Mondoweiss

Israel Warns UN and Palestinians to Cleanse Their 'Lexicons' of a Word. Guess Which One

Haaretz reports that the UN Sec'y-General used the word "Nakba" yesterday, angering Israel.

The [UN's official] report said the UN chief telephoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to express his solidarity with the Palestinians on the day they mark the "nakba," the Arabic word meaning "catastrophe" that is used in reference to the founding of the state of Israel.
 
Danny Carmon, Israel's deputy ambassador to the UN, told Israel Radio that the term "'nakba' is a tool of Arab propaganda used to undermine the legitimacy of the establishment of the State of Israel, and it must not be part of the lexicon of the UN."

Apparently it's the first time the UN has used the word, Nakba. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni made the same point re Nakba in a speech yesterday, per Ynet:

"with the establishment of a Palestinian state, we wish to see the end of the conflict. The Palestinians will be able to celebrate their independence if on that same day they also strike the word 'Nakba' from their lexicon."

Now close your eyes and for just one second imagine how I'd feel if you told me not to use the word "pogrom" to describe what happened to my ancestors in Russia.

 

 

Peretz and Goldberg Get Obama to Renew the Balfour Declaration

I'm still mulling Marty Peretz's longish phone conversation with Obama about Israel, also Jeffrey Goldberg's longish interview with the candidate. One of the weird things about both conversations is the sense that Goldberg and Peretz are extracting a promise from Obama to the Jewish community. Indeed, Goldberg establishes himself as a Jew who is a guardian of Jewish "worry". In a sense, neither is that interested in what Obama really thinks--both men behave less like journalists than petitioners, trying to get Obama on the record expressing his support of the Jewish state as an answer to the Jewish problem. "I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?" Goldberg asks. Then: "Do you think that justice is still on Israel’s side?"

The whole thing feels like a reprisal of the Balfour Declaration, 91 years on, with Peretz and Goldberg reenacting the roles of Chaim Weizmann and Lord Rothschild, and Obama playing the role of the British ruler. Here's why the analogy fits, and why it is actually helpful in understanding Israel/Palestine:

A Nakba Memorial, of Sorts

The Etzel Museum, commemorating the Irgun, is itself housed in a former Palestinian home in Jaffa.

And check this out: several demonstrations by No Time to Celebrate Jews, including 10 openly-identified "anti-Zionist" Jews outside a "birthright" event in New York. The great Hannah Mermelstein was there...

Jaffa Is Still Contested Space (Even in Jewish Hearts and Minds)

Against Commentary Magazine, a reader has offered me this Jaffa blogger. Her name's Yudit, an artist. I want to believe she's Jewish. Oh my god, there are some beautiful Jews in the world! She says Jaffa, once  "bride of the sea" to the Arab population, is now a slummy suburb of Tel Aviv. She resists continuing efforts to push Arabs out, and describes a demonstration the other night at the Etzel Museum, a museum of the Irgun, right in historic Jaffa: 

At the etzel museum a small audience listens to a sound & light heroism performance,
We are kept at "a safe" distance, but using old pots and sticks as well as small flutes we raise a lot of noise. Banners tell the story of the naqbe in Jaffa, of the acts of terror carried out by Etzel against civilians. Sixty years ago, the naqbe.

Reuven Abergil tells the story of how that happened, while the Brits and the Hagana conveniently looked in the other direction. They controlled the road blocks on the way to Jaffa and the Etzel people dressed to look like local Arabs, passed through with their weapons and explosives. Bombs hidden inside a watermelon cart and a truck exploded in Jaffa's market. Children and women were murdered. The aim was to create terror and make the population want to flee away.

'Commentary' Ignores Palestinians' Eyewitness Testimony in Denying that Zionists Drove Arabs From Jaffa in '48

Last week I blogged about Commentary's piece denying the Nakba, which was underwritten by the chairman of the New-York Historical Society-- a landmark of Nakba denial, published in what was once a glory of Jewish intellectual tradition: Commentary, the magazine I grew up with, stacks of it, my parents didn't throw it away. The article demonstrates how fealty to Israel is eroding Jewish intelligence, as it has forced some of the smartest people on the planet to devote themselves to alchemy, coming up with elaborate proofs that black is white.

One paragraph that particularly disturbed me said that "huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven [Commentary's emphasis] from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces.. In Jaffa, Palestine's largest Arab city, the [Arab] municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea..." In making this assertion, author Efraim Karsh denied the New Standard View, that the Zionists forced the Palestinians from Jaffa. He offered no evidence.

Having just attended a speech on the Nakba by Lila Abu-Lughod, an eminent anthropologist at Columbia University, in which she stated that her father had been "driven" out of Jaffa by Zionists, I posted about the Commentary piece, and a couple days later Commentary published an annotated version online, including the following footnote to support Karsh's claim re Jaffa:

Amid Tears, Brandeis Student Senate Declines to Congratulate Israel at 60

The world keeps changing. The Globe has a shocking story on Brandeis's student senate tabling/killing a resolution to congratulate Israel on making 60.

The resolution sparked more than two hours of debate on the senate floor on March 9, leaving some students in tears, according to a senator who was there. Critics questioned whether it was appropriate to have student leadership delve into Middle Eastern politics on a campus that hosts students from 100 countries, some of which oppose Israel's policies.

Such a resolution "shuts people like me up," said Lisa Hanania, 20, a Christian Palestinian-Israeli student from Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish city outside Tel Aviv. "For me it's 60 years of Nakbah - Catastrophe - of the Palestinian people."

"The senate is not the place for a discussion about the State of Israel," said Senator at Large Jessica Blumberg, 21, a junior from New York's Westchester County. "There are people going to Brandeis who are Palestinian refugees."

Following the discussion, student senators voted, 13 to 6, with one abstention, to "postpone indefinitely" a vote on the resolution, effectively killing it.

A few comments: Brandeis is half-Jewish, it keeps blowing my mind. These kids are the most sophisticated about these issues in the country. I visited it last year and was stunned by the support I saw for Jimmy Carter. Zochrot visited it last month and was welcomed. Jessica Blumberg and Noam Shuster, an Israeli-American who has co-founded Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine, are clearly the way the arrow is pointing for young Jews. Wonder how many of Commentary Magazine's readers are under 40?

Thanks to Joachim Martillo for the tip.

Nakba and Neocons Can Dance

How many years will it be till neoconservative Commentary Magazine apologizes for its Nakba denial? 5, 10, 50? Well, I'm setting the egg-timer. Because the National Post of Canada, a neocon hive--owned by rightwing Jews, long guarantor of a platform to David Frum, who invented two dangerous slogans, "Victory or Holocaust" and "Axis of Evil"--yesterday stated there was "ethnic cleansing" in '47-48 Palestine. First it printed a piece by contributor Jeet Heer on the Nakba that was unapologetic:

Obama Vs. Goldberg (Or, Why the Jewish Experience of the U.S. Civil Rights Struggle Is Israel's Only Hope)

Yesterday Richard Silverstein offered a criticism of Times reporter Ethan Bronner's comments on the Nakba:

[Ethan] Bronner has done a good job of channeling a certain Israeli nationalist perspective on the necessity of retaining Jewish dominance within the State of Israel. But what he hasn’t done is allow for the transformation of such attitudes over time. Look at the racial attitudes of white America toward African-Americans before 1954...

Can anyone now imagine an Arab running for president or prime minister of Israel? Perhaps not. But it will happen as surely as Barack Obama is now running for president. Time heals wounds as long as people really attempt to grapple with the issues that divide them. In my heart of hearts, I believe that they, and Israel, will find a way to realize the deepest aspirations of Arab and Jew within Israel.

...[F]or Israel to realize the full meaning of its democratic nature and its Declaration of Independence, developments must gradually move toward Israel becoming a state of all its citizens. Otherwise, Israel will be an ethnocracy with truncated rights for its Arab minority. [All emphases mine]

Prophetic. Now flash back nearly 20 years, the most important moment in the making of Barack Obama, the Harvard Law Review's presidential election of 1990. From the Boston Globe:

In the fall of 1989, when Obama returned to campus for his second year, students were protesting the lack of minority law school faculty. They staged sit-ins in the law library, camped outside the office of Dean Robert C. Clark, and carried signs that read "Diversity Now" and "Homogeneity Feeds Hatred."

[In February 1990, the election lasted] until just after midnight, when only Obama and a 24-year-old Harvard graduate named David Goldberg remained  contenders .

At about 12:30 a.m., the editors called Obama into the room, told him he had won, and broke into applause. [Kenneth] Mack, another black editor, pulled Obama in for a hug.

"It was a hard hug, and it lasted a while," Obama told the Harvard Law Record, the school newspaper, at the time. "At that point, I realized this was not just an individual thing. . . but something much bigger."

A few additions to this important parable of American life: Obama's presidency put him on front pages around the country and led to his book deal. The Globe's fine reporting was done by Michael Levenson and Jonathan Saltzman, who I assume are like myself, upper-middle-class Jews drawn to journalism.  David Goldberg is, I believe, a progressive lawyer specializing in public law in New York, working for poor women denied health care.

The Declaration of independence that Silverstein cites promised that Israel would " ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex..."

The lesson of this story is a simple one. After World War II, Jews in America and Israel set out to guarantee civil rights to all, even in the wake of horrors like the Holocaust and slavery/segregation. In America, we also were a minority, and Jewish activists in the David Goldberg tradition succeeded beyond the world's wildest dreams. In Israel we have utterly failed. Homogeneity breeds hatred. Diversity now.

Israel Could Transform Its Future, and Image, by Recognizing 'Nakba' Right Now

Something's happened in the last year: the debate over the 1967 borders is giving way to a debate over the '48 borders. Ilan Pappe said this was happening in his book on '48, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, now it's all around us; Israel's 60th birthday is causing even the New Yorker to print the word Nakba. If Israel actually wanted to preserve the two-state solution, it would issue a statement tomorrow acknowledging the great suffering in the Nakba, and the need to address the refugees' rights.

Yesterday the softspoken Columbia U. anthropologist, Lila Agu-Lughod, co-author of the book Nakba (who met her co author, Ahmad Sa'di, at her father's funeral in Jaffa 7 years ago), posted these eloquent comments on the Columbia University Press blog to honor the 60th anniversary of the Nakba:

The Palestine/ Israel conflict has occupied center stage in international affairs at least since the Balfour Declaration in 1917... Its macabre manifestations confront us on TV screens and newspapers’ pages daily. The efforts invested to solve it peacefully have so far failed. And despite apparently huge diplomatic efforts (genuine, self-serving, or cynical) doomed approaches continue, paradoxically, to prevail. These approaches most commonly—and with various degrees of sophistication—construct a political landscape that is dominated by elites who are described as either for or against peace. Leaders are classified in loaded and dichotomous terms: as moderate or radical; westernized or traditional; secular or fundamentalist. Very little, if anything at all, is said about those who construct these categories and their interests in doing so, let alone their role in perpetuating the conflict. Nothing is said about the morality of those who categorize....

[A] durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians must begin by tackling the moral foundation of the conflict. In 1948 the vast majority of the indigenous population, the more than 750,000 Arab Palestinians who resided on 77.8% of the land of their country—which later became Israel—were expelled. The will of the international community to allow their return, expressed in the UN resolution 194, has been ignored.

How can Palestinians challenge the current realities that are constructed by powerful nations and the dominant narrative that denies their existence, dreams, and aspirations? Why has the morality of their claims to nationhood and to a return to their homes not been understood or supported?

Hot Tip for Hackademics

Much to its credit, Commentary magazine has posted an annotated version of Efraim Karsh's piece on 1948. I urge all hackademics (to steal Avi Shlaim's wonderful word) to have a look at the footnotes. I'm going to.