Remembering the Palestinian NAKBA
Nasser Barghouti and Bassemah Darwish
Nearly 30 years since she had seen her Northern Galilee home in what
she called ‘48 Palestine’, Rasmiya Barghouti was finally given a permit
by the Israeli military authorities to visit. She decided to take two of
her daughters and four of her grandchildren with her.
It took less than three hours to reach Safad, renamed Tsvat by Israel
after 1948. The van stopped in front of the white stone home that held
her childhood memories. She proceeded to the familiar metal door, where
she knocked. A large eastern European woman opened the door; the two
argued.
Rasmiya returned to the van, her hardened face wet with tears. Her
only words were: “She wouldn’t let me in. She still has the same
curtains I made with my mother.”
They proceeded in silence, as she wept discretely, to lunch at a
hotel on Lake Tiberias where her youngest grandchild grew hyper. Instead
of imposing her usual military-style discipline on the child, she
encouraged him to splatter water and make even ‘more noise’ - a shock to
the rest of the family.
The Israeli waiter hurriedly came to the table demanding, in Hebrew,
they stop the raucous behaviour. It was then that her defiance exploded
into cursing the waiter in Arabic. “We can do whatever we please. This
is my father’s hotel”, she yelled. Until that moment, her children and
grandchildren had been sheltered from knowing anything about her dear
loss.
Ethnic cleansing
The rage of this Palestinian woman was born out of seeing her
childhood home, from which she was forced to leave in 1948, now occupied
by a stranger who would not even allow her in. She’d seen her father’s
hotel, which he was never allowed to vacate, taken over by strangers.
For the first time since her violent dispossession in 1948, she was
allowed to visit her homeland, but not to return.
Because millions of other Palestinian refugees are denied even such a
visit, Rasmiya was considered ‘lucky’. While Israel celebrates 60 years
since its establishment, Palestinians everywhere commemorate the ‘Nakba’(catastrophe
in Arabic) that befell them after armed Jewish militia raided their
homes and expelled them.
The exclusionary Zionist vision of creating a Jewish state in
Palestine meant the elimination of the indigenous, ‘non-Jewish’
population.
In his book, the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian
Ilan Pappe writes: “on March 10, 1948 veteran Zionist leaders together
with young Jewish military officers, put the final touches to a plan for
the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”.
Pappe explains how Jewish militias, the future Armed Forces of the
state of Israel, carried out a plan of large-scale intimidation and
siege, setting fires to Palestinian homes, planting mines, destroying
more than 500 villages and exercising other terrorist activities.
In the end, nearly 800,000 Palestinians were forced out of their
homes and into refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt and elsewhere.
Rasmiya’s family was among this wave of refugees. This massive ethnic
cleansing completed the first phase of the compulsory ‘transfer’ that
the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, advocated in his address to the
Jewish Agency Executive as early as 1938. Thus the Palestinians had
become the victims of the victims of Europe.
Nakba denialists
Ten years ago, the late Edward Said commented on the ‘Israel at 50’
celebrations: “I still find myself astonished at the lengths to which
official Israel and its supporters will go to suppress the fact that a
half century has gone by without Israeli restitution, recognition or
acknowledgment of Palestinian human rights. The Palestinian Nakba is
characterised as a semi-fictional event caused by no one in particular.”
The same stubborn refusal to recognise the Palestinian Nakba
characterises the ‘Israel at 60’ celebrations today.
For Palestinians, denial of the Nakba is tantamount to denying the
Holocaust for Jews.
Remembering the Nakba is even more compelling given what former US
president Jimmy Carter describes as an apartheid-like system that Israel
has built to entangle the Palestinians in a seemingly endless cycle of
hopelessness and violence.
Israel still denies millions of Palestinian refugees their
UN-sanctioned right to go back to their homes simply because they are
not Jewish.
Israel continues its 41-year-old military occupation of the West
Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Israel continues to impose
its savage blockade on the Gaza Strip.
Israel continues to build its illegal wall and settlements on
occupied Palestinian land. And Israel continues to treat its own
‘non-Jewish’ population as second-class citizens.
Can any conscientious person, then, celebrate Israel at 60? When
Israel has made reparations for its shameful past; when it has conformed
to international law and universal human rights; when it has ended its
brutal oppression of the indigenous people of Palestine; and when it has
allowed Palestinians to practice their right to self-determination on
their own land, we can all celebrate. Then, even Rasmiya’s descendants
may celebrate.
- Third World Network Features
(The writer is a Palestinian-American and President of the San Diego
Chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Rasmiya
Barghouti was his grandmother).
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