One Arab's view and one Jew's view of Israel
Of course neither of these is characteristic. To say that all Jews or all Arabs (or even most) have the same view of anything would be a racist oversimplication. But there is enough thought and commonality between these two views, expressed at the annual "birthday" of the creation and disaster, that they are well worth considering.
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Resisting the Nakba
The viciousness of Israel is testament to its knowing that Palestinians will always remain steadfast and defeat its past and present attempts to erase them, writes Joseph Massad
Indeed, memory has always been a key component of Palestinian resistance. When Palestinians insist on naming their country, their cities, and their villages with their original names, they are not only resisting the vulgar names that Zionism has bestowed on the land, they are also insisting on a geographic memory that Israel has all but succeeded to erase physically. Zionist cruelty has been such that Israel insisted for 50 years after its creation in denying that the Palestinians even exist as a people, or as a name; that the very name "Palestinians" should not even be uttered. For Zionists, the very name "Palestinian" functions as some magical incantation that could obliterate them at the existential level. They are not necessarily wrong in their impression, for the name Palestinian is itself the strongest form of resistance against their official memory. The name "Palestinian" has also been generative of continuities in Palestinian culture and life, in Palestinian identity and nationality, things that Israel had hoped it obliterated completely and whose survival will always threaten its mnemonic operation of inventing a fictional memory of non-Palestine, of non- Palestinians.
Palestinian counter-memory is in direct confrontation with the Nakba's achievement of obliterating Palestine as a geographic designation and an affront to the Nakba's ongoing efforts to obliterate the Palestinians as a national group with a pre-Nakba history. The survival of the Palestinians after the Nakba started, and despite its assiduous efforts to efface them, has made the Nakba a less than successful Zionist victory. It is in this context that Israel's insistence on calling Palestinian citizens in Israel "Israeli Arabs" is designed to silence their Palestinian-ness. Zionism's insistence that Palestinian refugees be settled and given the nationality of their host countries is aimed also to erase their name.
Israel's final admission a decade ago that there was a Palestinian people would come at the price of reducing the Palestinian people to one-third of their total number. In signing Oslo, Israel compromised with a collaborationist Palestinian leadership, wherein the price the Palestinian Authority would pay for Israel's agreeing to name West Bank and Gaza Palestinians with their proper names was the de-Palestinisation of the rest of the Palestinian people. In return, the Palestinian collaborating leadership, under the guise of the Geneva Accords, has agreed to multiply Israel's Jewish population by a factor of three, wherein Israel would be recognised as the state of all Jews worldwide and not of the Jews who live inside it, let alone the Palestinian citizens over whom it rules.
But this arrangement has failed. Hard as it tried to legitimise itself, the Palestinian Authority could not but be seen for what it is: the creation of the Israeli occupation, an authority which in its structure and logic is not unlike all colonial puppet regimes in Asia and Africa serving their masters, not excluding the Judenröte (Jewish councils) that the Nazis set up in occupied Poland's ghettos to run Jewish life, collect taxes, and run the post offices, inter alia; or the Bantustans that apartheid South Africa set up as alternative homelands. The Palestinian Authority's attempt to acquire the power of naming the Palestinian and Jewish peoples failed as much as Israel's attempts before it. Palestinians continue to insist on their name and on their inclusion in a Palestinian nation, while non-Israeli Jews insist on not joining Israeli nationality, no matter how much they may support Israel. The politics of naming is the politics of power and resistance. The power to name creates fictional histories against material realities. While Israel has succeeded in imposing physical and geographic realties, its attempt to obliterate historical memory has failed. Palestinians are always standing in the way of its falsification of their history and its own.
Moshe Dayan once eloquently described the Nakba as follows:
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don't even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlul, Gvat in the place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Haneifa, and Kfar- Yehoshua in the place of Tel-Shaman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
The success of the Palestinian resistance to the Nakba has forced a similar process of renaming Zionist and Israeli victories that is now adopted across much of the world, and even, albeit in a much more limited fashion, in the United States. To echo Dayan: Palestinian resistance and victimisation replaced Zionist conquests and victories. Many of you don't even know the names of these Zionist victories, and I don't blame you, because the Zionist history books and propaganda that once legitimised them are no longer considered legitimate. Not only have these books and this propaganda lost legitimacy, but the Zionist and Israeli victories are no longer recognised as such either. The Nakba arose in place of "Israel's war of independence," Apartheid replaced "Jewish sovereignty," the expulsion of the Palestinians replaced "Plan Dalet," or even the "return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland," Israel's institutionalised and legal racism replaced "Israeli democracy," Palestinian citizens of Israel replaced "Israeli Arabs," the Palestinian people replaced the "non-Jewish communities in Palestine" as the Balfour Declaration had described them, and Palestinian maftul replaced "Israeli couscous" which continues to try to replace Palestinian maftul. There is not one single Zionist victory in this country that the Palestinians have not resisted and challenged.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/897/op8.htm
[A]fter the black September of 1970, Golda Meir said, what is this talk of the Palestinians? We are the Palestinian people! At that point it clicked in my mind: this was morally unacceptable.
Yes, the Jews had a right to their own state, and they had a right to this state. This demand was made even stronger by the Holocaust and the guilt of the Europeans after 1945.
It is all too easily forgotten, however, that there was a moderate Zionism. There were people like Martin Buber, who said from the beginning that the right to a Jewish state must be made acceptable to the existent population, the non-Jews.
Militant Zionism, on the other hand, did not develop any further in its thinking. Even today, it is still based on a lie: that the land that the Jews settled was empty.
Today, many Israelis have no idea what it must feel like to be Palestinian - how it is to live in a city like Nablus, a prison for 180,000 people. There are no restaurants there, no cafes, no cinemas.
What has become of Jewish intelligence? I am not even speaking of justice or love. Why does one continue to feed the hate in the Gaza Strip?
There will never be a military solution. Two peoples are fighting over one and the same land. No matter how strong Israel becomes, there will always be insecurity and fear.
The conflict is eating away at itself and at the Jewish soul, and it has been allowed to do so. We wanted to own land that had never belonged to Jews and built settlements there.
The Palestinians see this as imperialistic provocation, and rightly so. Their resistance is absolutely understandable - not the means they use to this end, not the violence nor the wanton inhumanity - but their "no."
...I do as I do because it drives me crazy to see how much injustice we Jews commit daily, and how much we endanger the future existence of Israel.
