Op-ed: Israel must acknowledge the Nakba, for its own people’s sake

I wrote that this week, but a little too late to get it published since we're already May 15th. Oh, and I was writing mainly for a western audience - keep that in mind as you read...
Happy Nakba day everyone!
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As the world joins Israel to celebrate its 60th birthday in a jovial international celebration attended by, among others, George W. Bush, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, Palestine and the Palestinians around the world will be remembering the 60th anniversary Nakba - the “Catastrophe”, term used to designate the loss of Mandate Palestine and the displacement of its people. Same date, same event, same land - yet the two events, and those remembering them, couldn’t be further apart.

In our finite world, land conquered by one party is necessarily lost by another (unless it’s Terra Nullius Antarctica), yet while the world has no trouble remembering the first event, Israel - along with some of its hard-line supporters - refuse to acknowledge that Zionist proto-military forces caused the displacement of hundred of thousands of Palestinians, pushing them into exile and barring them from returning to their ancestral homes for the following 60 years.

For Israel to recognize the Nakba and its devastating effect on the Palestinian psyche - which late Columbia University professor Edward Said compared to the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish mentality - is not an acknowledgment of the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees. It is not even an admission of guilt.

It would, however, be a large step towards understanding the central grief of a sizable segment of its population, an important step on the road to improving Jewish-Arab relationships within Israel. Nearly 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, those who were not evacuated or have not fled their country in 1947-48, and while they theoretically enjoy legal and constitutional rights, most have lost their land in favour of housing projects for Jews. Many live in crowded cities near the ruins of their old villages and are not allowed to return, the idle land being earmarked for potential Jewish immigrants to come. Their houses have already been granted to foreigners who haven’t decided to go to Israel yet.

Israel’s Jewish citizens are well aware that the land their country was built on a little over half a century ago was not ‘a land without a people’ as Israel Zangwill said, but most will quickly dismiss the thought, leaving this major event of their country - the story of its establishment - in an artificial darkness, somehow obstructing the millennia of history that took place between the destruction of the Temple and the twentieth century.

History is ugly by definition, and no nation has an immaculate past.

Recognizing the events of the Nakba would also allow Israel’s Jews to empathize and to connect with their co-citizens, paving the way to better national relations and perhaps to the emergence of a national identity beyond ethnic and religious differences.

Understanding the “other’s narrative” is considered to be an essential part of conflict resolution, and reconciliation. Nowhere is this more valid than in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where the shared events with diametrically opposed stories are at the core of the negotiations’ main contentious issues. If Israel is indeed serious about seeking peace with its neighbours and if we, in our responsibility as an international community are committed to assist them, the Nakba is where to start, even if all negotiations pertain to the lands occupied in 1967. It is impossible to understand the origins, and therefore the negotiating limits, of the ‘final status issues’ - mainly Palestinian refugees, borders, Jerusalem - without understanding how the problem started.

Luckily, an increasing number of courageous Israelis have been facing, head on, the question of the Nakba recognition and have sought to communicate with both the Palestinian and the Israeli public. With the Israeli public, in an effort to inform, educate, and challenge; with the Palestinian public, to let them know that someone listens. Zochrot (‘Remembering’, in Hebrew) is one such organisation. Through advocacy within Israel, they seek to remind people of the villages that once stood underneath their homes, of the price paid by the Palestinians - in lives, in the loss of their houses and belongings, and in the continued plight of the refugees - that paved the way to the establishment of their young nation.

For if the State of Israel is “to make the Jewish state legitimate in the eyes of those who feel they are its victims” as former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said, the State must first understand why they feel they are its victims.

Then, perhaps, in the absence of a common narrative, a pair of mutually acknowledged narratives will exist. Much can be achieved from there.

Mohamed works as an economic consultant in Ramallah, Palestine, and has attended both the Israeli and the Palestinian ceremonies.

(the photos of which should be posted sometime soon!!)