Peter Beinart writes in the NYT-
Why has the impending eviction of six Palestinian families in East Jerusalem drawn Israelis and Palestinians into a conflict that appears to be spiraling toward yet another war?
Because Hamas demanded that Israeli security forces withdraw from both al Aqsa and the neighborhood in which the evictions were to occur. When Israel ignored their deadline, Hamas launched a war it was bound to lose.
Because of a word that in the American Jewish community remains largely taboo: the Nakba.
The American Jewish community is American. Nakba isn't a word that trips off the tongue of the average Yank.
The Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, need not refer only to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled in terror during Israel’s founding.
In 1954, under 'Operation Wetback', 1,074,277 "returns", defined as "confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States not based on an order of removal" occurred.
After the Second World War, millions of Germans were expelled from former German territory. In the Indian subcontinent, about 20 million people were displaced. The recent Civil War in Syria has led to 5.6 million people being displaced. Over half a million have been killed. The Nakba is pretty small potatoes by the standards of the region.
It can also evoke the many expulsions that have occurred since: the about 300,000 Palestinians whom Israel displaced when it conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967; the roughly 250,000 Palestinians who could not return to the West Bank and Gaza after Israel revoked their residency rights between 1967 and 1994; the hundreds of Palestinians whose homes Israel demolished in 2020 alone. The East Jerusalem evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of expulsion that is as old as Israel itself.
But such expulsions were already old in the time of Nebuchandezzar. It seems 1.3 million Assyrian Christians have fled Iraq since 2003.
Israel isn't the only country which expelled Palestinians. About 20,000 were expelled by Jordan after Black September. Almost 400,000 fled Kuwait after it was liberated. About 20,000 fled Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Lebanon still does not grant Palestinians civil rights. In Saudi Arabia, 150,000 Palestinians fear expulsion.
Among Palestinians, Nakba is a household word.
Though Nakba is what their leaders inflict upon them year after year, decade after decade.
But for Jews — even many liberal Jews in Israel, America and around the world — the Nakba is hard to discuss because it is inextricably bound up with Israel’s creation.
Which was inextricably bound up with the fact that those on the losing side in the Second World War lost territory and saw millions of their people displaced. The Palestinian leader- Grand Mufti Husseini, was a great pal of Hitler. That turned out to be a bad idea.
Without the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, Zionist leaders would have had neither the land nor the large Jewish majority necessary to create a viable Jewish state.
No. The British- as the mandatory power recognized that a Palestinian state would not be economically viable but a Jewish state would be economically viable. Thus, Jordan and Egypt were to take over the areas earmarked for the Palestinians. In view of their virulent hatred of Jews, a one state solution was impossible. Still, few expected Israel could beat the Arab armies.
Thus, what made Israel viable was that its people were economically productive and willing and able to defend themselves. What made a Palestinian state unviable then and now was the Palestinian inability to advance collectively in either economic or military strength. Being dependent on outside aid means they that others pull your strings. You are a proxy for conflicts between regional powers.
As I discuss at greater length in an essay for Jewish Currents from which this guest essay is adapted, acknowledging and beginning to remedy that expulsion — by allowing Palestinian refugees to return — requires imagining a different kind of country, where Palestinians are considered equal citizens, not a demographic threat.
Narratives and 'imaginings' are considered by some Liberals to have magical powers. Getting paid for telling such fairy stories is nice work- if you can get it.
Yasser Arafat agreed not to include United Nations (UN) Resolution 194 (which guarantees the refugees’ right to return) in the Oslo accords. By then, nobody in the region was keen to host Palestinians- not because they were evil but because their leaders were mad.
To avoid this reckoning, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies insist that Palestinian refugees abandon hope of returning to their homeland.
This demand is drenched in irony, because no people in human history have clung as stubbornly to the dream of return as have Jews.
No irony is involved in wanting something which you won't let others have. A guy who wants to fuck his wife does not want everybody to fuck her. Beinart may have different views in this respect.
Establishment Jewish leaders denounce the fact that Palestinians pass down their identity as refugees to their children and grandchildren.
No they don't. What they object to is people trying to kill Jews.
But Jews have passed down our identity as refugees for 2,000 years.
What has changed that identity is the creation of an economically and militarily viable State which is able to inflict great pain on those who attack it.
Palestinians have failed to create an identity as a people able to thrive and prosper under their own leaders.
In our holidays and liturgy we continually mourn our expulsion and express our yearning for return. “After being forcibly exiled from their land,” proclaims Israel’s Declaration of Independence, “the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion.” If keeping faith that exile can be overcome is sacred to Jews, how can we condemn Palestinians for doing the same thing?
Suppose the Palestinians had created a prosperous statelet in territory they control. Israelis would want to do business with Palestinians. So would everybody else. But the Palestinians are internally divided and dependent on foreign aid. Who knows who is pulling the strings of this faction or that faction?
Beinart believes that a guy who likes fucking his wife should not condemn any rapist who grabs her. He should keep faith with the notion that the sacrality of the marriage tie involves letting all the rapists and perverts in the area free access to his spouse.
In addition to telling Palestinians they cannot go home because they have been away too long, Jewish leaders argue that return is impractical.
What Jewish leaders argue is irrelevant. What matters is whether they can win a war. The fact is Yassar Arafat gave up the 'right to return' long ago. Mexico too gave up the dream or getting back territory it lost to the USA. If Americans are so keen on respecting the rights of others, why not allow free immigration from Mexico and points south? After all, those people must have sojourned in the continental United States.
But this too is deeply ironic because, as a refugee rights advocate, Lubnah Shomali, has pointed out, “If any state is an expert in receiving masses and masses of people and settling them in a very small territory, it’s Israel.”
But Israel is only good at assimilating Jews. It would be shit at assimilating Hindus or Confucians.
It is deeply ironic that Lubnah Shomali is not coming to my house to do the washing up. How is it okay for her to do her own washing up but completely neglect the dirty dishes piled up in my sink?
At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 1990s, Israel took in about 500,000 immigrants.
None of whom wanted to kill Jews.
If millions of diaspora Jews began moving to Israel tomorrow, Jewish leaders would not say taking them in was logistically impossible. They would help Israel to do what it has done before: build large amounts of housing fast.
Guess where.
When most Jews imagine Palestinian refugees’ return, they probably don’t envision it looking like Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they predict Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. But the tragic reality is that not many Jews live in former Palestinian homes, since it is believed that only a few thousand remain intact.
Beinart forgets that houses stand upon land which probably had a Palestinian owner at some point in the past.
Ms. Shomali estimates that more than 70 percent of Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948 remain vacant.
But the land is being used for some other purpose. Still, if Palestinians were known to be peaceful, hard working, guys who got on very well with Jews, then there would be an economic case for bringing them in. Suppose such Palestinians eagerly complete their military service and rise up in high tech fields. Then every country in the region would be competing for them. Look at Hong Kong. Countries around the world are vying with each other to attract immigrants from there.
And the Palestinian activists and scholars who envision return generally argue that large-scale eviction is neither necessary, nor desirable. Asked in 2000 about Jews living in formerly Palestinian homes, the famed Palestinian literary critic Edward Said declared that he was “averse to the notion of people leaving their homes” and that “some humane and moderate solution should be found where the claims of the present and the claims of the past are addressed.”
A literary critic, famed or not, is still a guy who knows shit about politics.
None of this means refugee return would be simple or uncontested. Efforts at historical justice rarely are.
This guy thinks he is expending effort of this sort. That's sweet.
But there is a reason the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates ends his famous essay on reparations for segregation and slavery with the subprime mortgage crisis that forced many Black Americans into foreclosure in the first decade of the 21st century.
There is also a reason Obama ignored the fool completely.
The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the past.
Very true. This was the plot of the first Poltergeist movie. America is built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Any day now, all sorts of ghosts and ghoulies will leap out of your Television screen and sodomize you with vim and vigor. Don't say you haven't been warned!
That’s also the lesson of the evictions that have set Israel-Palestine aflame. More than seven decades ago, Palestinians were expelled to create a Jewish state.
Which is doing very well.
Now they are being expelled to make Jerusalem a Jewish city.
Which will do very well.
By refusing to face the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies ensure that the Nakba continues.
But both will continue to do very well provided they don't screw up economically or militarily.
Perhaps American Jewish leaders fear that facing the crimes committed at Israel’s birth will leave Jews vulnerable.
Or perhaps their skulls aren't full of shit. The fact is sound economic policies and effective military resources make people less vulnerable. Virtue signaling about past crimes may earn you a little money but it may fatally discredit whatever political tendency you represent.
Once the Nakba taboo is lifted, Palestinians will feel emboldened to seek revenge.
They were doing so in the Twenties and Thirties and Forties and Fifties and so on. Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy because the guy promised to give Israel 50 fighter jets.
But more often than not, honestly confronting the past has the opposite effect.
But that effect is still zero.
After George Bisharat, a Palestinian-American law professor, wrote about the house in Jerusalem that his grandfather had built and been robbed of, a former Israeli soldier who had lived in it contacted him unexpectedly. “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong, but I participated in it and I cannot deny it,” the former soldier said when they met, and then added, “I owe your family three months’ rent.” Mr. Bisharat later wrote that he was inspired to match the Israeli’s humanity.
Actually, religious people who feel they have unjustly profited have a soteriological, not humanitarian, motive for offering restitution. They believe that they will have to answer in the after-life for any theft or other unjust enrichment in this world.
“Just that response, writ large, is what awaits Israel if it could bring itself to apologize to the Palestinians,” he wrote.
Because apologies have magic powers. Sadly, Hamas will continue to fire rockets at Israel so long as that is what it is paid to do. The odd thing is that this time round the only party who benefits is Bibi Netanyahu.
In that moment he saw “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples.”
It is not the magnanimous Palestinians who are doing well as lawyers and surgeons and so forth who fire rockets. It appears that the Palestinians in the region have been moving towards religion and away from an older Left-Liberal ideology which is now associated with corruption and incompetence. The religious position is that a Jewish state must not be allowed to exist in the Holy Land. What is unclear is whether all Jews must be killed even if they surrender. It is perfectly possible that conversion could be an alternative to death.
There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former soldier: “teshuvah.”
Will Beinart become a ba'al teshuvah- i.e. repent his secular life and embrace orthopraxy? Perhaps.
It is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is “return.”
There is no irony here at all. Tawbah also means 'return'. The notion is that sin represents a falling away from purity.
In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual.
But, it could also be physical. That is why Israel exists.
That means the return of Palestinian refugees — far from necessitating Jewish exile — could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish life.
But what if the returnees keep killing Jews? They may well consider this to be a religious duty.
“The occupier and myself — both of us suffer from exile,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.”
Darwish was banned from returning to Israel after he joined the PLO at the age of 32. However, in 1995, he was allowed to settle in Ramallah. He didn't like it and left. One can scarcely blame him. Writing about being an exile is cool. Not being an exile is not cool if you happen to come from a deeply boring part of the world.
The longer Jews deny the Nakba, the deeper our moral exile becomes.
It is immoral to complain of exile if you aren't actually exiled. On the other hand, my claim to having suffered genocide at the hands of all and sundry aren't bogus at all. The longer Jews deny that I am actually Anne Frank- except with bigger boobs and the ability to twerk- the deeper their moral exile from niceness.
By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.
Very true! Guys in Gaza whose apartment buildings have been blown up need to begin a process of repair which doesn't involve doing anything as boring and back-breaking as construction work. They should just chat with some apologetic Jews on Skype and then go home to houses which have magically rebuilt themselves.
The problem with being a virtue signaling pussy is that sooner or later you go too far. That's what Beinart is doing here. A guy from Gaza reading this may, initially, have been nodding his head and saying 'this dude is cool'. Then comes the punchline- repairs happen by magic. Only a guy from a very rich and secure part of the world could believe such shit. His White Privilege has destroyed his humanity. He can't see what even the worst Islamophobe has to admit- viz. that this is a fucking humanitarian disaster. Good people- hard working people- people with kids and grannies and so forth- have lost everything. True, they will rebuild their lives but in a few years time the same shit will go down once again. Beinart will recycle this Nakba crap. But what is the worth of his crocodile tears? True, it may become a fashion for wealthy Jews to continually apologize for the Nakba just as some continually apologize for slavery or whatever. But those are the perks of Privilege. You get to pretend to be a swell guy without doing shit to help anybody.
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