10  The Memoricide of the Nakba

Nationalist extremists are also trying to wipe out any physical evidence that could remind future generations that people other than Serbs ever lived together in Bosnia. Historic mosques, churches and synagogues as well as national libraries, archives, and museums have been torched, dynamited and bulldozed … They want to eliminate the memory of the past as well.

Sevdalinka.net

Over 700,000 olive and orange trees have been destroyed by the Israelis. This is an act of sheer vandalism from a state that claims to practise conservation of the environment. How appalling and shameful.

Address by Ronnie Kasrils, Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, South Africa, London 30 November, 2002.

10.1 THE REINVENTION OF PALESTINE

As the owner of lands in general, along with other agencies that possess state land in Israel such as the Israeli Land Authority, the army and the government, the Jewish National Fund was also involved in establishing new Jewish settlements on the lands of the destroyed Palestinian villages. Here, dispossession was accompanied by the renaming of the places it had seized, destroyed and now recreated. This mission was accomplished with the help of archaeologists and biblical experts who volunteered to serve on an official Naming Committee whose job it was to Hebraize Palestine’s geography.

This naming committee was in fact an old outfit, already put in place in 1920, when it acted as an ad-hoc group of scholars that granted Hebrew names to lands and places newly purchased by the Jews, and they continued to do so for lands and places taken by force during the Nakba. It was reconvened by Ben-Gurion in July 1949, who turned it into a sub-division of the JNF. The naming committee was not working in a total vacuum. Some of the Palestinian villages were inevitably built on the ruins of earlier and even ancient civilizations, including the Hebrew one, but this was a limited phenomenon and none of the cases involved was unambiguous. The postulated ‘Hebrew’ sites date back to such ancient times that there is little chance of establishing their locations properly, but then, of course, the motive for Hebraizing the names of the evicted villages was ideological and not scholarly. The narrative accompanying this expropriation was very simple: ‘Throughout the years of foreign occupation of Eretz Israel, the original Hebrew names were erased or became garbled, and sometimes took on an alien form.’ The archaeological zeal to reproduce the map of ‘Ancient’ Israel was in essence none other than a systematic, scholarly, political and military attempt to de-Arabise the terrain – its names and geography, but above all its history.

The JNF, as mentioned before, was busy confiscating land in the 1950s and the 1960s, but it did not end there. It also owned land in the Greater Jerusalem area that it had received from the Custodian of Absentee Lands after the 1967 war. In the early 1980s, this land was passed on by the JNF to Elad, the settlers’ NGO that was then and remains today devoted to the ‘Judaization’ of East Jerusalem. This NGO focused on Silwan and stated openly that it wanted to cleanse that village from its original Palestinian inhabitants. In 2005 it received assistance from the Jerusalem municipality, which ordered the destruction of three dozen houses there under the pretext of ‘illegal construction and expansion’.

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the JNF’s main challenges were the government policies of privatisation of land ownership, accelerated under Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999) and Ariel Sharon (2001–2003; 2003–2006), which threatened to limit the JNF’s control. However, both these right-wing prime ministers were torn between Zionism and Capitalism, and time will tell how much land their successors will allow to remain in the JNF’s hands in the future. What is not going to change is the strong hold the JNF has over Israel’s forests.

In these forests Nakba denial is so pervasive, and has been achieved so effectively, that they have become a main arena of struggle for Palestinian refugees wishing to commemorate the villages that lie buried beneath them. They are up against an organisation – the JNF – which claims that there is only barren land under the pine and cypress trees it has planted there.

10.2 VIRTUAL COLONIALISM AND THE JNF

When it set out to create its national parks on the sites of eradicated Palestinian villages, the decision as to what to plant was totally in the hands of the JNF. Almost from the start the JNF executive opted mainly for conifers instead of the natural flora indigenous to Palestine. In part this was an attempt to make the country look European, although this appears nowhere in any official document as a goal. In addition, however, the choice of planting pine and cypress trees – and this has been overtly stated – was meant to support the country’s aspiring wood industry.

The three aims of keeping the country Jewish, European-looking and Green quickly fused into one. This is why forests throughout Israel today include only eleven per cent of indigenous species and why a mere ten per cent of all forests date from before 1948.1 At times, the original flora manages to return in surprising ways. Pine trees were planted not only over bulldozed houses, but also over fields and olive groves. In the new development town of Migdal Ha-Emek, for example, the JNF did its utmost to try and cover the ruins of the Palestinian village of Mujaydil, at the town’s eastern entrance, with rows of pine trees, not a proper forest in this case but just a small wood. Such ‘green lungs’ can be found in many of Israel’s development towns that cover destroyed Palestinian villages (Tirat Hacarmel over Tirat Haifa, Qiryat Shemona over Khalsa, Ashkelon over Majdal, etc.). But this particular species failed to adapt to the local soil and, despite repeated treatment, disease kept afflicting the trees. Later visits by relatives of some of Mujaydial’s original villagers revealed that some of the pine trees had literally split in two and how, in the middle of their broken trunks, olive trees had popped up in defiance of the alien flora planted over them fifty-six years ago.

Within Israel and throughout the Jewish world the JNF is seen as a highly responsible ecological agency whose reputation rests on the way it has been assiduously planting trees, reintroducing local flora and landscapes, and paving the way for scores of resort and nature parks, complete with picnic facilities and children’s playgrounds. Israelis find their way to these spots by clicking on the different icons on the JNF’s detailed website, or taking their cues from the material posted on the various information boards located at the entrances to these parks, and at various stations along the way within the recreational grounds themselves. These texts guide and inform visitors wherever they go, even if all they want to do is enjoy themselves and relax.

JNF parks do not only offer parking spaces, picnic areas, playgrounds and access to nature, but also incorporate visible items that tell a particular history: the ruins of a house, a fortress, orchards, cactuses (sabra), and so on. There are also many fig and almond trees. Most Israelis think these are ‘wild’ figs or ‘wild’ almonds, as they see them in full bloom, towards the end of the winter, heralding the beauty of spring. But these fruit trees were planted and nurtured by human hands. Wherever almond and fig trees, olive groves or clusters of cactuses are found, there once stood a Palestinian village: still blossoming afresh each year, these trees are all that remain. Near the now-uncultivated terraces, and under the swings and picnic tables, and the European pine forests, there lie buried the houses and fields of the Palestinians whom Israeli troops expelled in 1948. However, guided only by these JNF signs, visitors will never realise that people used to live there – the Palestinians who now reside as refugees in the Occupied Territories, as second-rate citizens inside Israel, and as camp dwellers beyond Palestine’s border.

The true mission of the JNF, in other words, has been to conceal these visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees it has planted over them, but also by the narratives it has created to deny their existence. Whether on the JNF website or in the parks themselves, the most sophisticated audiovisual equipment displays the official Zionist story, contextualising any given location within the national meta-narrative of the Jewish people and Eretz Israel. This version continues to spout the familiar myths of the narrative – Palestine as an ‘empty’ and ‘arid’ land before the arrival of Zionism – that Zionism employs to supplant all history that contradicts its own invented Jewish past.

As Israel’s ‘green lungs’, these recreational sites do not so much commemorate history as seek to totally erase it. Through the literature the JNF attaches to the items that are still visible from before 1948 a local history is intentionally denied. This is not part of a need to tell a different story in its own right, but is designed to annihilate all memory of the Palestinian villages that these ‘green lungs’ have replaced. In this way, the information provided at these JNF sites is a pre-eminent model for the all-pervading mechanism of denial Israelis activate in the realm of representation. Deeply rooted in the people’s psyche, this mechanism works through exactly this replacement of Palestinian sites of trauma and memory by spaces of leisure and entertainment for Israelis. In other words, what the JNF texts represent as an ‘ecological concern’ is yet one more official Israeli effort to deny the Nakba and conceal the enormity of the Palestinian tragedy.

10.3 THE JNF RESORT PARKS IN ISRAEL

The home page of the JNF’s official website showcases the agency as being responsible for having made the desert bloom and the historical Arab landscape look European. It proudly proclaims that these forests and parks were built upon ‘arid and desert-like areas’, and that ‘Israel’s forests and parks were not always here. The first Jewish settlers in the country, at the end of the 19th century, found a desolate land with not a mite of shade.’

The JNF is not only the creator of Israel’s ‘green lungs’, it is also their preserver. The JNF declares that the forests are there to provide recreation for the benefit of all citizens of Israel and to make them ‘ecologically aware’. What visitors are not being told is that in addition the JNF is the principal agency whose job it is to prevent all acts of commemoration at these ‘forests’, let alone visits of return, by Palestinian refugees whose own houses lie entombed under these trees and playgrounds.

Four of the larger and most popular picnic sites that appear on the JNF website – the Birya Forest, the Ramat Menashe Forest, the Jerusalem Forest, and the Sataf – all epitomise, better than any other space today in Israel, both the Nakba and the denial of the Nakba .

10.3.1 The Forest of Birya

Moving from north to south, the Birya Forest is located in the Safad region and covers a total of 20,000 dunam. It is the largest man-made forest in Israel and a very popular site. It conceals the houses and the lands of at least six Palestinian villages. Reading through the text on the website and simply highlighting what it includes and excludes, none of the villages of Dishon, Alma, Qaddita, Amqa, Ayn al-Zaytun or Biriyya are ever mentioned. They all disappear behind the descriptions the website gives of the forest’s wonderful charms and attractions: ‘No wonder that in such a huge forest one can find a plethora of interesting and intriguing sites: woods, bustans, springs and an old synagogue [namely a small piece of mosaic that may or may not be an old synagogue, as the area through the ages was frequented by the Orthodox Jews of Safad].’ In many of the JNF sites, bustans – the fruit gardens Palestinian farmers would plant around their farm houses – appear as one of the many mysteries the JNF promises the adventurous visitor. These clearly visible remnants of Palestinian villages are referred to as an inherent part of nature and her wonderful secrets. At one of the sites, it actually refers to the terraces you can find almost everywhere there as the proud creation of the JNF. Some of these were in fact rebuilt over the original ones, and go back centuries before the Zionist takeover.

Thus, Palestinian bustans are attributed to nature and Palestine’s history transported back to a biblical and Talmudic past. Such is the fate of one of the best known villages, Ayn al-Zaytun, which was emptied in May 1948, during which many of its inhabitants were massacred. Ayn al-Zaytun is mentioned by name, but in the following manner:

Ein Zeitun has become one of the most attractive spots within the recreational ground as it harbors large picnic tables and ample parking for the disabled. It is located where once stood the settlement Ein Zeitun, where Jews used to live ever since the medieval times and until the 18th century. There were four abortive [Jewish] settlement attempts. The parking lot has biological toilets and playgrounds. Next to the parking lot, a memorial stands in memory of the soldiers who fell in the Six Day War.

Fancifully meshing history and tourist tips, the text totally erases from Israel’s collective memory the thriving Palestinian community Jewish troops wiped out within a few hours.

The pages of the JNF website on the history of Ayn al-Zaytun go into great detail, and the narrative that accompanies a virtual or real journey into the forest takes the reader back to the alleged Talmudic town in the third century, before skipping a whole millennium of Palestinian villages and communities. It finally focuses on the last three years of the Mandatory period, as these same grounds were hiding places where the Jewish underground, trying to escape the watchful eyes of the British, trained its troops and stashed the weapons it was amassing.

10.3.2 The Ramat Menashe Park

South of Biriyya lies Ramat Menashe Park. It covers the ruins of Lajjun, Mansi, Kafrayn, Butaymat, Hubeiza, Daliyat al-Rawha, Sabbarin, Burayka, Sindiyana and Umm al-Zinat. At the very centre of the park lie the remains of the destroyed village of Daliyat al-Rawha, now covered by Kibbutz Ramat Menashe of the socialist movement Hashomer Ha-Tza‘ir. The remnants of the blown-up houses2 of one of the villages, Kafrayn, are still visible. The JNF website highlights the admixture of nature and human habitat in the forest when it tells us that in its midst there are ‘six villages’. The website uses the highly atypical Hebrew word for ‘village’, kfar, to refer to the kibbutzim in the park, and not the six villages underneath the park – a linguistic ploy that serves to reinforce the metaphorical palimpsest at work here: the erasure of the history of one people in order to write that of another people over it.3

In the words of the JNF website, the beauty and the attraction of this site are ‘unmatched’. One of the principal reasons is the countryside itself, with its bustans and its ruins of ‘the past’, but there is a master design behind all this that strives to maintain the contours of the natural scenery. Here, too, nature has its ‘particular appeal’ because of the destroyed Palestinian villages the park covers up. Both the JNF’s virtual and real tour through the park gently guide the visitor from one recommended spot to another, all carrying Arabic names: these are the names of the destroyed villages, but here presented as natural or geographical locations that betray no earlier human presence. The reason one can move from one point to the other so smoothly is attributed by the JNF to a network of roads that were paved in the ‘British period’. Why did the British bother to pave roads here? Obviously to better connect (and thus control) existing villages, but this fact can only be extracted from the text with great difficulty, if at all.

This system of erasure, however, can never be foolproof. For example, the JNF website tells us something you will not find mentioned on the boards that punctuate the forest paths themselves. Within the many ruins dotting the place the ‘Village Spring’ (‘Ein ha-Kfar’) is recommended as ‘the quietest part of the site’. Often a village spring would be at the heart of the village, close to the village square, as here in Kafrayn, its ruins now providing not only ‘peace of mind’ but also serving the cattle of the nearby kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek as a resting point on their way to meadows down below.

10.3.3 Greening of Jerusalem

The last two examples come from the Jerusalem area. The western slopes of the city are covered with the ‘Jerusalem forest’, another brainchild of Yossef Weitz. In 1956 Weitz complained to the mayor of Jerusalem about the barren sight of the western hills of the city. Eight years earlier, they had of course been covered with the houses and the cultivated lands of Palestinian villages bustling with life. In 1967 Weitz’s efforts finally bore fruit: The JNF decided to plant one million trees on 4,500 dunam that, in the words of the website, ‘encircle Jerusalem with a green belt.’ At one of its southern corners, the forest reaches the ruined village of Ayn Karim and covers the destroyed village of Beit Mazmil. Its most western point stretches over the land and houses of the destroyed village of Beit Horish, whose people were expelled as late as 1949. The forest extends further over Deir Yassin, Zuba, Sataf, Jura and Beit Umm al-Meis.

The JNF website here promises its visitors unique sites and special experiences in a forest whose historical remnants ‘testify to intensive agricultural activity’. More specifically, it highlights the various terraces one finds carved out along the western slopes: as in all other sites, these terraces are always ‘ancient’ – even when they were shaped by Palestinian villagers less than two or three generations ago.

The last geographical site is the destroyed Palestinian village of Sataf, located in one of the most beautiful spots high up in the Jerusalem Mountains. The site’s greatest attraction, according to the JNF website, is the reconstruction it offers of ‘ancient’ (kadum in Hebrew) agriculture – the adjective ‘ancient’ is used for every single detail in this site: paths are ‘ancient’, steps are ‘ancient’, and so on. Sataf, in fact, was a Palestinian village expelled and mostly destroyed in 1948. For the JNF, the remains of the village are one more station visitors encounter on the intriguing walking tours it has set out for them within this ‘ancient site’. The mixture here of Palestinian terraces and the remains of four or five Palestinian buildings almost fully intact inspired the JNF to create a new concept, the ‘bustanof’ (‘bustan’ plus ‘nof’, the Hebrew word for panorama, the English equivalent for which would probably be something like ‘bustanorama’ or ‘orchard-view’). The concept is wholly original to the JNF.

The bustans overlook some exquisite scenery and are popular with Jerusalem’s young professional class who come here to experience ‘ancient’ and ‘biblical’ ways of cultivating a plot of land that may even yield some ‘biblical’ fruits and vegetables. Needless to say, these ancient ways are far from ‘biblical’ but are Palestinian, as are the plots and the bustans and the place itself.

In Sataf the JNF promises the more adventurous visitors a ‘Secret Garden’ and an ‘Elusive Spring’, two gems they can discover among terraces that are a ‘testimony to human habitation 6,000 years ago culminating in the period of the Second Temple.’ This is not exactly how these terraces were described in 1949 when Jewish immigrants from Arab countries were sent to repopulate the Palestinian village and take over the houses that had remained standing. Only when these new settlers proved unmanageable did the JNF decide to turn the village into a tourist site.

At the time, in 1949, Israel’s naming committee searched for a biblical association for the place, but failed to find any connection to Jewish sources. They then hit upon the idea of associating the vineyard that surrounded the village with the vineyards mentioned in the biblical Psalms and Song of Songs. For a while they even invented a name for the place to suit their fancy, ‘Bikura’ – the early fruit of the summer – but gave it up again as Israelis had already got used to the name Sataf.

The JNF website narrative and the information offered on the various boards set up at the locations themselves is also widely available elsewhere. There has always been a thriving literature in Israel catering for domestic tourism where ecological awareness, Zionist ideology and erasure of the past often go hand in hand. The encyclopedias, tourist guides and albums generated for the purpose appear even more popular and are in greater demand today than ever before. In this way, the JNF ‘ecologises’ the crimes of 1948 in order for Israel to tell one narrative and erase another. As Walid Khalidi has put in his forceful style: ’It is a platitude of historiography that the victors in war get away with both the loot and the version of events.’4

Despite this deliberate airbrushing of history, the fate of the villages that lie buried under the recreational parks in Israel is intimately linked to the future of the Palestinian families who once lived there and who now, almost sixty years later, still reside in refugee camps and faraway diasporic communities. The solution of the Palestinian refugee problem remains the key to any just and lasting settlement of the conflict in Palestine: for close to sixty years now the Palestinians have remained steadfast as a nation in their demand to have their legal rights acknowledged, above all their Right of Return, originally granted to them by the United Nations in 1948. They continue to confront an official Israeli policy of denial and anti-repatriation that seems only to have hardened over the same period.

There are two factors that have so far succeeded in defeating all chances of an equitable solution to the conflict in Palestine to take root: the Zionist ideology of ethnic supremacy and the ‘peace process’. From the former stems Israel’s continuing denial of the Nakba; in the latter we see the lack of international will to bring justice to the region – two obstacles that perpetuate the refugee problem and stand in the way of a just and comprehensive peace emerging in the land.