The day of the Nakba
Palestinians participate in a march to commemorate the ‘Nakba Day’ in the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 13, 2015. Photo by AFP
Israel continues to criminalise marking Nakba Day
Activists now face difficulty in commemorating Palestinian dispossession during Israel’s founding due to Israeli law.
By Patrick Strickland, Al Jazeera
May 14, 2015
Haifa – Each year on May 15, Palestinians across the world commemorate the Nakba (catastrophe), or the 1948 establishment of Israel that led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being displaced from their homeland.
The estimated 1.7 million Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and live in villages, towns and cities across the country are no exception. Each year, protests, marches, lectures and other events to mourn their ancestors’ dispossession are held in Palestinian communities across Israel.
Yet, since 2011, Israeli legislation has made mourning the Nakba publicly difficult for Palestinians and others in Israel. The “Nakba Law” authorises Israel’s finance minister to revoke funding from institutions that reject Israel’s character as a “Jewish state” or mark the country’s Independence Day as a day of mourning.
Although the Nakba Law has yet to be technically implemented, human rights groups and activists say it has a dangerous deterrent effect and is meant to intimidate Palestinians and others who view Israel’s establishment as a day of mourning for Palestinians.
Among those who could be potentially affected by the Nakba Law is Zochrot, an Israeli non-governmental organisation that aims to keep the memory of the 1948 events alive and promotes the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.
“The Nakba Law is part of an atmosphere to suppress the Nakba narrative and a discussion of the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees,” Liat Rosenberg, director of Zochrot, told Al Jazeera. “These are right-wing, anti-democratic efforts [that] continue to create an atmosphere of fear and suppress this issue from the public discourse.”
Back in February, Yona Yahav, mayor of the central Israeli city of Haifa, withdrew municipal funding for a Zochrot film festival about the Nakba. The event was scheduled to be held at the local cinema the week before Israel’s Independence Day, marked this year on April 23, but it was cancelled in the end.
The cancellation in Haifa followed a political uproar that surrounded a similar Zochrot film festival in Tel Aviv’s public cinema in November 2014. The Tel Aviv Cinematheque came under fire from Israeli politicians after it was announced that it would be hosting the three-day film festival.
In an Israeli Knesset session, parliamentarian Alex Miller, a member of the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party, called the festival “a pathetic attempt by the Cinematheque to take advantage of its stage to support Israel’s enemies that are looking for every way to undermine our sovereignty”.
Limor Livnat, then the culture and sports minister, asked the Ministry of Finance to withdraw the state’s 250,000-shekel (around $64,000) financial contribution to the Cinematheque.
“It is an unreasonable situation, in my view, when an entity that is supported by the State of Israel enables the holding on its premises of a festival devoted entirely to preaching that the day on which Israel was founded is a day of mourning,” Livnat wrote in a statement, adding that the government should not fund an institution that “encourages debate over what the Palestinians call ‘the Right of Return'”.
Zochrot’s Rosenberg says the law has so far failed and “has achieved exactly the opposite” of its desired effect by sparking a public conversation about the 1948 events. “We can most definitely see that there is a greater space to talk about the Nakba in Israel, but we still have a long way to go. The more legislative attempts to limit the space for discussion [about the Nakba], the greater the public interest becomes.”
Adalah, a Haifa-based legal centre for Palestinians in Israel, challenged the law, but the court rejected its petition in April 2012. The justices ruled that it could not be stricken down before it is actually implemented.
“The declarative level of the law does indeed raise difficult and complex questions,” Israeli Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch and Justices Eliezer Rivlin and Miriam Naor wrote in their ruling at the time. “However, from the outset, the constitutionality of the law depends largely upon the interpretation given to the law’s directives.”
Pointing to the cancellation of Zochrot’s film festival in Haifa, Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer at Adalah, explains that the law’s true danger lies in its “deterrent impact” on freedom of speech and the possibility of self-censorship.
“Without actually implementing the Nakba Law, [the law] has been used as an excuse to limit freedom of expression,” Zaher told Al Jazeera. “It has a chilling effect.”
Since 2012, Tel Aviv University’s Palestinian student groups have had to hold Nakba Day commemoration events off campus and pay for their own security in order to prevent the university from violating the restrictions set out by the Nakba Law.
Palestinians mark Nakba Day with protests
Students at Haifa University were also unable to attain a permit to hold a Nakba Day commemoration event in 2014, but they held a small protest. Several participants were suspended for the remainder of the semester and Palestinian student groups were temporarily banned from holding events on campus, a decision that was later overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court.
“Yet our main fear is more about the smaller institutions that will not go to Adalah or the media because they will be afraid to lose their funding,” Sawsan Zaher explained. “Without being implemented, the law is more of a statement to Palestinians in Israel: ‘Don’t mention the Nakba; you have no collective narrative; this is not legal.'”
Zaher said the law “dehumanises and delegitimises Palestinian citizens of Israel” and treats them “as enemies”.
In November, hardline incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, dissolved the Knesset following uproar over the “Jewish nation-state bill”, proposed legislation that defined Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” and allots Arab citizens individual rights but not communal rights.
In March, Netanyahu’s Likud party garnered a landslide victory in parliamentary elections. Cobbled together with a 61-seat majority, Netanyahu’s new coalition is poised to include several smaller right-wing parties, such as the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party and former Likud member Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu party.
“We expect more laws like this in the next Knesset,” Zaher said. “The Nakba Law is just one of dozens and [there are] more to come.”
Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_
Demonstration on May 13, 2015 in Ramallah to commemorate the Nakba – the birth of the state of Israel 67 years ago in British-mandate Palestine. Photo by Mahmoud Illean, Demotix
Remembering the pain in Palestine
By Daoud Kuttab, Al Arabiya
May 14, 2015
Sometimes it is difficult to remember the daily suffering of Palestinians living under occupation.
The wars and turmoil all around us tend to divert our attention from genuinely terrible issues that might seem mundane when compared to the wars in Syria or Yemen. But the human tragedy in Palestine is real, even if it is not headline news.
Take for example the case of Khaled Abu Arafeh, Ahmad Ottwan, Mohammad Totah and Mohammad Abu Tier who have been denied their birthright to live in Jerusalem and are forced to reside in nearby Ramallah without any documentation.
Their crimes
Their crime is that they were elected (in the case of Abu Arafeh, minister) following the victory of the pro-Hamas parliamentary list in 2006.
For 10 years they have been fighting the case in the Israeli courts and were imprisoned three times. Their main sin (as per the Israeli prosecutor) is that they have not shown loyalty to the state of Israel.
East Jerusalem, the birthplace of these men, was unilaterally annexed by Israel shortly after the 1967 occupation. No country in the world has recognized this annexation.
Further south, there is the case of the villagers of Suisa, a rural community south of Hebron that the Israeli military has been using for military exercises.
When the villagers complained to the Israeli high court, it ruled in favor (you guessed) of their army, not of the third class Palestinians living on their lands.
In April 2002, Israel surrounded the Church of the Nativity in an attempt to arrest tens of Palestinians who had decided to hide there. After intensive negotiations, Israel agreed to allow the 39 Palestinians temporary free passage to various locations. Thirteen were sent to different European countries and 26 were sent to Gaza.
The agreement was for a two-year stay and then they would be allowed to return to their homes in Bethlehem. It is now 13 years and there is no sign that they will ever be allowed to return.
The above are only a few cases that show some of the problems Palestinians who have been living for nearly 47 years under a foreign military occupation face.
A push in the wrong direction
This occupation, which also features a colonial settlement enterprise, has just received an even bigger push by the creation of the most radical right-wing government in the history of Israel.
In the last hours of negotiations that led to the government formation, the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home Party sought and was granted positions that directly affect Palestinians.
Now the deputy defence minister in charge of the lives of four million Palestinians is in the hands of pro-settlement right-wing Israeli nationalists.
The more direct position of head of civil administration is from the same Party. The civil administration, which was supposed to be closed down as part of the Oslo Accords, is now in charge of more than 60 per cent of West Bank land defined as areas C.
This is the one area that a future Palestinian state can exist; it is now in the hands of pro-settler Israeli officials who will no doubt double or triple Jewish settlers and settlements, pushing even further away the chance of any reasonable possibility of the two-state solution.
The Israeli high court, which some argue keeps the army in check, will no doubt turn even more radical now that the new minister of justice, from the same right-wing party, is on the record as being committed to weaken the court.
Some argue that such a right-wing government will produce the kind of international pressure that will force the Netanyahu government to refrain from provocative actions against Palestinians.
Few Palestinians believe that. Experience tells us that with such a government even worse things will happen to Palestinians, and the international community will do little more than give lip service against such acts.
Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian professor and initiator of calls for an academic boycott of Israel, said in a column in the New York Times that Israel’s extremism will encourage global boycott of Israel.
A big boost
The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement will no doubt receive a big boost as a result of the new government, which no longer includes members who could give the appearance of wanting peace.
In some way, the new Israeli government is a true reflection of the state of Israel without the makeup and masks that have been so cleverly used for years.
As Palestinians remember the 1948 Nakbeh when they lost their lands and homes to what is now the state of Israel, it is sad to realize that we are so far away from any reasonable solution that could provide for the other part of the partition plan, namely an independent Palestinian state.
With the prospects for an overall peace getting farther and farther away, it is important not to forget the human element of this decades-old tragedy, especially deportees within their own country and refugees around the world.
This article was first published in the Jordan Times on May 14, 2015.
Daoud Kuttab is an award-winning Palestinian journalist who resides in Jerusalem and Amman. Mr. Kuttab is the director general of Community Media Network a media NGO that runs a radio station in Amman (al balad radio 92.4fm) a newsweb site ammannet.net and a TV production operation in Palestine Penmedia (penmedia.ps) which is producing the Palestinian version of Sesame street. You can read his blogs on DaoudKuttab.com and find him on Twitter @DaoudKuttab.