March 21, 2008
I am not really certain when we started
labeling what happened to our people and our country, following
the establishment of the state of Israel, as "Al- Nakba".
But this is not really the important point. What is important,
from my perspective as a Palestinian, is that there is a need
to understand what happened to us in and around 1948; and why
it happened the way it did; and what should we do to circumvent
Al-Nakba from persisting into our future.
As it has been characterized
officially, Al-Nakba, or "the catastrophe",
is a short-hand euphemism for the disaster that befell the Palestinian
people and society in historical Palestine, in and around 1948,
when Israel declared itself to be an independent country. Thus,
we started equating and associating the "independence"
of Israel, or the 15th of May of every year since 1948, with
our "catastrophe". By doing so, we reduced the evil
that was willfully perpetrated against us, as a people and a
society, to a commemorative date on our annual calendar; where
our enemies celebrate and we mourn.
Al-Nakba should not be viewed
as a "catastrophe" in the same sense as those sudden
upheavals, destruction, etc, caused by inexplicable natural disasters,
massive earthquakes, flooding, tornadoes, or an unexpected attack
by meteorites from outer space. I want to argue here for the
need to widen our conception of Al-Nakba, and to think of it
as a disastrous process, whose seeds were consciously planted
at least since the beginning of the last century, and whose clear
targets were our displacement and alienation from our indigenous
land, and our supplanting by Jewish-Zionist colonists being hurled
at us from other parts of the world.
My call for re-focusing our
conceptualization of, what was termed Al-Nakba, is certainly
not to deny, or undermine, the evil that was perpetrated and
impacted an entire society, history and territory. Al-Nakba
stands as a critical marker in the life of at least three generations
of Palestinians since 1947-1948; and it will be indelible in
the minds of future Palestinian generations. It is, no doubt,
a violent severance and interruption of the Palestinians from
their past: from their familiarity with their daily surroundings,
their immediate environment, and their natural connection with
their milieu. It is a process that led to the cleansing (i.e.,
killing and expulsion) of at least 86% of the indigenous Palestinian
population that lived in the area that became Israel; and the
erasure of at least 531 of their villages and towns, with the
explicit goal of creating an exclusive Jewish state in the same
area. Al-Nakba is an ongoing process of "memoricide"
(to use Ilan Pappe's term)-the wiping out of individual and collective
memory, in the hope that it cannot be rekindled.
Al-Nakba
Process: Agencies and Targets
From the above perspective,
and according to all available serious historical analyses, Al-Nakba
was not a sudden happening that came from nowhere. What happened
in 1947-1948 was a culmination of a colonial settler process,
whose aim was (and continues to be) to dislodge the indigenous
Arab population of Palestine and replace them with Zionist Jewish
settlers from other countries. These settlers and their descendents
spearheaded a systematic process, which started in the early
twenties of the last century, of cleansing the land from its
Palestinian population, and transforming it to become an extension
of the globalized capitalist center. The process is continuing
today, with the direct and indirect sanctioning of the US, Europe
and a multitude of their client states and non-state agencies.
In order to arrive at a clear
and deep understanding of this broad process, I propose to look
at "Al-Nakba Process" on two levels: the phases of
its development, and its targets. In terms of the phases, we
can delineate three, somewhat overlapping, phases: (1) The Planning/Designing
phase, (2) The Implementation phase, and (3) The Completion phase.
Embedded in these phases, I would highlight three clear targets:
(1) People, (2) Land, and (3) Institutions.
The Planning/Designing
phase
This is recognized to have
begun with the holding of the first Zionist Congress in 1897.
The idea of establishing a Jewish National Fund (JNF), with
the goal of acquiring Arab-owned lands in Palestine (and the
region), for exclusive Jewish use, was proposed during that first
Zionist Congress, over hundred years ago. The idea of JNF was
formally approved in 1901, and was registered as a company in
Britain in 1907, with the explicit objective of acquiring lands
and immovable properties "in Palestine, Syria, and in any
other parts of Turkey and the Sinai Peninsula". It was
later stipulated that the land acquired by JNF, irrespective
of the means, and held by it, are "the inalienable property
of the Jewish people, and only Jewish labor could be employed
in the settlements." (Lesch). Subsequently, a British Commission
concluded that "the land has been extra-territorialized.
It ceases to be land from which the [Palestinian] Arab can gain
any advantage now or in the future. Not only can he never hope
to lease or cultivate it, but he is deprived forever from employment
on that land " (Lesch) . In May 1954, and through an official
memorandum from the Israeli government, the JNF was subsumed
formally as a company within Israel. The signed Memorandum kept
the objectives, as they were in the original registration, but
identified the JNF's activities "in the State of Israel
and in any area under its jurisdiction, for the purpose of settling
Jews on these lands and properties." Furthermore, the JNF
was recognized as one of the arms of the World Zionist Movement.
(Abu Ras). It is estimated today that 13% (or about 2.5 million
dunums) of the land area in Israel is held by the JNF; the majority
of which are lands belonging to Palestinian refugees; lands which
were taken over as a result of the ethnic cleansing process.
Thus, it is obvious that the
Jewish National Fund has been the paramount Zionist agency of
Al-Nakba-as the Zionist arm of the colonization of Palestine.
Establishing for Al-Nakba of
Palestine followed a dual track: political- diplomatic and economic.
The colonial settler process was codified (or formalized) in
1917 by the British Balfour Declaration, when the British Government
committed itself to "view with favour the establishment
in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."
With the conclusion of WWI and the establishment of the League
of Nations, Great Britain was designated by the League of Nations
as the Mandatory power for Palestine in 1923. The preamble to
the British Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, with
minor adjustments (Mallison in Abu-Lughod, 61).
This means that the western
powers, which emerged victorious from the WWI, and established
the League of Nations (and similarly, later on, the United Nations,
following WWII), were committed to the establishment of a "national
home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, and to its enforcement.
In other words, the League of Nations, the British Mandate,
and the United Nations were paramount political-diplomatic-economic
agencies of Al-Nakba.
To solidify Zionist control
over the land and other critical economic resources, prominent
Jewish businessmen were given monopolistic concessions by the
British Government, immediately following the imposition of the
Mandate, in the twenties and thirties of the last century, in
spite of the fact that "in each case the concession was
contested by other serious claimants" (Lesch). Thus, the
Zionist enterprise was allowed to control critical natural resources
(e.g., Palestine Electricity Company, the development of minerals
in the Dead Sea, the Palestine Land Development Company, etc),
in preparation for Al-Nakba.
In the meantime, the system
of Jewish-Zionist education was separated from that of the prevalent
system of the indigenous population; and became fully centralized
under the exclusive control of the Zionist Movement, to which
it allocated about 40% of its budget. The objective was clearly
to inculcate the mythical claim of Zionism in the new generations
of settlers; to strengthen the Zionist colonial control of the
land; and to prepare for a separate hegemonic Jewish presence
in Palestine.
I am maintaining here that
had Zionism not been a settler colonial movement, with the objective
to establish an exclusivist "Jewish national home"
in Palestine, and had it not received the political, economic,
and military support of the major Western powers who emerged
victorious from the two world wars, this whole process, most
likely, would not have culminated in Al-Nakba. The recurrent
insistence on dividing the land, to allow for a hegemonic and
an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine, against the explicit
will of its indigenous population, which, sadly, persists until
this writing, is the direct prelude for Al-Nakba.
Any serious review of the machinations
and deliberations, in the context of the U.N. and hegemonic Western
powers, which sought to operationalize the "Balfour Declaration",
leading to the creation of Israel, would have to conclude that
the division of Palestine (regardless of the land area allotted
to each group) was a sure recipe for cleansing the indigenous
population living in that area, i.e., a sure recipe for Al-Nakba.
If we are to reflect on the idea of partitioning Palestine,
in order to accommodate Zionist aspirations, and Western capitalist
plans, as early as 1937, as suggested by the Peel Commission,
we see no serious effort invested in the UN context to avert
Al-Nakba. Palestinian society then, as it is now, was completely
exposed and vulnerable to external forces, as well as to the
control of internal agents of those forces. Its internal social,
economic and cultural structure lacked the required immunity
to withstand those forces. Thus, a new Zionist-Jewish state
was established in 1948 on a decimated indigenous, rural society,
called Palestine.
The persistent push of the
imperialist and capitalist centers then, and their client states,
taking the cue from the Zionist movement, was for physically
partitioning Palestine, to create a separate state for the Jews;
it was never for establishing a just and democratic society in
all of Palestine. This could have been possible to adopt then,
had this been the goal. But this was never the plan of the Zionist
movement; nor was it the intention of the Balfour Declaration,
thirty years earlier; nor did it harmonize with the objective
of creating a paramount Jewish colonization agency (the Jewish
National Fund), nearly 46 years earlier.
Implementation
and Completion Phase
I shall not dwell in much detail
under this section, because it is well documented, and it had
been discussed by a number of historians, Palestinian and non-Palestinian,
since the fifties of the last century; and documented and analyzed
lately in a most comprehensive way by historian Ilan Pappe, in
his fine book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
In a snapshot form, early cleansing
operations started in December 1947. At the time, the Palestinians
constituted two-thirds of the population (when they were nearly
90% of the population of Palestine at the beginning of the British
Mandate in 1923). At the beginning of the cleansing operations,
Palestinians owned about 97% of the land. As a result of the
ethnic cleansing operations, 531 Palestinian villages were erased;
more than 86% of the indigenous Palestinian population was destroyed,
expelled, or became displaced. Thus only 14-15% of the indigenous
Palestinian population (about 130,000 150,000) remained
in their homeland, while the rest became displaced and homeless
refugees.
While the Palestinian population
remaining on their own indigenous land (in Israel) number today
about 1.3 million, their land robbery continues, through government
legislations. In 1967, the Israeli Knesset passed the "Law
of Agricultural Settlement" that "prohibited the sub-letting
of the Jewish-owned land of the JNF to non-Jews the law furthermore
ensured that water quotas set aside for the JNF lands could not
be transferred to non-JNF lands." (Pappe, 222). The Palestinian
minority in Israel, which constitutes now about 18% "has
been forced to make do with just three percent of the land."
It is estimated that 70% of the land belonging to the Palestinians
in Israel "has been either confiscated or made inaccessible
to them." (Pappe, 223).
How do we
circumvent Al-Nakba from persisting into our future?
Based on the above, I am convinced
that Al-Nakba process will persist recurring in the Palestinian
future unless and until we, and all the forces in the world that
do not want to see a recurring Nakba, embark unequivocally on
the following steps:
1. Stop thinking and acting
for the partitioning of historical Palestine, as a pretext to
find a solution for the current unjust situation, resulting from
the process of the last hundred years.
2. Work towards the dismemberment
of the exclusivist, racist Zionist-Jewish-Israeli state, in favor
of a democratic, non-hegemonic state, for all the inhabitants
of historical Palestine.
3. Highlight the historical
evil perpetrated against the Palestinian people, and work globally
towards forcing the World Zionist Movement and the State of Israel
to acknowledge their direct responsibility for perpetrating this
historical evil, and for taking real measures to rectify it.
Khalil Nakhleh is a Palestinian anthropologist, independent
development and educational consultant and writer. His latest
two books are: The Myth of Palestinian Development (2004),
and (co-authored with Tafeeda Jirbawi) Empowering Future
Generations (2008). He is the editor of a forthcoming book,
The Future of the Palestinian Minority in Israel. Dr.
Nakhleh resides in Ramallah, and may be reached at abusama@palnet.com.