There aren’t two narratives of Exodus and the Nakba, there’s one (that’s what Zochrot says). Our task in the Obama age is to bring them together. Last night in Brooklyn we watched a video of the late Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout, whose family of 9 was forced out Lydda (near Tel Aviv) in July 1948.
Shammout said the following: Israeli soldiers banged on the door. “Out, out!” All the people gathered in the town square. They thought it would be like the British during the Arab revolt in 36-39, when they gathered the Arabs and searched their homes. “We were surrounded by Zionist fighters… They ordered us to leave by the road… I saw shops that had been broken into and looted. The windows were broken and everything was a mess. We also saw bodies along the roadside.” His parents were scared and parched. It was a hot day. They passed an orchard Ismail knew. The Israeli soldiers stood along the road at 10 meter intervals. He slipped away and got a bucket he knew was by a stream, but when he brought the water to the procession, “a lieutenant got out and put a revolver to my head, ‘You pour the water on the ground.'” The boy was terrified. “What choice did I have?”
He watched the water trickle into the dust and was grateful to the lieutenant for not shooting him.
Why? In 1979 the NY Times ran David Shipler’s piece (for which I can’t find a link) on the censorship by the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin’s memoir of the ’48 war, specifically of passages describing the Israeli army’s expulsion of 50,000 Palestinians who lived in Lydda and Ramle, now called Lod, the area of the Tel Aviv airport, and an area of strategic importance to Israel as it took on the Arab states that opposed the creation of an Israeli state. “What is to be done with the native population?” Ben Gurion was asked during a strategy session. “B.G. waved his hand in a gesture which said, ‘Drive them out!’ …’Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring. Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly…”
The purpose of the expulsion was not simply strategic, to control the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road during the ’48 Israeli-Arab war; Shammout and his family were not allowed to return.
These events have now caused destruction in the great house of the American Jewish tradition of intellectual leadership and civil rights, to the Jewish tradition of factgathering and analysis that elevated the sciences and journalism in my country. To view this destruction, just read Commentary Magazine’s monument to Nakba denial, lavishly funded by the chairman of the New-York Historical Society, which asserts there was no Nakba, that the Arabs drove Arabs out of Palestine. Lydda is mentioned once in the piece, as an example (during the Arab rebellion) of Arab on Arab violence. 100 years from now that magazine will be in an exhibit at the Nakba Memorial in Washington, and young Jews will ask themselves, Why did people ignore these witnesses to atrocities?
[Later: I apologize to readers for failing to provide a link on the Shipler piece. Here it is. Though you have to buy it. I have a pdf of it but am too backward to know how to upload it.]
