Freedom to Nakba

May 14 is celebrated in Israel as “Independence Day,” since it marks the end of British colonial rule over what had been the British Mandate of Palestine, and the proclamation of the new state of Israel. One day later, May 15, Palestinians commemorate the violent expulsion of around 850,000 Palestinians from their homeland, that started with the attack on Tiberias City on December 22, 1947. By January 3, 1949, 437 cities and villages had been destroyed and depopulated: 295 of them were obliterated through assaults or expulsion orders by Zionist troops,106 were depopulated in the midst of psychological warfare caused by the fall of neighboring villages or towns, and 36 fell victim to outright massacres committed by Zionist fighters. Many of the refugees fled to Gaza.

Palestinians refer to these 13 months as the beginning of the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe.” Every year since 1998, it has been commemorated on May 15 with the “Palestinian March of Return.” This year, however, the Association for the Defense of the Rights for the Internally Displaced Persons in Israel was forced to cancel the March. Organizers were informed that a crowd larger than 700 people or the presence of Palestinian flags would lead to “immediate police intervention.” Already since 2011, the “Nakba Law” made the commemoration ever harder, prohibiting the allocation of funds to all institutions that engaged in academic, cultural, artistic, or political activities that observe the Palestinian Nakba Day as a day of mourning. But things have become much worse.

After October 7, 2023, in May 2024, Sabreen Msarwi, a middle school teacher in Tayibe, was fired for participating in the March, and last April, in Tel Aviv, Meir Baruchin, a 62-year-old high school teacher who had been teaching history and civics for 35 years, was arrested for his Facebook posts that pleaded against the dehumanization of Palestinians: “For most Israelis, if you say Palestinian, they automatically think terrorists. They have no name, no face, no family, no hope, no plans – nothing.” For no other reason than refusing to engage in this multi-leveled erasure, for no other reason than defending Palestinian human and political rights, Baruchin was locked up for four days as a “high-risk detainee” in solitary confinement, while his apartment was ransacked by Israeli authorities.

It is particularly calamitous that the State of Israel, whose government claims to speak for all Jews worldwide, criminalizes remembrance, when, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his pathbreaking book Zakhor (Hebrew for “Remember!”) teaches us, remembrance is a religious commandment in the Torah, especially the remembrance of Exodus, the liberation from captivity and enslavement. Moreover, as the historian Enzo Traverso has argued, the “civil religion” of Holocaust memory has for decades “served as a paradigm for the remembrance of other genocides and crimes against humanity.” Traverso warns that if this “sacred and institutionalized memory serves only to support Israel and attack the defenders of the Palestinian cause on the pretext of antisemitism, our moral, political, and epistemological bearings will become unmoored, with devastating consequences.”

Excerpted: ‘Independence Day, Nakba Day, and the Starvation of Gaza’. Courtesy: Commondreams.org