The Warped Mirror: Rewriting history for the "nakba"

"I wish Israel the very best on its 60th . . . And to be fair to the Palestinians, I wish them a very happy Nakba day." This sarcastic comment (#1356747) by a reader of the Guardian's "Comment is Free" site was clearly meant to mock the all-out media effort to provide an "even-handed" coverage of Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations by adopting the "nakba" narrative that postulates that the establishment of Israel was inevitably a "catastrophe" for the Palestinians.

In an article that was fairly typical for this coverage, the Palestinian Oxford academic Ahmad Samih Khalidi starts out with the assertion: "As Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its establishment, an inescapable counter-reality lingers over the occasion that is inextricably twinned with it. It is the nakba or catastrophe, the 60th anniversary of the destruction of Arab Palestine in 1948." Khalidi explicitly rejects the well-documented fact that mainstream Zionists at the time were trying hard to do their part to make peaceful co-existence possible; instead, he insists that “Israel could not have been built as a Jewish state except on the ruins of Arab Palestine."

Obviously, this kind of claim completely ignores the UN partition plan of 1947 that envisaged the establishment of two states: one Jewish and one Arab - and the Arab state would actually have been the first Palestinian state in history. Yet, Khalidi asserts that due to the establishment of Israel, the Palestinians were deprived of their status as "a longstanding majority on their own soil" and condemned to become "a small, vulnerable minority and a tattered, broken nation living in exile or under foreign rule." Again, this claim runs counter to historical facts since Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries of "foreign rule", which continued after World War I with the establishment of the British Mandate.

Khalidi then turns to "the history of the struggle over the land of Palestine" and argues that it "stands in stark contrast to the adage that violence gets you nowhere." So where does violence get you? According to Khalidi, "[the] 1948 war, including pre-state Jewish terrorism, established the state of Israel." That is arguably a rather peculiar way of saying that the Jewish population of Palestine was forced to defend itself against Arab attacks that started shortly after the announcement of the UN partition plan in November 1947 and culminated with the onslaught of five Arab armies immediately after Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948. By the end of this war, nearly one percent of Israel’s Jewish population had lost their lives.

Of course it had been the Arabs who had hoped to accomplish something by violence, which they openly acknowledged. As Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman told the UN Security Council on April 16, 1948: "The representative of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday that they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight." And the Arabs made no secret that they were fighting to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state; when they failed in this, they were fighting to undo it, and failed again.

Yet, Khalidi's claim that there are instances when instigating violence paid off has some validity when he argues: "The 1987 Palestinian intifada drove Israel to talk to the PLO, culminating in the 1993 Oslo agreement. Furthermore, Israel's decision to withdraw from south Lebanon in 2000 was the result of a realisation that staying put was not worth the sacrifice. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was a direct consequence of the second 2000 intifada. The current debate about the need to engage Hamas is more a reflection of the Islamic movement's military prowess than any real conviction that it is a potential partner in peace."

Obviously, in these instances Palestinian violence could "achieve" something in the sense Khalidi has in mind because Israel was unwilling to employ the counter-violence it could have easily employed to deny the Palestinians any gains from their violence.

While Khalidi refrains from explicitly endorsing violence and terrorism, it is clear from some of his other writings that he is not in favor of a negotiated two-state solution. In an article entitled "Thanks, but no thanks" he has argued: "Today, the Palestinian state is largely a punitive construct devised by the Palestinian's worst historical enemies; Israel and its implacable ally, the US. The intention behind the state today is to constrain Palestinian aspirations territorially, to force them to give up on their moral rights, renege on their history and submit to Israel's diktats on fundamental issues of sovereignty."

For Khalidi, violence and terrorism thus seems primarily a way to prevent a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until a "one-state solution" becomes somehow inevitable. Particularly revealing is Khalidi's objection to any perceived attempt "to constrain Palestinian aspirations territorially". There is arguably considerable irony in the fact that it is always Israel that finds itself suspected and accused of "expansionist" ambitions, while a Palestinian writer can openly declare his opposition to any attempts "to constrain Palestinian aspirations territorially".

The rejection of the two-state solution and the often-made claim that a "one-state solution" would represent an incomparably more "just" solution are a direct consequence of the increasingly popular notion that Israel's establishment inevitably caused the Palestinians' "nakba" -  a "catastrophe" that is sometimes implicitly compared with the Holocaust, and that is always employed to demand unconditional empathy for the Palestinian plight. But while this plight is real and must be addressed, it is truly contemptible to demand empathy and wish at the same time that the Palestinians will resist any peaceful resolution until they are in a position to insist on a "one-state solution".

The sarcastic comment wishing the Palestinians "a very happy Nakba day" captures this kind of hypocrisy. It has often been pointed out that in 1948, when some 700 000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the fighting that was instigated by their own leaders, untold millions of people all over the world experienced a very similar fate in the wake of World War II and the dissolution of the colonial empires. Most of these refugees could only dream of getting the international support and attention that the Palestinians received - and this is most definitely true for the 800 000 Jews from Arab countries who were forced to abandon their ancient communities. From all those refugees, it is only the Palestinians who continue to insist on sacrificing their present and their future for their past, for the memories of a "nakba" that is symbolized by keys to homes that no longer exist, homes that children are taught they should long to go "back" to, even if they have never seen them.