War On Palestinian Memory

By Ramzy Baroud

This commentary was published in The Jordan Times on 06/04/2011

 

Palestinian citizens of Israel must have felt proud of the fact that their collective tenacity proved stronger than any Israeli attempt at dislocating them from their rightful historical narrative. Now they are being told to cease and desist from commemorating Al Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, which saw the brutal seizure and depopulation of most of Palestine in order to construct the Israeli “miracle”.

Currently estimated at a fifth of the population of today’s Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have endured appalling treatment for decades. As Muslims and Christians, they have been regarded as an anomaly in what was meant to be a perfect Jewish utopia governed by the laws of democracy. This is the quandary that Israel has never mastered, as the non-Jewish citizens of Israel have represented a major obstacle to that vision.

The question of what to do with Palestinian citizens of Israel has long haunted Israeli politicians. Discriminatory laws, unlawful seizure of land and even violence have all failed to deter Palestinians from demanding equality and exposing the moral inconsistency of Israel’s selective democracy and dubious history. Moreover, all attempts at fragmenting Palestinian national identity - through different sets of laws for Palestinians in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and millions in diaspora - were hardly enough to destroy the innate sense of solidarity and belonging that Palestinian communities felt towards each other.

When Palestinian activists gather in Jerusalem, Algiers or London, one fails to trace borderlines, the details of identity cards, or any other desperate forms of classification used by Israel. When Palestinians meet, Israel’s divisive laws prove futile.

Israeli politicians have “lost sight of a basic concept in democracy”, claimed the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) in a recent statement, as cited by the BBC. The statement was a response to the Israeli parliament’s approval of a bill that “allows courts to revoke the citizenship of anyone convicted of spying, treason or aiding its enemies”.

Like scores of other bills introduced to the Knesset, many of which have been approved, the most recent amendment to the Citizenship Law of 1952 targets the Palestinian population of Israel. The bill, passed on March 28, was sponsored by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, the proud sponsor of nearly two dozen other discriminatory bills. Liberman’s 2009 campaign was largely based on the slogan: “No loyalty, no citizenship.” The latest bill is another manifestation of this idea.

But it is hardly the only bill targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel. Another was passed only a few days earlier. The “Nakba Bill” passed its final reading on March 22 and was sponsored by Alex Miller (Yisrael Beiteinu). This bill can be understood as a war on the collective memory of Palestinians, as it targets those who mark and commemorate the catastrophe of 1948.

“We are ready to go to jail,” was the response of MK Jamal Zahalka, of the Balad party, who warned of “civil rebellion” against recent bills.

“Nakba law won’t stop Arabs - we’ll just increase our protests.”

Haneen Zoabi, also of the Balad party, told The Electronic Intifada: “This is a kind of law to control our memory, to control our collective memory. It’s a very stupid law which punishes our feelings. It seems that the history of the victim is threatening the Zionist state.”

A stupid law it may be, but one rooted in Israel’s historical fear of Palestinian memory. Indeed, the war on memory has its own convincing, albeit cruel logic. From Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” of 1923 - aimed largely at sidelining the “native population” from the “Zionist colonisation” of Palestine - to Uri Lubrani’s desire to “reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters”, attempts at forcefully removing or reducing the Palestinian population is the cornerstone of Zionist reasoning. The reasoning, which was essentially predicated on presenting Palestine as a “land without people”, is often challenged by the fact that the Palestinians are too stubborn to terminate their historical, intellectual and very personal relationship with their land. Their persistence has made a mockery of Israel’s first prime minister Ben Gurion’s faulty prediction in 1948 that “the old will die and the young will forget”.

Yes, the old will continue to die, but the young are far from forgetting. So how does Israel want now to exact forgetfulness from Palestinians? Israel has always enjoyed a broad definition of “democracy”, which purported to reconcile ethnic and religious exclusivity, on the one hand, and the inclusive parameters of true democracy, on the other. Outside Israel, those who dared question this wisdom were labelled anti-Semites.

Palestinians in Israel, who fought against the iniquitous and dehumanising definitions, were often labelled as a “fifth column” and were designated “enemies” of the state. It is they who now risk losing their citizenship or being fined for the supposedly sinful act of remembering the tragedies that have befallen them.

Although racist and discriminatory laws have defined the Israeli parliament for years, the unmistakably bigoted nature of these laws and the frequency at which they are being passed reflect the level of fear of the Zionist project. The major obstacle to this project remains a people who refuses to be defeated or to be transformed into “woodcutters or waiters”.

Israel seems to be resolving its quandary of being a Jewish and a democratic state, and it has decidedly chosen to be the former. There is nothing democratic about the most recent bills that passed in parliament. Israel is now officially an apartheid state, and all the hasbara in the world cannot resolve the moral crisis that is now at the core of Israeli politics.

Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on March 2 that veteran diplomat Ilan Baruch had quit his post as he was no longer able to defend Israeli policy. It seems Baruch made his decision in the nick of time, as it would be a truly arduous task now to try and justify Israel’s war on Palestinian memory.

The writer (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.