Al Naqba. The forgotten ethnic cleansing

View of the sea from Nablus hills. September 2013.

Historic recurrent events sometimes allow us to think about moments in history that are often forgotten, when not completely unknown. The topic I would like to talk about today is the “Al Naqba”, which in Arabic means “The Catastrophe”. Each year, since 1948, Palestinians on the 15^th of May remember what happened to those some 418 destroyed villages in Old Palestine, the 750.000/1.300.000 Palestinians forced to leave their homes and those some 15.000 people killed by the Israeli militia, on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel.

Analyzing these events require perseverance, patience and reflection. I’ll try to be as much as clear and concise as possible, leaving you then the choice of whether studying the subject independently or not.

Do I exist or not? This may be a normal question for Palestinians and this is a question I always asked myself. Being a Palestinian from the Diaspora, basically, I come from (or my family comes from) a village that no more exists or exists but with another name. Indeed, since the 30s of the last century, Israel has tried to make us absent, expelling us by force or more simply killing us. The climax of this unreasonable violence against the Palestinian population has been reached in 1948, with the Al Naqba. That’s why is so important for me today to reconstruct the events that led to this tragic moment. It’s not only a way to demonstrate that I exist but it’s a way to remember and demonstrate that something called Palestine and Palestinians existed before 1948.

The Al Naqba is what the Palestinians have called their dispossession and dispersal before and during (for me even after) the creation of the State of Israel. Greeting the new- born State, Chaim Weizman called it “a miraculous clearing of the land, a miraculous simplification of Israel’s task”. And that’s exactly what it was: a forced, violent, criminal ethnic cleansing and not a voluntary depart and concession of land made by Palestinians to the Jewish communities, as many Israeli historians say. In the Israeli history books you’ll read that the Independence Day (that is the day in which Israelis celebrate their liberation. Liberation from what and whom is still not clear for me) and the Al Naqba are two concomitant events, rather than one the cause of the other. Indeed, since the beginning, Israelis have been very good in creating their myths and their version of the history, brainwashing generations and generations of Israelis. And still, they believe that in 1948 many Palestinians living in the areas that now are called Israel left voluntarily their homes or that fled under the orders of the Arab commanders.

Though, the issue is much more complicated. Violence and confrontations between the Jewish and Arab communities date from, at least, 1922 and saw the first escalation in 1935, when Sheikh Izzeddin Qassam organized a sort of rebellion against the British, who in 1917 signed the Balfour Declaration (i.e. a document in which they recognized the right of Jews to go back and settle in Palestine, while not affecting the rights of the indigenous population). This document is, perhaps, the most important one for the history of Palestine and the Middle East in general (along with the Sykes- Picot agreement with which France and Britain divided the Middle East): it modified and shaped the region in an unpredictable way. A massive immigration of Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe started and thousands of Jews (then Israelis) settled there. The settlement of this community and the purchase of land by them was not always so peaceful and the peasantry (which constituted the majority of the Palestinian society) has been the most affected by the loss of land: thus, when the projects envisioned by the British rulers and the Jewish community became clear (i.e. creating a Jewish State in an already inhabited land), Palestinians engaged in a three- year insurgency, which was known as the Great Rebellion. Clearly, it was militarily futile, but it represented a popular demonstration of outrage and claim of rights.

Since that moment, Zionist officials started to put into practice the theoretical plans fabricated during the previous years: the only way to settle the issue, said Joseph Weitz (in charge of colonization and settlement), was to cut and to eradicate the Arabs from the roots and “no one single village or tribe must be left”. Under Weitz’s auspices, the Jewish Agency started preparing meticulous plans for the ethnic cleansing of urban and rural Palestine. When the plans of actions were ready, David Ben Gurion, the leader of the Yishuv, said that all they needed was a strategic moment to put them into practice. The moment arrived during the Second World War: the Nazi regime, the concentration camps, the climax of anti- Semitism in Europe and the tragedy millions of Jews exterminated by the Nazi regime prepared the Western countries to think to compensate Jewish sufferings with a state in Palestine and made Zionists convinced of the righteousness of their enterprise.

The last obstacle was represented by the British authorities that were still ruling Palestine: the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, indeed, aware of the fact that the aspirations of Zionists were utterly incompatible with the rights and interests of the Palestinians, was trying to find an impartial and more equitable solution to the issue. Thus, Jewish militia started to attack the British, that unwilling to take steps against them, in the wake of the Holocaust, decided to leave the country. In the meanwhile, in 1947, the UN General Assembly called for a partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish State.

Ethnic cleansing operations immediately began. In March 1948, David Ben Gurion activated the master plan, the so- called Plan Dalet, for the “systematic and total expulsion” of Palestinians from their land. Each militia received a list of villages and precise instructions about how and when to attack, occupy and destroy the villages and evict the population. The modes of attack were, in the words of David Hirst, “exemplary terror, preliminary siege and “softening up” by aerial and artillery bombardment, psychological warfare, expulsion at gunpoint, collective executions and outright massacres”.

As of 15 May 1948, much of the plan had already been executed and by early 1949 the Palestinian exodus was complete: between 700,000 and 1,300,000 Palestinians left Palestine to seek refuge in the neighboring Arab countries or those portions of Palestine (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) which were out of the Zionist plans.

All this happened under the well- aware eyes of the Western countries, that openly supported the Zionist projects without reservations, partly because they felt guilty for the Holocaust and partly because they finally could get rid of the “Jewish problem” (thinking that they conceded Palestine to the Jewish community only because of humanitarian considerations would be an option too naïf to be taken into consideration, bearing in mind the power relationships of that time. Rather than accept the Western unconditional support, even Israel should ask itself questions). Moreover, after an initial self- restraint, the US gave their support to the Zionist plan seeing in their colonial policy a means of defence of democracy and progressive western ideals, in an Arab world perceived as underdeveloped and barbaric.

Putting aside historic and humanitarian considerations, though tragic, what is important nowadays is that this ethnic cleansing has never been recognized neither by Israel nor by the Western countries, which are responsible as Israel is, given that at that time Palestine was administrated by the United Kingdom, entrusted of this task by the former League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations.

Recognizing the Palestinian sufferings is not only a sort of compensation for what they lost (lives and land), but it’s a recognition of their right to be considered as human beings. The fact that anyone wants to acknowledge that killing thousands of people and forcing them to leave their lands and to settle in other countries were all criminal acts, reduce Palestinians to class B citizens. It means that they weren’t entitled to live neither in Palestine nor anywhere else. While, in a fair and just world, killing people, of any ethnic or religious origin whatsoever, should be bluntly condemned and despised.

Recognition of this tragedy is not the only thing we need. As what happened 66 years is still ongoing (killing, dispossession and destruction of lands, properties, homes, natural resources, forced displacement, unrecognized right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees worldwide), recognition is not enough. What should be sought and implemented is justice. Justice may be reached and implemented through international legal norms and standards. Nowadays, the lenses of the rule of law should guide us towards a just compensation for what happened yesterday and a fair and equitable settlement for what will happen tomorrow. Only a reciprocal recognition of rights and duties can lead Palestine and Israel towards a viable solution of this endless conflict. Palestine has already done what she could, renouncing to armed struggle and the whole Palestine and recognizing the State of Israel as a legitimate interlocutor in the international arena. Israel could start from recognizing that what it has done in 1948 was illegitimate and unlawful. Even because the Al Naqba is a part of their history as well.

Waiting for that moment (that maybe I’ll not able to see), it seems to me desirable today to remember those people who lost their lives without any reasonable reason, those who are still living in painful conditions in refugee camps and those who, even living in well- off conditions, share the common destiny of having been involuntarily uprooted from their ancestral land and who don’t know whether there’s a place in the world for them or not.

Sources:

Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

David Hirst, Beware of Small States. Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East

Two interesting articles:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avraham-burg/israel-independence-day_b_5268536.html 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/world/middleeast/navigating-lost-villages-in-israel.html?ref=middleeast&_r=0