Good evening to all and thank you all for coming for this fifth annual lecture of the Center for Palestine Studies at SOAS. My name is My name is Gilbert Ashkar and I'm the chair of the center, I've been the chair of the center for the last six years, that is since its foundation. and that's actually practically my last or before the last meeting as chair of the Center for Palestine Studies. There's one more activity coming next week in which I'll be also chairing in this capacity.
After that, I'm stepping down because we have two mandates, and someone else will be replacing me as a chair of the center. So this is... A special moment for an annual lecture for a Center for Palestine Studies.
This year, as you know, is the year of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or of the also foundation of the State of Israel, which is connected to what the Palestinians and the Arabs call the Nakba. And in... Sorry, but the event is recorded and filmed, so you will find everything online. Please, no recording and no filming, because these things should be authorized in advance when people need to film. That's why we had to refuse a request for filming.
Sorry for that. But it will be online. You will see the whole lecture and this introduction. So, I was saying that this is the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, and indeed it would be difficult to find a more appropriate speaker on this occasion than Elias Khoury. I'm very happy, glad to welcome Elias, who's an old friend for me.
We are both from the same country. from Lebanon. Elias is someone who has been very intimately linked to the Palestinian issue, the Palestinian cause I should say, and the Nakba in particular is a central theme of his work and in particular two of his major novels, Gate of the Sun, which has been translated and published in English a few years ago.
and his very last one, Ghetto's Children, or Children of the Ghetto, depending on translation, which will be coming out very soon. These are among the novels that deal with the theme of the Nakba, which is also the theme of many of the other writings of Elias, which are not only novels and literature. And I should say there is a further reason why...
why probably Elias Khouri is a very appropriate person to speak of this theme. He is born the year of the Nakba, 1948, so that's also an anniversary that for him means, I'm sure, a lot. Now Elias Khouri, as I just hinted at, is a personality with very multiple dimensions. in terms of production. There is Elias Khoury, the writer, the novelist, the best known, at least in the Western world, the best known aspect of Elias Khoury.
There's Elias Khoury, the academic. And Elias Khoury, the political activist turned public intellectual with age and and status. So let me speak a little bit about these various. facets of Elias's personality.
As for the political activist turned public intellectual, Elias has been involved since his youth in the Palestinian Palestinian national movement, actually, he even joined the Palestinian national movement early on. And it's been, I mean, the issue of Palestine has been his really life concern and life theme. He was also prominent in Lebanon as an intellectual, but through a very important role also he played as the editor of the cultural supplement of one of the key main... newspapers in Lebanon, which became, under his editorialship, a political organ in addition to the very important cultural role that this played.
And Elias was one of the figures, or let me say it this way, one of the left-wing figures. along with Samir Qasir, of whom some of you, I guess, may have heard or known, who were involved in the popular uprising against the Syrian regime's domination over Lebanon in the year 2005. Samir Qasir, the person whom I just named, and who was a very close friend of Elias, was... assassinated was the first in a series of people assassinated after the uprising, not to mention the fact that the uprising was in reaction initially to the assassination of the ex-Prime Minister, former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri.
The academic, well, Elias is not only a writer, actually he's also a playwright, he's a novelist, but someone who writes about literature. and a literary critic. He has books, several books, works of literary criticism, and he has taught. I mean, when I say academic, it's in the very...
literal sense. He has taught at various universities in New York, at Columbia University, and at the NYU, New York University, and he used to spend every year a few months in New York for his teaching. I understood from him that this stopped now.
And he taught also at the American University of Beirut, at the Lebanese American University, and at the University and the Lebanese university, the public university of Lebanon. The third aspect, the third facet of Elias, the novelist, is something that is beyond my competence. I'm no specialist of literature, but for this...
I asked my colleague, Professor Wen-Chin Ouyang, to present this dimension, which is a very important dimension of... Elias Khoury's work and production. A few words about Wenxin. She was born in Taiwan and raised in Libya, and she is therefore, she defines herself as a native speaker of Arabic and Chinese. She completed her PhD at Columbia, and actually that's where she came to know Elias, and she's not.
not the only person here in this room who has known Elias as a lecturer at Colombia. And she taught at Colombia before and other places before coming here. She's the author of several books on literary criticism, on the Arabic novel, various dimensions of the the Arabic novel, so she's a very appropriate person to present our guest.
Please, Wenxin. Good evening, everyone. Marhaba Ilyas.
It is my great pleasure and indeed great great honor to be given an opportunity to say a few words about our guest of honor. Our keynote speaker, Elias Khouri, a head of the Center for Palestine Studies annual lecture on the Nakba in the present. He is, I am sure, known to you already as an avant-garde Beiruti cosmopolitan intellectual writer and critic whose 13 novels are today available in 15 languages.
And more importantly, in tonight's context, he is astonished to... supporter of Palestine and the Palestinians. His commitment to enroll in the Palestinian cause are well known. In 1967, as a 19-year-old, Elias traveled to Jordan, where he visited a Palestinian refugee camp and enlisted in Fatah, the largest resistance organization in the Palestinian liberation organization. He left Jordan after thousands of Palestinians were killed or expelled.
in the wake of an attempted coup against King Hussein, known as Black September. From 1975 to 1979, Khouri was editor of Shu'un Palestine, Palestinian Affairs. Collaborating with Mahmoud Darwish from 1981 to 1982, he was editorial director of Al-Karman.
His Palestinian experience and his intersection with post-colonial Arab and international politics, including the Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990, would become the focus of his novels. For example, in his 1998 seminal novel on the Palestinian exodus, Bab al-Shams, beautifully translated into English by Humphrey Davis as The Gate of the Sun, which came out in 2006. one is an uncompromising retelling of the story of their traumatic loss and experience of statelessness, homelessness, and exile. The Gate of the Sun, I am told, is the only Arabic novel that sells well in English. It has been made into a film, a very long one I might add, by eminent Egyptian director Yusri Nasrallah in 2003. I am sure it has been partaking in making known to the world, the plight of the Palestinians since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. But tonight, I want to go against the grain of his lecture on Daganakba in the present and say more about his impact on generations of young scholars of Arabic literature in North America and Europe. These include local scholars and Arab scholars who, for one reason or another, ended up in places like Colombia.
University or New York University, where Elias also taught. I do this very briefly. I will start with the specificity of my personal experience, then branch out to address his more global impact around an axis of three intersecting issues that have a relevance to how we do Palestine studies and more particularly Palestinian literature here at CERAS. These issues are one One, what and how to teach modern Arabic literature in the U.S. and European academic institutions, which, number two, are inexorably connected with Orientalism, and here I mean the established paradigms in U.S. and academic institutions for the study of the non-European cultural and literary production. And three, the relationship between academic pursuits and...
and activism. I met Elias Khoury possibly in 1985, I can't be sure for now, through a fellow PhD student, Samah Idrees, when I was an impressionable Chinese from Taiwan, Libyan, who three years into her PhD studies was completely disillusioned by Columbia University's Arabic Literature program. And I'll explain. The existing structures did not allow me to pursue Arabic and Chinese comparative literature.
The curriculum in pre-modern Arabic did not include Arabic critical thought and theory. And the curriculum in modern stopped at the generation of Taha Hussein and Al-Aqad. I was more particularly disillusioned by the academic and interpersonal politics. Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism had yet to have an impact on Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern studies, even at Columbia University. When Samah Idris arrived at Columbia University from Beirut, he brought a revolution with him.
He fought for contemporary writers to be read and discussed at the modern Arabic literature graduate seminars, and he played... a key role in organizing events to which key Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers and intellectuals were invited, such as Emile Habibi, Anton Chammas, and of course, Elias Khouri. These intellectuals were invited to speak and address the American public. I have known Elias Khouri and his works for more than 30 years now. I have not been privileged enough to be a member of his group.
his entourage and in Lebanese Irta has two meanings, the classical sort of entourage and the more popular gang. But I have benefited a great deal from being around them. Being antisocial and classically inclined, I prefer to hang out with the dead on a good day.
But on a bad day, I'm always happy to be dragged along to go start chasing. Reading Khoury's novels such as Little Mountain which came out in 1977, White Mask my favorite 1981 and the journey of Gandhi of Little Gandhi 1989 opened my eyes to the beauty intellectual rigor and innovations of the contemporary Arabic novel and its expensive global horizon that goes beyond let us say the influence of North America a Western Europe we need not wait for the critical establishment, which is invested in all sorts of ideological and political interests, to decide for us what to read and what to teach. Reading his classical, sorry, reading his critical essays, such as, Studies in Critique of Poetry, 1979, Lost Memory, 1979. 1982, Tajribat al-Bahat, experimenting with searching for Horizon 1984, and Zaman al-Ihtilal, a time or period of occupation, 1985, and those published in Al-Safir, where he served as the editor of the culture section, Mulhaq Thaqafi, between 1983 and 1990, first, and later, since its revival after the Civil War. reading those and listening to him talk about genealogies and new directions of Arabic narrative at graduate seminars, memorably hearing Elias dismissing the Maqamat and championing the Thousand and One Nights, Alef Layla Wa Layla, and hearing him debate the role of literature in national and international politics at conferences on the Arabic novel, memorably his exchange with Huda. Barakat in Paris, where Elias went for, we want to liberate Palestine,.
And Huda went for,,, we want to put bread on the table. Hearing all this taught me two lessons. One, that the classical is always present and must necessarily be seen through the prism of the modern, and for me to understand the classical. I must understand my position in the present. And two, that we can be both scholar and activist at the same time, that our activism need not compromise our critical stance.
And perhaps above all, that Palestine is present and everywhere when we think about the Arab world, Arab culture, and Arabic literature today. His most recent novel, Children of the Ghetto, My Name is a Child, is Adam which came out in 2016 once again epitomizes his position as writer critic and activist right and I understand that the English translation by Humphrey Davis will be coming out in a few months so as such Elias is a specter in the curriculum and ethos of Palestine studies and Arabic literature at SAAS. It is indeed our great fortune that the real flesh and blood Elias Khouri is here to talk to us tonight.
So please help me give him our warmest welcome. Thank you very much, Wenxin. There will be some time, limited time, but there will be some time for Q&As at the end of the lecture. Please. Good evening, everybody.
Thank you, Gilbert. Thank you, Wenxin. Actually, what I have said is a huge burden.
I hope that I deserve a little bit of it, at least. And thank you, Gilbert, and the Center for Political Studies for inviting me here for two reasons. First, because it gave me the opportunity to meet all of you.
And second, because it gave me the opportunity to go through this nightmare of the British visa, which is becoming something unbelievable for someone like me coming from where I come from. So with this I will begin, and the title of my presentation is Nakba, the Memory and the Present. One of the most significant moments in my life was in January 2014, when a group of about 200 young Palestinian men and women captured a piece of land.
in the outskirts of East Jerusalem and built a village of tents. This land was confiscated by the Israeli occupation and was named area of the land of Israel. E1, and it was designed to build a new Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian land. The young liberators of this piece of land named their new village Bab Shams, Gate of the Sun. And the destiny of the village, unfortunately, was not different from the destinies of hundreds of Palestinian villages that were destroyed and bulldozed by the occupying Israeli army.
The village survived three days, and after its brutal destruction, it was recreated three times with different names and destroyed three times. times. The last village to be destroyed carried the name the grandsons of Eunice. Eunice is the main protagonist of a novel published in 1998 in Beirut entitled The Gate of the Sun.
The novel narrates the stories of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and it is the story of a lover who spent his life as an infiltrator crossing the Palestinian border from Lebanon in order to meet Nahila, his wife and lover who stayed in the Galilee. And it happened that I signed this novel. The most interesting aspect of this political cultural event was not only the fact that the imaginary became a reality and that the real simulates literature.
and reproduces it, but also the fact that these young activists were facing the Nakba with their will. They declare the fact not realized by the majority of Arab and Palestinian intellectuals that the Nakba which began in 1948 is still taking place today. The Nakba is the present and not history.
In 2011, I gave a lecture in the School of Advanced Studies in Berlin, entitled The Continuous Nakba. And to my amazement, the debate that followed concentrated not on denying the Nakba as usual, the way the dominant Israeli discourse insisted on for so long, but to challenge the idea of the Nakba as a process that never stopped since 1948. Because this hypothesis will delegitimize the whole Zionist project and shed a light on its nature as a classical settler colonial project that has its roots. in the European colonial project of the 19th and early 20th century.
Edward Said, in his book, The Question of Palestine, wrote an excellent analysis of the colonial roots of the Zionist project and read it with the theoretical approach he formulated in his masterpiece, Orientalism. What the young founders of the village Bab al-Shams proved with their intuition and sense of survival was the obvious. They realized from their daily life experience under occupation that they are living under a daily existential threat that no discourse of peace or absurd negotiations about a two-state solution can cover. They are a people that must disappear, or to use the Israeli's radical innovation, they are present absence.
The idea that perplexed me. While working on my novel, The Children of the Ghetto, is this fascinating and vague concept that was formulated by the Israeli law about the present absence. This concept was designated to define the status of the Palestinians that stayed in their homeland, which will become Israel. Those of them that lost their properties by law, Because they were displaced from their villages or cities by the occupying forces and found refuge in other places inside what will become Israel, were given the name of the present absence. On the other hand, those who were forced to leave for neighboring countries, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, were given the title of absence and their properties.
were confiscated as being absentee's properties. If you were a Palestinian after the war of the Nakba of 1948, you are either a present absent or an absent. You didn't lose only your land and property, but you have lost your name also. I can realize the meaning of being absent. But the term absent-present seems totally irrational for me.
How can one be absent and present at the same time? When I first encountered this term, I thought that it is a literary metaphor, and it fits the title of a novel written by Kafka. Probably this will be the title of the third volume of my trilogy, The Children of the Ghetto. But I realized that this term became a juridical term in the only democracy of the Middle East, and the Israeli institution applied it by the force of law.
Thus, the Palestinians of Israel became the first literary character in history. that was not created by novelists or poets, and they illustrated concretely that the wild imaginary of the oppressors can be much more sophisticated than the imagination of writers. Being absent, or present absent, means that you are invisible. This invisibility is reflected in the Israeli literature through the non-existing Palestinian and or through a mute Palestinian shadow or a nomad or a child.
This amazing fact is clear in the post-state literature, where the Palestinian is pushed to become a present absent, where the Palestinian is pushed to become a present absent, when we rarely encounter him in Israeli novels. The most significant representation of the Palestinian was written by the Israeli novelist S. Yizhar in his novella Khirbet Khizra 1949, where the Israeli author creates the character of the Palestinian.
as a shadow during the occupation and destruction of a Palestinian village in southern Palestine. The interesting approach in this masterpiece is the introduction of the Palestinians as the Jews of the Jews. Analysis of the way the novel describes the Palestinian villagers will take us directly to the anti-semitic european vocabulary used to describe the jew The great moment of revelation in this novel comes when the author brings Jeremiah to his contemplations. I quote, I wanted to discover if among all these people there was a single Jeremiah, mourning and burning, forging a mouth of fury in his heart, crying out in stiff tones to the old God in heaven atop the tracks of exile. End of quote.
The Jew of the Jew was to be recreated as a shadow in Amos Oz's My Michael, or a mute Arab, even when he exists as a teenager, like Naim in Alibet Yehoshua's The Lover, or as a mythical, magical character, Hilmi, in Grossman's Smile of the Lamb. He is in these three novels a literary soul. solution to the problems of the Israeli Jewish characters.
What's amazing is that this image of the Palestinian mute child will become a paradigm in the Israeli literature and will be reproduced recently by a young writer, Alon Hillou, who is of Syrian origin, in his novel, The Rajani House, 2008, where we see the Syrian language being Here we meet Salah Rajani, a troubled Palestinian boy who suffered from a vision of the coming Palestinian disaster. The boy is like the Arab in Yehushua'a facing the forests, unable to speak, and his visions, although revealed through writing, are unsaid. With the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem in 1967, the invisible will become visible.
The Palestinians are here, and no one can deny their existence. Thus, the strategy of the continuous Nakba was to push them towards the fate of the Palestinians designed by Israel as invisibles. The destiny of the present is to become absent.
This is the guideline of the Israeli strategy in the occupied territories. And this is implemented. in a very long and sophisticated project.
Through, one, the bypass roads, where a visitor to Israel can go to the settlements of the West Bank without seeing any Palestinian. The Palestinian towns and villages are covered to the extent that they became nearly invisible. Two, the racist separation wall, which separates and confiscates lands transforming Palestinian cities into prisons in the open air.
Three, the checkpoints that destroys life and makes circulation a difficult job, if not impossible. Four, the settler enclaves inside the Palestinian neighborhoods, mainly in Jerusalem and Hebron. Fifth, the siege of Gaza, which created the biggest ghetto prison in the world. These elements are crowned by the law of nationality, which will give legitimacy to an apartheid Jewish state named Israel.
The Palestinians must disappear and the visible must vanish. I never understood the puzzles of the Zionist project till while working on the second volume of my novel, The Children of the Ghetto, I came across two shocking terms, Sabunim and Mezelmaner. and Muslim manner.
Sabunim became widely used shortly after the establishment of the Jewish state. It pointed to the survivors of the Holocaust who had made their way to the Promised Land. This pejorative term carries dual meanings, a metaphoric allusion to cowardice and a literal meaning of the word. deriving from the origin of the word sabun, meaning soap, found in both Arabic and Hebrew languages.
This is a reference to one of the alleged barbaric practices of the Nazi Holocaust, which was to produce soap from the bodies of its victims, an unfounded claim which was held by many as true at that time. Sabunim is the parallel to the term Muslim manner, Muslims, which was used to describe the weak, which was used by the Nazis to describe the weak among the Jews in Nazi camps. So identified in preparation for taking them to their deaths.
How can we understand these two terms, Sabonim and Muslims? I was faced with the ambiguity of soap for the first time when visiting an installation by the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum at the Arab World Institute in Paris in 1996. She had created a cartographer's map from 2,400 blocks of the famous Nablus soap, clearly etched... with the borders of the Israeli occupation in Palestine. The heady aroma of the Nablus Soot had permeated the open areas and corridors of the Arab World Institute and had captured all my senses. My own interpretation of the artist's interesting choice of material was that the very smell of soap made from Palestinian olive oil.
should represent the antithesis to the occupation and that the smell of the land should ultimately be able to overcome the violence, the borders and occupation. But the astonishing reaction from some Israelis to this installation was that using soap was a racist sanctioning of Nazi crimes. On being confronted with this interpretation of the Palestinian artist's work, I became at a loss at the way to find a common understanding of terminology between victim and oppressor. Indeed, does a possibility of discovering a common vocabulary exist?
If the Palestinian artist is not to be allowed to use Nablus soap for fear of stirring up a Zionist interpretation of the Bible, of her art that destroy the very essence of its humanity, how then are Palestinians to express their tragedy? Or must their tragedy be obliterated because a more tragic narrative was crafted in the gas chambers of a racist Europe? Must victims be further victimized by silencing their voices and enforcing their acceptance of their gradual elimination? nation by those who claim to be the very descendants of the victims of the Holocaust. In this case, what is the true meaning of the word Sabunim that became prevalent in Israel?
How can a true understanding of its multiple meanings be reached? The other term, Muslims, is now a blanket term used to paint every Muslim and Arab as a potential terrorist amid the re-emergence of racism and fascism in the world. Consequently, every task of... of humiliation and death must be levied by the collective Muslim and Arab worlds. In the death camps of the Nazis, the word had an entirely different meaning.
It was used to indicate that the Muslims is marked for elimination. There, on the verge of imminent death, the meanings of words become confused. In fact, words lose all meaning because the silence of the victim becomes the only language befitting the host.
horror of genocide. I do not want to analyze these two terms. I merely mention them to point out that miscomprehension is a defining facet of language. The assertion that language is a means of communication is merely an assumption that highlights only one function of language. In fact, language also creates A spectrum of nuances for the meaning of words, such that oftentimes the implicit is more significant than the apparent.
In Arabic, to its... the Arab linguist of old referred the verb to speak in Arabic to its root, kalama, which translates to the verb to wound. that a world is a wound to the soul.
We must therefore probe the true meaning of words through the association between the wounds they inflict and human suffering. Similarly, the terms Holocaust and Nakba are both surrounded by a shroud of ambiguity. While the term Holocaust or Shoah, which is used to describe the catastrophe inflicted by the Nazi death camps of World War II has become an accepted term by historians and academia in general, there remain some voices that either deny its very existence or cast suspicious over the number of its victims.
These voices may be currently inconsequential, but they embody a worrying trend accompanying the rise of the fascist right in Europe. and the United States. It carries within it the seeds of a new anti-Semitism which may take on several forms of which Islamophobia is but one.
On the other hand, the term Nakba, which is used to describe the catastrophe of the Palestinians, suffered many interpretations. The term, which was coined by Konstantin Zeray, the Damascus historian in 1921, is used to describe the catastrophe of the Palestinians. 1948 was not easily assimilated into Arab vocabulary and has only now taken its place as an autonomous definition of the Palestinian tragedy. Despite the current acceptance of the defining term, Israeli law prevents the Palestinian victims residing in Israel from commemorating the Nakba.
The Holocaust embodies the essence of European racist ideologies with their various philosophical, political, and religious roots. We may need to search for the birth of anti-Semitism. among the pages of the historians, of the historians'records of the Crusades or those of the Spanish Inquisition following the Reconquista of Andalusian Spain.
However, anti-Semitism reached its pinnacle with the barbaric final solution that the Nazis tried to implement in Europe. The Palestinian Nakba is linked to a different history. historic phenomenon defined by European expansionist colonization.
The civilizing mission resulted in the colonizing of wide regions, particularly in Africa, spreading from Algeria in the north through Rhodesia and South Africa. The Zionist project was, according to its founding fathers, a part of this phenomenon. It's true that the starting point of the Zionist movement was the colonization of the The main point of the founding fathers of the national Jewish project was the anti-Semitic reality that led mainly to the pogroms in Eastern Europe in the 19th century.
But their answer to the permitting anti-Semitism was not the only or inevitable one. Jewish options spanned national cultural integration, such as the Bund. of a national state as endorsed by the Orthodox Jewish currents because, according to them, it contradicted Jewish religious beliefs. A third option was total integration as advocated by the adherents of liberalism and Marxism.
Only at a larger stage and in conjunction with the British mandate in Palestine after World War I did the Zionist option overpower the other. possibilities and became concrete after World War two however the Zionist option remained faithful to its colonialist beginnings it was concurrently a national project as well as a colonial enterprise, wherein lies its inherent contradiction which bears no resolution. In all probability, the fusion of the Holocaust and the Zionist project was the one myth on which the State of Israel built its legitimacy, and which continues to be the weapon of choice in the face of any criticism levelled at it.
The mere mention of Israeli inhuman practices, illegal settlements in the West Bank, the siege of Gaza, and the destruction of the Arab world, all of these are the myths that Or the systematic ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem produces loud laments of anti-Semitism made possible by the alchemy of linguistic equivocation. The Palestinians refrained from utilizing the term Holocaust to describe their own catastrophe and used different terminology for the purpose. This is further indication, if one is necessary, of the essential role of the Holocaust in essential difference the two historical events in both the circumstances surrounding them and in what they signify.
Even though some Israeli practices may take us back to those of the Nazis, it's a mistake to fall into the trap of making such comparison as it would only lead to obscuring issues that color the present. This is an error committed by many Israelis, Jews, Palestinians, and Arabs, and is no less grave than the mistaken belief by some of the Palestinian leaderships in the 40s of last century that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, thereby committing the great folly of cooperating with the Nazis. Refusing to fall in the trap of such a comparison is crucial.
not only because of the enormity of the pure evil created by the Nazi horror machine, but also because of the inherent difference between the two events. The Holocaust, as a major episode in human history, highlights the ever-present possibility of sliding into racism. It ought to be a continuous reminder for the whole of the human race of the importance of standing vigil against the insidious encroachment of racism and of refuting its very assumption. The Nakba, on the other hand, is the embodiment of the colonial expansionist reality that gave birth to the apartheid. regime in South Africa, causing people everywhere to unite in the struggle against this regime led by the African National Congress in South Africa and culminating in its eradication.
The Holocaust and the Nakba are similar in that they are both relevant to the essential struggle of humanity against racism. The necessity for the memory of the Holocaust to survive as a collective human memory is only made possible by adopting a solid stance against expansionist colonial occupation of which Israel is the last remaining rampart. in today's world. Do we stand facing two memories that are in need of being harmonized? Addressing the Niqba as a memory is a trap that many may fall into regardless of becoming a collective human memory that must be preserved and whose lessons must be internalized.
It was a barbaric event that took place in a recent past, in that sense has become part of history and an inescapable truth embedded in the collective human. It must be protected from Holocaust deniers or those that attempt to use it to excuse any form of oppression, ethnic cleansing, and racism. The Nakba is an inherently different issue.
The Nakba's initial bloodied chapters were written with the forceful ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. Yet during the Oslo Accords between the Palestinians and the Israelis in 1993, the Nakba appeared almost like a nebulous memory that was put to rest by both parties through mutual compromises. However, it was... the very Oslo Accords that proved to be a mirage because they were understood differently by each party.
The Palestinians understood it to be the end point to the occupation of the West Bank. Jerusalem and Gaza, as well as the starting point for the establishment of their own state on 20 percent of their historic homeland. The Israeli establishment understood it to be a compromise that would allow them to continue to build settlements and to annex Palestinian land in exchange for allowing Palestinians the right to remain on par with the Israeli state. part of their land and to self-rule over the affairs of their designated bando's towns.
This proves the error of some Arab historians who consider the Nakba a historic event whose place is set firmly in the past. The everyday reality of life in Palestine clearly indicates that the 1948 war was merely the beginning of the catastrophe of the catastrophe. event that did not end when the ceasefire agreements of 1949 were signed.
In fact, 1948 was the beginning that continues to this day. The debate around the existence of a master plan for the expulsion of Palestinians must now be approached differently, particularly as Walid Khalidi conclusively proved the existence of such a plan valid, which was reiterated by Ilan Pape in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The expulsion of Palestinians from their villages and towns in 1948 does not give Israel the right to deny them return. and to confiscate their homes and their lands under the pretext that these are absentee properties.
The absentee's property law that reach peaks of absurdity by refraining from the property law is not a law that is in fact a law of the law. Referring to the present absent person is in fact worse than the act of its expulsion because it transforms the expulsion from an event to a continuous state. Suffice it to study the events surrounding what is referred to as the uprooted villages within the borders of Israel, such as Safouria, whose tragedy was described by its great poet Taha Muhammad Ali.
Understand? We understand that the Nakba is a continuing story. The inhabitants of Safouria, who had remained on the land of their forefathers despite fleeing their village, and who had taken refuge in neighboring Nazareth, are banned from visiting their destroyed houses or their land. Their properties were confiscated, and they remain present as citizens of Israel and absent rightful owners. Land appropriation by the Israeli state had not ceased.
Even peasants who have escaped the absent present categorization suffer from the expropriation of their agricultural properties for the declared Israeli objective of judaizing the land. The Nakba continues to this day even for those Israeli peasants. Palestinians who were denied their national identity label as Palestinians and are now referred to as Israeli Arabs.
The truth behind the current situation is perhaps best illustrated by the destruction of Al-Araqib village in the Negev by Israel more than 100 times within six years, each time after it was destroyed. rebuilt by its stubborn original inhabitants with the help of Arab and Jewish activists. While the continuing Nakba is obscured from view in Israel by the laws and legislation approved by the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, the Nakba is very conspicuous in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
Those lands that were occupied in 1967 are subject to military laws. While settlements proliferate in every corner, from Jerusalem, which is being suffocated by Jewish settlements, to the West Bank, through the Jordan Valley. The consequences of the continuing Nakba are...
nowhere clearer than in Jerusalem and Hebron, where settlers plant their communities among Palestinian neighborhoods, closing roads and turning ordinary cores into into a daily nightmare. They reach the peak of inhumanity through transforming Gaza into the biggest open-air prison in the world. In an effort to distinguish between a memory and the present, I have taken the liberty of elaborating the point in order to emphasize my hypothesis that the Nakba is not a past event that happened 70 years ago, but a historical but is a continuing painful journey that only began in 1948 and endures to this day.
Memory of a past event, however agonizing, can be addressed through remembrance and requiring those guilty of instigating evil to face up to what they have committed in preparation for turning the memory of the event into a collective human memory. hand, needs to be addressed through serious efforts to change its inequities here and now. Political, intellectual, ideological tools are required as cohesive agents to bring together all those who stand against colonialist occupation, regardless of their nationalities or their ethnic or religious affiliations.
Hence, the error of asking the mutual recognition of the Holocaust and the Nakba becomes clear. I, speaking as a human being above all else, as a Lebanese by birth and a Palestinian by affiliation, declare that I have no prerequisites for recognizing the horrors of the Holocaust, and it's in fact my duty to keep its memory alive. The Holocaust is my responsibility.
responsibility as a member of the human race, despite it having been a product of European fascism. As much, my deeply ingrained moral duty is to be an active participant in the struggle against anti-Semitism as well as all forms of racism anywhere in the world. I am proud to walk the path charted by my mentors before me, members of the Lebanese and Arab intellectuals.
activist group who formed the Anti-Fascism and Nazism League in Beirut in 1939 and were imprisoned for it by the fascist Vichy occupation regime at the time. This path leads me to continue the struggle against the Zionist colonialist occupation project in Palestine. For me, the issue is one of principle and is non-negotiable.
It also applies to the continuing Palestinian Nakba. Two wrongs do not make a right. The crime does not wipe out another, and racism is not remedied by counter-racism.
The continuing Nakba suffered by Palestinians should act as a wake-up call for the collective world conscience in an effort to defeat the last remaining colonialist occupation phenomenon in the world. The mutual recognition of the Holocaust and the Nakba is an affront to moral sensibilities. A solid moral stance is divorced from any form of negotiation, and the interplay of moralistic mirroring is irrelevant here.
In this context, it's meaningless to speak of two sides being considerate of each other, nor is empathy a relevant concept. a perpetrator and a victim, and there is no space for equating the two. The Nazi criminal in the Holocaust was the product of racism, an abhorrent ideology that should be continually repudiated and combated in whichever guise it presents itself.
The continuing Nakba, on the other hand, is the product of the colonialist occupation which internalizes racism and seeks to ethnically cleanse the land of its people. by pursuing justification through several avenues. One of them, of course, is the myth of the idea of the promised land.
In both cases... are very distinct in nature, negotiation is inappropriate. Both racism must be totally eradicated, and the Kurnoolian occupation must be dismantled while preserving the rights of those who are recently part of the landscape, because a crime is never erased by committing another. The Holocaust and the Nakba are not mirror images, but the Jew and the Palestinian. are able to become mirror images of human suffering if they disabuse themselves from the delusion of exclusionist nationalist ideologies.
The oppressed Jew in Nazi Europe is not only the mirror image of the Palestinian, but that of every human, everywhere, just as the Palestinian is the mirror image of all the expelled and oppressed peoples everywhere. image of the refugee tragedy playing out on the footsteps of the third decade and the painful cries for help emanating from Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Somali and Afghani refugees as they wade through the sea of suffering and death once called the Mediterranean Sea. This is how the Sabunism and the Muslim manner become permanent.
mirrors reflecting the pain of a common human tragedy. In this vein, we begin to understand Edward Said's description of the Palestinian as the victim of the victim. And we find our way back to the optimism of the human will amidst the pessimism of the intellect. We discover the human values that under the very threat of the threat of obliteration by the counter forces of capitalism, barbarism, racism, tyranny and extremism.
And thank you.