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Abstract
In this essay we trace the return of history as a process that has become integrated into the transformation of Palestinian political consciousness. We examine how Palestinian history, particularly the history of the dismantlement of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the majority of Palestinians from their homeland – known in Palestinian historiography as the Nakba – has gradually started to occupy the centre of the present political and cultural experience and discourse of the Palestinians in Israel. We examine why the Nakba, the defining experience in modern Palestinian history and politics, was, until the mid-1990s, silenced in the “official political sphere” of the Palestinians in Israel. We will also try to explain when and why history returned to take an active and conscious place central in Palestinian political discourse, and more recently, political behaviour and cultural activities. We argue there has been a discernible process of transformation from a silenced collective memory around the Nakba to its gradual return as a salient force in the modern political consciousness of this community. We trace this transformation and examine the various manifestations of this return, which, we argue, reflects a dramatic makeover of their present collective consciousness. We then briefly address the political implications of this transformation.
Notes
1 The term “return of history” as we use it here reflects the powerful impact of history on the current political experience of Palestinians as we observed it in the field; it is totally different to the meanings the term acquired in other contexts, such as its use in opposition to the concept of “end of history” as in Kagan (Citation2008) and Welsh (Citation2016).
2 Palestinians in Israel have no local or national archives. Even on the larger Palestinian scale, there are no official national archives yet. In general, Palestinian archives were confiscated during and after the 1948 war by Jewish forces. Many of the Palestinians’ cultural sources – books, family memoirs, and documents and other archival materials – reside in Israeli archives and libraries (Amit Citation2014; Banko Citation2012).
3 For a discussion of the unique characteristics of this settler-colonial case, see Rouhana (Citation2014). For example, as a settler-colonial state without a motherland, and as a national movement at the same time, Zionism can show mitigated colonial effects vis-à-vis the Palestinian citizens in Israel, such as when Israel’s claim to being a democratic nation-state allows for a margin of democracy for the colonized. At the same time, the colonial effects are intensified, such as when the Palestinians in Israel are denied the right to the very relationship with their homeland (which mainstream Zionism considers as the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people).
4 See, for example, the special issue of Settler Colonial Studies dedicated to Palestine in 2012, entitled “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine.”
5 We use the Arabic term tahjeer, which means the process of the Palestinian expulsion from Palestine in the circumstances of war. In our view, the importance of the debate over whether the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed or left under the duress of war, or whether the ethnic cleansing was pre-planned or evolved in the context of war, is overblown and has been used to overshadow more fundamental questions regarding the take-over of a homeland and the right of the refugees to return to their homeland. Indeed, the Arabic term often used in the popular culture is hajeej, which literally means collective, unorganized departure, and which dramatically encompasses the “voluntary” and involuntary departures of masses of people under the pressure to survive.
6 For a detailed description of how and why few Palestinians remained in Lydda after its population was expelled by the Jewish forces in 1948, see Munayer (Citation1998).
7 While Palestinians were completely expelled from some Palestinian cities such as Safad, Tiberias, and Bisan, some managed to stay in other cities such as Jaffa, Haifa, and Akka, which became known as mixed cities (Sabbagh-Khoury Citation2015).
8 For how elaborate, systematic, and carefully planned this process was, see Benvenisti (Citation2000).
9 For efforts to erase Palestinian names and traces of destroyed Palestinian villages, see also Benvenisti (Citation2000).
10 It was the emergence of a group of poets from the Palestinians in Israel who acquired the title “poets of resistance” within the Palestinian political and cultural spheres (Kanafani Citation1968). The poets included Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad, Salem Jubran, and Samih Al Qassem.
11 Salman Natour (novelist), interview by Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury, July 5 2012, Haifa, Israel. Transcript available from authors.
12 To this day, Palestinians in Israel are not represented in any Palestinian bodies such as the Palestine National Council, nor are they considered a constituency of the PLO.
13 Despite the state system of criminalizing and securitizing return, many Palestinians assisted returnees to stay after they managed to cross back.
14 In particular, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, the oldest and, at the time, the largest organized Arab-dominated party in Israel, emphasized the importance of baqa’a. This serves as an indication that the concern for survival has remained with the Palestinians in Israel since the start of the Nakba.
15 For how these experiences were reflected in Palestinian literature at the time, see Furani (Citation2012); Makhoul (Citation2012).
16 Jaffa alone was the home of three large newspapers in 1932. The total number of newspapers in Jaffa reached fourteen by 1939. Thirty-eight newspapers were published between 1929 and 1939. See Bracy (Citation2010); Kabha (Citation2004, 328–331).
17 Thus, these institutions cannot be seen as a natural development of pre-1948 institutions and civil organizations.
18 It would be inaccurate to claim Arab celebrations of Israel’s Independence Day were all coerced. While this might have been true during the years of military rule, one cannot make such a claim when Arabs raised Israeli flags as late as the mid-1990s in the heart of the Arab community in Israel – in Nazareth. The process that some Israeli sociologists referred to as the Israelization of the Arabs in Israel included what they considered to be the acceptance of the state and its identity (Smooha Citation1997; for a critique, see Rouhana Citation1997).
19 For decolonization in the Israeli–Palestinian context, see Rouhana (Citation2018).
20 We chose the months of March to May to capture coverage of the two main commemorational dates for Palestinian citizens: Land Day on March 30 and Nakba Day, which falls in May. The range of years we selected extends from before the Madrid talks of 1991 until the year the survey was conducted. The 1993 Oslo Accords defined the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees as one of its five final issues. But Palestinians in Israel and the IDPs were left as an internal Israeli issue not to be addressed in Israeli–Palestinian negotiations. This prompted IDPs to organize in 1995 to demand the return to their original towns and villages, and to initiate the annual march of return a few years later. For several years it was Land Day, commemorated annually since 1976, often by national strikes, which galvanized the collective popular action of Palestinian citizens (Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury Citation2014). Our survey shows the Return March, which started in 1998, to be one of the most important collective actions initiated by Palestinians in Israel since the start of the Nakba. The number of articles that discussed the Nakba increased by more than four times from 1990 to 2013. In addition, the number of participants in the Return March gradually increased (peaking in 2017 with an estimate of tens of thousands).
21 Although this change in political discourse has not, by and large, employed anticolonial grammar, its text or substance is founded in anticolonial consciousness. Anticolonial grammar is increasingly used, in parallel with the return of the settler-colonial framing of the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinian National Movement (Rouhana Citation2014).
22 This observation is consistent with Wolfe’s (Citation2006) assertion that settler colonialism is a structure and not merely an event.
23 Many writers now say “since the start of the Nakba” to emphasize process rather than “since the Nakba” which refers to it as an event (Khoury Citation2012).
24 See Hoffman’s (Citation2010) work on the poet Taha Muhhamad Ali and Antoon’s work on and translation of the poet Mahmoud Darwish (Citation2011).