Nakba

Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory

Ahmad Sa'di, Lila Abu-Lughod

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231509701
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past.

By focusing on memories of the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress.

The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost.

Nakba brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present.

Contributors: Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University; Diana Keown Allan, Harvard University; Haim Bresheeth, University of East London; Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University; Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley; Isabelle Humphries, University of Surrey; Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University; Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London; Omar Al-Qattan, filmmaker; Ahmad H. Sa'di, Ben-Gurion University; Rosemary Sayigh, Lebanon-based anthropologist; Susan Slyomovics, University of California, Los Angeles

Part One

PLACES OF MEMORY

1	The Rape of Qula, a Destroyed Palestinian Village Susan Slyomovics

Archives and Memory

Writing is a political act that not only represents the past, but also, within the Palestinian-Israeli context, molds the past. Words determine what is remembered and what is forgotten. To transmute individual Palestinian memories of 1948 from oral narratives into written words is an urgent task for researchers in “a race against time,” according to Saleh Abdel Jawad, professor of history and political science at Birzeit University (Sayigh 2002b: 30). Given the decreasing population of Palestinians still alive from the generation of 1948, Abdel Jawad points to the history and goals of one project, the series of Birzeit University’s volumes appearing under the collective rubric Destroyed Palestinian Villages:

The idea to create a “memorial” monograph series about the destroyed Palestinian villages was proposed in 1979 by Dr. Kamal Abdulfattah and Dr. Sharif Kanaana. In 1983 the idea materialized, beginning with Dr. Abdulfattah’s publication of the first map of the Palestinian destroyed villages. And in 1985 the [Birzeit University Research] Center began to publish its monograph series under the supervision of Dr. Kanaana. Research continued until the closure of Birzeit University on the 9th of January, 1988 by a military order which struck all Palestinian universities for years!! Work on the series resumed only in May 1993. At that time, I was designated director and we again took up the work of documenting the destroyed villages, with a new approach. The work, focusing on the 1948 exodus, is mainly historical rather than anthropological—adding a significant number of new interviews but also grafting oral accounts with the written sources, especially Israeli archival material and secondary sources, and, finally, cross-checking the information.

(ABDEL JAWAD, forthcoming)

Each “memorial” book in the Birzeit University series memorializes a Palestinian village that no longer exists.¹ Villages are drawn from more than four hundred occupied and evacuated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.² Beginning with volume 14 dedicated to the village of Qaqun (Abdel Jawad 1994: i–iv and al-Mudawwar 1994), and in subsequent village histories, Abdel Jawad and the Birzeit University researchers enlarge the discursive domain devoted to the Nakba. Based on extensive interviews with former inhabitants that are checked against relevant written sources, scholars continue to investigate the contentious historical and historiographical issue: why did the Palestinians leave in 1948 and why is this question important? Abdel Jawad observes:

Palestine in 1948 is a typical case of a history full of holes, between a history fabricated by Israeli historiography and a history absent or lost by Arab and Palestinian historiography. Israeli historiography has adopted a denial of the Nakba, a negation of the breadth of ethnic cleansing perpetrated in Palestine. If it has always adopted a position of indifference in regards to Arab sources, Israeli historiography was particularly violent in its refusal to hear the voice of victims and their testimonies. In contrast, Arab and Palestinian historiography has never succeeded in forming a complete and solid narrative (récit) to confront the weight of this war of 1948, which ended with the birth of the problem of Palestinian refugees, the heart of the current Israeli-Arab conflict.

(ABDEL JAWAD 2004: 627)

To set the Palestinian narrative against the Zionist one is not an abstruse academic exercise; it is a historiographical confrontation with immediate implications and stark outcomes. Vocabulary deployed by professional historians speaks to battles about past historical events that possess powerful legal and political force in the present to influence core issues, for example, the status of Palestinian refugees, their right of return, and their claims for restitution and reparation. To debate why Palestinians left in 1948, the terms espoused by historians presuppose widely divergent ideological, and hence policy, conclusions: expulsion versus self-expulsion, abandonment, flight, exodus, evacuation, uprooting, displacement, dispersion, exile, depopulation, population transfer, ethnic cleansing, sociocide and politicide. No less than at the basic level of naming, the ways in which the respective national narratives become texts, that is, the nature and processes of text-making, are fueled by historiographical controversies that relegate Palestinian Arab testimonies to unverifiable oral, potentially self-serving, memories when measured against the weight of Jewish Israeli written discourses and archival sources.

Influenced by oral testimonies gathered as part of the Destroyed Palestinian Villages project, when Abdel Jawad became director of Birzeit’s Centre for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society he unearthed new facts about the 1948 period to arrive at these conclusions about the scale of Israeli killings: that there were Israeli killings of unarmed Palestinian civilians as yet not fully documented, and that accounts by his informants of specific killings in their home villages were true.

In 1993, I worked on randomly chosen villages mainly from the central area. Why? When people left, they went as a bloc to the nearest area. People from the center of Palestine went mainly to the West Bank. So, one researcher worked on Abu Shusha, another from the north chose villagers of Tirat Haifa from a refugee camp in the north, and a third chose al-Dawayima because he himself is from there. In 1993 we knew there had been a massacre in al-Dawayima. I was astonished and shocked that in addition to al-Dawayima, there are unknown massacres in Tirat Haifa and Abu Shusha. Within days, in some cases within weeks, this led me to conclude in 1994 that we were facing a much larger scale of massacres than previously known.

In 1997, the next phase of oral histories and research led us to this idea: there was a brain behind the massacres, call it a master plan, call it an outline, because there is a pattern to the killings, and a logic to this pattern. After working in different archives, my picture is that Palestine in 1948 was a theater of Israeli massacres, a continuous show of Palestinians massacred, of killings and destruction, and of psychological warfare.³

Individual survivor testimonies collected from exiled al-Dawayima villagers by Birzeit University researchers in the 1990s, for example, confirm an Israeli army massacre of more than eighty villagers during the 1948 war. The “slaughter"—David Ben-Gurion’s term—is discussed by Israeli historian Benny Morris in his path-breaking 1987 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–49.⁴ Morris supports his conclusions by archival sources, contemporary journalism, leaders’ memoirs, and diaries.

The case of al-Dawayima exemplifies the complex interactions among historians, historiography, and oral histories. In his book The Palestinian Catastrophe, for example, Michael Palumbo claims accuracy for Palestinian oral memoirs when juxtaposed with Western, non-Arab sources, e.g., American, United Nations, British and Israeli (Palumbo 1987: 17). In contrast, Benny Morris explains that he “very, very, rarely” used interviews to establish facts:

While contemporary documents might misinform, distort, omit or lie, they do so in my experience, far more rarely than interviewees recalling highly controversial events some forty years ago. My limited experience with such interviews revealed enormous gaps of memory, the ravages of aging and time, and terrible distortions or selectivity, the ravages of accepted information, prejudice and political beliefs and interests.

(MORRIS 1987: 2)

Decades later in the revised 2004 edition, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris insists on the archives as the sole reliable window to the past, largely disregarding the role of those in power who influence the formation and content of the archive. This conceptual and methodological acceptance of the archive as the locus of unassailably authentic records excludes live witnesses as legitimate historical sources, although Morris gestures toward consulting “the essentially anthropological ‘village series’ produced by Birzeit University Press":

The value of oral testimony about 1948, if anything, has diminished with the passage of the 20 years since I first researched the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Memories have further faded and acquired memories, ideological precepts, and political agendas have grown if anything more intractable; intifadas and counter-intifadas have done nothing for the cause of salvaging historical truth.

(MORRIS 2004a: 4)

It is noteworthy that Morris’s expressed concern with the unreliability of memory is occasioned by an anecdote about Israeli memory, hence a lapse or rupture not by the victims but in the perpetrator’s memory. The largest single expulsion of Palestinians, some 50,000 urban-dwellers, occurred from July 9–18, 1948 after the Israeli conquest of the towns of Lydda and Ramla. Morris’s decision never to rely on interviews with Jews or Arabs is clinched by a spectacular case of repressed and denied Israeli, not Palestinian, memory:

My brief forays into interviewing had persuaded me of the undesirability of relying on human memories 40–50 years after the event to illuminate the past. The clincher came when I asked Yigal Yadin, the famous professor of archaeology who in 1948 had served as the Haganah/IDF head of operations (and often de facto chief of general staff) about the expulsion of the Arabs from the towns of Lydda and Ramle. “What expulsion?” he asked—about what had been the biggest expulsion of the war. He did not deny that an expulsion had taken place; he merely said that he could not remember.

(MORRIS 2004a: 6)

Morris’s fidelity to the Israeli archives ensures a steady stream of revelations documenting new Israeli massacres and rapes of Palestinians in 1948. In what has since become a famous interview with journalist Ari Shavit published in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper on January 9, 2004, Morris documents statistics of a dozen cases of rapes and twenty-four instances of massacres as supporting evidence for a pattern:

What the new material [Israel Defense Force Archives] shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves. . . .

About a dozen [rapes]. In Acre, four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. . . . At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg. . . . That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres.

(SHAVIT 2004)

Morris starkly opposes the truth of written documents in the Israeli archives against Palestinian false memory and witnessing, oppositions that help to explain both his remarkable research into, and his subsequent support of, Israel’s “mass expulsion” and “population transfer” of the Palestinian population in 1948. Morris currently counts himself among the “transferists,” placing himself in the company of David Ben-Gurion: “Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here” (Shavit 2004).

While Morris’s views about the inevitability of Israel’s mass expulsion of the Palestinians have been widely debated and often condemned (Beinin 2004), it is the discipline of oral history that challenges Morris’s methodological prejudices foremost by foregrounding the humanity, hence the role of the excluded Palestinian as primary witness in the face of statistics, categories, and archival documentation. When the voices of the survivor and victim are inaudible except as mere cases, the consequences for those who are the subjects of repression are political and ethical. So too, are the methodological consequences, because impeded is the creation of the secondary witness: the historian and anthropologist empathetically attentive to and informed by the full presence of Palestinians speaking and remembering. Written history, therefore, need not be opposed to witness memories; rather, memory is a source for, indeed it propels, history by instigating the inquiry into accurate, empirical facts about what happened in each destroyed Palestinian village. A different historiography, grounded in testimonial witnessing by displaced villagers, permits access to Palestinian history and narratives kept alive in no small part by Israeli attempts to expunge all traces of destruction; these attempts call the narratives of massacre into being. Archives, too, are products of their time and place, their selecting and collecting practices, often written with an eye to the future. Diplomatic, military and political documents are problematic as records of an authoritative historical understanding. Especially important here is what is absent from the Israeli archives.

These complex interactions among memory, ethical concerns, Palestinian oral history, and Israeli archives as they emerge in the aftermath of the Nakba sent me in search of the histories of one Palestinian site: the village of Qula, depopulated and destroyed in 1948, and revived statistically in 2004 as reported in Morris’s interview: “There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country”

Qula’s Rape

Consider Qula, a Palestinian village in the Ramla district that was destroyed in 1948, a case study in Abdel Jawad’s history of the 1948 war (Figure 2). Historians Benny Morris and Walid Khalidi give crucial overviews of the hard-fought battle for the village during the war, while Abdel Jawad adds lived experience perpetuated in living memory. In the late 1990s, Abdel Jawad tape-recorded exiled Qula villagers who describe the difficult situation they faced by early June 1948, before the United Nations Security Councilmandated First Truce that resulted in a temporary cease-fire among the combatants between June 11 and July 9. Many male Qula villagers had been killed elsewhere, either defending other villages or participating in attacks. No less than fifty Palestinian fighters from the villages of Qula, al-‘Abbasiyya and Kafr ‘Ana died attempting to take over the British military camp at Tel Levitsky once the British departed. When Qula was attacked, villagers recount to Abdel Jawad that their main body of defenders were fighting to recapture Wilhelma, an agricultural colony founded before World War I by German Templars. None expected the Israelis, who entered from the west through the cornfields; at first, villagers expressed uncertainty about whether indeed the Israelis were attacking, since they heard only gunshots in the air. Thus, villagers’ defense of Qula was minimal. Qula villagers had already paid dearly with their lives: fighters had died elsewhere, and these deaths further demoralized local defenders.

Concerning the fate of Qula, historical accounts by Khalidi and Morris concentrate on July 10, 1948, the pivotal date that fell during the ten-day period, July 9–18, between the First and Second Truces. Attempting to secure the center of th...