In 1948, the Syrian intellectual and historian Constantine Zurayk wrote a book, The Meaning of the Disaster, which staged a major confrontation with the collapse and destruction of Palestinian society that accompanied the birth of Israel: the sweeping away of most of Palestine's Arab population by the Zionist militias and the IDF, and the failure of the Arab states to take effective action in support of their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The term 'an Nakba', 'the catastrophe' came into widespread use at least partly because of Zurayk's unsentimental and rigorous analysis: Ma'na al nakba.
Today, May 15 is called by Palestinians (and recognised by the UN as) Nakba Day, the commemoration of the disaster that overtook Palestine as the new State of Israel was born. It follows immediately on May 14, when, in 1948, David Ben-Gurion read aloud the 'Declaration of the State of Israel', at Beit Dizengoff in Tel Aviv, and, along with the other members of the Provisional State Council, signed it.
This moment of triumph and exultation for Zionism was accompanied by ethnic cleansing, murder, brute violence, chaos, social and political fragmentation and historical rupture as experienced by Palestinians.
It is essential to realise, however, that the State of Israel did not come out of nowhere, and the assault on Palestinians did not begin on May 14, 1948. The important Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi argues that the century-long war on the Palestinians began with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when the British government, which did not yet control Palestine, declared its interest in the creation of a 'Jewish homeland' in the territory. The Declaration stands as a declaration of war; indeed in its rhetoric and presuppositions it is an act of war, in its setting aside of Palestinian wishes and its negation of any sense of Palestine as a polity or of Palestinians as political subjects. The Zionist project did not start in 1948 or, indeed, in 1917. The political movement began with the publication of Herzl's Der Judenstaat in 1896 and the holding of the first meeting of the World Zionist Organisation in 1897.
In other words, the events of 1947 - 1949 were not a beginning but were, in their way, a culmination. A new state, long prepared, thought about, theorized, agitated for, planned, organised and set up ab ovo long before May 1948. The new state was a testament to Zionist determination, zeal and rigour - the product of what Edward Said called 'a discipline of detail'. It was also, of course, a testament to British vacillation, UN passivity, Arab incompetence and by and large a total lack of planning by the Palestinian elite.
Approximately 750,000 people fled historical Palestine during the Nakba. The process was accompanied, as we now know and as Palestinian historians have said for a very long time, by brutality, heartlessness, murder, cynicism and massacre.
I used to see the Nakba as the ultimate disaster which had befallen the Palestinians. And in historical terms, it remains that. But in terms of sheer violence and casualties, it was probably exceeded by the Lebanon War of 1982, when the IDF stormed north, shoving UN forces and Palestinian militias aside and arrived after about a week at the outskirts of Beirut. Israeli forces then laid siege to Beirut all summer long, lobbing thousands of artillery shells into the city and dropping thousands of bombs on a target entirely without anti-aircraft defences, pulverizing it and slaughtering tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. The world looked on aghast. Even Ronald Reagan appealed to Menachem Begin for the onslaught to stop. But no: Mr Begin, former leader of the Irgun Zionist militia notorious for the Dayr Yassin massacre of April 1948 announced that Hitler himself was hiding in Beirut and needed to be rooted out. The rooting-out duly went ahead and culminated in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, where 1700 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were savagely murdered by Israel's Phalangist allies. The IDF - 'the most moral army in the world' - looked on and played Simon and Garfunkel songs on its PA systems, occasionally shooting flares into the night sky over the camps to allow the butchery to continue.
And now we have the Gaza massacre - to call what has happened since October a 'war' is largely to bend sense - in which the casualty rates are even worse. At least 35,000 dead in seven months, of whom 70% have been women and children. And the response of the world is even more bizarre, crass and inhumane than in past times. America arms Israel to the teeth. Germany reiterates that the defence of Israel is part of its 'reason of state'. The British Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, declares that cutting of all necessities to civilians - food, water, electricity - is a legitimate act of war. The President of the European Commission, a leader with no democratic mandate in the Union or elsewhere, flies to Israel to declare her support. Irish politicians say nice things but take no practical actions. The current plans of the Irish government to recognise 'the state of Palestine' fly in the face of the complete lack of Palestinian sovereignty - an essential component of statehood - in either the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. The IDF invades Rafah, and President Biden - one of the most ferociously Zionist of American politicians, who encouraged Menachem Begin back in 1982 to go ahead and murder women and children in Lebanon - offers Israel more military aid.
The brilliant writer Pankaj Mishra wrote recently in the London Review of Books of the way that the Western governmental response to what Israel is doing amounts to a comprehensive tearing-up of the structures and values of humanitarianism, law and protection against genocide, put in place after 1945. 'Gaza after the Shoah' amounts to an evisceration of any residual right of the Western powers to claim to humanitarianism, decency, international legitimacy as their prerogatives. Gaza is not just a disaster, another Nakba, for Palestinians (and in the perfervid expressions of members of Israeli political society, cheerleading every shell and every bomb). The supposed 'Jewish state' is shredding the whole legal apparatus instituted to make sure that another holocaust could not happen. And it is being cheered on by the leaders of the Western world, enthralled by a 'McCarthyite philo-semitism' (in Nancy Fraser's words) which so clearly demonstrates the relationship of Zionism to the forces it apparently opposes. This is a moral and political disaster of the first order for the entire global system.
There is so much to read on Palestine these days that me pointing to such things may be irrelevant. But here we go.
Rashid Khalidi at Jacobin:
Seraj Assi at Jacobin:
Here is Mishra's essay at the LRB:
Jodi Dean at Verso:
Conor
