Co-memory and melancholia: Israelis memorialising the Palestinian Nakba 9781847793225

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Co-memory and melancholia

Co-memory and melancholia Israelis memorialising the Palestinian Nakba

Ronit Lentin

Manchester University Press Manchester

Copyright © Ronit Lentin 2010 The right of Ronit Lentin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 8170 5 hardback ISBN 978 1 8477 9322 5 Institutional First published 2010 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistance or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Helen Skelton, Brighton, UK

In memory of my parents, Lia (Schieber) and Miki Salzberger-Tsabar

Contents

Preface and acknowledgements

page ix 1

1

Introduction: living in the shadow

2

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory

20

3

Memory and melancholia

45

4

The fall of Haifa: telling autoethnographic stories

66

5

The road to Damascus

87

6

Historicising the Nakba: contested Nakba narratives as an ongoing process

106

7

Zochrot: Nakba co-memory as performance

127

8

Conclusion: melancholia, Nakba co-memory and the politics of return

153

References

173

Index

188

Preface and acknowledgements

Writing this book between the 60th and the 61st anniversaries of the Nakba and the State of Israel, in the year of the Gaza war, the bloodiest of Israel’s bloody wars, has been both traumatic and liberating. In particular, the book is the result of a series of dialogues conducted with a group of people without whom it could not have been written. As always, my conversations with my soul sister Nitza Aminov have sustained me intellectually, politically and emotionally. Nitza Aminov and Tamar Avraham have given me useful interviews quoted throughout the book, and both of them and David Landy read chapter drafts and their comments and suggestions were invaluable. David Landy and Anaheed Al- Hardan acted as my research assistants and their work informs parts of this book. Eli Aminov was inspirational, and as always made sure I got the latest books relevant to my research. Other people who assisted me in the birth of this book, directly and indirectly, include Nahla Abdo, Ronit Chacham, Honaida Ghanim, David Theo Goldberg, Smadar Lavie, Yosefa Loshitzky, Ilan Pappe, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, Ahmad Sa’di, Yehouda Shenhav, Oren Yiftachel, Michal Zak, Raef Zreik and Elia Zureik. I am grateful to Wakim Wakim of ADRID and Salman Natour of the Emile Touma Centre for agreeing to talk to me, and to the organisers of Mada Al Carmel’s Nakba conference in 2008 for inviting me to present a preliminary paper. The work of Zochrot opened up the conversation about the Nakba in Hebrew – speaking to members, following the group’s activities and reading its publication was invaluable. Thanks to Louis who lovingly pulled me out of my Gaza abyss. The translations of of the Hebrew works I cite are mine, unless published translations exist. I dedicate the book to Alana Lentin and Partho Sen-Gupta and their daughter Noam, and Miki Lentin and Miriam Levin and their daughter Arielle.

1 Introduction: living in the shadow

All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one story in place of another story. (Hélène Cixous 1997: 178) Each one of us, Israelis and Jews, has a shadow, the shadow of the 1948 Palestinian refugees. (Uri Davis 1994: 190)

Prologue: May 2008 - exile and last journey? Feelings of doom have accompanied the preparations for my visit to observe the 60th anniversary of the Nakba and Israeli independence. It feels like my last chance to witness the contradictory rituals of the Israelis celebrating their independence and the Palestinians marking their catastrophe. I will be staying with my soul sister Nitza who persuaded me to extend this visit to encompass both ‘the march of return’, held, as in previous years on Israel’s Independence Day (this year falling on May 8 in Saffuriyya), and Nakba Day, held on May 15, the day the British officially exited Palestine in 1948. I have been edgy for days before travelling, apprehensive about the paper I am to present at the Arab Centre for Applied Social Research Mada alCarmel’s conference, ‘Sixty Years of Nakba Homeland and Exile – Loss, Alienation, and Forms of Resistance’, in Nazareth. I am the only Israeli participating, the only one speaking in Hebrew – a great honour, but very nerve racking. I don’t know as yet that there would be repercussions. For several years now I have been making these trips to the other shore of my bifurcated life, navigating the choppy waters of my exiled existence. As I write in this book, I have opposed my Israel – mine not only because I was born and grew up there, but also emotionally – since shortly after the 1967 war. But ever since I remember I have always taken upon myself the duty to account, to take to account, as both my birthright and my mission. Yet for the first time, the journey feels ominous, almost terminal. I feel a sudden pang of yearning for mother – her last few years in a home meant I was not free to immerse myself as I have done in the past four years

2 Co-memory and melancholia

since her death when I was staying with Nitza in Jerusalem. Here I have total freedom to indulge my politics openly. Louis s parting words, ‘go to the Sea of Galilee, you might have a conversion’, said with a sad smile, make me think about the Road to Damascus – the moment of realisation, and about the attended melancholia that I write about in this book. It takes me a few hours after reaching Nitza’s to relax and slide into our familiar, friendly political world, and for the ominous feelings to subside. I am gradually back in the Jerusalem of my youth and my estrangement gives way to the here and the now, as if I had never been away. In the spirit of auto-ethnography (Ellis 2004) this book is interspersed with the personal narrative of my 2008 journey. I don’t mask my impressions in objective terms. I am encouraged by Ella Shohat’s discussion of the the exiled intellectual; evoking Edward Said’s words about the impossibility of writing ‘objectively’ about the conflict, she writes: ‘critics belong to a community, and act in certain circles. But there is a moral difference between the critic who belongs to the oppressors and the critic from the oppressed society’ (Shohat 2001b: 209).

Introduction During her third visit to Israel in March 2008, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. ‘The Shoah’, Merkel said, ‘fills us Germans with shame. I bow to the victims. There is nothing like the human crisis created by the Shoah. Only if Germany recognises its eternal responsibility for the Shoah, would it be able to build a humane future’ (Ilan 2008). Ever since World War II, German leaders have aspired to normalising Germany’s partnership with the Jewish state – former perpetrator seeking the forgiveness of its victims. However, though Merkel referred to the Iranian nuclear threat and stressed Germany’s historical commitment to Israel’s security, promising that ‘Germany will never abandon Israel’, and reminding her listeners that as she was speaking ‘thousands of [Israelis] are living in fear of Qasem rocket attacks’, she said nothing about Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinians under occupation. A few days after Merkel’s visit, a group calling itself ‘Academics for Justice’ distributed an online call to ‘all Jews of conscience’ to join the ‘No Time to Celebrate: Jews Remember the Nakba’ campaign, organised by anti-Zionist Jews from the US and Canada to coordinate and make visible the Jewish response to Israeli Independence Day celebrations and Jewish participation in commemorating the Nakba (http://academicsforjustice.org). Merkel’s visit, just before the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel and of the Palestinian Nakba, epitomises and normalises the abnormality of the Israeli state, built from the destruction that was the Shoah on the disavowal of the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Introduction: living in the shadow 3

As Israeli ‘new historian’ Han Pappe argues (2008: 93), any discussion of the 1948 war, which Israelis call their ‘War of Independence’ and Palestinians their ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe, should begin ‘from the place of understanding the clear advantage of the Israeli military forces and the weakness of the Palestinians, and on the other hand the myth of “the few versus the many” dominating all public discussions’. Nurit Gertz (1995) outlines three Zionist myths or ‘ideological narratives’, aimed, through being repeated in a variety of textual articulations, at conserving the hegemonic power relations. The first myth is the ‘few against the many’ narrative, according to which a Jewish ‘David’ was attacked by an Arab ‘Goliath’, the second is the struggle between the enlightened (Jewish) Europeans and the backwards (Arab) Orientals and the ensuing myth about Palestine being a ‘desert’ which the Zionists made ‘bloom’, and the third is the struggle between the isolated Jewish nation and an uncaring world, a narrative strengthened by the indifference of the world in face of the Nazi genocide. A fourth myth is that of Israel as European. Yet as Shohat argues, Zionism, which claims to be the liberation movement of all Jews, equating ‘Jewish’ and ‘Zionist’, was in effect a liberation movement for European Jews only. According to Zionist discourse, Zionism ‘saved’ Mizrahi (Arab) Jews from their Arab oppressors, and from conditions of poverty, illiteracy and superstition. Mizrahi Jews, Shohat writes, were brought to Israel to serve Zionist-European purposes, and ‘were systematically discriminated against by the Ashkenazi Zionist establishment which distributed resources preferring Ashkenazi Jews over Mizrahi Jews’ (Shohat 2001b: 141). Most Israeli historians, including ‘new historians’ (e.g. Morris 1987), are Ashkenazi and tend not to link the Palestinian refugee problem with the issue of Arab Jews despite the obvious connections. According to Yehouda Shenhav, this leads to an Israeli taboo against presenting the Mizrahi issue in political, rather than folkloric, terms, amounting to collective denial. Shenhav does not spare liberal Israeli Jews who, he argues, deal with the Palestinian issue not out of love for the Orient, but rather because of their wish to transfer the Palestinians across the fence, where they would no longer threaten western hegemony. Israel’s Mizrahi Jews, however, cannot be transferred: ‘recognising the Mizrahis as a collective, not merely as individuals, requires a reorganisation of Israeli society’ (Shenhav 2003: 12). My starting point in this book is the deconstruction of these myths which enabled the denial of the destruction of Palestine. I am aware that the ‘we’ I represent is a middle-class Ashkenazi ‘we’. I am challenged by Smadar Lavie, anti- Zionist Mizrahi feminist academic and activist, to bear in mind that my viewpoint, and the viewpoint of many Israeli Jewish political activists is limited by a racial and class divide (see Abarjel and Lavie 2006). In 2005, the British Council sponsored the Dublin production of the Tricycle Theatre’s Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry (Tricycle 2005: 1). The British Council’s support for this verbatim theatre show, which documents the inquiry into the worst act of state violence against civilians in

4 Co-memory and melancholia

the history of the British occupation of Northern Ireland, is a memorial enacted and sponsored by the perpetrators, not the victims. The show can be understood as what Pierre Nora (1989) calls Lieu de mémoire, but also as an attempt to incorporate this controversial murder of civilians into the British consensus for the benefit of British audiences. In recent years, with the proliferation of ‘peace processes’ and Truth and Reconciliation Committees, and in light of the increasing prevalence of what is becoming known as ‘memory studies’, discourses of memory of catastrophe are shifting from the margin to the centre, and from the realm of the victims to that of the perpetrators. This is despite the fact that war crimes tribunals have mainly served the interests and political and moral needs of the international community, rather than local needs (Amadiume and An-Na’im 2000: 5). Memory of catastrophe involves a lengthy process of remembering and forgetting, which often begins to be engaged with only one generation after the catastrophe, as demonstrated by studies of the legacy of the Nazi Holocaust (see e.g., Langer 1991; Felman and Laub 1992; Lentin 2000). Zionism and Zionists are far from homogeneous and the long history of dissent within Zionism has its roots in the 1890s with thinkers such as the prominent essayist Ahad Ha’Am, whose 1891 article ‘Truth from the Land of Israel’ noted the maltreatment of the Arabs by Jewish settlers, attributing it, as Tom Segev points out (2002: ix), to psychological causes: ‘They were slaves in their land of exile and suddenly they find they have unlimited freedom ... This sudden change has produced in their hearts an inclination towards repressive despotism, as always occurs when “the slave becomes king”.’ David Ben Gurion’s more militant Zionism won over the peace-oriented Brit Shalom, the group headed by the President of the Hebrew University J. L. Magnes and the liberal philosopher Martin Buber. However, political dissent, in the wake of the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Sinai, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, and in particular after the first Lebanon war (1982) and the outbreak of the first Intifada (1987), has been an ongoing feature of Israeli Jewish life, even though, as Segev (2002: xi) points out, it has been difficult to demonstrate its achievements. Segev, and the book tided The Other Israel that his foreword appears in (Carey and Shainin 2002) deal mostly (though not exclusively) with dissent within Zionism, by the so-called ‘Israeli peace camp’ rather than with antiZionist Israeli Jewish dissent (for a discussion on the differences between postand anti- Zionism see Chapter 5). Furthermore, the Israeli resistance movement tends to focus on the 1967 occupation, even though, as Shenhav argues, such resistance imagines pre-1967 Israel as a ‘lean and just republic’, erases the 1948 Nakba and assumes that before the 1967 war, Israel was ‘beautiful and just for the Palestinians living under martial law ... and for the Mizrahi population who were sent to live outside the centres of urban power and became the backbones of what is called “the second Israel’” (Shenhav 2008: 322—32; see also Yiftachel 2009).

Introduction: living in the shadow 5

Questions of guilt, responsibility and accountability are regularly debated in Israel in relation to Nazi culpability, yet my aim in this book is both narrower and broader. Against the background of recent developments in memory studies, which represent one of the latest ‘turns’ in the social sciences since the 1980s (Olick 2008), my specific focus is on one form of memorial practice by perpetrators – the co-memoration by Israeli Jews of the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe, when over 700,000 Palestinian civilians were expelled or escaped from their homes, leading, according to the UNHCR, to the existence today of- over four million Palestinian refugees (Kuperman 2005). More broadly, however, and as most anti-Zionist Israeli Jews have their own ‘road to Damascus’ tale, this book attempts to explore how some Israeli Jews (and some non-Israeli Jews) keep returning to ‘the facts, the details which were never highlighted, and the chasm between them and the narrative we were brought up on’ (Pappe 2008: 94). The process of working on this book led me to think of the obsessive preoccupation with Palestine and Palestinians by anti-Zionist Jews, but also by more mainstream members of the ‘peace camp’, as being affected by a deep melancholia for the Palestine they/we destroyed and the Palestinians they/we dispossessed. This obsessive melancholic preoccupation may be difficult for Palestinians to accept in view of their ongoing dispossession. However my object of analysis is not the Palestinians. I have a problem with researching the other from a powerful position, even though I agree with Edward Said (1980) that the Palestinian experience must be dialectically set against Zionism, which ‘has meant as much to us, albeit differently, as it has to Jews’ (Said 1980: xv). My project is rather researching ‘us’, anti-Zionist Israelis and the consequences of our melancholic longing for Palestine. As an émigré Israeli middle-class Ashkenazi Jew – opposed to Israeli state policies since 1967 (Lentin 1980, 2004c, 2008a; Abdo and Lentin 2002) – I am very conscious of the problems of writing as an Israeli about the meanings of the Nakba. I acknowledge that awareness of othering in social research is never ‘directly soluble by methodological rules’ (Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002, 120). I remind myself that in researching Palestine, as in co-memorating the Nakba in Hebrew, the Palestinians often get erased, their voices subsumed by the voice of the powerful coloniser and that, regardless of our position and politics, all Israeli Jews are implicated in and must take responsibility for the colonisation of Palestine, even though I accept Lavie’s challenge that, as Shohat (2001a) argues, Mizrahi Jews were, and are, Zionism’s Jewish victims. In Chapter 4 I discuss my own responsibility – as the daughter of one of the prestate Hagana soldiers who conquered Haifa. Set against the daily practices of the Israeli racial state, this study is a reflection on the contested relations between commemoration and appropriation from the standpoint of a member of the perpetrators’ collectivity, whose politics align her with the colonised.

6 Co-memory and melancholia

Racial state and Nakba denial Setting the object of analysis as the co-memoration of the Nakba by Israeli Jews necessitates giving readers some idea of the extent of the Nakba, though I do not intend to provide a comprehensive unfolding of the Nakba or of the history of the struggle over Palestine (there are many accounts, including flan Pappe’s comprehensive and readable The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006). The notion that Nakba survivors have been silenced or have silenced themselves until very recently is very potent, but the truth is that Palestinians began engaging with their dispossession as ‘al-Nakba’ – ‘the catastrophe’, already in the late 1940s (see Masalha 2005; Pappe 2006: xiii). Earlier works by Qunstantin Zurayk (1948), Musa Al-‘Alami (1949) and ‘Arif Al-‘Arif (n.d.), discussed in chapter six, all named the dispossession as ‘al-Nakba’. That the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel resulted in the devastation of Palestinian society and the expulsion of at least 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the parts of Palestine upon which Israel was established is by now a recognised fact by all but diehard Zionist apologists. As Abu-Lughod and Sa’di (2007) write, between 60,000 and 156,000 Palestinians (depending on the source) who remained behind became nominal citizens of the State of Israel, yet were subjected to a separate system of military administration, land confiscation and second class entitlements (see e.g., Jiryis 1968; Sultany 2004). Palestinians who fled to other parts of Palestine, particularly the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, lived under the repressive Hashemite regime or the uncaring Egyptian administration until, in 1967, both came under Israeli military occupation. For Palestinians, the 1948 war led to catastrophe – ‘a society disintegrated, a people dispersed, and a complex and historically changing but taken for granted communal life was ended violently’ (Abu-Lughod and Sa’di 2007: 8). Importantly, in Palestinian history and memory the Nakba has become a demarcation line, after which the lives of Palestinians at the individual and the communal levels irreversibly changed. Israeli Jews who attempt to grapple with Palestinian dispossession have to begin by confronting a pre-ordained Israeli ethos, overlaid by images of destruction and Jewish fears of another holocaust, and a version of the Jewish few facing a multitude of Arab enemies, intent, as Israeli Jewish children were repeatedly told, on ‘throwing us into the sea’. However, as Israeli historians Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim have repeatedly stressed, such descriptions of an Arab ‘Goliath’ intent on destroying the Jewish ‘David’ have no factual reality. ‘It is vital to link what we already know – about the expulsions, the destruction of villages, the bitter existence of the Palestinians, the IDF’s cruelty in relation to Arab civil society in Palestine, the slow destruction of Hebron, the drying up of East Jerusalem, the destruction of the Gaza Strip, with what we know today about the Zionist ambition to establish a Jewish state ... a state for Jews only.’ Though uncomfortable, we must reread the events of 1948 in light of the

Introduction: living in the shadow 7

central fact Israeli Jews have not been acquainted with, that ‘the Zionist leadership was always determined to increase the Jewish space ... Both land purchases in and around the villages, and military preparations, were all designed to dispossess the Palestinians from the area of the future Jewish state’ (Pappe 2008: 94). The official Israeli narrative in relation to 1948 is that the Palestinian Arabs were not expelled, that they ‘escaped’. But, Pappe asks, ‘if they escaped, why were they not allowed to return? Why were their houses and their neighbourhoods destroyed immediately?’ Pappe’s project is to recast the narrative: the flight/expulsion of the Palestinians was not a miracle (‘a miracle happened to us, the Palestinians escaped’), it was rather a plan, whose ‘execution was deferred from time to time, but denial means agreement with atrocity’ (Pappe 2008: 95). Not everyone agrees about the existence of a masterplan. Benny Morris, one of the pioneering Israeli ‘new historians’ who, having started his academic career as a left-wing draft resister, later changed his political stance with the onset of the al-Aqsa Intifada when he blamed the Palestinians for the collapse of the Oslo peace process. Morris has consistently argued that the state of Israel and the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) played a significant part in precipitating the flight of more than 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine. But despite his meticulous and well-documented account of the 1948 war, Morris persists in rejecting claims about a masterplan, dubbing the Arabs ‘barbarians’ and stresses the jihadi character of the Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine, echoing Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis (Shlaim 2008: 8). This is despite the fact that Morris’s own study refutes the Zionist myth of ‘the purity of arms’ of Jewish soldiers in contrast to Arab barbarity. ‘In truth’, Shlaim cites Morris as writing, ‘the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948’ (Shlaim 2008: 8). Ultimately, despite his learned contribution to the history of the 1948 war, and even though his work has been ground breaking in unearthing the realities of the war and the Nakba, Morris’s latest study (2008) perpetuates the mythologisation of that war. What has become known in Israel as the ‘new historians’ debate in relation to 1948 (discussed in Chapter 6) is fundamental to understanding the contested histories of the dispossession of the Palestinians. For now, rather than retrace the unfolding of the Nakba, I outline the layers of denial the story of the Nakba encountered, not as a narrative encompassed within the pages of a book or the walls of a museum, but rather as ‘a space of legitimacy and understanding within which a pluralistic discourse that would include the multiple voices and experiences of Palestinians could find a hearing, and perhaps contribute to a solution in the future’ (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007: 297). While some would argue that the failure of the Palestinian narrative stems from the victims’ silences, Sa’di argues that this failure is due above all to the lack of desire by the western world and by Israeli and world Jewry to deal with the moral weight of the Palestinian catastrophe. This contrasts sharply with the way the postwar

8 Co-memory and melancholia

German state has assumed moral responsibility for the Holocaust, as expressed by Merkel’s address to the Knesset, and exemplified by the many memorials for deported and murdered Jews on German soil (see Young 2000). Sa’di lists several factors in the erasure of the Palestinian catastrophe in the west. The legacies of Orientalism notwithstanding, the Nakba took place in the shadow of the Holocaust: Sa’di cites Ben Gurion as referring to western support for the partition of Palestine as ‘Western civilisation’s gesture of repentance for the Holocaust’ (Morris 2000b: 186). Furthermore, the ‘magisterial’ Zionist narrative includes elements which appeal to the western imagination: the return of the ‘people of memory’ (Nora 1996: 18) after 2000 years of exile, and their rebirth, and the depiction of the 1948 war, as mentioned above, as a war of survival of ‘the few against the many’. Moreover, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was paradoxically presented by the Zionist narrative as ‘a deceitful act of the natives themselves’, as the Palestinians, according to the accepted Zionist version, were called upon by their leaders to leave their homes to facilitate the advance of the Arab armies, despite appeals by the Jews to stay and live in happy coexistence. This narrative was successfully dismantled in studies by Israeli ‘new historians’; as Sa’di reminds us, ‘the most comprehensive evidence against the Zionist version of the War of 1948 has come from the Israeli archives’ (2007: 299). It is important to remember, however, that the construction of a narrative of the birth of the nation, what Bhabha (1990) calls ‘the narration of nation’, is one of the characteristics of David Theo Goldberg’s (2002) Foucauldian theorisation of the racial state. Foucault (1990) argues that when life becomes included in mechanisms of state power, politics turns into biopolitics, the territorial state becomes a ‘state of population’, and the nation’s biological life becomes a problem of sovereign power, which he terms ‘biopower’. Through a series of governmental technologies, biopower creates ‘docile bodies’ and the population – its life, welfare, longevity, health - becomes the ultimate object of government. In Society Must be Defended (2003) Foucault charts the transition from sovereignty’s power to kill undesired people to the regulatory modern state which directs its biopower at living beings. Put simply, Foucault posits a transition from the sovereign power of the old territorial state, ‘to make die and let live’, to modern biopower, ‘to make live and let die’. The duty to defend society against itself (and ‘the nation’ from its others) means that the state can scarcely function without racism, which Foucault sees as ‘the break between what must live and what must die’ (2003: 254). According to this analysis, racism has two functions, the first is separating out the groups that exist within a population, the second is making it possible to establish ‘a relationship between my life and the death of the other ... the more inferior species die out ... the more I – as species rather than individual - can live, the stronger I will be’ (Foucault 2003: 255). Rather than serving one group against another, race – understood in classificatory rather than biological terms – becomes a tool of

Introduction: living in the shadow 9

social conservatism and of state racism. which society practices against itself. Foucault sees racism as an ongoing social war, nurtured by biopolitical technologies of purification. This sheds light on the various and ongoing plans, since before the establishment of the state of Israel, to ‘transfer’ Palestinians outside the state’s borders so as to construct a Jewish state with as few Palestinians as possible (see e.g. Pappe 2006). In Goldberg’s (2002) theorisation of all modem nation-states as racial states, the state is a state of power which excludes in order to construct homogeneity.Modern states, each in its own way, employ seemingly innocuous governmental technologies such as constitutions, border controls, the law, policy making, bureaucracy, population census, but also, significantly for my project in this book, invented histories and traditions, narratives, ceremonies and cultural imagining, to exclude and include in racially ordered terms. The racial state’s aim is to produce a coherent picture of the population by keeping racialised others out and by legislating against the ‘degeneracy’ of indigenous minorities. In line with Goldberg’s theorisation of all modem nation-states as racial states, and Foucault’s view of racism as intrinsic to all modern, normalising states, there is little doubt that Israel must be theorised as a racial state par excellence, where what Giorgio Agamben (2005) terms ‘the state of exception’, constructing some lives as ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1995; see Ghanim 2008) was instituted prior to its establishment in relation to its Palestinian citizens. This state of exception has been supported through military power and a series of emergency laws, as outlined by Yehouda Shenhav: ‘In Israel there is a constant state of emergency. The state inherited the British Mandate’s “Emergency Regulations” under which it continued the anomalous suspension of the law, within the law ... We must remember what this system enables: one rule (life) for the majority of the state’s citizens, and another (death, threat of death, threat of expulsion) for the state’s subjects, whose lives have been rendered “bare”’ (2006: 206-7). Following Foucault’s general idea about the need to defend society, and remembering that Zionism was articulated as the imperative to protect the nebulous body dubbed ‘the Jewish nation’ from antisemitic persecutions, we begin to understand the inevitability of theorising the State of Israel as a racial state from its very inception, unpalatable as such theorisation is for a state arguably established for the Jewish victims of racism and antisemitism. The Israeli Jewish genetics professor Rafael Falk reads the history of Zionism as a eugenicist project, aiming to save the Jewish genetic pool from the degeneration forced upon the Jews by diaspora existence (Falk 2006: 25). Falk argues that understanding Judaism as a racial essence became an integral part of Zionist thought towards the end of the nineteenth century. While many European Jews struggled against the idea that Judaism is a race, prominent Zionist thinkers such as Theodor Herzl, Moshe Hess, Haim Nachman Bialik, Max Nordau and even the liberal philosopher Martin Buber adopted the terminology of volk – a 1 racial nation shaped by ‘blood and soil’ (Falk 2006: 18—19; Lentin 2008a).

10 Co-memory and melancholia

Israel, constructed as the state of the ‘Jewish nation’, grants automatic citizenship to anyone who can prove she has a Jewish mother, while depriving citizenship from Palestinians born on the land but absent on census day – both in 1948 and in 1967. Palestinians not expelled during the 1948 Nakba were redubbed ‘Israeli Arabs’ and put under military rule, based on British Mandate Emergency Regulations issued in 1945. These regulations virtually abolished basic rights of expression, movement, organisation and equality before the law, though they left Palestinian citizens of Israel the right to vote and be elected. A series of laws, including the Law for Absentee Property (1950), the JNF Law (1953) and the Law of Agricultural Settlement (1967) barred the selling, leasing, sub-letting and owning of land by ‘non-Jews’, a euphemism for Palestinians. Though officially abolished in 1966 with the end of martial law, to all intents and purposes the emergency regulations are still in place, controlling 20 per cent of Israel’s citizens (Pappe 2006: 220—2). According to Sa’di (2007: 304—9), the Israelis and their Zionist supporters have employed several strategies of denial in relation to the Nakba, even though manifestations of the Nakba surround Israelis wherever they go in their history, geography, architecture, landscape, food, language and the Palestinians who remained. The first is the myth of ‘a land without people for a people without land’. The second strategy is recognising that the Nakba took place but denying it carries any moral or practical implications, and making an exaggerated connection between Palestinians and Nazis. The third strategy for dealing with 1948 is addressing the moral weight of the Palestinian Nakba unapologetically as most clearly articulated by Benny Morris in a 2004 interview with Ha’aretz, in which he declared his disappointment that the Nakba was not more thorough (Shavit 2004). However denial, as Stanley Cohen argues, is a paradox. In order to use the term ‘denial’ to describe a person’s statement ‘I didn’t know’, one has to assume she knew or knows about what it is that she claims not to know (Cohen 2001: 5—6). The most profound forms of cultural repression become part of consensual reality as societies arrive at unwritten agreements about what can be publicly remembered and acknowledged. In the 1980s, the exposure by Jewish Israeli ‘new historians’ of the complex reality of the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 led to outrage by official Israel that its ‘own’ intellectuals had shown what ‘everyone knew from personal memory’ – acutely demonstrating the denial paradox (Cohen 2001: 139). And the denial continues. Spurred by his South African upbringing and his involvement with the Israeli peace movement, Cohen outlines the layers of official Israeli denial in relation to his work on torture with the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem: ‘outright denial (it didn’t happen); discrediting (the organisation was biased, manipulated or gullible); renaming (yes, something does happen, but it is not torture); and justification (anyway, "it” was morally justified).’ While this denial is actively employed by the state and its actors, Cohen is most disturbed by Israeli liberals who ‘were uneasy and

Introduction: living in the shadow 11

concerned. Yet there was no outrage. Soon a tone of acceptance began to be heard. Abuses were intrinsic to the situation; there was nothing to be done till a political solution was found; something like torture might even be necessary sometimes; anyway, we don’t want to keep being told about this all the time’ (Cohen 2001: xi). I engage with some of these-strategies of denial throughout the book.

Anti-Zionism and antisemitism This book analyses Nakba co-memory practices from an anti-Zionist rather than Zionist standpoint. One of the dilemmas of following this path as an Israeli Jew means having to cope with accusations of self hatred or worse, antisemitism. In an interview published by the Israeli online publication YNet, Ilan Pappe, who received death threats following his support for an academic boycott on Israel, rebuffs charges of self hate or antisemitism, insisting: ‘I don’t write in order to annoy and I certainly don’t hate myself, and I also love many people in Israel. I did not commit treason’ (Ynet 2008). Similarly, in Precarious Life:The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), the feminist philosopher Judith Butler speaks of the difficulty of criticising Israel without being charged with antisemitism. Silencing Israel’s Jewish critics, Butler says, means controlling ‘at the level of the subject, what one is willing to say out loud and, at the level of society in general, to circumscribe what can and cannot be permissively spoken out loud in the public sphere’. I am inspired by Butler’s warning that ‘the exclusion of those criticisms will effectively establish the boundaries of the public itself, and the public will come to understand itself as one who does not speak out, critically, in the face of obvious and illegitimate violence, unless, of course, a certain collective courage takes hold’ (Butler 2004: 127). I revisit the meanings of dissent and its place within Jewish Israeli society throughout the book. Like more than 7,000 leading Israeli Jewish intellectuals and politicians and diaspora Jewish figures, I am included in the SHIT – a 2 virulent internet site listing what it dubs ‘Self Hating Israel Threatening Jews’. Though this causes me no loss of sleep, I acknowledge the unease of Jewish intellectuals working in the US such as Butler and Goldberg at being attacked as ‘antisemitic’ when they criticise Israeli state policies. According to Goldberg, There is a sharp distinction, often lost, between the notion of self-hating Jew and that of self-critical Jew. To criticise Israel as a state formation, and the Israeli state and governmental policies as enacting particularly vicious expressions of humiliation, dehumanisation, and degradation, as Judith Butler has pointed out, emphatically counts as the latter without amounting to the former. To criticise the government of Israel and its policies, even to criticise the partial grounds on which that state was founded, is not to criticise Jews as such, nor is it to place Jews anywhere and everywhere at risk, notwithstanding the spike in antisemitic attacks in the likes of France. It is not even to place Jews in Israel at risk. Quite the

12 Co-memory and melancholia

contrary; it is to point out the way in which such policies and governmentality manifest the very insecurity they claim to undo. (Goldberg 2009: 111)

Interestingly however, Goldberg’s trenchant and astute critique of Israeli state policies, what he calls ‘racial Palestinianisation’, does not entail ‘self loathing nor self-loathingly to desire Israel’s destruction’. He is insistently concerned to question ‘not Israel’s right to exist, but rather its forms of expression and its modes of selfinsistence and enforcement’ (Goldberg 2009: 142, emphases in the 3 original). It is also worth noting that what is perceived as the difficulty of maintaining a critical stance as a public intellectual, both in post-2001 US and in Israel, in the face of patent injustice, which has led many public intellectuals ‘to waver in their public commitment to principles of justice’ (Butler 2004: xi), pales by comparison with the difficulties facing those living under occupation on a daily basis. Israeli Jews who have been criticising the state for many years – either from within Zionism and its so-called ‘peace movement’, or from a post-Zionist or an anti-Zionist stance (see Nimni 2003) – are well acquainted with the dilemmas outlined by Butler who, perhaps somewhat naively, reminds her readers that ‘it is not a vagary of moral relativism to try and understand what might have led to the [2001] attacks on the United States’. She adds, again somewhat obviously, that ‘one can – and ought to – abhor the attacks on ethical grounds (and enumerate those grounds), feel a full measure of grief for those losses, but let neither moral outrage nor public mourning become the occasion for the muting of critical discourse and public debate’ (Butler 2004: xiii-iv).

Holocaust and Nakba: memory and catastrophe Memory of catastrophe, often both sacralised and banalised (Bauman 2004a), is not merely a currency of the ‘confessional culture’ of what Bauman (2000) calls ‘liquid modernity’, it is also becoming an increasingly valid social sciences theme, no longer the exclusive realm of historians and psychologists. Memories of catastrophe take up to one generation to surface – due to survivors and perpetrators being silenced and silencing themselves, often so as to be able to go on living after the catastrophe, and due to histories most often being written by the victors, at least initially. This is taken on board by a new generation of social scientists who, in the aftermath of the World Wars, the Holocaust, and other catastrophic events, including, as this book argues, the Palestinian Nakba, have been increasingly studying the complex implications of the construction of memory as a collective political artifact. In the early 1990s, when I began working on my doctoral dissertation exploring the gendered relations between Israel and the Holocaust by collecting personal narratives of Israeli daughters of Holocaust survivors, my research participants, Jewish Israeli published authors or film makers, all started their narratives by talking about their survivor families having been ‘silent’, or

Introduction: living in the shadow 13

‘silenced’ in the new Israel (Lentin 2000). I recognised that silence. My research process led me to realise that I too belong to a silent survivor family, who, in struggling to make a life in Palestine and then Israel among the ‘new Jews’, who, I argue, were the masculine antithesis of the feminised diaspora and Holocaust, preferred not to speak about ‘there’. The auto/biographical and the intellectual indelibly linked. My work was inspired by Bauman’s seminal Modernity and the Holocaust (1989),’ written in the wake of his wife Janina Bauman’s (1986) memoir of surviving the war, hidden, in the Warsaw ghetto and beyond. Her work helped Bauman see the Holocaust as ‘a window, rather than a picture on the wall’, and an extension, rather than an aberration of modernity. Bauman’s study remains a baseline from which to think sociologically about the Holocaust and other traumatic ruptures of modernity. His work also helped me to link the silencing and self-silencing of survivors with the appropriation of the Holocaust by the Jewish state as ‘a certificate of its political legitimacy’ (Bauman 1989: ix). I concur with Abu-Lughod and Sa’di that the memory of the Holocaust, after that initial silence, became so dominant a narrative of our times, particularly, but not only, in Israel, that the Palestinians could not make themselves heard over the louder story ‘told by European Jews who stressed their alliance with the cultural and political values of the West’ (Abu-Lughod and Sa’di 2007: 12). This dialectic link between the Holocaust and its implications for the Jewish state’s dispossessed Palestinian victims - underpinning this book as it does much of my work - is not an easy one to make. The claim of Holocaust uniqueness overrides – intellectually and emotionally – any call for universalising comparisons. Indeed, calls by sociologists to make ‘implicit comparisons explicit’ in relation to Holocaust studies raises ‘questions about which comparisons about the Holocaust are made, contested and refused’ (Gerson and Wolf 2007: 7). Israeli Jews are particularly sensitive, perhaps understandably, about comparing the treatment of the Palestinians with what the Nazis did to the Jews. When the orthodox Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz accused Israeli soldiers shortly after the (first) Lebanon war in 1982 of ‘Judeo-Nazi mentality’, he provoked a public outcry. Hence, too, the hostility with which Bauman’s keynote lecture was received by Israeli Jewish Holocaust scholars in the conference I organised in Trinity College Dublin in 2003 (see Bauman 2004a). More recently, however, we can detect a shift: speaking about the legacy of the Holocaust, employed to perpetuate Israeli victimhood and justify the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians, Israeli novelist Etgar Keret says that ‘protecting Israeli victimhood must mean having to ignore the Palestinians’ pain (Jaggi 2007). I am guided by Said’s (1978) argument about Zionism having an ‘immense traumatic effectiveness’ for the Palestinians, and by Jacqueline Rose’s (2005) parallel claim that Zionism has been traumatic for the Jews as well as the Palestinians. The belief that in order to understand it, the Holocaust must be positioned within history and explicitly compared with other phenomena leads

14 Co-memory and melancholia

me to make these links central to my critical theoretical work (Lentin 2004a, 2008a) and to my commitment to the implications of the memory of the Holocaust but also - as a Jewish Israeli citizen - to solidarity with the Palestinians.

Exiles and internal emigrants In the wake of the Holocaust, many German intellectuals were debating the concept of ‘collective guilt’, arguably coined by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Jeffrey Olick’s (2007) essay on the public debate in relation to what became known as ‘the Other Germany’ helps me to begin thinking about the potentialities of what has been glibly dubbed ‘the Other Israel’ (Carey and Shainin 2002). Olick makes a case for studying the legacies of perpetration which serve to understand ‘our moral and political thinking about political accountability more generally’ (Olick 2007: 293). This got me thinking about the legacies of Israeli Jews as victims turned perpetrators, albeit sometimes comemorising Israel’s own Palestinian victims’ catastrophe, similar to what Germany has been doing in relation to Nazism’s Jewish victims. On the one side of the postwar German debate stood those German intellectuals who, like Thomas Mann, went into exile during the Third Reich, and on the other stood the so-called ‘inner emigrants’, who, like Erich Kästner – whose books were hugely popular with many generations of Israeli Jewish children of European origin – stayed in Germany during the Third Reich but whose disengagement meant they were harassed, though not necessarily 4 interned, by the regime. One of the most prominent German exiles, Mann argued that ‘Nazi Germany was not something separate from an “inner core” of German identity but a pathological emanation of it’ (Olick 2007: 296). For Mann, ‘there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning’ (Mann 1963: 48). Criticised for not returning to Germany after the war, Mann defended himself by expressing disappointment that German intellectuals, who, he insisted, were partly responsible for the Third Reich, failed to resist, at least by staging a ‘general strike’. Mann was seen by his contemporaries as an advocate of collective guilt. One of Mann’s critics, Frank Thiess, using the phrase ‘the inner emigration’ (Paetel 1946), posited ‘the unity of exiles and inner emigrants as representatives of the other Germany on the basis of which German identity could be rehabilitated, new (old) foundations strengthened and collective accusations repudiated’ (Olick 2007: 297). In light of this claim, Olick asks whether inner emigrants belonged to the large culpable mass, a core question in framing how to be German after the war. In 1959 Kästner wrote that he had chosen not to emigrate so as to bear witness and provide a written testimony, insisting that as a victim of the regime, the implication of German collective guilt added insult to injury. Indeed, Kästner

Introduction: living in the shadow 15

saw Germans like him as the victims of the Nazi state, arguing, in relation to exiles such as Mann, that ‘whoever did not experience it, whoever was not despairingly caught up in this labyrinth, throws the first stone at his people too easily’ (Kästner 1959). Kästner heaped scorn upon Jung’s proposition that the sentimental distinction between Nazis and opponents of the regime was ‘psychologically illegitimate’, and his insistence that ‘all Germans were either actively or passively, consciously or unconsciously, participants in the atrocities’ (Jung 1989,. cited in Olick 2007: 304—5). By contrast, Karl Jaspers another ‘inner emigrant’ – differentiated between several levels of guilt: criminal guilt, which belongs only to those who violated the law; political guilt, which comes about for the entire citizenry of modem states, which allow no one to be non-political; moral guilt, which is the personal responsibility one bears before the tribunal of one’s own conscience; and metaphysical guilt, the responsibility that survivors often feel towards those who suffered and died (Koterski 2001). Jung made a complex but clear distinction between moral, legal and psychological guilt, suggesting that while guilt can be apportioned to the lawbreaker from a legal, moral or intellectual point of view, as a psychic phenomenon it ‘spread itself over the whole neighbourhood’, thus distinguishing between ‘the individually guilty and the merely collectively guilty’ (Jung 1989: 53, emphasis added by Olick). Jung’s theory of the shadow, and the belief that each individual is in some way exactly what s/he does not wish to be, helped him explain National Socialism. Hider, Jung argued, symbolised something in every individual, and ‘represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality ... and this was another reason why they fell for him’ (Jung 1989: 6, cited in Olick 2007: 308). The shadow theory explains Jung’s diagnosis of collective guilt in postwar Germany: ‘The murder has been suffered by everyone, and everyone has committed it: lured by fascination of evil, we have all made this collective psychic murder possible’ (Jung 1989: 54). Jung tries to explain the ways we can feel badly for an act we have not committed; collective guilt, for Jung, is ‘a state of magical uncleanliness’, but it is also a ‘very real fact’ (Jung 1989: 53). Kästner, by contrast, makes a distinction between guilt and debt, rejecting the guilt, and accepting the debt; as Dahrendorf (1967) explained, for Kästner a debt was payable, while guilt remains permanent. But Kästner’s insistence that Germans were the Nazis’ victims remains prevalent in German popular culture, demonstrated, for instance, by Bernd Eichinger’s 2004 film Downfall, which presents the German people as Hider’s ultimate victims, without mentioning the Holocaust or Hider’s real victims (Denby 2005). This view of the Germans as the Nazis’ victims resonates with Olick’s comment that ‘one is ... tempted to say that Jung’s diagnosis of a feeling of collective guilt has some merit, redeeming itself not only in the worst dregs of German society but here in its best representative (Kästner). This is exactly the kind of defence Jung’s theory expects, a “me too” claim of victimhood’ (Olick 2007: 309).

16 Co-memory and melancholia

Olick explores the moral agonies of German defeat, the most consequential for Germans, because individual and collective identities are formed by collective responsibility. Theorising what he terms ‘bystander states’, Cohen (2001: 147) apportions another meaning to the term ‘inner emigrants’ who, he argues, are bystanders with liberal values who survive the sight of atrocities committed by their state by retreating into private life; they sustain the inner/outer split by cutting themselves off from the unpalatable aspects of daily realities by not reading newspapers or watching television. This, in addition to indulging in intense escapist immersion in private diversions, creates an ‘innerism’ which shields those liberals from disturbing news, as they subscribe to universal humanitarianism while at the same time burying their unease. But such unease, Cohen argues, again demonstrates the paradox of denial (Cohen 2001: 84). All this leads me to draw a link between denial and ‘working through’ in my exploration of the co-memorative work by Israeli Jews, which illustrates not only the distinction between guilt and responsibility, but also the shadow that Jung speaks about.

Living in the shadow In the first United Nations International NGO meeting on the Question of Palestine held in Geneva in 1983, Uri Davis, then a Jewish Israeli member of the Palestinian National Council, was invited, together with the renowned Palestinian scholar Edward Said, the Israeli Jewish journalist and activist Uri Avneri, and the Israeli Jewish politician Matti Peled, to address a workshop on the future of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. In his autobiography, Crossing the Border, Davis quotes his address which opened with the following words: ‘Each one of us, Israelis and Jews – has a shadow, the shadow of the 1948 Palestinian refugees. Our houses are built on the ruins of their houses, we till their lands. I spent my childhood and my youth bathing in the shadow of the Sidna Ali mosque. Only ten or twenty years later did I become aware of the full meaning of this sick privilege ... ’ (Davis 1994: 190). A resonance of the shadow that Jung and Davis speak of, quite separately and in different contexts, and of the insistence that a nation of perpetrators fell victim to its fascist leadership, insisting on perpetuating victimhood rather than taking responsibility, can be found in Jacqueline Rose’s claim that Zionism not only had an ‘immense traumatic effectiveness’ for the Palestinians but, in demanding an ‘apparently intractable allegiance’, was also traumatic for the Jews (Rose and Bechler 2005). In The Question of Zion (2005) Rose corresponds with Said’s The Question of Palestine (1978), in which he claims that both communities have to be aware of the other’s history of suffering. Using a psychoanalytic framework, Rose positions Zionism, ‘one of the most potent collective movements of the 20th century’, against those who see any criticism as antisemitic and those flatly opposed. She rejects reviewers who

Introduction: living in the shadow 17

accuse her of equating Zionism with Nazism, insisting that her project aims to show how Zionism offers Israeli citizens either lethal identification or radical dissent. Critical of identity politics as rather stable and detaching ‘politics’ from state powers, Rose’s work on psychoanalysis and feminism argues that identity is not simply something you own; it is always unstable, on the move, capable of transformation. Crucially, she rejects forming your identity on the basis of victimhood, a psychic and political strategy used by both Israeli Jews and Palestinians (though her focus is on Zionist politics). For- Rose, victimhood is an event, something that happens to you. If you turn it into an identity, you have ‘created a profound internal problem for yourself’... Just as thinking about women as victims of male violence is ultimately inappropriate – it both disempowers women and makes the relationship between violation and what it is possible to be, too monolithic, so too thinking about Jews as victims (even though awful things have happened to Jews), ‘fossilises the heart and becomes something to hold onto as an exhaustive account of who you are, victimhood becomes a prediction that will last an eternity’ (Rose and Bechler 2005). Citing dissenters within Zionism, such as Ahad Ha-Am, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, Rose’s exploration of Zionism reveals the unconscious determinants of what it is to try to forge a national identity based on pain and victimhood. Positing the ‘rigidification of identity’ which the state justifies, and which ensures that ‘every catastrophe that happens to Israel becomes a confirmation of its view of itself ... leading to a fortification of the soul’, Rose argues that the need to feel safe as a nation often takes on the form of a repetition of trauma. She reminds us that although Israel, the fourth most militarily powerful nation in the world, is not in danger, and while the fear that Israel will be destroyed is groundless, it does not mean it is not real and understandable. However, ‘when the fear becomes an identity that justifies itself by a violence that cannot acknowledge itself as violence, something has gone terribly wrong’ (Rose and Bechler 2005). Using the example of the IDF commander in Gaza who remembers ‘the flames of the Holocaust’, Rose writes that ‘this fortress mentality that Israel cannot relinquish means that it cannot see itself as the agent of violence. That is one of the effects of trauma: you can’t then see what you are capable of doing. You are always repeating a situation in which you are threatened and potentially destroyed’ (Rose and Bechler 2005). Without equating Zionism and Nazism, this book makes conceptual links between my theoretical and empirical work on memorialising the Holocaust and the Nakba, and explores the co-memoration of the Nakba sixty years after the event, by Israeli Jews. I ask whether those engaged in such co-memory practices – who attempt to bear witness and take responsibility though often without drawing political conclusions - can be theorised as ‘internal emigrants’ who, in Arendt’s words, exile themselves from a world growing too brutal to an interior world more sane but only apparently more real, or whether – in not drawing political solutions or defining themselves as anti-Zionist – those

18 Co-memory and melancholia

engaged in such co-memorative practices aim to and ultimately become encompassed by the Israeli Jewish Zionist consensus. The book interrogates the potentialities of internal emigration, questioning whether such co-memoration ultimately appropriates the Palestinian memorising voice, thus discursively continuing the colonisation of the land, or whether, as argued by Caruth (2001; Bresheeth 2007), through telling and retelling, these co-memory practices hold the potential for creative redemption, which might turn melancholia into more liberating mourning work. Emerging from what Davis calls ‘the shadow’ and I call ‘the background music’ of the Nakba – not spoken about, but always in the air in the Haifa of my childhood (see Chapter 4), this book explores that shadow and the memory work performed by Israeli Jewish ‘exiles’ and ‘inner emigrants’ – those living in Israel and those, like me, living in voluntary exile. However, I must keep reminding myself and my readers that our (Israeli Jewish) shadow is far from being the focus of the Palestinian trauma. As Cixous (1997) has it, this book is ultimately a story told about someone else’s story, a story about melancholia, memory and grief, someone else’s memory and grief, though in many ways also my, our, own memory, postmemory (Hirsch 1997) and grief, received through fragments of nearly forgotten fragments, as I demonstrate in Chapter 4, which links the fall of Haifa with my fading memories of my father. According to Halbwachs (1992: 38), ‘it is in society that people normally acquire their memories ... [and] recall, recognise, and localise their memories’. However, I argue in this book that collective memory is always an act of collaboration, hence co-memoration (see Chapter 2). Thus this is the story of co-memory, memory acquired not only ‘in society’, but also in conquest, constructed, unlike history, in collaboration with the conquered other’s ‘another story’. This is an Israeli-Jewish story about Palestine – indelibly and dialectically woven into the story of Israeli Jewish dissent – co-memoration of victor and vanquished, ultimately, as this book argues, united in grieving the loss of Palestine. Butler writes, ‘if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you’. Yet, despite her attempt to overcome the prohibition against thinking the Other under the sign of the ‘human’, a prohibition that disavows the Palestinian loss, highlighting instead ongoing Israeli Jewish victimhood, Butler recognises that we cannot muster a ‘we’ except by ‘trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you’ (2004: 49). It is the eve of Israeli Independence Day and we are in the Palestinian village of al-Azarieh on the outskirts of Jerusalem where Nitza works with a Jahalin Bedouin project when the siren commemorating Israel’s war dead is sounded. One of the Jahalin children points to his ears and a Bedouin driver draws our attention to the siren. Nitza and I smile politely – it has been years since we stood to attention at the sound of the siren. That evening I make her watch the

Introduction: living in the shadow 19

televised torch lighting ceremony on Mount Herzl. Like every year, twelve torches are lit, ‘for the glory of the State of Israel’, but this year the ceremony is dedicated to children and each torch is lit by an adult working with children and a child. Torch lighters come from all sectors of the population, including ‘good Palestinians’ such as members of the Druze and Bedouin communities. After the torch lighting, there is an over-choreographed pageant of hundreds of marching soldiers and dancing children who construct formations to welcome Israel’s 60th birthday. After the ceremony, television channels broadcast the organised public entertainment gigs – colourful, yet staged, alienated. I remember folk dancing on the streets of Haifa with what seemed then like genuine joy, in the years before the realisation.

Notes 1

2 3

4

Arthur Ruppin, director of the ‘Erez Israel office’, and Zionism’s main ‘colonisator’, preached eugenicist selection of the racially dominant old-new Jewish ‘human material’ in the Zionist settlement of Palestine. Ruppin, who, like other race hygien- icists, believed the state had a central role in ‘improving the race’ of the volk, was instrumental in producing a Zionist repertoire of racial categories and volkist imagery (Bloom 2007). www.masada2000.org/shit-list.html.last accessed 12/2/10. Nadia Abu el-Haj (2010) provides a strong criticism of Goldberg’s insistence on Israel’s right to exist, arguing that ‘anti-colonial movements seek to dismantle colonial states’ and that the symmetry he constructs between Israel’s denial of the Palestinians and the Palestinians’ denial of Israel’s right to exist, a symmetry which fails to understand the ways in which for Palestinians and as an historical fact ... this was and is a project of colonial settlement. The concept ‘inner emigrants’ was used by Hannah Arendt to describe those Germans who remained in Germany during the Third Reich, yet exiled themselves from a world grown too brutal to an interior world more sane but only apparently more real (Curtis 1997: 31). Arendt differentiated between herself as ‘exile’ and her colleague Karl Jaspers as ‘inner emigrant’ (Kohler and Saner 1992).

2 Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory

Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget? ... No ethical person would admonish Jews to forget the Holocaust ... yet in dialogue with Israelis ... Palestinians are repeatedly admonished to forget the past ... ironically Palestinians live the consequences of the past every day – whether as exiles from their homeland, or as members of an oppressed minority within Israel. (Bishara 2007)

Introduction In ‘Categorial murder, or, how to remember the Holocaust’, Bauman (2004a) argues that despite the common belief that the success or failure of any political struggle ‘hangs on the effort to keep the memory alive’, memory is a mixed blessing. The past, Bauman argues, is a bagful of events and memory always selects and interprets, and the resurrection of the past, keeping the past alive, can only be attained through the active choosing, reprocessing and recycling work of memory. ‘To remember is to interpret the past; more correctly, to tell a story is meant to stand for the course of past events’ (Bauman 2004a: 28, original emphasis). Bauman calls the Holocaust ‘categorial murder’, categorial since the victims were targeted due to being assigned a category, not due to anything they were or did. Groups, he argues, are constituted by sharing memories and the experience of categorial murder (and so of categorial victimhood), is such an experience, conducted between the two traps of sacralisation and banalisation. This is particularly true of memory of catastrophe which, by highlighting the group’s victimhood and suffering, sets it against other groups, and particularly against those who perpetrated the catastrophe. While neither ‘categorial murder’ nor genocide, the Nakba has been described variously as ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Pappe 2006) or ‘spaciocide’ (Hanafi 2005), perpetrated by people categorising themselves as ‘Jews’, ‘Zionists’ or

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 21

‘Israeli Jews’, against people categorised as ‘Palestinians’, ‘Arabs’, and later ‘Israeli Arabs’. Not unlike the Holocaust for Jewish people, which changed the condition of modernity, the Nakba is a foundational event for the Palestinians, a memory and a narrative standing for a series of catastrophic events whose influence continues to the present. After years of denial and silencing by Israel, and of self- silencing (Kanaaneh 2007) and ‘failure to narrate’ (Abu-Lughod and Sa’di 2007: 11), the memory of the Nakba has for a number of years been in the process of being recovered, recorded, revived, theorised, and politicised for the benefit not only of the past, but also of the present and the future. Even though it is not the only act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in modem history, the Nakba is unique in many ways, in that the dispossessed Palestinians, particularly those ‘internal refugees’ (Masalha 2005) who remained in Palestine, live side by side with those who expelled them, took over their lands and properties, reconceptualised them as ‘Israeli Arabs’, and continue to deprive them of their rights by the prohibition of land ownership on all but three per cent of publicly owned lands. ‘For Palestinians, still living their dispossession, still struggling for return, many under military occupation, many still immersed in matters of survival, the past is neither distant nor over.’ After sixty years ‘neither Palestinians nor Israelis have yet achieved a state of normality; the violence and uprooting of Palestinians continues’ (Abu-Lughod and Sa’di 2007: 10). In this sense, then, dealing with the Nakba is not only about memory or commemoration - the topic of this book - but rather about ongoing dispossession, which makes the memory of the Nakba unique. This chapter links the theoretical foundations and politics of social memory in relation to the building blocks of the current ‘memory turn’ in the social sciences to social memory in the Israeli context. The chapter posits memory as social, constructed and mediated and, after situating the study of the Nakba within the framework of the new discipline of social memory studies, it is divided into three main themes, theorising memory in spatial, temporal, and social terms. The centrality of the actual site of remembrance – Palestine as a geographical space – leads me to begin with Pierre Nora’s (1989) notion of ‘sites of memory’ and to theorise the erasure of memory, or ‘memoricide’ by tracing what Benvenisti (2000: 56) calls the ‘white spaces’ that were the Arab communities in the mental map carried by Jewish persons, and to question whether Palestine as memory site must always also by definition be a site of silence. I then pursue a temporal line of inquiry, beginning from Marianne Hirsch’s (1997) notion of ‘postmemory’. My central question here is whether postmemory – not remembrance of something one has experienced but rather an evocation of something someone else remembers – can actually be termed memory. I do not explore second-generation Palestinian Nakba memories but rather the postmemory of Israeli Jews. Some of them are actual perpetrators, though the majority of those engaged in active co-memorative work are neither Nakba perpetrators nor their direct descendants, which complicates the notion

22 Co-memory and melancholia

of postmemory, linking it to both a reconstruction of collective memory and to Nora’s ‘memory sites’. As all narratives ‘tell one story in place of another story’, I ask whether Israeli Nakba co-memoration, mediated, as Hirsch suggests in relation to second-generation Holocaust ‘re-memories’, through testimonies, photographs, films, books, and distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection, may erase rather than evoke the memories of the Nakba. I conclude by reiterating memory as a social process. Because I believe that each act of political memory is also an act of co-memory, hence the concept of commemoration, I link Halbwachs’s (1992) concept of ‘collective memory’ to what I conceptualise as the co-memory of the 1948 Nakba by Israeli Jews and Pierre Nora’s concept of memory sites with Yehouda Shenhav’s (2003) conceptualisation of ‘communities of memory’. In Chapter 3 I move to discussing the psychic reproduction of Nakba comemory by Israeli Jews, somewhat paradoxically emanating, I suggest, from deep melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Situating the Nakba in social memory studies The founding myths of the state of Israel, Masalha (2005: 3) writes, ‘which dictated the conceptual removal of the Palestinians before, during and after their physical removal in 1948’, brought about the invention of a series of quasi legal definitions such as ‘Israeli Arabs’, and euphemisms such as ‘transfer’ and ‘present absentees’ to describe the position of those Palestinians who remained in the State of Israel as internal refugees. However, euphemisms, as Agamben (1999: 31) writes in relation to the use of the term ‘Auschwitz’ as shorthand for the Holocaust, are ‘the substitution of a literal expression with an attenuated or altered expression for something that one does not actually want to hear mentioned’, always involving ambiguities. Thus the Nakba, and its consequences both for Palestinians and also for Israelis who took over their lands and property between 1948 and 1950, is subject to commemoration and demands for entitlements on the one hand, and a repertoire of denial on the other. This unique positioning of the Palestinians in relation to Palestine, their entitlements continually contested and denied by the Israeli state, makes the theorisation of social memory crucial to any discussion of memorisation as comemoration – the focus of this book. Conscious that memory itself is not available for research without a copious study of the individual mental archives of those who survived, and because my orientation is that of a sociologist, not a psychologist or psychoanalyst, this study focuses on the social construction of memory, and the public narrative and performance of commemoration. Like Laleh Khalili, I am concerned not with images inside people’s heads, but ‘with the social

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 23

invocations of past events, places and symbols in variable social settings’ (Khalili 2007: 4). However, unlike Khalili, who studies ‘the performances of remembered Palestinian (hi) stories and transformations in national commemoration’ by examining ‘icons, events and persons commemorated in ceremonies, calendars, schoolbooks, and history- telling in order to shed light on transformations in the character and strategies of the Palestinian. national movement’, my study focuses on the ‘mnemonic practices’ (Olick 2003) of members of the perpetrators’ community, set against the disavowal by Israeli state and society of both the fact and the interpretation of the Nakba. We should, however, note at this early stage that, unless you are a Nakba survivor or a Nakba perpetrator, you cannot ‘remember’ the Nakba. At best you can evoke or recall that memory using testimonies, archives and other documentary evidence. A lot of the co-memorative impetus, by both Palestinians and those Israelis who focus on ‘remembering’ the Nakba in Hebrew, which should be rephrased as ‘evoking’ the Nakba, employs testimonies of Nakba survivors, as discussed in Chapter 7, raising the question of whether the focus is the event or the narrating self. Survivors’ testimonies are influenced by many psychological, social, and political factors. Although they are an invaluable resource in understanding the mindset of those involved, and in conveying memories and postmemories, survivor testimonies convey merely a partial understanding of catastrophe – following Hilberg (1995), Arendt (2005), Olick (2007), and Sivan (1999), my sense is that merely concentrating on the victims without studying the testimonies of the perpetrators covers up the extent of the atrocity (as argued in Chapters 4, 5 and 8). Lawrence Langer distinguishes between ‘common memory’ which ‘urges us to regard the Auschwitz ordeal as part of a chronology, [freeing] us from the pain of remembering the unthinkable’, and ‘deep memory’ that ‘reminds us that the Auschwitz past is not really past and never will be’ (Langer 1991: xi). Some may argue that the Holocaust, horrible as it was, is indeed a historical event, while the Nakba – not genocide but rather ‘ethnic cleansing’, or ‘spaciocide’ – continues in the shape of ongoing denial of access, land confiscations and oppression of the Palestinian population. My argument is that while the experiences of Palestinian refugees vary greatly, depending on their class, age, gender, and diasporic location, whether they are internally or externally displaced, and whether or not they are camp dwellers, the memory of the Nakba must be theorised as ‘deep memory’, in the sense that Palestinian dispossession is ‘not really past and never will be’ (until, that is, a just resolution is arrived at, including the return of the refugees and the demise of the state of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state). Moslih Kanaaneh demonstrates this continuity of catastrophe bluntly when he compares internally displaced Palestinian refugees and refugees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who, he writes, ‘did not leave Palestine, nor did they mean to. Like the internally displaced, they too thought that they would become internal

24 Co-memory and melancholia

refugees in Palestine, not exiled refugees across the border. But the conspiracy was larger than they thought, and the Palestinian ground they ended up on was moved out of Palestine [...] Those who remained, remained not in the Jewish State of Israel but in Palestine even when it became the Jewish State of Israel’ (Kanaaneh 2007). Charting his own trajectory from the personal – writing a doctoral dissertation on ‘official’ memory in postwar Germany – to the intellectual, Olick (2008) links the development of social memory studies to the so-called ‘turns’ in the social sciences in the 1980s – linguistic, narrative, discursive, and cultural. Olick and Robbins (1998) start their survey of the development of social memory studies from classical European social theorists such as Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Simmel, who, despite insights about temporality and the past, did not address social memory. Little attention was paid to the issue in the social sciences – as opposed to history – until the 1980s, when the interest in the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of ‘collective memory’ (1992) captured the sociological and anthropological imagination. Since then both the public and the academic domains have become saturated with references to social or collective memory. For Halbwachs memory is a matter of how minds work together in society, not simply mediated but structured by social arrangements: ‘[I]t is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognise, and localise their memories’ (Halbwachs 1992: 38). Though appropriating psychological terminology, Halbwachs developed the concept of collective memory not only beyond philosophy but against psychology. Rejecting Freud’s argument that the unconscious acts as a repository for all past experiences, Halbwachs argues that it is impossible for individuals to remember outside of their group contexts. Another boundary for social memory studies is its relation to historiography. Halbwachs sees history as dead memory, a way of preserving pasts to which we no longer have an ‘organic’ experiential relation. Despite this polarisation between history and memory, there is growing recognition that memory frequently employs history in its service, and that, vice versa, historians often provide political justification for nationalist projects and other identity struggles. Importantly, it is Halbwachs’s presentist argument that history is written by people in the present for particular purposes that makes the distinction between memory and history both a matter of disciplinary power and political aims. According to Halbwachs, autobiographical memory is memory of events that we ourselves experience, while historical memory is memory that reaches us only through historical records or testimony. History is the remembered past to which we no longer have an ‘organic’ relation, while collective memory is the active past that forms our identities. Collective memory is often equated with official memory, popular memory, cultural memory. However Halbwachs’s main point, Olick and Robbins argue, is that although collective

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 25

memory does seem to take on a life of its own, it is only individuals who remember, even though they do much of this remembering together. Olick and Robbins refer to ‘social memory studies’ as a general rubric for inquiry into the varieties of forms through which we are shaped by the past, conscious and unconscious, public and private, material and communicative, consensual and challenged, referring to distinct sets of mnemonic practices in various social sites, rather than to collective memory as a thing.. The 1980s ‘memory boom’ was due, according to Nora (1989), and Winter (2001), as much to technical developments and the explosion of archives, as to western affluence which led to increase in the consumption of cultural commodities of which ‘memory’ was one. Equally, memory creates collectivities and is central in the upsurge of identity politics (see also Novick 2000). Olick and Robbins (1998) list several other reasons for the current rekindling of interest in social memory. First, multiculturalists identify historiography as a source of cultural domination and a challenge to dominant historical narratives in the name of repressed groups. Second, postmodernists attack linear historicity, truth and identity, linking history, memory and power relations. Third, hegemony theorists provide a class-based account of the politics of memory, highlighting memory contestation, popular memory and the instrumentalisation of the past. The descaralisation of traditions refers to Foucault's ‘archaeological’ stance and to Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Crucially for my discussion, a fourth factor in the popularisation of social memory studies is the link between memory and nationalism. According to Anderson (1991) the transformation of temporality and the rise of interest in the past made it possible to think the nation. National identities are predicated as much on remembering as on forgetting and this invocation of fixed national identities points to collective memory being constructed, narrated, and maintained by what Goldberg (2002) calls ‘racial states’. As pointed out in Chapter 1, I theorise Israel as a racial state par excellence, and a ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2005), which mobilises foundational myths and narratives to construct homogeneity and justify its ongoing occupation of Palestine in the name of a nebulous ‘Jewish nation’ and in memory of generations-old Jewish victimhood. As Yizhak Laor wrote in Ha’aretz in 1994, ‘first came the deeds, and the documents, and the attempt to prevent the publication of the 1 documents (the large expulsion plan, plan Dalet, for instance). Then came the state, and the state had a narrative’ (Laor 1995: 115). The role of memory in constructing statist homogeneity becomes doubly salient in relation to commemorating war dead. Thus the memory of war is turned into a sacred experience which provides the nation with a new depth of religious feeling. Though the role of social and political memory changed irretrievably in the wake of the Holocaust, Olick and Robbins (1998) argue that while some authors regard the Holocaust as the decisive turning point, others see in it merely one last and most horrible stage in a development already

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under way - one which included the horrors of colonialism, two world wars, racism, and environmental damage – on the road to postmodernity. While most studies of Israeli collective memory focus on the Holocaust and on Israel’s wars, in the wake of what has been called ‘the new historians’ debate’ (see Chapter 5), recent studies debate the role of the 1948 war and the Nakba in shaping Israeli Jewish collective memory (e.g., Benvenisti 2000; Bronstein 2005a, 2005b; Gertz and Khleifi 2006; Pappe 2006). However, the work of the ‘new historians’, Nimni (2003a: 8) cites Said (1998) as saying, denotes ‘the profound contradictions bordering on schizophrenia’ that informs 2 some of their work in admitting the Nakba while claiming that ‘there was no other choice’ – another demonstration of the denial paradox Cohen (2001) writes about. According to Shenhav, one consequence of this debate is the consensus that what was thought until the end of the 1970s as universal Israeli collective memory is in fact the particularistic memory of the founding fathers of Zionism – Ashkenazi, Eastern European, white (Shenhav 2003: 156). Critical scholarship analyses hegemonic memory, replacing it with counter-memory (Foucault 1977), which nonetheless becomes, as Shenhav argues, part of the struggle to shape Israeli collective memory.

Memory place: sites of memory, sites of silence The French historian Pierre Nora, a leading theorist of memory and editor of a seven-volume project on ‘sites’ or ‘lieux’ of French memory (1992), observes the paradoxes of memory in postmodernity. Nora’s ‘Between memory and history: les Lieux de Mémoire’ (1989) arguably helped inaugurate a ‘memory boom’ which has in turn been subject to critical fire (Rosaldo 1989; Klein 2000; Novick 2000). These critiques, while not denying the power of memory as lodged in sites, attack their valorisation as having mystified the process of claims-making, since such valorisation places these claims within the essentialist and non-negotiable framework of collective memory. This accounts for the importance, as well as contestation, of sites of memory in Israel. According to Nora, the present ‘memory boom’, due to ‘the perception that anything and everything may disappear’, leads us to speak so much of memory ‘because there is so little of it left’ (1989: 7). The struggle to retain national memory, despite the recognition that there is so little memory left, has led to an impetus to conserve and preserve, even though, as Shenhav (2003: 157) notes, what is called memory is but an inventory of things which are impossible, and perhaps even unnecessary to remember. This impetus to remember and preserve leads us, according to Nora, to construct lieux de mémoire or ‘memory sites’, where memory crystallises. This has occurred in a specific historical moment ‘where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn’. Lieux de mémoire, Nora argues, replace ‘real environments of memory’ – for instance through the

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 27

disappearance of peasant culture or the process of interior decolonisation of ethnic minorities, families and groups that up to now have possessed reserves of memory but little or no historical capital (1989: 8). Nora’s argument that memory and history are fundamentally opposed is problematic. For him memory is life, borne by living societies; it remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again. Memory is blind to all but the group it binds – which means, as Halbwachs (1992) argued, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific, collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, hence its claim to universal authority. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative (1998: 9). Claiming the authenticity of collective memories (Klein 2000) is very evident in Nora. In a sense Nora claims that we retain sites of memory because that is the best that there is now there is no spontaneous memory. Therefore, he writes, ‘these lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it’ (Nora 1989: 12). Nora argues that modern memory is archival and because these archives are impossible to apprehend owing to their sheer size, they have become the negation of ‘organic’ memory, even though they are intended to be its substitute. He suggests that the increasing importance of memory is not simply because there is so little of it, but also that memory, through the weight granted to Freudian and psychoanalytical thought, assumes prime importance in our culture. Memories are located in our individual selves and the modern injunction is that it is our duty to ourselves to find these memories. Now that the search for of memories has become individualised, everyone is trying to search for his/her own individual memories and genealogies. Archives are not only kept by the state and other institutions, but by everyone: ‘The less memory is experienced collectively, the more it will require individuals to undertake to become themselves memory-individuals’ (Nora 1989: 16). Such memory is simply self-affirmation. He refers to this as duty-memory, which is inextricably linked with archive- memory. Lieux de mémoire can be material, symbolic or functional – even an apparently functional site like an archive or a schoolbook becomes a lieu de mémoire if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura. While lieux de mémoire come in various shapes, their materiality is what counts – ‘memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events’ (Nora 1989: 22). However Nora is very clear about the limitations of lieux de mémoire. For while they aim to stop the world from forgetting, their mutable nature makes this an impossible task; each generation invests the lieu de mémoire with

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different interpretations so that they ultimately become their own referent as ‘pure, exclusively self-referential signs’, and their mutability is what makes them such a fascinating area of study (Nora 1989: 23). Nora further argues that historiography - the history of history – dissociates itself from memory, which becomes the object of history. His theorisation of the ‘memory-nation’ which is the incarnation of the unification of memory and history, and his claim that through this unification history becomes a social science, while memory remains a private phenomenon, upholds Goldberg’s argument (2002) that racial states operate not only through mechanisms of power and control but also through the invention of histories and traditions. This is particularly true when the nation in question defines itself as a ‘memory nation’, and where the struggle for territory is also the struggle for memory, as is the case in both Israel and Palestine. Disagreeing with Halbwachs’s presentist approach, Yael Zerubavel (1994a, 1994b) is critical of the idea that memory is in decline. The expansion of memory-studies since the 1980s and the constant salience of the battle for memory in the Palestinian context make it difficult to disagree with her. Indeed, valorising certain sites of memory over others is an ongoing process in Israel exemplified in the stark juxtaposition of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, a central site of Israeli Jewish collective memory – with Deir Yasin – the neglected and deliberately forgotten site only 1,400 metres away (Eisen 2003; Shadid 2005). This illustrates the argument made by Forty and Kuchler (1999) that collective memories, in order to be programmatic, are equally constructed by what is forgotten. A memorial project such as Yad Vashem, however important, does not create any positive sites of memory within Israel – the Holocaust’s most persistent symbol being, after all, a void. Bilu documents the many sites of collective memory currently being created in Israel by religious and particularly Moroccan Jews who have successfully transplanted their cult of saints onto the Israeli landscape (though such sites of collective memory may be inaccessible to secular, Ashkenazi Jews). While secular Zionist sites in Israel may also be losing popularity and be contested, institutionalised and centralised (Bilu 2003), many Israeli Jews face a lack of appropriate sites of positive identification and connection. Zerubavel (1994), discussing the Masada myth in Israeli collective memory, notes the decline of the ‘activist’ reading of Masada from a site which encapsulates the heroism of the Jewish people to one which is seen as a symbol of failure and of tragedy, analogous to the Holocaust. This relative failure to construct a secular ‘sacred geography’ of Israel, one which could provide Israeli Jews with a network of lieux de mémoire through which they can control the landscape is highlighted by Benvenisti (2000), who attempts to replace the old failed ‘flawless Hebrew map’ of Zionist provenance with a more complete and encompassing Israeli narrative, in order to achieve possession (see Chapter 5). It may well be such motivations, a wish to belong to the land and to incorporate it into the collective memory of Israeli Ashkenazi

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 29

Jews, which inform the co-memorative work of groups such as Zochrot (discussed in Chapter 7). That the land of Palestine must be theorised as a lieu de mémoire is almost self-evident. Here we have a disputed territory, co-inhabited by coloniser and colonised. On the one hand, this is a territory to which all members of ‘the Jewish nation’ (at least those with a Jewish mother) have automatic citizenship entitlement through the Law of Return, a ‘land of Israel’ sanctified by religious memory upheld in Jewish prayers through the centuries and reified through the ongoing act of settler colonisation. On the other, the territory’s Palestinian current and former inhabitants are tolerated second-class citizens, ‘present absentees’, occupied subjects, or diaspora subjects without citizenship entitlements. For some of these categories of Palestinians Palestine the land remains a realm of memory: many still keep deeds to their property, keys to the houses they left behind, photographs, and scraps salvaged prior to the flight, material mementos and symbolic reminders of lived geographies. The most distinctive features of Palestinian social memory, Abu-Lughod and Sa’di write, are ‘its production under constant threat of erasure’ and its ‘orientation to place’. But for Palestinians, the places of the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine itself are more than merely sites of memory, they are also ‘symbols of all that has been lost and sites of longing to which return is barred’ (AbuLughod and Sa’di 2007: 13). Redolent of the metaphorical equation of woman and nation (see YuvalDavis 1997; Lentin 1999; Mayer 2000), Palestinians often evoke the body of place in metaphors such as the land of Palestine as a woman raped or violated, a beloved or a mother needing protection, and co-memorate it in descriptions of lost villages (Khalidi 1992), maps of demographic and statistical data (Abu Sitta 2004), or memorial books (Slyomovics 2007). However, Slyomovics argues that while the metaphor of rape has been employed to embody the loss of Palestine, Israeli historians such as Benny Morris violate history, and, by refusing to interview survivors and insisting instead on archives as the only reliable 3 source, ignore and erase the voices of the Palestinians. Metaphors, Slyomovics reminds us, ‘annihilate history and dissolve temporality, especially concerning the functions of memory and oral history with respect to Palestinian national history’ (Slyomovics 2007: 38). Susan Slyomovics (‘The rape of Qula, a destroyed Palestinian village’, 2007) and Rochelle Davis (‘Mapping the past, recreating the homeland: memories of village places in pre-1948 Palestine’, 2007) vividly demonstrate the centrality of place as contested territory. Slyomovics studies the Bir Zeit project on destroyed Palestinian villages against the background of the State of Israel’s ceaseless transformation of landscape and geography after 1948, and shows how memories become texts and how words shape the past. She uses the example of a national park with monuments to the Jewish war dead which occupies the land where the Palestinian village of Qula once was, where tourists go to sitespecific material displays of Israeli ‘state cult’ (2007: 42) to illustrate Palestine’s

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contested geographies, documented by Benvenisti (2000) and Pappe (2006). Davis uses Nora’s ‘sites of memory’ theorisation to understand how Palestinians position the village as ‘all that was pre-1948 history’ (2007: 58), exploring Palestinian memorial books that map the past and which, given the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over land, confer an authority to know. Memory books, written, not unlike Holocaust memoirs, ‘so that we don’t forget’ (2007: 61), call on young Palestinians to continue to fight and believe that Palestine can be returned. Davis is aware, however, that imagining the village as epitomising Palestine and nationalising the Palestinian peasant are implicated in idealising Palestine (2007: 72). Even though almost 90 per cent of the urban Arab population was uprooted in 1948, delaying the process of change and modernisation of Palestinian-Israeli society, with the result that sixty years later ‘no Arab urban society worthy of the name has been created in Israel’ (Benvenisiti 2000: 7), the discourse of the Palestinian village as epitomising Palestine remains powerful. This leads Manar Hassan (2005: 197) to critique the erasure of the Palestinian city from both Israeli and Palestinian collective memory, resulting in ‘imagining Palestinian society as a rural society ... [making it hard] to believe that historic Palestine, that is pre-Nakba Palestine, consisted of real cities’. Beyond academic study, Palestine as living lieu de mémoire is enacted and evoked in a variety of mnemonic practices. On Israeli Independence Day on 8 May 2008 I participated in a march of return to the destroyed and deserted village of Saffuriyya, the site of the 2008 annual march of return organised by the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Displaced Person in Israel. Three days later I participated in a silent march with Nakba survivors - a group of diaspora Jerusalemites – in the affluent Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talbieh. The survivors wore T-shirts with ‘Nakba survivor’ on the front and ‘This is my house’ on the back, making a silent, yet potent claim to their families’ lost homes, now inhabited by middle-class Jewish Jerusalemites. Both marches and a host of local marches, conferences and gatherings in Palestine, Israel and in the diaspora, collectively enacted and commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Nakba for which Palestine is a living memory site. With the establishment of the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Displaced Person in Israel, return marches such as those I witnessed are affirming the materiality and placeness of the Palestinian space, beyond mere memory. According to the Association’s chairman Wakim Wakim, the Association was formed ‘when we had the feeling that the PLO did not represent the Palestinian interest in relation to the internally displaced, because we considered the internally displaced an integral part of the refugee issue’ (interview, May 2006). Until recently there was a degree of self-silencing of Nakba memories, due, some argue, to shame at not having fought (Khouri 1998; Tamari 2002), but mostly to fear, particularly during the Military Government which ended only in 1966. However, according to Wakim, these

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 31

fears are beginning to be assuaged due to the Association’s annual march of return to the destroyed villages (as discussed in Chapter 8). Silence and self-silencing about the Nakba is a persistent feature of being a Palestinian in Israel. As Nadera Shalhob-Kevorkian, a Palestinian lecturer in the Law faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem writes, ‘being Palestinian ... means living – mostly in silence - the personal/political struggle of oppressed people, working diligently to mend the broken voice inside and between us that carries within its cracks the agony and suffering of my people’ (Shalhoub- Kevorkian 2002: 176). Writing about the process of decolonisation, Shalhoub- Kevorkian tells about growing up in Haifa where the Nakba was contested memory: My mother was the one who spoke the unspeakable while my father tried all he could to hide the horror, perhaps out of shame, perhaps out of fear of losing more – losing us - or perhaps out of the power of the powerless. What made it terrible was that my father spoke about the struggle to survive only on rare occasions. He would always say that everyone was trapped, that the Arab world turned a blind eye to Palestinian suffering and dissemination ... .My mother held on to the memories of her own experience, stories, proverbs, and love, lest others erase them. She refused to glorify the madness we, as children, lived in, but she also refused to succumb to amnesia. (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2002: 179)

Importantly, Palestinian silence and self-silencing about the Nakba is not only a consequence of Palestinian shame, fear or amnesia, but also of a deliberate Israeli state policy of silencing and denial. According to Laor, the story of the Israeli state was born of deep silence. At the high point of the big expulsion, in the summer of 1948, David Ben Gurion kept silent when he was speaking about what happened to the Palestinians. Laor argues that political and military leaders, while acknowledging what was happening - the expulsions, the massacres, the killing of people who hid in mosques, the rapes, the looting – actually said very little about the atrocities. Moreover, writers and intellectuals collaborated in the silence, albeit with a plethora of words, short stories, poems, novels. ‘Israel’, Laor writes, ‘is a society created by its elite, which explains the central role of the state in the construction of national memory.’ Memory and forgetting are building blocks of hegemony and nation-building, as Goldberg argues in theorising racial states (2002). As Laor argues, ‘Ben Gurion knew exactly what he wanted to be remembered, and what he wanted to be forgotten. Israeli nation building included many things that had to be forgotten (Yiddish, what they did to Mizrahi Jews, and the expulsion of the Palestinians) and many things that had to be remembered: from “the chosen people”, the forefathers, and the second Temple, and Bar Kochva, to the Warsaw ghetto uprising as representing the memory of the Holocaust’ (Laor 1995: 120). Therefore, I want to argue that sites of catastrophic memory are also sites of silence. The land of Palestine – replete with signifiers of pre-Nakba Palestinian life, from almond and olive orchards to ‘Arab houses’ taken over by Jews in

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deserted and demolished urban neighbourhoods and villages, and ruined dwellings and mosques, some still standing in depopulated villages – is also the site of silencing the expulsion and the mass exodus. Ben Gurion, Laor writes, ‘believed in silence, because he believed in the power of words to recall, be studied, and become the “truth”. Therefore he did not speak about the expulsion, giving a nonverbal instruction (to expel the Palestinian of Lidda)’ (Laor 1995: 125). But I need to keep reminding myself that my project is not to survey Palestinian silences and commemoration practices, but rather Israeli Jewish comemorative practices, and these too, as I show in Chapter 7, use similar strategies of marches to specific destroyed Palestinian sites, investing them with the status of lieux de mémoire, and, as I argue in Chapter 3, of sites of mourning and melancholia.

Memory time: post-memory or evocation? The distinction made by Halbwachs and Nora between memory and history takes me from exploring place to considering the time of memory. It is a truism to say that without the passage of time there is no memory and that the passage of time ‘creates distortions, fosters nostalgia, makes repression easier, and threatens us with forgetfulness’ (Abu- Lughod and Sa’di 2007: 16-17). AbuLughod and Sa’di outline three aspects of the salience of time in relation to Palestinian memory work. First, not unlike the passing of the generation of Holocaust survivors, there is the issue of the passing of the generation of the Nakba, which is why oral history projects and internet sites archiving Nakba testimonies have become so central. Second, Abu-Lughod and Sa’di argue, Palestinians are threatened with forgetfulness. They cite Salman Natour’s play Memory that ends with the narrator’s growing amnesia: ‘My memory has betrayed me, and slowly I am losing it. I fear the black day when I find myself without any memory, just a body ... ’ (Natour 2003: 19). While the play is an urgent call to document, record, film, catalogue, and store Palestinian collective memory, Natour is aware of the contradictory nature of the Palestinian Nakba narrative, as he told me in Haifa in May 2006: I see two opposite processes. On the one hand, people such as Wakim Wakim’s father have been released from their fears, from all their inhibitions. Before they die they want to leave something, tell their story. They are aware of this need. On the other hand, many people undergo an opposite process. They say what happened sixty years ago is the past. Now things are different ... They internalise the Israeli claim that the solution to the refugee problem means the end of the State of Israel. They think in terms of the Israeli state. These people ... are [Palestinian] intellectuals who work in influential positions, but many simple non-political people also think so ... I see two processes, overIsraelisation and over-Palestinianisation. (Interview May 2006)

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The Nakba embodies an unbridgeable gap between two qualitatively different periods, pre- and post-Nakba, making generational time a third key element of memory time for Palestinians. The transfer of memories between the generations is a complex and involved process, and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory (1997) is useful in capturing the way in which second and third generations grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth but shape their lives. However the Palestinian second and third generations often have their own direct experiences of violence, displacement, humiliation, and expropriation. Concentrating her study on photographs as aide memoirs, Hirsch knows, however, that more than memory is at stake as photographs do not recall the past but can actually block memory and become a counter-memory. Like the Holocaust, the Nakba is recalled inter alia via photographs, mostly of preNakba Palestine. But such photographs, Hirsch writes, suggest the impossibility of mourning: ‘it is precisely the utter conventionality of the domestic family picture that makes it impossible for us to comprehend how the person in the picture was, or could have been, annihilated’ (Hirsch 1997: 21). For Hirsch, the attempt by second-generation writers and artists to invoke their families’ catastrophe by employing photographs and other material memorabilia becomes a lieu de mémoire with the ‘spatiality of memory mapped onto its temporality, its visual combined with its verbal dimension’ which makes memory an ‘imagetext, a double-coded system of mental storage and retrieval’ (1997: 22). Hirsch uses the term ‘postmemory’, enthusiastically adopted by researchers dealing with second-generation evocation of memory of catastrophe including the Nakba, with some hesitation, conscious that the prefix ‘post’ may imply that we are beyond memory. Postmemory, she insists, is ‘a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation ... Postmemory characterises the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth.’ Hirsch prefers the term ‘postmemory’ to ‘absent memory’ – also used to explore the legacy of catastrophe for second-generation survivors – because postmemoty need not be absent, but is as full and as empty, certainly as constructed, as memory itself (Hirsch 1997: 22). While this book is not about Palestinian ‘postmemory’, many Palestinian scholars (e.g. Dajani 2002; Nusair 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2002; Abu-Lughod 2007; Jayyusi 2007; A1 Hardan 2008) write themselves into their texts as members of the second Nakba generation, teasing out having one’s everyday reality overshadowed by memories of a much more significant past. In his study of Holocaust monuments, James Young calls this kind of secondgeneration evocation ‘received history’, or ‘the afterlife of memory represented in history’s after-images: the impressions retained in the mind’s eye of a vivid sensation long after the original, external cause has been removed’ (Young

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2000: 3—4). However, contrary to Holocaust ‘received history’, reinvoked in the mind’s eye long after the original cause has been removed, in the case of Palestinians, ‘both memory and postmemory have a special valence because the past has not yet passed’ (Abu-Lughod 2007: 79). Lila Abu-Lughod’s powerful ‘Return to half-ruins: memory, postmemory, and living history in Palestine’ (2007) about a daughter’s visit to her father’s place of return in Jaffa, is an exemplary Nakba postmemorial autoethnography. Like the participants in my study of Israeli daughters of Holocaust survivors (Lentin 2000), all of whom began their narratives by speaking about their families’ silence about the Holocaust, Abu-Lughod cannot remember hearing her father’s stories about 1948 as she was growing up in the United States. After spending days and nights defending Palestinian Jaffa in 1948, Ibrahim Abu- Lughod went into exile. Only when he returned to live in Jaffa in the 1990s was he able to retell his stories. The trauma lived on in his daughter ‘only as a wounded identification in a hostile United States where sympathy for Palestine was scarce’ (2007: 89). Her father understood that, powerful and shattering as it was, the Nakba was unrecognised from the standpoint of the victim, yet, unlike academic analysts of collective memory, he regarded individual memories as the stuff of history of the Palestinian experience. As she documents her father’s funeral, for Abu-Lughod Palestine and Jaffa are particularly resonant ‘sites of memory’. But it was her father’s experiences, more than his stories, which made Abu-Lughod want to write about the Nakba, which, she reminds us again and again, ‘is not just something of the past’ (2007: 103). After his death, the daughter remembers her father saying ‘We [Palestinians] were born to suffer ... ’ (and I cannot help thinking how Jewish this sounds - this was what my grandmother Charlotte used to say), adding that Palestine and Jaffa are ‘particularly resonant sites of memory’. After his death, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod is mourned by Mahmoud Darwish who says: ‘He was born in Jaffa and to Jaffa he returned, to remain, there for eternity, close to the tree of Paradise’ (Abu-Lughod 2007: 99) – temporal and spatial reflections unite in this second-generation memorial. Another member of the Palestinian second generation, Lena Jayyusi (2007), also insists that the Nakba is not ‘just something of the past’, albeit stressing that had there not been a massive dispossession, the visibility of the Palestinian collectivity could not have folded away quite so easily. Jayyusi develops the notions of iterability and cumulativity in thinking of 1948 catastrophe stories as coming from multiple sites and a plurality of voices. Often told in the first person plural, the communal voice, Nakba stories move between various emblematic dates 1936 (the Palestinian uprising), 1948, and 1967, though the Nakba continues through the past still being at work in the present. While patterns of iteration, repetition and accumulation are typical of many narratives of colonisation, the Palestinians use memory as resistance and memory work as maker of national identity. Unlike Nora, who differentiates between history and memory, Jayyusi argues that in the Palestinian case there

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 35

is continuity of history and memory, iterated across time, relating to the same agent and the same land, its objects becoming memory objects rooted in an embodied place. Crucially, this continuity of the past in the present enables agency regarding the future. Rather than recovering a lost ‘realm of memory’, for Jayyusi the continuity of time as recovering past and present history provides the power for agency and is a project for the future. While most studies of memory regard memory positively, as healing collective trauma, memory, as Bauman (2004a) writes, is a two-edged sword. More specifically, as Israeli film scholar Yosefa Loshitzky argues, ‘within this cult of memory a big gap opens between memory cultivated by the victims of past atrocities and the perpetrators of these crimes. No nation is in a rush to commemorate its past sins’ (Loshitzky 2006: 327). This means that the postmemories of second-generation Palestinian Nakba survivors and of children of Israeli perpetrators rarely intersect. In Chapter 4 I write about my own postmemory of the Haifa Nakba in relation to my father’s probable role in it, yet my ‘postmemory’ is but an evocation, based on flimsy fragments, since my father spole very little about the fall of Haifa before he died prematurely in his early sixties. Increasingly, however, Israelis of my generation and my children’s generation are taking on board the perpetrator postmemories as perpetrator narratives of 1948 begin emerging, though not necessarily told by children of Israelis who took active part in perpetrating the Nakba (see e.g., Dalia Karpel’s 2005 film about Yosef Nachmani, one of the architects of Jewish settlercolonialism in Palestine, discussed in Chapter 4). Many of the narratives by Israeli Jews have a ‘road to Damascus’ structure, elucidating the moment or the process of realisation that the official Israeli narrative is no longer acceptable (as discussed in Chapter 5). One exception of the above rule is a narrative published in December 2007 on PalestineChronicle.com by Miko Peled, an Israeli peace activist and writer living in the US and the co founder of the Elbanna Peled Foundation in memory of Smadar Elhanan and Abir Aramin. Typically, Peled, whose father, the Israeli General Matti Peled, ‘hero’ of the 1948 and 1967 wars, shocked Israel when he dialogued with Palestinian leaders in the early 1970s, confesses not to have 4 known any Palestinians in his early life: ‘for the most part for us Israelis, Arabs were different, they were a minority and all we felt towards them was fear, mistrust and contempt. I became familiar with the term “Palestinian” in the late 70s only because my father was involved in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Until then they were always called Arabs, or Al Fatah, or Fedayin, or terrorists ... The first time I met and talked with Palestinians was in California in the year 2000. I was 39 years old’ (Peled 2007). Peled grew up on the ‘indisputable historical facts’ of the 1948 war, which he had to believe in, because my father fought and was wounded in 1948, fighting in the first Jewish army since the fall of Judea some 2000 years ago. I heard the stories directly from him and from my mother. My mother lived through the siege on

36 Co-memory and melancholia

Jerusalem , raising my older brother and sister on little bread and even less water ... My mother ... told us that after the fighting was over and the Arabs fled from their homes in West Jerusalem (Arabs in West Jerusalem, that took a while to really sink in, I never knew there were Arabs living on our side of the city), their vacant homes were distributed to the Jews (by whom? I always wondered). My mother Zika was the wife of an officer in the young, heroic Israel ... and she was the daughter of Dr Avram Katsnelson, a member of the ‘National Council’ which was the de facto Jewish government in Palestine. So it was only natural that she was offered one of these lovely Arab homes in Jerusalem. But she said it made her sick to see Jewish people move in to these homes that were still fully furnished. She said that the Palestinian residents had to flee in haste and when the Jews took over, they found breakfast still warm on the dining room table. She said she could not and would not take a home that belonged to another family. (Peled 2007, emphases added)

Peled’s story valorises his parents’ and his own actions - ultimately his story is about what is ironically called Israeli ‘bleeding hearts’, not about the Palestinian ‘other’, even though many postmemory narratives such as Peled’s, and indeed my own, reconstruct the memory of 1948 with a political aim in mind. I elaborate on such Damascene narratives in Chapter 5. For now, I want to argue that such narratives originate most probably from the same impetus described by Giorgio Agamben (1999) when he writes, after Primo Levi (1988) about the shame of those who survived the Holocaust, having witnessed those who drowned, who have lost their humanity, who have gazed upon the Gorgon and who are therefore unable to bear witness (see Lentin 2004a). Like Young, I too grew up ‘playing’ with the Holocaust. Not light-heartedly, but ‘in the obsessive earnestness of children trying to work through a family’s trauma’ (Young 2000: 42; see also Grossman 1985). But unlike Young, I also grew up with the ‘background music’ of the Haifa Nakba, heard but not heard, knowing and not knowing at the same time - illustrating the denial paradox Cohen (2001) speaks about. Writing about Holocaust monuments Young asks ‘how does a city like Berlin invite a people like the Jews back into its official past after having driven them out so murderously from it?’ (Young 2000: 152). However, Israeli second- and third- generation of Nakba perpetrators cannot simply extend the question to Israel and ask how does a post-Nakba world accommodate and re-member absence, since unlike the annihilated Jews of Europe, the Palestinians are not absent. Even though some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or escaped never to return, many remained, and since 1967, many are under Israeli occupation, not merely as ‘present absentees’, but rather ‘absent presentees’, the reality of whose dispossession cannot be brushed aside as mere history or mere memory. Another question that must be asked about Israeli second-generation Nakba co-memoration practices is the one Hirsch asks as to whether photographic and other representations assist us to forget rather than remember. The marches to destroyed Palestinian sites, such as those conducted by Zochrot, a group dedicated

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 37

to commemorating the Nakba in Hebrew, are aimed to ‘challenge Israeli consciousness and conscience, with its efforts to remind us complacent inhabitants of Zion of the dark, unfamiliar side of the Zionist narrative – the Nakba ... (through) mediatised visits, every month or two, to ruins of Arab settlements deserted in 1948 ... ’ (Lapid 2008). However, while such marches concretise the Palestinian tragedy through linking participants with a real place, a real ‘memory site’, the question of whether photographic and other representations work as a memory aid or an aid to forgetting remains open.

Conclusion: collective memory as co-memory Having looked at social memory as both spatial and temporal, I conclude this chapter by reiterating social memory as a collective act of commemoration and argue that each act of political memory is also an act of co-memory, the collective aspect of commemoration. Contrary to the psychoanalytic claims that memories are preserved whole within the unconscious of an individual psyche and that in remembering, one resurrects or reimagines the past (Freud 1957), Halbwachs (1992) believed that individual memories are fleeting and that as the past is constantly revised, all historians can rely on are representations. Halbwachs is not speaking about memory, but rather about commemoration, which, according to Hutton (1993: 6), comprises fixed representations beyond which historians can’t go. Memory’s image acquires stasis, providing evidence of society’s efforts to give form to its imagination, and the historian’s task is not, as Freud thought, to resurrect the (unconscious) past to living (conscious) memory, but to describe the images in which collective memory lives. The debate between psychoanalysis and postmodernism continues to dog social memory studies. On the one side of the debate stands the Freudian psychoanalytical approach which assumes that painful experiences are repressed and hence forgotten by the conscious mind, yet they continue to press on the ego for expression. Freud’s belief that all human memories are recoverable moved him to claim that psychoanalysis can be enlisted in the service of history beyond individual memories. The deep source of memory as repetition is in effect the ‘historical truth’ that Freud the psychohistorian sought to discover (Hutton 1993: 68). However, Cohen argues that repressing atrocities committed in one’s name is never really successful, because repressed pain is not really forgotten and the deeper we go, the more difficult we enter a state of double unawareness – both of the original repression and of our efforts to hide its emergence now. The penalty for repression is repetition without recognising we are repeating and in the end, the repressed returns as the past comes back to haunt us (Cohen 2001: 119). On the other side of the debate stands the postmodernist deconstructionist approach which uses Foucault’s genealogical methodology to inventory and describe commemorative forms. Like Freud, Foucault claims that all forgotten

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experiences are retrievable from a reservoir of repressed memories. But unlike Freud, he believes that the search for the self is a journey into a mental labyrinth where memory fragments are recovered, but these can’t give us an overall meaning; the meanings we recover are partial truths and their value is ephemeral. For Foucault the psyche is not an archive but a mirror, and can only reflect images that we conjure up to describe ourselves. Looking into the psyche is like looking into the mirror image of a mirror. One sees oneself but the meaning of the self for Foucault is less important than the methods we employ to understand it (Hutton 1993: 115). Foucault opened a new form of historical research – the history of discourse and representation – which became the signature tune of postmodern history. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) Foucault argued that knowledge is not only communicated but created through its mode of organisation. In moulding knowledge, discourse excludes alternative formulations, and it is exclusion which opens up the possibility of non-traditional histories, which Foucault called ‘the history of the present’, that, instead of beginning from a mythical past and working forward, works from the present backwards (Hutton 1993: 112) – another presentist approach. Foucault’s genealogy assumes that history that stresses continuity from fixed beginnings superimposes a pattern on the past which, when deconstructed, uncovers a hidden agenda, offering a whole new order of understanding. Foucault shifted his interest from collective memories through which traditions are perpetuated to what he called ‘countermemories’ – the discursive practices through which memories are perpetually revised. In this reading, the archive is no longer merely a repository of facts but rather an inventory through which traditions are refashioned. And it is always power that bends discourse to its needs, revising our conceptions of the past (Hutton 1993: 112-13). According to this deconstructionist reading, the Zionist belief in Jewish history as emanating from primordial biblical origins as historiography perpetuates itself, revealing hidden agendas. Zerubavel’s (1994a, 1994b) discussion of the use made by Israeli Zionism of the memories of Masada and the Holocaust, discussed below, illustrates the power play between accepted state memories and a variety of counter-memorial voices. When the ‘new historians’ uncovered Zionism’s hidden agenda in relation to the 1948 war, their discourse ‘created a whole new order of understanding’. Foucault’s research illuminated the power to determine which voices are heard in the public forum. The voices that were heard in the Israeli public forum, even in the wake of the new historians’ alternative readings of the Zionist archives, were more often than not male, Ashkenazi, middle-class, academic voices. It took some time for alternative voices – alternative to the new historians’ alternative – to be heard, and even then, the voices heard tended to be academic voices, men’s voices (Yael Zerubavel and Idith Zertal were notable exceptions), and very few Mizrahi and Palestinian political activist voices (see Chapter 5).

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 39

Contemporary historians keep returning to Freud’s insistence on the possibility of retrieving repressed memories, be it through psychoanalysis or, as many oral historians believe, through sheer repetition. With particular reference to Holocaust memories, Saul Friedlander (1980, 1991, 1992) was interested in the power of the past that cannot be represented, and in the problem of commemoration with an eye to the future, asking how we can represent the past in a way that the truth of its ‘deep memory’ will not be forgotten by posterity (Hutton 1993: 72). Likewise, the question of Nakba memories is not merely one of individual psyches attempting to cope with the impact of repressed ‘deep memories’ on that individual psyche, but rather – as both postmodern historians such as Foucault and psychoanalytical historians such as Friedlander would have it - one of the nature and the limits of representation and commemoration for a collective, whose loss and grief are not only past memories, but present experiences. To understand better the place of Nakba commemoration in contemporary Israeli Jewish discourse we must keep returning to Judaic narratives such as Masada and the Holocaust in constructing what Foucault calls the ‘hidden agendas’ of Israeli collective memory. Israel, where the discourse of the ‘bereavement family’ (Witztum and 5 Malkinson 1993: 243) corresponds to the discourse of ‘the people’s army’, anchors its social memory not merely in the ancient territory where modem Zionists chose to settle, and in the attended Zionist foundational myths, but also in the legacy of the Holocaust, a central building block of Israeli collective memory, prevalent in Israeli talk and silences (Zertal 2002). Holocaust victims are resurrected time and again, serving present interests, becoming central factors in Israeli political discourse, particularly in relation to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. There was no war, from 1948 to the second Lebanon war, that was not defined and conceptualised in terms of the Holocaust (Zertal 2002: 16). Yet Israeli social memory has deeper roots, as Yael Zerubavel’s (1994a, 1994b) comparative study of Masada and Holocaust memory demonstrates.6 Zerubavel juxtaposes the myth of Masada, a story of active memory and the ideal of patriotic behaviour, central to the Zionist concept of the ‘new Hebrew’, with the opposing narrative of the Holocaust, perceived in the early years of the state of Israel as epitomising the passivity of Europe’s Jews, allegedly ‘going to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter’ (see Lentin 2000). Despite the problematic issue of suicide – censured in orthodox Judaism – the slogan ‘Masada shall not fall again’ inspired many generations of Zionist Israelis, including my own, and the Masada story was continually recreated and promoted by pre-state Jewish underground organisations, the IDF, archaeological teams, mass media, youth movements, textbooks, the tourist industry, and the arts (Ben Yehuda 1996). Crucially, however, Zerubavel argues that with the greater acceptance of the Holocaust and its survivors Masada and the Holocaust both became depictions of the tragic element in the Zionist understanding of both past and present. Positing counter-memories of Masada

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as heroic, she argues that such deviant memories, in recapturing history from the ashes of mythical memory, explode the turning of historical events into national myths which not only encourage ‘spurious historical analogies, but can also distort the present and become a self-fulfilling prophesy’. This means that ‘although these deviant versions reject memory stories, they admit the huge influence these memory stories have on the Israeli political culture, and caution against it’ (Zerubavel 1994b: 66). Zerubavel (1994a, 1994b) and Zertal (2000, 2002) argue that Israeli nationalism is based on a culture of death and Jewish victimhood, a recurrent theme. Commemorating Masada as heroic links the death of the individual with the revival of the nation: ‘the defenders of Masada sanctified the nation through their patriotic sacrifice. Therefore the members of the Hebrew nation owe their lives to those ancient heroes’ (Zerubavel 1994b: 56). But death, so central to Israeli collective memory, and to conceptualising Jewish Israel as a victim community, is the death of Jews, not of the Jews’ Palestinian victims. Zertal (2002) studies the manipulation by the state of the collective memory of the Holocaust in order to justify the 1967 war in which the Arabs were equated with Nazis and Nasser with Hitler (see also Zuckermann 1993; Segev 2000). However, as Si van reminds us (1991), the Holocaust - which happened on European soil was perceived as an aberration of the normal order, while the loss of a hundredth of the Jewish population in the 1948 war was much closer to home. This led to post-1948 commemorative practices not only enabling Israeli society to mourn the fallen, but also shaping social memory and constructing a commemorative tradition which, by necessity, excluded Palestinian losses and erased Palestine. It is worth noting that the relatively modern Hebrew word for commemoration, hantzakha, derives from the Hebrew root netzakh (eternity) and bears no grammatical relation to the word for memory, zikaron, from the 7 root zakhar – which is also the word for masculine. Hantzakha or eternalisation is a term reserved in modern Hebrew for commemorating Israel’s (Jewish) war dead (Witztum and Malkinson 1993: 241), not Holocaust victims or war victims on the Palestinian-Arab side - denoting the close links discussed above between memory, nationalism, and war. Memory – zikaron – is an ancient Hebrew term, which, according to Jewish tradition, is not only about not forgetting, but also about action, hence the active commemoration of Israel’s war dead. On the personal level, families commemorate their war dead through naming a place or a newborn after the fallen, or enacting commemorative practices such as fellowships, studentships, a memory room, a library or a cultural centre. On the national level, the commemoration of war dead resulted in fixing a series of memorial days – Holocaust Memorial Day, Memorial Day for Israel’s War Dead, and the Day of Independence (Witztum and Malkinson 1993: 241). In addition, military cemeteries are separated from civilian cemeteries, sanctified, but also centrally controlled regarding the shape and inscriptions permitted. In this respect Young argues that, in adopting the

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 41

ancient Hebrew calendar with all its ancient holidays which commemorate destruction or Jewish victories, the State of Israel nationalises Jewish memory: ‘Time would no longer be measured in the distance between the Temple’s destruction and the present moment. Instead, the redrawn calendar would find its genesis, its anchor, in the birth of the state itself. All else, including memorial days, would now be regarded as either culminating in Independence 8 Day or in issuing from it’ (Young 1993: 265—6). Witztum and Malkinson chart three stages of Israeli commemoration practices. The first stage, from the pre-state period until 1967, was one of idealisation and denial. This was a heroic period climaxing in the 1967 victory. During this time national bereavement was quiet and dignified, the pain suppressed and experienced only in the private domain. The second stage, lasting until the 1973 war, was one of protest and searching. Hanoch Levin’s satire The Queen of the Bath (1970), an attack on the heroism myth, used the biblical sacrifice narrative as the son blames the father for sending him to his death while he (the father) remains alive. The third stage, following the 1973 war, was one of disorganisation, guilt and despair. Feelings of confusion, embarrassment and accusation intensified after the first Lebanon war and the Intifada, and for the first time there was a rift between society and the bereaved parents who began to protest against the ongoing war (Witztum and Malkinson 1993: 253). The gradual erosion of the Zionist myths and the transformation of Israeli society from one united by Jewish victimhood and Israeli heroism to a fragmented society, no longer united in the purpose of ‘no choice’ war, elucidates the poly vocal nature of Israeli memory stories as the two versions of memory, the activist and the tragic, co-exist in contemporary Hebrew culture and are both used in a variety of contexts and by a variety of audiences (Zerubavel 1994b: 66). In the past ancient heroic survival myths, the legacy of the Holocaust and the mythical heroism of ‘the few against the many’ of the 1948 war served to consolidate a unified Zionist narrative about the inevitability of war, determined that ‘Masada shall not fall again’. At present globalisation, individualisation and greater awareness of the wrong of the Zionist point of departure that ‘security for persecuted minorities can be provided only by nation-states in which these minorities become majorities’ (Nimni 2003a: 6) lead to the construction of new memory stories and new ‘memory communities’. In his study of the collective portrait of the 1948 generation, Sivan (1991) suggests that a state cannot become a nation-state without first being a ‘memory community’, which Israel no doubt is, despite the fragmentation and contestation. Commemoration, Sivan suggests, appears in the second stage of mourning, and serves mourning in two ways. On the one hand, being a social collaborative process, it provides social support built on affective empathy, and is the best way of fostering recovery from the loss as individuals find they are not alone in their grief. On the other hand, commemoration leads to the objectification of the lost object and to gradual disconnection.

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According to Shenhav (2003), counter-memory is not about constructing yet another stable ‘memory site’ but rather about eroding the dominance of hegemonic memory and creating space for additional memories. Commemoration in ‘memory sites’ is about the erasure of memory - after all not all fighters are heroes and not all their exploits are equally commemorated. Instead of memory sites, Shenhav proposes the term ‘community of memory’ which challenges the institutionalisation of memory stored and captured in memory sites. Communities of memory - polyvocal cacophonies of arguments and counter-arguments, testimonies and ‘facts’ – are convenient arenas for official memory to be challenged. In a community of memory, as opposed to a more stable site of memory, memory can be updated and live within history. ‘The existence of communities of memory obliges us to rethink the connection between a historiographic project, which aspires to a totalisation of the past, and collective memory which is splintered and fragmented’ (Shenhav 2006a: 142). While Shenhav’s ‘community of memory’ is a depository of countermemories, it is worth noting that communities of memory are always by definition also exclusionary. As tempting as it is to conceptualise Israeli Jews who commemorate the Nakba as a community of memory, I suggest that it is more apt to think of Nakba commemoration by Israeli Jews as co-memory. Here is a memory story of Palestine indelibly and dialectically woven into the story of Israeli Jewish dissent co-memoration of victor and vanquished, united, as I argue in Chapter 3, in grieving the loss of Palestine. What is missing in the debates on the place of the memory of the Nakba in relation to questions of homeland, rights, entitlements, refugeehood, against which Israelis position Jewish victimhood or Zionist heroism (and at times also the divine Jewish right to the land) as an opposing narrative, is the story of the perpetrators, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. More specifically, my argument is that in the case of Israelis committed, like I am, to the political implication of evoking (rather than ‘remembering’) the Palestinian Nakba, including the contested issue of the Palestinian right of return, memory is not only a collective social practice, as Halbwachs proposes, but also a political instrument, constructed through conquest, in collaboration with the conquered other’s ‘another story’ (Lentin 2008b). Several scholars (e.g. Zuckerman 1993; Zerubavel 1994b; Segev 2000; Zertal 2002; Lentin 2004a; Loshitzky 2006) detail the constant references made by official Israel and its leading intellectuals and academics, as well as by ordinary people, to the Holocaust in the context of all stages of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, from the 1948 war to the second Lebanon war. But as memory, as Bauman argues, is a double-edged sword, it is unacceptable to employ the Holocaust both to justify and negate the Israeli colonisation of Palestine. As the Israeli political activist Yehudith Harel, a bereaved mother and daughter of survivors, cautions, we must not use the Holocaust in opposing Israel’s policies, as ‘neither Arafat nor Sharon are Hider and neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are Nazis’ (personal communication, January 2002, cited in Lentin 2004a).

Memory sites, postmemory, co-memory 43

Writing about the world after the siege of Jenin, Yitzhak Laor argued that Israelis ‘look to punish anyone who undermines our image of ourselves as victims. Nobody is allowed to take this image from us ... When a cabinet minister from a former socialist republic compared Arafat to Hider he was applauded. Why? Because this is the way the world should see us, rising from the ashes ... it. seems that what we have internalised of the memory of the Holocaust is that any evil whose extent is smaller is acceptable’ (Laor 2002). 9 According to Loshitzky (2006), this constant reference to the Holocaust ‘demonstrates a repetitive and constituent ideological pattern that has reached the status of a pathologically dangerous myth’. Yet this constant reference to the Jewish tragedy, I want to argue, denotes a degree of unresolved grief transferred, as I argue in Chapter 3, to the melancholic loss of Palestine.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

Plan Dalet, or Plan D, was the ‘fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionist leadership contemplated dealing with the presence of so many Palestinians living in the land the Jewish national movement coveted as its own. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go’ (Pappe 2006: xii). Pappe cites Ben Eliezer (1998: 253): ‘Plan Dalet aimed at cleansing of villages, expulsion of Arabs from mixed towns.’ Said refers in particular to Benny Morris and Zeev Sternhell. Benny Morris’s total reliance on Israeli sources and his refusal to deal with Palestinian sources, stems not merely from his inability to speak Arabic, but also from contempt for their point of view (Beinin 2004). It is worth noting yet again that the easily penned term ‘us Israelis’ hides many heterogeneities, including class, ethnicity, and often gender. Thus, it is safe to assume that Peled’s ‘us Israelis’ denotes middle-class Ashkenazi Israelis and therefore does not speak for all Israeli Jews. Similarly the term ‘Arabs’ is most probably a euphemism for ‘Palestinians’, and more specifically ‘Palestinian citizens of Israel’, as Peled goes on to explain. This is derived from universal conscription and the notion that ‘the whole nation is an army and the whole army is a nation’ leading, as organisations such as New Profile – a Movement for the Civil-isation of Israeli Society argue, to the militarisation of Israeli society (www.newprofile.org, last accessed 12/2/10). Masada, a fortress overlooking the Dead Sea, was the last remaining fortification against the Romans at the end of the Jewish revolt of 66-73 AD. In The Jewish War (2004), the apostate historian Flavius Josephus describes how, three years after the Romans conquered Judea and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, a group of a thousand people, including women and children, found refuge on Masada. After a long siege, the Romans destroyed the walls surrounding the fortress and when the besieged understood the end was inevitable, their leader Elazar Ben Yair persuaded his people to kill their women and children and then kill themselves (Zerubavel 1994b: 45). Jewish people regarded Josephus as a traitor and for many centuries the story of Masada, while it did exist in historical Jewish annals (The Book of Josiphon was a medieval text which gave a different version to Josephus’s), disappeared from collective Jewish memory until the birth of political Zionism in the nineteenth century.

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7

8 9

Rachel Adler engenders Jewish memory when she writes: ‘In a patriarchy, the only memory is male memory, because the only members are male members. They are the rememberers and the remembered, the recipients and transmitters of tradition, law, ritual, story and experience’ (Adler 1991: 45; see also Lentin 2004b: 62). I am indebted to Tamar Avraham for referring me to this quote. www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a757745427&db=all (last accessed 13/2/10).

3 Memory and melancholia

This world has been destroyed forever. And my heart often cries when I recall it. Because it was part of my life, my childhood, and it had beauty and connections. Not only fear, not only death. Many of us loved the villages we detonated, that world gone forever. (Haim Guri 2004: 189, emphasis added) After the 1967 war I went to the Shuafat refugee camp as part of my work in order to study its problems ... I asked those who attended the meeting about their villages ... and suddenly another geography, the geography of my childhood, was evoked. I felt these people were my brothers – a feeling of partnership, proximity. I could not share their sense of loss but I could feel – did feel – a deep, painful nostalgia for the disappearance of my childhood landscapes. I sensed it and I understood that one can separate between understanding and agreement. I understood them, but I didn’t have to agree with them. (Meron Benvenisti 1988: 137, emphasis added)

Introduction In the final chapter of my novel on the women of my mother’s family, Night Train to Mother (Lentin 1989), I locate Hetti in Haifa's downtown Palestinian quarter. Hetti is based on my great aunt Rebecca, whose baby daughter and husband died in Transnistria – a reservation between the rivers Dniester and Bug, today in Moldova, where the Jews of Bucovina were deported by the Romanian fascist authorities during World War II – and who came to Israel with her son in the 1950s. As I write in Chapter 2, I spent my childhood ‘playing with the Holocaust’; Transnistria was a silent member of our extended Romanian Jewish family, never explicitly spoken about, but always there in the hushed conversations of my grandparents’ relatives who came to Israel in the 1950s broken, alien to us Israeli-born children, told again and again that we were the Israeli antithesis of the Jewish diaspora, the ‘first generation to redemption’. The way I described

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Hetti’s 1970s Haifa was part of my own nostalgic attachment to ‘the land’ of Palestine from which I voluntarily exiled myself in 1969: She lived in downtown Haifa amongst the Arabs. How Menashe spoke about the Arabs and their right to this land, which had become hers. Downtown Haifa didn’t sound that bad. Independence Road. Independence for whom, she could hear Menashe laugh. Houses corroded by the eternal presence of the sea. Tin roofs. Condominiums with patchy apartments and dusty shutters and bits of pale blue paint around doors and windows. Against the evil eye. Opposite her window a dome which could be either a mosque or a church. There is a rusty cross on top but with all the Arabs it could be a mosque. Clay flower pots above her head and big glass pickle jars, turnips, gherkins, peppers. Dust everywhere. Grey, pale, so Asian. Hard to bear. (Lentin 1989: 201)

While always listening and not listening to mother’s family stories about ‘there’, I also grew up, as I write in Chapter 4, with the ‘background music’ of the Haifa Nakba. Haifa’s Palestinians were not ‘present absentees’ – a term coined by the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law for Palestinians who left their homes and lands in 1948 regardless of the reason (Masalha 2005: 13) - but rather ‘absent presentees’, there but not there. Like for other Israeli Ashkenazi middleclass Jews of my generation, Arabs were shadows, whose existence was indelibly rooted, as Benvenisti (1988) writes, in our childhood landscape, yet ‘on the mental map carried by the Jewish young person and his or her parents, the Arab communities were white patches – terra incognita’ (Benvenisti 2000: 56). We – and I must keep emphasising that by ‘we’ I mean Ashkenazi middleclass Israeli Jews who grew up on Holocaust and diaspora negation and Nakba disavowal – were taught to love ‘the land’ with desperate passion, ‘the land’ which we were told to ‘conquer with our feet’ through endless youth movement and family hikes. Noga Kadman (2008: 47) writes about Yedi’at ha’aretz (getting to know the land) as a central value in the Zionist ideology: ‘because most Israelis migrated from other countries and did not know the land, this project was designed to fill the void, to acquaint them with the landscapes, the history, the flora, the geography and the geology of Erez Israel, and enable them to know the land as their fathers before them.’ Knowing the land, taught at school in ‘homeland’ (Hebrew for geography) classes classes, became a complete culture, with walking hikes ‘from sea to sea’ (from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea – a four-day Zionist youth movement rite of passage), usually in harsh conditions aimed, according to Zerubavel (1995: 120—1), to develop a tough ‘new Hebrew’ as the antithesis of the weakling diaspora Jew. ‘They taught us that in hiking in the desert we were conquering its hills and valleys with our feet. The roads and desert paths would become Jewish as Israeli vehicles were driving through them’ (Benvenisti 1988: 145). Following Benvenisti, Kadman stresses that the remains of Arab existence were not considered part of the land Israeli Jews had to ‘know’, even though, as

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Pappe writes, ‘anywhere where there are almond, fig or olive trees, there was a village. People lived there. Today they live in refugee camps, or in the occupied territories, or in other villages in Israel, or across the border’ (Pappe 2005: 90). The education system inculcated contempt for the Arab landscape and taught Israeli youths to erase them from their mental map (Benvenisti 2000: 57). The canonical. 1948-generation writer S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky), whose stories, published immediately after the 1948 war, graphically depict its horrors, describes the villages his troop was sent to empty of its civilian population, in deeply contemptuous terms for the local Palestinians, soon to be expelled from their land: we had just begun to go into the villages that had been conquered ... we would rather stand or walk the entire day, anything rather than sit on that earth, which wasn’t the soil of fields but a putrid patch of disgusting dirt, spat upon by generations that had cast their water and excrement and the dung of their cattle and camels upon it, those dirt plots around their hovels, touched by the stench of the refuse of wretched human habitation. Everything was filthy, it was disgusting to pick anything up. (Yizhar 2008: 12-13)

I remember using words such as Khirbeh (ruin) to express contempt for the remains of Palestinian villages which we did, nevertheless, lovingly consider an integral part of ‘our’ Israel, sparing not a thought for the dispossessed Palestinians. Benvenisti’s father David Benvenisti was a well-known cartographer who mapped ‘the land of Israel’, hebraicised the names of its settlements and published a series of guidebooks of the old-new land. His textbook, Our Land (1946), was an important component in the education of young Jews in Eretz Israel, yet his son notes that only two or three pages are devoted to the Arab communities, described as either ‘noble savages’ or ‘lazy peasants’. Palestinian agricultural practices, according to Benvenisti senior, ‘can be considered as authoritative sources in the reconstruction of the life of our ancient forebears and have the power to shed light on obscure biblical and linguistic topics’ (Benvenisti and Cohen 1938, cited in Benvenisti 2000: 63). In other words, studying the ‘natives’ was important only insofar as it illuminated the study of ancient Jewish culture on ‘the land’. Benvenisti knows that his father’s maps, despite his friendly contact with Arabs, ‘were not innocent scientific excursions. He had a clear agenda: to draw a Hebrew map of the land, a renewed tide deed. In his naive or self-serving way, he genuinely believed that he was doing so peaceably, that there was enough room in the country for everybody. And he was convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was his absolute right to reclaim his ancestral patrimony. The map he drew and the textbook he wrote were meant to transform the symbolic possession of the land into actual position by inculcating his children and countless other young Israelis with the Zionist ethos of moledet (homeland):

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knowledge of the glorious Jewish past, intimate communion with its nature, and personal commitment to pioneering collective agricultural settlement’ (Benvenisti 2000: 2). Benvenisti’s own writing about his deep attachment to ‘the land’, which Jews call ha’aretz and Palestians al-bilad (both using the definite article), is shadowed by colonialism: Like all migrants, we too tried to erase all the ‘foreign names’ from the map of the land. But the analogy is complicated, because we are not simply a society of migrants or a colonising army. When we came here, we re-established our link with the landscapes from which we were expelled two thousands years ago. We have not forgotten the names and retained the memory of the landscape. For eighteen hundred years we carried with us our ‘sacred geography’ ... It was only natural that when we returned to Eretz Israel (after the 1967 war) ... we aimed to turn the spiritual holy map into a material, realistic one. (Benvenisti 1988: 134—5)

The Zionist imaginary was based on mythical images of the ‘new Hebrew’, the negation of the Jewish diaspora Jew, the ‘paradise’ landscape of Palestine, and for some, on an uncomplicated dream of cooperation between colonising Zionists and indigenous Palestinians. Thus Netiva Ben Yehuda, the legendary 1 1948 woman fighter, writes dreamily about kibbutz Degania on the shores of Lake Kinneret on the eve of battle: that view of the tall trees - how many other places in the land have such tall trees? And the Jordan River, the Jordan! And the Kinneret – ‘a place where cedars and clouds meet’ – all of this ran through my mind together with Zionism’s real dreams, of the paradise we will establish here in the promised land, contrary to the darkness and rot of the diaspora, how we will all live here 2 together ... Arabs and Jews, in peace, love, serenity, and sing Rachel’s songs, ride horses, hug cows and donkeys and sheep. (Ben Yehuda 1985: 92)

In the Zionist imaginary the Palestinians were at best ciphers, their villages ‘white patches’, woven, together with their minarets and their donkeys, into the ancient biblical landscape, and at worst a ‘fifth column’, or ‘the enemy’. Ben Yehuda’s description of the 1948 battle for Degania moves swiftly from the idyllic to the horrible, as she describes the ruthlessness of the Palestinian fighters: In my head Degania remained a pastoral idyll. Good, warm, dreamy. The war had not reached it yet. And then suddenly, we are standing by those first, ancient, huge trees – we lean on them, hug them, but here, underneath these trees is the worst death Zionism has inflicted upon itself. That awful disgusting death, the mutilation of dead bodies, the breaking of limbs. Depriving the dead of their human form. How they hate us. How they detest us, how they kill us with such hatred ... and to see this here, in Degania, on the good earth of Degania ... what will be the end? (Ben Yehuda 1985: 93)

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Arabs and landscape blur, loved and hated, admired and feared. Later, Ben Yehuda describes the endless arguments between the Jewish fighters: ‘You have sentiments for your enemy ... They slaughter you and you not only pity them, you love them! ... But unlike the Nazis, here it’s different. Here it’s more like a civil war, so we kill each other. But how can we hate them? They are, after all, like children’. (Ben Yehuda 1985: 98). Like other 1948 generation writers, she has no doubts about the Zionist project. Ben Yehuda’s is the archetypal 1948 fighter Zionist story, mixing a passionate love for the landscape with deep attachment for her dead comrades, rather than regret for the loss of Palestine, as we find in the writings of other Israeli Jewish writers of her generation quoted below. In a 2006 interview with Arthur Neslen, conducted, Neslen writes, ‘because I heard ... that she had committed a terrible crime during the War of Independence’, Ben Yehuda admits she shot people face to face, including women and children, yet she expresses regrets only for her fallen comrades, not her victims: ‘I still suffer. You never get rid of it. War taught me the importance of friendship, love, and the readiness to suffer hardship. This you have to know when you are young, especially if you want to build a country and you don’t have a choice after six million of you were killed’ (Neslen 2006: 143). Unlike Ben Yehuda, some Israeli Jewish resisters travelled a long way to our current oppositional stance, as I write in Chapter 5. In this chapter I want to suggest that ‘our’ passionate love for the land is tinged with deep melancholia. Melancholia as the impetus to evoking the Nakba is the central argument of this book. I begin this chapter with a discussion of Freud’s ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1957) in which he distinguishes between mourning, a normal process of coming to terms with the loss of a loved object, a process that usually comes to an end, and melancholia, an unresolved pathology that can often destroy. I go on to discuss Israeli film theorist Haim Bresheeth’s (2007) rereading of Freud to think about the persisting melancholia where mourning work cannot be carried through, as in the case of the Palestinians who live with the lost unattainable country within reach, and about the potentialities of transcending melancholia through telling and retelling the story of loss. I develop Bresheeth’s line of inquiry about Palestinian film-making about the Nakba to pose a set of different questions and ask whether Freud’s differentiation between mourning and melancholia may provide a plausible explanation for the preoccupation of some Israelis with the loss of Palestine, through, inter alia, commemorating the Nakba. Renato Rosaldo (1989) on postimperial nostalgia and Paul Gilroy (2004) on postcolonial melancholia provide another layer of critical explanation for this persistent melancholia. Throughout the chapter I quote from writings by Israeli Jewish authors who speak about that unresolved melancholic nostalgia for ‘the land’ and its disappearing Palestinians. I conclude by asking, after Judith Butler (2004), if the incorporation and, by necessity, appropriation of the memory of the Nakba by

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Israeli Jews is ultimately a signifier of narcissism, stemming from an unassuageable melancholia and guilt, which may be creating an object which the ego wants to incorporate into itself by devouring it.

From mourning to melancholia We seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with ... our cultural frames for thinking the human set limits on the kinds of losses we can avow as loss. After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is the loss, and how does mourning take place? (Butler 2004: 32)

I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. (Burton 2004: xiv) Melancholy was first popularised by the seventeenth-century English writer Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1624 and republished many times since). But it was Freud who made melancholia central to our understanding of the malaise of modernity. In ‘Mourning and melancholia’, Freud (1957) posits memory as the root cause of trauma but also the source of its resolution, and compares melancholia with the normal effect of mourning. Mourning, Freud writes, is an acceptable reaction to the loss of a loved person but also to the loss of an abstraction such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. While mourning involves departure from the normal attitude to life, it is not regarded as pathological, as we expect the sense of loss to pass over time (1957: 243). However, individuals who are unable to mourn for whatever reason may lapse into melancholia, which features a profoundly painful dejection, a cessation of interest in the outside world, the loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of activity, and the lowering of self-regard, leading to self-reproach and culminating in an expectation of punishment. When the normal work of mourning is completed, the ego usually accepts the loss. By contrast, in melancholia the object might not have died, but is rather lost as an object of love. According to Freud, melancholia may be related to an object loss that is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradiction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. In mourning – the inhibition and loss of interest are fully accounted for by the work of mourning. In melancholia, on the other hand, the fact that the loss is unknown will be responsible for the melancholic condition (Freud 1957: 245). In the work of mourning a reality check usually shows that the loved object no longer exists. While mourning is a finite reaction to loss, the melancholic puzzles us because we cannot quite see what it is that is absorbing her. Whereas in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty, in melancholia the ego itself becomes the centre of attention: the person has

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suffered a loss with regard to an object, but she reports it as a loss regarding her own ego (Freud 1957: 246). Crucially to my discussion, the energy invested in the object can regress into narcissism, which Freud expresses in pathological terms: ‘This substitution of identification for object-love is an important mechanism in the narcissistic affection ... the object wants to incorporate the object into itself, and ... it wants to do so by devouring it’ (1957: 249). And narcissism is often accompanied by guilt: the love for the lost object – a love which cannot be given up even if the object itself has to be given up - takes refuge in narcissistic identification, and is often replaced by hate for the lost object which the ego turns upon itself (1957: 251). In mourning work, time is needed for reality testing when the mourner gives up the lost object by declaring it dead and gone, and when this work is accomplished, the ego is free of the lost object. Melancholia, on the other hand, is like an open wound, containing rage against the ego itself and ambivalence about the lost object. Of the three preconditions of melancholia - the loss of the object, ambivalence, and regression of libido into the ego – the first two are also found in the obsessional self-reproaches after a loss has occurred. In such cases ambivalence becomes the motive force of the conflict, and Freud observes that ‘after the conflict has come to an end there is nothing left over in the nature of the triumph of a manic state of mind’ (Freud 1957: 258). In ‘The continuity of trauma and struggle: recent cinematic representations of the Nakba’ (2007), Haim Bresheeth develops the Freudian differentiation between mourning and melancholia to analyse Palestinian films which he posits as ethnographic monuments to the continuity of both pain and struggle, denoting the return of the colonial repressed, reclaiming for Palestinians the memory of the Nakba, offering voice to the Palestinian tragedy and space for national and individual existence and identity in the present. Bresheeth notes that one of the crucial differences between the normalcy of mourning and the pathology of melancholia is that the latter can be triggered by a loss of an ‘ideal kind’; hence the loss triggering melancholia is not necessarily a death, or total loss, but something like the loss of one’s country, which is different to death. Bresheeth asks what happens to societies when mourning is prevented, and when coming to terms with loss is not possible. Palestinian society has been reeling from its 1948 catastrophe, and while Israel has planted millions of fir trees and set up thousands of stone and metal memorials to its war and Holocaust dead on the ruins of Palestinian villages, it refused to allow Palestinians to commemorate their own history. In this way ‘power is not only exercised over the land and its people, it also controls the story, its point of view, and the meta-narrative of truth and memory’ (2007: 164—5, emphasis in original). However, as Bresheeth points out, the country, Palestine, ‘is still there. Thus the loss continues, gets fixated, cannot be mourned and done with, as in the case of death’. However, ‘the loss of one’s country never ends, it must be even more pronounced when the loss is

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experienced in situ - while living in the lost country’, as the conditions for remembering and commemoration did not exist under Israeli military rule, lifted only in 1966, and it took the shock of the 1967 war for a Nakba narrative to begin developing (Bresheeth 2007: 162). Bresheeth analyses films made by Palestinian citizens of Israel around the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel that tell and retell the story of the Nakba, reviving and reclaiming the experience through cinematic storytelling. He posits these films as ‘trauma agencies’ marked by trauma and melancholia (Bresheeth 2007: 182). He then cites Cathy Caruth’s ‘Parting words: Trauma, silence and survival’ (2001), in which she reads Freud to show the interplay between the death drive and the life energy, asking ‘what does it mean for life to bear witness to death?’ (2001: 14). Bresheeth exemplifies this with a quote from Muhammad Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin, in which a little girl says: ‘the Israelis can kill and maim, but they cannot win ... all the mothers will have more children ... and we will continue the struggle ... .’ This movement from death and the trauma of destruction to the new life that will bloom and bring salvation, is an example of what Caruth unearths in Freud’s article, ‘the constant seesawing between the polarities of the death drive and the life drive, between utmost despair and new hope’. This, Bresheeth argues, throws new light on the stories told in the films he examines, and on the whole practice of Nakba storytelling (2007: 169). I am inspired by Bresheeth’s reading of Freud and Caruth as positing a creative way of understanding the way in which these Palestinian Nakba films are redemptive, since ‘being able to control your story is the fountain of strength of the dispossessed’ (Bresheeth 2007: 178). But the stories he relates also indicate that memory is the material of myth, and myth is the foundation of the identity of nations, as Anderson (1991: 204) says when he points out that national narratives involve forced public amnesia, as experienced among Palestinians living in Israel after 1948, where the conditions for remembering did not exist because Israeli rule prohibited any such activity, and only gradually, with the ending of the military government and the establishment of the PLO in 1964, and particularly after the shock of 1967, did a narrative develop and grow. As Abu-Lughod and Sa’di remind us, the memory of the Nakba remains vivid as the Nakba continues, even though the narrative of Zionism as a liberation movement has ‘decimated the space for Palestinian culture work’ (2007: 178). In the culture arena, the Zionist narrative of Palestine is one of erasure, denial, and active silencing by historians and intellectuals. The first casualty is the word Palestine itself – replaced by Erez Israel, denoting the very absence of Palestine, the country, the people, the language, the history, epitomising the historical amnesia described by Anderson (2007: 179). This erasure by Zionism has four layers: first at the level of country/nation – the level most responsible for producing melancholia; the second level, less abstract and more painful, is the level of locale, town or village occupied, destroyed, and erased from memory, as if the self itself was destroyed; the third layer is that of family, so often dismantled as a unit of social organisation by

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dispersal and dislocation; the final level is that of the individual, real people who had to continue to fight mental as well as military occupation by Zionist myths and army (Bresheeth 2007: 180; Ben Zvi 1999). Beyond the loss of country and home Bresheeth points to the loss of one’s story, and the right to tell one’s story. Palestinian filmmakers Nizar Hassan, Muhammad Bakri, Elia Suleiman, and others fight for their right to tell their own story, operating in the interstitial space between Israeli and the Palestinian cultures. As Israeli Palestinians, living on the seams of Israeli society, they live in ‘two parallel universes disregarding each other yet totally bound to each other’. Furthermore, the occupier inhabits a third memorial space, that of the Holocaust and Auschwitz ‘so that Palestinian interstitial existence is now situated on the space between two universes of Judaism, rather than in their own country. They are also situated on another interstice – that of the space between the Jewish distant past in Palestine and their current control of it ... ’ (Bresheeth 2007: 181). Gertz and Khleifi (2006) offer an alternative reading of Palestinian films that often present one single metanarrative of the 1948 trauma and the pre1948 idyll, thus constructing the Andersonian amnesia necessary for the creation of a national narrative. Palestinian cinema in all its varieties, they argue, often blurs specific places and events so as to sharpen the sense of Palestinian victimhood. In doing this, these cinematic narratives isolate the Palestinian narrative from the Israeli narrative which silenced it. Thus Nabikha Lutfi’s Because the Roots do not Die (1977), based on the stories of Palestinian women about the destruction of Tel el Za’atar in 1976, evokes ‘the initial event, the Nakba, perceived as a sudden disruption of a state of idyllic calm’ (Gertz and Khleifi 2006: 59). The act of making the films analysed by Bresheeth denotes the active reclaiming of Palestinian identity and bridging and combining memory. Facts, however, are not enough, these films seem to tell us. In order to bring trauma and melancholia to an end, one must tell stories. In other words, Bresheeth is saying that in order to turn melancholia into more productive mourning work, we need to tell and retell the story of the trauma – if we cannot return to the place and recapture it for ourselves, at least we can tell our story. There is something redemptive here – does the exiled Israeli Jewish film scholar assuage his own melancholic loss and outrage by theorising Palestinian cinematic storytelling? In a sense many of ‘us’ oppositionist Israelis take comfort in our political and theoretical work – at least ‘we’ are making space for ‘their’ story, and I cannot stop wondering why we do this work. It is far more circuitous to employ Bresheeth’s insight into the difference between mourning and melancholia to understanding the preoccupation of (some) Israeli Jews with the loss of Palestine, ‘the land’ and the Palestinians expelled and driven out by the Zionist project. The Freudian argument about shifting the object of grief from the lost object to the mourning ego resonates with the concept of the shadow discussed in Chapter 1 that Jung (1989) linked

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to German postwar collective guilt and Davis (1994) describes as the shadow of the Palestinian refugees falling on all Israelis. Freud describe this process not merely as mourning the loss of the object, but as ‘the shadow of the object [falling] upon the ego ... in this way an object-loss was transformed into an egoloss’ (Freud 1957: 249). Freud’s prescription – that talking can provide a cure for pathological conditions, including melancholia – was already noted by Burton when he wrote ‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy’. My argument in this chapter is that the preoccupation of some Israelis with Palestine and the Nakba may indeed provide a creative way of assuaging the melancholia engendered by the destruction of Palestine, but that in talking about Palestine and the Nakba, the melancholic ego turns the attention to itself. Telling and retelling the Nakba by Palestinians may be a creative way of assuaging melancholia and turning it into a redemptive process of mourning the past and planning for a more just future. For Israeli Jews preoccupied by the co-memory of the Nakba, I argue in this book, the incorporation and arguably appropriation of the Nakba story, while definitely part of a search for a more just future, may also mean turning mourning the lost object into melancholia for the mourning subject herself whose loss of ‘the land’ then becomes the central point as it recreates its lost object by incorporating it into itself, and devouring it, as I now discuss.

'We loved the villages we were detonating' I, who loved Erez Israel with all my heart, moved in it like a silent plot: ‘where is the Mukhtar’s house?’ as a preamble to T.N.T. It was apparent that the war would come sooner or later and we prepared ‘village files’, ‘perspective outlines’, and ‘situational outlines’, and ‘approach roads’, and ‘viewpoints’, and ‘targets’ ... We were walking, but very often we forgot the reason for walking ... A walk in Erez Israel of peace and neighbourly relations. Because we were all involved with them, field by field, house by house, and at times - heart by heart. And I didn’t mention the ‘mixed neighbourhoods’ of Romema, and Sheikh Bader, or Wadi Nisnas, and the streets of Tiberias and Safed ... This world has gone forever. And my heart cries when I remember it ... You couldn’t hate these villages, where we ate bread (butter and honey, fried eggs in olive oil, sharp, heavy labne balls, stuffed vine leaves, hot sweet mint tea, and ‘Sada’ coffee, bitter as death) ... That Erez Israel that was destroyed was part of our love (Guri 2004: 189—90, emphasis added)

The poet Haim Guri, one of the 1948 fighters, is one of the most prominent protagonists of the tribal Israeli Jewish mythology. Guri’s three canonical poems of that war, ‘Here lie our bodies’, ‘The friendship poem’, and ‘Bab el Wad’, epitomise the essence of the 1948 generation. These poems, an indelible part of the Israeli Jewish ceremonial commemoration of the fallen of that war, shaped generation after generation of Israeli Jewish youth. These poems,

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Horowitz writes in his introduction to a collection of Guri’s writings, I Am a Civil War, have ‘expressed the Israeli Jewish ethos, the essence of collective memory and camaraderie that shaped “our” identity’ (Guri 2004: 7). Like denial, paradoxical because the person claiming not to know knew or knows what it is that she claims not to know (Cohen 2001: 5-6), the victors’ melancholia is also a paradox, especially when it expresses the love for the object that the ego. destroys, love and hate mixed and blurred. It is worth remembering, as Freud has it, that narcissism is often accompanied by guilt. If the love for the lost object - a love which cannot be given up even when the object itself has to be given up – takes refuge in narcissistic identification, it is often replaced by hate for the lost object that the ego turns upon itself. I attempt a translation of Guri’s eponymous poem ‘Civil War’, which poignantly expresses the melancholic paradox of the ego’s ambivalence towards the lost object: Civil War I am a civil war And half of me shoots its last At the walls of the vanquished. Field court, Working in shifts, Its lights not fading. And there the just shoot the other just. And then there is silence And fatigue and darknesses and empty cartridges. I am night in an unwalled city Open to all. (Guri 2004: 32)

Guri’s work depicts the illusory paradox of the simultaneous Israeli Jewish melancholic yearning for the loss of Palestine and the delusion that conquest means co-existence – ‘here we have a poet whose yearning for the land of Israel does not impair his regard for the Arab as a partner, for mutual respect and hope’ (Horowitz 2004: 8). And the disturbing paradox of the melancholia Guri writes about when he says ‘many of us loved the villages we detonated, that world gone forever ... ’ sends me thinking about postcolonial melancholia and 3 postimperial nostalgia in the age of the post-colony.

Postcolonial melancholia and postimperial nostalgia In After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004), Paul Gilroy argues that since its victory over Hitlerism, Britain has been unable to face, never

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mind mourn, the profound change in circumstances and moods that followed the end of Empire and loss of imperial prestige. This coincided with the arrival of a large number of postcolonial citizen-migrants and with the shock and anxiety that followed from the loss of the sense that the national collective was bound by a coherent and distinctive culture. Once the history of the Empire became a source of shame and discomfort, its complexities were put aside, ‘rather than work through those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and ... actively forgotten. The resulting silence feeds an additional catastrophe: the error of imagining that postcolonial people are only unwanted alien intruders, without any substantive history, political, or cultural connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects’ (Gilroy 2004: 98). Gilroy calls the failure to come to terms with Britain’s current immigration ‘postimperial melancholia’. This syndrome builds on earlier patterns of imperial melancholy, which Gilroy distinguishes from the guilt-ridden loathing and depression that have come to characterise Britain’s xenophobic responses to the strangers who have ‘intruded’ upon it in recent times. Gilroy adapts the term melancholia not directly from Freud’s discussion of narcissism and bereavement, but rather from the German psychoanalysts Alexander and Margaret Mitscherlich (1975). Faced with radical loss, the German people, they argue, warded off a collective process of mourning as the nation’s collective guilt was projected into its fallen leader and this guilt intervened to block and defer the country’s comprehension of its history (Gilroy 2004: 107). This left blank holes in individual autobiographies and created intergenerational complicity that prevented anything that entails responsibility. In ‘Imperialist nostalgia’, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1998) uses another angle to look into these blank holes that may prevent taking responsibility when he describes the specific form of nostalgia often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed or destroyed. Yet imperialist nostalgia is another paradox: the person deliberately alters something and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to her intervention. Imperialist nostalgia occurs alongside ‘the white man’s burden’, and such forms of longing are closely related to secular notions of progress that Goldberg (2002) calls ‘racist historicism’. The term nostalgia (from the Greek nostos ‘to return home’, and algia, ‘a painful condition’ – denoting a painful longing for a lost past) dates from the late seventeenth century when it described a medical condition: a pathological homesickness among Swiss mercenaries who were fighting away from home. Rosaldo stresses that from its inception nostalgia was associated with processes of domination: nostalgia is an appropriate emotion to invoke so as to establish one’s innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed. Like childhood memories that are always seen as innocent, imperialist nostalgia is associated with innocent, tender recollections. However, its relatively benign

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character facilitates imperialist nostalgia’s capacity to transform the responsible colonial agents into innocent bystanders. Crucially, Rosaldo includes researchers when he speaks of postimperial nostalgia. He acknowledges that the conditions that enabled him and Michelle Rosaldo to reside among the Ilongots already made them complicit in imperialism, although -their efforts to disguise their complicity were heartfelt and sincere. He concludes by critiquing the memories that evoke the moods of imperial nostalgia as both reproducing and disrupting ideologies: It is in their inconsistent plenitude that memories eventually unravel the ideologies they so vividly animate. Such analytical recollections are more a process of immersion and gradual dissolving than a latter-day veni-vidi-vici of agonising introspection, breast-beating confession, and absolute redemption. This mode of analysis attempts not so much to overpower an ideology, by grabbing hold and demystifying it, as to evoke it and thereby make it more and more fully present until it gradually crumbles under the weight of its own inconsistencies. (Rosaldo 1989: 121)

Reading Gilroy and Rosaldo pushes me to reflect upon the implications for those of ‘us’ who imagine both the pre-1948 ‘land of Israel’ and the pre-Nakba Palestinian existence in nostalgic mood and to wonder whether nostalgia always conceals guilt, masquerading as elegiac postures towards the destroyed land and dispossessed Palestinians, as I now demonstrate.

The Yizharian sorrow Goldberg writes that ‘the moral qualms over eviction-driven expansion are well characterized in novelist Yizhar Smilansky’s short story depicting the Sartrean dilemma faced by a young soldier caught between executing evicted Arab villagers and contributing to securing Israel’s infant existence [...] That dilemma seems now to have been resolved overwhelmingly in favour of the latter’s national prerogative’ (Goldberg 2008: 28). Yizhar’s famous story ‘Khirbet Khizeh’ was first published in 1949 and published in English in 2008, and is an optional part of the standard curriculum in Israeli secondary schools (Shulman 2008: 115). His aim, Yizhar writes, was to tell the story that had haunted him and expose the 1948 lie, because he was ‘astonished at how easy it had been to be seduced, to be knowingly led astray and join the great general mass of liars that mass compounded of crass ignorance, utilitarian indifference, and shameless self-interest – and exchange a single great truth for the cynical shrug of a hardened sinner’ (Yizhar 2008: 7). I am interested in the part Yizhar’s melancholic prose played in Zionist myth-making and I want to suggest that what Yizhak Laor (1995) calls ‘the Yizharian sorrow’, a mixture of melancholic longing for the land and contempt for its inhabitants, not only constructs Zionism’s others, it is also, despite Yizhar’s soul-searching monologues, far less

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iconoclastic than his admirers would like to believe. Despite his misgivings about the executions and the expulsions, Yizhar never rejects the Zionist ideology. Rather, as Laor suggests, his narrative must be located within the ruling ideology, emanating from the author-soldier’s obedience, rather than opposition, to the Zionist hegemony. In ‘Khirbet Khizeh’, which Yaron Peleg (2005: 131) describes as ‘one of the most existentially ethical texts in modern Hebrew literature’, Yizhar describes the expulsion of a group of Palestinian villagers. While having serious misgivings about what the Israeli fighters were perpetrating against a civilian Palestinian population, Yizhar’s narrator participates in the order to ‘assemble the inhabitants of the area ... load them onto transports, and convey them across our lines; blow up the stone houses, and burn the huts; detain the youths and the suspects, and clear the area of “hostile forces’” (Yizhar 2008: 8-9). ‘Khirbet Khizeh’ participates in the Zionist orientalist-colonialist dialogue – establishing, 4 already in 1949, the pattern of ‘shooting and crying’ that Benny Morris speaks of. As his narrator questions the justice of deporting innocent civilians, and protests ‘it’s a filthy war’, his comrades assure him of the (Jewish) future of the village, not accidentally named ‘Khirbet Khizeh’ (the Khizeh ruins), which will become ‘ours’ once ‘they’ are transferred across ‘our lines’: Moishe’s eyes sought mine as he spoke. ‘Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet what’s-its-name, you hear me, and they’ll take this land and work it and it’ll be beautiful here!’ Of course, absolutely! How hadn’t I realised it from the outset? Our very own Khirbet Khizeh ... Long live Hebrew Khirbet Khizeh! Who, then, would ever imagine that once there had been some Khirbet Khizeh that we emptied out and took for ourselves. We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile. (Yizhar 2008: 108)

The story is replete with love for the landscape and contempt to its Palestinian inhabitants. As the order to attack the village and the Palestinian ‘infiltrators’5 is obeyed, he describes the sporting competition between the soldiers as they shoot the escapees, all the while expressing deep contempt for their passivity. After the deed is done, Yizhar’s text becomes deeply elegiac. Note the repetition of the words ‘silent’ and ‘silence’, the silence about the expulsion in real time parallels the political dictum never to explicitly mention the expulsion: Behind the village was already beginning to fall silent, its houses gathered on the slope of the hill, bounded here and there with treetops from which the sun, behind them, forged silent shadows, which were sunk in contemplation, knowing much more than we did and surveying the silence of the village, the same silence which, more and more, was conspiring to create an atmosphere of its own, a realisation of abandonment, an oppressive grief of separation, of an empty house, a deserted shore, wave upon wave, and a bare horizon. And that same strange silence as though of a corpse. (2008: 108)

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But the narrator’s melancholia is compounded by rage, as he understands that, despite his comrades’ reassurance, the village is not ‘ours’ and never will be: ‘I felt that I was on the verge of slipping. I managed to pull myself together. My guts cried out. Colonizers, they shouted. Khirbet Khizeh is not ours’ (2008: 109). Yet, his rage is short lived: ‘And why not? It was nothing. A single day of discomfort and-then our people would strike root here for many years’ (2008: 109, emphasis in the original). As his comrades justify the expulsion by laying the blame on the Palestinians (‘nobody asked them to start these wars ... Too much of our own blood has been spilled because of them’, p. 103), the narrator notices a woman who makes him have a sudden insight, borrowed from the Jewish diaspora experience: We saw a woman ... She was holding the hand of a child about seven years old. There was something special about her. She seemed stern, self-controlled, austere in her sorrow. Tears, which hardly seemed to be her own, rolled down her cheek ... So much so that I felt ashamed in her presence and lowered my eyes ... she was too proud to pay us the least attention ... Something struck me like lightning. All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like ... I had never been to the diaspora ... but people had spoken to me, told me, taught me, and repeatedly recited to me, from every direction, in books and newspapers: exile ... Our nation’s protest to the world: exile! ... What, in fact, had we perpetrated here today? (2008: 103—5).

Yizhar, born in 1916 in Rehovot, was a school teacher and principal before becoming a member of Knesset. When Esther Fuchs interviewed him in 1977, and asked him whether he agreed that his stories are ‘about the conflict between the Jewish ethical heritage and the Israeli struggle for survival’, he castigated her for looking for political meanings in his writing. ‘The Israeli War of Independence will soon become a long-forgotten history. What remains is the music’ (Fuchs 1982: 16). But despite his protestations, Yizhar’s prose remains the canonical expression of the 1948 generation’s soul-searching and melancholia. Yet, according to Laor, Yizhar’s narrative about the inevitability of war makes him an active partner in constructing the myth of Israeli victimhood, according to which, ‘we were and will always be pure and few; we never wanted war, of course, and we are far weaker and besieged ... [yet] we always rise from the ashes and win, because we are forced to win ... (Laor 1995: 58). Yizhar’s 1948 stories, published immediately after the war, reflect the Israeli- Jewish elegiac yet triumphant postwar mood – postcoital sorrow. His iconic position as the moral narrator of Israel’s ‘inevitable’ wars lives on. Historian Fania Oz-Salzberger (2008) uses him to argue that Israeli dissent is nothing new and that, already after the 1948 war, Israeli-Jewish literary voices such as Yizhar’s were questioning the injustice perpetrated upon the Palestinians. Oz-Salzberger describes Yizhar as ‘one of the most important poets of the Palestinian landscape in the Hebrew language’, and finds solace in

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comparing Yizhar’s ‘purity’ with today’s IDF Border Police, whom she describes as ‘rough and illiterate, harassing young Palestinians from a jeep riding in the streets of Hebron’ (Oz-Salzberger 2008). However, Oz-Salzberger ignores the text’s internally racist undertones. As Michal Zak (2008) points out, Yizhar’s protagonists are always Ashkenazis, always kibbutz or moshav dwellers, and by contrasting ‘us’ (Ashkenazi Israeli Jews) as relatively enlightened with the ‘rough and illiterate’ Border Police officers (‘Oz- Salzberger’s code name for Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Russian, Druze and Bedouin soldiers’), Oz-Salzberger marginalises the Mizrahi critique of the Zionist discourse. Oz-Salzberger ends her Ha’aretz opinion piece by bemoaning that today ‘no Yizharian protagonist sits in the jeep, bitterly writing tough paragraphs in superb Hebrew in his head’. But Zak takes her to task: ‘Oz-Salzberger encourages a discourse of shooting and crying instead of calling a stop so that no future generations would say in Yizhar’s trenchant words: ... “we expelled and inherited. We came, we shot, we burnt, we bombed, we pushed, and expelled and exiled’” (Zak 2008). Although Yizhar’s narrator is stunned by the expulsion and by his comrade’s response about the Jewish future of the depopulated village, he never mourns the expelled Palestinians, but rather ‘all the good and the beautiful that came to an end in 1948 ... like Palestine, like the darkened orange grove ... like this prestate land’ (Laor 1995: 60). The ‘Yizharian sorrow’ does not become a tragedy because Yizhar cannot bring himself to reject the dominant Zionist ideology. Laor argues that ‘the pain about the destruction of Palestine and the irony regarding its replacement with something new become entrenched in a more rigid ... pattern ... of melodrama’ (Laor 1995:63) . Yizhar, the ethical fighter who derides himself as a ‘bleeding heart’ (Yizhar 2008: 85) never doubts the Zionist project, and his stories must be read ‘as ... variations on how you can hide forever what you cannot see at present’ (Laor 1995: 71). Ultimately, despite the melancholic tone of these 1948 stories, despite his nostalgia for ‘all the good and beautiful that came to an end in 1948’, Yizhar is captivated by Zionism. Unable to complete the work of mourning, he remains fixated within the melodrama of Israel. Yizhar is one of the key architects of the Zionist myth, and myth, Laor reminds us, does not deny things, but purifies them, making them innocent, justifying them (Laor 1995: 75).

Conclusion On our way to the depopulated village of Saffuriyya for the 2008 march of return, we listen to discs of Erez Israeli songs. It is, after all, the Israeli Day of Independence, and although I and my friends Eli and Nitza share an unrelenting faith in a secular democratic ‘solution’ to the ‘question of Palestine’, we are also creatures of our upbringing. These songs evoke a longing for what I like to imagine as an uncomplicated ‘pre-state land’. We sing along and laugh as we travel through the upper Galilee landscape among Palestinian villages, patchy and over-built because the denial of planning permissions

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prevents regulated rural development. As we climb towards Nazareth, images of childhood and youth movement hikes keep flooding my mind. I am only homesick when I am here, never when I am back ‘home’ in Ireland. The bare rocks, the dry trees and the thorny hills make my body ache with a longing I keep forgetting I feel. But there is nothing to mourn, no working through, only deep debilitating sadness, a point of no return.

Rosaldo offers no prescriptions; his article should rather be read as a methodological comment on the implicit participation of anthropology in the 6 colonising mission. Similarly - reminiscent of the ‘shooting and crying’ stance Shenhav argues that Israel is the outcome of the occupation, and the occupation is all of us. ‘The occupation does not differentiate between here and there. The occupation does not stop at the checkpoint ... Not just the state enacts the occupation, not just the settlers ... we too, the professors who teach settlers and occupation soldiers are partners in the occupation; we too, inhabitants of Green Line Israel, who pay the taxes that finance the occupation’ (Shenhav 2006b: 32). Paul Gilroy, on the other hand, not unlike many Israelis who engage in comemory practices, has a need to envision a better future and his analysis of postcolonial melancholia is more prescriptive than Rosaldo’s reflexive selfscrutiny. If, according to the Mitshcerlichs, melancholic reactions are prompted by the loss of a ‘fantasy of omnipotence’, the racial and national fantasies that imperial and colonial power required were (like those of the Aryan master race) predominantly narcissistic. This realisation prompts Gilroy to suggest that, Before the British people can adjust to the horrors of their own modem history and start to build a new national identity from the debris of their broken narcissism, they will have to learn to appreciate the brutalities of colonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit, to understand the damage it did to their political culture at home and abroad, and to consider the extent of their country’s complex investment in the ethnic absolutism that has sustained it. (Gilroy 2004: 108)

Is Gilroy right that only once English people come to terms with the brutalities of Empire will they be able to appreciate that these brutalities were enacted in their name, damaging them as much as those on the receiving end of these brutalities? Is he right that only by working through and mourning the excesses of Empire will they be able to accept alterity? England is not Israel; Israel has no imperial past but rather an imperial present. So perhaps there are no direct parallels? However, narratives of nostalgia and melancholia keep emerging. Thus, for instance, Benvenisti writes about his post-1967 visit to a refugee camp near Jerusalem in order to study and report the needs of the refugees. He writes that apart from his sense of affinity, ‘I could and did share deep nostalgia mixed with pain for the lost landscape and a nagging feeling of guilt, for my triumph had been their catastrophe’ (Benvenisti 2000: 3). And, from a completely different standpoint to Benvenisti’s, son of the

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land and of the land’s Zionist cartographer, historian and political activist Tamar Avraham, a relatively new immigrant from Germany, wrote about her own melancholia in response to a paper I sent her: I would never have thought about melancholia, but when I read what you wrote I understood how true it is in my case. When I walk through Lifta or the Palestinian neighbourhoods destroyed in the Nakba near my house I not only think about the injustice and about the need to return these houses, I also feel sadness about the lives lost, a sort of romantic picture emerging from the beautiful stone remains. This is also true about my feelings about the separation wall. I see the human rights infringement, the attempt to control the land ... but also feel sadness about the destruction of the landscape and nature. Only now I understand that this is not only some green-ecological sentiment, but something more complex ... I think about the destroyed landscape as ‘biblical’, an ancient idyll that I probably wanted to find when I came to this country. (Personal communication, May 2008)

Is the Freudian understanding of the difference between mourning and melancholia useful in exploring Israelis coming to terms with the Nakba? Freud’s analysis of identification as ‘a preliminary stage of object-choice; the first way in which the ego picks out an object’ (Freud 1957: 249—50) seems a perfect description of the incorporation and appropriation of the Nakba story analysed in Chapter 7 – narcissism, stemming from guilt rather than ‘more productive shame’, and creating an object which the ego wants to incorporate into itself ... by devouring it. The fact that ‘we’ are all implicated in ‘still being here’ and in the shame of being a subject might explain the proliferation of works - artistic, academic, testimonial – dealing with the Holocaust. Elsewhere (Lentin 2004a) I suggest that ‘we’ are bound to return to the genocidal repressed, while all the time evading the gaze of those who touched bottom, which makes the testimony of genocide hard to tell and harder to hear, even in our liquid modernity’s ‘confessional culture’, and despite the plethora of testimonial representations of catastrophe. This resonates with Bresheeth's argument about telling the Nakba story through an obsessive return to the locus of the trauma. Though most Israelis prefer to ignore the Nakba, many Israeli Jewish commemorators seem compelled to return again and again to the sites of the catastrophe, telling and retelling the Nakba story as a way of devouring the story of the other, expiating their guilt through the act of retelling. In the process they expropriate the narrative of the Nakba, which, they argue, is also the story of their, our, own identity, as discussed in Chapter 8. Thus the loveobject – the land - which has been stolen by us but also for us, becomes the object of mourning. Our mourning work entails telling and retelling the story of loss and returning again and again to the locus of pain, because, as Caruth (2001) writes, the font of hope lies in the obsessive return to the ‘scene of the crime’, to the locus of pain. ‘Representing the trauma in a story, a spiel (game,

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but also play in German) is the mechanism chosen by all to deal with the various traumas they are facing - death, parting, loss, devastation’ (Bresheeth 2007: 169). Doing so also alleviates the guilt which, I want to suggest, has become part of the Israeli-Jewish psyche, which, one generation after the Holocaust, has been transformed from victim to victor, who all the while continues to perceive him/herself in terms of victimhood. Like Bresheeth and Caruth, and like many Israelis preoccupied with comemorating the Nakba, Paul Gilroy believes in a version of Freud’s ‘talking cure’. Telling and retelling the grim details of the dispossession might lead, according to this reading, to assuaging melancholia and to working through the (normal and finite) process of mourning. However, Rosaldo’s suggestion that imperialist nostalgia has a capacity of transforming the responsible colonial agents into innocent bystanders seems to more accurately describe the paradoxical Israeli Jewish nostalgia for the lost Palestinian landscape which Israelis actively and wilfully destroyed as Kadman (2008) documents. Side by side with Israel’s selfconceptualisation as the eternal victim – a sequel to ‘the world was standing by as we were being annihilated’ during the Holocaust Israelis continue to passionately love the land while hating its former inhabitants, love and hate eternally blurred. And I wonder whether it was this blurring that made Yizhar write these elegiac lines in November 1948 at the end of ‘the Prisoner’, a story about a group of pre-state soldiers deliberating whether or not to set free a Palestinian prisoner: The field was one large golden fragment. The ten of thousands of dunams were one magic space ... all was one golden fragment, a shallow plot of land, and above it glittering gold, excited, a golden round, huge, endless; and even if perhaps behind ... there was another sadness, a deep sadness, that sadness of who knows, of shameful failure, of the who knows in the heart of a waiting woman, the who knows of a doomed life, the very private who knows, and of another, more general who knows, that the sun might set, and he might remain among us, unfinished. (Yizhar 1977: 108)

Gilroy (2004) writes that the pressure of the past on the present is regrettably resolved not through healing and reconciliation but in a series of defensive arguments that seek to minimise the extent of empire and then to deny or justify its brutality, and finally to present the British themselves as the tragic victims of their extraordinary imperial successes. Likewise, the preoccupation with the excesses of the Israeli dispossession of Palestine, instead of being instruments of healing and reconciliation, may instead serve to minimise the extent of the dispossession – blaming the Palestinians for running away’, or presenting a discourse of the settlement of newly arrived Jewish immigrants in Palestinian villages whose inhabitants allegedly left, despite the evidence, presented by Kadman (2008: 25), of the deliberate policy of destroying the depopulated villages and settling them with

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newly arrived Jewish immigrants as early as November 1948. Second it may serve to deny or justify the brutality. And third this preoccupation may serve to present the Israelis themselves as victims of their excesses – as in arguing that it is not what we do to the Palestinians, it is what the occupation does to us, brutalising ‘our best boys and girls’ - a popular sentiment shared by many Israeli anti-war activists. A final point of departure is Judith Butler’s (2004) proposition that ‘we’ are always also reflected in our Others, upon and from whom we are constituted, whether we choose to or not, that the loss of the Other impinges on our own humanity in ways which cannot always be accounted for, and that our grief for that loss can not always be rationally understood: It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there ... If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who am ‘I’, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you ... is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related. (Butler 2004: 22)

I want to suggest, therefore, that the shadow of the Palestinians’ pre-1948 existence and of their dispossession impinges in ways which cannot always be accounted for rationally, resulting in grief which is not necessarily given to a successful resolution of mourning work, resulting rather in ongoing melancholia which pushes some of ‘us’ into the arms of a like-minded political (or co- memorative) community. As Butler insists, staying with grief without seeking a resolution to grief through violence and without ‘banishing melancholia’ and ‘getting over’ the suffering of others, ‘can be a point of departure for a new understanding if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of the vulnerability of others’ (Butler 2004: 30).

Notes 1

2

3

Degania was founded on 2 9 October 1910 by ten men and two women on Um Juni as an independent commune. Degania was the first kibbutz where the principles of independent work and collective life materialised (www.degania.org.il, last accessed 12/2/10). Rachel Bluwstein Sela (1890—1931) was a Hebrew lyric poet who immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1909. She was a member of a kibbutz on the shores of lake Kinneret and is known by her first name, Rachel. Shenhav argues that postcolonial theory is not limited to the understanding of the postcolonial in historical terms, writing about the occupation in Israel in colonial terms while also referring to a postcolonial reality, where ‘direct colonial rule exists, with emergency

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4

5 6

regulations left over from the great empires ... we can also use a postcolonial analysis to understand the colonial history of Palestine’ (Shenhav 2006b: 29). Beinin (2004) discusses Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, in which Morris discussed the unpublished diaries of Yosef Nahmani, a leader of the Zionist institutions in the eastern Galilee, who offered a clear description of the expulsion of Arabs, the confiscation of their lands and his concerns about these issues during the 1948 war. Summarising his analysis of Nahmani’s diaries, Morris notes that Nahmani’s regrets about the expulsions mark one of the first instances of the distinctive Israeli syndrome known as ‘shooting and crying’, which has since become a shorthand description of left-learning Israelis who mourn the dispossession of the Palestinians, while not condemning Zionism, and, in many cases, continuing to serve in the IDF. ‘Infiltrators’ is the term used to describe those Palestinians who tried to return to their villages once the fighting died down. See Stuart Hall’s ‘Race as a floating signifier’ (1997) in which he implicates Christianity, western science as well as anthropology in the racialisation of the colonised.

4 The fall of Haifa: telling autoethnographic stories

I am as much constituted by those I grieve for as by those whose deaths I disavow, whose nameless, faceless deaths form the melancholic background for my social world. (Judith Butler 2004: 46)

May 2008 Since Mother died visiting Haifa has been a strange experience. Haifa never really felt like home yet as I grow older, and due to my research into Nakba co-memoration, visits are becoming more emotionally charged, as I mourn my disappearing birthplace. On our way back from the Association of the Internally Displaced march to Saffuryya, we stop in Wadi Nisnas, Haifa’s Palestinian quarter, for a committee meeting of the Haifa Conference for the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State in Palestine (www.ror1state.oig). Being in the Wadi brings back a rush of childhood memories, blurred reminders of a present- absence. Later in the week I visit again to meet Manar, a young Palestinian friend who has just handed in her doctoral dissertation on the de-urbanisation of Palestine. We drink coffee in a Palestinian-owned restaurant in the German Colony’s Ben Gurion street,1 part of a new Palestinian cafe culture, which has a feeling of ‘abroad’.2 Later that day I visit Mother’s and Father’s graves; the first time since Mother’s funeral in 2005. Before I take the bus back to Jerusalem, I eat hummus with my friend Orna, a Jewish Israeli Haifa university lecturer, in a Palestinian-run seaside restaurant. As I listen to the wind and gaze at the rough sea, I remember our weekly family outings to the beach all those years ago. Is this work reintroducing me to my lost city?

Introduction In April 1948 the Jewish militia, the Hagana, overcame the Palestinian population of Haifa, bringing about the fall of Arab Haifa and the decimation of

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its Palestinian community. As Pappe writes, the conquest of a small village and the expulsion of its inhabitants is not a small thing. The army expelled whole families who were separated within hours from their belongings, minimal as these might have been, and from their heritage. However the expulsion of an entire urban neighbourhood is catastrophic and traumatic, not only for those expelled but for their society and nation. The ‘cleansing’ of the rural areas was never completed, even though it brought about the expulsion of the majority of Palestine’s population. In urban areas the ‘cleansing’ was total; here and there a few hundred frightened inhabitants remained, but more than 100,000 Palestinians who lived in these urban spaces disappeared, never to return (Pappe 2008: 97). Like Carolyn Ellis (2004), I refuse to apologise for foregrounding the personal or to try to persuade my fellow sociologists that my writing is indeed sociology. Throughout this book I combine my own story – a Jewish-Israeli woman born in Haifa, Palestine, prior to the establishment of the Israeli state, brought up in Israel and working and living in Ireland, with fragments of the stories of other Israeli Jews, to write about the co-memorisation of the Nakba. The bulk of this chapter links my story with the story of my late father, 3 Michael- Miki Salzberger-Tsabar, one of the Jewish foot soldiers who conquered Haifa, set against the contested accounts of the fall of Arab Haifa, providing an autoethnographic account of the consequences for me of my father’s involvement in the war of Haifa. As a research methodology, autoethnography has been defined by Ellis as ‘writing about the personal and its relationship to culture ... an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness’ (2004: 37). This book also employs more conventional research methodologies, including observation and interviewing, as well as reading, theorising and documentary analysis. Crucially, however, writing autoethnography means, as Ellis (2004: 333) puts it, conjuring ‘emotional, visual, and other sensory images about my experiences of real people engaged in actual events’, delving into my memory, and then searching for the words to describe the emotional, but also the theoretical, reactions to the material, based on my personal, but also my academic life.

My father, an introduction Of all his immigrant friends my father had been in the country the longest – he migrated with his parents to Palestine in 1925 as a child of thirteen from Vienna. His parents had moved to the capital in 1915 from Gura Humorlui, a small country town in the northern Romanian province of Bucovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into which the Empire imported Jews to form the commercial and cultural German-speaking elite. In 1984 I visited Gura Humorlui, a modest small town on the edge of the Carpathians, where I met two of Father’s elderly cousins who stayed in postwar Romania. Like other Jews who remained in

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northern Romania in little towns that once had a Jewish majority, they led a precarious existence in what they did not know then were the last years of Ceaușescu’s regime of terror. The synagogues lay empty and they lived in the shadow of Ceaușescu’s dreaded secret police, the Securitate. In the local derelict Jewish graveyard I saw Shapira and Salzberger tombstones overgrown with ivy. I remember only one story from the Vienna of Father’s childhood, about little Miki cheering Kaiser Franz Joseph, whose gilded carriage and white horses he never forgot. Having moved to Vienna at the age of three, he knew little about his Bucovina birthplace. The only thing he, or perhaps someone else, told us, his three children, was that his mother had him late, embarrassed at becoming pregnant at 45. A sickly baby, he was renamed Michael after the angel and survived. What a start, life as a mistake ... In 1925 Miki and his parents were brought to Jerusalem by his brothers – twenty and twenty-four years his elders. His father, Jacob Salzberger, was a luft 4 mensch, married off to Bertha Shapira, the daughter of a wealthy family, because he was supposed to be a scholar. He turned out to be neither scholarly, nor a businessman. The Salzberger family history demonstrates how biographies often tell larger social stories, raising public questions in their social, economic and political organisation (Back 2007: 23). Miki’s oldest brother, Dr Motti Salzberger, an ear, nose and throat specialist, who was often summoned to fish out bones from Jewish throats on Friday nights, became a respected Jerusalem physician, with many wealthy Jerusalem Palestinian patients. Motti married Vera, a beautiful Jewish Russian revolutionary, and they opened their Jerusalem home to artists and writers. He left her for another woman, and after his death, his widow married one of his wealthy Palestinian patients. His children met their Palestinian siblings only after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967. Miki’s was a typical immigrant Jewish boyhood in Jerusalem, Palestine. He studied at the best Jewish secondary school – the Hebrew Gymnasium, where he was initially mocked for his foreign accent. But he worked hard at passing for a sabra and resembling his school friends, most of them also children of recent immigrants. In an early photograph I see a dark-eyed, serious European boy in a sailor suit, so different from the ideal-type rougher, barefoot Israeli Jewish children of the time. Miki did not say much about his European childhood, but he loved telling us about his school days and about being amongst the founders of Hamachanot Haolim youth movement, constructing a nativist sabra auto/biography from what was an immigrant childhood. According to Netiva Ben Yehuda, Hamachanot Haolim epitomised the the Jewish Sabra attitude towards the newer immigrants: ‘The left-wing youth movements, particularly Hamachanot Haolim, set the tone. They were the truest sabra model ... the young new Hebrews ... The new immigrants were not given half a chance. Let us first see ... how fast he can divest himself of the diaspora signifiers and adopt the image of the real sabra ... we could not bear their diaspora customs, or their dress, we did not allow them to speak with the

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slightest accent. If you can’t speak like us, shut up’ (Ben Yehuda 1981: 71). But it’s worth remembering that everyone was an immigrant - apart, that was, from the local Palestinians. Miki’s Jerusalem childhood always seemed magical to me, invoking a longing for Palestinian East Jerusalem, the city beyond the wall which I got to know only after the 1967 occupation when it became possible for Israeli Jews to visit the Old City. I remember my fascination on the first illicit visits I made immediately after the city fell in 1967. In 1976 I published ‘Stone of claims’, a short story about a brief love affair with a Palestinian young man, a story which glorified the city, almost embarrassingly so (Lentin 1976). The fascination was short-lived; today’s East Jerusalem has been taken over by orthodox Israelis, much of it destroyed beyond recognition: I no longer long for Father’s city beyond the wall. I have reflected on ‘Stones of claims’ in the book I co-edited with the Palestinian sociologist Nahla Abdo (Abdo and Lentin 2002), writing about the exoticising ambiguity with which we regarded the Palestinians: Knowing Arabs meant eating their roast lamb and salty-sour cheese balls which floated in jars of green olive oil. Knowing Arabs was going to their weddings and telling your youth movement pals that Debka was actually an Arab dance. Knowing Arabs was saying that their music was not that monotonous after all. (Lentin 1976: 111)

Miki did not stay in Jerusalem. Having studied engineering in Prague, he worked for the British state oil company in Iraq, eventually setting up an electrical goods manufacturing plant in Haifa, where he met my mother Lia Schieber, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish timber merchant from Bucovina. Lia got a job with the British airforce and rented a room from Miki’s brother’s family. In early pictures she looks like a glamorous 1940 starlet, and his friends – by now nativised as pioneering Israelis rather than the European migrants they were - gossiped about her wearing red lipstick and curling her naturally blond hair. This is how Haifa became my accidental birthplace.

The perpetrators: an autoethnography Collecting Palestinian victims’ testimonies, as is practiced by Zochrot (see Chapter 7), offers Israeli Nakba co-memorators a certain feel-good factor. However, the testimonies of Israeli perpetrators are much harder to collect. Since the 1980s, the work of Israeli ‘new historians’ (e.g., Flapan 1987; Morris 1987, 1994, 2000a, 2002, 2004, 2008; Pappe 1988, 2006, 2008; Shlaim 2007 - see Chapter 6) began mining Zionist and Israeli state archives for accounts of the perpetrators’ acts. However, little serious attempt was made to excavate the personal stories of Jewish pre-state soldiers who carried out the expulsions, expropriations, massacres, rapes and ethnic cleansing.

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There are a few exceptions. One is the Haifa University Masters dissertation by Theodore Katz in which he studied Israeli veterans’ testimonies of the massacre in the Palestinian village of Tantura, which provoked much acrimony and a legal challenge (Katz 1998; for a critique see Esmeir 2007). Another is Benny Morris’s study of the diaries of Yosef Nachmani, one of the architects of Jewish settler-colonialism in Palestine (Morris 2000a; Karpel 2005). Nachmani’s diaries open a window on Zionist dualism, between Jewish idealism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Having served in the underground Jewish policing force Hashomer in the 1920s and 1930s, Nachmani purchased arms for the prestate militias and Palestinian lands for the Jewish settlers. Differentiating between ‘good Arabs’ and ‘bad Arabs’, he believed in co-existence, albeit one based on Jewish domination and on the transfer of Palestinians beyond the boundaries of the putative Jewish state. Nachmani’s diaries denote deep moral consternation shedding light on the dark side of the 1948 war, from the massacres and expulsions of innocent villagers, to the looting and robbery which accompanied almost every Jewish victory – a classic case of ‘interpretative denial’ (Cohen 2001). Yet according to Morris, Nachmani was unaware of ‘the link between these events and his own actions, which, for decades, aimed at the expropriation and expulsion – albeit legally and with financial compensation – of the Palestinian villagers’ (Morris 2000: 102). Morris argues that Nachmani’s story reveals Zionism’s Janus face: on the one hand a self-perceived morality, consideration, and compromise – wishing for ‘coexistence’ with the Palestinians on what both peoples call ‘the land’; and on the other, destructive, selfish and power-drunk racism - which accords Zionism its ‘internal self righteous force ... making it unstoppable’ (Morris 2000a: 103). Nachmani’s biography offers me a prism through which I can read the co-memoratation of the Nakba, and link the story of the dispossessed Palestinians with the perpetrators’ story, allowing me to focus on the story of the 1948 war in Haifa and my father’s part in it. My autoethnographic approach, which tells, as Cixous (1997) puts it, one story in place of another story, is part of my search for clues as to what led me to a lifetime of opposition to Israeli state policies. Most anti-Zionist Israeli Jews have their ‘road to Damascus’ tale, as to when the penny dropped, usually in the wake of the 1967 war, or the 1982 Lebanon war (as discussed in Chapter 5). The story told in this chapter is part of my longer and gradual realisation, which has to start with the Haifa Nakba and my father’s part in it. However, accessing the testimonies of the 1948 Jewish perpetrators remains a fraught and, in Father’s case, impossible task, since I never interviewed him before his untimely death aged sixty-two in 1974. In Les Back’s (2007) book on sociology as the art of listening he reminds us not only that ‘thinking, talking and describing is always betrayal’, but also that ‘as a partner in thought, death may offer an orientation to life itself’. He cites a reported remark by Saul Bellow’s that ‘Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything’ (Back 2007: 4). My father’s premature death, but also

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the deaths of so many Palestinians, makes writing necessary. Far from being an apologia, against the background of the parallel narratives of the battle for Haifa, my excavation involves an archaeology of the involvement of one perpetrator, reluctant as he might have been, in the fall of Haifa, and the consequences for his anti-Zionist exilic daughter. Critical autoethnography is ‘located within a larger historical, political, economic, social and symbolic context... Such writings often offer a passionate, emotional voice of the positioned and explicitly judgmental fieldworker’ (Van Maanen 1995: 9-10, cited in Ifekwunigwe 1999: 43). However, I remind myself that in researching Palestine, as in Zochrot’s co-memorating the Nakba in Hebrew, the Palestinians often get erased, their voices subsumed by the voice of the powerful coloniser. And I know that Israeli autoethnographic accounts such as mine, while motivated by empathy and political solidarity, always involve an ultimately problematic appropriation of which we are all guilty, because too often in speaking about Palestine we speak about our own subjectivity, our own politics, our own identity.

Haifa, Palestine Haifa never really felt like home. I am not quite sure why. After all, I spent my childhood and youth there, studied at the Reali Hebrew School – considered one of the best in the country - a school run on strict disciplinarian terms, but which enabled me to excel at literature and languages, even though I was regrettably forced to choose between Arabic and French, opting for the latter. I was a member of the Carmel Brigade of the Israeli Scouts movement and our many hikes were our way of ‘conquering the land with our feet’. Like everyone else I was made to reluctantly participate in the school’s mandatory pre-army training at which I was always trailing behind. During the summer, I spent every Saturday morning on the Mediterranean beach with my family, struggling with my fears of the crushing waves. As we were swimming in the glorious beach of Tantura, I spared no thought to the significance of the ruined houses, or the bustan, the unacknowledged remains of the Palestinian village whose inhabitants were massacred and expelled in 1948 (see Yuval-Davis 2002). My Haifa childhood was a typical middle-class, Jewish-Ashkenazi childhood. So where did my sense of alienation come from? Perhaps it stemmed from being an asthmatic child who struggled with the physical activities so highly valued in training us to become ‘the first (Jewish) generation to redemption’, marking us as strong, earthy sabras, so different from the allegedly weak and effeminate diaspora Jews. Or perhaps, like the tortured, and much loved Israeli poet Leah Goldberg, I had always felt like a ‘weed’, or, in my better moments, ‘a tree in the darkness of the forest, chosen by the light to 5 reflect upon’ (Goldberg, n.d). My physical weakness also meant I did not serve in the IDF, again marking me as different from all my school mates in a climate

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where military service was universal, long before the Israeli draft resistance 6 movement was born, my trajectory departing from what had been until then a ‘normal Israeli childhood’, a departure I had an instinctive premonition about from a very young age. Might this estrangement have been due to the thick shadow cast by the Haifa Nakba? One way or another, as soon as school was over, I moved to Jerusalem, which I still regard as my Israeli home. There is a gap between the Palestinian image of Haifa as a Nakba site and symbol and the Israeli public relations image of the city as a model of ArabJewish co-existence, an image that willfully ignores the complete destruction of Haifa’s old city and the erasure of its Ottoman past (Yazbak 2007). Weiss studies the Palestinian neighbourhood Wadi al Saleeb, whose inhabitants were forced to abandon it during the 1948 war, resettled by North African Jewish immigrants and razed to the ground in the 1970s (Weiss 2007: 18). She writes that the work of memory needs to slow down the near-total erasure of Palestinian Haifa, so as to put the mirror to its previous inhabitants, whose existence continues to cast a long shadow on the city which became Jewish in one fell swoop. In the Haifa of my youth, Palestinians were not entirely absent: they were providers of ‘Arab food’ which we loved as children, they were labourers and cleaners, they worked as manual workers in my father’s electrical manufacturing plant, or they were Druze – ‘good Arabs’ not included among the internally displaced since no Druze permanently left their villages (Masalha 2005: 14), nurtured through a ‘contract of blood’ with the Israeli state. Indeed, two sons of Druze sheikhs attended my school - both later becoming Israeli government officials. So – while not fully absent, the Palestinians of the Haifa of my youth were not fully present. Nor were they our equals, their presence was rather shadowy. Because of the deep personal resonance the story of the fall of Haifa has for me, I am inspired by Liz Stanley’s (1996) theorisation of ‘research as necessity’, and Donna Harraway’s (1998) ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘embodied objectivity’, both of which make the juxtaposition of contested narratives a vital component of this story as it unfolds. I want to put back the dark backing of the mirror to Haifa’s previous inhabitants, making visible the contested histories of the city and its 1948 battle. Though mostly agrarian, a third of pre-1948 Palestine’s Arab population lived in cities. Manar Hassan (2005: 197) criticises the erasure of the Palestinian city from both Israeli and Palestinian collective memory, resulting in ‘imagining Palestinian society as a rural society ... (making it is hard) to believe 7 that historic Palestine, that is pre-Nakba Palestine, consisted of real cities’. Haifa, situated on the Mediterranean Sea at the foot of Mount Carmel, was the largest of these real Palestinian cities. The Palestinian story tells of Haifa gradually developing from a fishing village to a major seaport due to its strategic importance for both the British, who had a mandate to govern Palestine between 1919 and 1948, and the Zionists. Though Haifa’s origins are ancient, the present-day city dates to the late eighteenth century when it was established by Zahir al-Umar, the

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strongman of northern Palestine. Haifa was briefly conquered by Napoleon’s army in 1799 before coming under direct Ottoman rule in 1840. In 1869 German farmers from the religious Templar Society settled in Haifa, and in the 1880s, before the onset of political Zionism, Jews began migrating from Europe. Haifa was transformed by the period’s global economy. By World War I, Haifa replaced Beirut as the main deep water seaport serving northern Palestine, southern Syria and Transjordan. The city’s development was accelerated during the British mandate, as Haifa became the terminus of an oil pipeline extending from Iraq, housing an oil refinery (www.palestineremembered.com). At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were 4,000 Palestinians in Haifa, and between 1918 and 1944, the year of my birth, Haifa’s population grew from 15,000 to 130,000, half Jewish and half Palestinian, mostly Muslim but with a significant Christian minority (Goren 2006). By the time I was born, most Jewish people lived in Hadar HaCarmel, half way up the mountain, where my parents rented their first apartment, or on the mountain itself, where they built a house as soon as Father’s business improved. While most Palestinians, employed in British army bases, the oil refineries, the port and railway services, lived downtown, there was a significant wealthy professional and business Palestinian elite living on Mount Carmel. The Israeli story narrates Haifa as a model of co-existence, a rich texture of nationalities and ethnicities living together in harmony and tolerance in a secular atmosphere (Goren 2006). It is a story of a city of immigrants, both Jewish and Palestinian, who established a mixed economy based on Haifa’s strategic position, with Jewish people using their ‘professional skills and international connections’ and Arabs their ‘labour, and links with the Arab markets’, making Haifa a ‘working, open city’, whose many industries lay the foundations for Arab- Jewish cooperation (Goren 2006: 37—8). Israeli urban scholars narrate Haifa as an ‘urban Zionist project’, the only city constructed as a ‘semi-kibbutz’ or ‘semicity constructed of suburban units’, a mixture of western city-centre welfare garden-city neighbourhoods and Bolshevik industrial suburbs, enabled, after 1948, by the reallocation of what was designated ‘deserted’ Palestinian property to poor North African Jewish immigrants (Weiss 2007). However, Arab Haifa disappeared instantly in April 1948. I do not provide here a comprehensive study of the parallel accounts and contradictory historiographies of the 1948 battle for Haifa, or of the events leading to the dePalestinianisation of Haifa and the ghettoisation of its remaining Palestinians (Pappe 2006). However, in order to reimagine my father’s role in the fall of Palestinian Haifa, I juxtapose here the contrasting accounts of the battle for the city as written by two Israeli historians, Tamir Goren (2006), who studies the activities of the Palestinian leadership in Haifa from its establishment in December 1947 until to the conquest of Haifa’s Arab quarters in April 1948, and Ilan Pappe (2006), who highlights the contradictions between the call, in the Israeli Declaration of Independence to ‘Arab people, citizens of the State of

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Israel, to keep the peace and play their part in building the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship’, and the explicit plan to destroy Palestine’s cities, which, by April 1948, became a fait accompli (Pappe, 2008: 96).

The battle for Haifa: Israeli versus Palestinian narratives According to the UN Partition plan, Haifa was included in the Jewish state. According to Pappe (2008), its inclusion, as Palestine’s only deep water seaport, attests to the international community’s preference of the Jewish settlercolonials over the colonised Palestinians. Jewish attacks on Haifa’s 75,000 Palestinians began already in January 1948 as a local initiative, in retaliation for the bloody Arab attack on the oil refineries. In December 1947 the Hagana killed many of the inhabitants of Balad al-Shaysh, the burial place of Shaykh Izz al-Din al- Qassam, one of Palestine’s most revered leaders of the 1930s, killing over sixty Palestinians, including women and children. Soon afterwards, the Hagana went into one of the city’s Arab neighbourhoods, Wadi Rushmiyya, expelled its people and blew up its houses – Pappe sees this as the beginning of the ethnic cleansing of Haifa, carried out while the British were looking the other way. Two weeks later, the Jewish forces successfully attacked the poorest Arab neighbourhood of Hawassa, causing panic which caused its 5,000 inhabitants to flee (Pappe 2006: 59-60). As they had only arrived in recent decades, Haifa’s Jewish inhabitants built their homes higher up the mountain. The Hagana exploited the Jewish topographical advantage and was able easily to shell and snipe at the Palestinian neighbourhoods. The concerted assault led to the decision by some 10,000 members of the Arab elite to evacuate to Beirut or Cairo. Pappe (2008: 99) notes that the abandonment by the Palestinian urban elites played a central role in the story of the destruction of Palestine, explaining why none of the cities escaped defeat, as opposed to some of the villages. The ill-equipped and poorly armed Palestinian leadership collapsed after December 1947, and on 18 April the British commander of Northern Palestine, Major General Hugh Stockwell, informed Haifa’s Palestinian leadership that within two days his forces would abandon the boundary lines between the Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods, opening the way to the Judaisation of Arab Haifa (Pappe 2008: 99). Goren (2006) tells the Jewish story of the battle for Haifa; his, and probably my father’s, is a story of Arab ‘riots’ in reaction to the rise of the Zionist movement and the British support for the Arabs. According to Pappe (2006), however, operations in Haifa were retroactively approved and welcomed (though not necessarily initiated) by the Consultancy, an ad hoc group of Zionist leaders assembled solely for the purpose of plotting and designing the dispossession of the Palestinians. Goren cites a Hagana report of the coordinated operation in Haifa which reads as a story of heroism and danger:

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As the British evacuated the city, our units began to immediately take key positions, capturing transport routes and army posts. Our units took ... the governor’s house, Hadar HaCarmel’s police station, the railway offices ... Yesterday afternoon our units attacked and captured the Headquarters in Salah a Din Street overlooking Wadi Rushmia and the eastern city exit. The enemy tried several times to take the building from us, but was defeated ... The boundary between us and the enemy moved forward and most of our new positions were in Arab houses. Many enemy bases were captured by our forces ... At dawn our units attacked Arab Halissa ... all houses were captured after heavy fighting. Arabs are abandoning the neighbourhood ... getting women and children out ... The enemy suffered many losses in life and property ... (HaHoma, cited in Goren 2006: 206)

Goren’s book has photographs of armed Hagana soldiers patrolling Arab Haifa harassing the local Palestinians. I am intent on the difficult task of editing Father into these pictures. Always dressed in khaki shorts and knee-length khaki socks, he could have easily been one of those part-time soldiers who believed passionately in the need to Judaicise Haifa. Father said little about his Haifa war, but I do know he was on guard duty in Wadi Rushmia; my brother, born in 1948, five days after the establishment of the Jewish state, remembers being told that while Father was on guard duty in the Wadi, Mother, in labour, was brought by ambulance to the hospital and the ambulance was shot at. Pappe’s (2006) description of the fall of Haifa is far less sanitised than Goren’s. The Jewish campaign of terrorisation, begun in December 1947, included heavy shelling: ‘the Jewish troops rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls, down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited. The moment panic-stricken Palestinians came running out of their houses to try and extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed by machine gun sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down the mountain-side, and detonated barrels of explosives, and went on for the first months of 1948 ... ’ On the website of the special Hagana unit, Hashachar (The Dawn), made up of mistarvim (Hebrew for ‘becoming Arab’, that is Jews disguised as Palestinians), the official historian of the Palmach (literally ‘strike companies’, the Hagana’s official fighting forces) writes: ‘The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation’ (Markiviski 1989, cited in Pappe 2006: 58). The Hagana’s first operation was given the ominous name of ‘Operation Scissors’ indicating a pincer movement cutting the city off from its rural Palestinian hinterland. Haifa was allocated in the 1947 UN partition plan to the Jewish state, and the Jews were determined to gain control of the city and its port, but without the city’s 75,000 Palestinian inhabitants; in April 1948, they achieved this objective (Pappe 2006). Pappe highlights the part played by the British in the fall of Haifa. Intended to leave the city in May 1948, British troops were present as Jewish units captured the Palestinian parts of the city. According to Pappe, British politicians later admitted that the British conduct

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in Haifa forms ‘one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the British 8 Empire in the Middle East’. When, on 18 April, the British informed the Jewish authorities that their forces were to leave the buffer zone between the Jewish forces and Haifa’s Palestinians, the road was open for the de-Arabisation of Haifa (Pappe 2006: 93—4). The fate of ‘the mixed city’ of Haifa was finally sealed on the night of 21 and 22 of April 1948, when members of the local Palestinian National Committee met in the home of the manager of the Arab Bank of Haifa. Having understood that defeat was imminent, the following morning they asked Stockwell to convey their surrender to the Jewish leadership. That afternoon the committee met the Jewish leadership in the Town Hall to applause by scores of Jews, Haifa having already been conquered by the Hagana, to sign away their city. The removal of the British barrier led to ‘Operation Scissors’ giving way to Operation ‘Cleansing the Leaven’ (literally ‘total cleansing’, referring to the Jewish religious practice of eliminating all trace of bread or flour on the eve of Passover). This, Pappe writes, was ‘brutally appropriate, as the cleansing of Haifa began on Passover eve, 21 April’ (Pappe 2006: 94). While Shabtai Levi, the city’s Jewish mayor, a decent man by all accounts, beseeched Haifa’s Palestinians to stay, promising no harm would befall them, Hagana loudspeakers were urging Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late, and Carmeli commander Mordechai Maklef issued explicit orders to his troops to ‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives’ (Pappe 2006: 95). I am trying hard to avoid self-righteousness, but I have a desperate need to speculate whether Father was one of the 2,000-strong, well-armed Carmeli Brigade Jewish soldiers facing the poorly equipped army of 400 local and Lebanese volunteers who had inferior arms and limited ammunition, a poor match to the armoured cars and mortars on the Jewish side. It is extremely painful for me to imagine Father as one of those who torched objects and forced doors open, and even killed, as the bewildered Palestinians, without packing their belonging, or knowing what they were doing, began leaving en masse, heading towards the port. I want to believe (though I will never know) that Father was not one of the troops who, once Palestinians left their homes, broke into and looted their houses. Pappe (2006) reports that on 22 April at dawn, the people came streaming into the harbour. The streets in the Palestinian part of the city were overcrowded and the Arab leaders tried to instill some order in the chaos. Loudspeakers could be heard asking people to gather in the old marketplace near the port until an orderly evacuation by sea could be organised. The Carmeli Brigade war book shows little compunction about what happened next. Aware that people were advised to gather by the port, Jewish officers ordered their troops to station three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port and bombard the gathering crowds below. The idea was

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to ensure that the flight would be in one direction only; as Palestinians gathered in the beautiful old Ottoman marketplace, they were easy targets for the Jewish marksmen (Eshel 1973: 147, cited in Pappe 2006: 96). As the shelling began, the crowd broke into the port, storming the boats moored there. According to the Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi, ‘Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers’ (cited in Pappe 2006: 96). In Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa (2000), his protagonist Said S. returns with his wife to Haifa in 1967 from Ramallah to look for the child they had left behind when they were swept by the fleeing crowds: Morning, Wednesday, April 21 1948. Haifa, the city, was not expecting anything, in spite of the fact that it was filled with dark tension. Thunder came abruptly from the east, from the heights of Mount Carmel. Mortar shells flew across the city’s centre, pelting the Arab quarters. The streets of Haifa turned into chaos ... After a while Said felt he was rushing helter-skelter, yet the alleyways, closed off by machine guns or bullets or the soldiers themselves, seemed to be pushing him unconsciously in one direction only. Over and over he tried to return to his real direction, picking out a particular alley, he found himself pushed by an unseen force towards one road only, the road to the coast. (Kanafani 2000: 153)

House to house searches, arrests and beatings meted out to those who did not leave during these fateful April days meant that even those who delayed decided to eventually leave. By 1 May only some 4,000 Palestinian were left in Haifa (Morris 2000a: 35-6).

Why did they leave Haifa? Every Palestinian must have asked his or her parents the same question: why did you leave? I imagine that the answer comes always in two stages: first, there are the obvious explanations, the threats, the bombs, the rumours of massacres, the death of close ones, as well as the great fear of rape, the traditional Palestinian man and woman’s paramount anxiety about the loss of honour. Then, after a moment’s silence, there comes the doubt as he or she examines his or her memories, which have, perhaps, begun to fade. Guilt then sets in, embarrassment, a whispering, nagging scepticism: what if I had been cowardly, what if ... (A1 Qattan 2007: 203)

The story of the de-Palestinianisation of Haifa, like the broader story of 1948, is debated around the key question of whether, as argued by Israeli historians, and as my father told it, Haifa’s Palestinian population was instructed by its leaders to evacuate the city despite being asked to stay by the Jewish leadership; or whether Haifa’s Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by design, as argued by Palestinian historians and revisionist Israeli scholars such as Pappe (2006).

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Goren’s (2006: 228) insistence that the Jewish leadership tried hard to prevent mass evacuation enters the realm of collective denial, as Cohen argues: the most profound forms of cultural repression become part of consensual reality: blind spots, shared illusions and zones of tacitly denied information. When the origins of theses blind spots are ideological and coercive – the histories that the state prefers not to be known – then the Freudian notion of ‘repression’ is curiously relevant. Collective memory is pressed into shape by being repressed. (Cohen 2001: 137-8)

Cohen exemplifies the ideological repression by perpetrators via the exposure of the Zionist myths about the 1948 war. The myth that the Palestinians left their homes because of their leaders’ instructions and in expectation of returning after the enemy had been defeated has always been disputed. But in recent years the account by Israeli historians has become more nuanced. Firstly, Israeli scholars report the desertion of Haifa by the Palestinian elite who evacuated their families even before hostilities broke out, resulting in Haifa’s Arabs remaining leaderless (Pappe 2006: 93). Israeli historians also stress the structural weaknesses of Palestinian society (Morris 2000a) and the inability of the Palestinian National Committees to bring about unity and prevent Palestinians from leaving (Goren 2006) as major factors in the defeat. When the complex history of 1948 was exposed by Israeli ‘new historians’, the Israeli establishment was outraged that its ‘own’ intellectuals – using Zionist archival sources – have shown what ‘they and everyone else knew from personal memory’ – thus illustrating the denial paradox (Cohen 2001: 139). Current Israeli historiography supports the Palestinian insistence on the active role the Hagana played in the de-Arabisation of Haifa (Weiss 2006). Kanafani’s description illustrates the inevitability of the flight, in the case of Said S. more tragic because in their bewilderment, Said and Safiyya had abandoned their infant: Like someone swimming against a torrent of water plummeting down a lofty mountain, Said forged ahead [...] The current carried him a few steps backwards, but he pushed on wildly like some hunted creature hopelessly trying to forge a path through a thick tangle of undergrowth. Above him the smoke and the wailing of bombs and hail of gunfire fused with the screams, the footsteps, the sea’s pounding, and the sound of oars slapping the surface of the waves [...] (Kanafani 2000: 155)

And what about Father? His version clearly illustrates the denial paradox. I recall him telling me that he remembered Haifa’s Jews begging the Palestinians not to leave the city; but he spoke no Arabic and was therefore unable to understand the Palestinian version of events. By all (Jewish) accounts, some Jews did try to persuade Haifa’s Palestinian inhabitants to stay. Weiss (2006) says the Jewish leadership was hugely embarrassed by the mass exodus, though

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she notes wryly that it might have been due to Haifa’s Jewish business community worrying about losing cheap Arab labour. After the initial shortlived embarrassment, however, Haifa’s Jewish leadership stopped calling upon the Palestinians to stay. The Palestinian mass evacuation wetted the Jewish appetite: ‘everyone ... understood that a Jewish state without a large Arab minority would be stronger [,..] Jewish atrocities [...] also contributed to the evacuation’. A month after the fall of Haifa, a Jewish commentator stated bluntly: ‘at first [we] were interested in keeping the Arabs [...] then another idea set in, better without Arabs, it’s more convenient’ (Morris 2004).

Interviewing my dead father? Miki never spoke about his childhood and said very little about his wars. Like the lives of so many twentieth-century Jews, his life was punctuated by wars. He was born two years before the onset of World War I on the outskirts of the Habsburg Empire. Unlike Mother’s family who escaped Romanian Bucovina during World War I to the relative safety of the Hungarian part of the province, Miki’s father took the family to Vienna, where Miki saluted his Kaiser. But I know nothing about their experiences in the imperial capital during that war. Miki lived through World War II in the relative safety of Palestine while members of his (and Mother’s) family were deported together with the Jews of Bucovina to Transnistria. Although he served in the Hagana, my father was not much of a soldier. Like other Israeli Jewish men, he had to do IDF reserve duty, but he was stationed with the Civil Guard, doing low-grade guard duty during the 1956 Suez War. He was not called up in 1967 and in the 1973 war he volunteered but was considered too old to be enlisted to the Civil Guard as his letters quoted below tell. One of his two sons, my brothers, served as an airforce mechanic and, having emigrated to the US, was not called up for annual reserve duty; my younger brother was an IDF helicopter pilot and served in the airforce for some twenty years; his own son is a jet pilot-navigator who served in the airforce for several years. Even though I did not do army service, war and the military have been an integral part of our family history as they are of what it means to be an Israeli Jew. From time to time memories of Miki’s distant past surfaced. When, as a picky eater, I refused to eat chicken skin or boiled potatoes, he muttered something about how lucky I was not to have experienced hunger, saying he was forced to eat potato skins, though he never made clear whether this was in Vienna dining World War I, or during his time in Prague as an impoverished engineering student. He would tell us we were lucky to be the first generation of Jews not to experience antisemitism – thus probably granting me the confidence to rebel against that very state of majority rule over the occupied Palestinians.

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Miki said little about his past and only insubstantial narrative fragments survived. Like the story about the woman whose photograph we discovered who he had wed in a fictitious marriage in order to facilitate her immigration to Palestine; we never found out whether this fictitious marriage involved a love relationship. He returned the old Parabellum pistol he hid in the linen cupboard for Mother to defend herself when he was on Hagana guard duty to the police in the 1960s, after my teenage brothers discovered it. He never told us whether he had used it and if so, doing what. The photographs of Hagana troops patrolling Haifa in Goren’s (2006) book keep troubling me as I desperately edit Miki into the picture. I know he stood guard at Hagana posts, but was he there when Palestinian refugees were led in lorry-loads to the harbour? Did he patrol the demolished old city? More crucially, did my father, the sensitive young immigrant whose family had escaped the outskirts of the empire to the relative safety of Jewish Palestine, witness his city’s Palestinian refugees leave their homes with hastily packed belongings, carrying them in sack loads on their bent backs? I cannot ask him now, but I wonder why it never occurred to him to tell us about his role in the Haifa Nakba. Did he have regrets? I will never know. Jung’s notion of ‘collective guilt’ comes to mind, and I think troublingly about the discovery, in the late 1960s, by the ’68 generation, children of German soldiers, of what their parents had done during the war. Listening to an Israeli interviewee in Dalia Karpel’s (2005) film about Nachmani talking about shooting a dozen crouched Palestinians hiding in a deserted building during the 1948 war, and saying he had no regrets even though some of this friends had called him ‘Nazi’, it may not be such an odd comparison after all.

Building auto/biographical memory sites; co-memory, postmemory Marianne Hirsch (1997) posits the ‘postmemory’ of the second generation, distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. James Young (2000: 3—4) calls this ‘the afterlife of memory represented in history’s after-images: the impressions retained in the mind’s eye of a vivid sensation long after the original, external cause has been removed’. Postmemory is not merely one facet of ‘collective memory’, it is also an explanation, when discussing the perpetrators, of the politics of denial Cohen speaks about. I wonder again whether Nora’s (1989) ‘memory sites’ are also ‘sites of silence’, where the landscape itself becomes the site of memoricide rather than memory, as Pappe (2006: 226) argues in relation to the reinvention and Hebraicisation of Palestine’s geography by the Israeli state. Whether or not Arab Haifa is such a ‘site of silence’, it is certainly a site of co-memory, a memory site I am attempting to construct in collaboration with the Palestinians who did remain in the city I grew up in shadowing my IsraeliJewish childhood and youth.

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Arab Haifa, and in particular Wadi al Saleeb, was largely demolished. The story of the 3,500-5,000 Palestinians left in Haifa after the Jewish troops cleansed the city on 23 April 1948 exemplifies the tribulations of the Palestinians under Israeli rule since that war. Pappe (2006) tells that on 1 July, the Israeli commander of the city summoned the leaders of the remaining Palestinian community to ‘facilitate’ their transfer from the various parts of the city where they were living into Wadi al Nisnas, one of the city’s poorest downtown areas. Some members of the elite were told to leave their residences on the slopes of Mount Carmel within four days. The shock was enormous – many of Haifa’s Palestinians were members of the Communist Party that had supported partition and they hoped that now that the fighting was over, they would live peacefully in the Jewish state whose establishment they did not oppose. Despite protests by the leaders, who called the move ‘ghettoisation’, the Palestinians were commanded to leave immediately and told they would have to cover the cost of their forced transfer. In their new abode, Wadi al Nisnas, which serves today’s municipality to cynically celebrate co-existence, through the convergence of Hanuka, Christmas and Id al-Fitr as ‘the feast of all feasts for peace and coexistence’, they were continually robbed and abused by 9 Irgun and Stern Gang members, with the Hagana standing by and doing nothing (Pappe 2006: 207-8). These days, above al-Istiklal mosque and below the largely Jewish neighbourhood of Hadar HaCarmel stands the large demolition site of Wadi al Saleeb. Israelis know it mostly because of the 1959 ‘riots’ by the North African Jewish immigrants settled there in the late 1940s, but few remember it was a Palestinian Muslim quarter (Weiss 2007). Over the years there were various plans to turn it into an artists’ quarter, but as the Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik (2007) reflects, ‘fifty years have passed and a new quarter has not yet been built for the Palestinians in Haifa’. In May 2008, Haifa was reported to have skipped the property boom experienced by other Israeli cities: ‘downtown Haifa has gaping or blocked windows, in Hadar Ha Carmel many houses with sea or mountain views have “for sale” or “for rent” signs, and there are no buyers ... Haifa is a city without a future’ (Zohar 2008: 34). Paradoxically, Haifa’s economic crisis means a Palestinian revival: in place of Jewish inhabitants who are deserting the city in large numbers, a new Palestinian middle class is moving in. The development of modern Palestinian-owned restaurants and coffee houses in the German Colony, where Haifa’s new Palestinian inhabitants are changing the urban landscape is encouraging. For me Haifa is a lieu de mémoire, and perhaps also a lieu de silence, where I attempt to co-memorate Haifa’s Palestinian past together with my Palestinian friends and colleagues, dreaming the impossible dream of a secular democratic Palestine. But this is another story for another day.

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My father, his daughter If Cixous (1997) is right and all narratives tell one story in place of another story, then perhaps telling the story of the Nakba is telling our own, my own story. Does telling it as an autoethnography and speaking about Father rather than about the Palestinian survivors of the ethnic cleansing of Haifa make me as guilty as Katz, who, according to Samera Esmeir (2007), argued that the contradictory, recursive testimonies of the survivors of the Tantura massacre constituted a ‘failure’ of memory? Should I have concentrated on reading the testimonies of Palestinian survivors of the fall of Haifa instead? Or would doing this perpetuate their victimhood? There are many dilemmas involved in representing my father through my ‘ethnographic I’ (Ellis 2004). Like Ellis, I was always predisposed to thinking like an ethnographer -1 always loved eavesdropping on people’s conversations on the bus and peeping into people’s houses, making up stories about their lives. I identify with Ellis when she writes: ‘as a child, I constantly listened in on conversations among adults ... I suspect my ethnographic instincts were present from a young age ... my taste for ethnography makes life interesting, as long as I remember to balance living in the moment with writing and reflecting on the moments in which I’ve lived’ (Ellis 2004: 333; see also Lentin 1989 2000). My father is not available to me to check his version of events, nor am I able to ask his permission to quote from his letters to me. This chapter is ultimately about my own Damascene trajectory, from an ‘ordinary’ Israeli postHolocaust childhood to a lifelong opposition to Israeli state policies and solidarity with the Palestinian ‘other’. Apart from his letters to me and a few faded family photographs, I have no documentary evidence to substantiate my strong sense that my life and political commitment have been shaped by his life experiences (though not his politics). I therefore borrow from Ellis (2006) the notion of taking ‘retrospective field notes’ of my life. Auto/biography and autoethnography are not history but rather representations of past events, assisting us in constructing, rather than reconstructing, lives (Stanley 1996). Because I have no access to his version of events, this is my attempt to construct a fraction of my father’s life in relation to the political issue which has been central to mine. Father migrated to Palestine not as a Zionist idealist but as a child whose father could not make a living in interwar Vienna. In Jerusalem he became a Zionist, assuming a sabra identity, bequeathing me a conviction that, as the Israeli popular song goes, ‘we have no other land’. But growing up in Haifa, where some Palestinians were allowed to remain, albeit concentrated in their downtown ghetto – their presence but also their absence meant that seeds of doubt were sown early on. My retrospective field notes include having heard, as a young child, the stories that Mother’s relatives were telling about their Holocaust experiences. They spoke hurriedly and compulsively, in whispers, because they didn’t want us, the ‘real

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Israeli’ children, to hear. I visited Mother’s and Father’s birthplaces in 1984 and documented these stories in Night Train to Mother, a novel about the lives of the women of my mother’s family (Lentin 1989). My retrospective field notes also include, I believe, having heard what I can only think of as ‘the background music’ of the Nakba. I heard it through Mother telling me repeatedly throughout my childhood how she used to mutter ‘I hate Arabs’ as she rushed to the pistol Father had hidden for her in the linen cupboard when he was on Hagana guard duty, while holding me, her asthmatic baby, and minding his old mother who was living with us. ‘Arabs’ became an object of fear, but also of scorn. That ‘background music’ of pre-1948 Haifa and of the 1948 war was also played through the fragments that Father never spoke about, but which were ‘in the air’. My retrospective field notes record us as being an argumentative family – from a very young age Father called me ‘the leader of the opposition’, a tide he kept reminding me of whenever I voiced any disagreement; as soon as we children were able to hold an argument, the family held regular debates around the dinner table. Did this preordain my lifelong practice of dissent? He was a strict parent, sparing with his praise. But he and I spoke about art and history, and in my teens I joined him and a group of amateur painters and we commented on each other’s works. He helped me research a final history of art school project on cubism, a twentieth-century art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which explored how, in cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analysed, and reassembled in abstracted form. I believe my propensity to analyse, take apart and deconstruct - a theoretical approach I employ in my teaching and research - dates back to my early discussions with Miki. When I became concerned with social issues, I asked him how does one depict poverty in painting and he pulled out a book of drawings by the German artist Georg Grosz, who not only depicted disabled, crippled, and mutilated victims of the catastrophe of World War I, but also portrayed the collapse of 10 capitalist society and its values. As Miki explained, Grosz’s crude caricature line drawings of corpulent businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were one way of painting poverty. But when it came to Israeli politics, I was always arguing with him. After the 1967 war our political arguments became bitter. My retrospective field notes also remind me that towards the end of his life, Father was becoming despondent. His huge achievements – he designed and manufactured the first Israeli-made washing machines, although his electrical manufacturing business did not prosper as he struggled with incompatible partners and cash flow, and he was an accomplished painter - did not assuage his sense of disappointment. Towards the end of his life he experienced clinical depression, although, due to stigma and shame, it was never explicitly named as such. His depression gives me another key to understanding the deep melancholia experienced, as I argue in this book, by Israelis who came to love the land which, in order to own it, had to be cleared of its former inhabitants.

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Many Israeli perpetrators carried the trauma of the expulsion for many years. Thus, Ha’aretz journalist Eliahu Zehavi, who participated in the expulsion of the Palestinians of Bissan, wrote a short story about the expulsion, published in Ha’aretz in 1958. He might have been forgotten but for Laor who republished the story in Mita’am – Review of Literature and Radical Thought in May 2008, together with a letter from Zehavi in which he wrote how traumatic the expulsion had been for him (Laor 2008: 15). I will never know whether Father too harboured such trauma and whether his melancholia returned him to the fighting in Haifa. When I asked Mother why they never spoke about his depression, she said that she was trying to stop me arguing with him, trying to explain that he was suffering, but I refused to understand. I got married and migrated to Ireland and in the last year of his life, Miki wrote me a series of letters, the first just after the outbreak of the 1973 war, his last war. Gertz argues that whilst the 1973 war seems to have unsettled the confidence of victorious Israel, this confidence had already been eroded between the 1967 and 1973 wars. She examines Israeli literary works which ‘plumb the depths of the anxiety about the Shoah and [Jewish] destruction, the sense of isolation in a hostile world, the cyclical movement of history – without past or future, and the desperate, painful expectation of [what poet Yehouda Amichai called] “the great happiness” lurking “behind it all’” (Gertz 1995: 119). My father’s letters, honest and painful articulations of his love for me and my daughter, his deep commitment to Israel, but also his doubt, worry and despair, reflect this anxiety with aching precision. They resonate for me with Nachmani’s fluctuations between revulsion at Jewish acts of wanton murder and looting and his conviction that the Jewish struggle was ‘hard, but moral’, but that ‘if we are to establish a state, we need ... to prevent unjust revenge’ (Morris 2000a: 71). Research always entails appropriation, and to regard his letters as mine to cite is problematic but perhaps not more so than the permission we researchers assume when we use quotes from our informants. However, these letters which speak of his reactions to the war and ‘the state of the nation’ are crucial to my attempt to understand him, to understand me. After his death, my mother and I have often talked about his depression and doubts, and about my politics, and I can only hope that he would have agreed to my quoting some fragments of his letters (emphases added): I was hoping they would mobilise me, but apparently they have enough old men. (7 October 1973) What happened this time was really awful; the fate of the nation was in doubt. There is no family in the country who has not experienced losses ... everywhere you go you see tearful eyes. Let us hope that the losses help us to move towards peace. (8 November 1973)

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We are all looking for developments in Geneva, even though the opening speeches were not encouraging. Hatred sounded from every word and I feel we are really isolated. This makes me think that perhaps we are to blame after all. (23 December 1973) As far as I am concerned, I am tired of all the victories. I would like to think that the future might bring some peace, although I am not too sure if we can live in peace. It seems to me that if the Arabs want to liquidate us, all they have to do is make peace with us. (22 January 1974)

By May 1974 his doubts became more explicit: Hard times ... on the one hand, the war with Syria continues, on the other, the internal situation contributes to our political isolation ... Is humanity really that cruel and selfish, or is the blame on us? I find it hard to decide ... After all, we did not seek wars and conquests, we merely wanted to live in peace with our neighbours, or perhaps I am wrong and we sought imperialism and oppression? ... I can see no ray of hope and I don’t know what to do, how can a simple man like me express his views. (22 May 1974)

I did not keep my letters to him. I was a young mother, expecting my second child and struggling with life as a migrant in my adopted country, but I want to hope that my letters were kinder than my arguments with him had been. In his last letter, written just four days before he died of a sudden coronary, my father, who had just been allowed to enlist in the Civil Guard, described 11 himself somewhat ironically as the ‘brave soldier Schweik patrolling the streets once a week ... they may even give me a gun’ (23 June 1974). It is as impossible for me to fathom what went on in Miki’s mind in these final days as it is to gauge the extent of his participation in perpetrating the Haifa Nakba. Probably, like Yosef Nachmani, he believed in the justice of the Zionist cause while at the same time feeling moral revulsion at the excesses of the power- hungry army. But, like Nachmani, my father bore responsibility for his part in perpetrating the Haifa Nakba, and I, his daughter, must take on this responsibility. At the same time I believe that it was his legacy as a migrant and his assigning me the role of an oppositionist from a very young age that shaped my lifelong career of political dissent and solidarity with my Palestinian sisters and brothers. From this distance in time and place, it is Miki’s selfimage as the ‘brave soldier Schweik’, a comic World War I reluctant soldier, that helps me make some sense of his soldiering – making his Nakba days somewhat easier to equate with what Esmeir calls ‘the year of conquest’, whose survivors lived on out of death, ‘their memories, as articulated by the silences, the multiple experiences, the various perspectives, are all indicators of the historical, of that which took place’ (Esmeir 2007: 249).

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Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11

Ben-Gurion Street (formerly Sderot HaCarmel), is the old main street of the German colony founded in 1868 by members of the Society of the Temple which continued to exist until the Second World War. The Haifa municipality has gentrified the red- roofed German Colony houses (www.planetware.com/haifa/ben-gurion-street, last accessed 12/2/10). ‘Abroad’ (huz la’aretz, literarlly ‘outside the land’, directly translated from the German ausland) is a hugely significant term in Israeli culture. Laor notes that any study of Israeli literature should encompass the strong Israeli desire to travel across the sea (Laor 2008: 128). Even though I have been living ‘abroad’ for nearly forty years, the allure of ‘abroad’ still looms large in my conceptual map, hence my description of the new Haifa Palestinian cafe culture as ‘having the feeling of abroad’. In the 1970s my parents changed their surname Salzberger to Tsabar, the Hebrew version of sabra, the Arab name of the prickly pear cactus, an appellation used by both Israelis and Palestinians for natives of Palestine, but which for Jews has a poignancy as they describe themselves, like the sabra, as prickly on the outside, yet sweet on the inside (see Almog 2000, for a portrait of Israeli Sabras). Yiddish for ‘insubstantial man’ without proper occupation or business. The full verse reads: ‘But if it happens that the gate opens / and all my body cries: here he is! / I would be like a tree in the darkness of the forest / chosen by the light to reflect upon’ (Leah Goldberg, ‘Experience’). On the Israeli refusal to enlist movement, see, e.g., ‘New Profile - Movement for the Civilisation of Israeli Society’, http://www.newprofile.org (last accessed 12/2/10); ‘Courage to Refuse’, http://www.seruv.org.il/ (last accessed 12/2/10). Eli Aminov (2007) goes further, critiquing the Zionist de-urbanisation of Palestine as a governmental technology. Rees Williams, the Under Secretary of State’s statement to Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 461, p. 2050, 24 February 1950, cited in Pappe 2006: 93. Irgun and Stem Gang were right-wing paramilitary organisations banned by Israel’s first Prime Minister after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. I didn’t know then, nor did Father mention it, that Grosz joined the German Communist party in 1922, and, disillusioned by a trip to Russia later that year, resigned from the party in 1923, before becoming the leader of Berlin’s Rote Gruppe (Red Group), an organisation of revolutionary Communist artists that prefigured the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany (www.artchive.com/ artchive/G/grosz, last accessed 12/2/10). The Brave Soldier Schweik is a famous satirical novel by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek. Schweik is a comical figure, a low-born rogue serving in the Austrian army during World War I. The following lines typify Hašek’s irony: ‘Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination ... ’

5 The road to Damascus

As a young person I was an enthusiastic Zionist. I can remember myself as a child of 16 joining my father who was responsible for school syllabi, on behalf of the military government (because he was fluent in Arabic), some times walking through the streets of Ramallah or Bethlehem armed with a rifle. I have no doubt that my stay in Stanford University, where I did my PhD at the time of Sabra and Shatilla ... was my watermark. I was not really anti-Zionist, but I was full of rage and horrible guilt. Particularly because of a Palestinian dormitory neighbour from Nablus who was studying in Stanford. He refused to speak to me and this led me to soul searching. I returned home to the Intifada and began to deal more and more with my Mizrahi identity at the same time as opposing the occupation. I think this led me to where I am today. A Zionist for me is someone who differentiates between the occupation of 1948 and of 1967. (Yehouda Shenhav, Professor of Sociology, Tel Aviv University, personal communication, February 2008) I recall the first time I felt the tragedy of the Palestinians penetrate my Zionist shield. Five years after the war ... I went to inspect the village well of Rana, near Beit Jibrin. I remembered the place from a trip with my father, and the desolation – the empty houses still standing, the ghost of a village once bustling with life - stunned me. I sat with my back against an old water trough and wondered where the villagers were and what they were feeling. (Meron Benvenisti 2000: 3)

Introduction Any attempt to understand the contemporary use of the term Nakba among 1 left- leaning Jewish Israelis requires tracing the development of the historiography of this contested term which I deal with in Chapter 6. In this chapter I discuss the construction of the reawakening of the Israeli Jewish memory of the Nakba as a ‘road to Damascus’ tale told by post- and antiZionist Israeli Jews – the realisation that the story of the birth of the state was not a story of liberation and redemption but involved the colonisation and

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subjugation of another people. For Benvenisti and for me, as for many others, that moment of realisation dates back to the wake of the 1967 war. More commonly, however, the realisation came after the 1973 war, the 1982 Lebanon war, or the first Intifada. The 1973 war, which took Israel by surprise, led to a widespread protest movement, directed at the mismanagement, of the war by 2 Israel’s military and political leaders. The 1982—2000 Lebanon war, the first not to be perceived as a ‘no-choice’ war, led to the Sabra and Shatila massacre in which the IDF allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen to enter two Palestinian refugee camps and massacre civilians inside, leading to mass 3 protests by Israeli Jews throuhgout Israel. The first Intifada (1987—93) brought television pictures of Israel’s brutal oppression of the uprising, leading many Israeli soldiers to testify as to the realities of the occupation and giving birth to the Israeli women’s peace movement with organisations such as ‘Women in Black’ (Svirsky 2002). In reaction to these three cataclysmic moments an increasing number of Israeli Jews ‘saw the light’, leading, inter alia, to a widespread movement of draft resistance, spearheaded by groups such as Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse,4 both peace groups of former soldiers campaigning against the occupation by backing soldiers who refuse duties of a repressive or aggressive nature, and New Profile, a feminist group backing draft resisters, 5 whose mission statement reads like a classical ‘road to Damascus’ narrative. It is perhaps ironic to refer to this very Jewish process of realisation as ‘the road to Damascus’, a charged Christian term denoting ‘a religious conversion, a revelation, especially about one’s self, denoting a change in attitude, perspective, or belief and referring to the biblical story of St Paul, who converted from Judaism to Christianity and from persecuting Christians to being one of them, while travelling on the road to Damascus.6 Despite its Christian connotations, this term fits the collective narrative of ‘seeing the light’ at different levels and stages of Israeli political awareness, examples of which I cite throughout this chapter. This collective narrative provides a crucial background for tracing the development of the Israeli-Jewish narration of the Palestinian Nakba. I begin this chapter by attempting to fathom the preoccupation of Israeli scholars with Palestine and the Palestinians and asking, after Saul Friedlander’s theorisation of Nazism, kitsch and death, whether the Israeli left’s preoccupation with the Nakba might harbour a degree of prurient fascination with Israeli atrocities. I go on to outline the distinctions between the terms anti-Zionism and post- Zionism – the advent of the latter in 1990s public discourse having arguably paved the way for contemporary Nakba co-memory.

Erasures and silences It all started long ago, in the Mekor Baruch neighbourhood of Jerusalem. When I was ten, at the end of the Mandate period, our landlord was an Arab named Jamil ... . The whole neighbourhood was mixed. And in my dad’s place of work,

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the Jerusalem municipality, Jews and Arabs worked together, too. My dad took me on outings in and around Jerusalem. I remember Palestinian Ein Karem very well, and Malha, and Lifta and Beit Mazmil. So the Arabs were never strangers to me. They were always part of my landscape. Part of the country. And I never doubted the possibility of living with them: house to house, street next to street. At the end of 1947 they disappeared [...] So, in the 1960s, when we talked about the principle of equality in Matzpen, I wasn’t just thinking in terms of socialism or a universal concept. With me it was baladi, my country, the scents and memories of my childhood [...] And the feeling that without them this is a barren country, a disabled country, a country that made an entire nation disappear. (Haim Hanegbi, former Matzpen member, in Shavit 2003)

One of the questions I attempt to answer in this book is the extent to which, similar to the amnesias involved in narrating the Holocaust in Israel’s early years (though for different reasons – see Lentin 2000; Segev 2000), another, longer lasting, publicly directed and intentionally constructed amnesia has prevailed in Israeli Jewish society in relation to the Nakba. This disavowal – assisted by the nation-building narratives of the 1948 war written by its victors, through the careful construction of a narrative of the old-new nation resurrected from the ashes of the Holocaust, side by side with the narrative of the Palestinians being responsible for their own expulsion (after all, Israelis tell themselves, we begged them to stay, didn’t we?) – led to the absence of the story of the Nakba qua Nakba from the consciousness of the majority of Israelis. This erasure was supported by the way in which ‘the changes in the landscape wrought by the war have been disregarded and a convenient “time-out” created in the historical-geographical continuum’ (Benvenisti 2000: 229-30). Kadman (2008) documents the erasure of the Palestinian landscape as a deliberate strategy of seizing Palestinian lands, aimed at ensuring the security of Jews, ‘redeeming’ the land and constructing a pioneering agricultural Jewish society. The State of Israel continues to work towards the ‘Judaicisation’ of the land to this day by establishing Jewish settlements on Arab lands, many confiscated by the state, and altering the landscape by planting imported fir forests so as to ‘Europeanise’ the Israeli landscape (KKL 1999: 23). This prevents land use by ‘internal refugees’ and eradicates the Palestinian heritage, refusing to name the sites of most of the depopulated villages while Hebraicising the names of the rest – thus obscuring the historical existence of the villages as landscape and heritage entities (Kadman 2008: 67). Benvenisti documents the collusion in this act of erasure by Israeli geographers, who, while not denying the Nakba, justify it by arguing the unique nature of the Israeli circumstances (‘the trauma of the Holocaust’), while at the same time portraying these circumstances in universal terms (Israel is similar to ‘most other dominant settler societies’) (Benvenisti 2000: 231). With the opening up of archives and the work of the ‘new historians’, the Nakba is gradually beginning to be recognised as a historical fact. By now,

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many, though definitely not all, Israeli Jews have accepted that the Nakba did happen. Many even name it as such. In 2007 former Minister for Education Yuli Tamir proposed introducing the teaching of the Nakba in Israel’s Palestinian schools, which led to a public outcry that this was ‘political masochism’ (Stern 2007). In 2009, in a speech in the President’s conference for democracy Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin said that the establishment of Israel was accompanied by much suffering and genuine trauma for the Palestinians (Ha’aretz 2009). Despite this gradual recognition, my sense is that the majority of Israeli Jews prefer to accept Morris’s contention in the 2004 interview with Ha’aretz, that while the ethnic cleansing of Palestine did happen, it was a necessary evil: ‘there are historical circumstances in which ethnic cleansing can be justified ... when the alternative is between ethnic cleansing and genocide, the genocide of your own nation, I prefer ethnic cleansing’ (Shavit 2004). Though he claims to be the pioneer in this work, Morris admits (2000a) that he ignored earlier publications by Israeli academics such as Yosef Gorni and Baruch Kimmerling and journalists such as Uri Avneri and Amos Elon, who had debunked accepted Israeli-Jewish discourse and collective memory long before him. Nor does Morris mention Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel, whose analysis of Israel as a coloniser predates the contemporary debate. Matzpen was founded in 1962 as a socialist anti-Zionist group that split from the Communist Party in disagreement with prevailing Soviet socialism. In 1964 Matzpen was joined by a group that included some Arab members that had split from the Haifa branch of the Israeli Communist Party (ICP), who brought along other Arab and Jewish activists from Haifa and the Galilee. This group joined Matzpen on the basis of the following jointly agreed principles: rejection of Zionism, revolutionary socialism, rejection of the cult of the Soviet Union and its ideological and political implications, absolute rejection of Stalinism and the cult of personality, support for genuine international solidarity, support for the integration of Israel in a socialist Arab union on the basis of selfdetermination. Although its membership never exceeded a few dozen (with a supporter circle of a few hundreds), in the post-1967 period, Matzpen was subjected to vicious attacks in the media, and to state repression, especially against its Arab members (Torbiner 2003; Lev and Shenhav 2010). Matzpen’s analysis of Zionism as a form of colonialism (Ehrlich 2003: 75) predated the sociological analysis of Israel as a settler-colonial society (Kimmerling 1983; Shafir 1989; Ram 1993; Yuval-Davis 2002). Immediately after the 1967 war, Matzpen called for Israeli withdrawal from the newly occupied territories and opposed the attempt to impose a political settlement. While Matzpen’s analysis of the consequences of the 1948 war posited the Palestinians as victims of the collaboration between Zionism and western imperialism, it also centred on their plight as Zionism’s victims:

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The most immediate victims of the Zionist colonisation process that culminated in the establishment of the state of Israel were the Palestine Arabs, who were almost wholly uninvolved in the 1948 fighting. Most of them became homeless refugees; the fate of those who remained in the area held by Israel was hardly better. They have lived ever since under arbitrary rule and are subject to constant and severe repression. The land remaining in Arab hands is still gradually but systematically expropriated, often by administrative subterfuge, to make way for Zionist development. The Arabs are second-class citizens in their own country, (www.matzpen.org) I can trace my own Damascene moment of realisation to my encounter with Matzpen immediately after the 1967 war. During the war I and a group of friends who had not been enlisted for one reason or another, found ourselves roaming aimlessly around Jerusalem. We offered our services to the authorities but no task was found for us. We followed news of the rapid conquests through a friend’s father, the French radio Jerusalem correspondent, who had access to information blocked to most Israelis. As the artillery fire sounded, Eli and I walked the streets, dazed, somewhat lost, sleeping fitfully on the floor in a friends’ city centre apartment. One day we found out that our friend Miri’s brother, who the family had not heard from for several days, was killed. We were young and ill equipped to deal our first encounter with death. When the war came to an abrupt end, Eli and I followed the victorious troops into the Old City of Jerusalem, witnessing bloated bodies on the road to the ‘other side’— another shocked encounter with death. We kept sneaking across the lines. On the Via Dolorosa I found an embroidered perfume bottle on the ground – I am ashamed to say that I picked it up and kept it – the only piece of war booty I ever possessed. Then Eli joined his IDF unit, and I spent the first weeks after the war in a haze. Some weeks later I was sitting with friends in Soramello, our favourite Jerusalem bar. There was shooting on the northern border and I asked, naively, what the war was all about if they were still shooting. Matzpen member Arie Bobber gave me a quick lecture and the penny suddenly dropped. Never a member, I hovered around Matzpen, my political understanding influenced by its Marxist analysis, compounding my alienation from mainstream Zionist Israeliness, and I have been there ever since.

London-based Israeli sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis also cut her political teeth in Matzpen, the topic of her MA dissertation. For both of us, leaving Israel and the close-knit, family-like war and death environment enabled us to progress from that moment of awakening towards political realisation. Yuval-Davis writes: ‘it was there that I heard for the first time an analysis of Zionism as a colonialsettler movement. And it was there that I heard for the first time details of what Israeli scholars called many years later the revisionist history of what actually happened during the settlement period and the establishment of the Israeli state. It took me years, however, to “translate” this intellectual and historical body of knowledge into an emotional one ... Only by being exposed to life in different, more pluralist societies, with different naturalised assumptions

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about human relations ... could I transcend the parameters of the social reality in which I grew up’ (Yuval-Davis 2002: 254). In this chapter I quote from Damascene accounts of post- and anti-Zionist Israeli Jews (obtained through published accounts and personal communication). In recounting Israeli anti-Zionist Damascene tales, the moment of conversion is crucial and how this is recounted indicates ‘our’ sense of self and current political positionality. Even though they construct a collective story, these tales are inherently heterogeneous, denoting political differences (between, inter alia, supporters of a secular democratic Palestine 7 versus those who support a two-state solution ), and kinds of activism (between those engaged in what can be loosely termed ‘peace activism’, those who engage in humanitarian work, those who refuse to serve in the IDF, and those who define themselves as political activists; in fact most activists are engaged on many fronts, participating in demonstrations, refusing conscription, assisting in humanitarian projects, holding checkpoint vigils and reporting IDF transgressions, engaging in political protest, dialogue groups and solidarity work, or – and this is true for many members of the Israeli resistance movement – forwarding emails). Other differences relate to ethnic location (Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi activists), gender, age, class, and geographical location (living in Israel or abroad). While I recognise this heterogeneity, I do not categorise the Damascene tales I quote from, in the hope that the narratives speak for themselves. I remind myself, however, that auto/biographical accounts are about the teller rather than the told, regardless whether we believe that our personal auto/biography is about empathy and solidarity. Ultimately, despite the good intentions, in much Israeli political activism, and in much Israeli research and writing on Palestine the Palestinians often get erased, their voice subsumed by the voice of the powerful colonisers, leading to a degree of appropriation that ‘we’ are all guilty of, despite our heterogeneous positionalities and good intentions.

Researching Palestine: kitsch and death? I came to the conclusion that Israeli society is best understood not through the existing inward-looking interpretations but rather in terms of the broader context of Israeli-Palestinian relations. (Israeli sociologist Gershon Shafir 1989) During my childhood in Jerusalem I took part in school and youth movement tours of Lifta, the emptied and half-ruined Arab village near the city [...] These visits left an impression that Lifta was an ancient place, a ‘khirbeh’, as it is was always deserted, mysterious, beautiful and somewhat threatening, with its silence and narrow paths [...] When I grew up I worked for a number of years in B’Tselem. I documented the human rights infringement of Palestinians living in the territories Israel occupied in 1967. My work exposed me to new information about the conflict. I understood that many of the inhabitants of the OPT [...]

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lost their world in 1948; that the Palestinians in Lebanon were not just another ethnic group [...] but refugees who had lived here until the Israeli victory in 1948; that Lifta is not just a picturesque ancient ruin but a home from which people, children, families were uprooted [...] My many tours through the country [...] confronted me again and again with destroyed sites [...] I could imagine the lives lived here years ago; the everyday hub of sounds and colours, children, domestic crafts, animals, water carrying which now is empty and silent, without any commemoration of the destroyed world and the reasons of its disappearance. This disturbing contradiction led me to this study. (Israeli scholar Noga Kadman 2008: 11-12).

In 1987 the Israeli sociologist Avishai Ehrlich argued that despite being a central process in shaping Israeli society, the Israeli-Arab conflict did not become a separate research topic (Ehrlich 1993: 253). Similarly, the Israeli Palestinian sociologist Elia Zureik (2007) cites Martin Seymour Upset’s (1964) remark that ‘almost no academic research and policy decisions about the problems of educational or social mobility ever deal with the Arab citizens of the country’. These are incredible assertions, bearing in mind the volume of research by Israeli scholars of the conflict and of Palestine and Palestinians: already in 1978, Smooha and Cibuliski’s annotated bibliography on the Palestinians in Israel contained 500 references. In 1993, influenced by the fall of the Soviet bloc and the Oslo Accords, Ehrlich wrote a postscript for Uri Ram’s essay collection on critical Israeli sociological perspectives, in which he predicted optimistically that the end of the conflict would create a new dynamic in Israeli and Palestinian societies. Ehrlich’s optimism reads hollow today, but there is a long list of Israeli researchers and research institutes dealing with Palestine and Palestinians. Not surprisingly, the Google list under the heading ‘Institute for Israeli Arab Studies’, which netted more than two million entries, includes research on security issues and peace studies. Understandably, researching ‘peace processes’ and ‘conflict resolution’ is lucrative business, yet the question why so many Israeli scholars are preoccupied with researching Palestinians keeps troubling me. This may sound surprising – after all, as historian Tamar Avraham says, ‘the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict in which we are all living and therefore it is healthy and normal that a lot of research is done about it’ (personal communication). It also may sound disingenuous, considering my own attraction over the years to writing about Palestine. In the book I co-edited with the Canadian- based Palestinian sociologist Nahla Abdo, I write about a book of conversations with six Palestinian women I published in Hebrew in 1982, the first book of its kind in Hebrew. I take myself to task for assuming that this was a dialogue between equals: ‘I was probably guilty of ... “white guilt” in trying to ingratiate myself to my interlocutors,’ I wrote in 2002, ‘like so many “progressive” Israelis, I thought I was conducting a collaborative, “progressive” project, while in fact my agenda was entirely mine, just as the resulting text, published in Hebrew (which meant that several of the interviewees were unable to read it), remained my intellectual property’ (Lentin 2002: 304—5). Today my research and activism

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focuses on racism and immigration, and I am more careful about researching the ‘other’, believing first that ‘in order for majority members to interrogate the experiences of minority ethnic and colonised peoples, we have to interrogate our own identity as “white”, and in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as Israeli Jews’ (Lentin 2002: 305), and second that the politically powerful must make space for the less powerful to conduct their own research. While researching Palestine often derives from empathy and solidarity, there are many other reasons for the proliferation of research by Israelis about Palestine and the Palestinians, including the tendency to Orientalise the Palestinian other (Said 1980), who epitomises the Orient-at-home as exotic, sensual, chaotic but also a desired ‘colonial fantasy’ (Yegenoglu 1998). Furthermore, and crucially, being educated in Arabic and Middle East Studies trains Israelis for military intelligence work: many Israelis researching Palestinians are security services veterans (Rabinowicz 1998: 134; Zureik 2007), contributing to the colonial power/knowledge regime. The close cooperation between the security services and Israeli universities and research institutes is an open secret. The relatively easy access to research funding on conflict resolution and ‘peace processes’ informs the choice of research topics. In his survey of Israeli scholarship on Palestinians in Israeli society, Zureik argues that although in much of the research Palestinian refugees stand for the conscience of Israeli society, many Israeli social scientists, influenced perhaps by the Arabists of the security industry, oppose the return of Palestinian refugees. For them, Palestinian refugees are outside the bounds of the legitimate collectivities which may assert their connection to the territories Israel controls. Zureik notes several trends in Israeli research on Palestinians in Israel, including the troubling proliferation of post-structuralism, deconstruction and postcolonial scholarship (prime practitioners of this line of work are Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir 2008a, 2008b; for a critique see Yiftachel 2009). Likewise Eyal Weizman argues that the IDF use of ‘swarm warfare’ in built-up urban areas of Palestinian refugee camps on the West Bank derives from a reconceptualisation – aided by postcolonial and poststructural theories – of military practices, illustrating the close relationship between postmodern theories and military practices (Weizman 2008a). Zureik (2007) insists that while useful, such perspectives run the risk of dwelling on the subjective at the expense of the objective, and depicting the Palestinians as what Rabinowicz (2001) terms a ‘trapped minority’ (see also Rosenfeld 2002), Another trend noted by Zureik is the proliferation of demographic studies, aimed at ‘maintaining Israel as a Jewish state in the face of high birth rates among the Palestinian population’, and ‘subordinating democracy to demography’. Of particular note here is geography professor Arnon Sofer of the University of Haifa who has a 8 made a career of tracking the Arab-Jewish population balance. ; Clearly, both ‘empathy studies’ and ‘control studies’ are problematic, albeit in different ways. As Hall (1997) reminds us, anthropology is deeply implicated in the construction of ‘races’ and racism. Anthropologist Dan Rabinowicz questions

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‘to what extent the categorisation of the other is a practice of self interest’ (Rabinowicz 1998: 9), but few Israelis researching the Palestinians – and this includes some of the most radical scholars - locate themselves reflexively, or question how their ethnic location influences their study. In her trenchant criticism of Israeli anthropology as ethnocentric, Israeli Mizrahi anthropologist Smadar Lavie (2003) argues that although Mizrahim and Palestinians form the majority of Israeli society, the academy (and anthropology in particular) is skewed in favour of Ashkenazi males, leading me to wonder to what extent Israeli research about Palestine is ultimately opportunistic. An example of what might be considered opportunistic research is the study of Palestinian art by Hebrew University professor of Art History Gannit Ankori (2006) which, although billed as ‘the first book on Palestinian art’, has been criticised for plagiarism ‘by both the League of Palestinian Artists as well as by the esteemed Palestinian artist and researcher himself, Kamal Boullata (who is also featured in the book)’ (Abu Kishk 2006). Tania Abu Kishk notes Ankori’s ‘self- awareness of the irony of an Israeli writing about Palestinian art, and at times there seems to be an effort to try to place herself also as an “other” in order to deal with this ... One wonders whether she is trying to find a way to deal with her own background and privilege and perhaps feelings of guilt as later she relates the story of her father trying to stop Jewish looters in 1948 from driving away with Palestinian property including carpets, artwork, furniture and a piano’, placing the (Israeli) self on the ‘right’ side of the power line. In contrast to the laudatory reviews written by Israeli critics Ariella Azoulay (2006) and David Green (2006), Abu Kishk’s review criticises Ankori not merely for ‘borrowing’ from Boullata, but also for separating the Palestinian artists analysed from the rest of the artists, ‘as if they are not part of the same world as the others [although a considerable proportion deals with Israeli perpetrators]. Breaking up and separating of these Palestinian artists from the other artists perhaps reveals Ankori’s “Israeli gaze” and is the very thing most Palestinians have tried to resist - their separation from each other and subsequent compartment-talisation. This is a particularly sensitive subject for Palestinians in Israel who have been already isolated from their Palestinian 9 brothers and sisters’ (Abu Kishk 2006). Rabinowicz (1998) argues that Israeli research about the Palestinians aims to provide a critique of Israeli society and culture, which he sees as reflexivity, even though he acknowledges that the proliferation of discourses of ethnicity is ultimately nationalistic, reflecting what Dominguez (1989) termed the epistemology of oppression. Talking about the other to talk about the self is ultimately racist. While the Saidian dialectic link between the Palestinians and Zionism certainly drives much Israeli research on Palestine and the Palestinians, in the postcolonial era anthropology plays a central role in defending ‘authentic’ cultures as a way of isolating the Third World. In his psychoanalytic essay on Nazism, kitsch and death, Friedlander (1982) fathoms why Nazism and the Holocaust, though past and gone, continue to

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haunt the western imagination through ever-increasing expressions, in history, literature, art, film, and television. His argument is that there is a ‘new discourse’ on Nazism that denotes a kind of aesthetic titillation borne out of the association of Nazism with death. Not everyday, banal death, but rather ritualistic, stylised, aestheticised death. Our contradictory attraction enables us, Friedlander argues, to digest the horrific past. Just as Hider hypnotised the German masses, Nazism, a dark mixture of kitsch and death, continues to fascinate us today even as we are repelled by its evil. Exorcising the past, according to Friedlander, does not mean being ready to face the past, but is rather a confrontation and the evasion of confrontation at the same time, which conceals the unbearable parts of that past. As much Israeli scholarly work on Palestine, the Palestinians, the occupation, and the Nakba concentrates on Palestinian victims rather than Israeli perpetrators (although a considerable proportion deals with Israeli perpetrators), Friedlander’s analysis leads me to wonder whether the melancholic preoccupation of some Israelis with the Nakba and the occupation – evidenced, among other things, by the relentless exchange by anti-occupation activists of electronic information about the horrors of the occupation – means reliving and revisiting what Laor (1995) calls the melodrama of the pain about the destruction of Palestine.

Post-Zionism, anti-Zionism On the issue of the nature of Zionism, it seems to me that thinking a bit about the nature of ‘Zionists’ (as opposed to concentrating on the abstract arguments regarding the ideology) reveals very quickly that they are not all ‘the same’. This is important from a strategic standpoint, because it means that with some we (by ‘we’ I mean those of us who are anti-Zionist) can work, and dialogue, and hopefully have them move in what we consider to be the right direction. As someone who was raised to be an ardent Zionist (in the unholy land), I know from experience that the changes I had to go through were gradual and slow. I don’t think this is unique [...] and I think that instead of striving for ideological purity, we should look for ways to be heard not just by those who are already part of the choir, but also by those who are moving in our direction. (Racheli Gai, Israeli political activist, email communication, 3 October 2008, jewswhospeakout_thestruggle.org)

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, much of the focus of the Israeli resistance movement comes from within Zionism, by Israeli Jews who call for ‘another Israel’. They focus on the evils of the occupation and on ‘peace work’, and hope that with the eradication of the occupation, ‘we’ can return to a pre-1967 ‘smaller’ Israel, and to the values of socialist Zionism and the ‘good old days’. However, suggesting that the nostalgic distinction between the occupations of 1967 and 1948 is the dividing line between Zionists and anti-Zionists, Yehouda Shenhav writes:

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Was (pre 1967) Israel really beautiful and just for the Palestinians within the Green Line, living under military government? Or for the Mizrahis, relegated beyond the urban power centres to become what was termed ‘the second Israel’? [...] the term ‘occupation’ is misleading [...] it assumes a state with clear boundaries and contiguous sovereignty [...] but instead we find porous sovereignty with blurred boundaries plus demands for self determination by Palestinians both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. (Shenhav 2008: 5—6)

While Shenhav’s dividing line runs between Israelis who oppose the 1967 occupation and those who invoke the 1948 occupation, for the veteran peace activist Jeff Halper, the fine line between protest and resistance demarcates the chasm between mainstream Zionism and what he calls ‘critical Israeli peace groups’. Halper traces his own road from oppositional work within Zionism towards what he describes as post-Zionism, rather than anti-Zionism, in An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossesion, Redeeming Israel (Halper 2008): For many years I was active in organisations that could have been described as ‘Zionist’ [...] Even the founding of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICHAD) in 1997, in which I took a leading role, did not signal the crossing of any particular ideological line [...] What pushed me beyond Zionism into a much more critical but contested and prickly political space was the demolition of Salim’s house. If, as the saying has it, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, then a post- Zionist is a Zionist who has witnessed a house demolition. (Halper 2008: 17—18)

Note the tide of Halper’s book; ‘redeeming Israel’ appears to be the point of the activism. The Palestinian other and his oppression by the Israeli house demolition policies seem to be subsumed into the anecdotal telling of the selfrealisation of the hegemonic Israeli ‘we’. Elements of my own self-realisation appear to have less to do with the Palestinian other and more to do with ‘our’ own self-definition. In 2000 Nahla Abdo and I were invited to present a paper on co-editing our book Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (Abdo and Lentin 2002) at the Israeli Association of Feminist Studies and Gender Research conference in Beit Berl College, on the theme of ‘difference’. Our joint presentation, on the real difficulties of putting together this collection, and about the differences between us regarding political issues such as nationalism and women’s place within nationalist projects, was met with a near-unanimous negative reception. In particular, declaring myself as ‘anti-Zionist’ in public in Israel for the first time met with mixed reactions. Some colleagues, once they realised that by anti-Zionism I meant opposition to Israel as an exclusively Jewish state, felt ‘sorry’ for me, while others were as visibly angry with me as they were with Abdo. However, ‘outing’ myself felt strangely liberating: I have come a long way in defining my own politics, although the trajectory has not been one-directional or one-dimensional. I have oscillated between the need

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for a ‘Jewish state’ for a ‘Jewish nation’ alongside a ‘Palestinian state’ for a ‘Palestinian nation’, and a rejection of all nationalistic aspirations, be they Israeli or Palestinian. The al-Aqsa Intifada and the racist, oppressive Israeli response have strengthened my rejection of narrow nationalisms, although I recognise the strong call for national self-determination by the oppressed. (Lentin 2002: 314

There are many differences – subtle perhaps, but differences all the same – between post-Zionism, which, according to Silberstein, ‘may be said to be engaged in a “space clearing gesture”, clearing spaces both for previously silenced voices and for alternatives to the dominant Zionist discourse’ (Silberstein 1999: 3—4), and anti-Zionism which, in eschewing the ‘post’ prefix, presents an alternative, rather than a sequel. As Yuval-Davis (2003) writes, post- Zionism requires a large measure of Gramscian ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Post-Zionism has been too complacently applauded, alongside the somewhat premature description of contemporary Israel as a pluralist, multicultural society. Most analyses of alternatives to the Zionist discourse assume, as does Nimni’s collection The Challenges of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamental Politics (2003b), a desire to downplay the influence of Judaism in the definition of the state and move towards the idea that Israel should become a secular state of all its citizens. Nimni locates post-Zionism within the current transitional period in Israeli social sciences and perhaps also wider Israeli society. A new generation of researchers, who no longer uphold the Zionist enterprise, take a critical look at the established ‘truth’ of Zionism. Among the central accounts in this strand is sociologist Baruch Kimmerling’s (2001a 2001b) discussion of the demise of the hegemony of secular Zionism. Nimni applauds the emergence of a ‘new’ group of historians, sociologists, and political scientists whose challenge to the accepted view of history-as-memory, and new genealogy of Israel as a colonial settler state has, he claims, undermined its legitimacy and raison d’etre (Nimni 2003a: 5—6). Post-Zionism can be understood as an Israeli version of globalisation (Ehrlich 2003), a display of middle-class individualism (Ram 2003), or a debate about the definition of social boundaries and the significance of the collective and the state. In other words, post-Zionism is neither ‘a break with Zionism nor anti-Zionism, but a search for a more equitable society in Israel’ (Nimni 2003a: 15). Ehrlich is the only one of Nimni’s contributors who historicises anti- Zionism in its liberal, religious and socialist forms. While liberal anti-Zionism abroad objects to the Jewish state because it sees Judaism as universalistic and anti-nationalist, in Palestine a new form of nativism, linked to the land of Canaan (and the Canaanite movement), born on the right, found its way to the non- Zionist left, which aspires to make Israel a state for all its citizens – Jewish and Arab equally – rather than a state for all the Jews of the world (Ehrlich 2003: 76-7). But it is Yuval-Davis’s conclusion (2003) that provides the most trenchant challenge to the discourse of post-Zionism, arguing that the suggestion that Israel has transformed into a post-Zionist, and hence pluralist, society is highly

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misleading. From its inception, she argues, the Zionist project was Janus faced – both a national liberation movement of oppressed and persecuted Jews from all over the world, and a settler colonial state, oppressing and excluding the indigenous population of Palestine. The very existence of a Jewish state in which all Jews can obtain automatic citizenship, she writes, means that Israel was a post- Zionist state since its very establishment. The emergence of the post-Zionist discourse in the 1990s is actually linked to an opposite phenomenon – the partial breakdown of the Zionist character of the state and the hegemonic Israeli- Jewishness. Yuval-Davis, analysing Israel as a settler-colonial society, cautions against what she sees as a complacent analysis of Israel as post-Zionist, liberal, and multicultural or even an ethnic democracy, which sees the construction of the ethnic domination of the Jewish collectivity as normal and compatible with the construction of Israel as a democracy. It is indeed the very contradiction of seeing the Israeli state as both Jewish and democratic which points us to inevitably theorising it, as I propose in Chapter 1, as a racial state par excellence. The prominence of the Zionist discourse means that the Israeli Damascene narratives I cite in this chapter often struggle with the tellers’ self-definitions. The narratives point not only to diverse trajectories towards realisation, but also to differing degrees of self-definition as post- or anti-Zionist. The overarching strength of the Zionist discourse means that these Damascene narratives can be positioned on a spectrum of proximity to distance from the Zionist core (see Racheli Gai’s narrative above, in which she, like so many other anti-Zionist Israeli Jews, relates her anti-Zionism to having been ‘raised to be an ardent Zionist’). Moreover, there appears to be a competition between Israelis who oppose Zionist policies as to who is the ‘best’ oppositionist, which makes it surprising that some of the people I quote are reluctant to call themselves ‘anti-Zionist’. On one end of the post-/anti-Zionist spectrum stand activists who cannot bring themselves to define themselves as ‘anti-Zionist’. This reluctance to name oneself as anti-Zionist might stem from the perception of anti-Zionism as deviant. As Jida Touma and Dina Zbeidy (2008) argue in their study of a group of anti-Zionist Israeli Jews and of media discourses on anti-Zionism, ‘anti-Zionists are seen as unwanted and deviant from the “normal”, and are usually not accepted. Members of anti-Zionist organisations were often regarded as being mentally ill’. They cite a columnist in the daily Ma’ariv (15 December 1972) who described those who belonged to the Red Front as ‘Drug users, sex perverts, and mentally deranged’. Touma and Zbeidy quote their interviewees as not feeling accepted by Israeli Jewish society and choosing their social circle carefully. One of their interviewees said that when you define yourself as anti-Zionist, you simply cannot stay part of the Israeli community (Touma and Zbeidy 2008: 22). On the other end of the spectrum stand people such as Uri Davis, whose theory of the shadow Israelis live under I discussed in Chapter 1. Davis, who in

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summer 2008 married his Palestinian partner in an Islamic ceremony, was reported in the media as a ‘post-Zionist’ who converted to Islam (Fendel 2008). His vehement response to being dubbed a ‘post-Zionist’ is utterly different to Israelis reluctant to name themselves anti-Zionists due to the perception of anti- Zionism as deviant: I am not ‘post-Zionist’ - I am anti-Zionist in the sense that I am wholly opposed to the idea of a ‘Jewish state’ as interpreted, projected and implemented by the Apartheid political-Zionist movement and the Apartheid state of Israel [...] My national identity is not ‘Jewish’ - my national identity is ‘Hebrew’, or more precisely, Palestinian-Hebrew; my citizenship is dual: the citizenship of the Apartheid state of Israel and the citizenship of the alleged democratic monarchy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Neither citizenship represents my loyal ties. I am loyal to the calling of my conscience and to the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My religious affiliation (or the absence thereof) is strictly my private business. (Davis, email communication)

A minority of the narrators link their political activity to their parents’ activism. Ha’aretz journalist Amira Hass, for instance, spoke about the influence of her parents’ Holocaust past and Communist Party membership, when she explained her choice to live first in Gaza and then in Ramallah to Harry Kreisler in Berkeley in 2003. For Hass there was no Damascene moment, rather her political commitment is due to her parents’ activism and her encounters with Palestinians: [My parents] were Jewish Holocaust survivors, members of the Israeli Communist Party. My mother had been a partisan in Yugoslavia against German occupation, but then she was deported to a concentration camp. My father was in the ghetto. I think I was raised in their personal attempt, an ideological attempt, to compensate for the terrible emotional and ideological vacuum and family vacuum created after the Second World War, with the loss of most of their family and friends, history and life; to compensate this with the hope that you can work on for a better world, where the principle of equality is recognised as a basis for human life [...] I grew up in a political family and a political surrounding. I was active in the Israeli left wing for years [...] but I always thought that our activity should be in the Israeli street with Israelis, and to explain to them and to try and promote the understanding that occupation is wrong. For this I didn't need to go and meet with or experience Palestinian occupation. But there was a change with the first Intifada, and I felt that all this kind of political activism led nowhere. (Kreisler 2003)

The Holocaust, a recurrent motive for oppositionist Israeli Jewish activism, is cited by many others. Broadcaster and feminist peace activist Hedva Isachar writes in the introduction to Sisters in Peace: Feminist Voices of the Left (2003): A number of Jewish activists cite the Holocaust as a significant memory in their lives. But contrary to the general discourse, they reject the sense of victimhood

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that developed in Israel as one of the lesson of the Holocaust, and refuse to allow anxiety to dictate their agenda. Instead they draw humanitarian conclusions from the past and emphasise the moral dictums that Jews – in face of their history - should follow. Most of the Israeli-born Jewish narrators have been exposed to the other, non- Zionist, point of view while abroad. (Isachar 2003: 16)

Isachar’s own realisation narrative starts in a ‘progressive’ Tel Aviv middleclass school, where she was allocated to the ‘Oriental’ stream: This was the name for Middle East Studies before Edward Said wrote about Orientalism – the construction of Middle-Eastern representations by the western colonial mindset. Our school believed in co-existence and organised meetings with Arab students from Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Haifa and Acco. I cannot remember being overburdened with details about their past or their present lives. Nor were we bothered by the fact that they were living under military government [...] My crisis came when, during my army service, the intelligence unit discovered that another female soldier, who was also my classmate, continued to correspond, despite the explicit prohibition, with a young Arab boy she had met during our school encounters. The discovery evoked such a scandal as if a dangerous spy ring had been uncovered. (Isachar 2003: 18)

Isachar’s contributors are either middle-class Ashkenazi academics or Israeli Palestinians, none are Mizrahi women. Most of them grew up in Zionist homes and were educated in what they described as political, but tolerant, families. Most described a process of ‘getting over’ the Zionist narrative, or of a ‘fissure’ in what was considered not one narrative amongst many, but the one and only national narrative. Their Damascene realisations happened in their late teens, during their military service, while studying abroad, following an encounter with a book or an idea, or with people who thought ‘outside the box’. US-born feminist peace activist Gila Svirky, one of the contributors to the Abdo and Lentin collection, recalls (2002): My journey into the radical left began in the non-Zionist right [...] But while my school and synagogue ignored Israel, my mother was a passionate Betar Zionist, a follower of Jabontinsky, who saw the Jewish state as extending to ‘both sides of the Jordan’ [...] I did not understand the relevance of this in my own life when I moved to Israel in 1966 – under my mother’s fervour – until the war one year later brought about the occupied territories and the rise of the settler movement. I briefly flirted with the idea of moving with my friends to a settlement near Jerusalem [...] but something stopped me. To this day, I don’t know what that ‘something’ was [...] The more thoroughgoing radicalisation and feminisation of my politics began with Women in Black in Jerusalem which I joined on its third vigil. Standing week after week with those women [...] and a progressive politics of peace was not far behind, as the Intifada made explicit the misery of the Palestinians under occupation. (Svirsky 2002: 234-5).

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The journey to anti-Zionism of the Jerusalem-based political activist Nitza Aminov, on the other hand, epitomises many elements of the anti-Zionist Damascene trajectory: I was born in 1947 and grew up in a small moshava [early agricultural settlement [...] not the labour movement, but rather what was called ‘General 10 Zionists’. My home was very right wing – my parents supported Begin and opposed the trade union movement. Mine was ‘the first generation to redemption’; we were told that the Jews who perished in the Holocaust more or less got what they deserved because they were not Zionists. I belonged to the ‘Labour Youth movement’ and there too the atmosphere was very nationalistic. One summer, between grades eight and nine, in summer camp, we were taken on a tour above the Lake of Galilee, where we saw the fields tilled by the kibbutzim and our leader told us proudly that the kibbutzniks ploughed close to the Syrian border so as to provoke the Syrians to shoot, so that the Israelis could retaliate and take over more lands. I remember thinking this was terrible, though my classmates thought it was great [...] At 18 I arrived in Jerusalem, where I met a group of people who held critical views. Later my former partner introduced me to the ideas of the Canaanites [...] During the 1967 war I was still in the army. I remember the pre-war anxiety and the euphoria of victory. I was mostly confused. I remember my first visit to the Old City, and I found it difficult to look at the white flags that were still flying on some of the houses. When I said that the traders seemed delighted, my partner explained that Jerusalem was a traders’ city – they had dealt with the Turks, then the British, and now with the Israelis. This did not make me feel any better, and very shortly after this I stopped visiting the Old City [...] In 1968 we married and were offered a cheap apartment in Ramat Eshkol, my response was that I would not buy an apartment on occupied land; anyway I believed these lands would soon be returned [...] After the 67 war I became close to Matzpen, the only organisation with an analysis of Zionism, where I learnt about socialism and Zionism. Yet I found it difficult to accept the ‘anti-Zionist’ analysis. I remember saying that accepting the anti-Zionist analysis meant negating the state as it was – not an easy process [...] Until the early 1970s I believed that the occupation was temporary but I gradually understood that it could last many years. Matzpen spoke about a socialist Middle East including self-determination for Jews and Kurds. One of the movement’s splits led to the birth of ‘the Workers’ Alliance’ which advocated a secular democracy (according to the analysis of the Palestinian section in the Fourth International). Although since 1974 I reduced my political activism for personal reasons, I have defined myself as ‘anti-Zionist’ for many years, and I have no problem believing that the state of Israel has no right of existence. For the past few years I have belonged to the ‘Committee for a Secular Democracy’. (Nitza Aminov, personal communication, May 2007)

It is important to remember that the Israeli resistance movement is by no means exclusively Ashkenazi, as suggested by Yehouda Shenhav’s narrative, which opens this chapter, and by Mizrahi activists Reuven Abarjel and Smadar

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Lavie (2006), discussed in Chapter 1. Outlining Mizrahi resistance in the wake of the second Lebanon war, which, Abarjel and Lavie argue, targeted Mizrahi and Palestinian Israelis, they propose that Israel has always compartmentalised its occupation into different categories, as if Gaza, the West Bank, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the Palestinian Diaspora were not all consequences of the 1948 Nakba and 1967 Naqsa. Yet even such a divisive strategy failed to diminish the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle for a homeland. The tags of post- or anti-Zionism are of little importance to Mizrahim, they argue, because As long as the western peace discourse does not designate separate categories for Mizrahi Jewry, the majority of Israel’s Jewry, for the Ashkenazi peace movements, and for Zionism, Mizrahi communities’ processual reworking into the region will lack the transnational aura necessary to render it possible. As long as the Arab leadership, not to mention the Palestinians, prefers talking peace with the ruling Ashkenazi minority - be it Zionists, post-Zionists, even anti-Zionists - Mizrahi communities will continue to view the peace discourse as part of the repertoire of exotic antics that the Ashkenazi cosmopolitan elite perform for the west. At the same time, they will continue to conceive of the Arabs, particularly Palestinians, only as lethal enemies. (Abarjel and Lavie 2006)

Conclusion In 1993, on the eve of the Oslo Accords, the Israeli novelist David Grossman published Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel, a book of interviews with Palestinians citizens of Israel (Grossman 1993).11 Having spoken to a variety of respondents, Grossman notes the precarious in-between position of Israeli Palestinians, who can neither hark back to a glorious past nor hope for a better future. At one level Grossman seems to understand the absurdity of the Palestinian existence in the Jewish State of Israel, even though his analysis may not be acceptable to Israel’s Palestinians, particularly those who, in recent years, have formulated their alternative vision in a series of constitutional documents (The National Committee 2006; Adalah 2007; Mada al-Carmel 2007). What interests me here, however, is not Grossmans’s analysis of the Palestinian existence, but his own reflections as an Israeli. After meeting with Dr Said Zeidani, native of the Galilee village of Tamra, who, in 1990, published a plan for autonomy for Israel’s Palestinian citizens in El Arabi, Grossman tells Zeidani that his vision of autonomy is an Israeli nightmare and Zeidani answers that Israel’s nightmares don’t interest him if they are at his expense (Grossman 1993: 188). Grossman listens, argues, responds, and is quite honest when he writes that what is depressing about the relations between the Jews in Israel and the Palestinians is that ‘the state of the Palestinians in Israel is so convenient for us Jews [...] it is easier for us to

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operate in such a complex situation when “our” minority is so passive’ (Grossman 1993: 296, emphases added). Yet, despite his understanding, despite the time spent listening and collecting what for him are often uncomfortable truths, Grossman concludes by admitting how. little he, ‘we’, know about the Palestinians in Israel and their aspirations for autonomy. Palestinians, he reminds us, remain invisible, avoided, regarded as a threat. Despite real friendships and political partnerships and alliances – ‘we’ often cannot remember ‘their’ individual names, and as a collective continue to call them ‘Israeli Arabs’, ‘minorities’, or ‘non Jews’. Grossman uses his observations – remember he published the book in Hebrew in 1992, a time of hope among supporters of the Oslo process – to envisage a better future. Writing as I do in 2009, in the wake of the Gaza war, I am much less sanguine. My point is that although so many Israelis research and write about Palestine and the Palestinians, although so much is invested in ‘knowing the enemy’, or, more recently, ‘understanding’ and ‘dialoguing’, and although there remains a kitschy but deadly fascination with the Palestinian other - the Palestinians themselves remain uncharted territory. The memory of their catastrophe is explained away, rationalised, even though today, long after Israel’s ‘new historians’ – to whom I turn in Chapter 6 – had opened the 1948 Pandora’s Box, there can be no more excuses.

Notes 1 2

3

4

The anomalous right-left divide in Israel tends to follow people’s political leanings in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian issue, not necessarily in relation to class consciousness. The protest against the Israeli government started four months after the 1973 war ended. It was led by Motti Ashkenazi, the commander of northernmost of the Bar- Lev forts and the only one during the war not to be captured by the Egyptians. Anger against the Israeli government (and Defence Minister Moshe Dayan in particular) was high, leading to the establishment of an inquiry, the Agranat Commission. Although it recommended the dismissal of the IDF Chief of Staff and several other IDF officers, public anger against the political leaders led to the resignation of Prime Minister Golda Meir in April 1974, followed by her cabinet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Yom_Kippur_War#Fallout_in_Israel, last accessed 14/2/10). The Israeli government initially declared that those critics who regarded the IDF as having responsibility for the events at Sabra and Shatila were guilty of ‘a blood libel’ against the Jewish state and its government. However, as the news of the massacre spread, the controversy grew, and on 25 September 1982 300,000 Israelis – roughly one-tenth of the country’s population at the time – demonstrated in Tel Aviv demanding answers. The protest, known in Israel as the ‘400,000 protest’ (the number of protesters was first exaggerated) was one of the biggest in the country’s history. Protests led to the establishment of the Kahan Commission of Inquiry which concluded that Ariel Sharon bore ‘personal responsibility’ and recommended his dismissal from the post of Defense Minister. But it was only after the death of Emil Grunzweig from a grenade attack hurled into a dispersing crowd of a Peace Now protest march, which also injured ten others, that a compromise was reached. Sharon would resign as defence minister but remain as minister without portfolio. Even though the commission ruled he should not hold public office, he eventually became Israel’s prime minister (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_ massacre#Media_and_public_reactions, last accessed 14/2/10). www.yeshgvul.org/index_e.asp; http://www.seruv.org.il/ (last accessed 14/2/10).

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6 7 8

9

10 11

New Profile’s mission statement is a classical ‘Road to Damascus’ narrative: ‘We, a group of feminist women and men, are convinced that we need not live in a soldiers’ state ... While taught to believe that the country is faced by threats beyond its control, we now realise that the words “national security” have often masked calculated decisions to choose military action for the achievement of political goals’ (www.newprofile.org, last accessed 14/2/10). www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/road_to_damascus_experience/ (last accessed 14/2/10). For a discussion of the one-state solution see Race Traitor 2005. Sofer is credited with masterminding Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan. In 2004 he wrote in the Jerusalem Post: ‘[I]t is going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam ... so if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill ... If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist’ (cited in Kibush website, March 2005, www.kibush.co.il/index_h.asp, last accessed 14/2/10). Interestingly, and unusually, Ankori has successfully sued two academic journals which published reviews accusing her of plagiarism. According to Boullata’s letter, published in a blog, ‘the appropriation of academic intellectual property equals the appropriation of land and territory in the field of political power. The fact that Ankori dares to appropriate information for herself matches the mode of action identified in the history of Israeli culture’ (Prush 2008). Zionim Klalim – a liberal right-wing party, member of the International Zionist Federation. The Hebrew tide was Present Absentees (Grossman 1992).

6 Historicising the Nakba: contested Nakba narratives as an ongoing process1

The work of the historian is temporary, not absolute, and historiography must be understood as accumulative, as every historian and every generation of historians adds another layer, another piece of information for an ever increasing basis of knowledge. (Morris 2000: 148). The Nakba, the disastrous uprooting from the homeland and the destruction of the villages, always existed in the personal and collective memory of the Palestinian citizens of Israel (Habib Buolos, cited by Elgazi 2001).

Introduction In Chapter 5 I discussed Israeli Jewish scholars, activists and writers speaking about Palestine in general as part of the construction of a specific Israeli-Jewish self. I now turn to a central strand of Israeli research on Palestine and the Palestinians, the revisionist histories of the 1948 war, spearheaded in the 1980s by historians Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim, and political scientist Ilan Pappe. Pappe, whose political credentials include robust support for Palestinian selfdetermination and the one-state solution, posits the importance of ‘history from below’ and of historical alternatives to Zionist history as a way of contributing ‘to a better coexistence in the torn land of Palestine’ (Pappe 1999: 6). This chapter starts by briefly juxtaposing the Nakba accounts of the Israeli ‘new historians’ with Palestinian narrations of the Nakba. While the early Palestinian accounts of the Nakba were written by people who were themselves part of the Palestinian population whose villages and urban quarters were depopulated and who witnessed the massacres, evacuations and population transfers, many early Israeli historians of 1948 were IDF officers, who wrote the history they took part in shaping. The gulf between so-called ‘progressive’ Israeli scholars and Palestinian scholars theorising Palestine was brought home to me during the ‘States of exception, surveillance and population management: The case of Israel/Palestine’ workshop held in Cyprus in December 2008. When the Israeli urban geographer Daniel Monterescu spoke

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about the Andromeda Hill project in Jaffa as an example of a ‘heteronomous’ gentrification project, built on ‘public lands’, the Palestinian sociologist Elia Zureik reminded the workshop that these ‘public lands’ were appropriated Palestinian lands. Moterescu’s response was to point (somewhat patronisingly, a point he also makes in his published work) to the ‘incongruence between the diasporic Palestinian imagination of Jaffa and the local lived experience of everyday life’ (Monterescu 2007: 163). Israeli Jews who participated in the 1948 war often display dichotomous sentiments. One renowned example is Amos Kenan, a ‘state generation’ writer who died in 2009. One of the perpetrators of the Deir Yassin massacre, he is reported in an a biographical novel written by his wife, the film scholar Nurit Gertz (2008), to have experienced both the traumatic consequences of what was a fierce battle and the guilt feelings resulting from the massacre of civilians. I write more about this in Chapter 8. The ‘new historians’, who exploited the opening of state archives to research the 1948 war, were too young to have partaken in that war – their studies are not based on personal memories; in contrast, the Nakba accounts of younger Palestinian scholars are rooted in their families’ memories and their own postmemory of the Nakba. The chapter then moves to literary forms of Israeli Nakba commemoration and discursive representation. According to Yochai Oppenheimer’s study of the representation of ‘the Arab’ in Hebrew and Israeli fiction (2008), Israeli Hebrew literature managed to bypass, if not erase, Palestinian history and especially the Nakba. However, in 2010, a collection of Hebrew poetry referring to the Nakba, written between 1948 and 1958, was published by Sedek, the literary magazine produced by Zochrot (Hever 2010), proving that Israeli poets did deal, albeit often in veiled terms, with the Palestinian catastrophe as it was taking place. As my focus is Nakba commemoration, rather than an extensive analysis of Israeli Hebrew literary representations of ‘the Arab’, I discuss briefly some accounts of the Nakba in Israeli literary narratives, from the early 1948 generation melancholic writings to works by contemporary writers who, I argue, in giving their Palestinian protagonists a voice, appropriate that very voice. Based on my observations about melancholia in Chapter 3 and of the narratives of realisation discussed in Chapter 5, I conclude by interrogating the identitarian duality of Israeli Jewish victimhood and guilt.

‘New historians’ and contested narratives Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People who branded him postZionist, who thought that his historical study of the birth of the refugee problem aimed to undermine the Zionist enterprise were simply wrong. Nonsense, Morris says, some readers simply misread the book [...] Therefore they reached the wrong conclusion, that when Morris describes Zionism’s most

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cruel actions in 1948, including the large expulsions, he was criticising it. They did not understand that the arch-documenter of the Zionist sins actually identifies with them, understands them, and thinks that at least some of them were inevitable. (Shavit 2004)

The accepted wisdom is that Israelis began telling the Nakba in the late 1980s with the advent of the so-called Israeli ‘new historians’, a term coined by the Israeli journalist Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion’s biographer, in a series of critical articles in Ha’aretz and in the American-Jewish monthly Commentary (Teveth 1989). The first major Israeli attempt to rewrite the history of the Nakba came from Simha Flapan (1987). His book was soon superseded by Morris’s landmark The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 (1987), based on an exhaustive trawl through the Israeli archives then available. The works of Ilan Pappe (1988) and Avi Shlaim (1988), seen as taboo-breaking and paradigmshifting, began an ongoing debate in Israeli academia (see Teveth 1989; Karsh 2000; Shapira and Penslar 2003; Shapira 2007). According to Shalim, the debate regarding 1948 began in a two-day conference at the Dayan Centre, Tel Aviv University in April 1989. The debate became a controversy between the ‘old Zionist version represented by historians, journalists and veterans of that war and the new version represented by Benny Morris and myself’ (Shlaim 1999: 176). Morris claims, however, that his 1988 article in the American-Jewish journal Tikkun was the first publication on the topic (Morris 2000a).This article (Morris 1988), and other works published in the same year, including Pappe’s Britain and the ArabIsraeli Conflict 1948–51 (1988), made a distinction between ‘new historians’ and ‘old historians’, many of whom were IDF officers. Chief among them was Nethanel Lorech (1958), the former commander of the IDF History Section and the author of an early book on the 1948 war. Other books, mostly published by the Ministry of Defence Publishing House, documented 1948 in relation to 2 specific brigades or specific locations. Early works by these ‘new historians’ shattered the Israeli consensus that during and after the 1948 war the majority of Palestinians either left their homes because they were instructed to make room for the invading Arab armies, fled in ill-informed fear, or departed along with the defeated Arab armies. Before the ‘new historians’, the accepted Israeli narrative was that the plight of the Palestinian refugees was neither the fault nor the responsibility of the Zionist leaders who supposedly greeted the emptying of Palestinian villages and towns as a welcome surprise. This myth was maintained in both academic and public discourse in Israel until the shattering of the Zionist consensus and the opening of the Israeli archives in the mid-1980s. This led to an ‘increasing sense among many Israelis that the maps of meaning provided by Zionism are simply no longer adequate’ (Silberstein 1999), or outdated. Interestingly, however, with the exception of Pappe, most of these ‘new historians’ maintained their Zionism, and saw their work, by being free of the

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worst errors of heroic Zionist narratives, as more suitable to a mature and selfconfident, or even post-Zionist, Israeli society, rather than an attempt to upset that society. Subsequent works by the ‘new historians’ and by others allow us to examine the tension between the facts they uncover and their political beliefs (Pappe 1992, 2004a; Morris 1994, 2004; Kimmerling and Migdal 1994, Kimmerling 2003; Benvenisti 2000). These can be usefully examined under the themes of responsibility for the Nakba, timeframes, and the issue of Palestinian subjectivity. Dealing first with responsibility: while the ‘new historians’, especially Morris, uncovered individual cases of expulsions and massacres as well as plans – notably Plan Dalet – for the removal of Palestinians, they were unwilling to accept the Palestinian contention that Plan Dalet was a Zionist master plan for ethnic cleansing. Interestingly, however, in a 2008 review of a book about the Palmach, Morris criticises the authors, all Palmach veterans, for not fully admitting the extent of Plan Dalet which was, he writes ‘a territorial plan for taking over the entire area allocated by the UN to the Jewish state’ (Morris 2008b). Accepting unambiguous responsibility for creating Palestinian refugees inevitably led to accepting responsibility for solving that problem, namely the right of return (Pappe 1988). Thus while Flapan (1987) does straightforwardly blame Israel for creating Palestinian refugees, most Israeli historians, following Morris, prefer to believe that ‘war and not design, Jewish or Arab, gave birth to the Palestinian refugee problem’ (Morris 2004: 588). Such a formulation allowed authors to present themselves as judiciously steering a middle line between Zionist and Palestinian narratives, and this line has become the new orthodoxy in Israeli schools (Raz-Krakotzkin 2002). This approach tends to be shared by Kimmerling and Migdal (1994) and to some extent also by Benvenisti (2000). Kadman shares this approach. Her 2008 study of the depopulated Palestinian villages in the Israeli-Zionist discourse follows Morris in arguing that ‘the inhabitants of half the depopulated villages escaped because of the military attacks; the others were expelled or escaped because they were afraid of attack, because a neighbouring village was occupied, because of psychological warfare or due to unknown reasons. In some villages the inhabitants were told to leave by Arab leaders’ (Kadman 2008: 16, citing Morris 1991: 592). This allows scholars to accumulate evidence about the expulsion of Palestinians while denying the existence of a pattern or a policy – an unwillingness that Said (1998) characterised as schizophrenic. Indeed Morris’s failure to ‘join the dots’ and see that the mass of documentation that he unearthed points to a policy of expulsion has been severely criticised (Pappe 1992; Finkelstein 1995) as has his failure to contextualise the events of 1948 within the overall framework of the Zionist plans for transfer (Masalha 2003). As discussed in Chapter 1, public denial takes different forms (Cohen 2001). In Israel, while revelations about more recent abuses (torture, administrative detention, death squads, taking civilian hostages, and collective

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punishments such as curfews, deportations and house demolitions) have been widely acknowledged as true, revelations about 1948 are far more threatening. You publicly deny what you privately know, yet, ‘every so often a public figure forgets to speak in code [...] Yitzhak Rabin (never one for simulation) would reply to right-wing hecklers demanding that Arabs should be expelled (“transferred”): “Don’t tell me about expulsions. No one has expelled more Arabs than I have’” (Cohen 2001: 159). In recent years, however, Israeli Jews have been somewhat more willing to accept the centrality of the expulsions, glibly termed ‘transfer’ (Morris 2002) and the fact that their state did indeed conduct systematic ethnic cleansing (Kimmerling 2003; Morris 2004; Pappe 2006).This may not simply be because it is no longer morally and intellectually tenable to deny this, but because such an acceptance can justify present and future attempts to transfer Palestinians (Pappe 2002, 2004a, 2006). Indeed, right-wing Israeli intellectuals are increasingly comfortable with the idea that their country was built on ethnic cleansing (Gutwein 2002) with Morris expressing his disappointment that the Nakba was not more thorough (Shavit 2004; for a trenchant critique of Morris see Finkelstein 1995). While Pappe may be exaggerating in saying that ‘the Nakba thus is no longer denied in Israel; on the contrary, it is cherished’ (Pappe 2002), it is nevertheless clear that acknowledging the Nakba is not linked to offering restitution to Palestinians. The link between restitution and commemoration is more complex, as the national leadership assumes a monopoly over the community and its property, as has been the case in the reparations received by the State of Israel from Germany after World War II. This link becomes more explicit with the juxtaposition of ‘population exchange’ and the Palestinian right of return posited in the 1970s by the PLO but also by the World Organisation of Jews from Arab Countries (Shenhav 2006a: 132). The second issue relates to timelines. The concentration by most Israeli historians on the events of 1948 when talking about the Palestinian refugee problem is striking. Focusing the debate on the specific events which led to vacating plots of land by specific groups of Palestinians – contextualised only by what fighting was going on in that area around that time – achieves two objectives. First, encapsulating what happened to the Palestinians within the narration of the military history of the war inevitably leads to the conclusion that the Palestinian refugee problem was a (regrettable) result of war – dubbed ‘collateral damage’ in the context, say, of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, the placing of the refugee issue within this narrow historical time frame closes the problem off from the present – it is presented as an episode of history which is now over, a position which accords with Israeli governmental policies that seek to dissolve the political dimension of the refugees’ dispossession (Piterberg 2001; Masalha 2003). Thus while pre-war continuities in transfer plans are grudgingly accepted, postwar continuities are not acknowledged.

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Non-Zionist scholars operate a different timescale and highlight the continuities between wartime policies and post-1948 ethnic cleansing. They treat the Nakba as the beginning of an ongoing policy of expulsion and expropriation, rather than a fait accompli which ended a long time ago (e.g., Karmi and Cotran 1999; Pappe 2004a; Abu Lughod and Sa’di 2007). Though hardly anti-Zionist, Morris is explicit in linking what he does admit was ethnic cleansing with the 1948 war. But in linking he also legitimates: ‘Massacres and rapes cannot be justified. They are war crimes. But in certain circumstances expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of ‘48 were war crimes. You cannot make omelette without breaking eggs. You must dirty your hands’ (Shavit 2004). Ophir critiques Morris’s use of the timeline argument, linking 1948 with the current consequences of the occupation. He argues that Morris constructs an enemy with whom Israel cannot compromise, ‘just as the occupation’s cages construct the terrorists [...] When Morris speaks about the need for transfer, he is not speaking of the future, but rather assists in constructing the transfer.’ Morris’s talk about Palestinian society as a sick society, Ophir writes, obscures the fact that if there is a disease, ‘the Israelis – soldiers, settlers, politicians and intellectuals like him – are the lethal virus [...] when Morris speaks of transfer he imagines, it seems, the return of the 1948 trucks. But under the Israeli occupation, the transfer goes on [...] through the demolition of thousands of homes, checkpoints and closures’ (Ophir 2004). In his 2000 book, Benvenisti partially adopts the same approach. However, in 2008, he makes a more explicit link between past and present. Commenting on the Saffyriyya march of return on Nakba Day 2008, he writes in Ha’aretz that many Palestinians were expelled from their villages long after the end of the 1948 war in order to make room for new Jewish immigrants. In January 1949 several hundreds inhabitants of Saffuriyya, included in the first Israeli census of population, were loaded onto trucks and transferred to neighbouring villages: ‘the authorities coveted the 55,000 dunams of the wealthy village and at the end of 1949 established a moshav on the lands. Saffuriyya’s present absentees settled in Nazareth, their houses overlooking the village of their birth. Fifteen other villages met a similar fate [...] The expulsion was not the result of local initiative, but rather of governmental policy’ (Benvenisti 2008). At the same time, Benvenisti argues that the ‘memoricide’ of the Nakba was so successful that it has disconnected any meaningful Palestinian link with the land, except for those Palestinians living in Israel. His aim is drawing a new Israeli map acknowledging the ‘white spaces’ which constitute the previous Palestinian presence and establishing a more meaningful Israeli connection with the land. What was lost, Benvenisti claims, needs a tombstone, not restitution. The third and most crucial issue in relation to the work of the ‘new historians’ is that of Palestinians as objects. By concentrating on the landscape both Benvenisti and Kadman largely evade the issue of Palestinian subjectivity. They are not alone in this: Beinin (2004) points out that for most ‘new historians’ ‘Jews are the subjects of history [...] Arabs are objects of Jewish

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action’. One can see this in Morris’s total reliance on Israeli sources. The eerie absence of Arab voices from his account, apart from the major methodological problems it poses, allows the creation of the refugees to be presented as a logistic and strategic issue. Morris’s refusal to deal with Arab sources does not merely stem from his inability to speak Arabic, but as Beinin and Laor (2004) separately argue, from contempt for their point of view. The refusal to regard Palestinians as anything other than objects corrupts most Israeli histories of the Nakba. Even when the suffering of the Palestinians is acknowledged and highlighted, they are rarely allowed interpretive possession of their history. Morris’s view that ‘there are no good Palestinian historians’ (quoted in Pappe 2004b) appears to be commonplace in Israeli academia (see also Gelber 2002). Likewise, Benvenisti (2000) appears to believe that there are no good Palestinian geographers, ridiculing their painstaking efforts to map the land as being ‘Palestinian sacred geography’ comparable to pornography in its obsession with an unreal image rather than the authentic landscape, which only those living in Israel can possess. Palestinians too have criticised this trend (see Boulos, in Elgazi 2001). While Palestinian writers cite both Israeli and Palestinian sources, and stress the need for academic dialogue, Pappe is exceptional among Israelis writing the history of 1948 in reciprocating. Stressing continuities between Palestinians inside and outside Israel as well as temporal continuities, he favours the Palestinian rather than the Israeli narrative, while at the same time trying to deconstruct and bridge both national narratives (Pappe 2004a). However, Pappe has been subject to a policy of exclusion amounting to an effective boycott (Podur 2005), leading him in 2006 to resign his position in Haifa University and accept a chair in the University of Exeter. It seems that most Israeli academics do not wish to cede interpretive control over the Nakba, which for all their differences, is geared towards severing those temporal and causal connections which challenges their present control over the land. Laor critiques the influence of the Israeli ‘new historians’ on the changing collective memory of the Nakba, reminding us that, contrary to the impression that these new historical narratives revealed new facts, ‘things were known, albeit covered, and the atrocities committed during the state’s early period were kept secret to this day. From its establishment the state took over the monopoly on memory [...] they wrote a history and then they wrote a nation for it’. Laor adds that what we have been witnessing recently is not the discovery of a deep secret, but the breaking of the agreement to remain silent [...] The issue is simple: during the war it was permitted to talk, in one way or another, about ‘returning the refugees’, for instance. And if the refugees in ‘returning the refugees’ were the subject, in ‘the right of return’ they become the object [...] In other words, Israeli nationalism became inseparable from the military terms through which Israelis perceive themselves. (Laor 1995: 132–3)

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While Israeli Jewish scholars began using the term Nakba only in the late 3 1980s, Palestinian scholars began describing the fate of their people during and after the 1948 war as ‘Nakba’ – catastrophe – as early as 1949 (Masalha 2005: 16; see also Elgazi 2001). I am not studying the Palestinian discourse of the Nakba, but it is useful to briefly survey the Palestinian historicisation of the 4 Nakba. The early chroniclers of the Nakba include the philosopher and liberal intellectual Qunstantin Zurayk (1948), historian ‘Arif al-’Arif (n.d.), Musa Al’Alami (1949) and Emile Al-Ghoury (1959), whose works make it clear that Palestinian and Arab writers engaged in much soul-searching in relation to the 1948 war (as did the Lebanese novelist Elias Khouri 1998), seeing the Nakba as primarily a catastrophe wrought by Arab inaction and collusion with Zionism and imperialism (see, e.g., Shlaim 1988), rather than only as a crime against humanity. These authors investigate the reasons why people left, the role of the local leadership and of the Arab states, trying to understand the reasons for the Nakba and offer ‘solutions’ – mostly through the notion of Arab unity. However, the argument by several Jewish scholars (e.g., Goren 2006; Rabinowicz 2007) that the Palestinians left due to the disorganisation of the local national committees, while not entirely wrong, is not the complete story, as some of the massacres (in particular Deir Yassin) were purposely perpetrated to effect the mass exodus. Furthermore, in contending with the Zionist claims that the Arab leaders called upon the Palestinians to leave, Al-Ghoury (1959) states that while there was indeed a call by the Arab states to transport children, women and old people from endangered areas in order to avoid needless loss of lives until the Arab armies entered, nowhere is there evidence of calls for a mass exodus. As for the Arab Higher Committee, it took many 5 documented steps to stop the exodus. A second wave of Nakba historiography appeared in the wake of the 1967 war. Revisiting his early work on the meaning of the Nakba, Zurayk (1967) argues that a new battle has been waged, and a new disaster has unfolded with even worse results than the 1948 disaster. He reiterates his analysis of the reasons for the Nakba in view of the new reality: the lack of Palestinian scientific development, 6 and weaknesses in the Palestinians’ ability to struggle for their cause. Mohammad Nimr Al-Khatib’s 1951 The Events of the Catastrophe, recounts the author’s experience as well as secondary eye-witness accounts of the catastrophe. This breaks new ground towards an emphasis on oral history which, Masalha argues, is a particularly useful methodology, due to high illiteracy rates among the agrarian Palestinian population (Masalha 2005: 5). Masalha cites Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi’s argument that ‘modem Palestinian historiography has suffered from “inherent historical biases” and that “the views and exploits of those able to read and write are perhaps naturally more frequently recorded by historians, with their tendency to favour written records, than those of the illiterate’ (Khalidi 1997: 89). This explains the centrality of oral history and interviews with Palestinian refugees to documenting the Nakba.

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A third wave of Palestinian Nakba historiography was published in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Abdulda ‘em’s book The Palestine Catastrophe of 1948: Its Origins, Reasons and Political, Intellectual and Literary Impact on Arabic Life (1998) provides an overview of the impact of the catastrophe on Arab politics from 1948 and until the present. He discusses the catastrophe’s impact on Palestinian history and society, and on the Arab political reality and culture. The central thesis running through Abdulda’em’s book is the similarity between past and present circumstances. The main and only difference, Abdulda’em argues, is that in the past the catastrophe gave birth to an all encompassing Arab resistance, whereas today, the catastrophe is giving way to retreat, submission and the sanctification of defeat. Mustafa Kabha’s essay ‘Towards a historical narrative of the Nakba: complexities and challenges’ (2006) charts the problems faced by Palestinian researchers and historians because of their history, such as the importance as well as the difficulties of using oral sources, and because of the fact that Palestinians never had the opportunity to work under an independent state or in independent institutions. Before the catastrophe, books were written under Ottoman and later British rule. Following 1948, most of the works were written in exile, under the constraints of Arab host states, which in turn reflected the specificity of the Palestinian researcher vis-à-vis each state. Elgazi documents several books on the Nakba by Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Jamil Arafat, a retired headmaster in the Gallilee village Mashhad, whose three self-published books deal with the history of the destroyed Palestinian towns and villages; and journalist Nabil Auda, whose book, Undyng Memory: Eye Witnesses Open their Hearts and Tell what Happened to them in 1948 – the Year of the Nakba was published by ADRID (Elgazi 2001). In 2009, Mada Al-Carmel, the Haifa Arab Centre for Applied Social Research, devoted the third issue of Al-Jadal to the Nakba, in which Ghanim (2009a) reminds us that the term Nakba denotes more than a historical disaster: ‘Nakba means the loss of one’s homeland, the collapse of society and the failure of one’s national project and dream. It also means living in exile outside the homeland, or estrangement within the homeland after becoming a citizen of a state that was erected on its ruins’. Ghanim’s (2009b) study of Palestinian intellectuals in Israel includes a fascinating chapter on Palestinian intellectuals writing the Nakba. Returning to the extensive use of oral history, Masalha argues that in the Palestinian case, oral history is not merely a methodological choice; its use can rather represent a decision as to whether to record any history at all. Here too Palestinians have to vie with the extensive institutionalisation of Holocaust memorialisation. In contrast to the Israeli Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, ‘there is no Nakba museum, no Nakba Hall of Names, no Central Database of Nakba victims’ names, no tombstones or monuments for the hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns ethnically cleansed and destroyed in 1948’ 7 (Masalha 2005: 7 ). Although oral history projects by Palestinian and nonPalestinian scholars (e.g., Said and Mohr 1985; ‘Issa 2005; Slymovics 2007; Davis

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2007; Sayigh 2007: Allan 2007) and documentation (e.g., Abu-Sitta 2000, 2004) are becoming increasingly popular, I question the tendency to focus on Palestinian victims’ and survivors’ testimonies to the neglect of the perpetrators’ accounts. But before I lose the plot, let me return to my central topic, the comemoration of the Nakba by Israeli Jews. The 1948-generation novelist S. Yizhar set the tone of the Zionist ‘shooting and crying’ duality, and the 1948generation poet Haim Guri provided Israeli Jews with a melancholic narration of their love-hate relationship with the Palestinian landscape; both were soldiers in 1948. Ever since, Palestine and the Palestinians, which Shohat (1991) theorises as the epitome of the Freudian repressed in the Israeli consciousness, have been a constant, if often hidden, theme in Israeli literary narratives as I now discuss.

Israeli Nakba narratives - from war stories to stories of yearning If historians do not write the history we poets will write it. Together we’ll gather our fathers’ history beads, we’ll collect the gems of our memory that we drowned in the ocean of shame, and we’ll exhibit them ... ... We’ll travel together into the belly of Zionism, our big history thief, until we might end the family silence, until we teach our children to speak Arabic (Almog Behar, ‘Our history’, Sedek 2008)

According to Opperheimer, despite their heterogeneities, references to Arab culture in Hebrew literature were underpinned by Orientalism, denoting contested ideologies of representation. But despite their heterogeneity, the texts Oppenheimer analyses represent limited possibilities of speaking about ‘the Arab’: ‘the polarities remain at the pragmatic-moral level (the texts deal primarily with the ways the Israeli Jew deals with the Arab, through separation, assimilation, initiated offensive or defensive combat, politicalmoral commitment. identification with the Arab’s suffering as a refugee and a wish to assist him, or distanced and apathetic observation etc) and never reach the cognitive level (what can be known about the Arab does not change significantly)’ (Oppenheimer 2008: 11, emphasis added). Oppenheimer delineates the portrayal of ‘the Arab’ in Israeli Hebrew literature, starting from Israel’s first two decades when the Orientalist metanarrative dominated Hebrew literature, a literature born of the post-1948 historical context and the uprooting of the Palestinian population. Early writers, many of them 1948 soldiers, expressed guilt towards the Palestinians, a guilt they attempted to cope with through shirking responsibility and depicting

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‘the Arab’ as cowardly, treacherous, and physically and culturally defective as opposed to the national signifiers of the (heroic) Israeli sabra (Oppenheimer 2008: 12). Despite the guilt, early writers such as S. Yizhar do not lose their Zionist idealism. Their successors, writers such as A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz do not focus on the 1948 war but rather on the ‘traumatic after-effects of guilt denied. The real Arab makes way for an imaginary Arab, whose role in this literature is to represent the violence of Israeli anxieties’ (Oppenheimer 2008: 13). The 1967 war led to forgetting 1948, and it was only after the 1993 Oslo Accords that the ‘centrality of the Nakba, the refugee experience and the idea of return signify the commitment of literary fiction to Palestinian history’ (Oppenheimer 2008: 15). Ultimately, however, Oppenheimer argues, the figure of ‘the Arab’ in Israeli Hebrew literature serves to construct a Jewish postnational identity ‘that crosses the boundaries of national belonging and “deserts” in order to oppose the occupation’. Several studies deal with Palestine and ‘the Palestinian’ in Israeli literature and cinema (e.g., Shohat 1991; Loshitzky 2001; Oppenheimer 2008; Rose 2005, 2008). Laor 1995 is an exception, dealing specifically with the silencing of the Nakba in Israeli literature), but to my knowledge there has been no comprehensive study dedicated to the Nakba in Israeli Jewish literature and art. A detailed discussion of the treatment of the Nakba in Israeli literary and cinematic works is beyond the scope of this study. In keeping with my focus on co-memory and melancholia, I sketch the trajectory from Yizhar and Guri’s melancholic narrations of 1948 to some contemporary insertions of the Nakba into twnety-first- century Israeli Hebrew narratives. I characterise it as a trajectory from war stories, where the protagonists are Israeli Jews who mourn the land and the lost Palestinians as they participate in the war against these very same Palestinians, to stories of yearning and loss, where, while Palestinians get a look in, Israeli Jews retain the speaking voice. According to Shaked (1993), nostalgia and schizophrenic duality are recurrent motifs of in Hebrew literature from 1948 onwards. According to Shaked, many state-generation authors ‘wrote nostalgic novels, expressing a yearning for better times, and criticism of the materialist transformations the Yishuv has undergone ...’ (Shaked 1993: 26). Shaked discerns two contradictory trends in the literature of what has been termed ‘the state generation’. ‘Born in a bi-national country, with “Arabs near home”, these writers ‘accepted the Zionist narrative unquestionably’, leading to the enforced forgetting (of both the diasporic past and the atrocities of 1948), and to sabra narcissism (Laor 1995: 145). On the one hand these writers had a deep conviction that the battle the Jews had to wage against the Arab world (including the indigenous Palestinians) was inevitable. On the other hand fulfilling the Zionist dream led to guilt about Jewish settlement in a strange land. However, ‘the guilt involved in the process of colonisation stayed in the background, and was expressed in the war stories

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of the two central writers of that generation, (Moshe) Shamir and (S.) Yizhar’. According to Shaked, ‘until the War of Independence the emphasis was on the war of existence and “liberation”, and the guilt feelings towards the victims of colonisation or occupation were suppressed’ (Shaked 1993: 30–1). Paradoxically, according to Shaked, the colonisers’ guilt came later, after the Israeli victories of the 1948 and the 1956 Suez war (Shaked 1993: 32). Shaked’s conclusion, however, expresses (Zionist) optimism: those who predict the disintegration of Israeli society, he writes, do not understand the potential of pluralism and of the unifying powers of ‘the tongue which [...] papers over the cracks’ (Shaked 1993: 42). While Shaked speaks of the unifying powers of the Israeli tongue to paper over the social cracks, Laor posits the ‘torn tongue’ of the Palestinians, arguing that Israeli novelists and poets collaborated in silencing the expulsions of 1948. Laor asks: ‘how did the version of “this is how we must remember things” become “this is how I remember things”, and even “this is how things were. Everyone said. I remember” [...] how did Israeli writers collaborate in turning subjectivity to objectivity?’ (Laor 1995: 118). While Shaked speaks of the schizophrenic split between guilt and support for the Zionist enterprise, Laor identifies a schizophrenic split between talk about ‘it’ – the expulsion – and admiration for the ‘beautiful souls’, who, like Yizhar, ‘shoot and cry’. No one tried to contradict the facts unveiled by the ‘new historians’, Laor argues. Rather the facts were used to construct a new narrative according to which we, Israelis, become the ‘besieged occupiers’, the subjects of our own melancholia: ‘Everyone knows’ there was a village here, but ‘no one knows’ that out of 600 villages 400 were destroyed. This knowledge does not exist. It is linked to personal memories overtaken by collective memories. Even if ‘anyone was able to know’, this information challenges ‘our right to be here’ [...] because the story cannot be told without a subject and the subject remains ‘our own existence’. The rest are tongueless ‘present absentees’, who of course have ‘hatred in their eyes’ [...] Our public language does not include this information ... because this is the nature of the state’s story [...] Therefore anyone who thought that Morris’s book would overturn the way Israelis were thinking, did not understand how entrenched the dominant narrative had become since Ben Gurion’s silence [...] (Laor 1995: 121–2)

Laor’s 1994/5 analysis had not been picked up by other literary critics. In 2008 he bemoans the lack of response to his original essay ‘The torn tongue’, published in Ha’aretz in 1994 (and republished as a chapter in his 1995 book). Apart from Yizhar’s 1949 Khirbet Khizeh, ‘Hebrew literature collaborated with Ben Gurion’s complete erasure of the past and the construction of a new space in which the Arabs are outsiders. If they are here, they cannot speak, because their tongue is torn’ (Laor 2008: 14). Oppenheimer (2008: 215) cites Morag’s (1987: 15) argument that studies of the figure of ‘the Arab’ in Israeli Hebrew literature in various historical periods

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tend to concentrate on a small group of canonical texts by key writers such as Yizhar, A.B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz. It is therefore unsurprising that many Israeli writers exploring the meaning of the Nakba keep returning to Yizhar, as I do in this book. Like Oz’s daughter, historian Fania Oz-Salzberger (2008), who, as I discuss in Chapter 3, seeks redemption in Yizhar’s soul-searching regrets, the Israeli peace activist David Shulman, in his afterword to the 2008 English edition of Khirbet Khizeh, draws a direct link between the story and the ‘us’ of the contemporary Israeli peace movement: ‘All of us have witnessed many times what Yizhar calls that unique heroism of the weak who didn’t know what to do and were unable to do anything, the silenced weak. All of us have experienced the narrator’s despair and imitated his final act of sorrow.’ However, if in 1948 there were no refusals to partake in the occupation army, ‘in Israel today, literally thousands of young Israelis have refused to serve in the army of occupation,’ yet ‘for a soldier who refuses today, the deep loneliness that Yizhar’s hero describes is perhaps a little less severe’ (Shulman 2008: 126–8). Yizhar did not accord the Palestinians a voice or the right of resistance, turning them instead into an ‘uncontrollable symptom, clouding the Israeli consciousness’. In Yizhar’s writing the Israeli is described as both oppressor at the material level and oppressed at the psychic level (the narrator of ‘Khirbet Khizeh’ compares the silence of the expelled Palestinians with his own inability to protest the expulsion), indicating the central role played by literature in constructing the national identity of the newly established Jewish state (Oppenheimer 2008: 167–8). After 1948, the Arab, formerly perceived merely as enemy, turns to representing an (Israeli) moral problem, his depiction abstracted and reflected in his opposite, the Israeli Jew. Beside literary representations of economic, social, and erotic relations between Arabs and Israeli Jews, the 1948 generation writers express nostalgia for the erased Arab culture. But this artificial nostalgia, Oppenheimer argues, ‘reflects the Zionist viewpoint, so European in character, that dreams a symbiosis between Jewish money and intelligence and Arab corporeality and culture as the ideal product of bi-national existence in the land of Israel’ (Oppenheimer 2008: 176–7). 1948 Israeli literature constructs a dual mechanism of guilt and repression: killing Arabs as national duty and without moral pangs. Aharon Amir, another 1948 writer, expressed this as a constant split, not only between ‘the man’ and ‘the job’, but also between the narrator, the Palestinian ‘them’ and the military ‘them’: He loved the village and loved the people who knew him and respected him and would invite him from time to time to weddings or other celebrations. He knew exactly whose houses they were detonating. This was why they agreed to make him part of the action. He knew most of the faces buried under the ruins. But this was somehow irrelevant. ‘God made me twins’, Siamese twins split in the middle, the man and the job. (Amir 1955: 89, cited in Oppenheimer 2008: 194)

According to Rose (2008), writers – though definitely not all Writers – played a central role in Israeli dissent which, she reminds us, had always

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existed. Laor, as is to be expected, is less indulgent than Rose towards Yizhar who, he writes, many years after Khirbet Khizeh, ‘understood that something that happened between his childhood [...] and his adulthood brought about the complete destruction of the dream. But Yizhar cannot write about this, therefore he returns, after the breakdown of the Zionist dream, to writing only about his prestate childhood [...] On the one hand, the expulsion was excised from the memory of that war, and on the other, he gave birth to the mystification of the sabra – the vulnerable boy, the hero, whistling, handsome, writing poetry, victim’ (Laor 1995: 139–41). And it is as victims that most Israeli Jews still perceive themselves – the few (Jews) against the many (all those Arab Muslims), the weak (not withstanding Israel’s military might) against the strong (all that Gulf money, all those Iranian threats). Because of Jewish history, victimhood remains a central component of Israeli identity (Loshitzky 2001). As already suggested, the discussion of the Nakba in Israeli literature tends to focus on a small number of canonical texts, including A. B. Yehoshua’s ‘Facing the forests’ (1969).This story about a student who, while spending the summer as a fire watcher, meets a mute Arab whose tongue had been cut out during the 1948 war, is, according to Benvenisti, ‘the most striking literary expression of the nightmare of return’ (Benvenisti 2000: 326). While the student-ranger spends the summer in the forest in order to research the Crusaders – Benvenisti makes an analogy between Zionism and the Crusaders – he discovers the Arab’s secret: under the forest planted by the Israeli state lie the ruins of his village. As the ranger and the Arab (in Yehoshua’s story neither has a name) get closer, the Arab explains that ‘this is his house and that there used to be a village here as well and that they have simply hidden it all, buried it in the big forest’. Like the ‘new historians’, the ranger begins to excavate, ‘looking for traces’. But it takes the forest fire – set by the Arab – for the destroyed village to emerge: ‘There, out of the smoke and haze, the ruined village appears before his eyes; born anew in its basic outlines as an abstract drawing, as all things past and buried’ (cited in Benvenisti 2000: 327). If the ranger is the personification of the ‘new historians’ (long before they began publishing), the fire becomes the realisation of the Israeli nightmare of 8 (Palestinian) return. Yizhar’s elegiac prose denotes the erasure of Palestinian villages and their replacement by the new Israeli landscape, but Yehoshua knows that the remains of the village cannot be hidden. Oppenheimer sees Yehoshua’s Arab as a ‘stain that spoils the picture, but that cannot be removed’ (Žižek 2004: 22, Cited in Oppenheimer 2008: 198). Yehoshua’s generation’s focus on the stain rather than the story it represents relates to experiencing the ‘disappearance’ of the Palestinian villages in 1948 via culture agents such as the education system, historiography and literature. ‘This is linked to the attempt to base the “Arab question” not on humanitarian principles of memory, moral responsibility and a critique of the national discourse, but on a pathology [...]

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leading to the destructive ending of the story: the burning of the forest by the Arab, aided by the Jew, as the fulfilment of desire’ (Oppenheimer 2008: 198). In the story everyone speaks of the danger of the forest being set on fire but when the fire comes, exposing the destroyed village, we are not witnessing a Freudian ‘return of the repressed’ but the realisation of the ongoing nightmare of return. However, in order to project the Israeli guilt onto the Arab and link the Jew to his pathology, the Arab has to remain unknown, unspeaking, nameless.9 Yehoshua’s story, though a typical example of Israeli fiction actively silencing the Palestinian voice, aroused heated reactions when it was first published. According to 1967-born Israeli writer Etgar Keret, Israeli literature is peppered with mute Arabs through and for whom Israeli writers speak (Ellis 2006). The Arab in Yehoshua’s story remains nameless: ‘The writer used political materials: Arabs, village, cut out tongue (here too he hasn’t got the guts to blame the state, suggesting that perhaps the Arabs had cut it) ... Yehoshua not only cut out his Arab’s tongue, he also re-interred the village which “suddenly emerged”, as a recurring unfinished burial ceremony’ (Laor 1995: 134). However, while Laor rightly argues that Yehoshua is unable to distance himself, ‘because this is the Zionist narrative desire: let them speak as we want them to speak, or not speak at all’ (Laor 1995: 166), Oppenheimer points out that despite his radicalism, in Laor’s novels too the speakers are Israelis, not Palestinians, who ‘remain silenced, mute’ (Oppenheimer 2008: 421). The initial absence of Palestinian subjects and their later emergence, albeit as silenced victims, while the Israeli Jewish point of view continues to prevail, is also discussed in studies of Israeli cinema (Shohat 1991; Loshitzky 2001). While Ella Shohat’s is a historical and ideological study of the corpus of Israeli cinema as a representational system, Yosefa Loshitzky focuses on the projection of Israeli identity through an analysis of major Israeli films. Loshitzky follows Hall in insisting that identity is a production which is ‘never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ (Hall 1996: 51). Loshitzky suggests that the films she discusses are all marked by victimhood, elevated in Israeli society to a ‘civil religion’, as minoritised and stigmatised groups – ultra-Orthodox Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Holocaust survivors, Russian immigrants and the Israeli Right – compete for a position on the victimhood ladder. Yet, while the coalition between these groups ‘points to the centrality of victimology in contemporary Israeli identity politics’, it fails to acknowledge Israel’s primary victims – the Palestinians (Loshitzky 2001: xiv). Zochrot publishes a literary magazine called Sedek (fissure in Hebrew), dedicated to ‘the Nakba of here’. The magazine publishes interviews, essays, poems and visual art pieces relating to the Nakba and to contemporary Israeli politics, yet the first three issues included no Israeli Jewish prose pieces dealing with the Nakba. Yet, thanks to the ‘new historians’ and groups such as Zochrot, speaking about the Nakba is becoming more permissible in contemporary Israeli literature and artwork. I want to end this section by

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briefly examining two recently published, very different, Hebrew novels, Osmosis by Eshkol Nevo (2004) and La Maison Dajani by Alon Hilu (2008), both of which can be theorised as Nakba co-memorative works. In contrast to the works discussed so far (and to other canonical ‘literary’ writers such as Amos Oz and David Grossman), Nevo’s and Hilu’s popular novels are unusual in that, unlike other popular works, they take a moral, critical approach to the political reality (Oppenheimer 2008: 422). Osmosis’s Hebrew tide, ‘Four Houses and a Yearning’, reflects the melancholic relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestine. The novel starts when two young people who are looking for a home erroneously enter the house of a bereaved family. They rent an apartment next door in the house of a Mizrahi family which had been the property of a Palestinian family before it was expelled in 1948. Zadek, a Palestinian construction worker, who is converting a third house, was actually born in the house the young couple moves into. The novel locates four individual ‘private’ stories in a very ‘public’ time – between the November 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin and a series of car bombs which shook Israeli society in 2006. When Zadek is arrested because in the course of searching for a family treasure hidden by his mother before his family was expelled in the house he is now converting, he attacks Avram, the current owner. The national space feels threatened, ‘but this only enables the public sphere to be reconstructed through moving and confronting its threatened boundaries. We need to read the way the car bombs are described in this novel as anthropologists in order to understand how the national story appropriates them so as to give them meaning’ (Mish’ani 2004). The Jews living in the four houses represent the broad spectrum of contemporary Israel where Jews stake their identities, while living in Palestinian houses. As Vig writes: ‘Ironically, the Israelis who live in houses which are not theirs, houses abandoned by the Arabs in 1948, are the same Israelis who throw the Arab into jail.’ Zadek, though a secondary character in this very Israeli novel, becomes central to the narrative. Vig empathises with his yearning: ‘For me Zadek [...] represents the Palestinians who were expelled in 1948, who continue to dream about returning to their homes. Arabs who live in refugee camps, but dream about their houses in Jaffa or Haifa’ (Vig 2006). Nevo acknowledges Zochrot and a number of Palestinian writers and film makers who ‘have agreed, even in these bad times, to open their hearts and help me understand the experience of the Nakba’. A portrait of transformations in Israeli Jewish society, the book is suffused by the ‘background music’ of the Nakba. When the media arrive after the violent confrontation between Zadek and Avram, the Jewish author lets his Palestinian character speak: ‘Everything started an hour ago, Zadek said. No, it actually started fifty years ago, when the Jews came and drove my family away from this house. On the night of the expulsion my mother left something here, and today I came back to my house, to get what was mine’ (Nevo 2004: 188). Zadek’s story about the night of the expulsion reads like so many Palestinian testimonies, yearning for the lost

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house, the lost landscape: ‘I am looking at the fig tree now [...] They destroyed Salman al-Sa’di’s house and instead they built a large villa, three floors. Of the mosque only stones remain [...] Fifty years have passed [...] I wonder what mother left in the house when we ran away. What didn’t she put in the two large sacks that we loaded onto the donkey? What is this important thing she wants me to bring back?’ (Nevo 2004: 172). Nevo’s best-selling novel is a product of the post Oslo and al-Aqsa Intifada period when the possibility of return, albeit ending with the arrest of the returning Palestinian owner, can begin to be discussed. The genre does not enable a serious discussion of the dual ownership of the land, yet Nevo does grant the Arab ‘a tongue, a memory of the past and a fantasy of the future’. Nevo’s novel, despite its popularity, makes an attempt, naïve and preliminary as it may be, to express the Palestinian viewpoint (Oppenheimer 2008: 424). Nevo is the grandchild of Levi Eshkol, Israel’s second Prime Minister, and unlike Yizhar’s, his is the sorrow of the third generation, the generation of draft resisters, anarchists, and escapists. The Hebrew tide of the book expresses the ongoing melancholia of a society on the edge of the abyss. However, in the novel, like in today’s Israel, it is the Palestinian who pays the price for Israeli narcissism, even though jailing him does not solve Israel’s existential problems; all it does is repress them. Completely different, Alon Hilu’s La Maison Dajani is a historical novel about the encounter between a Jewish coloniser, Haim Margaliot Kalvariski, and a Palestinian boy and his mother, Saleh and Afifa Dajani. Kalvariski, who arrives in Palestine from Poland in 1895, comes across Madame Dajani and her son and covets both the Dajani demesne and the lady of the manor. Like Nevo, Hilu too allows ‘his’ Palestinian protagonist to speak, and the book is the juxtaposition of Kalvariski’s diaries, based on actual materials Hilu unearthed in the Zionist archives, and Saleh’s fictional diaries. Kalvariski succeeds in acquiring both the Dajani estate and Afifa’s body. As he consummates the carnal relationship with the latter, he sets about turning the estate into a prosperous ‘colony’, first employing the Palestinian tenants and later, when he meets with opposition and what he regards as laziness, importing Jewish colonists to do the work. Kalvariski has grand designs for the estate: ‘I must say without shame, I have many fantasies about the estate, like bringing here many colonists, and building many towers [...] and plant many hectares of all types of trees, and establish a colony that will be a model to all colonies in the holy land’ (Hilu 2008: 176). Throughout, Hilu’s coloniser protagonist expresses his disdain for the Palestinians: ‘they are ignorant, their eyes are open wide in idiotic and stupid expression. They were sitting on the ground in a strange posture, their knees stretched outwards, eating some green legumes called foul, which cause any European who eats them to have angry bowels and upset stomach’ (Hilu 2008: 162).

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The relationship is doomed to failure as the boy prophesises a future of ‘a big, terrible war [...] he sees his people, the Arabs, besieged in their homes, and the Jews showering upon them showers of fire [...] In his own eyes he saw the fire burning the arms of a newborn baby and blinding a little girl’ (Hilu 2008: 177). The novelist inserts the Zionist future into the Palestinian boy’s imaginings as he prophesises the destruction of the estate in the big war, ‘and in the future, they would build three towers, very tall towers, their heads in the sky, one square tower, one triangular tower and one round tower. The towers made of glass [...] Their yellow haired fair children and their bare skinned mothers will walk complacently between the towers, stamping on the dried up well, the uprooted orchards [...] and will know nothing about Saleh and Afifa and Amina and Mustafa Dajani, god rest him, who once upon a time lived here, loved here’ (Hilu 2008: 178). The boy and his mother become hostile, forcing Kalvariski to abandon his dream colony. In the epilogue Hilu tells his readers what happened to his protagonists. The boy takes his own life, and the mother ends her life in a psychiatric hospital. Kalvariski moves to the north of the country, where, like Yosef Nachmani, He dedicated his life to two ambitious, yet contradictory goals: the first a massive purchase of lands in Erez Israel [...] from Arab Effendis, while expropriating their tenants who had worked the lands for many years. Later on socialist moshavim and kibbutzim were established on these lands. His second, controversial, goal was working towards dialogue and reconciliation between Jews and Arabs in Erez Israel. Thus for instance, Kalvariski established in Rosh Pinna a school for the children of the neighbouring Arab village Ja’ouni, met with King Faisal in Damascus in order to persuade him to reach agreement with the Jewish settlement, and was one of the founders of ‘Brit Shalom’ and ‘Kedma Mizraha’. Towards the end of his days, according to Wikipedia, he expressed enthusiastic support for the establishment of a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews in Erez Israel, and this might be why he was forgotten or erased from Zionist consciousness. (Hilu 2008: 359-60)

Nothing remained of the estate – after the 1948 war its lands were confiscated by the state and purchased by a developer who built an office block in the shape of three towers, one square, one triangular and one round. Hilu grants his Palestinian protagonist not merely the right of speech, but also the foresight – or indeed hindsight – of prophesy. The Palestinian boy epitomises the primitive savage prophesising the Zionist occupation, but the novel is suffused by the duality of the Jewish colonists’ contempt and desire for the Palestinians, depicted as lazy, dirty and primitive, yet coveted by the Polish Jewish entrepreneur. Although in this strange novel the Nakba is set in the future, the yearning for the heady days of the early Jewish settlement of Palestine is the recurrent motif. Is the granting of voice by the Jewish writers to ‘their’ Palestinian protagonists a practice of co-memory? Or do both writers employ the Palestinian characters to tell a very Israeli Jewish story? No longer is the tongue

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of the Palestinian protagonist cut, as in Yehoshua’s ‘Facing the forests’, but the Palestinians’ voices are still refracted through the hegemonic Jewish narrator, who expresses his melancholic yearning through the Palestinian sub-plot.

Conclusion There are good historical reasons why Israeli Jews should have a defensive selfimage and a character armour of insecurity and permanent victimhood. The result is xenophobia that would be called ‘racism’ anywhere else, an exclusion of Palestinians from a shared moral universe and an obsessional self-absorption: what we do to them is less important than what this does to us. (Cohen 2001: 137)

In her 2008 Guardian article on contemporary Israeli literature, titled, aptly ‘Chroniclers of pain’, Jaqueline Rose argues that ‘Zionism has been a phenomenal success [...] Meanwhile the condition of the Palestinians, who are subject to a brutal occupation and siege, deteriorates by the day, while the rulers of the world do nothing. The visionary moments of the fiction [...] remain a dream. As long as Israel possesses the power, and uses that power to lord it over the Palestinian people, this will continue to be true. The literature can give us hope, provided we recognise the fundamental and continuing injustice that has spawned it’ (Rose 2008). Loshitzky’s discussion of victimhood as the main component of Israeli identity focuses on melancholia, as Israeli Jewish displacement and homelessness remain strong themes in the films she discusses. As the return of the Jews has turned the Palestinians into homeless refugees or exiles in their own homeland, both peoples remain ‘forever trapped and locked in the tragic dialectic created by what Rashid Khalidi calls “the contrasting narratives regarding Palestine”’ (Loshitzky 2001: 170). However identity and particularly national identity is far from given; it is rather a construction which becomes fact precisely because its birth is a fiction. I am reminded by Loshitzky’s insistence on victimhood as a cornerstone of Israeli identity when I read Guardian journalist Tanya Gold’s article on children of Nazis who have converted to Judaism and moved to live in Israel, some as orthodox Jews. According to Israeli professor of psychology Dan Bar-On, who studied children of Nazi perpetrators, ‘the motive of the converts is to join the community of the victims. If you become part of the victim community, you get rid of the burden of being part of the perpetrator community’ (Gold 2008: 8). I put this idea to several Israeli political activists and they reject Bar-On’s explanation of their activism, which, they insist, stems from political rather than emotional motives, and from rage rather than melancholia. I want to insist, however, that when national identity is based on victimhood, as it is in the case of Israel – which, despite its military might, constructs its (Jewish) citizens as the victims of history, antisemitism, Nazism, ‘the Arab world’, Palestinian ‘suicide bombers’, Hamas, and now Iran – the

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battle cry of the nation demands an ongoing project of identification as minoritised groups engage in competition of victimologies. If on the one side of that battle cry stand those who see themselves as forever victims, I wonder whether, on the other side of the battle cry stand those of us ‘progressive’ anticolonial and anti-occupation Israeli Jews, whose identities are constructed through a project of identification with the minoritised and the occupied, directing not only ‘our’ political, but also emotional choices. Chapter 7 discusses the work of Zochrot, but for now I want to conclude by reflecting upon the motivation of Israeli Jews whose Damascene narratives place them outside the Zionist consensus and ask whether ‘our’ support for the Palestinian cause and critique of the Israeli narrative spells a project of identification and a psychic shift from perpetrators to victims through solidarity and empathy, but also an attempt to represent ‘us’ as ‘beautiful souls’, making up for the sins of ‘our’ fathers, ‘our’ state, ‘our’ army of occupation. Regardless of the ostracism some anti-Zionists experience in mainstream Israeli and Jewish society – often having to confront uncomprehending families and friends – ‘we’ all are, as Shenhav reminds us, beneficiaries of the ongoing occupation of Palestine. ‘We’ benefit from the occupation, yet most of ‘us’ seem unable to listen. After the death, in August 2008, of Mahmoud Darwish, regarded as the Palestinian ‘national poet’, Yael Lerer, the Israeli Jewish publisher of his poetry in Hebrew, wrote in Ha’aretz: Darwish wrote for us too. Many of his poems address us, Israeli Jews, directly. The poem ‘State of siege’ [...] looks as if it was written in Hebrew [...] He addresses us, but we do not want to listen. We cannot relinquish the occupier mentality that sees the native only as devoid of culture, that regards his culture as folklore, and that at best, takes interest in his art, as Darwish said again and again, ‘in order to know the enemy or in order to make peace with him’. (Lerer 2008)

Notes 1

2 3

4

This chapter has benefited from work done by David Landy and Anaheed al-Hardan when they were my research assistants in a project funded by the Global Networks project at the Institute of International Integration Studies (IIIS), Trinity College Dublin. I am indebted to both of them. See, for instance, Eshel’s book on the battle for Haifa (1973), discussed in Chapter 4. According to Eli Aminov, even Matzpen members, who did document the 1948 war, did not use the term before then (personal communication). Palestinian Israeli scholars such as Ghazi Falah, As’ad Ghanem, and Azmi Bishara and Jewish Israeli scholars such as Ilan Pappe, Oren Yiftachel, and Baruch Kimmerling, were among those who introduced the term in Hebrew (Ilan Pappe and Oren Yiftachel, personal communication).The first academic article I could trace explicitly using the term in Hebrew was Kimmerling s ‘Al Nakba’, in 50 to 48: Critical Moments in the History of the State of Israel (1999). The survey, conducted by Anaheed Al-Hardan, is based on three main conceptual time periods: The (1948) War of Palestine and after; the (1967) June War and after; Oslo and

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5

6

7 8

9 10

after. All the materials for this survey were obtained from Lebanon - via the internet book sellers of Neel wa Furat and through ordering copies of chapters from the Institute for Palestine Studies Library, with the exception of Kabha’s essay, published by Mada alCarmel in Haifa. This means that the scope of this survey is limited in nature due to the focus on material published in Beirut and the dearth of contemporary works. Furthermore, the IPS Library limited what could be ordered to one chapter from each book. These measures included releasing statements to the people and urging them to remain; asking leaders of the Army of Holy War and the local National Committees to stop people from leaving; touring the country and warning people against leaving; submitting a memo to bordering Arab states and in which they asked them not accept any Palestinians unless the case is absolutely necessary; declining the request of the head of the Roman Catholics of Haifa and the north, Georgus Hakim, to allow women and children to seek refuge in Lebanon, and urging him to send them to safer parts of Palestine instead. Other works published around the 1967 war include Al-Sa’d’s (1968) Al-Nakbaat alThalaath (The Three Catastrophes), a discussion, based on his own memory and on general knowledge of what unfolded during the war of Palestine, of the Arab states at the time of the catastrophe; Sami Hakim’s (1969) Tariq al-Nakba (The Catastrophe’s Path), a diplomatic history of the period between the declaration of the Partition Resolution until the final armistice agreements between Israel and the various Arab states. In addition, Hakim’s book also includes chapters on post-1948 diplomatic history, including the various international resolutions condemning the Israeli state from 1950 to 1967. But see Tamir Sorek’s ‘Cautious commemoration: the changing patterns of disciplining Palestinian memory in Israel’ (2008). The story, Benvenisti reminds us, was published four years before the 1967 war, when ‘it became evident that the Israelis were not merely troubled by nightmares of “the return” of the 1948 refugees: the impetus for expulsion had not disappeared but had inevitably reemerged to create a new nightmare - of the return of the new refugees. On 7 June 1967 the inhabitants of three villages in the Latroun salient – Emmaus, Yalu, and Beit Nuba – were expelled’ (Benvenisti 2000: 327). All of which make Yehoshua’s story so powerful – forty years of incessant studies attest to it (Oppenheimer 2008:200). Likewise, even though several contributors to Judith Gerson and Diane Wolf’s collection, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (2007) refer to the Holocaust serving Jewish respondents to draw on universal messages of ‘never again’, they all stop short of employing the lessons of the Holocaust to express solidarity with the Palestinians.

7 Zochrot: Nakba co-memory as performance

Zochrot is part of a development in Israeli Jewish society that for the past several years gradually enables speaking about the Nakba. It is probably a question of time, a younger generation had to grow up that is more willing to deal with the dark sides of its grandparents’ history. There is academic research, there are films and newspaper articles dealing with the Nakba, and in this climate an organisation like Zochrot was able to start working. So, in a sense, Zochrot fills an existing need, and its existence creates one of many other opportunities for people who are open to learn about the Nakba. (Tamar Avraham, written interview 2007)

Prologue: methodological crisis In addition to autoethnography, this book uses conventional ethnographies, including semistructured interviews, email interviews, observation and literature and media reviews. Following Said in critically evaluating the consequences of exilic writing against the grain (Shohat 2001b: 209), and in the spirit of reflexivity and accountability, it is fair to start this chapter, which analyses the performative co-memorative work of Zochrot as a case study of Israelis coming to terms with the Nakba, by outlining my ‘methodological crisis’. In May 2008 I presented a paper at a conference organised by Mada alCarmel. The paper provided a critical evaluation of the work of Zochrot, and among others, quoted a former Palestinian Zochrot member who, when she found out I had cited her without her explicit permission to quote from an interview carried out in Spring 2006, demanded to be removed from any subsequent text. While she granted me the interview in the full understanding that my aim was to critically evaluate Zochrot, I agreed that citing her without her explicit permission amounted to appropriating the Palestinian voice, one of my main points of criticism of the relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. No extent of autoethnographically situating myself within my research text can undo the unequal power relations between researcher and researched, and, more specifically, between a western-based Israeli Jewisn academic, and a member of the colonising majority, and a local Palestinian informant.

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Zochrot’s director, Eitan Bronstein, followed the exchange with an email in which he argued that my analysis misrepresented the group’s work and intentions. In particular he objected to my suggestion that ‘without explicit critique of the Israeli racial state, Zochrot’s actions remain symbolic’, and that ‘it is hard to escape the feeling that, in regarding its commemorative acts as “conquest”, and a central part of Israeli-Jewish identity, and in aiming at reconciliation rather than a political solution, Zochrot perpetuates rather than contests the ongoing colonisation of Palestine’ (Lentin 2008b). Bronstein pointed me to Zochrot’s 2008 conference on the right of return (see Musih and Bronstein 2008), to argue that, contrary to my claims, Zochrot is fully committed to the politics of return. He demanded that the interview with him carried out by my research assistant not be used in my text. An email exchange between Zochrot members ensued and some of my criticism in relation to the appropriation of the Palestinian voice was taken on board. This exchange and the current developments in the work of the group, made me rethink both my methodological approach and my analysis. In fairness, the impetus for writing this book owes a lot to the work of Zochrot, which, when I first found out about it, seemed the long-awaited acknowledgement that the Palestinian skeleton in the Israeli cupboard can no longer remain hidden. As Kadman writes, the groups work signalled the return of the depopulated Palestinian villages to Israeli consciousness and public discourse (Kadman 2008: 130). Zochrot’s co-memorative work is undoubtedly laudatory and creative in breaking the silence about the Nakba in Israeli society and following the group’s activities – via its website, and through participating in some of its events and tours – inspired me to think critically about the complex and problematic relations between Israeli Jews, Palestine and the Nakba.

Introduction In this chapter I analyse the co-memorative practices of Zochrot, established in 2002 by a group of Israeli Jewish peace educators ‘who believe that the ArabIsraeli conflict is prolonged by overlooking the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948’ (Bronstein 2005a: 219), and committed, in its own words, to ‘remembering the Nakba in Hebrew’, as a case study of the complex relationship between Israeli Jews and the Nakba. Zochrot’s activities imply a seemingly unproblematic intertwining of dispossession, memory, and responsibility, but it is worth asking, yet again, whether, in relation to events one has not experienced, it is possible to speak of ‘remembering’, as the evocative name of the group implies (‘Zochrot’ means remembering in the female form – Hebrew is a gendered language and the name purports to subvert the ‘masculine’ erasure of the Palestinian other1). My suggestion is that ‘invocation’ or ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 1997) are more appropriate than ‘remembering’, as suggested in Chapter 2. Indeed, the booklets produced by Zochrot about depopulated Palestinian villages and urban neighbourhoods are introduced by a caveat: ‘This booklet is not a memory book, certainly not in the accepted terms of “commemoration”.

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Nor is it a guidebook or an academic historical study. This booklet is a learning experience in Hebrew on the Palestinian Nakba’ (emphasis added). My analysis follows several theoretical prisms, raising a number of separate but interrelated questions. I begin by locating Zochrot within what I see as the ongoing crisis of the Israeli resistance movement. Second, after briefly charting Zochrot’s history and activities, I discuss the performative nature of its postmemory work. Third, problematising the position of the witness of catastrophe, after Primo Levi (1988) and Giorgio Agamben (1999), and drawing links between Holocaust and Nakba testimonies, problematic as such links might seem, I discuss the role of the Palestinian witness-victim in the telling of this very Israeli-Jewish story, and suggest that a more fruitful line of inquiry would be to excavate the testimonies of Israeli perpetrators. Fourth, although Zochrot is clearly evolving, moving between performative acts of reshaping Palestine’s symbolic landscape and an involvement with existential political issues such as the right of return and the one-state solution, I ask whether invoking the Nakba in Hebrew can ultimately have more than symbolic meaning, important as this might be. The final, and most complex question of all, is whether this very Israeli co-memorative performance ultimately appropriates the Palestinian voice. In Chapter 8 I discuss the suggestion that Zochrot, like other Israeli Jewish political activists, who, as argued in Chapter 6, identify with the oppressed other, engage in such appropriation in invoking the Nakba, as Zochrot does, as an indelible part of constructing members’ Israeli Jewish identity. I theorise Nakba commemoration by Israeli Jews as co-memory, the memory story of Palestine indelibly and dialectically woven into the story of Israeli Jewish dissent – co-memoration of victor and vanquished, united, as I argue in Chapter 3, in grieving the loss of Palestine. Melancholia shifts the mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject, and I wonder whether comemorising the Nakba in Hebrew shifts the object of commemoration from the colonised Palestinians to the colonising Israelis who use this commemorative act to construct their own (Israeli Jewish) identity.

The Israeli resistance movement: narratives of crisis I write this book in 2008–09 during and after the Gaza war. Writing is made difficult by rage and I keep escaping the task to surf the net and read thousands of emails from Palestinians and oppositional Israelis. On 6 January 2009 as Israel shells a UN-run school, killing 50 and injuring 55, and as horrific photographs rush in from all media, official Israel says the bombardment of civilians will continue because ‘Hamas chooses to use civilians as human shields’ (an argument refuted by the UN Goldstone inquiry, released in September 2009, which has found evidence that war crimes and possible crimes against humanity were committed by Israel and Hamas, McCarthy 2009).The state is supported by its leading intellectuals. Award-winning novelist Amos Oz tells an Italian newspaper: ‘Hamas is responsible for the outbreak of violence’ but called for a ‘complete ceasefire’.

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Novelist A. B. Yehoshua joins in, publishing an appeal to Gaza residents to end the violence (Sela 2009).2 On Facebook and other social networking sites, Israeli oppositionists express their rage and despair. Thousands of Israelis stage demonstrations, posting youtube videos because the mainstream media don’t cover them; activists publish opinion pieces anywhere that would take them.3 Writer Adi Sorek writes in her blog: ‘Since it started, I am in a state of shock. I can no longer scream [...] In the past I would have joined those who demonstrated in the Sde Dov Airfield, wearing white and dirtying themselves in red. Now all I can do is stare [...] or join silently in the large demonstration [...] When did it begin? How long can it last? The ungraspable bluntness of my people.’4 Hebrew University Law lecturer Daphna Golan calls for an academic strike: ‘Because of the rocket fire, all the academic institutions in the south of Israel are shut, and because of the war, thousands of students have been called up. But outside the line of fire, college and university studies are continuing as though there was no war [...] We should actually have gone on strike many years ago - in the days of the first Intifada, when the IDF closed the schools and universities in the territories for months on end. They told us then not to bring politics to the campus, and said the army knew what it was doing; they told us we couldn’t let the Palestinians throw stones, and so we kept teaching. Those years, when educational institutions in the territories were closed repeatedly for many weeks, when entire villages and cities were placed under curfew [...] the suicide bombers and Qassam launchers of today were growing up. Then too, they told us there was no one to talk to, and we continued as usual. The head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank, who prohibited the Palestinians from owning hundreds of books placed on a blacklist, was selected as the dean of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem humanities faculty, and he, like most of the Orientalists from the IDF and Shin Bet, assured us there was no one to talk to’ (Golan 2009). My own grief and rage becomes unbearable as the war goes on. I develop a skin rash, waking several times each night with a burning itch. I assuage my rage by writing letters to the Irish Times, taking part in a major demonstration in Dublin and participating, together with many well-known Irish writers, in a ‘writers for peace’ reading in central Dublin, in which I read ‘Get out of Beirut’ by the Israeli poet and peace activist Dalia Ravikovitch, written during the 1982 Lebanon War, a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, and an excerpt from my own 1996 novel Songs on the Death of Children. I dedicate my reading ‘in solidarity and deep grief’ to the 1,370 Gazans and 13 Israelis killed during the invasion’, yet I feel uneasy at being congratulated by members of the audience as their ‘token good Israeli’.

Since its establishment, Zochrot has succeeded, through its effective communication strategy and lively website, to create strong public impact beyond its actual membership. According to Zochrot member Tamar Avraham: The number of active members of Zochrot is quite small, 30–40, among them about eight who work for Zochrot and several who do occasional freelance work. This means that this is quite a closed group [...] There is a teachers’ group

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studying the Nakba and members are invited for lectures by different groups. I can’t give you a number, but it is said again and again that the number of interested groups is growing. About 100-200 people participate in the tours, again according to what is reported. At least half of them are Palestinians, and a part of the Jewish participants are ‘convicted’ people who join every tour. That means that the number of new participants being exposed to the tom’s is quite small, and since summer 2006 there have been complaints that the number of Jewish participants is declining. Most activities are addressed to people living in the Tel Aviv area. Finally, Zochrot’s e-mail list reaches about 1,000 people who are regularly informed about its activities. (Written interview, 2007)

In order to analyse Zochrot’s postmemory work I first locate it in the context of what seems an ongoing crisis in what I somewhat problematically call the Israeli resistance movement. Since the first Intifada (1987-93), many Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian groups have created protest and dialogue forums in the midst of the ongoing conflict, operating on several globalisation-frombelow non-state and anti-state levels, mostly initiated by Israeli Jews. Elsewhere (Lentin 2007) I theorise Israeli oppositional groups as networks – many of whose members belong to more than one grouping, moving in and out of oppositional activism – as described by Bauman’s differentiation between relations, partnerships, and other forms of mutual engagement, and networks, in that ‘network suggests moments of “being in touch” interspersed with periods of free roaming’ (Bauman 2004c: xii). While many groups fit this description, Zochrot, though networking with other groups in Israel and abroad, is closer in definition to an organisation, complete with secure funding, waged office holders and premises. Many of the groups operate within what has been described as Israel’s ‘peace camp’, remaining firmly within the Zionist fold. According to Jeff Halper, founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICHAD), his shift from left-wing Zionism to what he calls post-Zionism is due to the line ‘between protest and resistance that creates the divide, the chasm between mainstream Zionists and what I call critical Israeli peace groups ... a postZionist is a Zionist who has witnessed a house demolition’ (Halper 2008: 17– 18). I would categorise Zochrot among this kind of post-Zionist ‘critical peace groups’. Since al-Aqsa Intifada, the erection of the Separation Wall, the deepening of the checkpoint regime in the West Bank and the siege of Gaza culminating in the winter 2008–09 Gaza war, several Israeli writers have detected activism fatigue, even despair. Writing about the dilemmas of the Israeli left in speaking against the ongoing occupation, sociologist Lev Grinberg (2005) bemoans the dearth of oppositional discourse, arguing that ‘there are no words to describe the process of humiliation and appropriation’ and that this paucity of words has replaced political discourse with postcolonial and postmodern theories, as 5 argued in Chapter 5 (see Zureik 2007). As a result, according to Grinberg,

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as a small, elitist community of those in the know [...] the words we put forward [...] do not become a common language of collective, public and political significance [...] This lack of language has become critical since the second Intifada. The absence of a popular resistance movement against the state’s response to the Intifada, and of a common goal, has silenced and immobilised us. (Grinberg 2005: 190, 192)

The dilemmas of the Israeli resistance movement also stem from the dominance of a globalised Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace industry’ – a ‘white industry’, governed, according to Israeli human rights lawyer Yael Berda, by the need to apply for EU funding, while grassroots activists, who conduct localised and less ‘sexy’ socioeconomic campaigns, are excluded from the lucrative ‘peace industry’ (Berda 2006, 17–18). Crucially, and despite the guarded optimism expressed by peace activists such as Gila Svirsky (2002) and Adina Aviram (2007), members of the Israeli resistance movement, often express a sense of paralysis in the face of the ever-worsening reality of the separation wall and checkpoint regime. For example, Leibner argues that the Israeli-Palestinian network Ta’ayush, established like so many other initiatives after the killing of Israeli Palestinians in October 2000 as an attempt by the Israeli left to create alternatives to the nationalistic reaction to the second Intifada, was in deep crisis due to members’ powerlessness vis-à-vis the increasing oppression in the territories, accelerated house demolitions, the worsening Palestinian economy, and the devastating effects of the separation wall (Leibner 2006). An example of the dilemmas facing the Israeli resistance movement is Machsomwatch, a group of women who observe IDF checkpoints and report their observations online. Important as it is in alerting the Israeli and global publics to the checkpoint regime, Machsomwatch’s work arguably enables the military to maintain this draconian regime, and by granting it an independent auditor, inadvertently justifies its excesses. According to Kirstein Keshet, there are tensions between non-Zionist and Zionist Machsomwatch members, who wish to plug into the Israeli consensus and remain part of the Israeli collective (Kirstein Keshet 2006: 110). Maschsomwatch thus forms an ‘uneasy alliance’ with the IDF, as a ‘loyal opposition’ rather than a subversive group (Kirstein Keshet 2006: 116). There are exceptions, however. Machsomwatch member Aya Kaniuk physically intervened to prevent IDF violence, and by doing so, some members felt, had ‘broken a taboo, of acting aggressively towards soldiers’. Kirstein Keshet classifies this approach ‘resistance as opposed to protest’ (2006: 113). She acknowledges that despite the importance of observing and reporting the excesses of the occupation, watchers often see the soldiers, rather than the Palestinians, as the main victims of the occupation. She is aware, however, that ‘victimhood is a dominant theme in all Israeli discourse, not least among the soldiers’, leading many Israelis, even those on the left, to regard the Palestinians as lesser humans. The dilemmas of the Israeli resistance movement become more acute when one steps away from the internet space where anyone with a computer

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vaguely interested in resisting the Israeli colonial regime can read a daily dose 6 of information and protest. Reading online communications and signing online petitions is relatively easy, despite the surveillance.7 Online activism tends to intensify in times of crisis, as during the Gaza war which, inter aha, served as a mobilisation call to Israeli Jews and anti- and non-Zionist Jewish (and nonJewish) activists throughout the world. Being an online resistance activist is one thing; it is quite another thing for Israeli Jewish individuals and grassroots organisations who perform the grinding everyday resistance work, providing legal, medical and humanitarian assistance to Palestinians under occupation (e.g. Physicians for Human Rights Israel), monitoring IDF checkpoints (e.g. Machsomwatch), supporting Israeli draft resisters (e.g. New Profile, Yesh Gvul) and Palestinian prisoners, opposing house demolitions (e.g. ICHAD), demonstrating against the ongoing siege of Gaza, and acting towards a one-state solution (e.g. the Committee for a Secular Democratic State in Palestine) to give but a few examples. Such resistance 8 work is arguably performed by a relatively small number of activists, often in the face of hostile families and neighbours. In a documentary produced by Zochrot, Youval Tamari talks about his family’s reaction to his Nakba commemorating activism: ‘the family knows about it, and doesn’t like it [...] saying “here he is again with this nonsense” [...] [they] think it’s all very well as long as we don’t have an Arab majority here’ (Savin Ben Shoshan 2004). The video shows several altercations with members of the public, yet another Zochrot member suggests that it is easier to cope with this than with what he calls ‘tacit support’. Bronstein (2005a) writes about Zochrot’s establishment in 2002 in the context of two processes. The first relates to the growing emphasis on the Nakba by Palestinian citizens of Israel. The second process - the aftermath of the October 2000 events and al Aqsa Intifada - is more closely related to the narrative of crisis of the Israeli resistance movement: Following these events there was growing understanding among Jews in Israel that joint Arab-Jewish activities were not enough to win the struggle for peace and equality. There was a need for Jews to take responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe and work towards changing the discourse within the Israeli-Jewish public. (Bronstein 2005a: 21)

Bronstein does not say that the narrative of crisis prevailing in the Israeli resistance movement necessitates, as Berda (2006) writes, not just expertise in writing grant applications, but also ‘public relations strategies and marketing gimmicks’. This does not belittle the effectiveness of Zochrot’s practices but rather suggests that in the climate of despair and activism fatigue, activists who wish their work to have an impact are compelled to seek new avenues of resistance – apparently co-memorating the Nakba in Hebrew was one such successful new resistance strategy. In 2005, as a result of an internal crisis in Zochrot, when one committee

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member insisted on continuing his IDF reserve duties, several members – including Palestinian members – resigned their membership. The crisis led to much soul-searching in relation to the relations between Jewish and Palestinian members and a critique of Zochrot’s focus on the past and the future while seemingly ignoring the present oppression of the Palestinians under occupation (personal communication). I return to discussing the question of appropriation below. For now I want to suggest that the relationship between Palestinians and members of the Israeli resistance movement is at best problematic. An internal document, exploring whether Zochrot has a defined ethnic identity, insists that as Zochrot’s uniqueness is the attempt to affect change among Jews in Israel, the activities of Jewish members constitute its most authentic action. More publicly, Bronstein writes that as Zochrot focuses on the recognition of Israeli Jews’ moral responsibility towards the Palestinians, the practice of Zochrot does not depend upon the consent or the approval of the Arabs in Israel [...] to some extent, Zochrot’s action might even exclude Palestinian groups in Israel, because its main target is to change fundamentally the discourse in the ‘national Jewish camp’. In reality and in practice, however, Zochrot’s activities are largely dependent on cooperation with Palestinians who live in the country. The Palestinians possess the memory that Zochrot is trying to promote. (Bronstein 2005a: 233, emphasis added)

This focus on Zochrot’s Jewish members and on addressing Israel’s Hebrewspeaking Jewish public as more authentic brings to mind Alana Lentin’s (2008a) analysis of the differentiation Frantz Fanon makes in Black Skins White Masks (1952) between the lived experience of the racialised and the authenticity constructed by identity politics. Not content with constructing a history or an identity of the black subject, Fanon insists on ‘lived experience’ as the central focus of a politics of resistance (A. Lentin 2008b). Just as melancholia shifts the mourning from the lost object to the mourning subject, without putting the lived experience of the racialised at the centre, the focus of the struggle shifts from the (Palestinian) object of grief and rage to the (Israeli Jewish) grieving and raging subject.

Performing co-memory On a sunny Saturday in March 2004, Dan took his eleven-year-old son, Tomer, to an event organised by Zochrot [...] The event took place near the ruins of the last existing house of Jelil, a Palestinian village that stood just south of Herzlia. Approximately one hundred people attended the event, in which displaced village elders, now living elsewhere in Israel, shared their childhood memories of their old village, of the events that led to its destruction, and of their case for reparation and return [...] The testimonies given at the event were followed by an account of the place’s history delivered by an Israeli researcher, and by a rendition by three Palestinian rappers of their version of memory and politics. (Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker 2005: 164–5)

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The description of Zochrot’s work on its website (www.zochrot.org) and in members’ written work (e.g. Bronstein 2005a, 2005b) and spoken explanations (such as the English-language tour guided by Youval Tamari in 2006, see Landy 2008), emphasise Zochrot’s aim ‘to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public, to express the Nakba in Hebrew, to enable a place for the Nakba in the language and the environment ... in order to promote an alternative memory to the hegemonic Zionist memory’. However, it seems that Zochrot’s ultimate aim is not commemoration per se, but rather reconciliation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. As Norma Musih writes: ‘awareness and recognition of the Nakba by Jewish-Israeli people, and taking responsibility for this tragedy, are essential to ending the struggle and starting a process of reconciliation between the people of Palestine-Israel’ (Musih, www.zochrot.org). Musih’s description stresses the centrality of the tours the group organises ‘for Jews and Arabs to Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948’. During these tours Zochrot members post signs that commemorate different sites in the depopulated villages and urban neighbourhoods and give details about each of them through testimonies of refugees and their families. In stressing the participation of both Jews and Arabs, and in conducting tours for foreign activists on study tours, the goal of incorporating the Nakba in Hebrew in the Israeli discourse gets somewhat lost. Acknowledging that these tours have different meanings for Palestinians and Jews, Musih strikes a somewhat patronising note: ‘for Palestinians this event is a journey back in time to the place where they used to live. For Jews, the tour and the commemoration of sites reveal memories that are hidden from view. The memories revealed often compete with the common, Zionist memory of the place.’ Zochrot produces booklets featuring refugee testimonies, photographs and historical background for each of the tours, reflecting, as Musih writes, the group’s ‘process of learning’. Posting signs commemorating pre-Nakba Palestinian villages and urban neighbourhoods is aimed, Bronstein writes in relation to resignposting the Palestinian Al Majdal in the contemporary Jewish Israeli town of Ashkelon, to ‘cause disorder in space’, raising questions of belonging and control. This is particularly potent in view of the etymological link between the Hebrew words ‘shelet’ (sign) and ‘shlita’ (control): ‘the sign makes a statement, and through it gains control over that space [...] [giving] an indication of the lives that had once been here and are now gone’. Through Zochrot’s actions, Bronstein argues, ‘the territory of the ruling city, Ashkelon, is perforated [...] it changes and becomes a different territory [...] the sign is a testimony to the deportation that took place here [...] The signifying act writes a new language in the space [...] [challenging] the dominant, Zionist, Israeli-Jewish time’ (Bronstein 2005a: 225–6). To recreate the Nakba in Hebrew, Zochrot has constructed a website that includes a database, of all the Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 including 9 maps and the names of the Israeli localities built on their lands. The site ‘places the Palestinian Nakba in the virtual space of Hebrew speakers who surf

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the web’ (Musih, www.zochrot.org). Musih outlines Zochrot’s other activities – workshops and lectures with Israeli groups of students, teachers and activists, and encounters between Palestinian refugees and the Israelis who live on their lands. This description stresses not only the challenges to participants’ prior knowledge and values, but also – and this is a central element in the group’s self-presentation – the potentialities for reconciliation through ‘opportunities for creating a space that would enable the needs of both sides to be met’ (Musih, www.zochrot.org). Zochrot also operates an art gallery, which opened in May 2007, and produces the magazine Sedek, both seeking ‘to give expression to work that was produced on and as a consequence of the Nakba and to open a critical, civic discussion, personal and political, that situates the place and the relationships 10 that were woven round it as the object of its study’ (Musih, www.zochrot.org). Musih concludes her description of Zochrot as a ‘learning group’ by stressing that learning without taking responsibility is not enough, and that ‘the Nakba is not the story of another people that took place somewhere else – it is a story that we, as Israeli Jews, are responsible for’. Taking responsibility means not only acknowledging the tragedy that took place, but also ‘the personal and collective right of return for every refugee who was expelled, and hoping for the implementation of this right, either by returning the lands, paying compensation or implementing actual return’. However, this acknowledgement is not a political solution but rather a ‘viable stepping stone to reconciliation’. Musih stresses that this is not easy for Israeli Jews: It is hard for us to give up the image of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, that would be endangered should we choose to allow the right of return. Allowing the right of return will change the demographic balance in Israel and the Israeli state would not continue to exist in its current form. I believe that in this new state life would be better for both Palestinians and Israelis living in this land. (Musih, www.zochrot.org)

I want to suggest that Zochrot’s work constitutes postmemory as performance. Examples of such postmemorial performances are repeat tours to depopulated villages and meditatised events such as the draping of the enclosing fence of. the school building in the depopulated village of Miskeh with ‘50 metres of white doth, Christo-style’ with ‘everyone in attendance – Israeli Jew and Palestinian, man and woman, young and old – having the opportunity to place their own pieces of art on the cloth’ (Epp Weaver 2007). Another example is the creation of a giant map of depopulated Palestinian villages in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, asking participants to position cards with a name of a depopulated village; at the end of the evening the municipality square, named after Israel’s assassinated prime minister Yizhak Rabin, was filled with names of villages destroyed during the Nakna (www.zochrot.org/index.php ?id= 2 0 3 ). Regarding Zochrot’s practice as performance is not a criticism. On the contrary: the intersection of performance discourse into the social sciences

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signals a move away from traditional studies of text- and venue-based performances towards a consideration of all social activity as performative (Fricker and Lentin 2007: 2). Musih’s description of Zochrot’s gallery upholds this: ‘The gallery and journal are outcomes of a cultural movement that is taking place alongside and despite the difficult political events of recent times, and embody a stage for dialogue between the word and the visual image. They are an attempt to create a text that examines its borders: The borders of content, of language, and of the discipline’ (Musih, www.zochrot.org). Beyond performance as a metaphor for everyday life (Goffman 1975), I understand Zochrot’s actions as lieux de mémoire that have a capacity for metamorphosis, ‘an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications’ (Nora 1989: 19).Through return visits and signposting in depopulated Palestinian localities, Zochrot ‘stages acts of performative memory, through which destroyed Palestinian villages acquire new sets of meanings’ (Epp Weaver 2007). Like Zochrot, Epp Weaver reads this performance of postmemory in terms of its reconciliatory potential, arguing, somewhat problematically, that although the depopulated villages remain sites of ‘rupture, dislocation, erasure and mourning’, Zochrot’s memorial performance has a sacramental quality ‘in which a bi-national future is embodied in the present through the remembrance of the past’ (Epp Weaver 2007). Crucially, Zochrot’s performance is a performance of co-memory – because without the Palestinian witnesses and survivors these acts of postmemory remain abstract. However, despite the Palestinian insistence on the centrality of oral history to commemorating the Nakba, relying on victim testimonies raises its own questions as I now discuss.

Testimonies: victims and perpetrators Have we – we who have returned – been able to understand and make others understand our experience? What we commonly mean by ‘understand’ coincides with ‘simplify’ [...] We also simplify history [...] the need to divide the field into ‘we’ and ‘they’ is so strong that this pattern, the bi-partition – friendenemy – prevails over all others. (Levi 1988: 22)

Because ‘the Palestinians possess the memory that Zochrot is trying to promote’ (Bronstein 2005a: 233), Zochrot’s work relies heavily on Palestinian refugee testimonies. Testimonies are central to Zochrot’s website, tours and the booklets accompanying the tours. In an event staged by Zochrot, commemorating the UN Partition Plan of 29 November 1947, members positioned life-size photographs of Palestinian refugees from Ras Al Ahmar (today the Israeli Galilee moshav Kerem Ben Zimra), currently living in Ein al 11 Hilwa refugee camp in Lebanon, in Tel Aviv’s fashionable Rothschild Avenue. Like other such installations, this was extremely effective, though it was not made clear whether these specific Palestinian refugees whose photographs were

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displayed had given their informed consent to the use of their images in Tel Aviv’s (Jewish) urban space. The use of images of Holocaust victims in the Imperial War Museum is problematised by historian Tony Kushner who asks, ‘can the body of the victim as individual ever be recovered?’ (Kushner 2003: 28). The question must also be asked whether Zochrot should be collecting Palestinian refugee testimonies or rather, on the one hand, translate existing 12 Arab-language testimonies, and, on the other, concentrate on the much harder task of collecting the testimonies of Israeli perpetrators of the Nakba. Having studied hundreds of videotaped Holocaust testimonies, Lawrence Langer suggests that Holocaust testimonies ‘are doomed on one level to remain disrupted narratives, not only by the vicissitudes of technology but by the quintessence of the experiences they record’ (Langer 1991: xi). The reliability of memory is not the main issue. Holocaust memory, Langer suggests, is an ‘insomniac faculty, whose mental eyes have never slept.’ His main point is that testimonies are ‘human documents rather than merely historical ones [...] factual errors do occur from time to time, as do simple lapses; but they seem trivial in comparison to the complex layers of memory that give birth to the versions of the self’ (Langer 1991: xv). This raises the question of whether the aim of testimonies of catastrophe should be the historical event or the narrating self. Furthermore, Holocaust research relies heavily on the testimonies of victims and survivors, rather than perpetrators. According to Agamben, the testimonies of those who survived catastrophic political events are often unspeakable, despite the imperative to listen, archive, and record. Discussing Primo Levi’s proposal that the ‘complete witness’ whose testimony we most need to hear but who is unable to narrate, is s/he who had reached bottom and faced the Gorgon (in Levi’s terms, the musulman), Agamben suggests that the complex relation ‘between language and the archive demands a subjectivity as that which in its very possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech’ (Agamben 1999: 146). Not unlike Holocaust research, where the role of testimonies is not aimed at validating historical facts, but rather giving voice to the survivors and providing them with a forum to share their experiences, Palestinian scholars emphasise the importance of oral history in keeping the story of the Nakba alive. On the one hand, as in 1944 66 per cent of the Palestinian population was agrarian with low history, oral history ‘is not merely a choice of methodology. Rather its use can represent a decision as to whether to record any history at all’ (Masalha 2005: 6). In the 2003 conference on the right of return, the Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari juxtaposed Israeli historical research about 1948 with the dearth of written research on the Palestinian side: ‘people felt this was their country, the whole world saw what happened therefore there was nothing to explain or defend. They were wrong [...] The Palestinian narrative was mostly oral ... what was amazing was the Palestinian silence [...] 13 it took 50 years’.

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On the other hand, some commentators believe that Nakba victims’ testimonies collected by Israeli Jews – the perpetrators – are ‘the least helpful thing if one wants to reconstruct the past as accurately as possible’. Tamar Avraham uses the example of the way many refugees from the Palestinian village of Lifta remember leaving the village after the 9 April 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, even though archival documents indicate that they had already left Lifta by February 1948. Deir Yassin – where between 93 and 254 Palestinians, 14 including 30 babies, were massacred, in addition to dozens killed in the fighting – became the epicentre of the catastrophe and was used by the Zionist leadership as a ‘warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight’ (Pappe 2006: 91), and by some Palestinians to explain their flight. Salman Natour, the Palestinian writer and director of the Emile Touma Centre in Haifa, provides three explanations for the significance of the Deir Yassin massacre for the Palestinians: Firstly, Ben Gurion wanted to cover up what was done [...] at the same time of the Deir Yassin massacre the Hagana and the Palmach committed other much worse crimes in the Galilee, in Haifa and later in Lod and Ramleh, and Ben Gurion wanted to cover up what they had done […] Secondly, the Arab leadership had an interest in frightening the people and thus mobilise them to defending their lands, but it achieved the exact opposite. Thirdly, the British too, in their radio programmes and leaflet drops, had a plan to leave this country to the Jews. All these factors manipulated the story of Deir Yassin, and it worked, people were frightened [...] The moment people heard that the soldiers were approaching, they ran away, because they said, we don’t want to be slaughtered [...] they were afraid, afraid of being raped, concerned about their honour, (interview with Salman Natour, May 2006)

By raising questions about refugee testimonies I do not negate the need to listen to their voices, but rather query the use of refugee testimonies by the perpetrators as one of the main tools of invoking the Nakba. According to Tamar Avraham the use of testimonies often obscures the historical narrative. Yet, when she questioned the efficacy of Zochrot’s practice of using refugee testimonies to ascertain the facts of the Nakba, she was told that it did not matter whether ‘the testimonies tell the truth or not. As long as they are represented as testimonies, [Bronstein] feels that everything can be said without trying to find out if it reflects the facts.’ Avraham argues that Zochrot sometimes takes a ‘wholly unscientific approach when Palestinian research is translated into Hebrew’. One example was not wishing to use exact translations for words such as ‘settler’ and ‘settlement’ even though this was the correct translation from the Arabic, reflecting Zochrot’s wish to ‘adapt the text for Israeli Jewish readers so as not to anger them too much’ (written interview, May 2007). The problem of the perpetrators using victim testimonies goes beyond historical accuracy. Refracting Palestinian refugee testimonies through the voices of members of the colonising collectivity, often in mediated or

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attenuated format so as to make them palatable to a hostile Israeli Jewish public, runs the risk of perpetuating their victimhood, and separating the Nakba past from present Palestinian reality. The complexities of the use of refugee testimonies by members of the perpetrator community are outlined by the Palestinian legal scholar Samera Esmeir (2007) in her discussion of Theodore Katz’s study of the 22 May 1948 Tantura massacre (Katz 1998). Katz wove testimonies of Tantura’s (Palestinian) survivors with those of the (Israeli) veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade and with archival records for his Haifa 15 University Masters dissertation. Esmeir argues that despite using oral history, Katz ultimately cast doubt upon his Palestinian witnesses’ memories and truth claims. According to her, Katz approached the testimonies of the Palestinian survivors as a positivist historian whose ‘conception of a linear progressive history [...] separates past from present, focuses on isolated events, locates individual actors and attempts to discover direct causal relations’. By contrast, the survivors’ answers ‘point to a different conception of time, in which past and present are not separate, and in which the emphasis is not on isolatable and describable events or massacres but on the terror that governed Palestinians’ lives during the war’ (Esmeir 2007: 241). Instead of linking past and present, Katz emphasised to his Palestinian informants that he was interested in ‘a future made possible by the generation of historical knowledge that will allow Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace’ (Esmeir 2007: 241). Clearly, like Zochrot, Katz’s main objective seemed to be reconciliation. Moreover, Esmeir takes Katz to task for using the contradictions and silences in the survivors’ testimonies to depict them as ‘defective’. While not denying the tale, he ‘questioned the ability of the tellers to fully remember’, without taking on board the two constitutive moments under which the memories about Tantura were produced: ‘one is the moment of experiencing / witnessing an atrocity during the year of conquest; another is becoming a witness of that moment and recalling it in its aftermath’ (Esmeir 2007: 244). Rather than seeing them as a problem for truth claims, ‘incoherence, contradictions and absence should then be understood as signifiers of something that is still present – the death of human relationships, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the destruction of an entire society’ – all of which requires a different reading of (Palestinian) memories, ‘as articulated by the silences, the multiple experiences, the various perspectives, [as] indicators of the historical, of that which took place’ (Esmeir 2007: 249, emphasis added). The use of Palestinians as native informants whose oral experiences are presented for others to interpret and decipher has an uncomfortable parallel in academic research in/on Palestine. As Tamari notes, ‘a division of labour emerges in which “visiting scholars” are able to dictate the terms in which Palestinian discourse is packaged and presented, while Palestinian “consultants” serve a proletarian function in this scholarly multinationalism’ (Tamari 1995: 24).This may be a reproduction of the practices of classical Orientalism whereby the Orient, seen in terms of the meanings it brings to the

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European subject, is viewed as incapable of representing itself, but must be represented by the Orientalist, who is then able to encompass its realities for the benefit of the colonising society (Said 1978). Epp Weaver (2007) further argues that the valorisation of oral history by Palestinian writers often avoids a reflexive theorisation of the interviewer’s ideological framework. Issues of class, gender and origin, as well as inequalities of power between colonised and coloniser make the collection of refugee testimonies hugely problematic. As bell hooks (1991) reminds us, social researchers often collect testimonies of the oppressed whose voice is used as data while the analysis is left to the more powerful researcher. I therefore suggest that in order to excavate the full meaning of the Nakba, Zochrot, a hugely effective lobby for the cause of Palestinian refugees, may consider embarking on a project of collecting testimonies of Israeli Jewish perpetrators, most of whom are approaching the end of their lives. Several such projects exist. Film-maker Eyal Sivan – who is working on an archive project in 16 Israel, interviewing Israeli perpetrators about the events of 1948 – said in a 2008 conference in London on the one-state solution that ‘it was impossible to build a common history on the basis of the experience of victims alone Palestinians as victims of the Israelis, Jews as victims of the Nazis. People always wanted to identify with the victims [...] We need to find a narrative that 17 enables the perpetrators to speak and to take responsibility for their actions.’ Other accounts of Israeli Nakba perpetrators include Dalia Karpel’s film on Yoasef Nachmani (2005) and Yuli Cohen’s film My Land Zion (2004), in which the director ‘confronts her parents on the role they played in the pre-state Palmach militia and talks with a Holocaust survivor, whose house currently 18 stands on displaced Arab land’.

Nakba as mantra, Nakba as ritual: beyond the symbolic? So Israelis use the term ‘Nakba’, but what does it really mean? (Ahmad Sa’di, personal communication, Cyprus, December 2008)

Nora argues that the present ‘memory boom’ led us to promote memory ‘because there is so little of it left’ (1989: 7). The struggle to retain national memory, despite the recognition that there is so little memory left, creates an impetus to conserve and preserve, even though what is called memory is but an inventory of things which are impossible, and perhaps even unnecessary to remember. Reading through Zochrot’s material is breathtaking. Zochrot is clearly committed to creating a dynamic, interactive Nakba lieu de mémoire in Hebrew, because so much of its memory has been erased and so little remains. But the question is whether this lieu de mémoire can significantly alter the memoricide committed by the Israeli state through the de-Arabisation of the landscape (see Benvenisti 2000; Pappe 2006; Kadman 2008).

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Epp Weaver (2007) argues that the Palestinian ‘refrain of home’ – with the aid of Ottoman land deeds and metal house keys (Zochrot’s logo is a keyhole) and oral history projects – are less about the past and more about ‘giving shape to an imminently uncertain present and future’ (Allan 2007: 11). If for the Palestinians memory may be a therapeutic practice, one cannot help feeling that for Israeli Jews the Nakba becomes a mantra, a strategy, often unlinked to the political conclusions necessitated by its co-memoration. According to Pappe in the wake of the 2009 Gaza war: We cannot allow 2009 to be just another year, less significant than 2008, the commemorative year of the Nakba [...] It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. In this new year, we have to try to realign public opinion to the history of Palestine and to the evils of the Zionist ideology as the best means of both explaining genocidal operations such as the current one in Gaza and as a way of pre-empting worse things to come. (Pappe 2009)

The signs posted by Zochrot to commemorise Palestinian sites are not intended to conceal or replace existing signs bearing the Hebrew place or street name, but rather add another layer. As Leshem (2004) argues, Zochrot’s signposting attempts to construct a ‘memorial community’ by proposing an alternative reading of the Israeli landscape, which is controlled by authorities such as the Jewish National Fund, and creating spaces for the Palestinian physical and mental existence within the Israeli memorial landscape. Even though the signs posted by Zochrot are usually removed soon after being posted, the signposting practice subverts the hegemonic landscape and repoliticises it. Though these signposts have a huge impact on tour participants, my question is whether this signposting is enabled by the ultimate Israeli control of the geopolitical landscape and its rememorialising. The Palestinian village associations who have been marching to their destroyed villages since the 1980s have not really engaged in resignposting, although many Palestinians participate in Zochrot’s tours, usually, but not exclusively as witnesses. This landscaping act thus remains the prerogative of the privileged children of the Israeli-Jewish hegemony. However, if we agree with Nora that we continue to evoke memory because so little of it is left, Zochrot’s website (www.nakbainhebrew.org), though it mostly documents the group’s own activities rather than broader political concerns, is arguably a lieu de mémoire, albeit representing the Nakba as a fading memory that only Israeli Jews can rescue. By comparison, Palestinian Nakba websites (see the London-based www.palestineremembered.com) are more directly dedicated to mapping and commemorating the Nakba itself. The question which is sometimes raised of whether the Nakba is a historical act or an ongoing event rings hollow in the face of ongoing land expropriations (see e.g. Yiftachel and Yakobi 2005), the checkpoint regime, the

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separation wall, as well as the ongoing siege, and the winter 2008–09 Gaza war. The Gaza war, which inter alia served as a mobilisation engine for Israel critical activism, could clearly not have left Zochrot members indifferent and the group increasingly links its co-memorative practices to current events. On 28 January 2009, an exhibition titled ‘Postcards to Gaza’ was launched in Zochrot’s gallery space in Tel Aviv, showing photographs by Shareef Sarhan, a Palestinian artist living and working in Gaza who photographed the city during and after Israel’s attacks, side by side with responses by a group of Israeli artists. The photographs and responses were published in postcard format and members of the public were invited to send the postcards on (Postcards to Gaza, www.zochrot.org). On 27 December 2008, the first day of the war, Zochrot conducted a tour to al-Ras al-Ahmar, as part of its ‘bridging memory’ project. Writing about the tour ‘while Gaza is under attack’, Umar Ighbarieh posted the following report on Zochrot’s website: The bad news from Gaza started to arrive as we drove to the north for our tour and commemorative ceremony in the Palestinian village of al-Ras al-Ahmar. First we heard that 50 people were killed in a massive bombardment of the city by Israeli planes. The number of victims rose at an alarming rate. By early evening, when we returned to Tel Aviv, the count of Palestinians killed had reached 200 [...] More than half the current population of the Gaza Strip are Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their towns and villages at the beginning of the Nakba and afterwards. The inhabitants of the town of alMajdal (today Ashqelon), for example, were loaded onto trucks and expelled to Gaza in 1950 [...] ‘Bridging Memory’ began as an optimistic idea, and ended in disappointment because Israelis were unwilling to become partners in thinking about the refugees whose tragedy Israel is responsible for, and whose citizens live today on the lands and even in the homes of these refugees. Israel has been oppressing the Palestinians since 1948, and continues to do so today. This oppression takes many forms, but they all lead to the same result. The refugees remain refugees, injustice persists. The terrible news from Gaza demonstrates that the story of the Nakba hasn’t ended, nor has the blood stopped flowing – even as these lines are written. (www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=706)

Ighbarieh’s report highlights the dilemmas inherent in Zochrot’s postmemory practices. While replete with the language of postconflict justice, such as ‘bridging memory’, and despite the upbeat optimism reflected in Zochrot’s annual report, Ighbarieh – a Palestinian Zochrot employee – is well aware of the group’s ultimate inability to make Israeli Jews ‘partners in thinking about the refugee tragedy’. Zochrot makes an important contribution to taking the Nakba skeleton out of the Israeli Jewish cupboard. Yet despite claiming that its signposting activities encourage a ‘more moral discourse’ in Israeli society and assist in shaping ‘a peace loving Israeli Jewish consciousness’ (cited in Kadman 2008: 130), some questions remain unanswered, mostly in relation to the

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appropriation of the memory of the Nakba and the use of the Nakba to construct and heal members’ Jewish identity, as I discuss in Chapter 8.

Appropriation? No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself [...] Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine [...] Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still the coloniser, the speaking subject, and you are now at the centre of my talk, (bel hooks 1991: 151-2)

Israeli resistance practices are riven with contradictions. In particular, one way or another, all Israeli Jewish members of the resistance movement – and I include myself – are implicated in appropriating the Palestinian voice. Though well meaning, some would argue that the Israeli resistance movement is ultimately more about repairing ‘what the occupation is doing to us’, than about what ‘we’ are doing to ‘them’. Furthermore, Habib Boulos criticises ‘Jewish Arabists’, who, he says, ‘represent the activities around Nakba memory as a “re-opening of the ‘48 files” – which were in fact never closed – aim to scare Israeli society and prevent it from understanding and empathising with the Palestinian tragedy’ (Boulos, cited in Elgazi 2001). Indeed, Laor’s trenchant critique of the Israeli resistance movement suggests that it affirms, rather than negates the Israeli Jewish collective: Every escalation of the [first] Intifada ultimately causes not merely a confrontation between the government and the opposition within Israel, but rather greater Jewish solidarity, regardless whether the escalation involves the massacre of Jews or Arabs. Perhaps the dead end implied in the ability to act ‘alonЇe’ – that is only Jews against a Jewish government – has brought about a kind of left-wing melancholia. (Laor 1999: 101)

Laor further argues that while the division between left and right centres on Israeli attitudes to the ‘Arabs’ who are not Israeli citizens – as soon as Israelis understand that they cannot ignore the occupied Palestinians, with whom they would have to live if a resolution is ever found, just as they have to live with the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the life of the Gazans become as insignficant as the life of Palestinian Israelis (Laor 1999: 103). As Kirstein Keshet argues, the ‘desire to help, the (illusory?) feeling of power that we as Israeli activists enjoy and the urge to exercise that power, are hard to resist [...] is a very Israeli conferring of dominance: a mix of good-will and arrogance, both towards the Palestinians and towards the soldiers’ (Kirstein Keshet 2006: 126), a dominance that ultimately erases the Palestinian voice.

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What has emerged from my research is that there is a degree of competition among members of different Israeli resistance groups as to who is ‘better’ at protest and resistance work. Rather than engage in self-righteous competition, I want to open up the question of whether Zochrot’s co-memory of the Nakba in Hebrew appropriates the Palestinian voice, and thus perpetuates Palestinian victimhood, a position that most Palestinians reject. I put this question to a number of respondents, some Palestinian citizens of Israel, others radical Israeli Jewish activists. Some Israeli commentators make flippant comments on Zochrot’s tours as offering young Jewish participants a way of meeting the opposite sex and getting laid; others emphasise the 19 exclusively Ashkenazi composition of the group. On the Palestinian side the responses were more measured. For Wakim Wakim, chairperson of the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID), the main group coordinating the Palestinian annual marches of return, all collaboration with Jewish groups is conditional upon accepting the refugees’ right of return. After a lengthy debate, Zochrot accepted ADRID’s position (indeed ADRID participated in the conference on the right of return organised by Zochrot in Tel Aviv in May 2008, discussed in Chapter 8): As far as I am concerned, this is the prerogative of Jewish colleagues, but it is clear that without the return of the last refugee there can be no peace [...] we are not speaking about solidarity in general, but about the need for Arab and Jew to accept this [...] As member of ADRID, I have been holding discussions with organisations such as Zochrot for some years [...] There was a debate which took a few weeks [...] and then they said ‘you are right’... This is our demand, to raise this idea that if there is change, it can only come as a result of political, not legal pressure. We appreciate that public opinion today is influenced by Zionism [...] Therefore all contributions in this regard are important. (Wakim, interview. May 2006)

Other Palestinian citizens of Israel voice other opinions. A former Palestinian member of Zochrot, who asked not to be quoted directly, criticised Zochrot for appropriating the Palestinian Nakba and determining future solutions without consulting the refugees themselves. Thus too, the Palestinian writer Salman Natour, while welcoming Zochrot’s work, argues that telling the Nakba story by anti-Zionist Israelis silences the local Palestinian voice; I welcome and respect Zochrot’s activities. I think it is important, very positive and the only way we can work with the Jewish side, through people who can lead the way into the Israeli Jewish consciousness. I also appreciate Israeli Jewish intellectuals and academics who work on the Nakba. But there is one problem [...] we should not allow a situation that because of the better resources at their disposal, the anti-Zionist Palestinian narrative is written by Israeli Jews. This is not right. Like it’s not right that in issues linked to the Jewish Israeli psyche, in relation to the Nakba, they speak about names of villages. It is an emotional thing, names of Arab villages instead of kibbutz names [...] This

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does not suit me as a Palestinian [...] The same applies to the anti- Zionist Palestinian narrative. It’s wrong that anti-Zionist Jews write it. Yes, they are wonderful, we all love them, we all respect them. Yes, we need it, and this is why we have established this Jewish-Arab research institute, as an institute that has Ilan Pappe, and Salman Natour and others who agree can work together. (Salman Natour, interview, May 2006)

At the same time, Natour criticises the tendency to ignore Palestinians who live in Israel when talking about the Nakba or the right of return in international conferences: ‘they invite anti-Zionist Israelis, Palestinians from Jordan or Lebanon [...] ignoring those who live here. And this is a mistake, a Zionist mistake, but also a mistake made by the PLO leadership’. Many Palestinian activists welcome Zochrot’s co-memorative work, albeit critically and conditionally. But Jewish Israeli political activists offer more nuanced and thoughtful criticism. Zochrot member Nitza Aminov, an Israeliborn socialist political activist and supporter of the secular democracy one-state solution, was enthusiastic about Zochrot when she first heard about them: When asking whether Zochrot appropriates the Palestinian voice, we must remember that this question is rarely asked, because as [left-wing] Israelis we think it’s great that such a group exists, and that if Israelis study and understand the topic, we’ll be able to change things. It took me some time to think about it because at first I was enthusiastic about this group because for me speaking about the Nakba is part of studying the meaning of Zionist colonialism, as a stage towards abolishing the Jewish state of Israel as it now exists. But after some time, you begin to think [...] of course this raises the question ‘so what, should we do nothing? Should we only analyse?’ But I believe we must analyse because if we get it wrong, the damage would be greater than the benefit. (Aminov, interview, May 2006)

Aminov further critiques Zochrot members’ reluctance to define the group as a political organisation, preferring instead to construct it as a human rights or a ‘learning’ organisation: For instance, when a Zochrot member kept using the term ‘expelled’ [in relation to the 1948 Palestinians], I argued that some of them ran away. This is as legitimate, and implies no value judgement. Not using the term ‘ran away’ also implies appropriation [...] The same member refused to regard Zochrot as a political organisation [...] for her Zochrot is a human rights organisation. I refuse to accept this. I uphold the Palestinian discourse about refusing to remain victims. This has led to a process of awareness in Israeli Palestinian society, whose younger generation, defining itself as ‘the upstanding generation’, complains against the inaction of their parents’ generation. (Interview, May 2006; see also Rabinowicz and Abu Baker 2005)

Aminov is particularly critical of Zochrot’s over-reliance on refugee testimonies, suggesting that the emphasis should shift to collecting perpetrators’ testimonies: ‘As part of dismantling the dominant Jewish Israeli Zionist

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narrative, which underpins the state, it is important to analyse other aspects of Israeli society and conduct academic research, which will not merely tell the Palestinian story, but will offer a historical and sociological analysis.’ Speaking about the performative and ceremonial aspect of Zochrot’s work, she adds, As you can see from its reports, for Zochrot these ceremonies – only one, very marginal aspect of memory work - are central. I believe that this work necessitates ongoing thought, analysis, criticism of the activities’ contents and meanings. Although some Palestinians get a sense of solidarity – which I think is very important – I believe this performative work is only one element, while for Zochrot it is central. Yet this is not political activity but rather a form of escapism. There are very few Jewish people who are prepared to admit that the state of Israel has no right to exist. Nothing can be repaired, and ethnic cleansing is an ongoing process. For me the most difficult aspect of Zochrot’s work is not making links between the past and what is happening today, so much so that members are unaware of what is going on in the occupied territory. (Interview, May 2006)

Tamar Avraham, who was born in Germany to non-Jewish parents, converted to orthodox Judaism and has lived in Israel for a number of years, working in compiling communal memory books for Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. In thinking about the appropriation of Nakba memory, she compares Holocaust and Nakba commemoration – which, she argues, have a lot in common, even though ‘most members of Zochrot are not that interested in the Holocaust’. Most of the books written about German Jewish communities are written by non-Jewish Germans in German, yet these books, she says, are vital for compiling the Pinkos HaKehillot memory books. This does not amount to appropriation because of a number of reasons: Firstly, a significant part of the books written about the Jewish communities is academic research, and everybody has the right to do research on whatever subject and to contribute to the discovery of unknown things, a legitimate goal in itself. Secondly, other books are the fruit of an attempt to come to terms with guilt and responsibility for what Germans did to Jews under the Nazi regime. The first step was often to reveal what the perpetrators did [...] and to remember these crimes, by putting memorial plates saying that the synagogue was burned down by the Nazis or organising processions remembering the events. Only after dealing with this, should the history of the Jewish community be told, as an act of protesting what the Nazis wanted to do: to eradicate the memory of everything Jewish in Germany. Thirdly, the history of the Jewish communities is seen more and more as part of local German history. Today, no serious volume on the history of a German town is published that doesn’t include a chapter on the local Jewish communities. (Written interview, 2007).

Altough when Germans write the history of Jewish communities, they often feel that they are writing their own history yet they can be thought of as

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appropriating Jewish memory, Avraham believes that understanding what happens reflects reality, ‘because Jewish communities and their individual members were indeed part of the town’s economic, social and cultural life’, and the identity of German Jews, most of whom ‘defined themselves as “German citizens of Jewish faith”, put their German identity and culture before their Jewish identity and religion’. Applying the same reasoning to Zochrot’s work, she concludes that it does amount to appropriation, for the following reasons. Firstly, Zochrot does not wish to conduct academic research; the booklets distributed at its tours mainly contain testimonies, which, as discussed above, ‘are the least helpful thing if one wants to reconstruct the past as accurately as possible’. According to Avraham, when she raised the topic, Zochrot’s director said ‘he doesn’t mind if the testimonies tell the truth or not. As long as they are represented as testimonies he feels that everything can be said without trying to find out if it reflects the facts.’ Furthermore, she says that her plan to emphasise research rather than testimonies in her work on the Nakba in Jerusalem was met with skepticism as to whether this is appropriate for Zochrot. Second, Avraham says that while there no longer seems to be basic resistance to dealing with what Zionists/Israeli Jews did during the Nakba, in some of the booklets Zochrot is still concentrating on ‘Palestinian village life before the Nakba and the experience of the refugees during the Nakba’, and not on the role of the perpetrators. According to her, this indicates that Zochrot is not sufficiently conscious of ‘the need to deal with the Nakba as a crime committed by Israeli Jews as part of a deliberate policy’ although taking responsibility for the Nakba has been formulated as Zochrot’s main goal. It is as if there is a – probably unconscious – attempt to reach reconciliation without all the necessary work of coming to terms with the crime, maybe out of ‘fear of confronting this responsibility and the angry reaction of a public that is denying guilt and responsibility’. The consequence of this omission is that ‘dealing with the history of the Palestinian villages becomes a kind of nostalgic return to the past’. The refugees’ destiny is ‘something to be deplored [...] creating empathy like a natural catastrophe that somehow landed on them’. This means that the opportunity to avoid appropriation by dealing with your own dark history is missed. Third, she argues that many members of Zochrot see the tours very much as a way of making them part of their own history. While recognising that Palestinian villages and Palestinian dispossession is of course part of Israeli Jewish history, Avraham remembers Bronstein saying that the most important thing for him personally is that these places, after he has learnt about them and toured them, are no longer unknown to him, becoming part of his map of the country, belonging to him; that he has ‘conquered’ them, literally. I was quite shocked [...] thinking that in this way the villages will be conquered for a second time. [But] I realised that he didn’t understand my problem, because for many of us the word ‘conquer’ has a totally different meaning. For me, with my

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European, anti-colonial background conquering is always negative, whereas for him, out of Zionist tradition and language, it is something positive.

She concludes by arguing that such attitude to the villages denotes strong appropriation: Unlike the Jews in Germany, the Palestinians of course were not part of the economic, social and cultural framework of the Zionist settlement and did not identify themselves as part of it. The only way, as I see it, to regard the villages as part of Jewish-Zionist history is to deal with what Zionists did to them and to take responsibility for it, but this, as we have seen, is not so much what Zochrot is doing. To sum up, the way Zochrot is working today has much of appropriation, and there is a serious need to think what can be done about it. The problem is that most members don’t seem to feel troubled about it. (Written interview, 2007)

Conclusion: returning to the scene of the crime? I grew up as a non-Jew in Germany and, although being born twenty years after the end of the war, I felt the heavy weight of the Holocaust, the idea of taking responsibility for the deeds of the group you belong to, even if you personally are not guilty, is very natural for me and I expect Israeli society to take responsibility for the Nakba. A first step to this would be allowing the memory instead of silencing it and covering the remains. (Avraham, written interview, 2007)

Questions of appropriation and of using the ongoing occupation and oppression of the Palestinians as a tool for expressing Israeli dissent are beginning to be debated in a variety of media. Artists have been particularly vocal in debating these dilemmas. In August 2009, Ma’arav, an online Israeli art and culture magazine, published a series of articles tided ‘Whose voice is this anyway?’ (Ma’arav 2009). Contributors asked who ‘owns’ the voice of the other, if anyone can ‘own’ a voice anyway, and what is the character of the moral right to employ it. Showcasing and debating artworks, curatorial work, film, and activism, contributors evaluate the questions that arise from creating and researching the other. Noa Roei’s ‘The Politics of aesthetics between Bil’in and Tel Aviv’ (2009) deals with the creation of objects and performances for demonstrations against the construction of the Separation Wall in the Palestinian village of Bil’in, and their subsequent relocation from the realm of protest to the one of gallery exhibition in Tel Aviv. The artistic means they employ, Roei claims (2009), align the protesters with members of the international contemporary activist-art community, allowing them to sound off not as oppressed but as active partners in this scene. Indeed, as Ma’arav editors Yonatan Amir and Ronen Eidelman acknowledge, the conversation is between Israeli Jews, even though the supplement, ‘should have included the voices of Palestinians and citizens of

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neighboring states such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. But the ongoing occupation means that creators and researchers from the world in general and the Middle East in particular are reluctant to collaborate with Israeli bodies. Since we thought it was inappropriate to use our voices alone to speak of the cultures of our neighbors, and in light of the IDF’s attack on Gaza (which has strengthened calls for boycott), we publish this supplement without these voices, which are sorely missed’ (Amir and Edelman 2009). In the process of writing I have come to appreciate that Zochrot is an evolving group. Key to introducing the Nakba to Israeli Jewish public culture, it is continuously learning, shifting from co-memory work towards more explicitly political work. In addition to participating in return conferences and in marches of return organised by Israeli Palestinian groups such as ADRID, in the summer of 2008 Zochrot held a conference on the right of return (both discussed in Chapter 8) and participated in the 2008 Haifa conference for the right of return and a secular democracy in Palestine. Of late, it publishes its materials not only in Hebrew and English but also in Arabic, constantly devising new strategies and new ideas. At the same time, it continues its comemorative work by conducting tours and publishing memorial booklets, returning repeatedly to the ‘scene of the crime’. Beyond merely evoking the Nakba as mantra, as modus operandi and as strategy, Zochrot members increasingly speak publicly about responsibility. In April 2009, on the eve of Israel’s 61st Independence Day, Zochrot member Amaya Galili writes about the lessons that learning about the Nakba have taught her: Accepting responsibility for the Nakba and its ongoing consequences obligates me to ask hard questions about the establishment of Israeli society, particularly about how we live today. I want to accept responsibility, to correct this reality, to change it. Not say, ‘There’s no choice. This is how we’ve survived for 61 years, and that’s how we’ll keep surviving.’ It’s not enough for me just to ‘survive.’ I want to live in a society that is aware of its past, and uses it to build 21 a future that can include all the inhabitants of the country and all its refugees.

We must ask, however, what the co-memoration of the Nakba facilitates. Does it facilitate Israelis’ ongoing sense of victimisation, enabling them to separate between past, present, and future? Does it enable the Israeli resistance movement to concentrate on ‘the [1967] occupation’, ignoring the fact that Israel’s Palestinian citizens are also the victims of the ongoing occupation and ethnic cleansing (Yiftachel 2009)? Galili – like other Zochrot members – emphasises the role of co-memorating the Nakba in leading to reconciliation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. On another level, then, does Nakba comemoration enable groups such as Zochrot to perform co-memory as an act of reconciliation rather than as leading to the dismantling of the racial state? Finally, as I discuss in Chapter 8, is Nakba co-memoration ultimately about aiming to heal Israel and repair Jewish identity?

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Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6 7

8 9

10

11 12 13 14

Bronstein explains the choice of the feminine appellation through stereotypical gendered assumptions of masculinity as militaristic and femininity as reconciliatory, despite the critique of the essentialism of such assumptions (see e.g. Sharoni 1992; Lentin 2004c): ‘the hegemonic Zionist discourse conjures up images of a violent . memory, invariably exclusive and masculine, and leaves no room for the [Palestinian] other. Zochrot seeks to promote an alternative discourse on memory, one that strives towards true reconciliation and is openly inclusive and compassionate towards the Palestinian side’ (Bronstein 2005a: 221). See Gideon Levy (2009) on the Israeli court philosopher Prof Assa Kasher, ‘koshering’ the Gaza war atrocities. See, e.g., Shlaim in The Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israelpalestine, Pappe in Electronic Intifada, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/ article10100.shtml, Loshitzky in Electronic Intifada, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10119.shtml, and Yiftachel in YNet, www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340, L-3652051,00.html. See also On The Left Side, www.on-the-left-side.co.il/ (all last accessed 15/2/10). www.notes.co.il/sorek (last accessed 15/2/10). Though of course there clearly are words, and Palestinians and their supporters use them in abundance. It is surely the refusal to relinquish the position of belonging to the oppressor society and the unwillingness to identify with Palestinians rather than the idea that this run-of-the-mill military occupation is uniquely horrible, that causes this silence (I am thankful to David Landy for this comment). See, for instance, Goldschmidt and Kaniuk’s www.mahsanmilim.com (last accessed 15/2/10). See e.g. the ‘SHIT list’ of 7,000 Self Hating and/or Israel Threatening Jews, www.masada2000.org/shit-list.html; and Campus Watch, which monitors US Middle East Studies against the ‘danger’ of, among other things, ‘predicting that Palestinians would establish a democracy, ushering in a transformation of the Middle East’, www.campuswatch.org/about.php (last accessed 15/2/10). Though unquantifiable, according people I consulted, the same people tend to participate in all activities (personal communication). For a list of depopulated Palestinian localities see www.palestineremembered.com (last accessed 15/2/10); Kadman (2008) provides a comprehensive Israeli list of depopulated villages. See Shefi’s (2008) review of an art exhibition tided ‘Salameh/Herzl: a view from the south of Tel Aviv’, constructed around a poem cycle by the Nazareth-born Palestinian writer Ragi Bathish, who lives and works in Tel Aviv. The artworks relate to the Salameh area, a former Palestinian neighbourhood, where many of the participating artists live and work. Contextualising the exhibition in the work of Zochrot, Shefi writes that it is one of many exhibitions to have jumped on the ‘Nakba band wagon’, to add a subversive veneer to what is rather mediocre art. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bCJkmqj6Lw (last accessed 15/2/10). See e.g. www.palestineremembered.com/ (last accessed 15/2/10). www.zochrot.org/index.php?id= 147 (last accessed 15/2/10). According to Pappe 2006, the figures were deliberately inflated by the Zionist forces in order to sow fear among the Palestinians and panic them to mass exodus. According to Benvenisti both Jewish and Arab source cite a figure of 254 (2000: 115).

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21

The dissertation was withdrawn after a successful law suit by the Alexandroni veterans. http://mondoweiss.net/2008/09/why-palestinian-oral-histories-of-nakba-must- be-givenweight-by-scholars.html (last accessed 15/2/10). ‘Challenging the boundaries: a single state in Palestine/Israel’ conference, http://onestate.net/ (last accessed 15/2/10). http://www.imdb.com/tide/tt1001383/ (last accessed 15/2/10). Personal communication, Smadar Lavie, Michal Zak. Tamar Avraham read a draft of this chapter in August 2009 and her comments are incorporated. http://rabbibrant.com/2009/04/29/why-i-cant-celebrate-yom-haatzmaut/ (last accessed 15/2/10).

8 Melancholia, Nakba co-memory and the politics of return

Introduction In publicising its activities, Zochrot emphasises the shift from denial to Israeli acknowledgement of the Nakba, rightly arguing that denial is no longer tenable. Chapter 7 discussed the performance of co-memory through an analysis of Zochrot’s commemorative practices. This chapter revisits the link between melancholia, race, memory, identity, and politics. Zionist state memory construction involved the creation of myths in the foundation of culture, society and nation (Ohana and Wistrich 1996: 19).The ‘new historians’ regard Zionism as a mythic grand-narrative that constructed an entirely fictive ‘invented tradition’ of national unity. For the ‘new historians’ the Zionist settlement project is an aspect of European colonisation of ‘authentic’ Palestinian nationhood, and the ‘war of independence’ is often described as Zionism’s original sin which gave birth to the Jewish state and expropriated 750,000 Palestinians (Ohana and Wistrich 1996: 21). Goldberg traces the Foucauldian processes by which the state of Israel was transformed into ‘protector of the integrity, superiority, and more or less purity of the homogenising group, what Foucault marks as “the race’” (2009: 109), and in the process denying not only the 1948 original sin-catastrophe, but the very existence of a Palestinian ‘nation’, or even ‘people’. Yet that denial, like traumas such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre ‘re-membered’ in Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir (of which more later), as Nurit Gertz (2009) argues, obscure the 1948 trauma hidden deeper within the Israeli Jewish consciousness. My argument in this book has been that these hidden traumas emerge not as mourning for Zionism’s lost Palestinian victims, but rather as unresolved melancholic grief for Zionism’s own original sin. In Chapter 7 I suggested that one impetus to making the Nakba a centerpiece of resistance work is the crisis in what I call the Israeli resistance movement. Tilly (1999) argues that social movements are often misunderstood

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as solidaristic, coherent groups, with continuous, self-contained life histories, rather than as clusters of performances, as I noted in Chapter 7 in relation to Zochrot. The Israeli resistance movement in all its diversity can be understood, following Tilly, as providing a ‘sustained challenge to power holders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of those power holders by means of repeated public display of that population’s worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment. At a minimum, social movements involve continuous interaction between challengers and power holders’ (Tilly 1999: 256–7).The Israeli-Jewish resistance movement aims to seek a variety of political solutions, from ‘peace’, ‘ending the occupation’, the demilitarisation of Israeli society and a two-state solution, to the Palestinian right of return and a one-state solution, and therefore the demise of Israel as a Jewish state. It can be theorised in terms of Tilly’s distinguishing features of social movements, which, he argues, lie ‘in sustained challenges to authorities and responses by those authorities, during which at least one challenger publicly displays WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment’ (Tilly 1999: 260). The emphasis on WUNC in much of the self-perception of Israeli Jews engaged in co-memorating the Nakba is palpable. Above all, claiming worthiness, groups engaged in Nakba co-memoration are relationally also engaged in constructing the meaning of Israeli Jewish identities. Linking memory and identity, Gillis argues that on the one hand, ‘the core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, the sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering’, and on the other, ‘we are constantly revising our memories to suit our current identities’ (Gillis 1994: 3). What changes over time is the nature of that ‘we’, from a ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor 1992: 25) to a ‘politics of interrogation’ (Hesse 1999: 212-14) of the ‘we’ who do the remembering. Zionist collective memory was about inventing tradition in the Hobsbawm sense (Zerubavel 1994b) and about identity formation through nation-building, which in the process has engaged in violent ethnoracial purging ‘forcing a considerable percentage of group members out of the national territory and so of the moral imaginary’ (Goldberg 2009: 119). Transferring the Palestinians has been Zionism’s and Israel’s life-long project and the Palestinians thus ‘purged’ are racially branded. It is worth revisiting the theorisation of the state of Israel as ‘a modern racial state knotted with and in constitutive contrast to the prehistory of Palestinian antiquity’. Palestinians, Goldberg writes, ‘are treated not as if a racial group, not simply in the manner of a racial group, but as a despised and demonic racial group’ (Goldberg 2009: 139, emphasis in the original). If memories of the Jew as the perennial hounded other play a central role in representing Zionism as a counter-historical struggle where race is denied in the narrative of a small democratic Jewish island in a sea of Arabs all calling for its demise, the contemporary melancholic co-memoration of the Nakba shifts the focus from nation-building towards repairing and healing that combative ethnoracial Israeli-Jewish identity.

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Pulling together the disparate strands of my argument becomes increasingly complex as practices of Israeli Nakba co-memoration are discursively entangled in memory, identity-making, melancholia, and politics. Nakba was the chosen Palestinian term to describe the 1948 expulsions. Acknowledging that for the Palestinians Nakba is a multilayered and emotional historical event and political discourse which aims, inter alia, to keep the memory of the catastrophe alive, establishing the Palestinian ‘permission to narrate’ (Said 1984), Pappe questions the supremacy of the term Nakba. Catastrophes, he argues, ‘like tornados, earthquakes, epidemics or famines, produce victims, not perpetrators [...] the peace camps on both sides preferred to tell the 1948 story as a tragedy [...] to look after the victims rather than ask who is to blame’. By contrast with the victim narrative, Pappe’s choice of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ paradigm frames the event as crime rather than disaster. He writes of his ‘deep conviction that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must become rooted in our memory and consciousness as a crime against humanity [...] the perpetrators here are not obscure – they are very specific people: the heroes of the Jewish war of independence’ (Pappe 2006: 5). Crucially, the production of Palestinians as victims, encouraged by the Palestinians themselves, and favoured by their supporters, must be linked to the historicist racialisation of the Palestinians, configured as pre-modem and ‘primitive’ by contrast with Israeli Jews seen as modern, Europeanised, civilising (Goldberg 2009). All too often, readings of the Palestine-Israel conflict omit the narrative of race and racialisation. As Goldberg reminds us, the crisis is ‘underpinned by a return to presumptions of racially conceived Palestinian in- or infra-humanity on one side and insistent Israeli assertiveness on the other’ (Goldberg 2009: 115). The absence of race, because ‘racelessly conceived in relation to and through religion, steers the interests of geostrategic positioning [...] [as] Israelis occupy the structural positions of whiteness in the racial hierarchy of the Middle East’ (Goldberg 2009: 117), notwithstanding the ambivalent position of Arab Jews. Thus, despite the unquestionable importance of remembering and telling the Nakba, and side by side with insisting on the Palestinian right of return, many in the Israeli ‘peace camp’ continue to deny both the racialisation of Palestinians, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, as was evidenced by the Zionist left during the Gaza war which it supported in the spirit of the (Foucauldian) imperative that (Israeli) society must be defended (Foucault 2003). This chapter revisits the memory and melancholia nexus through several prisms. I begin by asking whether Israeli-Jewish Nakba co-memoration ultimately serves to construct activists’ Jewish identity with melancholia here being not for the land or the lost Palestinians, but rather for an uncomplicated and idyllic lost Jewish Israeli identity. I go on to revisit Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterposing co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and question, whether return narratives by Israeli Jews,

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courageous as they might seem, are ultimately about healing Israel. Rose posits self-righteousness as an Israeli trait, citing Golda Meir’s famous claim that she could never forgive the Palestinians for what they were making her do to them. Amazingly, Israel, Rose reminds us, can forgive the Palestinians for killing its sons, but not for forcing it to kill theirs (Rose 2008: 88). Such claims are clearly disingenuous, as argued by Israeli political activists whose involvement in political work is not about constructing a high-moral-ground Israeli Jewish identity. I then ask whether Israeli Jews engaged in this co-memory work express what Goldberg (2009: 141) calls ‘racial melancholia’, and conclude by reiterating my argument, via linking a critique of Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir with Israeli Jewish oppositional responses to the 2008–09 Gaza war, that much of this grief and memory work – including my own – is a symptom of a melancholic longing for a lost Israeli innocence.

Memory and identity In May 2009, on the eve of Israel’s 61st anniversary, Columbia University Teachers College published a study1 according to which 47 per cent of Israeli Jews surveyed about the 1948 Nakba ‘believe expulsions took place’. While ‘46 per cent believe that Israel and the Arab/Palestinian people have been equally responsible for the outbreak and continuation of the conflict’, 43 per cent upheld the Zionist narrative primarily blaming the Arab/Palestinian people, and 4 per cent blamed the Jews. It is tempting to share the study’s optimism that at long last Israeli Jews are beginning to acknowledge the Nakba. The study’s authors were encouraged by the fact that the memory of the conflict was ‘somewhat critical’, suggesting ‘that Israeli-Jewish society has changed to become more critical, open and self-reflective, allowing it to adopt less biased narratives’. However, a closer look at the results shows that optimism about the acknowledgement of the Nakba by Israeli Jews may be premature: 60 per cent of the respondents were unaware that in the 1947 United Nations’ partition plan the Palestinians, two-thirds of the 1947 population, were offered only 44 per cent of the territory. And unsurprisingly, the study also found ‘a strong connection between the collective memory of ‘‘past Jewish persecution” (regarding antisemitism and the Holocaust) and the diagnosed collective memory of the conflict’. Likewise, Shlomo Avineri, writing in Ha’aretz on the occasion of Pope Benedict’s May 2009 visit to the ‘Holy Land’, while acknowledging the Nakba and the resultant Palestinian pain, blames the Palestinians for rejecting the 1947 UN partition plan and for their ‘decision to respond to it with force’ (Avineri 2009). On the eve of the 61st anniversary of the Nakba Israel’s rightwing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman proposed a bill prohibiting the commemoration of the Nakba by Palestinian citizens on Israel’s Day of Independence. Any such commemoration, the proposed bill suggests, would be

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punishable by three years imprisonment. Commemorating the Nakba evidently remains a potent terrain of contested memories, identities, and myths, and according to Zochrot’s director Eitan Bronstein, it also indicates that Israeli Jewish society is increasingly ready to face the catastrophe and admit its responsibility (Bronstein 2009a). While Nakba commemoration is a central component of Palestinian identity, my focus is the role of this co-memorative practice as a component of Israeli Jewish identity making. Poignantly asking ‘who needs identity’, Stuart Hall (1996) posits identities as dynamic, relational, multiple, and contingent. He critiques the ‘identity discourse’ as having to do with the desire to return to a notion of an unmediated core subject and politics, and proposes identification rather than identity. In everyday parlance identification means recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group, or with an ideal and a form of solidarity. But as a discourse, identification is a construction, a process never completed, always in process, always conditional. Likewise Bauman (2001) argues that in ‘liquid modernity’ identity is a central prism through which other aspects of contemporary life are examined. Discussions of justice and equality are conducted in terms of recognition; culture is debated in terms of group or categorical difference, creolisation and hybridity; and the political process is theorised in terms of human rights (ultimately a right to a person’s separate identity irrespective of national or other belonging), and of life politics (identity construction, negotiation, and assertion). The identity discourse, Bauman argues, tells us more than anything else about the present-day state of society, as politics is replaced by a search for identity. Bauman’s insistence that if you cannot do what matters, you turn to what matters less but which you can do, is particularly potent. Identitybuilding thus becomes one of many ‘substitute pastimes’, invented as community Collapses; but although community-creating seems to dim our solitude, at least for a time, it ultimately signifies a retreat from politics. National identity, Bauman further suggests, was from the start a battle cry, a project calling for gigantic effort and the application of a lot of force to make sure the cry is heard and obeyed. The national territory had to overlap with the undivided sovereignty of the state which, as Agamben (2005) suggests, consists first and foremost of exemption. Thus national identity serves as an instrument of separating ‘us’ from ‘them’, as national identity, differently from all other identities, demands exclusive allegiance and fidelity (Bauman 2004b: 21–2). Astute as it is, Bauman’s analysis implies that identities can be assumed and discarded at will. Identities become contentious when racialised and colonised people seek recognition, as implied by Fanon’s distinction between a claim to ‘authenticity’ and the centrality of ‘lived experience’. According to Alana Lentin (2008a), Fanon is adamant about the centrality of lived experience in relation to black people representing themselves rather than being 2 represented by their colonisers. Fanon emphasises the difference between the idea of an authentic culture or national identity and the necessity of using the

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lived experience of the racialised as a means of understanding and overcoming oppression. Experience is thus seen as fluid, while authenticity is seen as a rigid way of constructing identities from the outside, by public or state understandings of ‘identity politics’ which conceive ethnic group identities as already ‘there’, fixed and unchanging. Lentin dismantles the demand by liberal theorists such as Taylor (1994), who regards self-determination as individualistic and narcissistic, and proposes authenticity, or the ‘politics of recognition’, which can be usefully channelled only if linked to a group project. The ‘politics of recognition’ allows one to be oneself as a universal right, based on the relativist dictum that no one has the right to criticise another’s values. However, contemporary academic preoccupation with ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ as the sole positions of the struggle of racialised people, has led to the conflation of ‘identity politics’ with antiracism, depoliticising the struggle, assuming what Bauman calls ‘cloakroom communities’ (2004b: 30). For Fanon, lived experience, on the other hand, negates notions of fixed identity, while authenticity is no more than a stage in transforming black–white relationships. All this is important not only in relation to the fluidity of identities, and to the strategic essentialism of ethnic and national identities, but also to the practicalities of the antiracist and anticolonial struggle. One of the most important questions often asked in relation to antiracist and anti-colonial resistance is who speaks for whom, who says what and from where? Antiracism, as Lentin argues, can be either generalised – intending to raise awareness among the population and achieve racelessness or, in the denial of race, what Goldberg (2009) calls antiracialism. Or it can be self-representational’, where the lived experience of the racialised informs the struggle.

Nakba co-memory: redeeming Jewish identity? We must go way beyond peace to redemption. We must redeem our country from its colonial past and present not only to enable us to finally normalise our existence and find our place in the Middle East, but also for our own sakes. We need to reconceptualise Israel as a country which celebrates the heritage of all its citizens, which promotes a cultural Zionism while making room for its other cultures, which develops an Israeli pluralism that may or may not morph into something new, and which is committed to human rights. The road is long and we haven’t even discovered it yet. (Halper 2008: 233)

Representing the Palestinians as mere victims not only contributes to the glorification of the land and the construction of a utopian Palestinian identity – a practice engaged in by Palestinians and Arabs in general as a central part of identity-building. It has also constructed the sign, Nakba, as relating to the vicissitudes of nature as opposed to Zionist history as relating to discourses of ‘independence’ and ‘liberation’, normalising Jewish life and transforming Jews from a religious group outside history to a national group (Khader 1998). For

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Hassan Khader, the sign, Nakba, is not immutable but rather mutating: ‘the lost Palestine will never return. As for the real Palestine, it exists in the Palestine of today with its particular demographic, cultural and linguistic characteristics.’ Just as the struggle to juxtapose Palestinian memory against the Zionist colonisation of memory dominates the Palestinian mindset, so, I want to argue, much of the struggle to co-memorate the Nakba by Israeli Jews emanates from a deep desire to redeem and repair Israeli Jewish identity, spoilt by the colonising impetus, as Halper’s quote above illustrates. While clearly a constitutive part of Palestinian identity, Israeli Jewish Nakba memory-making – beside having become part of the architecture of Israeli resistance work, particularly in its increasingly articulate espousal of the Palestinian right of return, as I demonstrate below – has also served as a building block of constructing its practitioners, in Tilly’s terms, as engaging in practices of WUNC - worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment - which at times seem to become self-referential, as the quote from Zochrot illustrates: Jewish activists in Zochrot wish to fundamentally change their approach to the disaster of the Palestinians which formed the foundation of the Jewish state in the land ... They also try to understand the Nakba as their own history. The Zionists expelled the refugees and prevented their return, making this story also a ‘Jewish story’. It is impossible to understand (and challenge) the identity of Jews in the land without referring to the ethnic cleansing which enabled their life in a state established for Jews only. (Zochrot, 5 February 2006, emphasis added)

Zochrot’s main aim is to evoke and commemorate the Nakba by speaking about it, in Hebrew, to the Israeli Jewish public. However, from the group’s written materials it is evident that when Zochrot members speak about remembering the Nakba, they also claim it in identitarian terms. While not negating the importance of making the Nakba present in Israeli-Jewish discourse, claiming Nakba co-memoration also as a Jewish story presents several conceptual problems. The first is the exclusion of Palestinians from this co-memorative act. Describing Zochrot’s actions as ‘a plea for a recognition of the moral responsibility Israeli Jews have towards the Palestinians, upon the rubble of whose world the Jewish state was founded’ rather than an ‘example of JewishArab co-existence’, Bronstein insists that Zochrot’s practice ‘does not depend upon the consent or the approval of the Arabs in Israel ... [and that] it might even exclude the Palestinian groups in Israel, because its main target is to change fundamentally the discourse of the “national Jewish camp’” (Bronstein 2005a: 232–3). However, Bronstein acknowledges that ‘the Palestinians possess the memory that Zochrot is trying to promote’ and therefore Zochrot is dependent on cooperation with Palestinians who live in the country. Zochrot’s insistence that the Nakba is also the story of the Jews in Israel links with my argument, in Chapter 1, that ‘we’ are all living in the shadow of the 1948 Palestinian refugees.

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A second problem – which I too am implicated in – is the construction of that’ we’, as implied by Hesse’s (1999: 212–14) substitution of Taylor’ politics of recognition’ with a ‘politics of interrogation’. Asking ‘whose recognition is sought and what is involved in the power to confer recognition and value’, Hesse posits a subversive circumvention of western culture and a subversive inscription of racialised spaces (Lentin 2002b: 230). The interrogation of that’ we’ has in fact already begun: as part of the responses to Musih and Bronstein’s ‘Practical thoughts about the return of Palestinian refugees’ (2008) which they begin with ‘As Israelis who live here, the right of return has always been one of the greatest taboos’, Tomer Gardi writes: ‘(you write) “for us”, “we”, “all of us” – first person plural in many variations appears many times in this text [...] it is not clear who are the “we”, for instance for which “we” was the right of return one of the greatest taboos? Eitan and Norma? Or a broader collective? Who is submerged in your “we”?’ (Gardi, in Musih and Bronstein 2008: 147). The ‘we’ Musih and Bronstein imply is clearly also middle class (as argued by Gardi who points out that ‘the time to study, that leisure, is a right enjoyed by very few people’) and Ashkenazi. In other documents about the right of return, Zochrot members write more explicitly: ‘the recognition and implementation of the right of return can bring about not only the repair of the historical wrong against the Palestinians but perhaps also the possibility for Jews to really return to the land. Return to it in the sense of really meeting it through the return of the Palestinians. Meeting the land and becoming part of it’ (Zochrot document). Third, while acknowledging the shadow of 1948 is crucial, I wonder throughout this book whether this ultimately substitutes the palpable Palestinian loss with a psychic melancholic focus on the grieving because perpetrating self. A 2009 paper by Bronstein provides a useful illustration of this conundrum. Borrowing concepts from psychotherapy, Bronstein suggests that ‘Jews in Israel tend to repress the Palestinian Nakba, but signs of it appear more and more often, burst out frequently, in a form that’s known as “post traumatic disorder”. I would argue that even Israelis who aren’t familiar with the Nakba, or who didn’t live through it, also experience this’ (Bronstein 2009). The act of repression, which began already while the Nakba was raging, and is evident in practices ranging from the Hagana destroying filmed evidence of Palestinian corpses to the Jewish National Fund (JNF) planting forests so as to hide remnants of destroyed Palestinian villages, according to Bronstein, are ‘themselves markers of the trauma that exists in Jewish Israeli society, but these also prevent the Jewish public from confronting trauma in a constructive way’ (Bronstein 2009). For Bronstein, when Israelis express anti-Palestinian sentiments this means ‘not only a recommendation for the future but an unconscious reconstruction of what actually occurred in the past, even if it was not completely successful’. Referring to an article in a religious nationalist magazine which criticises Zochrot’s signposting practices ‘as if the lands were theirs’, he argues that despite the violence expressed in the text, it also contains

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remnants of guilt and attempts to repress that violence. However, he sees the guilt feelings contained in the magazine text’s violent anti-Palestinian incitement as evincing the writer’s humanity. Bronstein further describes a tour to the destroyed urban quarter of Majdal, today the Israeli town of Ashqelon, in which there was a dispute between a Palestinian woman and a local Jewish resident, after which the local Jewish man helped her to re-erect the sign he and his neighbours had taken down and ‘brings her a glass of water to calm her down’. Bronstein interprets this as an act of acknowledging the Nakba, and thus of healing and reconciliation: This gesture of reconciliation is also, apparently, not a conscious one, but one that I want to understand as containing the potential for reconciliation involved in the act of recognising the Nakba. Dealing with the Nakba frees one from the automatic violence and/or victimhood that Israeli Jews are taught to feel. This freedom can be healing both personally and collectively. When Jews in Israel recognise the Nakba, they become motivated to extend a hand or a glass of water to Palestinians, in an appeal for forgiveness and reconciliation. (Bronstein 2009)

I read this paragraph again and again, with mixed feelings of amazement and incredulity. Yes, the tour did aim to re-member the depopulated Palestinian town of Majdal, and to resignpost its Palestinian name for all to see. Yes, the tour did aim to give the Palestinian refugee ‘permission to narrate’, albeit for the duration of the tour only. And yes, the local man, an Arab Jew now residing in the former Palestinian town, after removing the sign and arguing with Sha’ida, did suddenly change his tune, offering to help her re-erect the sign and extending a glass of water. But reading this story as signaling not only deepseated trauma (we do not know whether the man had been part of the 1948 occupying forces, so we have to assume that his is a collective Israeli Jewish trauma) but also a trauma leading to acknowledgement and reconciliation is a huge leap. 3 Online responses to Bronstein’s text were divided. One respondent wrote, ‘the Nakba-as-a-Jewish-trauma line is an indulgent, often self-indulgent view of colonial hatred [...] another way of making Jews the central feature of conversation and concern in this apartheid state, rather than the Arabs, for whom the trauma is obviously far worse’. Another wrote, ‘violence to others is a trauma. Arguably it won’t be stopped until the pain of the harm done to others is registered in the consciousness of the perpetrator [...] it is emphatically not self- indulgent, it’s brave’ A third respondent distinguished between different kinds of Jews: ‘Zionist thugs who stole and continue to steal what’s left of historic Palestine’ and ‘humanist Jews’ who can ‘remake Jewish identity’. My point is that discourses of remaking Jewish identity, and, as Halper says, ‘redeeming our country from its colonial past and present’, although not the main motivation for Nakba co-memoration, are ultimately a central part of the ethnoracial logic of stratification. The Palestinian-Philistine is pre-modem victim, requiring being ‘given voice to’, while the Israeli-Jew is modern, or

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postmodern, as evident from poststructuralist trends in artistic and academic representations of the Nakba and its subjects-victims, as already argued, conferring voice to the voiceless Palestinian. Not only does co-memorating the Nakba being perceived as having the potential to heal spoilt Israeli-Jewish identity; the Nakba itself is perceived as part of Israeli Jewish history. In parallel, although they recognise that the Palestinians are the main objects of state oppression, many Jewish Israeli members of the resistance movement also feel oppressed by state policies. Ariella Azoulai, lecturer in contemporary philosophy and visual culture, curator and documentary film director, distributed a text she wrote during the Gaza war, in which she bemoans the difficulty to conduct a policy of resistance in a regime that denies its oppressive policies while silencing its (Jewish) opponents and 4 constructing a propaganda war. Her argument is that ‘if we were whites in South Africa, we would have been overwhelmed by mass killings of black citizens’ and ‘some would have joined the blacks in creating a united front against the regime’. Yet because the Israeli state ‘conducts a campaign against us too, men and women citizens’, she feels Israeli Jews like herself are prevented from joining ‘the Arabs’ (interestingly, she does not use ‘Palestinians’), because the regime separates not only between ‘Arabs’ but it also, ... separates us from the possibility granted to the worst nations The possibility to turn a leaf in their history To change their ethos, their language, their horizon To stop persecuting the Arabs To stop thinking that we deserve what they don’t And choose a reasonable life of cooperation With the people our parents have brought us here to live with This regime forces us to be collaborators With deeds we do not want to collaborate in and do not want to be done in our name It forces us to separate ourselves from those we have been fated to live with In order to act in our name We have to be part of the act of ruling And until then we ask to differentiate ourselves From the regime’s acts And identify ourselves with those against which it acts. (Azoulai, distributed email communication 2009)

Azoulai’s mail attests to the deep despair felt by many members of the Israeli resistance movement and can be linked to Agamben’s ‘Beyond human rights’ (2004), in which he argues, after Arendt, that differentiating between refugee and citizen harbours dangers not only for the refugee – outside the law, forever positioned in the twilight zone of the ‘state of exception’ – but also for the

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citizen. If, as Agamben argues, the camp – concentration camp as well as refugee camp – is the political paradigm of modernity, a state we are all still living in, then the apparently marginal figure of the refugee – in this instance, Palestinian refugees but also displaced Palestinians citizens of Israel and Palestinians under occupation – in unhinging the old trinity of state-nationterritory, deserves to be considered the central figure of our political history, calling into question the very principles of the nation-state (Agamben 2004). Many Israeli and Jewish critics of Israeli state policies couch their opposition to Israel’s oppressive policies in being Jews or Jewish Israelis (see e.g. Karpf et al. 2008). This is despite Eyal Weizman’s potent argument that in some way, those who oppose the state participate in producing its oppressive policies. ‘By accepting the necessity of choosing the lesser evil out of a set of given options’ (as in ‘if only we acknowledge the Nakba we can pave the way to reconciliation’), Weizman writes, ‘opposition and human rights groups de facto accept the inevitability of the systems that dictate the options obscuring any possibility of refuting their logic and the grounds of their authority [...] participation [...] communicates consent’ (Weizman 2008b: 49). On the other side of the Jewish and Israeli opposition spectrum, however, stand those who reject any anti-Israeli resistance activism ‘as a diaspora Jew’, claiming, as does the radical British-based Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon, that ‘by fighting Zionism in the name of their Jewish identity they approve of Zionism ... To demand that Jews disapprove of Zionism in the name of their Jewish identity is to accept the Zionist philosophy. To resist Zionism as a secular Jew involves an acceptance of basic Zionist terminology, that is to say, a surrendering to Jewish racist and nationalist philosophy. To talk as a Jew is to 5 surrender to [Haim] Weizman’s Zionist philosophy.’ I stand somewhere between these two approaches. On the one hand, I want to believe that my oppositional activism is not merely identitarian but rather political. I agree with Oren Yiftachel who responded to my argument about melancholia: You may want to consider many people who have worked for years against the Jewish state, as Israelis. This is not just about healing but has a political agenda which, of course, includes bringing the Nakba into public debate and engaging with the right of return. Zochrot held the first ever conference on the right of return and some presented ‘the day after’ scenario, which is not just about healing, but about transformation, that is, making it a non-ethnocracy [...] but admittedly, we are a very small minority; perhaps vocal, but small. (Oren Yiftachel, email communication, 15 May 2009)

On the other hand, as Bauman writes, ‘my Jewishness is confirmed by Israeli iniquities paining me still more than atrocities committed by other countries’ (Bauman 2004b: 11), my own opposition does stem from my Israeli Jewishness, as discussed in Chapter 4.

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Ultimately, the necessary conclusion of co-memorating the Nakba must be recognising the Palestinian right of return. Zochrot has been involved in conferences and marches of return from the very start. I now turn to evaluate critically Zochrot’s commitment to the return of Palestinian refugees, beginning with a brief discussion of the politics of return as expressed by internally displaced Palestinians in Israel.

The morning after co-memory: Palestinian Nakba commemoration, reconciliation, and the right of return Documenting the internally displaced Palestinians (IDPs) in Israel, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (2009) highlights the role of the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced in Israel (ADRID) who, since the early 1990s, engaged in popular countrywide organised action aimed at securing the return of the IDPs to their villages and reconstructing the collective memory of the Nakba. Sabbagh-Khoury acknowledges that attention to the Nakba and to issues of refugees has varied, gaining centrality only in the post-Oslo period. ADRID’s activism has been helpful in encouraging the IDPs, who, according to several commentators (e.g., Abu Lughod and Sa’di 2007; Kanaaneh 2007), and due to the repressive Military Government abolished only in 1967, have, until recently, ‘failed to narrate’ the Nakba, to give themselves not only ‘permission to narrate’ the Nabka, but also to demand their return. However, this ‘failure to narrate’ is true mostly for internally displaced Palestinians, not for Palestinians in the diaspora, as the review of the Palestinian Nakba literature in Chapter 6 6 illustrates. Furthermore, Elgazi (2001) cites the Palestinian writer Habib Boulos who says that Palestinian citizens of Israel ‘have not stored (the memory of the Nakba) in a drawer. The Nakba was alive in memories and in the yearning to the brothers who were uprooted in 1948, and live as refugees across the border and in the diaspora.’ ADRID demands the abolition of the Israeli laws that regard the IDPs as ‘absentees’ as well as the return of the IDPs and the refugees to their towns and villages in accordance with UN Resolution 194, which calls for the return of the refugees or their compensation. Interestingly, Sabbagh-Khoury argues, ADRID’s discourse of the IDPs as citizens in the State of Israel undermines ‘the Israeli claim that the return of the refugees constitutes a demographic threat to the Jewish character of the State of Israel’. At the same time ADRID keeps the memory of the destroyed villages alive by organising marches of return, conferences, and seminars, helping to place the issue of the IDPs within the Palestinian context both inside and outside Israel. This emphasises the links between Palestinians in Israel and Palestinians in exile ‘by connecting their issue to that of the refugees, regardless of the fact that Israel deals with the refugees within its borders in isolation from the other issues, and views their issue as an internal Israeli affair’ (Sabbagh-Khoury 2009). Wakim Wakim, the association’s chairman, told me in May 2006:

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Until several years ago the [Nakba] memory was personal, not collective. You could hear the story of al-Nakba from every person, but unfortunately it has not found place in our literature. Particularly in contrast to the other side’s story, the Zionist story. When someone like Teddy Katz comes and speaks about the massacre in Tantura, it’s not that the survivors of Tantura didn’t know [...] they simply did not talk about it. They spoke about it among the survivors but not as part of the public discourse. Some thought other people will pass on their story, some thought it did not need telling and some were afraid. People lived under the Military Government until 1966. I am speaking about the first generation, who were afraid to disclose. Take my father [...] his discourse is entirely different [...] he did say there was something, but leave it [...] why speak about it. But gradually we are introducing new ideas, that we cannot go on like this. The negative identity has gone. When people asked my father where he was from, and he is from el Bassa, he would say I am not from here, I am not from Me’ilia. This was negative identity ... Today if you asked him, he would say, I am from el Bassa. I don’t want to boast, but I can tell you that the new discourse introduced by ADRID contributed towards creating a new identity, a more positive explicit identity, enabling them to claim belonging to the villages from which they were dispossessed. (Wakim, interview, May 2006)

Speaking at Zochrot’s June 2008 conference on the right of return, Wakim too spoke in identitarian terms, proposing ‘a new form of collective identity’: The ongoing Nakba has turned Palestine into one big ghetto that no one can protect. Palestinians will never give up their rights – and there is enough evidence to prove that it is impossible to defeat Palestinian resistance – therefore, we need a revolution of thinking within the 1948 borders, to ensure the rights of all of us based on legal arrangements, mutual citizenship, a constitution, a separation of religion and state, a new legal system to adapt to the new reality, et cetera. An entirely new definition of a collective identity is all of our responsibility. (Wakim, cited in Barrows-Friedman 2008)

Norma Musih and Eitan Bronstein’s detailed paper presented at the conference chose to discuss not the right, which they regard as not needing reaffirmation, but rather the return itself (Musih and Bronstein 2008). The text, the result of a study group Zochrot has held for several years, is published in its entirety in Sedek with responses by a group of Palestinian and Israeli scholars and activists. Musih and Bronstein divide their presentation into three stages, before the return, the return, and after the return. As a first prerequisite they posit the need to end the violence, by both Israel as the strong occupying power and Palestinians. In his response, Shetrit reminds them, however, that European Zionism in Palestine cannot exist without violence, and that therefore ‘the central project is to de-colonise Palestine. The price for this might be the emigration, voluntarily or out of fear, of most of the European colonisers’ (2008: 151). The second prerequisite is Jewish people studying the Nakba, and Palestinians studying ‘the non-hegemonic aspects of Jewish history and

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religion’ (2008: 152). Gardi’s comment is that while they wish to introduce the Palestinians to the non-hegemonic aspects of Israel, their own ‘we’ is rather hegemonic (2008: 152), and Shetrit writes that the symmetry suggested by Musih and Bronstein not only denotes the arrogance of those who ‘shoot and cry’, it also obscures Zionism’s oppression of Arab Jews (2008: 153). The third prerequisite involves alternative mapping so as to create an alternative reality, stressing that ‘as opposed to the claim that “there is no room”, Salman Abu Sitta’s research shows that most of the depopulated villages remain empty’. Again, using an uncontextualised ‘we’, Musih and Bronstein are taken to task by Shetrit who insists that colonisation spells ‘the highest level of violence’ (2008: 155). Another prerequisite for return is conducting alternative surveys as to how many Jewish Israelis would be prepared to give up their homes in favour of the original owners, and how many Palestinians would like to actually return. Shetrit’s comment is uncompromising: ‘Are you dreaming? Why would anyone give up his house? It is inhuman to expect anyone to do so, I mean the rehabilitation of one refugee by creating another refugee. Israel is a death trap for Jews. You focus on the refugees, but this is only one aspect of the story, terrible as it is. I am bothered by the Jewish aspect. In the framework of the existing state you won’t be able to solve the problem’ (2008: 155). Other prerequisites include a constitution and practical construction plans. Musih and Bronstein go on to describe the actual return as a mirror image of Israeli absorption of Jewish immigrants, including organising reconnaissance tours for communities wishing to return, housing returning Palestinians in existing absorption centres aimed at Jewish immigrants, involving Israeli Palestinian society in their absorption and organising training courses for the refugees in exile towards their return. Gardi and others criticise this model of return as based on a model of Zionist modernity. They then discuss a variety of priorities: the return would be gradual and based on age (priority given to older refugees), place of residence (priority given to Lebanon-based refugees), communities (keeping refugees from original communities or refugees living in specific refugee camps together), priority given to internal refugees, and to refugees wishing to be buried in Palestine or come for a visit. Finally, asking where the refugees should return to, Musih and Bronstein raise several possibilities, from returning to the specific villages they were expelled from to settling anywhere in the country. Dealing with the post-return stage, Musih and Bronstein present a radical state model, no longer a nation state but rather a communal state. Acknowledging that the hegemonic Jewish Ashkenazi group paints the whole nation white, they suggest decoupling citizenship from nationality by allowing the creation of a variety of communities – a complex model which goes way beyond the scope of the actual return. Above all, the presentation emphasises reconciliation, achieved through a South African-style truth and reconciliation programme, in which ‘the victims

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tell their story and the perpetrators are also compelled to tell their story in public, since public statements involve healing not only for those making the statement, but for the whole society’ (2008: 168). Beyond healing Israeli society – which remains pivotal, as I have argued in this chapter – Musih and Bronstein conclude by detailing the advantages of return both for Jews and Palestinians. The Jews, they write, would ‘renounce sovereignty, exclusive control of the land’, becoming a minority, renouncing Israel as a Jewish state. This would enable Jews, for the first time since the onset of Zionism, to begin to live in the land and not only to lord over it as occupiers or as dreamers of a mythological return to Zion; in the disappearance of ‘Erez Israel’ as a myth and in turning the land to an actual political entity there lies – paradoxically - the opportunity for Jews to “arrive” in the real land, to see and get to know its history, geography and demography [...] Life in Jewish places does not have to racidally change ... they can continue to work in Hebrew, study Jewish history and cultivate Jewish and Hebrew culture (2008: 170).

While they reassure the Jews, Musih and Bronstein suggest somewhat presumptuously that the Palestinians would have to renounce the dream of their lost paradise. Mythological Palestine in which everything was wonderful will never return and remains in the realm of memory and yearning. For the Palestinians, joint life in the land would mean living with the occupier, with those who expelled most of your people. This spells a huge challenge for the occupied, who would no doubt prefer the occupier to simply vanish. This will not happen. Some Jews, mostly European Jews who won’t be able to adapt to the new non-Zionist reality, might use their other passports and move elsewhere, but many will stay – amongst whom those who simply have nowhere else to go (2008: 170).

Though a thoughtful and honest document, reflecting a long period of study and careful consideration, Musih and Bronstein’s blueprint is ultimately anchored in a notion of a unified, because hegemonic, Jewish Israeliness. As Gardi writes, ‘you are asking for the deconstruction of the imaginary unity while at the same time reconstructing it. But the land of Israel is a myth only for a privileged group in Israeli society’ (2008: 170). Ultimately, I want to argue that such blueprints stem from a deep melancholia for an innocent originary Israeli identity, a mourning for the failure to realise those values ‘we’ were brought up on, of morality, justice, and democracy, albeit for Jews only.

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‘Self-hating Jews’ and racial melancholia There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way ... The debate boils down to the question: ‘Never again to everyone, or never again to us?’ [...] [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card [...] There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that says, ‘Never again to anyone’ (Naomi Klein, cited in Feldman 2009)

Developing the concept of racial Palestinianisation, Goldberg suggests that Israel was founded on the ‘psychic stress of melancholic negotiation in relation to the long-suffering experience of its European pre-history’. At the same time, he argues, Israel’s founding is the ‘embodiment and extension, resistance and repression, memorialising and masking of melancholic aggressivity, of aggression and aggravation’ (Goldberg 2009: 140). Goldberg describes this as ‘racial melancholia’, which he defines as ‘the suffering effected by the loss from failing to live up to the society’s self-projection of democratic ideals. By extension, ‘collective melancholia’, is ‘the exacerbated socio-psychic condition, the social stress, following from [...] the failure to realise these social ideals – of democracy, of morality, of justice’ (Goldberg 2009: 141). Goldberg’s distinction between antiracism and anti-racialism extends this further to ‘raceless melancholia’. Denying that the issue is race and racism (even by radical Israeli scholars such as Yiftachel (2006), who insists that what besets Israel is ‘ethnocracy’ rather than ethnoracial domination, see Lentin 2008a) screens the violence of racial exclusions from conscious recognition through denial: ‘Melancholia often strikes too those trying to turn resistance into the pragmatics of grievance’ (Goldberg 2009: 141–2). Throughout the book I have theorised Israeli melancholia as shifting the grief from the lost land and expelled Palestinians to the resisting (Israeli Jewish) subject. Goldberg understands racial and raceless melancholia in the Israeli context as the difficulty to come to terms with the failure to realise ideals of democracy, morality, and justice, upon which Zionist ideologies grounded the reclamation of ‘the land without people’ for the pariah, persecuted Jewish ‘people without land’. I too was brought up on the innocent, enthusiastic hope for a just Jewish future. Turning from victims to perpetrators was not part of the plan. Yet, after the Gaza war, in the spirit of mourning the loss of ‘our’ innocence – as if that innocence had remained intact until the most recent onslaught in December 2008, all the past wars and atrocities notwithstanding – Anat Biletzki, professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University and chairperson of the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem could write, ‘as an Israeli’ (meaning, of course ‘as an Israeli Jew’): ‘Some of us, as Israelis, are grieving over what we have become. Blaming the other side with a roster of rehearsed clichés cannot mitigate the grief’ (Biletzki 2009, emphasis added). In the grief for ‘our’ lost innocence, the Palestinians are racialised as the victims of ‘our’ state, which, as Azoulai writes, also prevents ‘us’ from acting to atone for Zionism’s ‘original sin’. But in the process, even some of Zionism’s

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most trenchant critics – while bemoaning their own stigmatisation as ‘selfhating Jews’, as do renowned scholars including Jacqueline Rose, David Goldberg, and Judith Butler – remain sufficiently anchored in their Jewishness to insist that their critique does not mean a call for the demise of Israel as a Jewish state. This demand, which I share with a small group of Israeli and Palestinian political activists whose aim is a secular democracy in Palestine (see Race Traitor 2005), is seen as a bridge too far. In this regard, Klein’s insistence on ‘boycotting the normalisation of Israel and the conflict, rather than Israeli people’, is refreshingly clear. However, Zochrot’s goal of reconciliation is a much more acceptable, softer option than calling for the demise of Israel as a Jewish state.

Conclusion The theme of grief recurs ... many of today’s oppositionists no longer grieve for the lost land, but – together with the grief for dead Palestinians in this disproportionate war – for the loss of their own souls ... I am not being harsh here; this is very close to what I feel ... I was educated after the Holocaust to believe in our humanity ... what a farce that sounds today, but a degree of grief for those innocent days still persists deep inside me. Does this make any sense? (Email to a postgraduate student 15 January 2009)

In the preface to his autobiography, the British Jewish writer and producer Michael Kustow writes that the Gaza war was shattering for many Jewish critics of Israel, reminding him ‘of the decimation of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two’ (Kustow 2009: ix). During that war the Israeli film director Ari Folman won the Golden Globe for his animated film Waltz with Bashir. The film presents the director’s attempts to recover repressed memories of the 1982 massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where 2,000 civilians were brutally murdered under the watchful eyes of the IDF, ‘as a soulsearching and honest account to face up to guilt and responsibility’ (Antoun 2009). In his acceptance speech Folman made no reference to the war that was raging as his film was being feted in European cinemas. In a BBC Radio 4 interview he justified the support of the Israeli foreign office, saying that his film made clear that it was not Israelis who committed the Sabra and Shatila massacre, but rather the Lebanese Phalange. Though hailed as an antiwar film, an honest attempt by Israeli soldiers to come to terms with atrocities committed by them and their proxies, Gideon Levy writes in Ha’aretz: ‘this is not an antiwar film, nor even a critical work about Israel as militarist and occupier. It is an act of fraud and deceit, intended to [...] tell us and the world how lovely we are’ (Levy 2009). It is shocking to realise that Folman’s film, which depicts the (animated) realisation by a group of IDF soldiers of what actually happened that dreadful night in Sabra and Shatila, aims to make you feel sorry not for the Palestinian

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victims but rather for the soldiers’ post-traumatic suffering. However, as Levy’s and Naira Antoun’s reviews point out, the film obscures several layers of selfdeceit, primarily regarding ongoing massacres, ‘the blood, which we have spilled and continue to allow to flow, from Jenin to Rafah’ (Levy 2009). In true soldierly camaraderie, in Waltz with Bashir the soldiers of the world’s most moral army sing out something like ‘Lebanon, good morning. May you know no more grief. Let your dreams come true, your nightmares evaporate, your whole life be a blessing’. Nice, right? What other army has a song like this, and in the middle of a war? [...] And then the tank, from inside of which this lofty and enlightened singing emanates, crushes a car [...] turning it into a smashed tin can, then pounds a residential building, threatening to topple it. That’s how we are, singing and wrecking. Where else will you find sensitive soldiers such as these? (Levy 2009)

The main point of Waltz with Bashir is the IDF soldiers’ inability to remember what is presented as their, not the Palestinians’ trauma. As a therapist reassures Folman’s animated figure that the soldiers shone the lights but ‘did not perpetrate the massacre’, Israeli viewers can heave a sigh of relief, ‘our clean hands are not part of the dirty work’. The therapist further explains to Folman that his interest in the massacre in the camps ‘derives from a different massacre: from the camps from which his parents came. Bingo! How could we have missed it? It’s not us at all, it’s the Nazis [...] It’s because of them that we are the way we are’ (Levy 2009). At the end of the film, animation is replaced by footage of the actual massacre, women keening amid the ruins and the bodies. Suddenly we see the real victims, not those who needed psychotherapy to get over their trauma, but those who lost everything. But as Antoun points out, the words of the woman screaming ‘my son, my son’ in Arabic are not subtitled, and her wailing cannot compete with the quiet reflection and mild manner of the Israeli veteran ... Not only are Palestinians essentially absent then, they are also of one time – Sabra and Shatilla. ‘Palestinians are not part of time’s passage; they are frozen in an incomprehensible, and in effect inaudible, wail’ (Antoun 2009). Beautifully executed but infuriating, particularly in not contextualising the war or showing the after effects of the devastation, Waltz with Bashir obscures another, older hidden trauma. Having made a subliminal visual link between the Palestinian child whose raised hands cling to the lorry which takes the refugees to an unknown destination with the famous image of the Jewish child who raises his hands in the Warsaw ghetto, Gertz writes: The repressed memory insists on seeing another shadow, beyond the silhouettes of these two children from Sabra and Shatila and the Warsaw ghetto: the same terrified, angry child’s eyes, the same lorry, the same convoy of refugees, the same soldiers standing around, the same camera angle looking from a distance at the throng approaching it, and the same Israeli fighter

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standing on the sidelines, shaken, but doing nothing. This happened in S. Yizhar’s story ‘Khirbet Khizeh’, depicting the expulsion n of civilians from an Arab village in 1948. (Gertz 2009)

But Gertz probes further, arguing that the trauma that overshadows all ‘our’ traumas is the 1948 Nakba. Thus, though the events of Deir Yassin, that most horrific massacre of the Nakba, she writes, were barely mentioned in Israeli literature or cinema, they do appear, indirectly, in two of Amos Kenan’s stories 7 about the ‘Battle of the 35’. In one story Kenan tells of a Palestinian shepherd found by the soldiers; they leave him alone but he alerts the Arab gangs who kill all the Israeli soldiers. In another story, however, Kenan tells of the same Palestinian Shepherd. This time the soldiers decide not to repeat their mistake and they kill the shepherd. They won that particular battle, but Kenan writes: ‘we could not wipe the memory of the old shepherd. He became a bad ghost, residing in abandoned wells, briar fields, ruins ... ‘According to Gertz, the two combined versions epitomise the paradox of the Israeli-Jewish existence which preoccupies Kenan: ‘the unwillingness to be a victim, the inability to accept the role of the perpetrator, and the dead end between the two’ (Gertz 2009). Kenan, she writes, chooses to represent his anguish not through a real story but rather through a myth, the myth of the Israelis as victims of Arab perpetrators rather than as active fighters, because, like in Waltz with Bashir, the 1948 battles have not disappeared, they simply hide behind more recent battles, subliminally pointing to the deep crisis of the Israeli psyche: the crisis of the victim who hides the trauma of the perpetrator. Or, as Jung’s theory of the shadow has it, the belief that each individual is in some way exactly what she or he does not wish to be, spending a lifetime mourning not what she or he does, but rather what she or he has become. My argument throughout the book, that so much of the impetus to comemorate the Nakba stems from melancholic concentration on ‘our’ grief rather than from the Palestinians’ loss, encompasses most of the actions of the Israeli Jewish resistance movement. If it seems harsh, it is not meant to be. There are many Israeli Jews who at some early moment of realisation did feel a sense of a lost dream. After all, most Jewish immigrants to Palestine and then to Israel did harbour a vision of a new, free, Jewish life. Many have also dreamt about cooperation with the local inhabitants. As my friend Nitza Aminov says in response to this dilemma, ‘at some point melancholia became rage, and made way for political activism’. Eyal Weizman’s critique of Israelis (and Jews) engaging in ameliorating the lesser evil does not imply a wish for the occupation to become more brutal ‘in order to shake a complacent population into mobilising resistance’. He rather advocates seeking ‘models of critical intervention that allow, simultaneously and paradoxically perhaps, the moderation of pain without surrendering to the system that inflicts it’ (Weizman 2008b: 55-6).

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Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

The study was conducted by two Israelis, Rafi Nets-Zehngut, Fellow at the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Daniel Bar-Tal, of the School of Education at Tel Aviv University, www.tc.edu/news/article.htm?id=6812 (last accessed 17/2/10). In the French original, ‘the fact of blackness’ chapter is called ‘L’ expérience vécue du noir’ – ‘The black’s lived experience’ – linking Fanon’s emphasis on lived experience to issues of representation and self-determination (A. Lentin 2008b). Respondents were mostly non-Israelis. Bearing in mind police surveillance and arrests in 2009 of members of anti-conscription organisations such as New Profile and Yesh Gvul, perhaps Azoulai is not mistaken after all. www.gilad.co.uk/html 20files/notin.html (last accessed 17/2/10). I am indebted to Anaheed Al Hardan for this insight; see also Salim Tamari (Zochrot 2003). The ‘35s’, a legendary group of pre-state soldiers who fought to liberate the besieged Etzion region during the 1948 war, was attacked by Palestinian fighters who killed all its members on 16 January 1948.

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Notes 1

2

When available I used the publishers’ English translation of Hebrew tides. Otherwise, I did my own translation (noting in brackets if the published in Hebrew). Arabic tides are transliterated and then translated (noting in brackets if published in Arabic). This information is not available on the book itself as well as on the Institute for Palestine Studies Library’s database.

Index

Abdo, Nahla 97

Ben-Yehuda, Netiva 48–9, 68–9

Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim 34

Berda, Yael 132, 133

Abu-Lughod, Lila 6, 7, 13, 21, 29, 32, 34, 52, 111

Bil’in 149

ADRID 145, 150, 164

Boulos, Habib 144, 164

Agamben, Giorgio 9, 22, 25, 36, 129, 138, 157,

Bresheeth, Haim 49, 51–2, 62–3

163 ‘State of exception’ 25, 163

Bronstein, Eitan 26, 128, 133, 135, 137, 151n, 157, 159, 160–1, 165–7

Aminov, Eli 86n, 125n

Burton, Robert 50, 51

Aminov, Nitza 102, 146, 171

Butler, Judith 11, 12, 18, 49, 50, 64, 66, 169

Anderson, Benedict 52 Ankori, Gannit 95, 105n

Caruth, Cathy 52, 62

antiracism 158

Cixous, Hélène 1, 18, 70, 82

antisemitism 11

Cohen, Stanley 10–11, 16, 26, 36, 37, 55, 70, 78,

anti-Zionism 11, 12, 88, 95–103

80, 109-10, 124

appropriation 144–9

collective memory 22, 24

Arendt, Hannah 17, 19n, 23

counter-memory 26, 38

art, Palestinian 95 autoethnography 34, 67, 69–71, 82, 127 Avraham, Tamar 62, 93, 127, 130–1, 139,147–9 Azoulai, Ariella 95, 162, 168

Darwish, Mahmoud 34, 125, 130 Davis, Rochelle 29–30 Davis, Uri 1, 16, 18, 54, 99–100 Deir Yassin 28, 107, 113, 139, 171 denial 10–11, 16, 22, 26, 31, 26, 55, 70, 78, 80, 109

Back, Les 68, 70 Bar-On, Dan 124

Ehrlich, Avishai 90, 93, 98

Bauman, Zygmunt 12, 13, 20, 35, 42, 131, 157-8,

Ellis, Carolyn 67, 82

164

Epp Weaver, Alain 136–7, 141, 142

‘Categorial murder’ 20

Esmeir, Samera 82, 85, 140

Modernity and the Holocaust 13

ethnic cleansing 20, 70, 90, 109, 110, 111, 155

Ben Gurion, David 31–2, 108, 117, 139 Benvenisti, David 47

Falk, Raphael 9

Benvenisti, Meron 21, 26, 28, 29, 45, 46–8, 61,

Fanon, Frantz 134, 157–8, 172n

87, 89, 109, 111, 112, 119, 126n, 141, 151n

field notes, retrospective 82–3

Index 189

Folman, Ari 153, 156, 169 Waltz with Bashir 153, 156, 169–71 Foucault, Michel 8–9, 25, 37–9, 153 Freud, Sigmund 24, 37–8, 49, 50–1, 52, 54, 55,

imperial nostalgia 56–7 internal emigrants 14, 17, 18, 19n internal refugees 21, 23–4, 89, 164 Intifada, al-Aqsa 131, 133

56, 62

Intifada, first 88, 106, 130, 131, 144

‘Mourning and melancholia’ 50–4

Isachar, Hedva 100–1

Friedländer, Saul 39, 88, 95

Israeli Arabs 10, 21, 22, 104

Gardi, Tomer 160, 166

Jaffa 34

Gaza war 17, 129–30, 131, 133, 142, 143, 150,

Jaspers, Karl 14, 19n

162, 168, 169 Gertz, Nurit 3, 26, 53, 84, 107, 153, 170–1

Jayyusi, Lena 34–5 Jung, Carl 14–16, 53, 80, 171

Ghanim, Honaida 9, 114 Gilroy, Paul 49, 55–6, 57, 61, 63 Golan, Daphna 130 Goldberg, David Theo 8–9, 11–12, 25, 28, 56, 153, 154, 155, 168, 169 Goren, Tamir 73–5, 78, 80, 113

Kadman, Noga 46, 63, 89, 92–3, 109, 111, 128, 141, 143, 151n Kanaaneh, Moslih 22, 23 Kanafani, Ghassan 77, 78 Kästner, Erich 14–15

Grinberg, Lev 131–2

Katz, Theodore 70, 82, 140, 165

Grossman, David 103–4, 105n

Kenan, Amos 107, 171

guilt, collective 14–15, 56, 80

Khader, Hassan 159

Guri, Haim 45, 54–5, 115

Kimmerling, Baruch 98, 109, 125n Kirstein Keshet, Yehudit 132, 144

Hagana 5, 66, 74–5, 79, 80, 81, 83, 139

Kustow, Michael 169

Haifa 5, 18, 31, 36, 45–6, 66–86 battle for 73–7

Langer, Laurence 23, 138

conference 66, 150

Laor,Yitzhak 25, 31–2, 42, 57, 58–60, 84, 86n,

Halbwachs, Maurice 18, 22, 24, 25, 27, 37

96, 112, 116, 117, 119–20, 144 Lavie, Smadar 3, 5, 95, 102–3, 152n

Hall, Stuart 65n, 157

Lebanon war, first 13, 88

Halper, Jeff 96–7, 131, 158, 161

Lentin, Alana 134, 157–8, 172n

Hanegbi, Haim 88–9

Levi, Primo 129, 137, 138

Hass, Amira 100

Levy, Gideon 169–7 0

Hassan, Manar 30, 66, 72

Lifta 92

Hilu, Alon 121,122–3

Loshitzky, Yosefa 35,43, 116, 119, 120, 124

Hirsch, Marianne 18, 21–2, 32–7, 80, 128 Holocaust 5, 6, 8, 12-14, 17, 18, 20, 212, 22, 23,

Machsomwatch 132 Mada al-Carmel 1, 103, 114, 125, 127

25, 28, 31, 36, 39, 42, 46, 62, 82, 89, 100, 114,

Mann, Thomas 14–15

126n, 129, 138, 147, 149, 156

march of return 30, 145, 150, 164

hooks, bell 141, 144

Masada 43n, 28, 38, 39–40

Hutton, Patrick H. 37–9

Masalha, Nur 6, 21, 22, 72, 110, 113, 114, 138

identity 17, 154, 157–8, 165

memory, collective 22, 24

Matzpen 89, 90–1, 102, 125n Jewish 158–64 IDF 7, 104n, 106, 108, 130, 132, 134, 169–70

memory place 26–32 memory time 32–7 Mizrahi Jews 4, 5, 31, 60, 96, 102–3, 120

190 Index

Morris, Benny 3, 7, 8, 10, 43n, 58, 65n, 70, 77, 79, 84, 90, 106, 107–9, 110, 111, 112

Rosaldo, Renato 49, 56, 61, 63 Rose, Jacqueline 13, 16, 118–19, 124, 156, 169

Musih, Norma 135–6, 160, 165–7 Sa’di, Ahmad 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 21, 29, 32, 52, 111 Nachmani, Yosef 35, 65n, 70, 80, 84, 85, 123, 141

Sabra and Shatila 88, 104n, 153, 169–70

Nakba narratives, Israeli 115–24

Saffuriyya 30, 60, 66, 111

Nakba, Palestinian history 113–15

Said, Edward 5, 13, 26, 43n, 94, 101, 109, 114,

Natour, Salman 32, 139, 145–6 Nazism 14–15, 16, 17

127, 141 Salzberger-Tsabar, Miki 67–86

Nevo, Eshkol 121–2

Segev, Tom 4, 40

‘new historians’ 7, 8, 10, 26, 38, 69, 78, 89, 104,

‘self hating Jews’ 11, 151n, 168–9

106, 107–12, 119

Shaked, Gershon 116–17

New Profile 43n, 86n, 88, 105n, 133

Sharon, Ariel 104n

Nimni, Ephraim 12, 26, 41, 98

Shenhav, Yehouda 4, 9, 22, 26, 42, 61, 64n, 87,

Nora, Pierre 4, 8, 21, 22, 25, 26–8, 30, 32, 34, 80, 137, 141, 142 Lieux de mémoire 26–8, 81, 137, 141, 142

90, 96–7, 110, 125 Shlaim, Avi 6, 7, 106, 108 Shohat, Ella 2, 3, 5, 115, 116, 120, 127 sites of silence 31–2 Slimovics, Susan 29, 114

Olick, Jeffrey 5, 14–16, 23, 24, 25

social memory studies 21, 22–6

Ophir, Adi 111

Svirsky, Gila 88, 101, 132

Oppenheimer, Yochai 107, 115–20, 121, 122, 126n

Tamari, Salim 30, 138, 140

oral history 113, 114–15, 138

Tamari, Youval 133, 135

Orientalism 8, 101, 115, 140–1

Tantura 70, 82, 140, 165

Oz-Salzberger, Fania 59–60, 118

testimonies 129, 137-41 Tilly, Charles 153-4,159

Pappe, Ilan 3, 5, 6-7, 9. 10, 11, 26, 29, 47, 66, 73-

transfer 22, 110, 111

7, 78, 80, 86n, 106, 108-9, 110, 112, 125n, 139, 142, 151n, 155 Peled, Miko 35–6 performance, co-memory 134–7

victimhood 17, 20, 25, 59, 63, 107, 119, 120, 124, 132 Vienna 67-8, 79, 82

Plan Dalet 25, 43n, 109 postcolonial melancholia 55–6, 61

Wakim, Wakim 30, 32, 145, 164

postmemory 18, 21–2, 32–7, 80, 128

war dead, Israels 40–1

post-Zionism 88, 96–103

Weiss,Yifat 72,73,78,81 Weizman, Eyal 163, 171

Rabinowicz, Dan 94, 113, 134, 144 racial melancholia 156,168–9

Yad Vashem 28, 114, 147

racial state 7-9, 25, 28, 154

Yehoshua, A.B. 116, 118, 119–20, 123

racism 153, 154, 155, 168 researching Palestine 92–6 resistance movement 129-34,153

‘Facing the forests’ 119–20, 123, 126n, 130 Yiftachel, Oren 125n, 143, 150, 163, 168

right of return, the 42, 150, 159, 153, 164–7

Yizhar, S. 47, 57–60, 63, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119

road to Damascus, the 70, 87–105

Young, James E. 8, 33, 36, 41, 80

Romania 67, 79

Yuval-Davis, Nira 91, 98–9

Index 191

Zak, Michal 60, 152n Zertal, Idith 38, 39–40 Zerubavel, Yael 28, 38, 39–40, 41, 46, 154 Zochrot 36, 38, 69, 71, 107, 120, 127–52, 153, 159–61, 163, 165, 159 tours 135 Zreik, Raef 81 Zureik, Elia 93, 94, 107, 131