Illustration by Nino Jose Heredia
On the 19th of April this year President Obama sent a warm message to Benjamin Netanyahu celebrating the continuing friendship between Israel and the USA that dates from mere “minutes” after the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948. That ‘strong, unbreakable bond’ extends to the USA’s continued support for Israel in spite of international outrage at its illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, the humanitarian crimes against the people of Gaza, its attacks on Beirut and Lebanon, and a catalogue of human rights violations, war crimes, and, of course, the contested legitimacy of the Israeli State itself. But whilst Obama stressed the historic significance of this “happy day” for Israel, Hillary Clinton alluded to the ongoing difficulties of establishing equality and peace in the area. Peace in the Middle East, notwithstanding the committment to Israel, needed to include “Palestinians, and all the people of the region security, prosperity, and the opportunity to live up to their full God-given potential.”
The Israeli celebratory dinner in Washington (which included the culturally disputed hummous) must have been a self-congratulatory affair. But Israel’s independence celebration has a sombre flipside, the Palestinian anniversary of Nakba on the 15th of May. Nakba day – “the day of catastrophe” – marks the official dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their land. In May 1948 at least 80% of Palestinians were ejected from their homes, many more lost their lives in the conflict leading up to the creation of Israel and many more died in the violence and poverty which is the Nakba’s legacy. This year Nakba day seems to have been strangely muted in the Western press, with one feature on the BBC that I could find, though there was a demonstration at Downing Street. Few commentators made mention of the historical dispossession that Israel is founded on. The myth that “Palestine was a country with no people for people with no country” (a phrase originating with an English clergyman, it’s worth noting) seems to have accepted by much of the media, resulting in a strangely foreshortened view of politics and imperialism in the Middle East, where Arab nationalism seems only to have become a problem in the last twenty years.
This amnesiac tendency means maintaining Nakba Day is even more important today. When the mass media is fundamentally disinterested in the experience of disempowered and disinherited peoples the articulation of counter-history becomes a cultural necessity. It remembers, and confirms, the obscured violence upon which the Israeli state is built. That Nakba day represents a real threat to the perceived legitimacy of the Israeli state can be seen in recent attempts to suppress its public commemoration. Imperialism would conveniently forget, erase and purge from this atrocity from memory.
Yet Nakba day, unlike many anniversaries, commemorates an ongoing dispossession, the consequences of which are economic, political and ideological as well as measured in human lives. Remembrance and solidarity with the Palestinian catastrophe acts as a direct call not merely for restitution, justice and peace but for the international community to reassess what constitutes moral order in a global perspective. Recalling the tragedy reaffirms a continuing need for justice.
