Independence or Catastrophe

By Stephen Gasteyer

Initially Published on Word Press: May 16 2016

https://gasteyer.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/independence-or-catastrophe/

There is no point in the year when the narrative of what has happened to this land since World War I is more starkly different depending on in which community one lives.  For pro-Zionist Israelis, early May marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, followed a week later by memorial day. Both are marked by sirens and a national moment of silence.  May 15 marks Israeli Independence Day.  It is celebrated as a day when Jews, the world over, were given a place of refuge from virulent antisemitism, the most horrifying example of which was the Nazi Holocaust.

The post-state Zionist narrative for years was that Israel threw off the yoke of British colonial rule, just like the United States, and therefore should have solidarity with the colonized people of the world, who had similarly emerged from colonial rule.  But like the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the post-colonial reality was the settlement by outsiders and displacement of those on the land prior to the establishment of the state.

More than 700,000 Palestinians were driven into exile in the war that established the State of Israel.  In this sense, Israeli colonial settlement is not that different than other colonial settlement projects.  But, as George Washington University historian Shira Robinson has noted, the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, facilitated by the British, League of Nations, and eventually the United Nations, had to balance from the beginning the goals of Jewish hegemony with the principles of universal suffrage and democracy enshrined in the corporate documents of those sponsoring organizations, and ultimately the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

In short, as colonial settlement scholars such as the late Patrick Wolfe have argued, Israel needed to justify colonial settlement in a way that other settler colonial entities did not.  (For more on this, see the 2012 special issue of the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1.)  Ultimately, Israel’s legal and administrative procedures, and the physical settlement activities, have followed remarkably similar patterns to the legal systems of other settler colonial regimes designed to remove the indigenous people and replace them with new settlers.  But this was done using a more sophisticated rhetorical campaign than in other cases.

When I first came to this land as a student trying to understand the conflict in the mid-1980s, the Israeli narrative of what happened in 1947-1949 was still laden with the now debunked narrative that Palestinian Arabs were misguided by their leaders into leaving despite pleas by early Israeli leaders to stay.  In fact, the historical record is now clear that Palestinians were driven from their land and their homes as refugees from violence — responding to more than 70 massacres, and often after weeks of siege that cut off Palestinians from access to food and water, as the refugees of Arroub Camp recounted as they described to me in the 1990s how they were driven from Beit Jibrin. (For a quick synopsis of the real attacks on Palestinians in 1948, see Morris’ Guardian piece from 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/14/israel.)

Robinson’s research documents the harsh conditions of military occupation and a legal system designed to favor Jews, at the expense of Arabs, that Palestinians who remained in Israel endured from 1948-1967. The system of permits and containment was designed to wrest land and resources from those Palestinians that remained, and to ensure Jewish control of land, economic participation, and political hegemony in the new state.  Palestinians who attempted to return to the land were often arrested, deported, or killed. Something between 370 and 600 Palestinian villages were cleared of Palestinian residents from 1947 to the mid-1950s.  Many were resettled as Jewish communities.  Others, such as the community of Baram (see photo below), have remained as Israeli parks.

The memory of being forced off the land has only somewhat faded over time, as those who experienced the Nakba directly have died.  But the powerful symbol of the key to the house that was abandoned in 1948 remains and calls for the “right to return” remain embedded in Palestinian society.  (See, for instance, http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=771523.)  Indeed, if anything, Palestinian and associated intellectuals have documented the experiences of life prior to and during Nakba in much more detail than when I first came in the mid-1980s.  No longer can anyone with any credibility say to a group of foreign students (as was said to my group in 1985), that there weren’t really indigenous Palestinians prior to 1948.  (Though I must acknowledge that, credible or not, right wing Zionist outlets like EretzIsrael.org still make this claim.  Indeed, I know from Facebook debates with former high school classmates that this still resonates with some.)

At the same time, the process of expulsion, containment, and settlement on the basis of race (non-Arab) and religion (Jewishness) continues.  As a Ma’an news headline read: ‘The Nakba continues’:  http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=771518.  Land confiscation, establishment of new settlements, violent crackdowns and arrests in response peaceful protests, disproportionate use of force and attacks on civilians by settlers and the military alike, and debilitating restriction on movement even within the West Bank, not to mention access to Holy Sites and economic opportunities in Israel still happen on a daily basis. And while there are many who resist through reclaiming and cultivating land, food, culture, education, legal action, boycotts, and other forms of peaceful protest, there are other Palestinians who lash out, often supporting violent resistance to ongoing processes of settler colonialism.  The difference in understanding the consequences of the establishment of a Jewish state and the Nakba 68 years ago is at the heart of this cycle of violence.  And breaking this cycle of violence would take reversing the cycle of colonial settlement.