The Nakba Isn’t Just History, It’s About People Feeling Homeless

Nakba commemorations are coming to an end. This month has been a real eye-opener for me, raised my consciousness. I want to talk about Nakba here in strictly emotional terms.

One of the signal moments for me came when Nadia Hijab, a highly successful Palestinian-American, born in Syria to refugees, said in Brooklyn, “I feel I belong nowhere.” This member of the Council on Foreign Relations belongs nowhere! “When I go to Palestine, I feel I belong there.” The right of return, said this softspoken intellectual, was an individual right. Did you or did you not want to go home? And now in midlife, she finds that she wants to be  back in Palestine.

I’m thinking about her feelings in universal human terms. What makes us feel at home? Zionism was born of Jewish feelings of homelessness in Europe. It was given political muscle by all the Eastern European Jews displaced and living in the U.S., who did not feel at home here. My grandparents who came over at the turn of the century after the pogroms didn't trust gentile Americans, felt like outsiders. Then after World War II, more homelessness: with all the displaced persons in Europe, many of whom ended up in Palestine, but also in the sense in this country among American Jews that the U.S. had allowed the Holocaust to take place. That was a part of my Jewish identification as an outsider (And it is the central idea of a paper on the Myth of Abandonment by Michael Desch that I am about to revisit, it is so important). Those alienated and abandoned feelings are what generated the state of Israel, and in turn the Israel lobby—we aren’t at home here, aren’t safe. We must take measures. It is of course staggering that people as wealthy and privileged as American Jews can feel outside, but many obviously do.  

The Nakba is of course about Arab homelessness. The tragedy of the state of Israel is that it expelled so many Arabs who had a traditional way of life utterly tied to the land of Palestine and those feelings have gone so long unhealed and now 60 years on they darken Israel’s future. The cover of the Nakba issue of  The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs is a haunting image of a Palestinian shepherd, covered with wool. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that very soon after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Germans acknowledged war crimes and before too long reparations began. The refugees of Europe had of course lost families and homes, but emotionally they were given refuge: granted their sense of grievance. That recognition has never happened with the Nakba. For 60 years, the insult has outweighed the injury. Of course there is a growing movement to recognize the Nakba, but Israel and American Jewish leadership have only deployed its guns against it, and in all the endless political dickering over the Right of Return, whether it can be extinguished with money or not, the central fact, We took your homes from you and forced you out—that has never been acknowledged. (I remember how shocked I was years ago when the publisher of a paper I worked at, who had worked at AIPAC, told me with a guilty smile that Israel had taken their homes away. I had no idea.) What if Israel acknowledged that horror tomorrow? It would go a long way right there to some resolution.

One of the Nakba books I read this month was Resistance, Exile and Return, an oral history by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian scholar who died in 2001. Abu-Lughod was forced from Jaffa in 1948 when he was a schoolboy. He became a leading academic in the U.S. and often had public debates with Zionists; and when they pressed him to visit Israel to actually see the conditions he was criticizing he cried in anger that he would never do so on their terms, but on his own: liberation.

Of course liberation never happened, and then late in life, and after an illness, Abu-Lughod had an epiphany. He was at a dinner party and heard a story about a South African Indian doctor exiled in London. Now apartheid had fallen--and how excited and happy the doctor had been to go home. To see his boyhood place, his haunts! Abu Lughod was overwhelmed by that same desire, and by a panic in his heart that he might never see Jaffa again. And so, with his American passport, he subjected himself to the humiliations of Ben Gurion airport and being made to sit for hours, etc., so as to experience those Indian doctor's feelings, racing around Jaffa trying to find his boyhood streets. Or eating at a privileged Arab home in Haifa--he felt at home speaking his language on the sea he had grown up on, across the table from a boyhood teacher. It is a beautiful ending to the book. He has stopped talking liberation, not that he doesn’t want it, and is talking about just being back. The angry spirit that has convulsed the book subsides. I wish Israelis would read that book!

The lesson of the Indian doctor going home to South Africa—and not Gujarat-- is that our sense of home is not so much racial or historical as it is personal. Our identities are complex and fluid. That same calmness at being home can be seen in Barack Obama’s book, when he goes to Kenya for the first time in his 20s, after feeling an outsider in American society. It can be seen in Michele Obama’s defiant outsiderness, and then her statement that she finally feels proud to be an American. Alice Walker was on C-Span this last week; she said that many blacks don’t feel at home in the U.S. even as they thrive. I am saying that feelings of alienation can be codified as racial or historical, but in the end they are personal, and often addressable in personal terms.

Jews also speak of exile, of course. Michael Walzer spoke of it last year at Yivo, when he said that Jews don’t feel completely at home in the U.S. Journalist David Samuels describes it in this comment on my site, a religious and historical exegesis (that exposes my ignorance of such matters), in which he states Israel's creation has opened "deep questions that have been quietly vibrating for millennia." Like that the Romans killed 1 million Jews when they destroyed the second temple. He writes on Jewcy that 15-20 percent of Americans are “confirmed antisemites,” something I rarely think about. I'm more attuned to recent vibrations, good vibrations. I've always felt at home in the U.S., and Zionism has washed over me without leaving a mark. One of the biggest Zionists I knew was Eric Breindel, the son of German Holocaust survivors, and my parents’ best friends who made aliyah, one was also a German Holocaust survivor. Read Michael Blumenthal’s book to see how At home (and not) Jews felt in Germany. As Sephardic Jews felt at home in Spain once.

Our diverse U.S. democracy is something the world has never seen before. I don’t think the next generation of American Jews is going to feel in exile. In fact, the separate schools movement and the birthright tours seem aimed at cultivating a feeling of exile in Jews that they would not ordinarily feel, surrounded by privilege.

The next generation of Palestinians won't need indoctrination to feel exiled, hungry for home. Of course Nakba’s central policy point is the right of return.  (A shared Jerusalem is not the big question; Jerusalem must be shared, if not now, 200 years from now.) In a way this whole thing would end right now if Israel said, Come back, come back. This was your home. Be at home those who want to be! Make your lives here, help us build a powerful state together, a light unto the world. We need you Arabs! The powerful force that opposes that idea is religious and ethnic nationalism, and the American support for it. To end the Jewish state, in Paul Berman’s view, means genocide-- a Holocaust lesson. The purpose of this blog is in a sense to dream better, to counter Berman’s view of the world. What if American (and Jewish) power and riches were used to help Israel get past that idea of nationalism, and to welcome Nadia Hijab home?