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CounterPunch
October
4, 2002
The Truth and
Violence of a Symbolic Act
When Israel's Flag Flies Atop the
Palestinian Authority Compound
by NORMAN MADARASZ
On September 21, 2002, Tsahal planted the flag
bearing King David's Star on the ruined site of the Palestinian
Authority's compound in Ramallah. Whether done by order or through
the folly of a hyper-patriotic shocktrooper, the symbolism of
the act brought the muddled intentions behind the destructive
will that drives Israel's strategy into the clarity of daylight.
Under siege, Chairman Arafat was free to leave, Ariel Sharon
declared. The radio message could have also added that so were
all Palestinians from the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River,
as well as those from the Gaza strip.
After weeks of newspapers being justifiably
slammed for their slanted coverage of the war, suddenly the fortune
of some foreign eyes caught a glimmer of truth. Jamie Tarabay
of the Associated Press was there to report that "at one
point, Israel troops raised a flag on a nearby building in the
compound. When told of the flag, Arafat got up to take a look
from a window, said Hani al-Hassan, a senior PLO official trapped
inside." Could anything else have been as obvious to him
as what that flag symbolized?
Israel planted its flag to seal the tautening
of the internationally condemned destruction of the Palestinian
Authority headquarters and land. The act ends up spinning history
forward to back. Foreign occupation and seizure of land -- AKA
land grabbing -- forces us all to look back and witness history's
unfolding as if it were now a message coded in reverse. To look
back to a time before the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and criminal
suicide bombings, to a time prior to the assassination by a Jewish
fanatic of a warrior turned leader of peace, General and Prime
Minister Itzak Rabin. Landing there we face an era of hopelessness
before the name Oslo arose to frame the opposite.
Further back on that journey, we would
be lifted to an era prior to the PLO, Beirut, Sabra and Shatila
and Munich, prior to the Six-Day War and occupation of what was
left of Palestinian land -- Arab land. The fact that UN General
Assembly Resolution 194 and Security Council Resolution 242 against
Israel have been left unenforced by the key players on the Security
Council itself should not justify our own forgetting. Their abnegation
has de facto abandoned the fate of Palestinians to destiny. Even
then history would still drive us back from "Palestinian
terrorists" to "PLO guerillas", and upward and
back to the Arab resistance.
Out of breath, we reach 1948 and the
Nakbah.
With an estimated 150,000 Palestinians
having fled to Jordan since the onset of Sharon's invasion of
the Palestinian territories, we are gazing once again at one
of the great flights of Palestinian Arabs from their homes. It
is being officially whispered as indirectly part of a "Transfer
Option", while according to countless reports it seems more
like a "Transfer and Fill Option". A pattern has been
set to life on this narrow contested strip of land. Every space
vacated by Palestinians is filled just as quickly by settler
Jews. And the major factor permutating the present from the past
is that the New York Times covers the onrush as if it were occurring
painfully but justifiably in the historical precedence of our
own backyard.
To that extent, the flag as it was hoisted
before Arafat's gaze is the stamp of the remarkably well-orchestrated
continuation, indeed drive to completion, of the Nakbah. As much
as we have tried thinking otherwise by weighing all of the options,
the interpretation keeps insistently pointing in that direction.
The onus is not on the Palestinians to prove that it is the extension
of the Nakbah; it is up to Israel's Jewish population to now
convince us that it isn't. Still, it all seems to pale terribly
when compared to 1948, when Israel took over 80% of Palestinian
land, inhabited land. However much it might pale in relation
to the real events, to memory's longing the Nakbah is now little
else but oblivion. Thankfully there are researchers and intellectuals
left to keep reminding us. The effort is to have their conclusions
be known in North America.
On May 17, 2002, al-Ahram weekly, the
English-language Egyptian political news review, featured an
article penned by Ilan Pappe on the events of 1948 called "Demons
of the Nakbah". The writer is a professor of political science
at Haifa University and a notable member of Israel's New Historians.
He sought to inform his non-Arab readers of the significance
of the term Nakbah -- which means "catastrophe" in
Arabic --, and his Arab readers of the oblivion into which the
term had fallen for Jews.
In the late 1980s, toward the end of
the first Intifada, Professor Pappe and other Israeli colleagues
began questioning the official history of the founding of Israel.
He has contextualized these origins as part of a "denial
process", a continually suppressed element of Israeli self-awareness
regarding the sources of today's conflict. No people likes to
be told how oblivious it is. Yet with the phenomenon of mass
psychologies being fairly well-studied in our times, every people
owes itself the work of being reminded of the historical blindspots
its passions brutally veil.
The symptom and residue of the oblivion
peers out from behind the pernicious question of the return of
Palestinian refugees to Israel, the right to which was decreed
in UN Resolution 194. Among other aspects of the failed Arafat/Barak
accord of 2000, the refugee question was to foment the dispute
even more than conflict over land. According to Pappel's account,
it was this issue that brought the peace accord to a deadlock.
By now it is well known to critical minds that Barak did not
yield to all of the Palestinian Authority's demands, as frequently
suggested in the Western press. Only 70% of the occupied West
Bank of the Jordan River were ever up for discussion.
As for the refugee question, close to
the entire political class of Israel put a stop to it. As Pappe
emphasized in his article, "the worst fear of the Israeli
negotiators was that there was a possibility that Israel's responsibility
for the 1948 catastrophe would now become a negotiable issue,
and this 'danger' was, accordingly, immediately confronted. In
the Israeli media and parliament, the Knesset, a consensual position
was formulated: no Israeli negotiator would be allowed even to
discuss the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the
homes they had occupied before 1948. The Knesset passed a law
to this effect, and Barak made a public commitment to it on the
stairs of the plane that was taking him to Camp David."
After some initial success in the course
of the 1990s to bring the Nakbah into public debate, Professor
Pappe has been witness to the politically sponsored retraction
of the circumstances of its occurrence -- retraction marshalled
at the highest political levels. According to his account, the
current minister of education in the Sharon government is responsible
for "beginning the systematic removal of any textbook or
school syllabus that refers to the Nakbah, even marginally. Similar
instructions have been given to the public broadcasting authorities."
Israel may be lauded for its democratic constitution and institutions.
By contrast, the limits of what is acceptable to think and believe
have proven to be irremediably set.
But what is the refugee question exactly?
And why is 1948 being discussed here as a result of the fact
that Tsahal planted the Israeli flag atop the ruins of the Palestinian
Authority complex, Chairman Arafat's rubbled headquarters, to
which they had laid siege and subsequently destroyed? Lest anyone
forget, the act of planting the flag on territory that is not
one's own, is an act of conquest and appropriation. These were
the principles that resulted in the Nakbah.
On the question of 1948, Professor Pappe
explains that while doing doctoral research at Oxford, he "found
strong proof for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians
from Palestine, and I was taken aback by the speed at which the
judaisation of the formerly Palestinian villages and neighborhoods
was carried out. These villages, from which the Palestinian population
had been evicted in 1948, were renamed and resettled within a
matter of months."
To the list of the Palestinian villages
of Israel, we will eventually have to start adding the refugee
camps of the occupied territories, like Jenin. Adjacent to the
border of Jordan, Western media purposely misses the outflow
of Palestinians. Sharon's problem now is how to get them out
of Gaza without attracting even more elements to a rapidly growing
dossier of ethnic cleansing, 'as they are also free to leave'.
By 1948, an era also spoken about at
length by Edward Said as the one during which he and his family
became exiles, Palestinian territory was being annexed at a feverish
pace. The UN General Assembly recognized the partitioning of
British-governed Palestine into an Arab state and Jewish state
in November 1947 (Resolution 181). By the time a narrow strip
of land was carved, stretching land-locked from the Sinai upward
to the Mediterranean in the vicinity of Tel Aviv, but remaining
squeezed against the Sea until the land north of Haifa, only
to then curb inward to the land known as Eastern Galilee and
bordered from the north by Lebanon, a more united land mass had
already been designed by Zionist insurgents. The UN act legitimated
the grounds for the massive land grabbing of 1948, which led
to Israel's independence. Mixed with terrorist tactics on the
part of the Stern gang, it meant to symbolize reparation on the
part of the Allied victors for the Extermination that none of
them were able to prevent in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany.
The "coming of Messianic time" was the Christian West's
gift of moral reparation for the Shoah, and perhaps for centuries
of oppression. It was also the moment when centuries of peaceful
coexistence between Jews, Arabs and Berbers, further west in
the Maghreb, began to unravel.
Was it justified? History can be judged
in hindsight only through the irresolution that interpretive
and self-interested litigation fosters. But what remains of that
past history in today's representation is what Pappe goes on
to show in his article. In minute detail he disassembles the
historical fabrication that brings the allure of legitimacy in
favor of what Israeli spokespersons plead for in today's conflict,
i.e. the refusal by its neighbors to accept its right to nationhood.
Pappe shows the attempt undertaken by different sectors of the
Israeli population to rid the memory of Arab residences and lands
from the cities now known as Israeli, renewing as it were with
Galilee and Judea. He accuses the historical negligence in the
field of "Middle Eastern Studies", which persisted
well into the first Intifada, of barely mentioning Palestinians
and the lives they led throughout the centuries in that area.
Furthermore Pappe emphasizes that the
academics familiar with elements of Palestinian life were mainly
those who had been Israeli intelligence experts. Other researchers,
who rely on historical accounts, have found little if anything
pertinent to use for compiling their study. In other words, the
eyewitnesses had left.
On May 14, 1948, the leaders of the Jewish
community in what was then British-ruled Palestine gathered in
the Tel Aviv museum to declare the founding of Israel. In an
interview given on Radio France Culture for a program celebrating
Israel's fiftieth anniversary, the former US Ambassador to the
UN, Ms Jeanne Kirkpatrick revealed an essential historical key
to the American and Israeli relationship. She recalled a discussion
with Golda Meier, the late former Prime Minister would have spoken
of how America and Israel are bound by a common spirit owing
to their experience as settler states.
Planting a flag on foreign territory
has one meaning and one meaning alone: conquest. Whether accidental
or intentional, this act has shown once and for all the power
and violence of symbolism, and the truth it can also convey.
It confirmed the objectives of the Sharon cabinet, annexation
of all the territories, further legitimized after Palestinians
were pushed to the brink of desperation, acted out in the criminal
hopelessness of suicide bombings.
On that final note, what history teaches
is never final. Be reminded Jews, Arabs, Christians and atheists
of all ilk: there has never been a popular insurrection in history
- not one - in which the ruling power has not treated the insurgents
as "terrorists". There has never been one in which
the ruling power has claimed that now, this time for sure, they
are really terrorists. After the blood letting of an initial
colonial campaign, fully justified in the eyes of the conquerors,
only terrorism could come to dishevel manifest destiny. History
may legitimate occupation, but historical repetition betrays
it.
Professor Pappe's commitment to the historical
sciences and the fair and accurate representation of where its
discoveries may lead has ended up jeopardizing his career. In
May, the University of Haifa decided to subject him to a trial
for comments he was alleged to have made of faculty members regarding
their reception of a master's thesis developed under his supervision.
The expulsion hearing arose from Pappe's effort to defend the
research of Teddy Katz, a former Kibbutz member in his late 50s.
Mr. Katz received his Master's degree from the university in
1999. His research told the story of a little-known slaughter
of hundreds of unarmed Arab fighters by Jewish militias during
the 1948 war of independence in the Palestinian village of Tantura.
An international campaign ensued, demanding
that Haifa University withhold its standard of academic freedom.
Just like the charges against Professor Pappe have only been
suspended, as he has emphasized, "but not dropped,"
so also has the Israeli flag been withdrawn from the P.A headquarters.
Yet its intent - at least as far as the Sharon government is
concerned - has not been lifted. Internationally condemned for
the destruction of the Palestinian Authority, the siege continues.
Norman Madarasz,
Ph.D., has contributed to Gabriel Riera's (editor) "Alain
Badiou: Philosophy under Conditions", forthcoming from SUNY
Press. He writes from Rio de Janeiro, and welcomes comments at
normanmadarasz@hotmail.com
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