Sa'di2002.pdf

Ahmad H. Sa’di

Catastrophe, Memory and Identity:

Al-Nakbah as a Component

of Palestinian Identity

T ,- 1948 W 34 4-5678-9 :; Al-Nakbah —the immense catastrophe—

for the Palestinian people and changed their life beyond recognition. First

and foremost, Al-Nakbah engendered the dispersion [ Shatat ]. Between

and DE percent of the Palestinians who lived in the part of Palestine that

later became Israel—i.e., D percent of Mandatory Palestine—were turned

into refugees. us, for Palestinians, Al-Nakbah represents, among many

other things, the loss of the homeland, the disintegration of society, the

frustration of national aspirations, and the beginning of a hasty process

of destruction of their culture. Rabinowitz has observed that Palestinian

identity hinges on the experience of dispossession and exile [ Ghurba ] as

well as mis-recognition international of Palestinian rights and suﬀ ering.¹

In a similar vein, Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian historian, essayist, and novel-

ist, argues that:

e contemporary history of the Palestinians turns on a key date: OPD . at

year, a country and its people disappeared from maps and dictionaries . . .

‘ e Palestinian people does not exist’, said the new masters, and henceforth

the Palestinians would be referred to by general, conveniently vague terms, as

either ‘refugees’, or in the case of a small minority that had managed to escape

the generalized expulsion, ‘Israeli Arabs’. A long absence was beginning.²

e absence and the disappearance to which Sanbar refers was not

absolute, however. It has been possible to partly reconstruct the past and

regain some of its representations because enough material and fertile

memories managed to elude the shattering experience of the society’s

INTRODUCTION

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disintegration and the stiﬂ ing international silence. Referring to such

historical experiences, Kracauer, the German cultural scholar, writes:

“ ere are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to

slip in.”³ Of the surviving material that somehow evaded destruction is

the rich collection of photographs that composes the “hard data” about

the Palestinians and their society in a number of photography books that

will be discussed later.

Following the pioneering works of Anderson,⁴ Said,⁵ and Hobsbawm

and Ranger,⁶ social scientists have begun locating identity in the inter-sub-

jective realm, where belonging to an imagined community is constantly

reproduced and bolstered through invented traditions, commemorations,

the construction of national museums, and the creation of national cul-

tural canons and national heroes.⁷ In the following, I suggest that, in

addition to these top-down processes, which aim at the nationalization of

the mass of a population, there are bottom-up processes, which are gener-

ated through localized experiences and sentiments. Dispersed and lacking

national institutions, archives, and documents, Palestinians have had to

resort to diﬀ erent venues of identity reconstruction. Similar to various

ird World peoples who have experienced centuries of colonization, the

question of identity among Palestinians has become intimately connected

to the “restoration of the individual’s subjectivity”⁸; that is, a national nar-

rative has been constructed through life stories, documents, and viewpoints

of individuals. Kracauer argues that history, similar to the reality it aspires

to represent, is a conﬁ guration of segments.⁹ In line with that, Al-Nakbah

is, in the ﬁ nal analysis, about the tragic fate of the men and women whose

lives had been shattered, and about their descendants, who continue to

suﬀ er its consequences. Random life stories told by individuals, however,

cannot create a national narrative with which a whole community can

identify unless these stories are located within what Pierre Nora has termed

“sites of memory.” For Nora,

. . . the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop the time,

to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize

death, to materialize the immaterial. . . . all of this in order to capture the

fewest of signs, it is also clear that lieux de memoire only exist because of their

capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an

unpredictable proliferation of their ramiﬁ cations.¹⁰

Nora’s concept of “site of memory” is, I believe, an indispensable tool

for understanding the way in which Al-Nakbah has become a constitutive

Catastrophe, Memory and Identity •

element of Palestinian identity. Al-Nakbah is a Palestinian event and a site

of Palestinian collective memory; it connects all Palestinians to a speciﬁ c

point in time that has become for them an “eternal present.” Given the

Palestinians reality, as discussed above, major eﬀ orts have been made to

reconstruct and preserve the past. ese eﬀ orts have yielded a number of

books, mainly of photographs, which attempt to recreate or conjure up

the feeling of how Palestine was before Al-Nakbah. ese works will be

described and discussed in the following section. Section two will analyze

Al-Nakbah as a site of beginning where contradictions, oppositions, and

juxtapositions have emerged. An analysis of these processes and their

impact on Palestinian collective identity will be unfolded in the third

section. is will be followed by a discussion of Palestinian encounters

with Al-Nakbah through visits to their former houses—the sites where Al-

Nakbah took place, and with which it will always be connected. e ﬁ fth

section attempts to locate the concepts of identity, nationalism, and site of

collective memory within the normal thrust of Palestinians’ lives.

A DEFINITION OF THE MEMORY SITE:

PEOPLE AND PLACE

Even P years after Al-Nakbah, the literature dealing with this catastrophic

transformation rarely goes beyond the detailing of events or the descrip-

tion of places, social groups, political activities, and military operations.

In other words, descriptions and a w rmations of the pre-Al-Nakbah past

have become the focal points for Palestinian, and many non-Palestinian,

scholars. In order to exemplify this type of intellectual production, I will

describe a few major works.

e ﬁ rst is a photography book called, Jaﬀ a the Perfume of a City ,¹¹

which represents an extraordinary documentation of Jaﬀ a’s social, eco-

nomic, and political history, as well as the city’s unfulﬁ lled planning

initiatives. e book is composed almost entirely of personal testimonies.

e ﬁ rst is by Shafeq al-Hout,¹² whose narrative is a breathtaking journey

through Jaﬀ a’s neighborhoods as they were seen during the late OPy s from

a passenger’s window in a public bus that crossed the city’s various neigh-

borhoods. Al-Hout serves as a local guide and supplies the tourist—that

is, the reader, who is a stranger, to the described scene—with a wealth of

information about the history of the city, its social make-up, its personali-

ties, and the historic events that took place in the city’s various sections.

us, at one street curb:

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e bus crosses the square and turns to the left to enter the Salahi Market,

another of Jaﬀ a’s commercial streets. It is the meeting place of the orange

traders. All of the traders are middlemen who had considerable information

on every orange grove in Palestine.

All the orange traders in Jaﬀ a used to begin their day with a cup of

coﬀ ee in Daoud Café, which had a wide yard and shady trees. Some would

go further and have a plate of foole [fava beans] in Al-Kahlah restaurant. At

that table you would ﬁ nd traders such as Said Baydass, Muhammad Abed

Al-Rahim . . .

At the end of this market one ﬁ nds the market of the vegetables. Most

of the businessmen here are of village origins.¹³

e eight pictures placed throughout the text give added life and cred-

ibility to the narrative: an orchard on Jaﬀ a’s east end, the train station,

the square of the grand mosque, a group of Jaﬀ a youth dressed in elegant

cloths, and so on

Jaﬀ a’s last mayor, Dr. Yousef Haikal, writes the second account.¹⁴

Haikal, who received his Ph.D. from the University of London and worked

in the judicial system, was mayor of Jaﬀ a during the critical period of

OP – OPO . In his testimony, he gives a summation of his activities and

accomplishments, which included the building of many public utilities:

roads, sewerage systems in the new neighborhoods, etc. Yet the jewel in

his crown was the planning project for Jaﬀ a. In order to accomplish the

implementation of a modern city plan, he met Egypt’s Prime Minister and

asked him to assign the project to two senior Egyptian planners: Ottman

Refqi Rostum, the senior engineer in Egypt’s archeology department, and

‘Ali al-Melegi, the head of Egypt’s town planning body. ey were asked to

prepare two plans, one for the rehabilitation of the old neighborhood, while

the other was to be a comprehensive plan for the city’s spatial expansion.

Mr. Haikal then details his attempts to convince Mandatory Government

o w cials in Palestine to change their pro-Zionist policy. Finally, he gives a

detailed account of his wartime activities: his meetings with Arab leaders to

secure arms shipments, and after the collapse of the front, his unsuccessful

attempt to sign a treaty with the Jewish leaders, through the British, which

would have converted Jaﬀ a into a non-ﬁ ghting city. is testimony, like the

others, is interspersed with photographs and photocopies of documents.

What motivated Mr. Haikal to write an essay that could have been

part of a reelection campaign? e answer, I believe, is two-fold. First,

there is an attempt to reconstruct life in Jaﬀ a as it was, and second, since

Al-Nakbah, leaders like Haikal have attempted to demonstrate that they

Catastrophe, Memory and Identity • O

did their utmost to avert what was to become the immense disaster. ere

are photos of Jaﬀ a and the life of its inhabitants placed throughout the

book. e photos include all kinds of Ja w ans: workers, students, young,

old, women, men, dignitaries and humble people in various sites: work-

shops, factories, cafes, schools, local clubs, the port, playgrounds, festivities,

the local al-Nabi Roubin festival, demonstrations, tours on the Ogea River,

etc. ere are also photographs of welcoming ceremonies of famous guests.

In addition to Palestinian political leaders, various Arab leaders, including

the Emir of Trans-Jordan, the Consuls of various Arab countries, as well as

Arab cultural ﬁ gures, most notably Egypt’s number one music composer,

Muhammad Abed Al-Wahab, visited Jaﬀ a. e living spirit behind this

project, Hisham Sharabi sums up the main theme of the book:

is expression [home] gains its real meaning only through direct experi-

ence, like the painful experience of the people of Jaﬀ a and all those who left

Palestinian towns and villages. For them the longing for the homeland, the

house of the forefathers . . . has become part of their inner life that cannot be

taken away . . . e person owns his homeland only when he looses it.¹⁵

Other works of this kind include Sara Graham-Brown’s e Palestinians

and eir Society ! – #$% ,¹⁶ and Walid Khalidi’s Before eir Diaspora:

A Photographic History of the Palestinians ,% – #$ .¹⁷ Khalidi arranges his

book in chronological order. Each section begins with an introduction

that provides the reader with essential facts concerning the period. Khalidi

then includes a wealth of pictures of Palestinians and their lives. Similar to

Graham-Brown, he also includes pictures of both Jews and Britons among

the book’s EP pictures. In these two books, as well as in others, the use of

photography proves to be a powerful tool in rendering the past, for it gives

speciﬁ c glimpses, a timeless presence, and conjures up images of the wider

social and cultural milieu of the time. Beyond that, I think that Khalidi’s

book, by the nature of its material, its style, and the source of the photo-

graphs included, tells a great deal about these kinds of books, as well as

about the signiﬁ cance of OPD as a site of Palestinian memory.

Firstly, the title of the book sums up both its content and the underly-

ing premise of its form of representation. Before eir Diaspora is about a

vanishing past—something that no longer exists—about people and places

that have undergone dramatic changes in such a way that the people (those

who appear in the photographs and their descendants) would never inhabit

the same places or even live in the same area. e purpose of the book is

to achieve what photographs can provide of visual proof: evidence that

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