There’s nothing new in this film about the Nakba – that’s why it’s so relevant

A scene from Neta Shoshani’s documentary ‘1948: Remember, Remember Not’ about the Israeli and Palestinian narratives of the War of Independence/Nakba

Aluf Benn writes in Haaretz on 11 September 2025:

A few months before he suffered a stroke and withdrew from public life, I asked Prime Minister Ariel Sharon what he had learned over his long career. “Nothing ever changes – except the past,” he replied without hesitation.

I thought of that conversation while watching Neta Shoshani’s documentary 1948: Remember, Remember Not, which aired Saturday night on Israel’s Kan 11, after more than two years of delays due to pressure from right-wing activists and threats from Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi to cut the public broadcaster’s budget.  77 years after the events, airing a film about the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 on Israeli television is still perceived as a subversive and bold act.

Shoshani followed the path charted by the “New Historians” of the late 1980s, who set out to shatter the founding myths surrounding Israel’s establishment – chief among them, the notions that Jews were “the few against the many” and that “the Arabs left willingly.” Her film shows how the Jewish side enjoyed military superiority almost from the start of the war, and how the expulsion of Palestinians was carried out according to a strategic plan (“Plan D” of the Haganah). Decades after Benny Morris published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in 1987, Shoshani encountered the same walls of silence and denial, which have still not crumbled.

Only few within Jewish Israeli society show interest in the Nakba, in the destroyed villages, in the circumstances that turned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into refugees. Most prefer not to know and not to ask what was here before, as they drive past cactus fences and the ruins of Arab homes. The government is actively engaged in erasing the evidence: at the heart of 1948: Remember, Remember Not lies the continued concealment of the Shapira Report – a document written by Israel’s first attorney general and exposed acts of massacre, rape, and abuse committed by fighters in Israel’s War of Independence against Palestinian villagers in 1948.

There is a utilitarian reason behind this silencing. “How one perceives 1948 bears heavily on how one perceives the whole Zionist/Israeli experience,” Morris wrote in his seminal 1988 essay The New Historiography: Israel Confronts its Past. “If Israel, the haven of a much-persecuted people – was born pure and innocent, then it was worthy of the grace, material assistance, and political support showered upon it by the West – and worthy of more of the same in years to come. If, on the other hand, Israel was born tarnished, besmirched by original sin, then it was no more deserving of that grace and assistance than were its neighbors.”

Shoshani completed her film before the October 7 war, and the time that passed between its production and its broadcasting only amplified how relevant it is. Israel is now carrying out a second Nakba in Gaza and the West Bank, and Jewish society here remains trapped in repression and denial – just as it was back in 1948.

As several of the film’s interviewees explain, Israel cannot admit to war crimes for fear of global backlash. That’s why no footage from Gaza is aired on Israeli TV, and the faces of soldiers are blurred. The public is told that “reports in the foreign press” showing mass starvation and the killing of children are not the result of IDF bombings and Israeli policy – they are nothing but Hamas propaganda and expressions of antisemitism from its Western sympathizers.

Just as it did in 1948, Israel places all moral responsibility for the disaster in the current war on the Arab side of the conflict: They started it, they deserved it, now let’s move on to the next reality show.

By the end of 1948: Remember, Remember not, I realized that Sharon was wrong despite all his wisdom and experience. The past doesn’t really change; it is always present here. And as was proven again just yesterday, the bloody Jewish-Arab cycle does not stop, even when leaders promise: “Just one more blow and it’ll be over.”

This article is reproduced in its entirety