This week marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. That means it is also the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and subsequent displacement of over 800,000 Palestinians outside of, but also within, Israel. I have been reminded of this by students on Library Walk, but also by my friend Harris, who is involved in a group called ‘No Time to Celebrate! Jews Remember the Nakba.’
At our conference in March, ‘Post-colonial Futures in a Not Yet Post-Colonial World,‘ we were lucky enough to have in attendance, among many others from far away, a Palestinian scholar from Israel. I was her host for part of the week, and it was from her that I first heard the term Nakba, Arabic for ‘catastrophe’ or ‘disaster.’ Her scholarship aimed to firmly place Palestinians within an international indigenous framework, something that seems an obvious fit in many ways, yet is not quick to resonate within dominant support for Israel within the U.S. and elsewhere. For me then, this year has not been about remembering the Nakba so much as simply learning of its existence, how it happened, how it continues, and how it is not unrelated from some of my own work.
After my own presentation at our conference, where I referenced the doctrine of terra nullius, literally ‘empty land’ and the legal justification used by British settlers of Australia even though they knew Aborigines inhabited the country (see earlier discussion here), someone suggested I read Steven Salaita (The Holy Land in Transit, 2006). Salaita uses comparative literary analysis to link Native American and Palestinian political positions. He makes it clear that the comparison is literal in many ways: for instance, Zionist leaders studied American approaches to the removal of Native Americans from their land. Yet it is also a crucial moral-political comparison that he thinks has too often gone overlooked, arguing that it is both counter-productive and hypocritical that Arab Americans lobby the American government to change its policies in Israel without at least acknowledging the situation of Native Americans, and vice versa.
While I have not finished reading Salaita, I think his provocation is an important one to consider. Yes, we have to pick the projects we devote our precious time to, and often those projects that are most meaningful will place you within communities you feel at home in. But, obviously too, there are ways to recognize similar struggles and build awareness of their similarities. I was thinking, before Harris’ gentle hint, that I would like to write something here but that I did not have a genuine enough place/commitment (not Jewish, not Palestinian) to remembering the Nakba. But those kinds of worries, while helpful in knowing where you’re overstepping your bounds, can very quickly become complacent excuses for doing nothing.
Blogging is not a very big something, but it is an easy enough start. My point is very simply: please visit No Time to Celebrate!, learn more and spread the word where you can too. I am grateful to be reminded that though the colonizer may not be going anywhere anytime soon in Hawai’i either, social movements are not to be judged only by their most formal outcomes. It is the process of acting together (maybe in Harris’ case, even getting arrested with his fellow organizers) that is sometimes most freeing.
Maile Arvin blogs here. She is a graduate student in Ethnic Studies living in Southern California. She likes coffee and poems.
2 Comments
May 13, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Maile! Thanks so much for writing this!
I’m glad you were thinking about it before my not-so-gentle hint! And I definitely think that you have a place in talking about the Nakba — the connections you make to indigenous activism and studies are so important!
May 17, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Thank you for this post!