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The Catastrophe Called Nakba
by Sam Sokol
The Jerusalem Post May 10, 2012
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friends to like this.
"All of the world knows what happened
here in 1948,' Daoud Abu Lebdeh says, while leaning against a table in a
coffee shop on the Hebrew University's Mount Scopus campus.
"The Israeli soldiers or the Israeli
militias like the Hagana, Kahane, the Irgun and Lehi came here and they [kicked]
the people outside from their homes."
Daoud is a nondescript man of 24 from the
Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. A correspondent and blogger with the
Palestinian website the Middle East Post, Daoud has come highly recommended
as an expert on the Nakba, the "catastrophe" of the birth of the
State of Israel, and concurrently, the start of the Palestinian refugee
problem, by Fatah Youth activist and Jerusalemite Mousa Abassi.
Except for the historical inaccuracy of
placing the radical Jewish nationalist movement of Kahanism in the 1940s,
several decades too early, Daoud's statement echoes the standard Palestinian
narrative of the Nakba, a topic which comes up every year as Arabs within
Israel, the Palestinian Authority and around the world commemorate the what
they see as the tragedy of Israel's establishment on May 14, 1948.
Elaborating on the Palestinian narrative
regarding what they have termed "ethnic cleansing," Daoud explains
that "the English books, the American history books, it's all the same.
There is nothing to change. The whole world knows what happened here."
"[The Jews] came here and established
their own state [and] until today they have prevented us [from] establishing
our state near to their state."
The Palestinian narrative is very clear.
According to Daoud and the Arab version of events, the Zionist movement began
bringing in Jews to Palestine, then a peaceful backwater of the Ottoman
Empire in which a distinct Palestinian culture had developed over centuries.
Having convinced the British to back their
nationalist goals at the expense of the local Palestinians, the Jews began to
bring in illegal immigrants and eventually drove the Palestinians out of
their homes in an orgy of violence and massacre.
The Jews, explains Daoud, have no claim to
any part of Palestine.
Asked why his predecessors did not accept the
1947 United Nations partition plan, unlike the Zionist movement which
endorsed it wholeheartedly, and instead chose to go to war, the Palestinian
journalist grabs my iPhone off of the table.
"I have taken your phone," he says.
"What do you do?" The partition resolution, he claims, was like
someone stealing a smartphone and then asking to split it. He asserts that
the Zionist movement had no claim to any part of the land and that asking the
Arabs to accept that they did was a trampling of their rights.
According to Daoud, the ancient Jewish
presence in Israel, preceding the arrival of Arabs and Islam to the country
by thousands of years, does not have any bearing on the current political
reality.
Asked why, he counters that the Jewish
presence in this land is similar to that of the Muslim Moors who conquered
Spain.
"Just as I can't, in the name of Islam,
go to Spain to occupy it and [expel] the Spanish because [in the past we were
there]," he says, "it's the same thing that you [Israel] are doing
now. It's not my problem that [King] David was here and Muhammad was
there."
The Palestinian focus on the Nakba, and on
the return to homes lost in the fighting and subsequent Arab mass flight from
Israel in 1948, has intensified over the past few years, he asserts. Despite
an emphasis on the Nakba, and Israel's illegitimacy, in the PA's educational
curriculum since the early 1990s, Daoud is sure that his people have grown
more attached to the Nakba narrative because they are disillusioned by the
failure to achieve a two-state solution.
However, despite the popularity and wide
currency enjoyed by the Palestinian version of events, not everybody
subscribes to the Nakba narrative.
Efraim Karsh, an expatriate Israeli,
historian and Arabist, is the editor of the Philadelphia-based Middle East
Quarterly, published by Dr. Daniel Pipes's think tank the Middle East Forum,
and, speaking with the Post by Skype from his home in the city of brotherly
love, affirms his contention that the popular version of events is based on
erroneous sources.
Karsh, who recently published Palestine
Betrayed, a history of the Nakba, explains that it is precisely the
widespread acceptance of Palestinian historiography that has stood in the way
of implementing a two-state solution and accounts for, in his view,
Palestinian intransigence.
An accurate history of the conflict, he
opens, should be independent of political ideology. He believes history has
no relation to political ideology. He himself, he continues, is an advocate
of the two-state paradigm, despite his absolute rejection of the Palestinian
narrative.
One of Karsh's main contentions in his book
is the responsibility of the Palestinian and outside Arab leadership for the
events of 1948.
"In 1947, prior to the first UN General
Assembly vote, Palestinian leaders rejected any form of Jewish
self-determination in Palestine. Hajj Amin Husseini, their most prominent
leader from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, upheld that 'there is no place
in Palestine for two races.' All areas conquered by the Arabs during the 1948
war were cleansed of Jews," he wrote in this newspaper last year.
Delving through Arab, Israeli and British
archives, Karsh in Palestine Betrayed paints a portrait of a divided and not
at all cohesive Palestinian-Arab society that, as he put it "all but
disintegrated, with 300,000-340,000 of its members fleeing their homes to
other parts of Palestine and to the neighboring Arab states."
Writing that "nowhere at the time was
the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society al-Nakba, 'the
catastrophe,' as it would come to be known in Palestinian and Arab discourse
– described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews," Karsh went
on to quote contemporary Palestinian Arab leader Musa Alami, who stated that
"If ultimately the Palestinians evacuated their country, it was not out
of cowardice, but because they had lost all confidence in the existing system
of defense."
Even more damning, in Karsh's eyes, is a
statement by Sir John Troutbeck, the head of the British Middle East Office
in Cairo, regarding a 1949 fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip.
"'We know who our enemies are,' they
[the Arab refugees] will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers
who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes."
Referring to these and similar statements,
Karsh tells the Post that "the beginning of my book basically tells it
all. In 1948-1949 no one among the Palestinians spoke about the Jews as
responsible for their plight. It came only later, ex post facto, that they
started explaining why they ran away. If you look, there are quotes of
refugees in Gaza in 1949 telling the British 'look, our leaders, the Arabs,
they pushed us out but not the Jews' so I cannot think that you need much
more than this [to understand the situation]."
In the Fifties, Karsh says, the narrative
began to change, with the plight of the Palestinian refugees being used as a
tool in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"In the Fifties you see the discredited
Arab leaders like the Mufti and others begin an attempt to basically absolve
themselves or rehabilitate themselves in their constituents," he says.
This alternative narrative, combined with
statements by Daoud regarding repeated Israeli rejections of Palestinian
peace offers which Karsh rejects as untrue, paint a picture, he says, of a
people unwilling to face reality.
The current Palestinian historiography is
"a combination of ignorance and reluctance to reconcile themselves to
reality [and] the result is very dispiriting for the future for peace,"
he continues.
Certainly, the PA's continuing demand for the
"right of return" would be looked upon differently by a world that
believed the Palestinian exodus to be the fault of the Arab states and local
communal leaders.
In fact, Karsh continues, while there has
been, even after the Roman exile, a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel for
millennia, the very concept of Palestinian nationalism is a 20th-century
creation.
Among his sources, Karsh quotes former Arab
nationalist, Knesset member and alleged Hezbollah spy Azmi Bishara, who once
made an appearance on Israeli television to announce that he doesn't
"think there is a Palestinian nation at all. I think there is an Arab
nation.
"I always thought so and I did not
change my mind. I do not think there is a Palestinian nation, I think its a
colonialist invention – Palestinian nation. When were there any Palestinians?
Where did it come from? I think there is an Arab nation. I never turned to be
a Palestinian nationalist, despite my decisive struggle against the
occupation. I think that until the end of the 19th century, Palestine was the
south of Greater Syria."
Of course, Daoud is having none of this. He
says that while he is ready to accept a two-state solution, there really is
no legitimate Jewish sovereignty in Palestine and that the entire conflict is
the fault of Zionist territorial hunger and ethnic cleansing. Karsh's
opinion, he believes, is the historical revision, not the current Nakba
narrative.
"The Jews suffered at the hands of the
Nazis. What we don't know is why we the Palestinians must pay the price for
that."
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Friday, May 11, 2012
Interview with Efraim Karsh: "The Catastrophe Called Nakba"
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