10 Articles on 60 years of Nakba
Resisting the Nakba
Author: Joseph Massad
One of the most difficult things to grasp in the modern history of Palestine and the Palestinians is the meaning of the Nakba. Is the Nakba to be seen as a discrete event that took place and ended in 1948, or is it something else? What are the political stakes in reifying the Nakba as a past event, in commemorating it annually, in bowing before its awesome symbolism? What are the effects of making the Nakba a finite historical episode that one bemoans but must ultimately accept as a fact of history?
For Israelis, an Anniversary. For Palestinians, a Nakba.
Author: Elias Khoury
IN 1948, during the war known to the Israelis as the war of independence, the historian Constantine K. Zurayk wrote the book “Ma’na al-Nakba,” later translated as “The Meaning of the Disaster.” The title struck a resounding chord, and nakba (catastrophe) became the term Palestinians used for the cataclysm that befell them that year.
Memories of a promised land
Author: Mike Marqusee & Eliane Glaser
Perhaps more than any country, Israel provokes strong feelings and violent arguments. Everyone, excluding the most fanatical Zionist or the Iranian President, seems to have complex, mixed feelings about it. Even the terms we use are booby-trapped. Does merely using the name Israel imply support of illegal occupation? If you call the region Palestine do you give succour to the suicide bombers? It is tempting to steer clear of the subject completely. Yet the fact of Israel’s existence and the arguments around it encapsulate so much that defines the present moment. As the frontier where memories of Nazism meet Islamic terrorism, as the continual reminder of the West’s hypocritical attitude to international law and as a profound contemporary case-study of the noxious influence of religion on politics, Israel has huge symbolic as well as strategic importance for all of us. To mark the 60th anniversary of its creation we asked two Jewish writers to reflect on what Israel means for them.
Expulsion and dispossession can't be cause for celebration
Author: Seumas Milne
George Bush arrived in Jerusalem yesterday to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary and talk up what has to be the most bizarre proposal yet for achieving peace: a "shelf agreement". This, Bush explained before he set out, would be a "description" of a Palestinian state to be hammered out between the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert before the end of the year. The idea would then be to put this virtual state on the shelf until the time might be right for it to be turned into a reality. In perfect step, Tony Blair announced that he has succeeded in negotiating the removal of three checkpoints and one roadblock on behalf of the Quartet of big powers and the UN - out of a total of 560 throughout the West Bank - but Israel will only actually remove them "in the future".
An Arab veteran of 1948 recalls Palestinian 'catastrophe'
Author: Ilene R. Prusher
Jerusalem - Mahmoud Jadallah recalls the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as if it were yesterday. As he guides a visitor through the village he once defended against Israeli forces, the names of outposts and passwords his Arab fighters used trip off his tongue.
But the day that the Jordanians told them to stop fighting is clearest. The war was over – for the moment, at least – and an armistice had been reached between Israel and Jordan. "The Jordanians came along with us and said, 'OK, we don't need you anymore. You can go home. We're in charge now. They're a state, and we're a state.'
Sixty years on, Palestinians mourn loss of homeland
Author: Alistair Lyon
BURJ AL-BARAJNEH, Lebanon, May 7 (Reuters) - While Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, Palestinian refugees mourn the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) when they lost their homeland. Often ignored in Middle East peace talks, they cling to a "right of return".
This land was theirs
Author: Hannah Mermelstein
On 20 March 1941, Yosef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund wrote: "The complete evacuation of the country from its other inhabitants and handing it over to the Jewish people is the answer."
On this day in 1948, almost two months before the first "Arab-Israeli war" technically began, the 1,125 inhabitants of the Palestinian village Umm Khalid fled a Haganah military operation. Like their brethren from more than 500 villages, they likely thought they would return to their homes within a few weeks, after the fighting blew over and new political borders were or were not drawn.
Nakba again
Author: Jonathan Cook
Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai's much publicised remark about Gaza facing a "bigger shoah" -- the Hebrew phrase for the Holocaust -- was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army's plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip.
More significantly, however, the comment appears to indicate the direction of Israel's longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
The Nakba generation
Author: Ziad Abbas
This year, it will sixty years since the Nakba (Catastrophe). Sixty years since we Palestinians became refugees. More than six million Palestinian refugees are still living far from their villages, towns and cities as a result of the Zionist invasion that uprooted them from their homeland in 1948. Generations have been born, have grown up, and have died in refugee camps, but the international community still continues to ignore the political rights of the Palestinian refugees. What makes it sad for me as a refugee -- one who was born and grew up in a refugee camp, and struggling not to die in a refugee camp -- is that the Nakba generation is dying. There are only a few people still left in the camp who remember the experience of living in the villages that were stolen from us. There are only a few who can tell stories about what it was like to be uprooted, to be sent to live in a tent in a refugee camp. Part of my work in the oral history and media projects at Ibdaa Cultural and Community Center in Dheisheh refugee camp is to interview people and collect the stories and history that is still undocumented, so that when the people die their memories and stories do not die with them.
The great catastrophe
Author: Mike Marqusee
The facts of the Nakba (catastrophe) are now well documented and beyond dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and is as vile as denial of any other historic crime.