ABSTRACT
Nations, as was famously proclaimed by Ernest Renan, are characterized by “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories,” yet at the same time also by the fact “that they have forgotten some things” (Renan 1990 [1882]: 11). This chapter addresses national ways of forgetting “some things”: the Israeli-Jewish forgetting of the uprooting of the Palestinians in the war of 1948. The formation of Israel as a Jewish nation-state was achieved by the exclusion of
the Palestinian Arabs from the core of its territory and identity. The most acute act of exclusion was carried out in Israel’s war of independence in 1948-1949. This war was fought between Israel and invading Arab armies and the local PalestinianArab population, who aimed to revoke the UN resolution over the establishment of a Jewish state in a part of the country that the Jews call Eretz Israel and the Arab world calls Palestine. By the end of the war Israel’s borders were fixed along the armistice lines-the “green line”—and became the recognized boundaries of Israel. The end of this war did not put an end to the hostilities between the sides and many wars followed since-the Sinai War (1956), the Six Days War (1967), the Attrition War (1967-1973), the October War (Atonement Days War) (1973), the Lebanon War (1982), the Gulf War (Israel was hit by Iraqi missiles) (1991), the first and later the second Palestinian Intifada (1987, 2000), the Second LebanonWar (2006), and many occurrences of violence in between. The great losers of the 1948-9 war were the Palestinians. Within the state’s
boundaries only about 150,000 of them were left, out of a population of 850,000 or 900,000. The rest became refugees, many of them in camps in the Arab states that surrounded Israel-Egypt (the Gaza Strip), Jordan (the West Bank), Syria, and Lebanon. In the war of 1967 Israel occupied some of the territories populated by these refugees, who now grew to about 3.5 million souls. As for the Palestinians who remained in Israel, they were conferred Israeli citizenship, but up to 1966 were subjected to strict military governance, and even after this governance was removed they remained citizens of a second class-de facto if not de jure. The relations between Israel and Palestinians remained at the core of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The Palestinians from the outside demand a “right of return” to the refugees and their descendants, and the Palestinians from the inside demand equal rights and collective recognition (Ram 2009). Israel adamantly rejects both demands, as threatening its own existence as a Jewish state, or the national state of the Jews.
Israel demands a recognition of its right to exist as such (though since 1967 it did not offer the Palestinians in the occupied territories a political resolution acceptable to them) and in its view the refusal of the Arab world and the Palestinians to accept it are at the bottom of the protraction of the conflict. It is not our aim to discuss here the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict or even the
political sociology of Israeli-Arab relations inside Israel (Ghanem 2000; Reiter 2009). It is rather the exclusion of the Palestinian-Arabs in Israeli political culture on which we shall dwell in this chapter, and this issue will be scrutinized here from the peculiar angle of the obliteration of the act of exclusion itself from the collective memory of the nation. Following the eminent British anthropologist Mary Douglas, we relate here to
“forgetting” not as an absence of remembering, or as ignorance, but rather as a certain kind, or certain kinds, of (active) remembering: “forgetting includes different kinds of selective remembering, misremembering and disremembering” (Douglas 2007: 13). We discuss in this chapter three facets of the collective forgetting of the Palestinian uprooting in Jewish-Israeli collective consciousness: In the first sub-heading we analyze the foundations of the Israeli regime of forgetting and discern three mechanisms of removing from memory of selected events: narrative forgetting: the formation and dissemination of an historical narrative; physical forgetting: the destruction of physical remains; and symbolic forgetting: the creation of a new symbolic geography by fixing new place and street names. In the second sub-heading we dwell upon a tenacious ambiguity that inheres in the regime of forgetting because it does not completely erase all the traces of the past. And finally, in the third sub-heading we discuss the budding of subversive memory and counter-memory that at least indicate the option of a future revision of the Israeli regime of forgetting and exclusion.
