Contested Land, Contested Memory Read online

  Advance Praise for Contested Land, Contested Memory

  “Contested Land, Contested Memory is a beautifully written book that provides an essential perspective on a topic that could not be more urgent: the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine as it unfolds against the backdrop of two peoples’ tragic pasts. Working from interviews with scholars, activists, and ordinary people, Jo Roberts captures the voices of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in all their diversity, pain, and eloquence. Deeply knowledgeable about the history and politics of the region and sensitive to the texture of individual lives, she brings together traumatic memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba without relativizing either history and without losing sight of the claims to justice that remain unfulfilled.

  — Professor Michael Rothberg, director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative at the University of Illinois and author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

  “Displaced and traumatized European Jews saw the events of 1948 as an independence war; Palestinian Arabs, displaced and traumatized in their turn, saw this war as al-Nakba. This compelling and compassionate book offers fresh insight into how these divergent histories reverberate in Israel today, examining how selective memories of suffering that exclude the ‘other’ impede reconciliation and a just peace.”

  — Mubarak Awad, founder, Palestinian Center for the

  Study of Nonviolence; founder and director, Palestinian Center for

  Democracy and Elections, West Bank and Gaza

  “The strength of this thoughtful book is not only its clear, cogent presentation of complex concepts, but also Jo Roberts’ skill in exploring the emotional history of Israelis and Palestinians. Given that emotions guide the political behavior of both parties, this nuanced, empathic, and knowledgeable book is an important read for supporters of each (or of both), and for people seeking a book through which to enter the charged field of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

  — Hillel Cohen, Israeli historian and journalist,

  author of The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem

  “Contemporary Israel is a land haunted by the ghosts of two staggering catastrophes. These ghosts live in the nightmarish knowledge of what was done by the Germans to the Jews of Europe and feed off denial of the raw injustice of what was done by Jews to the Arabs of Palestine. In this moving, lyrical, and very important book, with some of the bravest and most honest of Israelis and Palestinians as guides, Roberts offers readers an intimate, often searing tour of the country’s psychological landscape.”

  — Professor Ian Lustick, Bess W. Heyman Chair of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; founder and past president of the

  Association for Israel Studies

  Contested Land,

  Contested Memory

  Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the

  Ghosts of Catastrophe

  JO ROBERTS

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 1948

  2 Catastrophe and Memory

  3 The “New Israelis”

  4 Reshaping the Landscape

  5 Knowing the Land

  6 Ghosts of the Holocaust

  7 “All this is part of the Nakba”

  8 Ghosts of the Nakba

  9 Histories Flowing Together

  Appendix: The Balfour Declaration

  Notes

  Glossary

  About the Author

  List of Maps

  The State of Israel in 1949

  Partition and Armistice Borders

  Sites of Arab Villages Abandoned During the 1948 War

  Maps drawn by Claire Huang Kinsley

  Acknowledgements

  First of all, my deep gratitude to the many Israelis, Jewish and Palestinian, who took the time to meet and talk with me, in cafés, workplaces, and homes across the country — historians, journalists, and activists; community leaders and organizers; civil servants, diplomats, and politicians; high-school teachers and university professors; architects and film-makers; Palestinian Israelis displaced in 1948 and Jewish Israelis who fought in the 1948 War; and Jewish-Israeli residents of former Arab villages. Many thanks to Muhammad Abu al-Hayyja, Suliman Abu Obiad, Ismail Abu Schehadeh, Sami Abu Schehadeh, Khalil Almour, Dahoud Badr, Shaban Balaha, Daphne Banai, Mara Ben Dov, Meron Benvenisti, Eitan Bronstein, Hillel Cohen, Miki Cohen, Shlomit Dank, Tamar Eshel, Roi Fabian, Talia Fried, Amaya Galili, Fakhri Geday, Raneen Geries, Rafi Greenberg, Uri Hadar, Marzuq Halabi, Noga Kadman, Naftali Kadmon, Ruby and Rabbi Jay Karzen, Ram Loevy, Khaled Mahamid, Rawda Makhoul, Rotem Mor, Benny Morris, Norma Musih, Ilan Pappé, Yeela Raanan, Dani Rosenberg, Haj Salim, Abed Satel, Yshay Shechter, Barbara Schmutzler, Tom Segev, Avi Shoshani, Hanna Sama’an, Lutfia Sama’an, Wajeeh Sama’an, Yossi Wolfson, Oren Yiftachel, and Nira Yuval-Davis. Even those who did not agree with my ideas freely gave me their time and perspectives. This book would not exist without them.

  My particular thanks to Hillel Cohen, for his seemingly endless generosity and patience, and to Noga Kadman, Sami Abu Shehadeh, Uri Hadar, Sara Matthews, Yeela Raanan, and Daniel Monterescu: all read parts of the manuscript and offered insightful feedback which has greatly helped this book. All errors are my own.

  Many thanks to James Loney, Alayna Munce, Claire Huang Kinsley, and Laurie Miller for the care they took in reading through the manuscript and the thoughtful editing suggestions they made.

  For help and support in many different ways, I would like to thank Gabi Abed, Suliman Abu-Obiad and family, Ellen Adler, Michael Armstrong, Dahoud Badr, Daf, Julia Dogra-Brazell, Amaya Galili, Bill Hanna and Kathy Olenski of Acacia House Publishing Services, Dan Hunt, Meg Hyre, Rebecca Johnson, Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, Bill Kinsley, the late Mimi Lamb, Nicole Langlois, Mark Leopold, Salah Mansour, Scott Marratto, David Mastrodonato, Denise Nadeau, Dorothy Naor, Alison Norris, Jane Sammon, Abed Satel, Hilani Shehadeh, Sarah Shepherd, Rosemary Shipton, Geoff Stanners, and John Tordai.

  Particular thanks to Eitan Bronstein and Raneen Geries for their generosity in putting me in touch with people to interview.

  Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Works in Progress and Writers’ Reserve programs and to the Toronto Arts Council for their much-appreciated financial support.

  Thanks to Arthur Kleinman for taking the time to send me an encouraging email years ago when I was considering studying social suffering.

  And thanks again to Claire: for her artistic skill in drawing the maps, for her invaluable perspective as the woman on the Clapham omnibus, and … well, for everything.

  The State of Israel in 1949

  Introduction

  Nira Yuval-Davis remembers sitting round the radio with her family in their Tel Aviv apartment, listening as the votes were counted at the United Nations. It was November 1947. If enough delegates voted “yes,” then they, the Jewish people of Palestine, would have a state of their own.

  As the results were announced, it seemed like the city could barely contain everyone’s joy. Spilling down onto the street, people danced and sang that night until long after young Nira, finally exhausted, had gone to sleep.

  But the U.N. General Assembly’s vote to end Britain’s colonial presence in Palestine by partitioning the land between its Arabs and Jews led to war: nights spent in air raid shelters, days of tension and fear. Nira knew nothing of what happened to the Palestinian Arabs — only that her valiant young nation had stood up against the invading armies of seven Arab nations, David against Goliath, and that it had prevailed.

  Each summer, in the years after the war, Nira’s family left the city for Tantura, a small fishing village
south of Haifa, where they and neighbours rented an old abandoned house. “We were three families occupying a big building with a yard, a bustan [orchard], a walled garden. We, the children and our mothers, stayed there for about a month in the summer, and our fathers joined us for long weekends,”[1] she writes in her essay, “The Contaminated Paradise.” In Tantura, her parents shed the stresses of their harried city lives. Nira spent idyllic days roaming the beaches and rocky inlets, disappearing for hours into the garden with a book, or exploring the old Roman fort and the empty, half-ruined houses of the seaside village. She watched sunsets over the sea, and moonlight rippling on the water. It was here that she learned to swim. For Nira, Tantura was her “magical childhood paradise.”

  As she grew to adulthood, Nira began questioning the beliefs that she’d had about her nation’s founding. After university she left Israel and eventually moved to London. She was already familiar with the Palestinian history of the 1948 War when, as a Leftist activist, she met Rafiq at a meeting on the Occupation. Rafiq was Palestinian, handsome, politically astute. They had a lot in common, and they laughed a lot together. They became lovers.

  One night, Rafiq told her how in 1948, at the age of four, he had been abandoned by his mother as she fled the Jewish soldiers attacking her village. Taken in by relatives, he was raised by them in exile. His mother, in a different country, never claimed him, and he had never forgiven her. Moved by his story, she asked him the name of his village. “Tantura,” he replied.

  The revelation was so devastating for Nira that she ended the relationship. Her memories felt “invaded,” “dispossessed,” she writes: “He took away my childhood haven.”

  Jewish Israelis and Palestinians both remember the land as their own, but their memories, individual and collective, are utterly different. Two competing narratives of historical suffering frame the conflict between them, two peoples whose dreams of nationhood are bound to the same territory.

  Israeli Ashkenazi Jews remember how the vision of a new Jewish society in Palestine germinated out of centuries of anti-Semitic persecution and violence. In the 1880s, state-supported pogroms in Russia and Russian-occupied Poland and Ukraine drove the first Zionist settlers to try to make that vision real. They bought land and worked it in hardscrabble pioneer settlements that slowly grew into villages and towns. Then the Nazis overran Europe, with their Final Solution to “the Jewish problem.” Forced into death camps, enslaved, starved, and gassed, six million Jews perished. Under the shadow of the Holocaust, or Shoah, settlers and survivors fought together in the 1948 War of Independence to birth their Jewish state.

  But Palestinians remember 1948 as the year of the Nakba. In a war that most of them never fought in, nearly three-quarters of a million people fled into an exile from which they have never been able to return.[2] These Arabs of Palestine became a displaced people who lost their historic homeland and everything that went with it: their land, their homes, their possessions, and their entire way of life. Over a million first, second, and third-generation refugees still live in refugee camps in neighbouring territories. Instead of the nation state they too had been promised when Britain’s colonial mandate over Palestine came to an end, the land was divided between the new state of Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.

  Nakba (in Arabic) and Shoah (in Hebrew) mean the same thing: Catastrophe. For Israelis and for Palestinians, the remembered history of a traumatic past has moulded their common understanding of who they are as a people. These catastrophes continue to mark the generations that follow — the descendants of Jews murdered in Auschwitz or Lodz or Babi Yar, and of Palestinians evicted into impoverished exile — and energize the force fields of collective memory they inhabit.

  After the 1948 War, the founding story of the state that took shape in Jewish Israeli collective memory did not include the disquieting narrative of the Palestinian Arabs and their removal. There were few Israelis who had not lost friends or family members in the Holocaust or the War, or been damaged themselves. Their new state was shelter from that traumatic past and security against a similar future, and there was no room for anything that might threaten that — including the story of the Palestinian catastrophe.

  As I researched the Palestinian Nakba, I became fascinated by Israel’s relationship with this difficult alternative narrative of its founding. How, I wondered, does the shadow of the Holocaust reach from the past into the psyches of Israelis today, and obscure this other history? Some 160,000 Palestinian Arabs remained in the new state after the 1948 War, and now make up some 20 percent of Israel’s population — how do these Palestinian Israelis experience the burden of their antagonistic dual identity, and how do they remember the trauma of their past? And what of Jewish Israelis who hear of the Nakba — how does it alter their perceptions of the politics, and the landscape, of Israel?

  The path that brought me to write about this troubled history began in a soup kitchen in New York City. I’d trained as a lawyer in my native Britain, but was dissatisfied, yearning for a practical way of integrating my faith and political commitment. I found it at the Catholic Worker, a lay community with an uncompromising anarchist philosophy of nonviolence, simplicity, political activism, and, above all, hospitality to those in need. At Maryhouse, a rambling former music school, some thirty people lived as a large, sometimes chaotic, extended family. Some had come from the streets or from mental hospitals, others were drawn by the desire to live differently; a different kind of need. Maryhouse was home to me for six years.

  It was here that I met Kassie Temple. Kassie, who had studied for her Ph.D. in religion under Canadian philosopher George Grant, had been a mainstay of the community since 1976. She had a fierce intellect and total fidelity to the needs of the people she lived with and who she met through our daily soup kitchen. A devout Christian, she also had a profound reverence for Judaism. For several decades Kassie would travel up to a yeshiva on the Upper West Side for weekly Scripture classes. Tirelessly busy the rest of the time, Saturdays she remained in her room, studying Hebrew scripture, writing, synthesising. Her love of learning spilled over to any who would listen, which I loved to do. While we chopped vegetables for the lunchtime soup-pot, Kassie would passionately recount what she had learned in class that week, or would apply her Jewish exegetical tools to the Christian scriptures. She could talk for hours, and sometimes did.

  Kassie taught me about contemporary Christianity’s casual erasure of Judaism; how the “Christ-killer” rhetoric of old had largely been replaced by a supercessionist narrative of Jews as the morally rigid and legalistic adherents of a dusty Old Testament, eclipsed by the Christian New Testament of grace, freedom, and love. She lent me André Schwartz-Bart’s Last of the Just, and I began to learn of the history of economic persecution, blood libel, and pogroms that marked Western Christianity’s historical engagement with Judaism, and which paved the way for the Holocaust. An avid student of history, I was amazed by how little of this I knew.

  I wrote frequently for the community’s newspaper, the Catholic Worker, and eventually became managing editor. Co-founded by journalist and social-justice luminary Dorothy Day, the paper had a print run of ninety thousand and was one of the most influential voices in the Catholic Left. Though fearless in tackling some of the day’s thorniest issues, it nevertheless avoided speaking about the situation in Israel’s Occupied Territories. Like other members of our editorial board, Kassie had little time for specifically Christian peacemaking efforts or commentary on the subject. “Let a couple of hundred years pass. Then maybe we can start telling Jews how to be peaceful,” she would say, her voice hardening.

  That was why, when I volunteered as a Human Rights Observer in the West Bank some years later, it was with a small, secular NGO, the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS). It was early summer. As I walked through Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport with its luminous, Spartan architecture, I saw a stack of tourist brochures and picked one up, looking for a map. Since childhood, I’ve loved maps; pestering a family
friend who worked as a travel agent to send me any spare copies, I would memorize cities and coastlines, trace imaginary journeys through Greece and China. The Israeli tourist brochure did not disappoint. I’d planned a few days travelling in Israel and quickly located my route — Tel Aviv–Jaffa, Jerusalem, Masada. But when I looked for Ramallah, the city I’d be passing through in a week’s time, it wasn’t there. Nor, indeed, was the West Bank. Everything between the 1967 Green Line and Jordan was unmarked empty space.

  IWPS was based in Hares, a village not far from Nablus. I’d read a lot about the political situation in the Middle East, but I was unprepared for the myriad humiliations faced by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories: the raw sewage I saw spilling down a hillside from a settlement into a once-fertile valley; the olive groves and farmers’ fields torn up to make way for the Wall; the unpredictable, listless hours of waiting at checkpoints; having to apply to the Israeli authorities for a permit to work or to travel, and risking being coerced into spying on your neighbours in order to get it; the quiet desperation of a middle class who hadn’t been paid for months because of economic sanctions.

  Perhaps most disturbing were the settlements, sprawling across hilltop after hilltop and dominating the villages and fields beneath them. Hares is close to Ariel, a settlement large enough to be considered an Israeli city. Ariel is primarily an economic rather than an ideological settlement; most people came for the good, cheap housing and tax breaks rather than to reclaim their religious heritage, and most commute daily into Tel Aviv. Yet the impact of their presence is devastating for nearby villagers: the lands around Hares were being ripped by bulldozers for the construction of a new road, parallel to the old, so that commuting settlers would not have to drive on the same roads as Palestinians.