Editor’s note: Mark Hage is a member of Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. He lives in Montpelier.
Historian Eduardo Galeano wrote, “No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.”
Israel was reminded again recently of the impossibility of silencing the Palestinian people and erasing their historical memory.
On May 15, Palestinians and their allies commemorated the “Nakba” – Arabic for “Catrastrophe” — which refers to the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948, the year Israel was established, and the destruction of more than 500 of their villages by Jewish forces.
There are millions of Palestinian refugees living in forced exile outside the Jewish state. It is estimated, too, that 1 out of 4 Palestinian citizens of Israel is an internal refugee.
All Palestinian refugees, no matter where they live, are prevented by Israel from exercising their “right of return” to their lands and homes, which is enshrined in international law.
For nearly seven decades, the Jewish state has aggressively denied the Nakba and concealed its crimes. It succeeded for a long time in convincing much of the world that it bore no responsibility for the Nakba, that Palestinians had left their villages and neighborhoods of their own volition under the orders of Arab leaders. There was no ethnic cleansing.
That fallacious and damaging argument has run its course, finally.
Thanks to a substantial body of research on the Nakba and its aftermath, including works by prominent Israeli historians, we know definitively that Israeli leaders, militias and terrorist organizations planned and executed the Nakba.
What the Zionist colonial movement, born in Europe in the late 19th century, could not accomplish through voluntary immigration and diplomatic machinations — a commanding Jewish demographic majority in Palestine — it achieved under cover of war by expelling or terrifying into flight most of the indigenous Arab population.
Today, annual Nakba protests and events in Israel (and across the globe) are growing in number, intensity and creativity. This year, more than 20,000 Palestinians took part in a “March of Return” to the destroyed village of Lubya, near the Israeli city of Tiberias. It was the largest Palestinian protest of its kind in Israel’s history.
A week earlier, a phone app called “iNakba,” which maps the hundreds of destroyed Arab villages across Israel, was released by Zochrot, an Israeli organization run jointly by Jews and Palestinians.
Veteran journalist Jonathan Cook, who is based in Israel and won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism, noted, “iNakba visibly restores a Palestine that Israel hoped literally to have wiped off the map.”
Zochrot organizes tours of destroyed Palestinian villages, says Cook, “often in the face of vehement opposition from the communities built on the rubble of Palestinian homes.” It also creates educational materials in Hebrew on the Nakba for Israeli teachers, but they are officially banned by the government.
Palestinians living under military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have no rights and are being violently dispossessed by Jewish settlers and soldiers, just as their families were 66 years ago.
Zochrot made possible the first Nakba film festival in Tel Aviv last year, and is creating an archive of filmed interviews with Israeli war veterans willing to go on record about their part in the expulsions of 1948.
The first conference in Israel dedicated to both the principle and practical implications of the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees took place in 2013 under the auspices of Zochrot.
This movement is still small, to be sure, but is embraced, in particular, by Palestinian youth, who will not tolerate the humiliating and discriminatory conditions that crushed the lives and spirits of their parents and grandparents.
And “right of return” activism is finding expression in different ways, according to Jonathan Cook:
“Architects are designing plans for new [Palestinian] communities that would house the refugees on or near their old lands.
“Refugee families are trying to reclaim mosques and churches, usually the only buildings still standing.
“Workshops have been arranged among refugee groups to imagine what a right of return might look like. Youth from two Christian villages, Iqrit and Biram, have already set up camps at their old churches, daring Israel to hound them out like their grandparents. Another group, I Won’t Remain a Refugee, is looking to export this example to other villages.”
When Palestinians, in solidarity with Jews of conscience, rise up on Nakba Day, they are not just challenging the dominant Israeli narrative of 1948 or setting the historical record straight.
They, along with other activists, are sowing the seeds of a Palestinian civil rights movement that has the potential to transform Israel, through nonviolent, mass political action, from a “Jewish state” to a state of all its citizens. This means, among other things, compelling Israeli Jews to confront the truth of the settler-colonial history of their country and the Nakba.
For Palestinians, the War of 1948 never ended.
Palestinians living under military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have no rights and are being violently dispossessed by Jewish settlers and soldiers, just as their families were 66 years ago.
Palestinians in Israel are citizens, yes, but they are severely and legally discriminated against in many social spheres, including employment, education, land access, health care, housing and immigration. Most of their land since 1948 has been confiscated through various means to benefit Jewish citizens and communities. They are also victimized, as are African immigrants in the country, by right-wing, racist and messianic organizations that believe they should not have to share Israel with anyone who is not a Jew.
Both systems of Israeli Jewish oppression and exclusion have their genesis in the Nakba.
