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Nakba

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The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة, romanized: an-Nakbah, lit. '"disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"'),[1] also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian people.[2][3] The term is also used to describe ongoing persecution, displacement, and occupation of the Palestinians, both in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region.[4][5][6][7]

The foundational events of the Nakba took place during and shortly after the 1947–1949 Palestine war, including 78% of the geopolitical entity then known as Palestine being declared as Israel, the exodus of 700,000 Palestinians, the related depopulation and destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and subsequent geographical erasure, the denial of the Palestinian right of return, the creation of permanent Palestinian refugees and the "shattering of Palestinian society".[8][9][10][11]

The Nakba greatly influenced the Palestinian culture and is a foundational symbol of Palestinian identity, together with "Handala" and the symbolic key. Countless books, songs and poems have been written about the Nakba.[12]

Components of the Nakba

The Nakba encompasses the displacement, dispossession, statelessness and fracturing of Palestinian society.[2][3]

Displacement

Dispossession and erasure

Statelessness

Fracturing of society

Terminology

 
Constantin Zureiq's 1948 book Ma'na al-Nakba, which coined use of the term.

The term "Nakba" was first applied to the events of 1948 by Constantin Zureiq, a professor of history at the American University of Beirut, in his 1948 book "Ma'na al-Nakba" (The Meaning of the Disaster).[13] Zureiq wrote that "the tragic aspect of the Nakba is related to the fact that it is not a regular misfortune or a temporal evil, but a Disaster in the very essence of the word, one of the most difficult that Arabs have ever known over their long history."[1]

The word was used again one year later by the Palestinian poet Burhan al-Deen al-Abushi.[1] Zureiq's students subsequently founded the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1952, one of the first post-Nakba Palestinian political movements. In a six volume encyclopedia Al-Nakba: Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis Wal-Firdaws al-Mafqud (The Catastrophe: The Catastrophe of Jerusalem and the Lost Paradise) published between 1958-60,[14] Aref al-Aref wrote: "How Can I call it but Nakba? When we the Arab people generally and the Palestinians particularly, faced such a disaster (Nakba) that we never faced like it along the centuries, our homeland was sealed, we [were] expelled from our country, and we lost many of our beloved sons."[1]

Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari also used the term Nakba in the title of his book "Sir al Nakba" (The Secret behind the Disaster) written in 1955. Use of the term has evolved over time.[15]

Commemoration

Main article: Nakba Day

In the Palestinian calendar, the day after Israel declared independence (15 May) is observed as Nakba Day.[16]

Nakba denial and memoricide

In May 2009 Yisrael Beiteinu introduced a bill that would outlaw all Nakba commemorations, with a three-year prison sentence for such acts of remembrance.[17] Following public criticism the bill draft was changed, the prison sentence dropped and instead the Minister of Finance would have the authority to reduce state funding for Israeli institutions that hold the commemorations. The new draft was approved by the Knesset in March 2011.[18][19] The implementation of the new law unintentionally promoted knowledge of the Nakba within Israeli society, an example of the Streisand effect.[20]

Long term implications

The most important long term implications of the Nakba for the Palestinian people were the loss of their homeland, the fragmentation and marginalization of their national community, and their transformation into a stateless people.[21]

References

  1. ^ a b c d Honaida Ghanim (2009). "Poetics of Disaster: Nationalism, gender, and social change among Palestinian poets in Israel after Nakba". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Vol. 22. pp. 23–39.
  2. ^ a b Webman 2009, p. 29: "The Nakba represented the defeat, displacement, dispossession, exile, dependence, insecurity, lack of statehood, and fight for survival of the Palestinians."
  3. ^ a b Sa'di 2002, p. 175: "for Palestinians, Al-Nakbah represents, among many other things, the loss of the homeland, the disintegration of society, the frustration of national aspirations, and the beginning of a hasty process of destruction of their culture."
  4. ^ Hanan Ashrawi, Address by Ms. Hanan Ashrawi, Durban (South Africa), 28 August 2001. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances: "a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba, as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, "apartheid, racism, and victimization" (original emphasis).
  5. ^ Saeb Erekat, 15 May 2016, Haaretz, Israel Must Recognize Its Responsibility for the Nakba, the Palestinian Tragedy, "The two-part makeup of the Nakba was borne through the destruction of Palestine and the construction of Israel. It encompasses around 350,000 internally displaced Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is seen through a racist legislative framework which legitimized the theft of Palestinian refugee land as enumerated in the Absentee Property Law... For Palestinians worldwide, the Nakba was not merely a day in history 68 years ago, but an entire system of daily forced subjugation and dispossession culminating in today’s Apartheid regime."
  6. ^ Sa'di & Abu-Lughod 2007, p. 10: "For Palestinians, still living their dispossession, still struggling or hoping for return, many under military occupation, many still immersed in matters of survival, the past is neither distant nor over. Unlike many historical experiences discussed in the literature on trauma, such as the Blitz, the merciless bombing of Hamburg and Dresden by the Allies at the closing stage of World War II, the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence, or the World Trade Center attack, which lasted for a limited period of time (the longest being the Algerian war of independence, lasting eight years), the Nakba is not over yet; after almost sixty years neither the Palestinians nor Israelis have yet achieved a state of normality; the violence and uprooting of Palestinians continues."
  7. ^ Manna' 2013, p. 87: "Contrary to what many think, particularly in Israel, the Nakba was not a one-time event connected to the war in Palestine and its immediate catastrophic repercussions on the Palestinians. Rather, and more correctly, it refers to the accumulated Palestinian experience since the 1948 war up to the present. After the Oslo agreements in 1993, there were hopes that the stateless Palestinian people would soon earn freedom and independence. However, the failure of the peace process to end the Israeli occupation and allow the birth of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel pushed the Palestinians back to square one. Furthermore, the erup- tion of a new cycle of violence which began in September 2000 added new dimensions to the disintegration of Palestinian society. For many Palestinians, these more recent events are adding new chapters and new meanings to the long-lived catastrophe since 1948."
  8. ^ Masalha 2012, p. 3.
  9. ^ Dajani 2005, p. 42: "The nakba is the experience that has perhaps most defined Palestinian history. For the Palestinian, it is not merely a political event — the establishment of the state of Israel on 78 percent of the territory of the Palestine Mandate, or even, primarily a humanitarian one — the creation of the modern world's most enduring refugee problem. The nakba is of existential significance to Palestinians, representing both the shattering of the Palestinian community in Palestine and the con- solidation of a shared national consciousness."
  10. ^ Sa'di & Abu-Lughod 2007, p. 3: "For Palestinians, the 1948 War led indeed to a "catastrophe." A society disintegrated, a people dispersed, and a complex and historically changing but taken for granted communal life was ended violently. The Nakba has thus become, both in Palestinian memory and history, the demarcation line between two qualitatively opposing periods. After 1948, the lives of the Palestinians at the individual, community, and national level were dramatically and irreversibly changed."
  11. ^ Khalidi, Rashid I. "Observations on the Right of Return." Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1992, pp. 29–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2537217 "Only by understanding the centrality of the catastrophe of politicide and expulsion that befell the Palestinian people - al-nakba in Arabic - is it possible to understand the Palestinians' sense of the right of retum"
  12. ^ Masalha 2012, p. 11.
  13. ^ Zureiq 1948.
  14. ^ Masalha 2012, p. 213-214.
  15. ^ Webman 2009, p. 30: Quoting Azmi Bishara in 2004: "This is our stone of Sisyphus, and the task of pushing it has been passed on from one movement to another, and in each case no sooner has a movement's ideologues exclaimed, 'I found it!' than the stone comes rolling down with a resounding crash... Our definition of the nakba has changed with every new ideology and every new definition that necessitated a change in means."
  16. ^ Bowker, Robert (2003). Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. Lynne Rienner Publishers. ISBN 1-58826-202-2, p. 96.
  17. ^ Boudreaux, Richard. "Israeli legislation raises loyalty issue", Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2009.
  18. ^ "חוק הנכבה". Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  19. ^ Vescovi 2015, p. 13.
  20. ^ Shenhav, Yehouda (4 December 2018). "The Palestinian Nabka and the Arab-Jewish Melancholy". In Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, Jonathan Boyarin (ed.). Jews and the Ends of Theory. Fordham University Press. pp. 78–. ISBN 978-0-8232-8201-2. By banning, sanctioning, and erasing, the Israeli legislature succeeded in achieving the exact opposite. This may be a perfect example of Max Weber's " unexpected consequence of human action."{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  21. ^ Manna' 2013, p. 91.

Bibliography

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