الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The catastrophe that befell Palestinian people in 1948 stands out in
history as one of the colossal disasters to occur over a relatively short period
of time. The Nakba is the Arabic name attributed to such calamity; it was first
used by the Syrian intellectual Constantin Zurayk in a book that analyzes the
event under the title Ma’na al-Nakba or The Meaning of the Disaster (Allan
1). The term later came to be used by other intellectuals and became widely
disseminated, to the extent that it is no longer restricted to the use of the Arabic
language solely, but entered the lexicon of other languages as well1. The
Nakba refers to the deliberate expulsion of a large number of the native
population of Palestine; “close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531
villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of
their inhabitants” (Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing xiii). Through many massacres
coinciding with the destruction and mass evacuation of the deeply rooted
inhabitants: “1948 saw not only the establishment of a settler-colonialist state
on nearly 80 per cent of Mandatory Palestine, but also the destruction of
historic Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians” (Masalha 2).
The forced expulsion, whether internally to other parts of Palestine in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, or externally to the neighboring countries, resulted in
one of the longest unresolved refugee problems in recent history, due to the
fact that the newly established Zionist state barred their return. The total
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number of refugees has mounted recently to around 5.9 million living across
the Middle East, according to UNRWA official records; they are scattered in
and around 58 official refugee camps throughout Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the
Gaza Strip and the West Bank (UNRWA). Those camps suffer gravely from
dire humanitarian conditions and grinding poverty. In addition, the Palestinian
diaspora encompasses a considerable number of refugees widely dispersed
around the world.
The Nakba signifies the sudden dismantling of the structure of the
Palestinian society, the erasure of many villages, and the wiping of the name
of Palestine off the map, “a whole country and its people disappeared from
international maps and dictionaries” (Masalha 3). According to Sa’adi and
Abu-Lughod, “the Nakba meant the destruction in a single blow of all the
worlds in which Palestinians had lived. For many, theirs was a dynamic,
prosperous, and future-oriented society. The Nakba marked a new era
dominated by estrangement, and often poverty” (9). It has thus become
“synonymous with the annihilation of Palestinian society, culture and history”
(Mattar 176).
However, the Nakba and its traumatic aftermath is not just a historic
past; in fact, it is still an ongoing experience. As Sa’adi and Abu-Lughod
describe it, “the Nakba was not the last collective site of trauma, but what
came later to be seen, through the prism of repeated dispossessions and
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upheavals, as the foundational station in an unfolding and continuing saga of
dispossession, negations, and erasure” (109-110). The second major blow for
the Palestinian society came in the year of 1967, with the war that came to be
called the Naksa or the setback. In this war, Israel took control of the rest of
Palestinian lands, turning more people into refugees, many of whom were
uprooted for the second time. Till this day, land appropriation, demolition of
houses and uprooting of Palestinian inhabitants persists incessantly on a large
scale across many areas of Palestine. Most recent of which is the forced
dispossession and expulsion of the families of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in
East Jerusalem.
Trauma forms an inevitable part of the Palestinian daily experience,
and has become an intrinsic part of the their collective consciousness. This
collective consciousness still harbors the traumatic rupture inflicted by the
Nakba, and it is still deeply ingrained in the life and politics of the Palestinian
society today (Masalha 13). The persistence of this traumatic collectivity fuels
the will to speak up and remember, rather than to maintain silence and opt for
forgetfulness. Narrating trauma, thus, acts as a unifying factor for all the
community.
However, the Zionist discourse attempts to silence the Palestinian one,
and has endeavored since the beginning of their project to reinforce and
promote the slogan formulated by Israel Zangwill that Palestine is “a land
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without people to people without land” (Said, Question of Palestine 9).
Following the Nakba, they deliberately sought to suppress the Palestinian
voice, and obliterate all evidence of Palestinian existence. Such endeavors
could be framed within the concept of “Nakba Memoricide” introduced by the
Israeli new historian Ilan Pappé, which refers to “the systematic erasure of the
expelled Palestinians and their miniholocaust from Israeli collective memory
and the excision of their history and deeply rooted heritage in the land, and
their destroyed villages and towns from Israeli official and popular history”
(Masalha 10). Ilan Pappé admits the injustice committed against the
Palestinians, “the deepest form of frustration for Palestinians has been that the
criminal act these men were responsible for has been so thoroughly denied,
and that Palestinian suffering has been so totally ignored, ever since 1948”
(Ethnic Cleansing xiv). Nur Masalha also points to “toponymicide” as one of
the primary means of the “de-Arabisation of the land”, which entails “the
erasure of ancient Palestinian place names and their replacement by newly
coined Zionist Hebrew toponymy” (10).
The Zionist systematic eradication was not only confined to the land,
people and language, but also of the Palestinian voice and story. The deliberate
destruction and appropriation of “records, documentation and cultural
heritage” of Palestinians, hindered them from imparting the truth of their
documented existence to the world for over a period of twenty years