Israelis who deny the Palestinian Nakba are waging war on their own past

A childhood memory: A group of kids and their teacher on a school trip. They are walking through excavations, listening to explanations from a tour guide about their ancestors who lived there 2000 years ago.

After a while, one of the kids points to some ruins between the trees. "Are these ancient homes as well?" he asks.

"These are not important," comes the answer.

Growing up in the '70s and the '80s you couldn't miss those small houses scattered near fields, between towns and in national parks. Most of them were made of stone, with arches and long, tall windows.

Palestinian children re-enact the Nakba in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in Lebanon in 2009.Credit: AP

They are gradually disappearing - partly due to the "development" trends which have left very few corners of this country untouched, but also due to a policy that is meant to erase any memory of the people who used to live in this land. But one can still find them sometimes, and in the most unexpected of places - the mosque which stands between the hotels on Tel Aviv's beach, or a few homes which stood until recently behind Herzliya's monstrous Cinema City complex.

I never heard the word "Nakba" - the "catastrophe" which Palestinians commemorate on May 15 each year - before the 1990s. It was simply not present in the language, or in the popular culture. Naturally, we knew that some Arabs left Israel in 1948, but it was all very vague. While we were asked to cite numbers and dates of the Jewish waves of immigration to Israel, details on the Palestinian parts of the story were sketchy: How many Palestinians left Israel? What were the circumstances? Why didn't they return after the war? All these questions were irrelevant, having almost nothing to do with our history - that's what we were made to think.

Even after the New Historians of the 1990s made the term Nakba a part of modern Hebrew and proved that in many cases Israel forcibly removed Palestinians from territories it conquered in 1948, we were engaged in the wrong kind of questions, such as the debate on whether more Palestinians were expelled or fled.

The important thing is that they weren't allowed to come back, and that they had their property and land seized by Israel immediately after the war (as was the case for Jews who left Arab countries in the years to come).

Palestinian protesters at the Israel-Syria border in May 2011. Several were killed when Israeli soldiers opened fire.Credit: Getty Images

Leaving a place doesn't make someone a refugee. It's forbidding him or her from coming back that does it.

For a short while in 2004-2005 I was writing book reviews for Maariv's internet site, and for several other magazines.

Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem struggle with Israeli police in May 1998, after officers tried to break up a march commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Nakba. Credit: AP

One Palestinian book I was asked to review was Muhammad al-Asaad's Children of the Dew. The book is an attempt to reconstruct the author's childhood in a village near Haifa out of his fragmented recollections, the stories of his mother and the legends of the village's people.

I remembered Asaad​ when, in 2010, I interviewed the speaker of the Knesset, now Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

A Palestinian family fill plastic containers with drinking water they bought from a vendor in Khan Younis refugee camp, in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit: AP

Rivlin, a hawk from Israel's right, grew up in Jerusalem, which was a fairly mixed town before 1948, and certainly more than today. He understands Arabic and has Palestinian acquaintances.

At one point, the conversation reached the idea - popular with mainstream Israeli pundits - that it will be impossible to reach an agreement with the current Palestinian leadership, which still includes many refugees. According to this line of thinking, we should look for interim agreements because the next generation, who weren't displaced themselves, might be more pragmatic.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (centre) stands with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin (right) during an official state Memorial Day service for the country's fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism.Credit: AP

"Nonsense!" Rivlin said. "Typical leftie patronising ... [the Jews] remembered our land for 2000 years, and now you want to tell me that the Palestinians will forget it in 10, 20 years?

"Believe me, they will remember."

Israelis watch an air show during Independence Day celebrations in Tel Aviv.Credit: AP

Rivlin does not advocate the right of return for Palestinians and one could also have doubts on the particular joint state he envisions for Jews and Arabs, but at the bottom of his thinking there is a very deep truth: The Jewish people are a living proof that a "refugee problem" won't disappear for generations, even hundreds and thousands of years, and therefore can't be ignored.

These days, the Israeli reaction to the mentioning of the Nakba is composed of several elements, each of them contradicting the other. Some say that there was no Nakba. Then there is the line that suggests that people left of their own will. And if they didn't - they deserve it, because the Arabs opposed the 1947 partition plan and declared war on the Jews.

Ahmad Saadi, a Palestinian refugee living in Lebanon, with a model of his home village of Taytaba in the Galilee, which he created from memory. Taytaba was depopulated in 1948 and remains derelict.Credit: Jason Koutsoukis

Finally, there are those who admit that Israel initiated mass deportation and prevented the refugees from coming back, but simply say that ethnic cleansings are part of the birth of almost every nation and the Palestinians should simply accept it. Ironically, the latter is the position of Benny Morris, the most well-known of the New Historians and the person who almost single-handedly proved the claims of forced deportations by Israel's military in 1948.

This kind of political argument has led to policy decisions, the most prominent of them being the 2011 Nakba Law. The original intention of the bill was to completely criminalise any mention of the Nakba (with a punishment of up to three years in prison), but this was too anti-democratic even for the 18th Knesset. The law that did pass forbids government-supported institutions from publicly commemorating the Nakba.

The bill is very vague, and theoretically it could be used to withdraw funds from a university which plans a debate on the Palestinian "disaster". More likely, though, is that it will be implemented against Arab municipalities and institutions in Israel who attempt to hold memorial ceremonies for the Nakba. It is important to remember not only that some 20 per cent of Israelis are Palestinian Arabs, but that many of them are refugees - the often-forgotten "internal refugees" who lost their homes and property but found themselves inside Israel at the end of the war.

In the same spirit, the leaking of the Palestine Papers in January 2011 revealed that US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice asked the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks to forgo some of their claims regarding refugees because "bad things happen to people all the time".

Apart from being insensitive on a basic human level, such actions - from the Knesset's Nakba Law to Rice's request - ignore one important thing: that the Nakba is part of Israeli and Jewish history.

In his introduction to Asaad's​ Children of the Dew, the Israeli editor of the book, Yossef Algazi, calls the author "a Wandering Jew of our time". Meeting descendants of Palestinian refugees in the last few years, I couldn't help thinking about the similarities between Jewish and Palestinian fates, and the sense of displacement the two people share.

I think that our real problem with the Palestinians has to do with the feeling that we need to ignore their story in order to hold on to our identity as Israelis – when in fact we will never feel "at home" without facing the wounds of the past.

"At the end of every sentence you say in Hebrew sits an Arab with a nargila [hookah]/ even if it starts in Siberia or in Hollywood with 'Hava Nagila'," wrote the Israeli poet Meir Ariel in his song "Shir Keev" ("Song of Pain").

I think it's the best political line written in Hebrew. It tells us that whatever we do, regardless of the political solution we chose to advocate or how powerful we might feel, our fate here will always be linked to the Palestinians'.

Denying the Nakba - forgetting our role in it and ignoring its political implications - is denying our own identity.

Noam Sheizaf is an Israeli journalist and editor. This is an updated and edited extract from a piece he wrote for +972 Magazine.