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I live in a Jerusalem suburb called "Mevasseret Zion." This is a new and developing, primarily upper middle class Ashkenazi neighborhood. In its previous incarnation this was a failing settlement erected in 1956 and inhabited by "Moroccans," until developers and contractors came and transformed it into "Mevasseret." Within this settlement, a new-immigrants "absorption center" was established which today serves mainly "Ethiopians." This absorption center arouses the fear of some of the new residents of "Mevasseret" and the envy of young couples from the descendants of the veteran residents. By the way, when I chose to move to "Mevasseret Zion," one of my significant considerations was ideological. I did not want to live across the "Green Line" and to regard my self as a "settler." Soon after our arrival Palestinian laborers from the villages and the refugee camps in the area came to work in our house and in the surroundings, and they did not call the place "Mevasseret" but rather for them, even until today, the place has remained "Qalunya." This was not the first time that I had encountered Palestinians, from all social classes - from simple day workers to colleagues, professors in universities - who sat with me to tell their family's stories, from where and to where they were expelled or fled in 1948 and what happened to each family member in great, often obsessive, detail. I will confess, more than once I was tempted to pull out a counter-narrative - to tell my tale and that of my family, of what happened to us in "our" Holocaust. My reasons were mixed. On one hand I wanted to demonstrate empathy and to say to my partner how much I understand him since I too was not a stranger to catastrophe and to being a refugee. On the other hand, the instinct was to present narrative versus narrative, catastrophe versus catastrophe, in order to "balance" the situation and to reach a certain "equilibrium of catastrophes." In the case of Qalunya there might have been even more than that: a certain justification of my personal presence in the place. But in most cases I overcame the immediate impulse and refrained from telling story versus story. I refrained from telling a counter-narrative because I felt that al-Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 is incommensurable with the Holocaust, except at one point. Both events left collective and personal traumas on the two nations, and they are living in the shadow of these traumas until today. It is impossible to understand their culture and their responses without understanding the centrality of these events in their identity and their memory. Thus, I was very happy to read a few months ago an article in this spirit by Edward Said on the Holocaust, an article that was written as usual with the intellectual courage that characterizes Said. Indeed in 1948 the Jews carried out ethnic cleansing and most of the Arab inhabitants of the territory upon which the Israeli state was constituted were brutally uprooted from their homes, often accompanied by incidents of massacre, rape and looting. As a result of this, the Palestinian collectivity collapsed as a social and political entity and became largely a refugee-camp-people and a people-of-exiles. But even a brutal ethnic cleansing and expulsion cannot be compared with systematic genocide, that was indeed primarily directed against the Jews. It was also a crime unprecedented in scope against all humanity, and was intended to create in the end a world order in which a group that was constructed as one "race" would rule over all the other "races." From a third perspective, the introduction of the Holocaust into the discourse and the conflict between us and the Palestinians is insufferable because the Palestinians are not an "involved party" to the Holocaust, except in the way that all humanity is involved in it. Not so the Nakba, which was directly caused as part of the founding story of the Jewish nation-state. But the story is even more complex. The place where I live is apparently identified with the biblical city "Motza," and it is in fact located next to present-day Motza, an additional suburb of Jewish Jerusalem. The emperor Vespasian turned it into a Roman soldier colony named "Colonia Amosa," which became a Byzantine settlement called "Koloneia," a name that the Arabs conquerors adopted almost unchanged in expression when they conquered the land in the 7th century. By the way, all of this instructive information on the place I live I found in a volume written by the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi. This volume serves as a sort of memorial to the Arab settlements and neighborhoods that were and are no more, following the 1948 war and the colonization of the land by the Jews. From this book I also learned that before 1948 there lived in Qalunya in 156 houses, about 900 Arab villagers. Tourists and pilgrims reported of rich village with relatively fancy homes in comparison with other Arab villages, with citrus groves, and with a travelers'-inn - the last resting-place before Jerusalem. The village was attacked and conquered by Hagana forces as part of "Operation Nachshon," on April 11, 1948. Benny Morris tells that the Jewish forces remained there for two days to ensure the total destruction of the village, most of whose residents had apparently fled already on April 9, following reports of the massacre at the nearby Deir Yassin. Not that all these mixed historical events grants me a greater right in my eyes to live there, since if one skips over 2000 years in the time tunnel, one does not have the right to demand from the Palestinians who lived there to skip over 51 years. And in general, this whole strange race of "who was there first?" is another one of the absurdities shared between the Palestinians and us. Moreover, the Zionist narrative which demands the restoration of the situation that was allegedly existing 2000 years ago seemingly gives credence to the demand to restore the situation to what it was 51 years ago. But the story of the place I live in is nothing but an allegory of what happened in this entire land before I immigrated to it. Between 700-800,000 Arabs were uprooted from close to 400 Arab settlements. Most of these settlements were wiped off the face of the earth, and a few of which were resettled by Jewish immigrants and their names Hebraicized. A small number of their inhabitants were killed in battles, or died of starvation and illness, and the lion's share of them became refugees and were dispersed throughout the entire region and the world. Some of the refugees were "internal," meaning those who fled or were driven out from their permanent homes, and despite remaining within the boundaries of the state of Israel, were not permitted to return to their homes. Their property as "present absentees" was confiscated and nationalized. This ethnic cleansing that was carried out in 1948 should be seen in its historical context. Indeed the results of the war were a great catastrophe for Palestinian society and caused indescribable human suffering for generations, suffering that still goes on today. But it is necessary to recognize that these results were not guaranteed from the start, and that there was a reasonable possibility at that same point in time that it would be the Jewish immigrant-settler society that would collapse and be destroyed. Both sides regarded the situation as a zero-sum war following which only one of the two communities would survive politically. That at least was the subjective and honest feeling among the Jews who had just begun to absorb the results of the Holocaust and its meaning. The possibility of another Holocaust in Palestine terrified the Jews and their military doctrine stood in the shadow of this trauma. The connection between the Jewish Holocaust and the Arab catastrophe exists also in Palestinian historiography, but the context and its meaning is different. The Palestinian complaint on this is familiar and clear: the Europeans and the Americans, the Christians and the "Westerners" indeed perpetrated a terrible crime against the Jewish people, which is itself a "Western invention." Some carried out the extermination and some closed their eyes and did nothing to prevent the extermination. After they committed their crimes against the Jews, they dissociated themselves from the responsibility and made the Arab-Oriental people pay the full price for these crimes by helping to dispossess them from their land, and thus compounded one crime with another. No wonder, therefore, the deep resentment many of the Palestinian Arabs feel towards the "West," and perhaps especially so of those who have themselves become more culturally "Western" than most "Westerners." As said, the trauma of the expulsion and the dispersion - a tragedy perceived as both personal and national - is until today shaping the Palestinian experience more than any other event. Like the Holocaust, in the harnessing of the Nakba for the purpose of building the collective identity there are constructive and creative principles alongside destructive and obsessive principles in terms of the Palestinian political, cultural and social behavior. This creativity found expression in literature and poetry for the construction of national collective memory, identities and narratives that mixed the old with the new. In time, the poet Fadwa Tuqan would confirm that "in 1948 my father died and Palestine was lost...these events gave me the ability to write the nationalist poetry that my father always wanted me to write." A popular culture coming from songs and ballads, poetry and prose, was created around three central topics on the mythical timeline past-present-future: memory of the lost Garden from which the Palestinians were expelled; the bitter lamentation on the present, the desire for revenge and restoration; and the description of the future victorious return to the field, the vineyard, the house, the settlement and the homeland. The further the Palestinians were from Palestine geographically and politically, and the less they were in contact with Jews and with Israel, the more intense the mythic principles grew in their consciousness together with hatred and the aspiration for revenge. Those who were in close, often intimate - often too intimate - contact with the concrete "Zionist entity" (mainly the "1948 Arabs") learned to recognize us well, our language, our mores, and the variety and multivocality within us and our culture. The same is true of the relations between us and the laborers and prisoners from the occupied territories following the 1967 war. Thus, on the one hand, arose the resentment and the feeling of injustice over what was done to them in the past and continues to be done in the present. On the other hand, the Jewish society inspired among some Palestinians a mixture of appreciation and jealousy of its material and spiritual culture and its military power. The more these Palestinians recognized us. And most of them recognize us better than we recognize and value them. The more it penetrated Palestinian consciousness that in the current socio-political context the Israeli state and society is an inalterable fact of life. Therefore it is better to find some modus vivendi with it and even to come to terms with its existence and to arrive at a tolerable arrangement with it. The recognition that an arrangement like this is preferable to the perpetuation of the Palestinian suffering and its be queathal from generation to generation was a real revolution in the Palestinian political thinking. Recently, some of their intellectuals, like our intellectuals of the 1930's, have even begun to dream of a binational state. Either way, a growing portion of the Palestinians, particularly those who live in the territories conquered by Israel in 1967, are prepared, for lack of choice, to relinquish the dream of "Greater Palestine." Despite the injustice in this concession, to relinquish their family property and part of their national assets, on condition that they get their own national satisfaction. Such a compromise must not completely curb their social and economic development and that their honor will not be completely trampled upon. In exchange the Palestinians expect from us - that even if we will not return to them their lands and homes that were usurped from them in 1948, at least we will recognize their catastrophe and their suffering, and that our society and state were founded and built upon the ruins of the Arab society and culture. In the symbolic field, the Palestinians seemingly do not even expect us to ask for their forgiveness - just that we recognize the facts. In the political and practical realm, they are entitled to expect that we will take direct responsibility, as a society and as a state for the rehabilitation of the Palestinian refugee society that we have created. Also, they have every right to demand that we will not force upon them a "subcontractor" regime such as Arafat's that violates their human rights. But at the first stage, it seems to me that the very recognition of the Palestinian narrative, collective memory, and suffering and its incorporation as part of "our" narrative, as we are a part of "their" narrative, is necessary for the maturation of Israeli society itself. Our feeling of strength as an am chazak, - a strong nation, is our ability to look self-critically in the mirror with the knowledge that the more the Palestinian society and people is rehabilitated, the better it will be for us as well, as Jews and as human beings. Thus, if the past, with all its burdens, cannot be forgotten either by us or by the Palestinians, my suggestion is at least to create a common and empathetic narrative of the past, where each of us recognizes the suffering of the "Other." Baruch Kimmerling |