* Signalement Palestina – Israël *
One year matters more than any other for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1948, Jews realized their wildly improbable dream of a state, and Palestinians experienced the mass flight and expulsion called the Nakba, or catastrophe. The events are burned into the collective memories of these two peoples — often in diametrically opposed ways — and continue to shape their trajectories.
19 Feb 2024
The conversation among the panelists, which took place by video conference on Jan. 3, has been edited and condensed for clarity, with some material reordered or added from follow-up interviews.
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collage van passages uit het NYT-artikel.
Salim Tamari: The mandate period completely thwarted the possibility of a common notion of citizenship. There was a period, at the end of the Ottoman era, when the new Constitution was adopted in 1908, establishing equal citizenship for all Ottoman subjects, instead of dividing Muslims from non-Muslims. Language was a very important articulator of national identity. Arabic was not only the language of the Muslims and Christians but the language of the Jews — the language of the land. The British framework changed all of that, creating three official languages, English, Hebrew and Arabic.
Itamar Rabinovich: The British made a lot of contradictory promises during the war. To persuade the Arabs to rebel against the Ottomans, they promised Hussein ibn Ali, the sharif of Mecca, who was from an important Hashemite family, a very large kingdom.
But they also promised to divide up the land with France and issued the Balfour Declaration. At the end of war, they had to reckon with these contradictory promises.
It’s the mandate that creates the political entity called Palestine. Before that, it was a geographic term. And the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism was over the question of what would be the nature of this entity — an Arab state, a Jewish state, a binational state or partition?
In 1920, we speak about Jews and Arabs. It’s only in 1948 that the Arabs become Palestinians and the Jews become Israelis.
Tamari: Sending the Jewish refugees to Palestine was a byproduct of European guilt, but a hypocritical kind of guilt because they did not want to bear the social and economic cost of absorbing the refugees themselves. The vast majority of Jewish refugees who came were not Zionists. They did not have a choice about where to go.
Penslar: It’s true that European countries did not want Jews to come back, and those who returned to Poland were persecuted and even killed. The U.S. would only take a portion of them.
A small minority of Jews who left the displaced-persons camps for Israel tried very hard to get to the U.S. But the dominant sentiment of the refugees was in favor of the creation of a Jewish state. One did not have to be ideologically Zionist to feel this way. As one friend of mine who lost her parents in the Holocaust told me, after the war many Jewish survivors simply wanted to live with other Jews.
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