of Europe only a few years before. In this grand scheme of things, the Palestinians could only be an annoying complication, to be written out of the history, painted out of the pictures, the names of hundreds of their ancestral villages erased as new Hebrew names were concocted or resurrected, their very name and that of their country becoming almost epithets in polite company.
As if all of this were not enough, an insidious process of blaming the victims ensued, ensuring that even if a few inconvenient facts about what had happened in 1948 did come out, they could be laid at the door of the Palestinians themselves, or of their fellow Arabs. Thus the scandalous canard that “their leaders told them to leave” was concocted, which assiduous research has shown to have been an essentially false story devised and propagated by Israeli apologists, and which untold multitudes have come to believe to be gospel truth in the intervening decades. Thus, we had the self-delusional and comforting argument that while the Zionist leadership was willing to share Palestine and live in peace with the Arabs before 1948, it was the Arabs who refused accommodation, started the war, lost it, and deserved all the consequences. From this premise followed logically the conclusion that nearly 1.4 million Palestinians and their descendants unto the third generation and beyond somehow deserved everything that happened to them in 1948 and afterwards because of the sins or the stupidity of their leaders.
Like all successful big lies, each of these embodied some element of truth, however small. Thus, in beleaguered Haifa in the spring of 1948, some Arab League representatives did tell the population to leave, although other Arab leaders told them to stay. In fact, the Arab leadership all over the rest of the country futilely tried to keep the Palestinian population from fleeing their homes. They did this as the refugee tide turned into a flood as defeat turned into rout in the spring of 1948 under the hammer blows of Plan Dalet. This was the Zionist master plan for the conquest of the coastal strip, including Jaffa and Haifa, and other key strategic regions of the country, which was implemented before the Mandate ended on May 15, 1948. Thus, while a very few important individuals of integrity and courage, like Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, sincerely called for sharing Palestine with the Arabs, the hard pragmatists who led the Labor Zionist parties, like Ben-Gurion, and their even harder rivals among the revisionists, like Jabotinsky and Begin, knew from at least the 1930s onwards that this was a fight to the finish over who would dominate the country. These leaders intended to win the whole country for the Jews exclusively, and knew from the mid-1940’s onwards that the big battalions were on their side.
By the time the Arab armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948, the miserably disorganized Palestinians had been crushed by the victorious military forces of the nascent Jewish State, which had already turned into refugees perhaps half of the 750,000 Palestinians who ultimately fled their homes. The Palestinians and the Arab states were hamstrung by internal divisions and appallingly bad leadership, not to speak of the scrupulously respected secret commitments made by King Abdullah, who controlled the two best Arab armies in the field, Jordan’s Arab Legion and the Iraqi contingent, to the Zionist leadership to restrict his forces’ sphere of action.
The 1948 war was nonetheless a closely fought affair, at least at the outset, and was very costly to the new State. Coming in the wake of the Holocaust, the losses which the nascent State of Israel incurred were particularly painful. But these losses, combined with the sweet intoxication of victory as a new Jewish national polity arose in the ancestral homeland of the Jews, and with the vindication of the central premises of Zionism which the atrocities of the Nazi era had conclusively provided blinded Israelis and those who sympathized with them to the losses involved in the dispossession of an entire people.
From the celebratory frenzy which has just begun moving into high gear this year, it is clear that little has changed since 1948 as far as the international representation of this event is concerned. We are told that this is Israel’s jubilee birthday, a holiday, an occasion for universal rejoicing. We do not hear the heads of state of governments the world over phoning one another to commemorate the simultaneous passing of Palestine in 1948, nor are there plans anywhere in the world for a solemn observance of the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Just as they have been for the past fifty years, the Palestinians are forgotten in all the festivities.
But genuine celebration, one which would commemorate the establishment of a Jewish State at peace with its neighbors, cannot take place until two things happen. The first is a realization that in the zero-sum terms in which both communities understood reality in 1948, the birth of Israel necessarily involved the bloody infanticide of Palestine. The second is the righting of this wrong, insofar as this is possible, via the much-delayed birth of a State of Palestine. This State will not be born, and peace will not come, until the reality of what happened in 1948 has been confronted. For there can be no progress towards the reconciliation which is necessary to resolve this conflict unless we can get out of the closed box which posits Israeli innocence regarding what has happened to the Palestinians, and which places the primary onus for their own victimization on the Palestinians themselves.
In other words, history--meaning history which is not obsessively self-reflexive as so much of Israeli and Palestinian history is--has to be let back in. While neither people should be expected to change its national narrative, it will be necessary for both to take account of elements of the other’s. For Palestinians, this does not require acceptance of the idea of Israeli innocence, but rather an understanding of the oppressive weight of the European context which drove Jews to Zionism--and drove many of them to Zion--and to doing what they did in Palestine to the Palestinians. Edward Said has stressed recently that Palestinians must do this if they are ever to comprehend and come to terms with what has happened to them over the past half century and more. As I have argued elsewhere, it will also require that the Palestinians accept some responsibility for their own failures in the 1930s, 1940s and afterwards.
Israelis will have to accept and atone for the fact that, however pure their motives and intentions may have been, and however pressing their circumstances at the time, in the process of constituting their nation-state they did grievous harm to a weaker people which had done nothing to them before this conflict began, harm which continues half a century later. This will require confronting a potent and well-entrenched reading of Jewish history (one embodying profound distortions of Palestinian history) which will not surrender the hegemony it has attained over the past half century without a struggle.
None of this will be easy. Both Palestinians and Israelis are accustomed to viewing themselves as victims, and to seeing the other as no more than one of a series of accessories involved in inflicting suffering on them. Rather than granting the Palestinians agency and accepting that they too may have honorable or at least rational motivations, many Israelis and Jews see the Palestinians as driven by the same blind hatred which has driven so many persecutors in Jewish history. There is no room in such a scheme for the idea that Israeli actions may have some bearing on, or could even cause, Palestinian behavior: by definition, Israelis are victims, no matter what they do. Similarly, for Palestinians, Israel and Zionism are only part of a vast concatenation of forces including Britain, the United States, and the Arab regimes, which has conspired throughout this century to deprive them of self-determination, and ultimately of their very land and homes in many cases. And since the Palestinians are by definition victims, their actions are invariably justified, even if they cause great suffering to Israelis, since the suffering the Israelis have inflicted on the Palestinians has generally been even greater.
The fact that there is some truth in the world view of both only makes both more stubborn. To underline these similarities, however, is not to say that the two are the same; historically, in the conflict between them in Palestine over the past century, one side eventually grew far stronger and became the winner, while the other grew far weaker and ended up the loser. In this conflict, one became the victimizer and the other the victim. And yet this is not the way in which these two peoples are regarded by the world, or at least in the United States. As I write these words, there is a debate whether Yasser Arafat should or should not visit the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and learn about a crime committed against the Jewish people on another continent by another people when he was a thirteen-year-old boy. Completely different though the events were in scale, scope, and universal historical importance, there is no museum, no memorial, no notice anywhere which records what Israel did to the Palestinians in 1948. Nor would Binyamin Netanyahu visit one if such did exist, even though he is head of government of a state which stands today on the ruins and in the place of Palestine.
While 1948 therefore does not mark a universal jubilee, it could still provide a valuable occasion for reflection on the differing meanings of the events of that climactic year for these two peoples, which in turn could be a stepping-stone to something else more substantial. However, if instead of sober reflection this anniversary is used by Israel and its friends for triumphalist crowing which rubs more salt into the wounds of the Palestinians, it will take us further away from the possibility of peace and reconciliation between the two peoples. Nor is it sufficient for this occasion to be used to mourn the sad fate of the Palestinians, and to demand atonement for what was done to them, understandable though the impulse to mourn is, and important though atonement would be. If the Palestinians are able to put forth such a demand credibly, doing so must be coupled with an attempt to understand why the awful course of Jewish history in Europe led Zionism to do what it did in Palestine, unjust though this was to the Palestinians, and why that same history might lead some to celebrate this outcome, tragic though it was for the Palestinians.
If there is ever to be a universal celebration which Palestinians and Israelis can share, much will have to change in the way of attitudes, and today we are certainly very far from any such changes. As has been suggested, the Palestinian attitude towards Jewish history will have to evolve, something which is exceedingly difficult while the Palestinians rightly feel themselves to be oppressed by the overwhelming power of the Jewish State, half of them living in exile from their homeland, and the rest under military occupation or living as second class citizens within it. Perhaps most importantly, however, if such a celebration is to be truly universal, the Palestinians must have something concrete such as independent statehood and national self-determination, to celebrate alongside the Israelis. For this to happen, Israelis and their supporters must recognize and make restitution for the harm that was done to the Palestinian people in creating the state of Israel in 1948. After half a century, perhaps it is finally time for that process to begin.
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