Abstract
In this chapter the author notes the ways that recent events have helped raise consciousness about al-Nakba, the “catastrophe,” that began in 1948 with the ouster of more than 700,000 Arab Palestinians during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. This chapter shows that further debates are needed about al-Nakba politics because for many years few outside of ranks of the “new” Israeli historiographers were willing to contemplate the possibility that some type of ethnic cleansing had taken place during the 1948 expulsions. Using the work of writers such as Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris as touchstones, the author puts on display the varied academic, legal, political, and military reasons why so few want to include the Nakba in the traditional canons of genocidal studies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Although a few writers today comment on the indigenocide or the genocide of the Palestinians during Al-Nakba, Yehoshafat Harkabi, an Israeli author, used the term “politicide” as an alternative way of explaining how the Arabs were trying to prevent the formation of the State of Israel. See Yohoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel, translated by Misha Louvish (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Israel Universities Press, 1972), 37–38.
- 2.
Haifa Rashed, Damien Short, and John Docker, “Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli Genocide of Palestine,” Holy Land Studies 13, no. 1 (2014): 1–23.
- 3.
Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Tradition, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Israeli-Palestine (London: Zed Books, 2007), 1. See also Nur Masalha, The Palestinian Nakba: Decolonizing History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books 2012).
- 4.
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007).
- 5.
Sari Hanafi, “Explaining Spacio-cide in the Palestinian Territory: Colonization, Separation, and State of Exception,” Current Sociology 6, no. 2 (2012): 190–205.
- 6.
Rashed, Short, and Docker don’t mind extending the definitional work of Raphaël Lempkin as they argue that many Holocaust and genocide scholars are fearful and submissive when confronted with the possibility that Zionist Israel could be a “genocidal settler colonial state.” Rashed, Short, and Docker, “Nakba Memoricide,” 1.
- 7.
For trenchant critiques of this Nakba denialism see Eitan Bronstein, “The Nakba: Something That Did Not Occur,” Zochrot, last modified August, 2009, https://www.zochrot.org/en/article/50644; Gideon Levy, “There Won’t Be Peace Until Israel Accepts Responsibility for the Nakba,” Ha’aretz, last modified September 22, 2016, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-there-won-t-be-peace-until-israel-accepts-responsibility-for-the-nakba-1.5440683; Rami Younis, “When Will the Israeli Left Accept the Occupation Started in ’48, not ’67,” +972, last modified June 6, 2017, https://972mag.com/when-will-the-israeli-left-accept-the-occupation-started-in-48-not-67/127911/
- 8.
Masalha, The Palestinian Nakba.
- 9.
Jamal Zahalka, “Knesset Approves Nakba Law,” Israel National News, last modified March 23, 2011, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143069
- 10.
See, for example, Nicola Perugini, “Settler colonial Inversions: Israel’s ‘Disengagement’ and the Gush Katif ‘Museum of Expulsion’ in Jerusalem,” Settler Colonial Studies 9 no. 1 (October 2018): 41–58.
- 11.
Henning Melber, “Genocide Matters: Negotiating a Namibian-German Past in the Present,” Stichprobem 17, no. 33 (2017): 1–24, https://stichproben.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/p_stichproben/Artikel/Nummer33/01_Article_Melber_Genocide_Namibia_draft_FINAL.pdf
- 12.
Bashir Bashir and Rachel Busbridge, “The Politics of Decolonisation and Bi-Nationalism in Israel/Palestine,” Political Studies (2018): 1–18, 6.
- 13.
Liam Stack, “No Google Says, It Did Not Delete ‘Palestine’ From Maps,” The New York Times, last modified August 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/12/world/middleeast/google-palestine.html
- 14.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
- 15.
Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Vintage, 2001), 208.
- 16.
Ian Black, “1948 No Catastrophe Says Israel, as Term Nakba Banned from Arab Children’s Textbooks,” The Guardian, last modified July 22, 2009, paragraph 6, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/22/israel-remove-nakba-from-textbooks
- 17.
For one of the best overviews of the role that politics plays in the formation of these Israeli and Palestinian archives see Ann Laura Stoler, “On Archiving As Dissensus,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38, no. 1 (2018): 43–56.
- 18.
Ian Black, “1948,” paragraphs 1–2.
- 19.
Ibid., paragraph 4.
- 20.
Ibid., paragraph 11.
- 21.
Ibid., paragraph 8.
- 22.
Ilan Pappé, “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36, no. 1 (Autumn, 2006): 6–20, 8.
- 23.
Benny Morris, “The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past,” Tikkun 3, no. 6 (November/December 1988): 19–23, 99–102. During these earlier phases Morris was willing to make claims about how traditional Israeli historians who studied Operation Dani, and the occupation of Palestinian towns like Lydda, “called the affair a ‘rebellion’ in order to justify the subsequent slaughter.” “The New Historiography,” 19. In that same essay in Tikkun he went on to accuse “Israeli historians in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s” of being “less than honest in their treatment of the Lydda-Ramle episode” 19.
- 24.
Morris, “The New Historiography,” 103.
- 25.
Some, however, argue that there was no massacre. See Eliezer Tauber, “Deir Yassin: There Was No Massacre,” The Times of Israel, last modified May 28, 2018, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/deir-yassin-the-end-of-a-myth/
- 26.
See, for example, Edwin Black, “Why International Farhud Day Stymies Invented Palestinian History,” Jewish Journal, last modified May 30, 2018, https://jewishjournal.com/opinion/234614/international-farhud-day-stymies-invented-palestinian-history/
- 27.
See, for example, Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 1992).
- 28.
Benny Morris, “The Historiography of Deir Yassin,” The Journal of Israeli History 24, no. 1 (March 2006): 79–107, 100.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Pappé The Ethnic Cleansing.
- 31.
Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer, 1995): 9–65.
- 32.
Morris, “The Historiography,” 100.
- 33.
Ibid., 100–101.
- 34.
See Stoler, “On Archiving As Dissensus.”
- 35.
John Docker, “Reconceptualising Settler-Colonialism and Genocide with Special Reference to Palestine, Sri Lanka and Australia: Reflections on Damien Short’s Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 16, no. 1 (2017): 37.
- 36.
For helpful background on Srebrenica see David Rohde, “Why Did Ratko Mladic Commit Genocide Against Bosnia’s Muslims?” The New Yorker, last modified November 26, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-did-ratko-mladic-commit-genocide-against-bosnias-muslims
- 37.
See, for example, Daniel Blatman, “Yes, Benny Morris, Israel Did Perpetrate Ethnic Cleansing in 1948,” Ha’aretz, last modified October 14, 2016, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-yes-benny-morris-it-was-ethnic-cleansing-in-1948-1.5449636
- 38.
Avi Shlaim, “The Debate About 1948,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27 (1995): 287–304, 287.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Ibid., 287–288.
- 41.
Ibid., 287.
- 42.
Ilan Pappé, “The Tantura Case in Israel: The Katz Research and Trial,” Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 19–39.
- 43.
Shabtai Teveth, “Charging Israel with Original Sin,” Commentary, September 1, 1989, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/charging-israel-with-original-sin/
- 44.
Ibid., 100.
- 45.
For more on parrhesia see Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, edited by Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001).
- 46.
Shlaim, “The Debate about 1948,” 287.
- 47.
Anaheed Al-Hardan, “Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought: The Transformation of a Concept,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 3 (2015): 622–638.
- 48.
Grace Wermenbol, “Preserving the Past, Mobilizing the Past: The Nakba As a Prospective Media Realm,” Arab Media and Society 25 (Winter/Spring 2018): 51–89.
- 49.
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.
- 50.
Al-Hardan, “Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought,” 635.
- 51.
Wermenbol, “Preserving the Past,” 51–67.
- 52.
Morris, “The New Historiography,” 100.
- 53.
For potentially explosive ways of discussing the “invention” of Israel or nation-states see Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, translated by Yael Lotan (London: Verso, 2009); Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London: Routledge, 1997).
- 54.
Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon, 1987).
- 55.
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
- 56.
Ilan Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (London: Macmillan, 1988).
- 57.
Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
- 58.
For a fine summary of some of the claims that have been advanced by the new Israeli historiographers see Anita Shapira and Ora Wiskind-Elper, “Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the ‘New Historians’ In Israel,” History & Memory 7, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1995): 9–40.
- 59.
Mordechai Bar-On, “Review Essay: Cleansing History of Its Content: Some Critical Comments on Ilan Pappé’s, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” The Journal of Israel History 27, no. 2 (September 2008): 269–275, 269.
- 60.
Ibid., 269.
- 61.
Ibid., 270.
- 62.
Shlaim, “The Debate About 1948,” 293.
- 63.
Ibid., 302.
- 64.
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 482.
- 65.
Saleh Abdel Jawad, “Zionist Massacres: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War,” in Israel and the Palestinian Refugees, edited by Eyal Benvenisti, Chaim Gans, and Sari Hanafi (New York: Springer, 2007), 59–127, 128.
- 66.
Ahmad H. Sa’di, “Remembering Al-Nakba in a Time of Amnesia,” Interventions 10, no. 3 (2008): 381–399, 382.
- 67.
Ibid., 382.
- 68.
Ibid., 383.
- 69.
Jawad, “The Arab and Palestinian Narratives,” 75.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
Shapira and Wiskind-Elper, “Politics and Collective Memory,” 19.
- 73.
Ibid., 29–30.
- 74.
Anaheed Al-Hardan, “Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought: The Transformation of a Concept,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 3 (2015): 622–638.
- 75.
Ibid., 623.
- 76.
Ibid.
- 77.
For more on the expulsions and “transfers” that took place during the Nakba, see Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians.
- 78.
Joseph Massad, “The Cultural Work of Recovering Palestine,” Boundary 2 42, no. 4 (2015): 187–219, 203.
- 79.
Nur Masalha, “New History, Post-Zionism and Neo-Colonialism: A Critique of the Israeli ‘New Historians,’” Holy Land Studies 10, no. 1 (2011): 1–53, 1.
- 80.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Necropolitical Debris: The Dichotomy of Life and Death,” State Crime 4, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 34–51, 34.
- 81.
Walid Khalidi, “Special Feature: The Fall of Haifa Revisited,” Journal of Palestine Studies 37, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 30–58, 30–34.
- 82.
Rashed, Short, and Docker, “Nakba Memoricide,” 1.
- 83.
Shapira, “Politics and Collective Memory,” 33.
- 84.
For a typical example of renascent journalistic interest in Al-Nakba, see Al Jazeera Staff, “Al-Nakba,” Al Jazeera, last modified May 29, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2013/05/20135612348774619.html. The four-part series on the Palestinian catastrophe chose to begin with the Napoleonic attempts to appeal to Jews who might ally themselves with the French so that they could check Britain’s incursions into this region.
- 85.
For a 1997 documentary film, that is 58 minutes long, that tries to help with consciousness-raising, see Benny Brunner and Alexandra Jansse, Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948 (The Netherlands: Arab Film Distribution, Landmark Media Enterprises, 1997). This documentary was based on findings that came from one of Benny Morris’ books.
- 86.
Martin Shaw, “Palestine in an International Historical Perspective on Genocide,” Holy Land Studies 9, no. 1 (2010): 1–24, 1.
- 87.
Omer Bartov, in Martin Shaw and Omer Bartov, “Discussion: The Question of Genocide in Palestine, 1948: An Exchange Between Martin Shaw and Omer Bartov,” Journal of Genocide Research 12, no.3/4 (2010): 243–259, 246.
- 88.
Bartov, “Discussion: The Question of Genocide in Palestine,” 246.
- 89.
Shaw, “Discussion: The Question of Genocide in Palestine,” 244.
- 90.
Bartov, “Discussion: The Question of Genocide in Palestine,” 248.
- 91.
Ibid.
- 92.
Anaheed Al-Hardan, “Decolonizing Research on Palestinians: Towards Critical Epistemologies and Research Practices,” Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 1 (2014): 61–71.
- 93.
Ibid., 62.
- 94.
Ibid., 69.
- 95.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Necropolitical Debris,” 34.
- 96.
Yifat Gutman, “Looking Backward to the Future: Counter-Memory As Oppositional Knowledge-Production in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Current Sociology (2015): 1–19, 11. For related commentaries on memory work, see Ronit Lentin, Co-Memory and Melancholia: Israel’s Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
- 97.
Gutman, “Looking Backward to the Future,” 11. See also Orlando Crowcroft, “What Does Al-Nakba Day Mean for Palestinians?” International Business Times, last modified May 14, 2015, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/what-does-al-nakba-day-mean-palestinians-1501356
- 98.
Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), xiv–xx.
- 99.
Shimon Peres, interview with Maariv, April 14, 2013, quoted in Ilan Pappé, “When Israeli Denial of Palestinian Existence Becomes Genocidal,” The Electronic Intifada, last modified April 20, 2013, paragraph 1, https://electronicintifada.net/content/when-israeli-denial-palestinian-existence-becomes-genocidal/12388
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hasian, M. (2020). The Indigeneity Wars: Academic and Public Refusals to Recognize Al-Nakba. In: Debates on Colonial Genocide in the 21st Century. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21278-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21278-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21277-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21278-0
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)