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Nakba Day

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mjl0509 (talk | contribs) at 16:14, 15 May 2011 (→Commemoration: Totally NPOV addition. I'm assuming today's events will need to be added to the page, but that is a blatantly uncited way to sum them up.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Part of a series on the
Nakba
Precipitating events
  • Background
1948 expulsion and flight
Discourse
Notable writers
Symbols and memory
Ongoing
Lists
Palestinian girl in a protest on Nakba Day 2010, Hebron, West Bank. Her sign says "Surely we will return, Palestine."

Nakba Day (Arabic: يوم النكبة Yawm an-Nakbah, meaning "day of the catastrophe") is an annual day of commemoration for the Palestinian people of the displacement that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.[1]

Defining Nakba

Main article: 1948 Palestinian exodus

During the 1948 Palestine War, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled, and hundreds of Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed.[2][3] The vast majority of Palestinian refugees, both those outside the 1949 armistice lines at the war's conclusion and those internally displaced, were barred by the newly declared state of Israel from returning to their homes or reclaiming their property.[2][3] This dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people is known to them as al-Nakba, meaning "the castastrope," or "the disaster."[4][5][6]

The term was first used to reference these events in the summer of 1948 by the Syrian writer Constantine Zurayk in his work Ma'na al-Nakba ("The Meaning of the Nakba"; published in English in 1956).[7] Initially, its use among Palestinians was not universal. For example, many years after 1948, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon avoided and even actively resisted using the term, because it lent permanency to a situation they viewed as temporary, and they often insisted on being called "returnees."[8] In the 1950s and 1960s, terms they used to describe the events of 1948 were more eupheumistic and included al-ightisab ("the rape"), al-ahdath ("the events"), al-hijra ("the exodus"), and lamma sharna wa tla'na ("when we blackened our faces and left").[8] Nakba narratives were avoided by the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon in the 1970s, in favor of a narrative of revolution and renewal.[8] Interest in the Nakba by organizations representing refugees in Lebanon surged in the 1990s due to the perception that the refugees' right of return might be negotiated away in exchange for Palestinian statehood, and the desire was to send a clear message to the international community that this right was non-negotiable.[8]

Though the Nakba refers to the events of 1948, their continued salience due to the irresolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has prompted Palestinians like Mahmoud Darwish to describe the Nakba as, "an extended present that promises to continue in the future."[5]

Timing

Nakba Day is generally commemorated on May 15, the day after the Gregorian calendar date for Israel's Independence.

In Israel, Nakba Day events by Arab citizens have been held on Israel's independence day, celebrated according to the Hebrew calendar date. Because of the differences between the Hebrew and the Gregorian calendars, Independence Day and the official May 15 date for Nakba Day usually only coincide every 19 years.[9]

Commemoration

Commemoration of the Nakba by Arab citizens of Israel who are internally displaced persons as a result of the 1948 war has been practiced for decades, but until the early 1990s was relatively weak.[10] Initially, the memory of the catastrope of 1948 was personal and communal in character and families or members of a given village would use the day to gather at the site of their former villages.[10] Small scale commemorations of the tenth anniversary in the form of silent vigils were held by Arab students at a few schools in Israel in 1958, despite attempts by the Israeli authorities to thwart them.[11] Visits to the sites of former villages became increasingly visible after the events of Land Day in 1976.[10] In the wake up of the failure of the 1991 Madrid Conference to broach the subject of refugees, the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced in Israel was founded to organize a March of Return to the site of a different village every year on May 15, so as to place the issue on the Israeli public agenda.[12] By the early 1990s, annual commemorations of the day by Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel held a prominent place in the community's public discourse.[10][13]

Meron Benvenisti writes that it was "[...] Israeli Arabs who taught the residents of the territories to commemorate Nakba Day."[14] Palestinians in the occupied territories were called upon to commemorate May 15 as day of national mourning by the Palestine Liberation Organization's United National Command of the Uprising during the First Intifada in 1988.[15] The day was inaugurated by Yasser Arafat in 1998.[16]

The event is often marked by speeches and rallies by Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, in Palestinian refugee camps in Arab states, and in other places around the world.[17][18] Protests at times develop into clashes between Palestinians and the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.[19][20][21] In 2003 and 2004, there were demonstrations in London[22] and New York City.[23]

In 2002 Zochrot was established to organize events raising the awareness of the Nakba in Hebrew so as to bring Palestinians and Israelis closer to a true reconciliation. The name is the Hebrew feminine plural form of "remember".[10]

Objections to commemoration of Nakba

Israeli media

Criticism of the observance of Nakba Day in the Israeli media involves claims that it is marked by Palestinians to celebrate their alleged wishes for the dismantling of the Israeli state and the Jewish majority population, and that the greater tragedy resides in the inability to solidify a stronger national movement for Palestinian citizens.[24][25] Arab citizens of Israel have also been admonished for observing Nakba Day in light of their relatively higher standards of living when compared to that of Palestinian residents living under Israeli military occupation,[26] or in neighbouring Arab states.

Israeli media also reports that displacement and loss of property during the 20th century is not unique to the Palestinian, and that in 1940 approximately 800,000 jews lived in Arab states (mostly in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq and Egypt), who in the following years were banished and were disinherited from most of their property.[27]

Israeli officials

  • Mention of the word 'Nakba' in Israeli textbooks was banned by the Israeli Ministry of Education in 2009.[28]

Organizations

  • Israeli group Im Tirtzu has launched a campaign, stating that "the Nakba is a myth and a scam, aimed at rewriting history and making the victim the aggressor".[31]

See also

References

  1. ^ David W. Lesch, Benjamin Frankel (2004). History in Dispute: The Middle East since 1945 (Illustrated ed.). St. James Press. p. 102. ISBN 1558624724, 9781558624726. The Palestinian recalled their "Nakba Day", their "catastrophe" - the displacement that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel - in 1948. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  2. ^ a b Morris, Benny (2003). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00967-7, p. 604.
  3. ^ a b Khalidi, Walid (Ed.). (1992). All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies. ISBN 0-88728-224-5.
  4. ^ Samih K. Farsoun (2004). Culture and customs of the Palestinians (Illustrated ed.). Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 14. ISBN 0313320519, 9780313320514. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  5. ^ a b Derek Gregory (2004). The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Illustrated, reprint ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. p. 86. ISBN 1577180909, 9781577180906. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  6. ^ Prior to its adoption by the Palestinian nationalist movement, al-Nakba was used to refer to the 1920 Battle of Maysalun, in which the French army invaded Syria and deposed Arab Revolt leader King Faisal I. (Sheleg, Yair 'Day of the citizen instead of day of the catastrophe', Haaretz, 11 May 2005.)
  7. ^ Rochelle Davis (2010). Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Ilustrated ed.). Stanford University Press. p. 237. ISBN 0804773130, 9780804773133. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  8. ^ a b c d Ahmad H. Sa'di, Lila Abu-Lughod (2007). Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory (Illustrated ed.). Columbia University Press. pp. 253–254. ISBN 0231135793, 9780231135795. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  9. ^ Hertz-Larowitz, Rachel (2003). Arab and Jewish Youth in Israel: Voicing National Injustice on Campus. Journal of Social Issues, 59(1), 51-66.
  10. ^ a b c d e Nur Masalha (2005). Catastrophe remembered: Palestine, Israel and the internal refugees : essays in memory of Edward W. Said (1935-2003). Zed Books. p. 221. ISBN 1842776231, 9781842776230. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  11. ^ Hillel Cohen (2010). Good Arabs: the Israeli security agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967 (Illustrated ed.). University of California Press. p. 142. ISBN 0520257677, 9780520257672. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  12. ^ Masalha, 2005, p. 216.
  13. ^ In 2006, for example, Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset told the Israeli newspaper Maariv: "Independence Day is your holiday, not ours. We mark this as the day of our Nakba, the tragedy that befell the Palestinian nation in 1948." (Maariv article (in Hebrew))
  14. ^ Mêrôn Benveniśtî (2007). Son of the cypresses: memories, reflections, and regrets from a political life. University of California Press. p. 164. ISBN 0520238257, 9780520238251. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
  15. ^ Speaking stones: communiqués from the Intifada underground. Syracuse University Press. 1994. p. 96. ISBN 081562607X, 9780815626077. May 15, which denotes the nakba, will be a day of national mourning and a general strike; public and private transportation will cease, and all will remain in their houses. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help)
  16. ^ Rubin, Barry and Rubin, Judith Colp (2003). Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516689-2, p. 187.
  17. ^ "Anger over Palestinian Nakba ban proposal". BBC News. 2009-05-25. Retrieved 2010-05-19.
  18. ^ Bowker, Robert (2003). Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. Lynne Rienner Publishers. ISBN 1-58826-202-2, p. 96.
  19. ^ Analysis: Why Palestinians are angry, BBC News Online, 15 May 2000.
  20. ^ Violence erupts in West Bank, BBC News Online, 15 May 2000.
  21. ^ Israel - Palestinian Violence, National Public Radio, 15 May 2000.
  22. ^ Pro-Palestine rally in London, BBC News Online, 15 May 2003.
  23. ^ Al-Nakba Day Rally in Times Square, 2004.
  24. ^ The Palestine Nakba Controversy
  25. ^ The real Nakba, By Shlomo Avineri, 09/05/2008
  26. ^ Time to stop mourning, By Meron Benvenisti
  27. ^ The Other Nakba: How Arab-Jews' property was robbed, By Tani Goldstein, 14 May 2011
  28. ^ a b Elia Zureik (2011). Elia Zureik, David Lyon, Yasmeen Abu-Laban (ed.). Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (Illustrated ed.). Taylor & Francis. p. 17. ISBN 0415588618, 9780415588614. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  29. ^ Knesset Approves Nakba Law, by Elad Benari, 23 March 2011
  30. ^ MK Zahalka: Racist laws target Arab sector, by Roni Sofer, 22 March 2011
  31. ^ Im Tirtzu new campaign: "Nakba Harta", by Amihay Ataeli, 13 May 2011
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