PETER BEINART ON THE NAKBA
Today, May 15, 2023, is the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel by the survivors of a great crime against humanity - the Holocaust - by the commission of another great crime against humanity - the Nakba.
Cross-posted from Peter Beinart’s Substack:
In America, Jewish Leaders Deny the Nakba. In Israel, They Celebrate It.
I wanted to say something about the debate that’s been taking place over the last few days in United States about the 75th anniversary of the Nakba. I can’t remember a time when there was this much conversation about the Nakba. It’s partly, of course, because it’s the 75th anniversary of both Israel’s creation, and the 75th anniversary of the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949. That’s part of the reason. I think the other reason that there’s been more discussion about the Nakba is because Palestinian voices are gaining more influence in the American public discourse. And in particular, we now have one member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, who is really dedicated to bringing the Nakba to public attention. I’m not sure there has been such a politician like that, a member of Congress like that in my memory. And so, she booked a room, as many of you may know, in the House of Representatives to do a public commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, which led Speaker Kevin McCarthy to cancel the room. And then she did it in the Senate because Bernie Sanders provided a room there. But that itself, it seems to me, is a marker of progress because in the past I don’t think there would have been a politician who would have stuck their neck out to try to hold a public commemoration to begin with. So, the fact that it produced this backlash was a sign of the fact that the issue is kind of more on the table for discussion in Washington than it was.
But the way it’s on the table, or the way that American politicians, pro-Israel politicians and kind of pro-Israel American Jewish organizations respond to this conversation of the Nakba I think is really telling. And what’s telling about it is that it’s very different than the way the Israeli government talks about the Nakba. And this is a symptom I think of something really significant about the moment we’re in, which is that on a whole range of issues, the way the Israeli government speaks cannot be taken and adopted by its defenders in the United States. Because the language of the current Israeli government is so explicitly racist, so explicitly kind of outside of liberal democratic norms that American Jewish organizations and pro-Israel politicians essentially have to come up with their own completely different discourse in which to try to delegitimize Palestinian claims. They can’t simply borrow what the Israeli government is saying because what the Israeli government is saying doesn’t fit within the terms of American Jewish and pro-Israel discourse, which tries to kind of justify things within a liberal democratic and humanitarian framework.
And so, what you saw was that the response from American politicians, and from Jewish establishment organizations to the discussion of the Nakba, was to essentially erase the Nakba. And the way that politicians did this—and my Jewish Currents colleague Ariel Angel notes this in her excellent essay, where she quotes Nevada Sen. Jackie Rosen. She quotes Jackie Rosen as saying, ‘calling the establishment of the world’s only Jewish state a catastrophe is deeply offensive.’ Of course, Nakba means catastrophe. So, what Jackie Rosen does is she completely ignores the fact, right, that 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in fear, that Palestinian society was destroyed. That she erases, and she says how outrageous it is, and how offensive it is that these people are calling Israel’s creation a catastrophe, as if somehow, they’re only upset because it’s not that Israel did anything that would have made them upset, right? When you get rid of the expulsion part, and you say they’re calling Israel’s creation a catastrophe, then you make it seem as if Palestinians are either completely irrational because what reason would they have to be upset at a Jewish state, or that they’re just antisemitic, right? They just hated the Jewish state because they hate Jews, which is the kind of general tenor of establishment Jewish and much Washington discourse. So, the Nakba is erased. Many, many different Jewish organizations essentially made this move. They just disregarded the whole expulsion part, right, which is what the Nakba is about, and said: how antisemitic you are for calling the creation of a Jewish state a catastrophe. It must mean that you really just don’t like Jews. That was essentially the main cause of set of arguments.
But the Israeli government’s leaders are not saying that at all. And my friend, Yehuda Shaul, from Breaking the Silence, noted this in a tweet, which I put in the text of the newsletter. But it’s also something I noted in a piece I wrote recently in Jewish Currents, which is that the leaders of this Israeli government are not denying the Nakba. They’re not doing the thing that their American Jewish defenders are doing. They are saying something quite different, which is: yes, there was a mass expulsion in 1948. It was good. And, if you’re not careful, we might do something like that again. Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister who oversees the civilian administration in the West Bank has been very explicit about the idea that there might need to be another mass expulsion. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister. But not only them, as Yehuda points out, but also, I point out of my piece: Yoav Gallant, the Defense Minister; Tzachi Hanegbi, the National Security Advisor; Avi Dichter, former head of Shinbet, who’s now the Agriculture Minister. All of these are Likud members, right? All of them have in recent years essentially used the idea of a Nakba as a threat. They’ve basically said to Palestinians: if you don’t clean up your act, if you keep resisting in ways that we don’t like, we might do another Nakba. Which, of course, acknowledges that there was a first Nakba—there was a mass expulsion event in 1948—and essentially backhandedly celebrates that and says: we might need to do that again.
The American Jewish establishment organizations, and figures like Jackie Rosen, can’t say that, right? That’s kind of outside of the bounds, I think, of kind of mainstream pro-Israel discourse, which is still based on the idea that Israel is a thriving liberal democracy, which shares all these liberal democratic humanitarian values with the United States, and that people just don’t recognize that because they’re antisemitic. So, if you’re operating in that framework, you can’t very well say: yes, Israel was born with an act of mass expulsion, and it was good, and Israel might need to do it again because the Palestinians are not accepting their lack of basic rights. That’s something which is really difficult to say. Maybe on the far right of the Republican party. But it’s not easy for establishment American Jewish organizations or Democratic Senators like Jackie Rosen to say. So, they have to make this other move, which is essentially basically to kind of pretend that the expulsions didn’t take place at all.
And I really do think this is a feature of this moment, which is that the Israeli government and its supporters are operating in a very different ideological universe than the ideological universe that kind of has long defined pro-Israel discourse in the United States. There’s just a kind of open racism that they are comfortable with in their language, and a kind of a frank, you know, understanding that Israel was in the past and does now need to potentially to expel Palestinians to continue to function, in their view, as a successful Jewish state. And these are things that are really difficult for American Jewish leaders to say. And so, this is the kind of disconnect that we have. And I think that one of the things that I would be worried about—if I were someone like Jackie Rosen, or a group like the Anti-Defamation League, or the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, all of which kind of were extremely angry at Rashida Tlaib for trying to do this Nakba commemoration, and congratulated Kevin McCarthy for shutting it down—I would be worried about the fact that Americans are able to hear what the Israeli government is saying for itself. And, therefore, the sanitized arguments that are being made in the United States are actually undermined and contradicted by what the Israeli government is saying itself.
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This is a tragedy for both societies..... as the Jewish officer said at the Wailing Wall when his unit liberated it in 1967, "Help us, God. We won."
The late and great Burr Tilstrom once performed a brilliant hand puppet vignette on NBC, when they had an experimental TV show on Saturdays. It was not the well-known "Berlin Wall" piece, but a similar one. In it, a hand in a black leather glove is a dictator abusing his subjects. Finally, an individual stands up to him and attacks him. They fight, and the oppressed hand beats and slays the dictator. He then looks at the dead gloved hand and touches the glove. Then he removes the glove and puts it on. In just a few moments, he becomes the next dictator, no different from the one he killed.....
Subjection and oppression all depend on power - who has it and who does not. This sad state of affairs has been played out many times - that it is Israel this time is astoundingly sad, but not really out of the bounds of possibility. Democracy is fragile, and there are those who would co-opt it for their own purposes. If we are not careful, we may be next - something wicked this way comes.....
The inhumanity of it all! About the terror of Nazi Germany, the expression resounded ‘first they came for the Jews….!’ And so the rallying cry must become ‘
First they came for the Palestinians!’ Here in America where all too many red states legislatures are slashing the concept of ‘separation of church and state ‘ from their state funding budgets!