You thought “the old men died and the young men forgot”: this is how the Nakba became a dream into a real aspiration

The May 2021 riots revealed the growing preoccupation of some Israeli Arabs with the Nakba and the “Right of Return,” which affected the riots. • A new study by the “Jerusalem Center for Public and State Affairs” authored by Nadav Shragai, It is no longer a dream but a real aspiration • “In the end, the Arabs in Israel are Palestinians; if you do not recognize it – you are completing yourself”

By Nadav Shragai, ISRAEL HAYOM  Feb 9/22

Aya Zinati, a native of Lod, is a public figure familiar to some Westerners in Israel. Despite this, six weeks after the riots among the Jews of Lod, she surprised many who did not know her views in depth. Zinati, now a resident of Haifa, works at Shatil, a foundation of the New Israel Fund, and is active in the Gisha and Zochrot organizations, and clarified that “despite the severe pain and real fear in Lod, she was born hopeful that we could talk about the right of return …” .

“We are in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem – the same people,” she said. “We are not talking about ‘coexistence.’ It is not a matter of ‘living together’ in mixed cities.

Zinati expressed satisfaction that she and her friends were able to present the “Palestinian struggle as one struggle,” emphasizing that “the occupation is one”: “I am not talking about the occupation of 1967. My terms are different from Israeli terms and should be internalized … when I speak of ‘ “The occupation”, I mean the occupation in “Yafa” (Jaffa), in “Lid” (Lod), in “Aka” (Acre) and in the village of Ma’alul (a village that existed until 1948 near Nazareth). “For my children,” said Zinati, ” I explain again and again that they are not from Haifa, but from the village of Malul, which was destroyed by the Zionists, and that they will return there. ”

Zinati is not alone in this approach. During and after the riots, the “Nakba” and the “return” were present in the discourse of intra-Arab networks in hundreds of tweets and posts. Allah, an Israeli Arab from Lod, tweeted at the end of May, for example: “The best thing is that the Israelis write about us, the Palestinians of ’48, that we are traitors. We betrayed them. The donkeys do not know that our loyalty has not been theirs for a long time. What was done to them that they ignored? ”

Journalist Hanan Amior, editor of the Perspective media review site, arrived in Lod during the riots and met there with three Arab boys as young as 16, “impressive boys,” as he testified, one of whom had joined the rioters a few days earlier. After a long conversation with them, Amior got the impression that “the story they tell themselves is completely different from the story we, the Jews, tell ourselves, and it is one and only – the Nakba.” They were born in Lod, “said Amior. The shadow that used to give the fruit tree in the yard of their grandfather’s house, in a village in the Galilee from before 1948, on the ruins of which a Jewish settlement was built. “The ‘occupation’ of 67 does not interest them at all. Just back to their homes from before ’48.”

Disruptions in the cities involved in the Wall Guard, Photo: Yossi Zeliger

In the days following the riots, one of Tamer Nafar’s songs – a veteran Israeli Arab rapper, also a native of Lod, who identifies himself as a “Palestinian with Israeli citizenship” gained renewed popularity. The song “I return home” describes the connection and affinity of some Westerners of Israel to homes that were abandoned in ’48: “I return to the house / where I can wash the dust of time immediately / … The sound of the key enters the lock / The key turns and turns … / And time turns and turns / … an entire people is expelled from its land and tries to return / in what language to say it? … “.

Sheikh Yussef Elbaz, a former imam of the Great Mosque in Lod, a member of the northern faction of the Islamic Movement, was even more blunt when he clarified a few months before the riots in Lod: “Israel is not our country. Our national duty is to preserve our identity, our land and our holy places The way to do this is through civil rebellion, gradually and in stages … “.

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Disruptions perpetrated by Arab-Israelis on their Jewish neighbors in the cities involved during the May events shook Israeli society. Delicate seams that ostensibly allowed coexistence between Jews and Arabs were suddenly unraveled. The Conscious Forgery identified almost immediately two main, direct, causes for the events: the false blood libel “Al-Aqsa in Danger” and the friction between Jews and Arabs in the Sheikh Jarrah – Shimon Hatzadik neighborhood. In the background of the events: the activity of the Torah nuclei in the mixed cities, “Judaization of Arab areas”, “economic and infrastructural gaps between Jews and Arabs” or the involvement of criminal elements in the riots.

On the other hand, almost no one spoke of the elephant in the room: the growing preoccupation of Israeli Arabs with “return” and “Nakba” – not only as a heritage, consciousness or theoretical matter, but as a basic element of Palestinian thinking and consciousness and as real-practical hope. These depth currents, it turned out, also influenced what took place in May, sometimes as a background and setting only and sometimes as a cause and a real and central generator.

Stone throwing and arson in Lod during riots, Photo: Oren Cohen

For many years, the return discourse was conducted mainly in the Palestinian diaspora around the world, in the refugee camps that the Arab and Palestinian states took care of, in the UNRWA refugee organization and, of course, in the PA and Gaza-controlled Gaza and Hamas territories. , And especially since the Monitoring Committee of Israeli Arabs in 2006 published the “Future Vision Documents for Palestinian Arabs in Israel.”

In these documents, Israeli Arabs were defined as both natives and citizens of the state and as “part of the Palestinian people, the Arab nation and the cultural, Arab and Islamic space …”. But in recent years, many Arab-Israelis have further exaggerated the definition of their self-identity and omitted the Israeli component and identity from it. A survey of positions conducted by Prof. Sami Smuha a few years ago found that while 80 percent of Westerners in Israel integrate Israeliness into their identity, at the same time, 60 percent define themselves as Palestinians. Journalist Meirav Arlozorov, who provided these data, commented that “the choice between the half-full glass and the half-empty glass can be made by everyone.”

In May 2021 and in events that occurred in the following months, Israel was exposed to the “half-empty glass”: the “Nakba” as a binding legacy, Palestinian identity and the right of return as a future commitment, also stood in the background, sometimes as a hidden and sometimes explicit and overt consciousness, not just in Lod.

Tayser Khatib, a resident of the Old City of Acre, explained after the events that “at the end of the day the Arabs in Israel are Palestinians and our identity is the Palestinian identity … Wake up, if you do not recognize it – you complete yourself again. It will happen again and again.”

The events in the northern coastal city did not occur on a smooth page. Already years ago, as in the days of riots, Arab residents of Acre tried to replace street signs and put up signs with the names of neighborhoods that were abandoned in 1948. In recent years – in parallel with the ceremonies in the PA – an annual memorial service has also been held in the city in memory of the three murderers of the Jews in 1905, whom the British sentenced to death by hanging for their part in the massacres of Hebron and Safed Jews.

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The synergy and mutual nourishment between the Palestinians in the Judea and Samaria territories and the Israeli Arabs was also reflected in the reactions to the arrest of some of the Arab rioters in the May events. Dozens of Acre residents, along with Arab MKs Jews. They also demanded that the PA and Hamas include the Israeli Arabs detained in disturbances in Acre, in negotiations with Israel on a future prisoner of war deal.

On the night of Independence Day 1941, a few weeks before the riots broke out, Arabs and Jews gathered at the Sariya Theater in Jaffa to talk about “Shiva” and “Nakba.”

In Haifa, where Jews were also attacked in the riots, tours had taken place two weeks earlier as part of a project known as the “Haifa-Beirut Bus,” designed to teach the history of the “Nakba” in the city. Here, too, an early consciousness base was built: the “Haifa Declaration,” written by a group of Israeli academics and Arab intellectuals two decades earlier, called on Israel, among other things, to recognize its responsibility for the “Nakba” and to begin implementing the Palestinians’ right of return. The statement corresponded well with many of the return tours conducted over the years in Haifa, and in dozens of other settlements in the country, as well as with the cries at the violent demonstrations in the city last year: “In spirit and blood we will liberate Haifa.”

In May 2021, Israeli Arabs attacked dozens of other Jewish settlements and targets in the north and Negev, attempted to lynch Jews, waved Palestinian flags and burned Israeli flags. Jews and Jewish neighborhoods were also attacked in Lod, Acre, Jaffa and Ramla. Jewish apartments in shared dormitories were looted and burned, two Jewish citizens were murdered and 196 Jewish citizens and another 300 policemen were injured. Many public properties were vandalized and set on fire and ten synagogues were set on fire. As the violence escalated, the GSS issued an unusual statement stating that it was terrorism.

As the riots continued and Jews found it difficult to move in some parts of the country, and often found themselves under siege in their homes and neighborhoods, the deeper layers of events that deviated from the interest of al-Aqsa or Sheikh Jarrah were exposed. Kamal Khatib, deputy head of the northern faction of the Islamic Movement, spoke in the midst of the riots and uttered (according to an indictment filed against him) “words of praise, sympathy and encouragement for acts of terrorism perpetrated against Jews.” Khatib defined the rebellious Arab generation as “the generation of courage and heroism.” He noted that May 15 will mark “the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba of our people.” “Even if you thought the old men died and the young people forgot,” Khatib explained, “the old men died, only after they taught their sons that this was Palestine, and left them a key, a Kushan and a taboo …”.

Muhammad Bracha, chairman of the Monitoring Committee of Israeli Arabs, clarified that Israeli Arabs are “part of the Palestinian people” and the protest is “civil and national.” Bracha explained that “Jerusalem has dear sisters: Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Lod and Ramla … Last May, During the last intifada, the focus of resistance against the forces of Zionist repression was especially in those cities that they tried to eulogize, distort and remove from the map of Palestine, “said Bracha.” These cities revolted as if to say: Here is Palestine. It used to be called Palestine, and it is called Palestine once again. ”

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Many of the demonstrators who rioted in those days in the Nablus Gate area of ??Jerusalem came from the Galilee and emphasized that they came from “northern Palestine” and not from northern Israel. Some of the perpetrators of the attacks in those days also spoke in a similar way. Montser Shelby, the killer of Yehuda Guetta, in the shooting attack on May 2 at Tapuach Junction, clarified in his interrogation that “according to religion I am allowed to hit and kill whoever took my lands, I mean you took houses in Ashdod and Haifa.” In the Shuafat refugee camp, near the house of Fadi Abu Shahidam, the murderer of Eliyahu Kay, young Arabs clarified: “This is our land. We were expelled from it in 1948 … You thought the old men would die and the young people would forget … Tourists and then return to their countries … “. A similar call was heard at one of the Bedouin demonstrations in the Negev, when one of the demonstrators recommended that Prime Minister Bennett return to San Francisco and declared: “This is not your place.”

A few months after the riots, the Chicago Community Center in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood of Lod – where Arabs rioted against their Jewish neighbors – staged a play in which the actors sang, among other things, the song “Motani,” the unofficial Palestinian anthem that speaks of the homeland to be liberated: My homeland, my homeland / The youth will not grow tired until your independence or until his death … /, we will beware of death and we will not be slaves to our enemies … / My homeland My homeland / The sword and the pen, not the words and the quarrel – they are our symbols … “.

Already a decade ago, the Institute for the Study of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO Monitor) mapped out 21 organizations – five of them Arab-Israeli – that support the “right of return.” The Mossawa organization, for example, spoke of a “return to the original settlements”; “Mada al-Carmel” stated that “reconciliation also requires recognition of the right of return and action for its implementation”; Whereas the “Return Council”, a Jewish body in particular, stated that “today we have a responsibility to work to promote the return of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons,” as well as “to work within Jewish society to increase awareness of the meaning of return, necessity, justice and feasibility.” The council recommended “imagining the return and planning it and the space that will be created in its wake,” noting that it could rely on 93 percent of the land owned by the state.

The violent events in May, which also sucked the Messiah of the “Return” and the “Nakba”, took place against the background of many previous and varied manifestations of this trend: return marches, in which the “keys of return” were carried, streets in Arab settlements named after abandoned settlements in ’48. , Restoration of cemeteries, mosques and churches that remained intact in the area of ??the Arab localities that were destroyed in 1948, and more.

A century and a half after the establishment of the state, it became clear that among a significant number of Israeli Arabs, “returning” is no longer a theoretical heritage dream, but a real aspiration. The events of May made it clear that this was not “just” a future challenge to the continued existence of the Jewish state or the state in general, but an aspiration with a proven, immediate potential of violence and terrorism, the dangers of which can no longer be ignored.