Global Courant 2023-05-13 16:02:00
On the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, it seems appropriate to reflect on how the events of 1948 shaped not only the history of the Palestinian people, but also their current colonial reality.
For Palestinians, the Nakba is a “spooky thing— to use a phrase first introduced by sociology professor Avery Gordon. It has become a psychic force that relentlessly haunts the present.
Haunting, as Gordon explains, is one of the ways oppressive forms of power continue to manifest in everyday life.
The Nakba – the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes in Palestine and the destruction of 500 towns and cities – is not just an event that happened some 75 years ago.
As many Palestinians point out, it is also an ongoing process characterized by sustained forms of state-sanctioned violence. It is something Zionist forces continue to practice. Every time a Palestinian is executed by Israeli soldiers or a house that has taken years to build is demolished, this particular act of violence not only shocks, but evokes the memory of the Nakba.
The permanence of the Nakba became very apparent when Jewish vigilantes staged a pogrom in the Palestinian town of Huwara in February, and instead of condemning the crime, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich complained that state troops, rather than private citizens, were invading Palestinian villages.
But the Israeli state’s strategy of creating new memories of violence among Palestinians to ensure the constant presence of the Nakba seems to contradict its official policy of denying that it ever happened.
Israeli officials and pro-Israel activists have repeatedly rejected the term, calling it an “Arab lie” and a “justification for terrorism”. Israeli authorities have also tried to ban all public references to the Nakba.
In 2009, the Israeli Ministry of Education banned the use of this word in textbooks for Palestinian children.
In 2011, the Knesset passed a law prohibiting institutions from holding events commemorating the Nakba. This law is actually an amendment to the Budget Foundation Law and confuses any ceremony marking the Nakba – for example, a public high school in Nazareth – with incitement to racism, violence and terrorism and the rejection of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state .
In other words, the Israeli state considers the Palestinian attempt to deliberately mark and keep alive the Nakba as extremely dangerous and is therefore determined to punish anyone who performs such public ceremonies.
However, Israel is not really interested in imposing social amnesia about the events of 1948, but rather aims to shape and control Palestinian memory.
The strategy is clear: through daily acts of violence, ensure that the Palestinians remain pursued by the Nakba so that they do not forget what Israel is capable of. At the same time, however, the state is making every effort to prohibit Palestinians from determining how they publicly remember this history, lest they use forms of commemoration to incite people against colonial rule.
This paradoxical policy – wavering between memory and commemoration, constantly reproducing the former and banning the latter – is an essential part of the settler-colonial logic that aims to forcibly erase the history and geography of the indigenous people in order to their displacement and replacement by settlers.
The suppression of the Nakba as a historic event worth remembering is part of Israel’s effort to reverse the history of colonial dispossession. Israel’s fear is that Nakba ceremonies will undermine the Zionist narrative that portrays Jewish settlers as perpetual victims of Palestinian violence and instead reveal the horrific forms of violence that Zionist forces deployed in 1948 and are still using to achieve their goal. reach.
In other words, Israel also strives to control the narration of history in order to advance the Zionist moral framework.
However, this goal is doomed to fail. Israel may prohibit its Palestinian citizens from commemorating the events of 1948 in public ceremonies, but for them and their brethren in the diaspora around the world, the Nakba is never dead; it’s not even over.
Just as long as Israel’s objectively the elimination of the idea of a Palestinian nation – whether through genocide, ethnic cleansing or the creation of enclaves and ghettos – has not been fully realized or, alternatively, has been completely nullified by the Palestinians’ achievement of self-determination, the Nakba will continue to serve both as a ghostly presence and as a concrete, integral part of Israel’s colonial structure. The Nakba can only be transcended when the settlers’ colonial project comes to an end.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.
