Blog # 18 June 22, 2014 Tel Aviv
Zochrot: Bending the arc towards justice
So why
should Jewish Israelis care about what happened to the people they defeated 67
years ago? The Arabs rejected the
Partition Plan, there was a war, (they started it), we won, yalla, move on. That is what I call the
dominant paradigm in both Israel and the US. Eitan Bronstein, founder of an
organization called Zochrot, (Remembering) is a little older and little greyer
than when I last saw him, but still driven by the need to bring the history of
the Nakba, the Palestinian experience of 1948, into Israeli consciousness. His
intensity and conviction is powerful.
I am pleased to see he has a new office that reflects the growing
success and activities of the organization.
In 2001, he was touring a Jewish National Forest and noted that while
there were signs about Roman ruins, and biblical sites and Mamelukes, there was
no documentation of an obviously neglected Palestinian village, (Imwas). “The houses were shouting to me,” the
cemetery, the stones, “like an obvious blindness.” He was working with Neve
Shalom, Wahat Salaam, the only consciously Jewish/Palestinian village devoted
to co-existence in Israel, talked with his friend Omar, and they decided to put
up signs reflecting the more recent history. This got picked up by a journalist, there was an article in
kibbutz newspapers, then a list of Palestinian villages on sites of kibbutzim.
Tom Segev wrote about this in a column in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, and
the idea took off.
Eitan
explains that this work, “Has to do with my own colonizer identity, signage is
colonizing practicing.” As Ben Gurion said, “In 1948, we took over the land,
now we have to take over the map.” Eitan states, “Our way to de-colonize is to rename.” He sees
the mission of Zochrot is to educate Israeli Jews and civil society about the
Nakba and the more controversial right of return for Palestinian refugees, and
to take responsibility for the Nakba.
This is not just Palestinian history, it is Israeli and human history,
“part of my own history.”
There are
many invisible pieces of this puzzle.
According to Eitan, the 1948 war did not happen between two sides where there
was a winner and a loser; the war was mainly between Jewish Israeli fighters
and Arab armies, not the local civilians on the ground. Israel lost some of the
battles when they encountered an Arab army: the Old City of Jerusalem or the
region of Latrun, but many of the victories were over civilians who were not
prepared to do battle. Additionally, the Nakba happened before the war, during
the war, and after the war. He
finds the most convincing evidence is the testimonies of Israeli fighters: “Expulsions
was easy, shoot a few shots, tell people to leave; it was not a military
challenge from the thousands of Palestinians.” So he sees this history as a
systematic expulsion of a civilian population by armed units followed by the
destruction of their villages to prevent return, thus the Nakba continues. He
adds that this is not the Israeli understanding of history, most now know the
word, Nakba, but most people do not really comprehend its meaning.
To
complicate matters, the Israeli government passed the Nakba Law in 2011 which creates
financial sanctions for any commemoration of the Nakba by an organization
funded by the state. On Israeli Independence Day a Jewish state should celebrate,
not mourn! This created an
atmosphere of fear and threats around the commemoration of the Nakba. On the
other hand, the law raised a lot of interest. There was a huge scandal over an
earlier law that actually said that anyone who commemorated the Nakba on Israeli
Independence Day could be sent to jail for one year. Fortunately this did not
pass. Eitan explains, imagine if
the US forbid any mourning or protest by Native Americans on July 4th
or Thanksgiving. Even Australians
remember the day they attacked and massacred the aboriginal population.
Since
Zochrot is not funded by the state, it is still a legal organization. Universities
are also closed on Independence Day, so students do not organize
commemorations. Two years ago, students at Tel Aviv University initiated a provocative
commemoration on Nakba Day which raised a lot of attention and a big argument
in the media. The university permitted the event, but the government said this
was not okay because it violated the spirit
of the Nakba Law which was to prevent all such events. At this point, Nakba
commemorations occur on May 15th, the day Israel declared
independence, but the national independence day celebrations occur according to
the Hebrew calendar, so the days are usually not the same.
I find it an
interesting historical point that while most Palestinians in Israel lived under
military rule until 1966, ie, they needed permits to travel within Israel, this
rule was lifted on Independence Day, no permits were needed. So on that day,
Palestinian families for years would visit their villages for personal, mostly
quiet, less political family gatherings.
15 years ago, they held their first March of Return on Israeli
Independence Day, so the issue is becoming increasingly politicized and public
and Zochrot is in the forefront of this struggle.
Zochrot is
involved in a number of extraordinary projects:
1.
Alternative tours like the one we did to the
destroyed village of Lifta
2.
Creating the only Hebrew map of destroyed Palestinian
villages
3.
Documenting all the destroyed villages since the
beginning of Zionism through the 1967 war, and locating 678 localities,
including 22 Jewish localities destroyed in 1948 by Arab armies and 62 Palestinian
localities destroyed before 1948. Eitan explains that when Zionists “redeemed
the land,” they destroyed the Arab structures. Land owners were sometimes Palestinian, Lebanese, and other
large, often absentee landowners. Eitan was told that the Golan was empty and
only had Syrian army bases there, but Zochrot documented 127 Syrian villages with
approximately 170,000 people.
4.
Preparing an educational study guide for high
schools. While they cannot get
officially invited to schools, they train teachers to use their material and to
include the information in their lessons.
While teachers can get fired and have been bureaucratically threatened,
Zochrot advises them to be “discrete,” to introduce the idea of “multiple
narratives.” This reality
obviously poisons the atmosphere for many teachers who want to explore this
topic in depth.
5.
Writing a very successful, practical tour guide
in Hebrew and Arabic, with 18 routes to different places in the Nakba with
photos, maps, and history
6.
Creating a book called Awda (Return) with
imagined testimonies for possible futures after the right of return for
Palestinian refugees is implemented.
There are twelve stories, six by Jews and six by Palestinians.
7.
Creating an inakba app for iphones, a free
download that uses GPS, and accurately shows all villages, photos, and related information
8.
And there are a host of educational workshops,
symposiums, film festivals, websites, and coalitions with other groups such as Badil,
Al Haq, and Palestinians in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, as well as Israeli
Zochrot’s most controversial work, I suspect, is on the
right of return for Palestinian refugees. Eitan explains, “We support the right
of return based on the right to choose or to compensate with reparations; it is
the choice of the refugees.” How
to actualize this is a very big challenge, it is clearly not practical for
people to expect to return to their old homes, often places are not there, some
are vacant, or now encompass a different community. “We try to show how
implementation is not putting us in more danger and will actually favor peace
and prosperity.” He is not talking about symbolic numbers, like the Geneva Initiative
and other agreements. “We do not accept that ideology,” and as an example he
explains: in practical terms, find out how many people want to return. “So
let’s say here are one million Jaffa refugees, maybe 100,000 may return. “How do we do that, so must prepare to
absorb these folks, so when, how, time frame, (one million Russians came, it
takes time).”
He continues that he favors a one state solution where everyone
can live in equality, where the state is no longer a Jewish state. “This is the
core reason of the conflict and is very problematic. In the context of the Mideast,
this is a good recipe for constant war. We already have a big Israeli
collective here, a culture. Hebrew speakers will continue and be enriched by
Arabs. Everyone should be
bilingual, why not? We are in the Mideast; Jewish tradition
and culture will continue but not as a state.”
So how did Eitan come to
such an idealistic and some might consider radical position? “We began right after
the onset of the Second Intifada, a crisis of the left.” In October 2000, he
had, “My last crisis with Zionism. I finally understood that the problem is
Zionism. Many more Israelis are exposed to this knowledge,” but they are still
a minority. Many Israelis acknowledge the Nakba, but cannot deal with the right
of return, but “it is not possible to dismiss.” Thinking back to the hundreds of children we saw playing in
the barren concrete streets of the Balata and Aida Refugee Camps and the
massive security apparatus and concrete walls that the Israeli government and
military continue to erect in their increasingly ghettoized efforts to protect
themselves, it is clear that it is time to think beyond the dominant paradigm
and Zochrot is clearly a good place to start.
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