A brief history of the observance and politics of Nakba day.
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the subsequent mass expulsions that lasted until October 1950, approximately 85 percent of the Arab Palestinians who had lived in the areas of Mandatory Palestine that ultimately were subjected to Israeli sovereignty were driven outside the borders of the newly established state of Israel. In the process, hundreds of Palestinian villages were completely destroyed, and the larger towns and cities lost most, if not all, of their Arab populations.
Differing existential conditions among Palestinian communities have led to a growing discrepancy in the collective self–image of both groups.
Between 700,000 and 800,000 Palestinian refugees took shelter in the remaining parts of Palestine still under Arab control (the Gaza Strip and the West Bank), as well as in the neighboring Arab countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, as well as elsewhere. These events are known in the Palestinian vocabulary as the Nakba (meaning ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic), and they constitute the key episode in Palestinian national history.
Those 156,000 Palestinians who remained under Israeli rule could not escape the dramatic consequences of the Nakba: about one-sixth of them came from nearby villages that were destroyed and depopulated. Subsequently they became internal refugees; many other lost their lands to Israeli state expropriations even though they remained in their villages; and families were torn apart never again to be reunited.
While the Nakba has constituted the major anchor of contemporary Palestinian national identity, it has also created borders, both physical and mental, between Palestinians.
In 1966 the military government that had been imposed on Palestinians inside Israel was formally removed, only to be quickly exported to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip the following year after Israel’s occupation of those territories. Since the beginning of the military occupation that began in 1967, more than half of the Palestinians in the world live under various segments of the “Israeli control system.” The territory under this control system, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, is ruled by ethnocratic principles that preserve Jewish domination while dividing Palestinians among various subgroups with different levels of civil rights, political rights, and economic opportunities.
This internal hierarchy places Palestinian citizens in an intermediate political status between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian non-citizens and ensures their relative benefits vis-à-vis their fellow Palestinians. As a result, differing existential conditions among the various Palestinian communities have led to a growing discrepancy in the collective self–image of both groups. The long delay in the adoption of a Nakba memorial day among the Palestinian citizens of Israel is one notable example for this discrepancy.
As early as 1949, one year after the establishment of the State of Israel, 15 May was marked in several West Bank cities (under Jordanian rule) by demonstrations, strikes, the raising of black flags, and visits of the graves of the 1948 martyrs. These events were organized by worker and student associations, cultural and sports clubs, scouts clubs, committees of refugees, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The speakers in these gatherings blamed the Arab regimes and the Arab League for failing to save Palestine. By the late 1950s, the 15th of May would be known in the Arab world as Palestine Day, mentioned by the media in Arab and Muslim countries as a day of international solidarity with Palestine.
The reviving Palestinian national movement of the late 1950s included 15 May on its calendar. Every year the Fatah bulletin, Falastinuna, dedicated detailed analytical texts dealing with the meaning of the day and the lessons of the 1948 disaster. Since the late 1960s, with the emergence of other commemorations celebrating the armed struggle and the revolutionary spirit, 15 May was temporarily somewhat marginalized. Still, in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and in refugee camps in Lebanon, 15 May continued to be commemorated by demonstrations and strikes.
While the Nakba has constituted the major anchor of contemporary Palestinian national identity, it has also created borders, both physical and mental, between Palestinians.
Inside Israel, none of these commemorations occurred until the 1990s. This was due to two main factors: the disciplinary power of the Israeli state authorities and the ambivalence of the Communist Party toward this commemoration.
The Communist Party—comprised of both Jewish and Arab leaders—has never avoided dealing with the Nakba per se. There is no doubt that the party did raise the issue of Palestinian refugees from a very early point—in the middle of the expulsion campaigns themselves, as well as in following years. However, the party avoided a temporal commemoration of the Nakba. Any meaningful choice of date, whether it was 15 May, or Israel’s Day of Independence (celebrated according to the Hebrew lunar calendar, in the second half of April or the first half of May), would have been interpreted as mourning the mere existence of the state, when in fact the party accepted Israel’s right to exist—although its leaders differed in their views on whether this was an a priori right or an ex post facto right.
Regardless, the Communist Party had no interest in implicitly challenging the state’s legitimacy by commemorating the Nakba, but was more interested in promoting a civic, secular form of non-Zionist Israeli patriotism shared by Arab and Jewish citizens. A shared commemorative calendar for Arabs and Jews could have supported this civic identity.
As the most important official public holiday in Israel not rooted in Jewish religious tradition, Independence Day was considered to have a higher potential for cross-confessional inclusion if reinterpreted to fit a universalistic ideology. Accordingly, until 1987, the party did not reject the celebrations on Independence Day but instead tried to de-Zionize the day both by reshaping its meaning as a civic holiday and by presenting the 1948 war as an anti-imperialist war rather than a Zionist war.
This rhetoric did not change even after the 1965 split in the party that left al-Ittihad, the party’s newpaper,in the hands of the faction that was considered to be closer to Arab nationalism. Before and after 1965, al-Ittihad published the party’s warm congratulations for the Day of Independence:
In these days the people of Israel celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel. Independence Day is a sacred holiday in every people’s life. We remember the sons who fell in the battle for the independence of Israel, for disconnecting the people of Israel from the colonialist countries and making it free in its homeland. The best sons of the Jewish and Arab people [sic] in Palestine fought against the foreign British rule of our country, for the liberation of the two peoples and their national independence. For those who cherish the future of our country, the Day of Israel’s Independence symbolizes the love of the homeland and the hope for its development, prosperity, peace, and security.
It is noteworthy that al-Ittihad published these texts as formal announcements of the party, but none of the writers of al-Ittihad ever signed his or her name. In the 1970s these congratulations were sarcastically criticized in public by the communists’ political rivals, and their enthusiastic tone significantly dwindled in the same decade.
For many years 15 May was not included among the dozens of memorial days celebrated in al-Ittihad. The first time a direct editorial reference to the date appeared was in 1986. In a short article the editor explained that 15 May had become a day of international solidarity with the Palestinian people because this was the day two states were supposed to be established, but the establishment of one of them, the Arab state of Palestine, was prevented by imperial forces. In other words, al-Ittihad did not protest the UN partition plan, but rather its incomplete implementation.
With the relative relaxation of the Israeli public sphere since the 1980s, public reference to the Nakba became more common in communist publications, as well as in publications of other emerging political forces. This development, however, did not include the marking of a specific date on the calendar for the Nakba. The establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in 1994, as part of the Oslo process, created the state-like mechanisms important for the creation of a stable, institutionalized political calendar. The Palestinians in Israel, although not part of the PNA, were influenced by this process. The decision of the PNA to commemorate Nakba Day in 1998 inspired Palestinians in Israel to take another step in the formalization of the memory of the Nakba.
Since 1999 the PNA has commemorated Nakba Day on 15 May (in 1998 it was commemorated on 14 May), but inside Israel this date usually has been observed only by local or partisan events. In most years since 1999, the central commemorative event of the Palestinians in Israel has been the March of Return, a mass procession to the ruins of a depopulated village during Israel’s Independence Day (which happens in May 15 only once every 19 years).
This date difference has been controversial. Those who advocate for 15 May argue that this is the date adopted by Palestinians everywhere, and the Palestinians in Israel should express their belonging to the Palestinian people by sharing the same calendar. The supporters of commemorating the Nakba on Israeli Independence Day, however, have highlighted a practical argument: since Independence Day is an official holiday in Israel anyway, it is easier to mobilize a large number of participants within Israel who have the day off from work and school.
Beyond these bare logistics, advocates of observing Nakba Day on Israeli Independence Day have also underscored the need to contrast the Palestinian and the Zionist narratives and to confront the state and the hegemonic Israeli view of 1948. In addition, they argue, many Palestinians who were socialized in the Israeli education system were accustomed to celebrating Independence Day until the late 1970s, and therefore commemorating the Nakba on the same day is an “antidote” to this false consciousness.
This article was adapted from Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendars, Monuments, and Martyrs.
Start reading Palestinian Commemoration in Israel »
Tamir Sorek is Associate Professor of Sociology and Israel Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of Arab Soccer in a Jewish State: The Integrative Enclaveand, most recently, Palestinian Commemoration in Israel.
Comments