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An occasional column by Nigel Parry for Middle East International magazine.
For the first time in 50 years Palestinians are widely discussing the events surrounding the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Over in Palestine, every magazine, newspaper and TV show is continually making reference to it. Nakba fever, however, reminds me of the release of Stephen Spielberg's Jurassic Park -- with accompanying dinosaur books, dinosaur posters and dinosaur chewing gum. It's as if everyone has only just realised they should be doing something about it, and have begun to mention it at every opportunity, with all the expected lack of depth such spontaneity implies. Online, the Catastrophe is, well, a catastrophe -- at least compared to a comparable event in the Israeli national consciousness, the Holocaust.
Despite the lack of planning, a handful of organisations have been posting Nakba-related material and creating Nakba websites. The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah, http://www.sakakini.org/, has launched a special website at http://www.alnakba.org/. The site contains listings of events round the world, survivors' testimonies, a chronology of events, a photo gallery, bibliography, and list of destroyed Palestinian villages, the latter describing what lies in their place today. Information is a little thin, the site was only launched earlier in the year.
The website and rich programme of events in Ramallah this year were funded almost entirely by European governments, in common with other Nakba-related activities and projects. The sad truth is that Palestinians living in a diaspora created by the Nakba have proved unwilling to put their hands in their pockets to commemorate it.
LAW, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, at http://www.lawsociety.org/, has a special section ofits site dedicated to a forthcoming conference, "50 Years of Human Rights Violations -- Palestinians Dispossessed", to be held on 7-10 June in Jerusalem. The conference, whose home page is at http://www.lawsociety.org/conf/, aims to address the distortion of historical fact by Israel about the last 50 years, to promote understanding of these issues amongst the world community and to develop strategies to address past human rights abuses and provide restitution in the Eramework of establishing a lasting peace.
Dayr Yasin, the most famous single event during the dispossession of Palestinians, has led to a number of related sites. Deir Yassin Remembered, http://www.deiryassin.org/, is an online information centre for material on the 9 April 1948 massacre. The full content of Ray Hanania's recent book Deir Yassin, Arab & Jewish Tragedy in Palestine is available in an electronic edition at http://www.hanania.com/dybook.htm.
"Nakba denial", a rising phenomenon among Israeli rightwingers, is perhaps most evident in a recent publication by the Zionist Organisation of America, http://www.zoa.org/. "Deir Yassin, History ofa Lie", available at http://www.zoa.org/archives/pr-980309-99.html. The report uses a 1987 report on Dayr Yasin by Bir Zeit University's Centre for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society, which concluded that the number of dead did not exceed 120 compared with the previously believed figure of 254, which it should be noted originated from a Jewish source -- the IZL commander at Dayr Yasin, Mordechai Ra'anan. Once this "lie" is knocked down to size, it is a short step for the report's author and ZOA's president, Morton Klein, to spend the rest of the report denying any massacre took place at all.
Bir Zeit University's Centre for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society itself has a website, although static in content, at http://www.birzeit.edu/crdps/village.html entitled "Destroyed Palestinian Villages: A Reign of Terror & Systematic Expulsion". This site looks at the case of eleven of the 415 destroyed villages, including Dayr Yasin.
Although it is reported that other virtual Palestinian memorial projects related to the Nakba are in the pipeline, someone who wants to find a really meaty offering will be disappointed by all of the above sites. All could go a lot further in terms of the information they offer, all could use serious funding to buy staff time to update them with available print material, and all could profit from the same dedication that is clearly manifest in the websites of Jewish organisations such as the Simon Weisenthal Centre, Yad Vashem and the myriad of other Holocaust memorial and information sites.
With the dwindling number of Palestinian Nakba survivors who were old enough to remember the events of the period and who are now aged 65 and over, the Palestinian people are in a race against time to recover from their memories a past that has been denied to them forthe last 50 years. To have a catastrophe befall you at the hands of someone else is one thing. To inflict a second on yourself and the generations that follow is something else entirely.
by Nigel Parry
22 May 1998
MEI 575