Reflections on Israeli independence day, the Nakba and how the thugs of tribal and religious nationalism from both peoples are tightly grasping the fabric of the land

Salman Masalha ||

How We All Got Here

Three reflections on independence and the Nakba:

1. Despite the fierce opposition to Israelization by Arab politicians of all stripes in Israel, for some reason the Palestinian citizens of the country actually behave like the ultimate Israelis. Their Israeliness is so deeply rooted that they mark Nakba Day according to the Jewish calendar, on the 5th of the month of Iyar – Israel’s Independence Day.

And lo and behold, when Independence Day is moved up a day at the request of the Chief Rabbinate over fear of a mass desecration of Shabbat, the Israeli Palestinians also move up their Nakba Day commemoration, as if they and the Rabbinate were Siamese twins.

The Palestinians in the occupied territories, in comparison, mark the event on May 15, according to the secular calendar, and no one commemorates the Nakba according to the Muslim calendar, which moves from year to year.

Maybe they do this because they’re afraid that
it will dissociate them from Israel’s Independence Day, or maybe according to the saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed: “Among all the nations of the world, you are the most like the children of Israel. You follow them step after step.”

2. All those accused of criminal acts – murderers, rapists, robbers or any other criminals – will always claim they are innocent, usually with the aid of experienced lawyers, in the hope that this will earn them points on the day their verdict is handed down and they ask for a lighter sentence. In many cases, even after the criminal is thrown in prison, he continues to claim his innocence, to search for more witnesses, to offer more evidence and ask for a retrial. He can be an ordinary citizen or a public figure, a Knesset member or prime minister.

The common Zionist is no different in this aspect. By virtue of his Zionist essence and his being here, he will always claim his innocence in causing the Nakba for the Palestinians. He will not recognize reality because the Nakba is a lie and because there is nothing because there was nothing. Four years ago, Moshe Arens tried to repel any attempt or even any hint of recognizing the disaster that befell on the Arab residents of the land with the establishment of the “Jewish” state. (“The Nakba - Perpetuating a Lie,” Haaretz, May 19, 2014)

3. On the Palestinian side too, we cannot expect an Arab to question the actions of his “leaders,” who have led him to this point. He, too, will not recognize the situation created here. It is no coincidence that there are no new Arab or Palestinian historians. For them to arise, Arab society needs to have a democratic substructure of free thought, with mechanisms for self-criticism.

An intellectual infrastructure for conducting self-examination does not exist in Arab culture. From the point of view of Arab rulers and tribal leaders, the implications of self-criticism are far-reaching. They could very well bring about the end of their tribal hegemony, allowing other tribes or ethnic groups to rise up in their stead. These would replace them, take control of the reins of power and fill their own pockets and those of their friends with coin. This is the way it has been since time immemorial, and this is still the way it is to this very day.

And this is how we all have reached this point. The thugs of tribal and religious nationalism from both peoples are tightly grasping the fabric of the land. One says, “It’s all mine,” the other says the same thing, and they cannot find a way to divide it. And the land drinks its fill of blood, sweat and tears over the years.

It seems that this good land is sick and tired of both of them.
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Haaretz, April 18, 2018

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Salman Masalha ||

The Massacre of Arab Nationalism

The Israel Defense Forces are slaughtering Palestinian civilians on the border of the Gaza Strip. Bashar Assad’s regime continues to slaughter Syrian civilians. And the entire world is sitting and watching with folded hands. Tweets, Facebook posts and press statements – these are the lip service the world knows how to pay to silence its conscience. But let’s focus on the Arab world, which presumes to describe itself as a single nation.

It must be admitted that the siege imposed on Gaza ever since Hamas took power there isn’t just an Israeli siege. It’s also an Arab one – because a single Egyptian decision would be enough to break the siege on Gaza’s border with Egypt. After all, the Egyptians pretend to be “Arab brothers,” and also “Sunni Muslim brothers.” Astoundingly, however, they aren’t Arab brothers at all.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has also joined in the festival of abuse heaped on Gaza residents. Every so often, he imposes sanctions on them and cuts the salaries of employees and bureaucrats.

The Palestinian issue always served repressive Arab regimes as a pretext for rejecting all civic demands from within their own countries for freedom, democracy, economic development and jobs for the young. These repressive regimes always beat their citizens with the stick of the slogan “Palestine is the top Arab issue,” and the slogan that followed from it, “No voice will take precedence over the voice of the war” to liberate Palestine. These slogans were the opium which with the regimes silenced and neutralized any aspiration for domestic political and social change.

Thus it’s no wonder that the intifadas that swept the region and became known as the “Arab Spring” occurred precisely in those presidential regimes that raised the standard of Arab nationalism and other empty slogans, such as freedom and socialism.

The past several years have provided decisive proof that all the pompous Arab slogans from the ideological school of the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath parties, about “a single Arab nation with an eternal mission,” were empty ones.

In this context, it’s worth noting that after the champions of these Ba’ath slogans, Assad’s father Hafez and Saddam Hussein, seized power in Syria and Iraq, respectively, there was no sign of these ideas of the unity of the “Arab nation” and its “eternal mission” being implemented on the ground. On the contrary, both in Syria and Iraq the “pan-Arab national party” served as a platform on which both tyrants, the Syrian and the Iraqi, built a sectarian and tribal regime.

In Syria, in every key governmental post, Assad placed members of his own tribe and sect – brothers, uncles, cousins – along with bootlickers from other communities, who received only governmental crumbs. Saddam Hussein did the same in Iraq. The empty slogans of Arab nationalism received grotesque expression in the 1991 Gulf War, when the elder Assad sent Syrian soldiers to join the American-led coalition that fought against Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait. So the standard-bearer of Arab nationalism from Damascus fought alongside the “imperialist” American superpower (to use the Ba’athists’ own term) against their “Arab brothers,” who ostensibly advocated the same ideology.

Recent years have provided evidence not just of the absolute failure of pan-Arab nationalism, but also additional evidence of the failure of the Arab “nation-states” created by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Syria is the salient example of this failure.

The Syrian civil war, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and created millions of refugees, along with Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, show that there is no “Syrian people.” A president who slaughters civilians who are supposed to be “members of his own nation” has through these crimes removed the mask he wore for many years and revealed the naked, tribal-sectarian truth for all to see.

In the face of these sights, every self-respecting Arab must recalculate his path.
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Haaretz, April 9, 2018

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