The San Diego Union Tribune has an article by Nasser Barghouti, a Palestinian-American and president of the San Diego Chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Nassemah Darwish, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian-American who lives in San Diego who has taught at Birzeit University in Ramallah. The piece is characteristic of the Palestinian tendency to rewrite history so that every trace of criticism of their own people’s behavior is replaced with a scape-goating accusation of the “enemy” Israelis. Note that the author uses a classic triumvirate of sources for this appeal to the progressive among us — the hyper-self-critical Israeli (Pappe), the authoritative “progressive” (Carter) and the UN as support for the moral accusations they make.
ISRAEL AT 60
Remembering the Palestinian Nakba
By Nasser Barghouti and Bassemah Darwish
May 7, 2008
Nearly 30 years since she had seen her Northern Galilee home in what she called “48 Palestine,” Rasmiya Barghouti was finally given a permit by the Israeli military authorities to visit. She decided to take two of her daughters and four of her grandchildren with her.
It took less than three hours to reach Safad, renamed Tsvat by Israel after 1948. The van stopped in front of the white stone home that held her childhood memories. She proceeded to the familiar metal door, where she knocked. A large eastern European woman opened the door; the two argued. Rasmiya returned to the van, her hardened face wet with tears. Her only words were: “She wouldn’t let me in! She still has the same curtains I made with my mother.”
They proceeded in silence, as she wept discretely, to lunch at a hotel on Lake Tiberias where her youngest grandchild grew hyper. Instead of imposing her usual military-style discipline on the child, she encouraged him to splatter water and make even “more noise” – a shock to the rest of the family.
The Israeli waiter hurriedly came to the table demanding, in Hebrew, they stop the raucous behavior. It was then that her defiance exploded into cursing the waiter in Arabic. “We can do whatever we please! This is my father’s hotel!” she yelled. Until that moment, her children and grandchildren had been sheltered from knowing anything about her dear loss.
The rage of this Palestinian woman was born out of seeing her childhood home, from which she was forced to leave in 1948, now occupied by a stranger who would not even allow her in. She’d seen her father’s hotel, which he was never allowed to vacate, taken over by strangers. For the first time since her violent dispossession in 1948, she was allowed to visit her homeland, but not to return. Because millions of other Palestinian refugees are denied even such a visit, Rasmiya was considered “lucky.”
Alas for Rasmiya. Would that she knew how many millions of people shared her fate — dispossession and loss — back then, but have moved on to full lives, and now can look back at the long-ago tragedy with regret, but without rage. Would that she knew how cruelly her own people have treated her — how they contributed to her loss and kept her in misery… and all that, so that they could cultivate her rage as long as its target was the Israelis. Alas for the dupes who read this and join her rage against the Israelis. Alas for the Palestinians who have such shallow leaders and spokesmen, who cannot rise above their vicious self-pity and tireless dreams of vengeance, to lead their people to a decent and dignified life!
While Israel celebrates 60 years since its establishment, Palestinians everywhere commemorate the “Nakba”(“Catastrophe” in Arabic) that befell them after armed Jewish militia raided their homes and expelled them.
The exclusionary Zionist vision of creating a Jewish state in Palestine meant the elimination of the indigenous, “non-Jewish” population.
The Zionist vision was far more inclusionary than the Palestinian vision of Haj Amin al Husseini or any of the other Arab nationalists of the day, for whom Arab sovereignty over a nation meant a relationship to minorities (like Jewish and Christian) that was essentlially a secular version of Muslim dominion over dhimmis. No Arab nation at this time would have been capable of forging a document like the Israeli Declaration of Independence, much less trying to make it work. The following discussion draws extensively on the work of Ian Pappe, a historian whose relationship to the historical documentation he works with can only be described as tenuous. What we see then, is the systematic use of a hyper-self-critical Israeli historian by radically unself-critical Palestinians bent on making Israel the villain of 1948, a particularly good example of the mutual embrace of a post-modern masochist and pre-modern sadists.
In his book, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Israeli historian Ilan Pappe writes: “ . . . on 10 March 1948 . . . veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
Pappe explains how Jewish militias, the future armed forces of the state of Israel, carried out a plan of large-scale intimidation and siege, setting fires to Palestinian homes, planting mines, destroying more than 500 villages, and exercising other terrorist activities. In the end, nearly 800,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes and into refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere.
Rasmiya’s family was among this wave of refugees. This massive ethnic cleansing completed the first phase of the compulsory “transfer” that the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, advocated in his address to the Jewish Agency Executive as early as 1938. Thus the Palestinians had become the victims of the victims of Europe.
What a deeply tendentious and two-dimensional picture the authors offer us here. Using a compulsively self-accusing Israeli to give the back story to Rasmiya’s heart-rending story, they suggest that what Pappe claimed was happening everywhere was also happening to the Arabs who fled Safed. Now what fraction of Pappe’s claims turn out to be true aside, the full story involves not only Israeli forces urging Arab flight in some places, but also Israelis doing everything they can to prevent flight on the one hand, and Arab propaganda about vicious Israeli deeds and intentions contributing to flight on the other hand. And, ironically, that latter situation probably happened to poor Rasmiya’s family. The ten thousand Arab residents of Safed who fled during the battle for the city were more frightened by Arab tales of the massacre at Deir Yassin than any behavior they witnessed in Safed, where the Jews did appeal to them to stay.
Ten years ago, the late Edward Said commented on the “Israel at 50” celebrations: “I still find myself astonished at the lengths to which official Israel and its supporters will go to suppress the fact that a half century has gone by without Israeli restitution, recognition or acknowledgment of Palestinian human rights . . . the Palestinian Nakba is characterized as a semi-fictional event . . . caused by no one in particular.”
No, actually. The main agents responsible for the Naqba are the Arab leaders who brought this tragedy down on the heads of the Arab residents of Palestine, and it’s people like Said who perpetuate the refusal of Palestinians to “face their history.” And, alas, Said is precisely the kind of Palestinian intellectual who had the tools, the occasion, and the resources to revise the Palestinian narrative. Too bad he lacked the ability to self-criticize, too bad he incarnated the very “Oriental” characteristics he insisted that Western scholars not talk about.
So instead of serious work, Said speaks to us of Israel’s duty to “acknowledge… Palestinian Human Rights”? The Israelis have treated their Palestinian Arabs better than any Arab nation where refugees fled. Where do Arab commoners have any “human rights” in the Arab world? What an extraordinary demand by an Arab population: that Israel grant them as a (hostile) minority — and much to their own detriment — human rights that no Arab country has been able to guarantee to its own Arab Muslim majorities.
Why not demand accountability of the perpetrators of the Nakba?
Because that would mean that. like so many millions of refugees created by ethnic clashes, they unfortunately have to change residence, and the countries that received them (and whose leaders’ irresponsible behavior created their fate) should long ago have integrated them. Of course that kind of responsible behavior towards one’s own, would also mean the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the effective recognition of Israel. And there’s the rub: to let go of this grievance means admitting to losing the war of elimination (there’s no evidence that any of the Arab armies that invaded Israel in 1948 would have created a Palestinian state rather than just divided the place up amongst themselves).
But admitting the loss and moving on is unbearable to Arab pride. So better keep those Palestinians in refugee camps and rage about how terrible the Israelis treated them 60 years ago, even as they have and continue to reinflict the wound every day for the last 60 years.
As Golda Meir put it: “There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” To wax psychological for a moment, “… love their children more than they hate themselves.”
The same stubborn refusal to recognize the Palestinian Nakba characterizes the “Israel at 60” celebrations in the U.S. media today. For Palestinians, denial of the Nakba is tantamount to denying the Holocaust for Jews.
This is precisely the problem. For Palestinians to compare the Nakba to the Holocaust is an act self-indulgence bordering on megalomania. At the same time, given that Palestinian leaders then and now openly (in Arabic) call for finishing Hitler’s job, there’s something nauseatingly sado-masochistic about Palestinian militants wrapping themselves in the flag of Jewish-stye victimization even as they identify with the aggressor.
The number of Palestinian civilians killed in the Nakba cannot, even by the most inflated figures, exceed the tens of thousands… the daily output of any death camp. The Jews never lifted an arm against the Germans — on the contrary, the Jews had an excellent war record for Germany in World War I — while the Arabs had promised to finish Hitler’s job of slaughtering every last Jew remaining in Palestine. Under those conditions, the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Arabs was actually among the more humane resolutions to the crises that struck the world’s ethnic conflicts in the wake of World War II (e.g., Germans in Eastern Europe; Hindus and Muslims on the Indian-Pakistani border). Certainly, had the Arabs won, we would be indeed in a position to compare the results with those of the Nazis.
Remembering the Nakba is even more compelling given what former President Jimmy Carter describes as an apartheid-like system that Israel has built to entangle the Palestinians in a seemingly endless cycle of hopelessness and violence.
That’s a fascinating formulation: the apartheid-like system that Israel has built (i.e., the system of defenses against an insanely determined effort to wipe it out) is really a system “built to entangle the Palestinians in a seemingly endless cycle of hopelessness and violence.” In other words the Israelis create both the hopelessness and the corresponding violence. Not a trace of self-determination here. The Palestinians have no agency in this formula; Israel does everything (and, since everything is a mess), Israel’s responsible for the mess.
But let’s translate this statement out of its demopathic formulation. The hopelessness is not the sense that there is no way that the Palestinian refugees could get their human rights. It’s that their leaders have defined the solution in terms of the “right of return” and, hence, the elimination of Israel. Thus, as as long as the Israelis exist, the Palestinians are denied their “human rights”, and by this formula, their hopelessness (i.e., their frustration at not being able to accomplish their goal of eliminating Israel), necessarily means they engage in violence. And who are we to question their violence?
The tragic fact is that the “human rights” of the Palestinian refugees could have been taken care of, as with so many refugees — including the similar number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries — by granting them citizenship where they took refuge. In the case of the Palestinian Arab refugees, given the fact that they shared the same language, customs and religion with the people among whom they took refuge, and the leaders of those countries had contributed significantly to their plight, that would seem like a “no brainer.”
Israel still denies millions of Palestinian refugees their U.N.-sanctioned right to go back to their homes simply because they are not Jewish.
Not at all. It blocks their right to go back to their home because they are a population that has been weaponized by a ruthless Arab elite, filled with hatred and resentment for Israelis as the scapegoat for Arab tyranny. All but the most ill-informed dupes of the West know that the return of the refugeees spells the end of Israel as a nation where Jews can live a life of self-determination.
By emphasizing the “because they’re non-Jewish” the writer hopes to push a number of Western buttons, from the anti-religious (no religion should have the right to discriminate) to the anti-Jewish (they’re so clubby). Never mind that any country with a Palestinian Arab majority would look a lot more like the Middle Ages (Gaza), than the enlightened world of human rights to which the authors are making their appeal.
Israel continues its 41-year-old military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel continues to impose its savage blockade on the Gaza strip. Israel continues to build its illegal wall and settlements on occupied Palestinian land. And Israel continues to treat its own “non-Jewish” population as second-class citizens.
Carefully done. I wonder what Barghouti and Darwish say to their Palestinian friends about the nature of the occupation… Green line or Shore line?
I used to know someone who had the tendency at any criticism to say, “Oh, so it’s all my fault.” As infuriating as that may sound to those doing the criticizing, I think it’s appropriate here. “Oh, so it’s all Israel’s fault?” Every progressive Westerner to whom Palestinians come with their list of grievances needs to ask, “So, do you think your side has contributed anything to this ‘cycle of violence’?”
Can any conscientious person, then, celebrate Israel at 60?
Anyone who rejoices in the creation of a state that commits to protecting the human rights of its citizens — no matter what their race, creed or gender — and continues to strive for that under the harshest of conditions. Would that there were even one such state in which the majority was Arab and Muslim. If there were, this “cycle of hopelessness and violence” might not seem so “seemingly endless.”
When Israel has made reparations for its shameful past; when it has conformed to international law and universal human rights; when it has ended its brutal oppression of the indigenous people of Palestine; and when it has allowed Palestinians to practice their right to self-determination on their own land, we can all celebrate. Then, even Rasmiya’s descendants may celebrate.
Since you feel free to dish it out, I assume you are also prepared to hear moral rebuke. So let me rephrase your concluding paragraph:
When the Palestinians have examined their embarrassing past honestly, when they have identified the Arab leadership that created and continues to prolong their stateless misery, when that Arab leadership has conformed to international law and universal human rights and therefore made reparations for their shameful past and granted the Palestinian refugees their human rights, when the Palestinian leadership ceases to preach and practice genocidal passions and produce an endless stream of hopeless haters who want to blow themselves up among Israeli civilians, when the Palestinians show a desire to practice their right to self-determination and establish a government of the people, by the people and for the people, then most everything could be resolved. Then, even Rasmiya’s descendents might be welcome to visit their ancestor’s home in peace and, who knows, in the joy of reconciliation rather than the bitterness of frustrated revenge.