The Palestine Nakba by Nur Masalha

Author:Nur Masalha [Masalha, Nur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-08-08T18:30:00+00:00

‘New History’ and the Liberal Coloniser: Khirbet Khiz‘ah and Zionist Narratives

In May 1949 the Hebrew novella Khirbet Khiz‘ah was published by S. Yizhar (real name Yizhar Smilansky, 1916–2006), an army officer during the 1948 war.9 Khirbet Khiz‘ah came out around the same time Arab historian Constantine Zurayk published in Arabic Ma’na al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Nakba) (1949, 1956). Khirbet Khiz‘ah was never translated into Arabic and Ma’na al-Nakba was never published in Hebrew. Four decades later, in the late 1980s when the ‘new historians’ began writing about 1948, Yizhar declared himself ‘the man who had [in 1949] laid bare the original sin of the State of Israel (Shapira 2000: 1–62, 2007: 81–123).

In May 1949, in contrast to the almost total obliviousness and forgetfulness of today (see Noga Kadman’s study Erased from Space and Consciousness [2008], discussed below), few ‘new Israelis’ were unaware that hundreds of Palestinian villages had been forcibly depopulated and destroyed by their army. Israeli historian Anita Shapira has shown that the veracity of the story of Khirbet Khiz‘ah, widely discussed in Hebrew in the early 1950s, was never internally questioned or challenged at the time. The ‘new historians’, when they began to publish findings from research in previously classified archives, also sought to remind Israelis of what they had forgotten from the mid-1950s onwards. Although Zionist atrocities in 1948 were widely known in Israel in the early 1950s, they were subsequently suppressed and rendered unknowable for the vast majority of Israeli Jews. Writing in 2006, ‘new historian’ Ilan Pappé observed:

educators, historians, novelists, and cultural producers in general have all been involved in a campaign of denial and concealment. The horrors of 1948 were hidden from the public eye and from generations to come by those who committed them. Only at the end of 2000 did Gideon Levy,10 a voice in the wilderness, cry out in an article in Haaretz: How could you have lied to us for so many years? Very few ask this question now, and even fewer are willing to answer it. (2006: 287–8)

Khirbet Khiz‘ah describes the expulsion of Palestinians from their village by the Israeli army, putting onto trucks those who did not evacuate their village, including the old and the sick who were unable to flee before the arrival of Israeli troops. Written in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 war, Khirbet Khiz‘ah is a poignant account, fictionalised but recognisably partly autobiographical, of the ethnic cleansing of a fictional Palestinian village of that name. In 1949–51 the book generated a degree of public debate in Israel (Shapira 2007: 88–96). In Arabic the word khirbeh means literally ‘ruins’, but in the local Palestinian dialect, notwithstanding Israeli and Hebrew usage, it means simply a relatively new small village established by several families that move out of a large mother village.11 However, according to Ronit Lentin, the Hebrew novella was not named Khirbet Khiz‘ah (The Ruins of Khiz‘ah) incidentally: ‘[T]he story is replete with love for the landscape and contempt for its Palestinian inhabitants’ (Lentin 2010: 58).

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