Yesterday I attended a touring presentation, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, of an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian speaking on the Nakba and the Right of Return. About 30 people came to an Arab group's space near Wall Street. First Eitan Bronstein spoke. Then Muhammad Jaradat.
I took great pleasure in the fact that generally at such joint American presentations, the Jewish speaker is a person of bigger presence, the Arab plays second fiddle; but these two guys were equal partners, equal as performers. Their presentations were like night and day. But they had the same point: Zionism must end for the people of Palestine to be healed and live together.
Bronstein was slightly merry and indirect. "Shalom," he said with a twinkle at the start. He and other leftwing Jewish activists became dedicated 5 or 6 years ago to the cause of changing Israeli consciousness to include the understanding that the Nakba is part of Jewish history, it is not some separate Arab narrative, and that their towns lie on the ruins of expelled Arabs' towns. There is simply no acknowledgment of this in Israeli society...
In one project, Bronstein's groups got lifesized photographs of Arabs living in a refugee camp in Lebanon and brought these photos back to the village they were forced out of in the Galilee. They did so because the Arabs said they would like this to happen; and they then "populated" the Israeli village with the images. I found this tremendously moving. Especially the image of an old Palestinian set up on a demolished grave in the village; for the old Palestinian died not long after the shot was taken, and he wanted to be buried back in his village. It showed how important art is to change consciousness. That image simply broke your heart. No explanations necessary.
Another project Bronstein's group undertook was to make up signs memorializing Arab features of Israeli cities and put them up in the city. He showed a film of his group putting up a street sign, right under the Israeli street signs, in Ashkelon, to describe the Arab village that had been there and how the residents were forcibly removed at night, in 1950.
Something remarkable happened. When they put up the sign, an Israeli man came down the street and ripped it down. An Arab woman who lives in Lod, outside Tel Aviv, and who visits Ashkelon every year because it is her ancestral home, rushed at the Israeli. "I was born here. My father's house was here." They began cursing one another and threatening to kill one another. The Israeli tossed the sign in the garbage. They almost came to blows. Then after a stormy exchange, the Israeli allowed her to put the sign back up, "to please her." And then he brought her a bottle of water, to cool off. She accepted.
Again, there is nothing to say about such a thing. But Bronstein drew a great storyteller's lesson.
"The Jewish Israeli said, 'I don't like the sign because I also live here.' Well what's the problem? No one touches your sign. Don't worry, no one will move it. So what is the problem with that word 'also'? The problem is the Zionist identity... We cannot really live with them. We cannot be 'also' here with them in equality. Because when we are 'also,' it is threatening our existence. This is exactly what we... are trying to challenge."
Now it was Jaradat's turn. He spoke softly and with a smile, but there was no merriness or symbolism. He said simply that the right of return was inalienable.
"The Zionist movement has not come to an empty land.... It is not true that they came to the desert to bloom it. They have not bloomed it. They have taken our flowers and our homes, destroyed the nature and the beauty of that country."
535 Palestinian villages were simply erased, including, Jaradat noted, a great deal of beautiful architecture that as anyone who has visited the Old City knows melds with the land in an indescribable way. Why?
"Because they want to erase the Palestinian people from existence. We were not supposed to exist as a people. Because if we exist then the Zionists will be brought one day to a tribunal because they have acted a crime against humanity, eviction, ethnic cleansing, genocide."
Jaradat said that despite the fragmentation and dispersal of the Palestinians, his people had made great progress. They have achieved unity, "and from unity we also got our identity." Their leadership is both united and defunct, the PLO. And over the next 20-40 years he believes the challenge to the Palestinian people is to "get our rights implemented. We will be criminals if we don't pave the ground for that--a secular democratic state in the future."
Will the Jews have to jump into the sea? No. There is plenty of room for both Jews and Palestinians. Then Jaradat also issued a challenge to Zionist identity. "[They say] 'We are Jews and we need to be alone, give us the land.' Those who are saying this... are not Jews, but Zionists." For Judaism is itself a Palestinian tradition. The Palestinian people are the unique heirs to three great religious traditions in their midst. "No one can divorce the Palestinians from this diversity of culture." Jaradat looks forward to the day when he, a nonreligious person, can go through the Damascus Gate and have his cup of coffee at a coffee shop even as Muslims walk past him to the Al-Aqsa Mosque with no fear that their right to worship will be circumscribed.
The crowd in the room was small, quiet, slightly adulatory. An older Jewish woman stood up to say that the message in the room that day would be met with "extreme hysteria" in the U.S. For we have a "sickness" here that prevents serious discussion. We believe that if Israel ceases to be a Jewish state, there will be no Jewish life, no synagogues. "The Jews will be killed there and then sooner or later our time [in the U.S.] will come."
Bronstein's answer was that Americans must help us to imagine that new state. Herzl was a visionary. He dreamed up something that did not exist 112 years ago and people said he was crazy. The new state "is not imagined. By artists, by writers, by architects, by movies." It can be imagined.
A few comments:
--The idea that the Nakba and Exodus are not separate narratives but must be integrated is revolutionary, liberating...
--Yes, I'm in an anti-Zionist mood today. But I'm not planting a flag, I'm listening and nodding my head. Richard, I consider myself post-Zionist but am still learning and often find myself opposed to Zionism. For those who are scared by this stuff, you should know that it wasn't a big crowd, and there were, I'd say, mostly Arabs and Arab-Americans in the audience.
--The anti-Zionist space in the U.S. is unquestionably widening. The charming Adam Horowitz of AFSC was there yesterday. I'd note that Tony Karon, Brian Klug and Joel Kovel (who has said "Is Zionism racism? Is the Pope Catholic?") gave a Zionism Reconsidered presentation in Chicago that the touring group observed; and Bronstein said that one of those K writers said that such a presentation couldn't happen in America a few years ago. True. It doesn't seem fringe any more. (Are you guys coming to New York? Lemme know.)
--Jaradat's description of Palestinian-Jewish heritage and having his secular coffee in the Old City was beautiful and confusing and reminded me of Saif Ammous telling Anita Shapira a year ago at Columbia that he also has Jewish heritage, but he can't live in the Jewish state.
--Doug Suisman is a Jewish-American urban designer who at the behest of Rand has imagined the Palestinian state, including the "flexible infrastructure corridor" joining Gaza and the West Bank, which he calls The Arc. His design is gorgeous and forwardlooking but I have always found it a little chilling. It's one thing to be for a two-state solution, as I am right now, and another to be dreaming up the beauty of a gerrymandered and fragmented geographical entity. I can't make my imagination go there-- to a kidney-shaped state with Gaza on the side, as Ammous says, or in the Arc's case, a trout fly with a hook swinging down. A two-state solution feels like a provisional way station for me. I feel that the segregationists in the south in the 60s might have called on such imaginations, too, and paid good money for them, and every Jew I know would have said No no no. The imaginative challenge Bronstein offered is a higher one. Imshallah...
--Zionist identity remains entwined with Holocaust consciousness. That old lady put it best. American Jewry maintains that first they will come for the Israelis, then for us.... And other words: hysteria, sickness...
I think we need a MAUS cartoon book, said Hegal from his grave.
I think imagining a single-state solution is like being 53, married, intentionally monogamous, and a "friend" brings a 20 year-old very sexy naked woman, eager to please, to your hotel room.
It takes effort to actually succeed at what is important to succeed at.
Yes, the revised MAUS cartoon book?
Speaking of being able to live together…Chuck Heston has gone to that big gun show in the sky.
Hospital Personnel Remove Gun From Heston's Cold Dead Hands
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/04/hospital-personel-remove-gun-from-mans.html
http://face2faceproject.com/
Trigger me this. All you peeps who never held a rifle while in the unform of a national military, do you see the same leaders as the rest of us do?
.
"The idea that the Nakba and Exodus are not separate narratives but must be integrated is revolutionary, liberating." – Phil
It seems obvious, now that you mention it. But it had never occurred to me. Fifty years ago, the civil rights issue was often marginalized as the "race problem" or "Negro problem." Now it is mainstream; everyone has a stake. But it wouldn't be if King, or others with courage, had failed.
A paragraph in the NYT story about Sderot triggered a memory:
"One attempt at a new approach involves a group in Sderot that has started holding discussions with Palestinians in Gaza via speakerphone. There is also a new blog, a discussion between a resident of Sderot and one of Gaza, both anonymous."
This is how racial integration of public schools was implemented in some Southern towns during the early 1960s — anonymously. One white and one black community leader — typically ministers — would start the process. Each was committed to recruiting one more person of his race, bringing the group to four members, two black and two white. Then it doubled two or three more times, typically to 32, by underground recruiting of more community leaders. They worked in strict secrecy, because of strong public opposition.
The group would then arrange the "foot in the door" — the introduction of a couple of exemplary black students into each grade of the white schools for the first year, to "break the ice" before full integration occurred. This gradualist approach sought to avoid fomenting a race riot by throwing two large groups together who had rarely met, and who harbored plenty of false conceptions about each other.
I witnessed it in sixth grade. A girl, Sylvia D., and a boy, A. Fransau, were to join our class. In the schoolyard the first morning, Ronnie F. was loudly proclaiming, "My momma told me I don't have to go to school with no niggers." But he quieted down in class when others didn't care to join his militancy.
The crux came a couple of weeks later in boys P.E. class. We had to transit hand-over-hand across a horizontal ladder. The black guy, Fransau, was more athletic than most of us. But suddenly, a popular, crew-cut redneck kid from outside of town, Dale S., started cheering, "Come on, Fransau!" as he was halfway across. We all joined in. You could hear the glass of the social barrier shattering. Ronnie F., outnumbered, never voiced another word of objection.
The names of the secret committee were never revealed. Some of them didn't even agree with integration, but wanted to avoid the violence which they regarded as a worse alternative. A push from the top — this was 11 years after Brown v. Topeka Board of Education — made it happen sooner than it would have as a bottom-up process, though a social tipping point was surely approaching in any case.
So, those trying to talk to each other across the Gaza-Sderot divide have the right idea; but the prevailing political ambience is stony soil. Most people of any ethnic group are pragmatists, not militants, who just want to live their lives. The notion that all Palestinians (or all Israelis) are murderers who will slit each other's throats in a unified state is a crippling misconception.
Enshrining the notion that "we can never live with THOSE people," the two-state solution is an uncourageous, segregationist fallback. Phil's words shine with both literal and metaphorical significence: "The Nakba and Exodus are not separate narratives but must be integrated."
I don't get your analogy, Richard. No snark or criticism intended there–I can't tell what you're trying to say.
As for the one state solution, it is the obviously fair and just way to solve the whole problem. Both sides accept each other and nobody has to leave, and Israel can be the refuge for persecuted Jews while Palestinians get to return to their native land.
Easy to say, but almost impossibly hard to do. There are so many people with attitudes that would have to change. I don't think it hurts to have people dream about it though–if enough people dream then maybe someday it'll be possible.
Re: "The Nakba and Exodus are not separate narratives but must be integrated."–Jim Haygood
Damn, Amen.
"I think imagining a single-state solution is like being 53, married, intentionally monogamous, and a "friend" brings a 20 year-old very sexy naked woman, eager to please, to your hotel room."
So Phil is selling out his wife for a quick, naughty piece of one-state ass?
The one-state solution: a moment of pleasure, a lifetime of regrets.
So to Phil this is some ball game, and to minder Witty, it's a contraceptive commercial.
Underlying this must be layers of angst about the Palestinian "demographic problem." Please, don't pro-create any more opposition to zionism. Use a condom when you post about Israel/Palestine.
Meanwhile settlements keep poppin' out left and right, and their mama stays permanently on American welfare. Can we put a condom on zionism for a while? Is the "new lobby" in favor of that?
Nice Falsetinian ProPALganda!!! Good blow job.
Nakba – the main cause of the Nakba was to wash the Jews from Palestine into the sea. The Arabs failed with their Nakba, The Jews won the war, Arabs fled to their leaders call, doing the Nakba for themselves. So what is really your problem?
Swish!
Hi Phil,
Glad you made it to Alwan and wrote about the event. As an organizer of the event, however, who knew a number of the attendees, I have to disagree with your assessment that a majority were Arab-Americans. There weren't very many Arab-Americans. The majority at Alwan were probably Jews.
Last night we held a second event with the same speakers in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the heart of the Palestinian-Americam community. That event was attended by about 80 people. At the Bay Ridge event, the majority were Arab-American, though the truth is, not by much.
Pat
"… Arabs fled to their leaders call, doing the Nakba for themselves. So what is really your problem?"
The problem is that the views of people as obviously misinformed as you are constitute 'public opinion' in the US.
From Le Monde:
"Military operations marked by atrocities
In "1948 and After" Benny Morris examines the first phase of the exodus and produces a detailed analysis of a source that he considers basically reliable: a report prepared by the intelligence services of the Israeli army, dated 30 June 1948 and entitled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948". This document sets at 391,000 the number of Palestinians who had already left the territory that was by then in the hands of Israel, and evaluates the various factors that had prompted their decisions to leave. "At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations." To this figure, the report's compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%… of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to "fears" and "a crisis of confidence" affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases…
In short, as Morris puts it, this report "undermines the traditional official Israeli 'explanation' of a mass flight ordered or 'invited' by the Arab leadership". Neither, as he points out, "does [the report] uphold the traditional Arab explanation of the exodus – that the Jews, by premeditation and in a centralized fashion, had systematically waged a campaign aimed at the wholesale expulsion of the native Palestinian population." However, he says that "the circumstances of the second half of the exodus" – which he estimates as having involved between 300,000 and 400,000 people – "are a different story."
One example of this second phase was the expulsion of Arabs living in Lydda (present-day Lod) and Ramleh. On 12 July 1948, within the framework of Operation Dani, a skirmish with Jordanian armored forces served as a pretext for a violent backlash, with 250 killed, some of whom were unarmed prisoners. This was followed by a forced evacuation characterized by summary executions and looting and involving upwards of 70,000 Palestinian civilians – almost 10% of the total exodus of 1947- 49. Similar scenarios were enacted, as Morris shows, in central Galilee, Upper Galilee and the northern Negev, as well as in the post-war expulsion of the Palestinians of Al Majdal (Ashkelon). Most of these operations (with the exception of the latter) were marked by atrocities – a fact which led Aharon Zisling, the minister of agriculture, to tell the Israeli cabinet on 17 November 1948: "I couldn't sleep all night. I felt that things that were going on were hurting my soul, the soul of my family and all of us here (…) Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken (10)."
The Israeli government of the time pursued a policy of non- compromise, in order to prevent the return of the refugees "at any price" (as Ben Gurion himself put it), despite the fact that the UN General Assembly had been calling for this since 11 December 1948. Their villages were either destroyed or occupied by Jewish immigrants, and their lands were shared out between the surrounding kibbutzim. The law on "abandoned properties" – which was designed to make possible the seizure of any land belonging to persons who were "absent" – "legalized" this project of general confiscation as of December 1948. Almost 400 Arab villages were thus either wiped off the map or Judaised, as were most of the Arab quarters in mixed towns. According to a report drawn up in 1952, Israel had thus succeeded in expropriating 73,000 rooms in abandoned houses, 7,800 shops, workshops and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and – most important of all – 300,000 hectares of land (11).
In "1948 and After" (chapter 4), Benny Morris deals at greater length with the role played by Yosef Weitz, who was at the time director of the Jewish National Fund's Lands Department. This man of noted Zionist convictions confided to his diary on 20 December 1940: "It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both people (…) the only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. (…) There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries(…) Not one village must be left, not one (bedouin) tribe."
Seven years later, Weitz found himself in a position to put this radical programme into effect. Already, in January 1948, he was orchestrating the expulsion of Palestinians from various parts of the country. In April he proposed – and obtained – the creation of "a body which would direct the Yishuv's war with the aim of evicting as many Arabs as possible". This body was unofficial at first, but was formalized at the end of August 1948 into the "Transfer Committee" which supervised the destruction of abandoned Arab villages and/or their repopulation with recent Jewish immigrants, in order to make any return of the refugees impossible. Its role was extended, in July, to take in the creation of Jewish settlements in the border areas.
Israel's battle to bar the return of Palestinian exiles was also pursued on the diplomatic front. Here, as Henry Laurens noted in a review of the revisionist historians (12), "the opening- up, and the use, of the archives made it possible to revise a number of previously-held positions. Contrary to the widely held view, the Arab leaders were prepared for compromise." As soon as the war ended, the Arab leadership was trying, within the context of the Lausanne Conference, to arrive at a general settlement based on Arab acceptance of the UN partition plan (Ilan Pappe gives a detailed account of their efforts (13)), in exchange for Israeli acceptance of a right of return for the refugees. Despite international pressure – with the United States to the fore – this enterprise was to founder on the intransigence of the Israeli authorities, particularly once the Jewish state had been admitted to the United Nations.
Despite this extraordinary accumulation of evidence, Benny Morris concludes in his first book that "the Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab." ("The Birth…", p. 286) His second book offers a more considered approach, in which he recognizes that the Palestinian exodus was "a cumulative process, there were interlocking causes, and there was a main precipitator, a coup de grace, in the form of Haganah, Irgun and IDF assault in each locality". ("1948…", p. 32). This shift of position does not, however, prevent him from continuing to resist any notion of a Jewish expulsion plan, and to exonerate David Ben Gurion, president of the Jewish Agency and subsequently prime minister and defense minister of the newly-created Israeli state.
As Norman G. Finkelstein has highlighted, in a textual study that is as brilliant as it is polemical (14), this twin denial by Benny Morris seems at first sight to contradict what Morris says himself. After all, he himself tells us that "the essence of the [Dalet] plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the prospective territory of the Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population and securing the Jewish State's future borders before, and in anticipation of, the Arab invasion." ("The Birth…", p. 62) And he also recognizes that Plan D, while it did not give carte blanche for an expulsion of civilians, was nevertheless "a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders" for whom it provided "post facto a formal persuasive covering note to explain their actions" (p. 63). Benny Morris contrives to make two seemingly contradictory statements within two pages of each other, namely that "Plan D was not a political blueprint for the expulsion of Palestine's Arabs" and that "from the beginning of April, there are clear traces of an expulsion policy on both national and local levels". ("The Birth…", pp. 62 and 64)
The same is true as regards the responsibility or otherwise of David Ben Gurion. Morris makes clear that the prime minister was the originator of the Dalet Plan. In July 1948 we find Ben Gurion again, giving the order for the operations in Lydda and Ramleh: "Expel them!" he told Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin – a section censored out of Rabin's memoirs, but published thirty years later in the "New York Times" (15). This order, Morris tells us, had not been debated within the Israeli government. In fact, some days previously the Mapam, partner of the ruling Mapai, had obtained from the prime minister an instruction explicitly forbidding the military to carry out expulsion measures… Ben Gurion later attacked the hypocrisy of this Marxist Zionist party for condemning "activities" in which its own militants, Palmah troops and kibbutzniks alike, had also taken part.
In Nazareth, General Chaim Laskov decided to take the official instruction literally. One story has Ben Gurion arriving there, discovering the local population still in situ, and declaring angrily "What are they doing here?" (16) Also in July, but this time in Haifa, we have Ben Gurion as the man behind the scenes in the operation for the "de-localisation" of the 3,500 Arabs still remaining in the town, followed by the partial destruction of the former Arab quarter.
In short, as Morris himself points out, power at that period of Israel's history resided with Ben Gurion and with him alone. All issues, whether military or civilian, were decided with him, often without the slightest consultation with the government, let alone with the parties that comprised it. In such a situation, the absence from the archives of any formal parliamentary or governmental decision to expel the Palestinians proves nothing. As Morris himself admits, "Ben Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders; he preferred that his generals 'understand' what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the 'great expeller'" ("The Birth…", pp. 292-3).
The fact that the founder of the State of Israel took advantage of the impressive extent of his powers and worked towards the maximum enlargement of the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the United Nations, and towards reducing its Arab population to a minimum, is a matter of historical fact. Morris devoted an important article (17) to Ben Gurion's long-term support for the transfer project. As he writes in his preface to "1948 and After…", "Already from 1937 we find Ben Gurion (and most of the other Zionist leaders) supporting a 'transfer' solution to the 'Arab problem' (…) Come 1948, and the confusions and displacement of war, and we see Ben Gurion quickly grasp the opportunity for 'Judaising' the emergent Jewish State" ("1948 and After…, p. 33).
Prior to this, he tells us that "the tendency of military commanders to 'nudge' Palestinians' flight increased as the war went on. Jewish atrocities – far more widespread than the old histories have let on (there were massacres of Arabs at Ad Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Safsaf, Majd al Kurum, Hule (in Lebanon), Saliha and Sasa, besides Deir Yassin and Lydda and other places) – also contributed significantly to the exodus" ("1948…", p. 22). "
See for more:
http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:GIv8i90ZoQoJ:www.nakbaonline.org/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story674.html+nakba+expulsion+ben-gurion+segev&hl=tl&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=ph
I think Morris is right.
The intention of Plan Dalet was national contiguity, NOT ethnic cleansing.
Not an Arab-free state, but a governable Jewish state.
Just try Richard to translate into this sort of euphemisms the plans discussed at the Wannsee-conference.
?
What was the intention?
To create a viable Jewish state.
The intention was NOT the malevolent statement of "ethnic cleansing".
If ethnic cleansing was proposed, it was in limited scope and time, for the purpose of firming the viability of the Jewish state.
That was 1948, not 2008. To equate needs, conditions, relationships now with then, IS revisionism.
An early 'revisionist':
"Most of these operations (with the exception of the latter) were marked by atrocities – a fact which led Aharon Zisling, the minister of agriculture, to tell the Israeli cabinet on 17 November 1948: "I couldn't sleep all night. I felt that things that were going on were hurting my soul, the soul of my family and all of us here (…) Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken (10)"
Have you already found out what the Wannsee-conference was about Richard?
Memory refresher:
The Wannsee Conference plan was to exile all Jews in the present and future areas under German rule to Eastern Europe, where they were to be exposed to extraordinarily harsh living conditions (and fatally exhausted or murdered.)
What's the point?
See Israeli Prof. Ilan Pappe's book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."
You can't state your own point?
I was theere! Eitan is much more charming then Adam. No offence…
My point is 2 wrongs don't make a right. Even if you hate assimilation, assimilate that.
"You can't state your own point?"
You state your own points continuously, Richard – the trouble is most often only you can grasp them (if you do).
Pity that you ignored my invitation to translate the plans discussed at Wannsee into the reprehensible Wittyspeak you employed for the crimes of 1948.
I don't understand your point. Can you state it more overtly so that I may?