The cause of the Palestinian people is the cause of the catastrophe which befell them, the Nakba, the Zionist invasion in 1948. In the public consciousness, the Nakba is also strongly correlated with the shame which befell the Arab nation as a whole due to the victory of the Zionist forces over the Arab armies, which sought to protect the Arab identity of Palestine and her citizens. This is how the Nakba went down in history, and this is how it took shape in the public imagination of the Palestinians, other Arab peoples, and those who have a deep sympathy for the Palestinian cause.
For years to follow, the Nakba became a staple of the school curricula in Arab countries, forming a plank of political thought among many of the political movements and parties which took shape there. Among the Palestinians, their own cause became a program of action and a driving force for political, educational, and cultural activities across many political boundaries. It was in such an environment of nationalist sentiment, that generations of Palestinian and other Arab [youth] had the ability to learn more widely about the Nakba, the Palestinian cause, and the risks posed by the Zionist project. All of this led to a heightened sense of patriotism, which fed into practical programs that would service of the Palestinian cause, culminating in armed struggle. The Palestinian cause was and still is the focus of national, political, and military activism within resistance organizations. Although many of these political groupings have abandoned the armed struggle, the Nakba continues to shape their outlook and remains the cornerstone of their activities.
With the rise of a defeatist attitude amongst the Arabs in the 1990s, and the fabrication of the myth of peace with the Zionist invaders, the Nakba, as an idea, began to lose ground compared to the centrality it had enjoyed before. In fact, some mainstream Palestinian factions began to treat it with disregard, as if the idea of the Nakba were only a tactical political tool in the service of another aim, namely that of a Palestinian state or national authority. As a result of this change in direction, a growing number of today's Arab youth know next to nothing about the Nakba, and have scant regard for the Palestinian cause. Unlike previous generations, today's acts of Israeli aggression evoke little by way of reaction amongst them.
One of the most severe challenges the Palestinian cause faces, and which any cause faces for that matter, is the risk of its disappearance from the public's awareness or consciousness. A great service to the cause would be to keep it alive in the hearts and minds of the people, to allow the people the right to believe and hope in an opportunity of the cause's triumph, and the restitution of their rights. The last few years have seen very drastic changes affecting the entirety of the Arab nation, striking its core and its very essence. There are efforts afoot which seek to push aside the Palestinian cause, and to declare a final defeat in the face of Zionism. These efforts are evidenced in two distinct trends, one Arab and the other Zionist, with an unprecedented level of agreement amongst them, greatly increasing the possible risk of losing the Palestinian cause.
The first of these trends is represented by serious efforts on the part of Israel and Western countries to present the State of Israel as a natural, authentic entity with rights over Palestinian territory. In line with these claims, Palestine, alone among all the countries of the world, was chosen by God for the Jewish people alone, without regard for the other peoples of the world: Palestine is thus a Jewish country by virtue of Divine Will, and no longer a racist settler-colonialist enterprise founded on the rape and killing of another people. The second trend is evidenced in that various Arab and Palestinian leaders have accepted of these claims, which is implicit in their recognition of Israel, a state based on the Zionists rape of the land in 1948. The acquiescence of some Palestinians in these efforts has gone so far as the distortion of history, insofar as it is a record of the fate of the Palestinian people through time. They have acquiesced with the fabrication of historical fictions, letting pass all that is related to Palestine as an entity and as a sense of being, including the name of Palestine, with all its related significance, symbolism, and meaning.
The fact that the Zionist project has been so successful necessitates the creation of a counter-argument to present to the world, to tell the truth of what happened in history. Such a counter-argument would be relayed creatively, based on verifiable facts and addressing people's sense of reason while presenting the facts surrounding the true story of criminal Zionist movements and their successor, Israel. Such a counter-argument would also deal with the excuses, myths, and ulterior motives peddled by the Zionists in their effort to form a false sense of historical sensibility for the Jewish state, of understanding why Palestine was chosen for this end. This story will cover the following themes:
1) Portraying the invading Zionist gangs in their true light, barbarian invaders who came from all corners of Europe with the help of Western colonialism, carrying the aim of capturing Palestine and removing its native Arab population. This means revealing the lies and deceptions of the Zionists, and the immoral means they used to achieve their goals.
2) Focusing attention on programs of racist propaganda and indoctrination which the Zionist movement practiced in order to prepare its cadres to carry out the plan of conquering Palestine.
3) Revealing the extent of the actions Zionist forces carried out in 1948, against the indigenous people of the country; uncovering the massacres and ethnic cleansing which took place in the towns and villages of Palestine. It will also draw attention to the actions of property appropriation, and the killing of the people in a way which revealed deep-seated hatred on the part of the Zionist movement.
4) Portraying the humanitarian disaster which befell the peaceful residents as a result of terrorist activities, and showing how these people saw their loved ones being raped and killed before their own eyes, while their property was looted.
5) We should also tell the story of what resulted from the dispossession of the Palestinians, of how they went from being normal people living in their own country to being refugees. Our story should show the extent of the Palestinians' commitment to their homeland, and their determination to regain their rights.
6) This campaign should also undertake to expose the Israeli campaign of twisting historical truths, of changing the public imagination through erasing all that is Palestinian, and changing the names [of towns and villages] and inventing another history with a parallel narrative.
The story which we will tell does not have to be born of a vacuum; the facts and reality of the matter have been recorded in books and documents chronicling the events of what happened and analyzing them. Other sources are the stories and tales of the human suffering which came out of the Nakba. Some of these sources already form a rich resource for research amongst a certain strata of writers, while the human stories have been taken up by the literati. This does not, however, remove the need for a re-telling of the story.
The invitation to work which is being presented here calls for a synthesis of a materialist approach to history that simply presents a fact with a narrative approach to telling a story, free of the kind of unnecessary ornamentation of much literature. The aim would be to portray the Zionist invaders in a similar manner to which many other invaders, like the Mongols and medieval European invaders, have been shown: as bloodthirsty barbarians whose aims were eventually defeated and whose states were finally overturned.
Examples of the type of effort which we need to see more of are to be found in works of history and literature which were produced in recent years and hone in on the events of 1948. The first of these is the work of Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine[1] and the second is Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury's The Gate of the Sun.[2] Pappe's materialist approach meticulously documents the crimes that took place in order for the State of Israel to be created. His book poses questions about the orders for forced expulsions and massacres carried out by the Zionist gangs. Khoury's novel, on the other hand, deals with the human suffering which comes out of the stories of the villagers who were forced out of the houses they built of their own toil, and the fields they tended to with their own hands, going on to tell the story of their later lives in the squalor of the refugee camps. The two books have a lot in common and some kind of common ground can be found between them, breathing life into historical details whilst at the same time maintaining the historical fidelity of narrated stories, relating stories and biographies, conserving records of names and places.
Should this project be realized, it would see the light of day in the form of a small series of inexpensive, widely available paperback books, works which could be accessible to young and old, specialist and non-specialist alike. It would be something like an encyclopedia of historical narratives on the Nakba of 1948, covering, as a matter of course, the precursors to this Nakba and its immediate impacts. It is hoped that this effort would form part of a bulwark of media and cultural efforts against which Zionist claims will crumble, together with the fantasies of "peace," and in actuality defeatism, harbored by some Arabs. It could be an archived source of information, a fount of knowledge and learning for future generations of Palestinians and other Arabs. Of course, this would call for a level of initiative, dedication, organization, and funding.
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- [1] Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld Publishing, 2007).
- [2] Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (London: Vintage Publishing, 2006).
