ABSTRACT
One of the grim paradoxes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that the foundation of the state of Israel, intended to create a safe haven for the ‘archetypical’ Jewish diaspora, spelt the immediate diasporisation of the Arab Palestinians. The territorialisation of the Jewish diaspora spurred a new ‘wandering identity’ and the Palestinians became a ‘refugee nation’ (Siddiq 1995:87). To the Palestinians, the birth of Israel is thus remembered as the catastrophe, al-nakba, to imprint the suffering caused by dispersal, exile, alienation and denial. Cohen (1997) adequately labels
both Jewish and Palestinian diasporas ‘victim diasporas’ to indicate the ways in which they have been formed as a consequence of disasters befalling them.
