Abstract
The 1948 war—or the Nakba (the disaster, catastrophe) in Palestinian terminology—is the central event in modern Palestinian history and the core around which the Palestinians’ national identity crystallized.1 The Palestinians lost about 77 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine and witnessed the destruction of 418 Palestinian settlements2 and the displacement of 500,000 to 650,000 of their fellowmen, who fled or were deported.3
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Notes
For historical analyses of the Palestinian defeat, see Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Yoav Gelber, Palestine, 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2001);
Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939A948 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).
The Israeli version is that 290 villages were destroyed, while Palestinian researchers, such as Mustafa al-Dabbagh and Salih Abd al-Jawad, counted 470 destroyed localities. Walid al-Khalidi claimed that out of 418 localities, 292 (70%) were totally destroyed, 90 (22%) were mostly destroyed, and seven (2%) were settled by Jews and therefore not destroyed. See Walid al-Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), preface, pp. xvi, xix.
The number of Palestinian refugees is a subject of bitter dispute. United Nations estimates compiled shortly after the war put the number of displaced Palestinians at 700,000 to 875,000. Israeli estimates claim 550,000 to 650,000, while the Palestinians hold that the number is higher than 900,000. See Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 147;
Danny Rubinstein, The People of Nowhere: The Palestinian Vision of Home (New York: Times Books, 1991), pp. 3–5;
Salman Abu Sitta, “Palestinian Right to Return … Sacred, Legal, and Possible,” The Palestinian Return Centre (London, 1 May 1999), http://www.prc.org.uk
Jabra I. Jabra, “The Palestinian Exile as Writer,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 84.
Emanuel Sivan, Arab Political Myths (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1988, in Hebrew), pp. 9–11.
7. Edward Said, “al-Talfiq, al-dhakira, wal-makan,” al-Karmil (Ramallah), nos. 70–71 (Winter-Spring 2002): 95–96; Anthony Smith, “The ‘Golden Age’ and National Renewal,” in Geoffrey Hosking and George Schopflin, eds., Myths and Nationhood (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 37.
Ali E. Hillal Dessouki, “Arab Intellectuals and al-Nakbah: The Search for Fundamentalism,” Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 2 (May 1973): 187–89. See the essay by Esther Webman in this book, which shows that the use of the term Nakba to denote the Palestinian predicament began in 1945.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Intelligentsia: Time to Give Up the Ghost,” Civil Society 7, no. 77 (May 1998): 4.
Nimer Sirhan, “The Nakbah in Palestinian Folk literature,” Palestine-Israel Journal 5, nos. 3–4 (1998): 153.
Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 1979), pp. 124–26.
See Harkabi, “The Palestinians and Their Awakening,” pp. 261, 276–77; Matti Steinberg, “A Generation Goes and a Generation Comes: The ‘Nakba’ Generation and the ‘Armed Struggle’ Generation,” in Wars, Revolutions, and Generational Identity, ed. Yosi Mali (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001, in Hebrew), pp. 119–23;
and Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 180.
Issa al-Shuaibi, “The Development of Palestinian Entity-Consciousness, Part I,” Journal of Palestine Studies 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1979): 77–79.
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 19.
Department of Geographic Information, Gaza Municipality, Urban Map of the City of Gaza (1998); Yedi‘ot Ahronot, Supplement, 26 September 1999; al-Hayat al-Jadida, 12 January 2000; al-Ayyam, 5 October 1996 and 3 July 2000.
‘Umar Musallam, Faysal Ghawadra, Hilmi Hasan, and Maha Halas, Lughatuna al-jamila lil-saff al-awwal al-asasi-al-juz’ al-awwal (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya—Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim, 2000), p. 7;
Mahmud ‘Atallah, Safa’ Bashir, ‘Abdallah ‘Abd al-Raziq, ‘Ali Dhiyab al-A‘war, Muhammad al-Sadiq, Yusuf Jum‘a, al-Tarbiyya al-wataniyya lil-saff al-sadis al-asasi (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya—Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim, 2000), pp. 8, 9, 42;
‘Abd al-Karim Abu Khushan and Jamal Yunus, Zaynab ‘Ayyash, Nabil Rumana, Yasir al-Mallah, Lughatuna al-jamila lil-saff al-sadis al-asasi-al-juz’ al-awwal (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya — Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim, 2000), pp. 115, 120.
Muhammad Jawad al-Nuri, Amin Badr al-Kakhn, ‘Ali Khalil Hamad, Zaynab Talab, ‘Ali Shihada Manasira, Ahmad Muhammad al-Khatib, Lughatuna al-jamila lil-saff al-sabi‘ al-asasi-al-juz’ al-awwal (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya—Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim, 2001–2), p. 40.
See The Book of Expression and Summarizing for Grade 8, p. 20, as quoted in Itamar Marcus, The New Textbooks of the Palestinian Authority for Grades 1 and 6 (Jerusalem: MICP, 2001, Hebrew). ‘Umar Mahmud Musallam, Ahmad Muhammad al-Khatib, Fatima Khalil Hamad, and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Isma‘il Abu Hinna, Lughatuna al-jamila lil-saff al-thani al-asasi-al-Juz’ al-awwal (Al-Bira-Ramallah: al-Sulta al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya—Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wal-Ta‘lim (2001–2), p. 60.
Itamar Marcus, The Palestinian Authority: Teachers’ Guides, March 2000 (Jerusalem: MICP, 2001), p. 12.
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Viking, 1960), p. 52.
Ze’ev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 57–68.
For general studies on Hamas, see Ziyad Abu Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994);
Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
Meir Litvak, “The Islamization of the Israeli-Arab Conflict: The Case of Hamas,” Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 1 (1998): 148–63.
For a social analysis of the Hamas movement, see Michael Milshtein, The Green Revolution: The Social Profile of Hamas (Tel Aviv: Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2007, in Hebrew). For Fatah, see Idem, Between Revolution and State: Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority (Tel Aviv: Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2001)
and Rex Brynen, “The Dynamics of Palestinian Elite Formation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 95 (Spring 1995): 31–43. On Islamic jihad,
see Meir Hatina, Islam and Salvation in Palestine: The Islamic Jihad Movement (Tel Aviv, Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2001).
For an analysis of the failure of the Camp David summit, see Shimon Shamir and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman (eds.), The Camp David Summit: What Went Wrong? (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2005).
As to Abu Mazen’s remarks, see Haaretz, 5 September 2002; for Sha‘ath’s, see Akiva Eldar, “Interview with Nabil Sha‘ath,” Palestine-Israel Journal 9, no. 2 (2002): 22.
In regard to al-Khalidi’s ideas, see Tamari, Return, Resettlement, p. 38; for Nusseibeh, see Sari Nusseibeh and Mark A Heller, Without Drums or Trumpets: An Arrangement for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1992), pp. 69–70, 76; for the ideas of Abu Ziyad, Haaretz, 23 July 2002.
See an example of this argument: Yezid Sayigh, “The Politics of Palestinian Exile,” Third World Quarterly 9, no. 1 (January 1987): 29.
Arafat often stressed that he was “a refugee of a people of refugees.” His image became a symbol of the continuing Nakba, after his personal ordeals of being hunted and exiled. See Rubinstein, Arafat: A Portrait (Lod, Israel: Zemorah-bitan, 2001, in Hebrew), pp. 30–35, 84–85. Arafat attests to his belonging to “the Nakba community,” relying (as he said) on the expulsion from Jerusalem that his mother’s family—Abu Sa‘ud—experienced in 1948. See Yedi‘ot Ahronot, Sabbath Supplement, 8 February 2002.
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Milshtein, M. (2009). The Memory that Never Dies: The Nakba Memory and the Palestinian National Movement. In: Litvak, M. (eds) Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230621633_3
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