JULY 2002

Professor Ilan Pappe©2002

As a Jewish child who was born in Haifa in the early 1950s I have not encountered the term Nakbah nor was I aware of its significance. Only in my high school days, the term made its first appearance.  There were three Israeli Palestinian pupils in my class and we all participated in joint and guided tours in Haifa and its vicinity. In those days, there were still evidences of Arab Haifa around the old city: beautiful buildings, remnants of a coveted market destroyed by the Israelis in 1948, mosques and churches. These relics testified to the city’s more glorious past. Many of these residues of the past are gone now, demolished by the bulldozers of a very ambitious mayor who has erased any urban characteristics that could point to the city’s Arab nature. But in those days there were quite a few ‘Arab’ houses squeezed between modern concrete buildings. The guides in the school tours used to refer to them as Hirbet al-Shaych (an elusive reference to an Arab house from an unidentified period). My Palestinian classmates muttered that these were the houses left from the 1948 Nakbah, but did not dare to challenge the teachers; nor did they expand on what they had meant.

As a young doctoral student in Oxford I have chosen 1948 as my topic for a thesis. I wrote on the British policy in that year, but incidentally discovered in the Israeli and British archives evidence that when put together gave me for the first time a clear idea of what the Nakbah was all about. I found strong proof for a systematic expulsion of the Palestinians and was taken back by the swift judaziation of the villages and nieghbourhoods that were evicted – they were renamed and resettled within a matter of few months. This picture contrasted sharply not only what I learned at school about 1948, but also what I gathered as a BA student in Middle Eastern Studies in the Hebrew University (although quite few of my courses dealt with the history of the country). Needless to say that what I found contradicted the messages conveyed to me as a citizen through initiation ceremonies in the army, public events such as Independence day and the daily media discourse on the conflict’s history.

When I returned home in 1984 to begin an academic career, I discovered the phenomenon of Nakbah denial in my new environment.  It was in fact part of a larger phenomenon that of excluding the Palestinians all together from the local academic discourse. This was particularly evident, and bewildering, in the field of Middle Eastern Studies in which I commenced my career as a lecturer.  Towards the end of the 1980s, as a result of the first Intifada, the situation somewhat improved. The Palestinians were introduced into Middle Eastern Studies as a legitimate subject matter, but it was done mainly through the eyes of academics who had been in the past Intelligence experts on the subject and who still held close ties with the security services and the IDF as consultants.  This academic perspective erased the Nakbah as a historical event and prevented the local academia from challenging the overall denial and repression of the catastrophe in the world outside the universities’ ivory towers.

For a short while in the end of the 1980s, several academics, including myself, caught the public attention by publishing scholarly books, which challenged the accepted Israeli version of the 1948 war. We accused Israel of expelling the indigenous population and destroying the villages. Although our early works were hesitant and cautious – and mine were not even translated to Hebrew – it was possible to gather from them that theJewish State was built on the ruins of the indigenous people of Palestine whose livelihood, houses, culture and land were destroyed.

The public response moved between indifference to a total rejection of our findings. Only in the media and the educational system we succeeded in directing people onto a renewed look at the past. But from above, the establishment, decapitated these buds of self awareness and recognition in Israel’s role in the Palestinian catastrophe; a recognition which would have helped Israelis to understand better the present deadlock in the peace process.

The struggle against the Nakbah’s denial in Israel shifted to the Palestinian political scene in the country.  Ever since the fortieth anniversary of the Nakbah, the Palestinian minority in Israel associated, as it had never done before, its collective and individual memories of the catastrophe with the general Palestinian situation and with their unique predicament in particular. This association was manifested in an array of symbolic gestures such as memorial services during the Nakbah day, organized tours to deserted or former villages in Israel, seminars on the past, and extensive interviews with Nakbah survivors in the local press.

Through its political leaders, NGOs and media, the Palestinian minority in Israel forced the public space not to ignore the Nakbah. The re-emergence of the Nakbah as a public topic was helped also by the climax of the Oslo negotiations – the attempt to convene a summit between Barak and Arafat in the summer of 2000.  The false impression at the time that indeed the end of the conflict was about to be negotiated placed the Nakbah and Israel’s responsibility for it at the top of the Palestinian list of demands. Despite the total collapse of this last effort, mainly due to an Israeli wish to enforce by intimidation its point of view on the Palestinian side, for a while the catastrophe of 1948 was brought to the attention of the local, regional and to certain extent global, attention. . Not only in Israel, but also in the United States, and even in Europe, it was necessary to remind those concerned with the Palestine question that this conflict did not only entail the future of the occupied territories, but also that of the refugees. The Israelis succeeded in sidelining the rights of the refugees from the Oslo accord – an aim that was helped by the ill-managed Palestinian diplomacy and strategy.

The Nakbah was kept so well out of the peace process, that when it suddenly appeared as an issue on the agenda, the Israelis felt as if a Pandora box was prised opened in front of them. The worst fear of the chief Israeli negotiators was that there was a faint possibility that Israel’s responsibility for the catastrophe would become a negotiable issue. This ‘danger’ was confronted immediately. In the Israeli media and parliament a consensual position was formulated: no Israeli negotiator would be allowed even to discuss the ‘Right of Return’.  The Knesset passed a law to that effect and Barak made such a public commitment on his plane’s ramp, before leaving for Camp David in the summer of 2000.

The media and other cultural systems were recruited as well to discourage any discussion on the Nakbah and its relevance to the peace process. It was in this atmosphere that I became involved in the Tantura affair. This affair erupted after an MA student in my university exposed an unknown massacre, one of the largest, in the 1948 war in the village of Tantura. He was brought to court in December 2000 for defamation and later, in November 2001, was disqualified in his university for daring to add yet another convincing evidence for the responsibly of Israel for the Palestinian catastrophe. The court system, it transpired, joined also willingly the denial process.

In this current year so far, when I look back at the effort of myself and others to introduce the Nakbah into the Israeli public agenda and space, what emerges is a very mixed picture. I can detect cracks in the Israeli wall of Nakbah denial and repression. It came about through the debate on the ‘new history’ and due to the new political agenda of the Palestinians in Israel. It was helped by the clarification of Palestinian positions on the refugee issue, towards the end of the Oslo process. As a result now in the middle of 2002 it is, after more than fifty years of repression, more difficult to deny in Israel the expulsion and destruction of the Palestinians in 1948. On the other hand, this relative success brought with it two negative reactions, formulated after, and in the wake of, the outbreak of Intifadat al-Aqsa. The first reaction was from the political establishment. The Sharon government, through its minister of education, began a systematic de-legitimization and exclusion of any textbook or curriculum that even slightly referred to the Nakbah. Similar instructions were given to the public broadcasting authorities.  The second reaction is even more disturbing and encompassed wider sections of the public.  Although a very considerable number of Israeli politicians, journalists and academics ceased to deny what had happened in 1948, they nonetheless, at the same time, were also willing to justify it; not only in retrospect but also as a prescription for the future.  Transfer entered the public space with force and was legitimized as the best means for dealing with the Palestinian ‘problem’.

Indeed if I have to choose what characterizes the current Israeli response to the Nakbah, I would stress the growing popularity of the Transfer option in the Israeli public mood and thought. The Nakbah, namely the expulsion of the Palestinians, seems now in hindsight to many in the center of the political map an inevitable and justifiable consequence of the Zionist project in Palestine. If there is any lament it is that the expulsion was not completed. The fact that even a new historian such as Benny Morris now subscribes to this view that the expulsion was inevitable and should have been more comprehensive helps to legitimize future plans of ethnic cleansing.

Transfer appears now as an official and moral option in the recommendation of the most prestigious academic center in the country, the center of interdisciplinary studies in Herzeliya; an outfit which advises the government. It appeared as policy proposals in the papers presented by senior Labour party ministers to their government. It is openly advocated by university professors, media commentators and very few dare to condemn it. And lately, the leader of the Majority in the American House of Representatives openly endorsed it.

A circle has been closed. When Israel took over almost eighty percents of Palestine in 1948, it did it through settlement and ethnic cleansing. It has now a prime minister who enjoys a wide public support and who wants to determine by force the future of the remaining twenty percents. He has, as had all his predecessors from Labour and Likkud alike, resorted to settlement as the best means. He added to this the destruction of independent Palestinian infrastructure. He senses, and may not be wrong, that the public would allow him to go even further, should he wish to repeat the ethnic cleansing not only of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, but if necessary also of the one million Palestinians living within the pre-1967 Israeli borders. The Nakbah thus is not denied anymore, it is cherished. However, its full story has to be told to the Israelis, as there may be still few who are sensitive enough about their state’s past and present conduct. They should be alerted that the horrific deeds that were concealed from them about 1948 could be easily repeated, if they and others would not act in time, before its too late.

Professor Ilan Pappe©2002.All rights reserved.

re.The Nakbah Demons
Ethnic cleansing attended the birth of Israel but, more than 50 years later, the country is still in denial about its bloody past. Those who speak out risk their jobs.
By John Pilger
 
Behind the turbulent news from Israel, a struggle for historical truth has passed almost unnoticed outside academic circles; yet its wider significance is epic. In May 1948, more than 200 Palestinians were killed by the advancing Jewish militia in the coastal village of Tantura, south of Haifa. According to the recorded testimony of 40 witnesses, both Arab and Jewish, half the civilians were shot in a "rampage". The rest were marched to the beach, where the men were separated from the women and children. They were taken to a wall near the mosque where they were shot in the back of the head.
 
The "cleansing" of Tantura (a term used at the time) was a well-kept secret. When they were interviewed four years ago, several Palestinian witnesses said they feared for their lives if they spoke out. One survivor, who as a child witnessed the murder of his entire family in Tantura, said to the interviewer: "But believe me, one should not mention these things. I do not want them to take revenge against us. You are going to cause us trouble . . ."
 
Trouble indeed. The researcher, a student called Teddy Katz, has had his masters degree annulled by Haifa University, even though he was awarded a top grade by the Middle Eastern department. When his research was revealed in the Israeli press, Jewish veterans of the attack on Tantura sued him for libel, and several Jewish witnesses recanted.
 
Katz had breached the taboo of the ethnic cleansing that gave birth to Israel and which the Palestinians mourn as Nakba - the catastrophe.
 
Without waiting for the case to come to court, the university struck Katz's name from its honour roll. Whispered to be a traitor, and under pressure from his family and friends, Katz, a devout Zionist who lived on a kibbutz, apologised. Twelve hours later, he retracted his apology.
 
Professor Ilan Pappe is one of the few to have read all the transcripts of more than 60 hours of Katz's taping of eyewitness evidence. "They include," he wrote, "horrific descriptions of executions, of the killing of fathers in front of children, of rape and torture." He describes Katz's thesis "as a solid and convincing piece of work whose essential validity is in no way marred by its shortcomings". The shortcomings, he says, come down to four minor mistakes. But the importance of the Katz research is its illumination of Israel's history in terms of "the expulsion, direct and indirect, of some 750,000 Palestinians, the systematic destruction of more than 400 villages and scores of urban neighbourhoods, as well as the perpetration of some 40 massacres of unarmed Palestinians."

Now it might be Professor Pappe's turn to be expelled from Haifa University. In an open letter circulated two weeks ago, he writes that the dean of the humanities department has demanded his expulsion for criticising the university over the Katz case. This runs deeper; Pappe has been a consistent opponent of Israel's illegal military occupation of Palestine. He describes the university "court" that threatens to punish him as a "McCarthyite charade". He has called upon "universities worldwide to debate a boycott of Israeli institutions, given their contempt for basic principles of academic freedom and dispassionate research". He says that only international shaming, free of the intimidation that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, will break the silence about "horrific deeds in 1948, and so prevent their repetition".John Pilger©
*Painting by Ghannam©;photographs PalestineRemembered.com ©All Rights reserved.