Mondoweiss

inside 'Bruno,' a glimpse of the Nakba

o happy day... 'Washington Post' covers racist Israeli current, and mentions the word 'Nakba'

I attack the Washington Post all the time. Well here's a great piece by Howard Schneider and Samuel Sockol of the Post about Israeli novelist Alon Hilu, who has made the Nakba a central theme in a historical novel about Palestine/Israel. Emphasis mine:

According to some historical accounts, there were pogroms in Russia

Isabel Kershner, writing from Lod, Israel:

Lod’s 75,000 residents are mostly Jewish, with Arabs making up a quarter or more of the population. Previously an Arab city known as Lydda, it was conquered by Israeli forces in July 1948. Most of the Arab residents were expelled — on the personal orders of David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the new state of Israel, according to some historical accounts — and turned into refugees. At least 250 men, women and children were killed in the fighting; more died of exhaustion and dehydration on the march east in the summer heat.

My mole says: "While I think it's important that they included this historical background, I really wonder if they're covering themselves from CAMERA-type criticism.  What is the controversy that makes this so uncertain?  Why can it not be readily documented one way or the other?"
My mind says: Last month Taghreed El-Khodary, the NYT correspondent in Gaza, said that Kershner can't go into Gaza because she is an Israeli. Huh. Wouldn't it be nice to get a Palestinian's view of this history?

Zellnik: make 2 democratic states (and then dream about one state)

Lately we've been conducting an informal roundtable on the challenge, Offer readers a forward-looking solution in Israel/Palestine. The following is a response from David Zellnik, a leading young playwright, and non-Zionist Jew.

Actions are more important than words, as in Joseph Dana’s eloquent reply to you; his entry about how the group Ta'ayush skipped potentially-frustrating wordsmithing in favor of direct engagement strikes me as the right approach.

That said, I'll try to answer you, because direct action is not always an option... And also because one desired result of direct action is to create a situation where the kinds of conversations you are having become unavoidable.

When a Zionist asks me if I believe in a Jewish state I say, I believe in a state that treats all its citizens equally. I try and counter a positive with a positive.

Usually the person is Jewish, and usually I continue: Look, a lot of Jews now live in Israel, there is a vibrant exciting Hebrew culture that didn’t exist 100 years ago. I’m all for that. Whatever solution is needed – and there are people dying daily for lack of a solution – we can agree the solution needs to include and preserve that. Also there are religious Jews – I’m not one – but there are those who believe god gave us the land. Great. Plenty of Mormons in the US have a charged belief about certain places in America/Utah but here’s what’s different: they don’t get to be privileged citizens because of what their holy book tells them. The reality is Jews are living in a land that has a strong indigenous Arab population and Israel is not allowed to discriminate against them simply because there’s anti-Semitism in the world or our holy book tells us the land is ours.

Ask them what a Jewish state MEANS to them. Does it mean a place where Jews have a strong connection to the land/history, a place where holidays are Jewish? None of that has to change. Does it mean a place where non-Jews are discriminated against in jobs, housing, education, with both de facto and de jure discrimination in the name of the Jewish state? That’s what the Jewish State means right now. Talk about the Present absentees, the unrecognized villages, etc., make them see that the words “the Jewish State” don’t just mean self esteem/affirmative action for Jews, they mean on the ground awfulness that no Jew would put up with as a minority in the West or anywhere.

As you can see, I have avoided the Occupation in this.

The Nakba is part of the Jewish narrative: Israelis deal with the trauma of 1948 as well

The paper was given today by Eitan Bronstein at the Shadow of Memory: Relational Perspectives of Remembering & Forgetting conference held in Tel Aviv. Bronstein is the Director of the Israeli organization Zochrot, which carries out educational and advocacy campaigns to promote understanding of the Nakba among Israeli Jews.

(Palestinian refugees leaving Lydda and Ramle, 1948. Photo: Palestineremembered.com)

“Min wayn jaye inti?”  Where the hell do you come from?: Repression of the Nakba and post-trauma among Jews in Israel

By Eitan Bronstein
Tel Aviv, June 2009

Translation: Charles Kamen

The following is an excerpt from a psychiatric evaluation:  “The patient is an 80-year-old man…no known history of psychiatric illness…was in a British jail in Palestine during the Mandate (?), fought in the war of independence, suffers from traumatic and repressed memories of the war…fully conscious, not fully aware of where he is, difficulty orienting himself, thinks he’s in a British camp or in a cemetery…False persecution ideation, ‘the staff wants to steal my blood and organs’…” [1]

At the beginning of June, 2009, a man about 40 years old came with his mother to my office.  He’d contacted me to help them trace his father’s activities during the 1948 war.  His father had recently died, aged 82, and had made both of them suffer greatly, terrorizing them with physical violence for many years.  They suspect his sudden angry outbursts were a response to the trauma he had suffered as a soldier during the capture of Al-Lid (Lod) in 1948.  They’d found on Zochrot’s web site descriptions of massacres, looting and rape.  The father had never specifically told them about what he did during the capture of Lod, but a few years ago he told his wife’s brother a confused story about how he and other soldiers ran wild in Lod during Operation Danny.  The son told me he’s afraid that his father was involved in massacres, looting and rape of Palestinians.  After Lod was captured his father went AWOL from the army for a month, and when he returned was tried before a military court.  He testified that “he felt ill and spent a month at home in bed.” [2]  “Why did he feel ill?” his son asked me, and replied, “I think it’s because of the terrible things he did.”  These activities also made the father afraid to meet Palestinians from the West Bank and from Gaza after the occupation in 1967, lest they recognize and try to harm him in revenge for what he did in 1948.

You don’t have to be a mental health professional to understand that if a person did such things, they must have affected him, and that he’s liable to be violent toward others and perhaps to himself as well.  What surprised me was that his son and wife thought that what happened in Lod in 1948 was the source of the father’s trauma.  In their particular case the Palestinian Nakba, the human catastrophe that harmed and defined the lives of millions, is also the source of the father’s years of violent behavior.  That’s their understanding of what they went through, and today they’re trying to reconstruct what he did during those days in Lod.

I’d like to describe and analyze a series of individual cases in order to argue that Jews in Israel tend to repress the Palestinian Nakba, but that signs of it appear more and more often, burst out frequently, in a form that’s known as “post traumatic stress disorder.”  I would argue that even Israelis who aren’t familiar with the Nakba, or who didn’t live through it, also experience this.  I won’t attempt here to link the specific cases with the collective trauma but, in a general sense, I think that the sources of this connection can be located in the relatively strong feeling of solidarity found in Israeli-Jewish society regarding the fundamental issues related to the conflict: the 1948 war, the justification for establishing a Jewish state, the Palestinian refugee question, the Law of Return for Jews versus the right of return for Palestinians.  There is a broad consensus among Israeli Jews on these issues, and the source of this consensus is rooted, among other things in their attitudes toward the Palestinian Nakba.

Whoever deals with the Palestinian Nakba knows quite a bit about the trauma that the Palestinians experienced, and continue to experience, but what effect did this trauma have on Israeli Jews?  It is difficult to generalize and identify specific behaviors that are the result of the defeat of the Palestinians in 1948, and the violence toward them, but one notable response can be identified – repression.  It is as old as the state.  It began in the midst of the Nakba.

my nagging question since Gaza

This is an interesting, Talmudic piece in Haaretz by Chaim Gans, an author on Zionism, saying that Palestinians unfairly paid the price (as no other people did) for the creation of the Jewish state, but that there was justice in the creation of that state:

Does Obama 'believe' in the Nakba?

Malcolm Hoenlein didn't like Ron Kessler's report on his comments about Jews being not crazy about Obama, apparently. And questioning what Obama "believes." He "backtracked," Newsmax.com says. Well, Newsmax.com is now releasing the transcript of the original interview. Here's a bit on the Nakba:

Hoenlein: Second, the idea that the sort of indirect equating of the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews with what Palestinians endured. The Palestinian refugee problem, or dislocation as he said, didn’t come about because of the creation of the Jewish state, it came about because the Arab states declared war on Israel, and warned the Arabs that they would suffer the same fate as the Jews if they didn’t get out. And then kept them as political pawns.

Kessler: And then to compare killing 6 million Jews with just displacing people...["just displacing people" is Orwellian speech for expulsion, ethnic cleansing]

Hoenlein: I’m saying there’s no comparison between the Holocaust, even if it was an indirect one, and he didn’t intend it to be an explicit one. I mean there is no comparison between that and what happened to Palestinians.

How typical, that reporter and source agree in dismissing the Palestinian experience.
Now Kessler wants to know if Hoenlein voted for Obama:

Kessler: Could I ask did you vote for Obama and now do you regret it?
Hoenlein: I never discuss how I vote.
Kessler: But have you heard that from some Jewish leaders, just privately? Hoenlein: That they’re saying that?
Kessler: Yeah.
Hoenlein: Let’s say there’s a lot of questioning going on about what he really believes, what does he really stand for. I think there’s a lot of uncertainty right now.

This Arab moment

Tonight I went to a book party on the Upper West Side for the posthumous memoir A World I Loved, by Wadad Makdisi Cortas, late mother of Mariam Said, at whose apartment the party was. Cortas was a Lebanese educator who died in 1979. Her life was devoted to girls of the Arab world. A secular missionary, by her daughter's description, and a liberated woman. Worked all her life. Handed her memoir, in English, to her son-in-law Edward Said, and died soon after.

US support for the 'special relationship' will continue to decline as Israeli history and values become more widely known

Harold Meyerson has a great oped in today's Washington Post which makes several of the same points we have been making on this site - American Jews' belief in liberalism and equality is beginning to outweigh their support for Israel. Meyerson:

But why the waning of American Jewish identification with Israel over the past few decades? At its birth, and for several decades thereafter, Israel commanded virtually consensual support among American Jews. But for the past 42 of its 61 years, Israel has ruled over Palestinians who are citizens neither of Israel nor of a Palestinian state. They are -- a condition that should be familiar to Jews -- stateless. The blame for their statelessness is surely their own as well as the Israelis', but in time, the Israeli role in the Palestinian disaster has eroded American Jewish identification with Israel.

By every measure, American Jews remain intensely committed to liberalism and to universal and minority rights. As a democratic state rising on the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel once embodied those values to its supporters, but 42 years of occupation have rendered Israel a state that tests those values more than it affirms them. Its most fervent American Jewish backers, to be found disproportionately among the Orthodox, identify with it for reasons that are more tribal than universal. All of which has created the political space for President Obama to try to craft a resolution to one of the planet's most venerable and dangerous disputes.

Two points. First, although Meyerson focuses on the Jewish community, I think it is actually the declining support for Israel among American more broadly that is opening political space for Obama. While the American Jewish community is clearly an important voice on this issue, it is also important that the issue not be left to Jews alone. The US send over $3 billion a year to Israel which makes this an issue for all Americans. American support for Israel seems to be dropping across the board and this is important.

Second, Meyerson draws a distinction between pre-1967 Israel and post-1967 Israel. This is common and understandable to degree, but ultimately misguided. Israel was not a flourishing democracy before the 1967 occupation. The first and most important example of this is the Nakba and its aftermath which went virtually unacknowledged outside the Arab world, especially in the Jewish community, for decades. Following the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1948, Israel held the Palestinians who remained inside Israel under martial law until 1966. The reason this history has not determined the US perception of Israel is because it is not widely known, and there is certainly an ongoing effort to keep it that way. Stories like Exodus helped sanitize Israel's history for Western audiences and helped create the liberal image that Meyerson refers to when he says "Israel once embodied those values to its supporters." What the ongoing occupation that begun in 1967 has done is make that illusion impossible to sustain.

As Israel's history becomes more widely known it can be expected that widespread US affinity for Israel will continue to fall, along with support for sustaining the one-sided "special relationship" that the US has maintained with Israel for so long.

My Gaza trip left me with a strange sympathy for the Israelis

One mental shadow cast by my trip to Gaza is sympathy for the Israelis.