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Reflections on Nakba Week
PUBLISHED MAY 2, 2005
As students who are concerned about the plight of Palestinians, we could not help but take heart at the way the events of Nakba Week went. Hundreds flocked to our events at a busy time of the year. Dozens of Columbians—of different backgrounds and all academic levels from first year to post-doc—met at 7 a.m. on a rainy Monday morning to post 2,000 posters carrying the names of destroyed Palestinian villages all over campus. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive and appreciative of our efforts at raising awareness.
As if to confirm the success of our week, we received the most predictable and vindicating reaction from the Zionist hard-liners on campus. They were seemingly devastated at our use of the word “Nakba.” As if the Palestinians, the victims of what we believe to be mass ethnic cleansing, need to be apologetic and use a more benign term to describe the destruction of their homeland—a term that suits the oppressor who destroyed that very homeland. Ironically, however, Zionists found no way out of using and repeating this very same word when objecting to its use. This is evidence of the success of the Palestinian narrative in asserting itself, proving that no matter how much effort is put into rewriting history, the ethnic cleansing and destruction of a homeland will be remembered with the word “Nakba,” rather than the phony “Ha’atsma’ut.”
Further, we were even more vindicated when we read the letter by Jacob Shapiro criticizing our organizing of Nakba Week and going public with an invitation for us to a meeting to diligently think and plan how we could have a debate on the Middle East.
Anyone can see through this charade: LionPAC is obviously not interested in debate itself, they are only interested in appearing to want a debate and in painting pro-Palestine groups as extremists who do not want a debate. When pro-Israel groups cannot answer arguments with better arguments, they turn the issue into a meta-debate about the need for debate.
All year long, not a single time were we approached by LionPAC to debate or discuss the Middle East, not in person, in print, in private, or in public. In fact, we approached them to co-sponsor an event and were ignored. Only now, in the final week of classes, after the success of our Nakba Week, did LionPAC realize that what we need most in Columbia is a planning meeting to discuss how we can discuss the Middle East.
The pattern is all too predictable, as is the racist thought-policing inherent in it: pro-Israel groups can hold their own events and shower us with their narrative and propaganda without ever thinking of our viewpoint or of engaging us in a debate—but when we want to have our events, we are told “enough” and that we should instead engage in a discussion on how we construct a debate. Through this sleight of hand, our expressing our narrative and our lexicon becomes a provocative, uncomfortable exercise that needs to be countered with an invitation to “dialogue.”
The reason pro-Israel groups do not engage in the discussion itself is that they know that Columbia and other universities are no longer the bastions of Zionism that they once were—as evidenced by Nakba Week’s success. The old pro-Israel arguments, which essentially boil down to justifying oppression and denying history, no longer have the same appeal they once had. So instead of attempting to engage in the discussion, the pro-Israel camp resorts to obfuscation and discussing the terms of discussion.
The response we have to Mr. Shapiro is simple: we are more than glad to join in any debate you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. However, we are only willing to debate the issues themselves, and have no interest in any meta-meetings to discuss how we discuss the issues, nor do we accept a McCarthyist dictation of what language we are allowed to use. And more importantly, what Mr. Shapiro needs to realize is that our organizing of our events is itself part of the debate that needs to happen, just like all of the events that LionPAC organizes are part of the needed debate. A real debate happens when people talk freely about the conflict, attend stimulating events, and discuss them, not when people organize meetings to talk about what language to use and how we can move on with talking about talking about the conflict. It is only if we engage in such open, honest, and inclusive debate that there can be a chance for the Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace.
Saifedean Ammous is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in sustainable development and a member of the Arab Student Association board. Omar Khalifah is a second-year M.A. student in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and a member of the Filasteen Club.
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It is despicable how all the pro-Arab articles in the Spectator attack Israel with venomous claims such as 'ethnic cleansing' while the pro-Israel articles only speak about how we are open to talk. To a neutral observer, it would seem that we have no real claims. By just reading Mr. Shapiro's and Ms. Steinberger's articles, no points addressing the conflict are made. I don't know if that is because of the nature of the 'open' community at Columbia where anything anti-Arab is considered xenophobic and wrong or is it because we in the pro-Israel community are cowards when it comes to expressing our side of the story. I made a reply to the article by Mr. Judd at the beginning of last week and I will copy it here to portray what I think are good points why us pro-Israeli students think that the Nakba week is wrong and is just another example of Arabs projecting guilt at others when the guilt should be placed on themselves. Israel is not to blame for the 'Nakba'. The Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states are to blame as pointed out below.
Will the Arab and Falisteen groups co-sponsor Yom HaZikkaron programs next week, which commemorate the 1% of the Jewish population of Israel killed in the 1948 war. One out of every 100 Israelis died in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, a war in which the Arabs were the aggressors. They failed to accept the Partition Plan and they decided to go to war in order to destroy the Jewish state at its birth. The refugee problem created by that war is the responsibility of the Palestinian Arabs who first attacked the Jews and the the Arab states who attacked the new Jewish state. Abba Eban, a rather dovish Israeli politician, commented on the Arab claims after 1948 by comparing them to a "child who kills his parents and then begs for the mercy of an orphan." Why should any pro-Israeli (or pro-humanity in general) student group commemorate the failed attempt by the Palestinian Arabs and the Arabs states to ethnically-cleanse one million Jews?!!
Benny Morris, a historian whom the author refers to, said in an interview with Haaretz, "a society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy." Later on in the interview, when referring to the massacres perpetrated by the Israelis, he added, "when you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well." There have been a lot worst refugee problems in the twentieth century that have been solved. Wars displace people and that is just the nature of battle. More than 12 MILLION ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe after WWII and there was no right of return. About 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries since 1948 and they were immediately admitted into Israel. It does not make sense to me how the Arabs were the aggressors, lost and now Israel is blamed for the outcome. What should Israel have done, not fight back. Morris notes how "it was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on." Remember this is the same Benny Morris that the author of the article referred to to support his point.
You cannot start and lose and then not expect bad outcomes. The same applies to the Six Day War. Abba Eban's quote is dead-on regarding the Arab mentality. The Arabs were the aggressors and they are the ones to blame. The Arab states are the ones who must resettle the Palestinian Arab refugees. There shall be no 'right of return' and ideally no withdrawals from territory gained in the Arab aggression of 1967. You fight a war and lose, then you lose. Whatever is lost is lost. There is no return to the beginning. No reset button. War is not a video game. Any territorial concessions made by Israel should be looked upon by the international community as proof of Israel's intense desire for peace and normal relations with her neighbors.
I think with such an attitude no Israelis or Palestinians will ever dream of a just peace. If you keep reading Benny Morris, who many Israelis (especially students of Ben-Gurion University, where he wrote his book) describe as an extreme and racist author, you will never attempt to understand the other side of the story. Whether you know it or not, you do not want to understand that there is such a side.
In fact, Benny Morris in his book "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1988" used military documents to write about the atrocious and barbaric actions (such as rape and torture) of Zionist organizations against Palestinian defenseless civilians to terrorize them in order to banish them. Have you read this book? Maybe not although it is by the same author.
Thus, I suggest you try to learn from slightly different historical resources than those you extract or distill your information from, which will be enough to contradict the facts that you have mentioned. For example, regarding the partition plan, did you know that Jews were 1/3 of the population at that time and owned only 8% of land and they were given the opportunity to get 57% of historical Palestine and the Palestinians were 2/3 of the population (who owned 92% of the land) and were given only 43%, addition to the fact that the land they were given were mostly infertile when compared to the Israeli land? Moreover, even if Palestinians agreed to this unfair partition, how can you predict that another war would not have started (by Israel) to occupy the full land? In fact, it's very likely this would have happened, because Israel has most of historical Palestine today and keeps occupying/stealing more and more land to build settlements to expand Israel. I guess you forgot about that.
I really do not want to talk about historical facts now, just look for them and you will easily find them. There is always the other side of the story although it might be not comforting to read. I think we should put our efforts in finding solutions to the suffering of both people! How can we move on now? As an Israeli author said, supporting the Israeli oppression and aggression against the Palestinians will not defeat the Palestinians, but rather will destroy Israel. So a just peace for both sides is the only option with a little sacrifice from the two sides.
Benny Morris is considered to be one of the 'New Historians' who are believe that Israel is more at fault for the wars than previously written by the more conventional historians. I know he does mention torture and even a few limited cases of rape in his books, but as he says in the interview with Haaretz that " when you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well." War is bad, and bad things happen during war. How about all the massacres the Arabs perpetrated. Wherever the Arabs took over, they expelled all the Jews. They razed the entire Jewish Quarter of the Old City including all the synagogues and the massacred Jews at Kfar Ezion, completely wiping out the entire population. It would have been a lot worst had the Arabs won the war. They attacked many other Jewish communes and settlements, but the Israeli forces were able to defend those. I chose to use Benny Morris' words since Mr. Judd used Benny Morris to support his point that the satanic Jews attacked poor Arabs for no reason. But Benny Morris does not make this claim, and he even says what the Jews did was very appropriate given the war imposed on them by the Arab attackers. I could've easily used more conventional historians who claim that powerful Arab forces attacked the severely underarmed Jewish forces who did not have one cannon or tank and had obsolete planes and miraculously defeated the Arabs. This is the story I still believe as does many historians such as Sir Martin Gilbert who created a DVD called Birth of a Nation which is an incredible video to watch. This is a much more pleasant history that the one that Benny Morris writes about, but as I said I chose Morris since Mr. Judd did.
Now onto the Partition Plan. The Jews were allotted about 55% of the land, but more than 60% of that was the barely inhabited Negev desert which was given to Israel since the Jews were the only ones there. The Arabs on teh other hand were given much of the southern half of the Mediterranean coast along with the western half of the fertile Galilee. Additionally about 70% of the land allotted for the Jewish state was owned by the British Mandate, not the Palestinian Arabs. About 18% of the land was owned by Palestinian Arabs misplaced by the Arab aggression in 1948. Not 92%.
As to your claim that the Jews would have started a war for more land, that is a baseless claim. The Jews never attacked for more land. The 1956 War was started because the Egyptians illegally blockaded the Straits of Tiran, cutting Israel off from the port of Eilat. In 1967, the Egyptians amassed along the border along with once again illegally blockading the Straits of Tiran along with threatening Israel with extinction. And furthermore, Israel never attacked Jordan who illegally occupied most of the land that the Palestinian Arabs claim today. Israel sent a message to King Hussein of Jordan that Israel does not want to fight Jordan. But Hussein already put his forces under the command of the Egyptians and they started shelling Israeli cities, which FORCED Israel to fight back and ultimately led to the conquering of eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan River. Additionally the settlements, for the most part, are built on either state owned land, or land that is purchased from Arabs. You can call it stealing, but that is false. The Arabs are more than happy to accept Jewish money, but then they complain that Jews are building on hilltops that were never settled by Arabs. The settlements do not displace any Arabs and all the restrictions on movement that the Palestinians undergo have nothing to do with settlements. The checkpoints were only implemented after 2000 when the Arabs started attacking Israeli cities.
Finally, you claim you do not want to talk about facts and I believe you because when facts are brought up, you lose your claim. You just rather say your few keywords like Nakba, occupations, ethnic cleansing and hope nobody calls you out on them with facts. We should find a peace settlement, but in order for that to happen, the Arabs must realize their blame in the refugee crisis and how there will not be a 'right of return' to Israel and the 1967 borders will be adjusted slightly. In 2000, Ehud Barak made a very fair offer to Yassir Arafat, one which Saudi Prince Bondar called a crime for refusing. Arafat did not even come back with a counter-offer as he just said 'Go to Hell' and left. Afterwards he rallied his people to terror against Israeli civilians. If this is the result of peace overtures by Israel, then why should Israel make sacrifices?
Thank God they wrote this op-ed.
Mr. Ammous is entitled to use any word he wants and I have no objection to calling the plight of the Palestinians a "nakba" or catastrophe. But the catastrophe is that they refuse to look in the mirror and see the reason for their plight is their own intransigence and terror.
No group of people on earth receives more money, support, or attention, and no group of people on earth have made less progress towards being a respected member of the international community. The Palestinians have witnessed a decline into economic penury, homophobia, religious intolerance, Holocaust denial, rabid anti-Semitism, and political despotism. Israel and the Jews can not be blamed for Arab decisions to start wars, murder civilians, execute "traitors", start internecine wars, attack forms of commerce, reject the rights of neighbors to live in peace, and engage in historical revisionism.
Israel is turning 60 years old. We should all celebrate. Mr. Ammous can scream all he wants but nothing will change the fact that Israel is the economic, political, intellectual, and innovative capital of the Middle East. It has no oil, but an economy equal to all its neighbors combined. It is the only place in the Middle East where the Christian community is increasing in numbers and homosexuals can live without fear of the law. As for the Palestinians, it is indeed a catastrophe, a catastrophe of their own making.
As Stephen Hawking said, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." Unfortunately, it's easy to convince ourselves with myths to alleviate or eliminate the feeling of guilt which provides us with legitimation of doing nothing.
This "illusion," instead, lets many who blindly support Israel celebrate "Yom Haatzmaut" without even attempting to understand that there are around 2 million people who are surrounded by tanks and/or 25 feet high wall with watchtowers and firing posts every 200 meters. Now you are saying that this collective punishment of the Palestinians has nothing to do with Israel whatsoever. Finding the root of the problem, rather than just using pain alleviations, is the only solution for a real and a just peace.
Unless you are in favor of Moshe Dian's policy (which is being implemented) who said to the Palestinians: "We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads."
A civilized nation is not only evaluated and judged based on its economic prosperity and/or behavior to the majority of its own people, but by its behavior to the minorities (20%) and how it treats the rest of world, particularly its neighbors.
Sure Israel deserve to be respected, the best economy on earth, , thanks to the USA billions funds every year to the great economy, no need for petrol, they take it cash, and the best democracy on earth, they never recriminate between killing an enfant, a child or a freedom fighter, everybody is equal in front of their tanks,
Just don’t underestimate Israel Poison now, from the north they could not penetrate like they used in Lebanon, their defeat was on all screens, from the south, hahahha, they cant inter Gaza anymore, every time they are trying, they lose solders,, in one week they lost 6, they are dying for a truce now, do you think Israel in its best time now???? and yet allot to come, wait and see.
A catastrophe of their own making?!! Please. You have to be kidding me.
The Palestinian "disaster" was not an event but rather an ongoing process of self-delusion and intransigence on the part of Palestinian militants. It is happening even now through the suicidal tactics of Hamas and its friends. The "reflections" of Ammous and Khalifa are themselves one small part of the disaster.
Do they realy think Israelis and their supporters are that much discomfitted by the use of the term "nakba" to describe the fate of the Palestinians? No more than typical Americans are made uneasy by the use of the word "disaster" to describe the fate of the Japanese Imperial Fleet at Midway. In this zero-sum world, alas, your enemy's disaster is your own triumph.
When might one hope for some show of pragmatism amongst those who want to redeem Palestine? I see nothing in the Ammous/Khalifa paper that resembles a practicable program for getting Palestinians out of their current mess. It's the same old brew of grandiosity and self-pity, and, in the end, it leads only to another pile of corpses, the great majority of whom will be Palestinian.
I could not have said i better myself... Way to go Filasteen and ASA!!
I agree- this article puts up a lot of good points that should really be considered.
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