Left-wing purists are evading the truth about the Nakba

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Israel is a binational state on both sides of the Green Line. Two peoples live here. Anyone who ignores that basic fact is cruel, stupid and blind – or willfully blind. Anyone who doesn’t ignore reality but still chooses for their own reasons to bypass the keystone, the great taboo, the elephant in the room, is doomed to fail in achieving a more optimistic horizon, and in the meantime will be surprised anew each time the demons and ghosts of the past awaken for yet another round of violence, loathing and misunderstanding.

The watershed is 1948. But that intersection is jammed: In a historiographic and sociopolitical process that welds together a number of local and global tendencies, it has been largely relegated to the margins in the last 20 years. Instead of occupying the central place that it should have, it is managed by a collection of extremists, purists, liars and tellers of half-truths (which, it should be noted, are worse than lies). Inevitably, the general public shuns the subject. The mainstream, which by its nature is already mired in quotidian life and its hardships, or in the latest news sensation, has become inattentive and disinterested.

On the Israeli right, we’re talking about all the propagandists and deniers: populist and militant politicians, research institutes funded by Judeo-evangelical money from America, slick movements like Im Tirzu (with its “Nakba? Nonsense!” slogan) and all kinds of arrogant online noisemakers who are threatening the local Palestinian community with another round of 1948.

But the real problem here actually lies with the purist left: people who toe the line according to the dominant fashions among the American and Western European progressive left, take a vow of loyalty to rapacious identity politics and to the PC dictatorship, and surrender and become addicted to the “politics of guilt.” This is the politics that sanctifies the dichotomy of victim/victimizer and oppressed/oppressor. Blind to nuance and contrasting narratives, it ignores contexts and circumstances and disdains facts that interfere with the story. The self-pleasuring of its users derives from endless wallowing in the same original sin – whether concrete, heightened, exaggerated, partial or imagined – it doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s possible to scrub it off or be scrubbed off by it.

We’re not talking about a big group. It has certain strongholds in the realms of the social sciences and humanities in academia, which are already suffering from unfortunate decline and constriction, and it also has a broad and disproportionate platform in Haaretz. Some of the members of the cult of purism and wallowing – who are well recompensed thanks to teaching posts or paid positions in all kinds of nonprofits and other organizations – definitely tend toward violence and shrillness. One would think that they would wield an insignificant influence. But an interesting mechanism is at work here. These squealing purists, along with their gangs of followers in the social networks, achieve a double effect (even if said individuals are not necessarily well-learned, may act a bit intuitively and are influenced by long-standing myths and indoctrination): Not only do their one-sidedness and sanctimoniousness plug up the ears of the general public, which can generally be said to embrace historiographic approaches, which at the end of the day are more nuanced and balanced.

Palestinian refugees in a camp just north of the Egyptian border receive their first allotment of blankets from the UN Palestine Relief Organization Jan. 1, 1949.
AP

Moreover, the wallowers and the scrubbers also oppress, silence and sow weakness and confusion among the silent majority within the liberal-democratic camp who, seven decades after the 1948 war, actually do possess the emotional and instrumental potential to deal seriously with the Nakba and its implications. After all, you have to be an ignoramus not to recognize it, be in total disconnect not to notice its remnants in every corner, and possess a heart of stone in order to disregard the loss and human pain entailed in it.

Indeed, this public, characterized politically as the “center-left bloc,” should have been the bridge to another kind of discourse – constructive and ultimately also productive – regarding the 1948 war. Perhaps assuming something like the historical role once designated to the religious Zionist movement (i.e., to forge a connection between the secular and ultra-Orthodox communities), constituting a kind of center of gravity capable of mediating and of kickstarting a dialogue which, in the end, can be shared by both Palestinians on one side and the Jewish right on the other.

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It is indisputable that a dialogue of that kind must be based solely on mutual recognition. And such recognition must be grounded in knowledge, facts and context. What happened, why did it happen, where did it happen over 70 years ago? There must be a Sisyphean effort to liberate history, at least to some degree, from the grip of ideology. But Nakba purists scorn that old-fashioned approach.

Thus, for example, in a recent column in these pages (“The saddest village in Israel,” June 23), Gideon Levy described Yacoub Odeh, his guide in the abandoned Arab village of Lifta at the western entrance to Jerusalem, in the following terms: “At 81, Odeh looks 60 and climbs Lifta’s paths like a 40-year-old; he knows every fig tree and remembers every home; each wall here evokes memories. He’s a retired teacher who lives in the neighborhood of Shoafat in East Jerusalem. In the past, he spent 17 years in an Israeli prison, but he won’t talk about that today, because it’s unrelated to the matter at hand, which is the struggle to preserve Lifta.”

It’s Odeh’s right to choose not to talk “about that,” and it becomes clear very quickly why that is his preference. But when his interviewer is all agog at his noble mien and waxes poetic about the beauty of Odeh’s native village, which was crushed by the jaws of the Zionist occupier – it is also his duty to tell his readers the whole truth. And the truth is that Odeh was imprisoned by Israeli authorities after being convicted of complicity in the 1969 murder of two Israeli students and the wounding of nine others in a terrorist attack perpetrated at a Jerusalem supermarket by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was sentenced to three life terms and was released early in the 1985 “Jibril deal” prisoner swap.

Palestinian refugees en route from Galilee to Lebanon, in 1948.
Jim Pringle / AP

One can argue that one side’s terrorist is the other side’s freedom fighter, and that many Israelis who have served in the Israel Defense Forces and in the security establishment have blood on their hands – that peace is made with enemies. But first it’s necessary to tell the truth – and the whole truth. Exactly in the same way that it’s possible and even admirable to describe with heartfelt emotion the world that froze and no longer exists in abandoned Lifta. There’s no one who has visited the ruins of an Arab village who isn’t familiar with that chilling and echoing silence. But to complete the picture it’s necessary to relate what brought about Lifta’s devastation.

The village, which once dominated the entrance to Jerusalem, served as a base for Palestinians to launch offensive operations and for sniping at nearby Jewish neighborhoods. On the eve of its conquest 73 years ago, residents of Lifta were ordered by the Palestinian militias to leave their homes temporarily for Ramallah, so that a strategic battle could be fought against Jewish forces from that site and its immediate environs. To the villagers’ misfortune, the battle, and indeed the entire war, ended in their defeat.

For the Palestinians, that defeat was definitely a catastrophe (nakba), and of epic proportions: It’s estimated that 700,000 of them left, fled or were expelled from their homes and from their towns and villages. The 1948 war, which precipitated that situation, actually started in 1947 – initially as a civil war, at the initiative of the Palestinians who refused to accept the United Nations partition plan. When the British Mandate ended, the hostilities developed into an all-out war in which the Jewish minority fought for its existence against the Palestinians in the country and a series of regular armies fielded by neighboring countries.

It’s permissible to argue that the Palestinians had the right to oppose the partitioning of their land, thus benefiting those they perceived as invaders who had only recently arrived. It’s equally permissible to justify, on those grounds, the Palestinians’ decision to launch a war of destruction, even at the expense of a people that had just recently suffered a genocide of millions, mass expulsion and the wholesale plunder of property and land (nakba to the power of 10, or 100). But the politics of guilt, in the spirit of the world’s progressive left, insists on fleeing from a series of key questions. Who started the war? What was the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv, supposed to do? What would have happened if the results had been different?

Such questions are perceived today in certain circles as anachronistic and childish. But there is something more anachronistic and childish than that: the one-sided purist wallowing that lays all the responsibility on the defender – and zero responsibility on the aggressor.