On May 11, the Jerusalem Post published an opinion piece by a university student living in Ramallah. Later a Facebook poster responded with his own views of the Nakba. Both make for fascinating reading:
For Palestinians, the Nakba is every day, not just once a year
This might be Israel’s day of independence, but for the Palestinians it is known as al Nakba, ‘the catastrophe’
This might be Israel’s day of independence, but for the Palestinians it is known as al Nakba, “the catastrophe”, marking 500 ruined Palestinian villages and millions of refugees. It is a reminder of the misery and suffering of a nation, generation after generation.
I believe I am right in saying our Nakba is every day, not just once a year. I would like to tell you a little bit about the life that I and millions of other Palestinians endure every day in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Nakba today is the hundreds of checkpoints in the West Bank that are manufactured to treat humans like caged animals. It is the people killed in Gaza — medical staff, journalists and UNRWA employees — who are not safe from Israeli attacks.
It is the thousands of houses, mosques and charities destroyed by air strikes. It is the innocent people living in the streets, each with enough misery and experience to fill the pages of a book.
You may not have heard of the woman giving birth at a checkpoint because soldiers did not allow her through to a hospital. Or the whole family who had to enter and leave their house through a window because the Israeli army blocked their door.
There are constant, unending restrictions: you aren’t allowed to look through this window, you may not access your own rooftop, you cannot step out of your house after five in the evening.
Today, Israel is deliberately concealing the realities of day-to-day life in the West Bank and Gaza.
Settlements are increasingly taking away what is left of my country’s land. The number of checkpoints is rising, some of them resembling military bases and with specific opening and closing times.
In Hebron, Palestinians have to go through multiple cages and electronic gates and are body-searched three times in five minutes — simply so they can pray. While Israelis celebrate their independence with parties on the streets of Tel Aviv, their fellow soldiers are proudly stopping frail old men from crossing a checkpoint to get to the Ibrahimi mosque.
In Gaza, youthful soldiers — themselves with no experience of life — film themselves shooting dead Palestinians.
This is the victory of hatred and insanity over morality and compassion.
There is a huge difference in the narratives that Israelis and Palestinians tell their respective sides but I think there are some basic points about the situation today that we should all accept are true.
I do not understand why this situation is called a “conflict”. A conflict requires some sort of power clash, a semblance of parity, but in Palestine and Israel this is not the case.
We have two different sides: one powerful, the other powerless; one armed, the other punished for peaceful resistance; one an occupier and conqueror, the other the occupied and conquered.
If you ever come to Palestine, you will see how there are borders everywhere that we do not control. The West Bank is divided into three zones: Zone A under Palestinian control, Zone B shared by both sides and Zone C under total Israeli administration — and it is the last of these that covers most of the West Bank.
Just anybody can visit, but not every Palestinian can exit.
In its 70th year, Israel is a deeply contradictory country. I hope that, in time, its actions in Palestine today and the steps it took to reach this stage will be fully revealed to the world. I hope that the Palestinians will reverse their situation.
The author is a university student who lives in Ramallah.
Please keep reading:
David Collier’s Response
Last week the Jewish Chronicle ran a piece titled ‘our Nakba is every day, not once a year’. It was penned by a Palestinian, Ehab Naser, a university student who lives in Ramallah. I asked the Jewish Chronicle if I could receive a comment as a ‘right to reply’, they chose to turn me down. This is what I had sent them:-
I don’t intend to address all the fallacies within Ehab Naser’s article, but I will say this. Naser’s description of Palestinian life uses worst case examples of life during conflict in Gaza and then conflates it with Palestinians living everywhere. People unable to look through windows or climb on a roof do not exist in Ramallah.
As it happens I was in Ramallah last week. A bustling, lively city with many large houses and flashy cars. I did not see any sign of occupation there at all whilst I was there, and the only weapons I saw were in the hands of the Palestinian police.
I spent the rest of my time in the West Bank, visiting the new Palestinian city Rawabi, eating lunch in Berzeit and walking through an exhibition in Banksy’s ‘Walled Off’ hotel in Bethlehem. I had the same problem viewing the exhibition in the hotel as I did reading Nasser’s comment piece. Neither are trying to tell the truth.
The ‘Nakba’ was the result of a civil conflict between the Jews who wanted to create the state the UN had promised them in 1947, and an Arab front that wanted to stop them. The local Arab communities received the help of irregular Arab forces that entered the Mandate areas as early as January 1948 and then by May from the forces of several armies of regional Arab states. The Arabs failed in their attempts to destroy the Jewish enclave and Israel survived its war of independence.
The Nakba is the price the Arab communities paid for this loss. I agree with Ehab that the price was heavy, but it was one that did not have to be paid. The Jewish side did not ask for the Arabs to oppose partition. The Jews did not want Arab irregular forces to enter the fight and they certainly had no desire to fight the forces of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq.
The Jewish community lost 1% of its total population in this battle. The alternative, defeat, would have led to a far greater loss.
What Ehab experiences everyday is not a ‘nakba’, but rather the result of his own Arab community still unable to come to terms with the presence of a Jewish state. More importantly, and it is why I have such trouble with his article and the Banksy exhibition, there still does not appear to be any acceptance at all, of the responsibility his own community must also take in having helped to create the environment in which he lives. In the stories they tell, everything is Israel’s fault. For as long as this remains the case, there will be no progress.
When I first went to Israel before the first Intifada, people moved about freely. Then the stabbings started. During the Oslo peace process, as I tried to work with Palestinians on building joint ventures, the buses started exploding. The cooperation between my own business and the PA stopped, when the violent second Intifada started. Then the wall went up as a way of protecting Israeli communities from terrorists infiltrating from PA areas.
Finally, there was the election, that saw Hamas receive the largest number of votes. Israelis didn’t vote for Hamas, Palestinians did. The result of voting for terrorists is the situation we see in Gaza today.
At every turn, Palestinians have been let down by their own leadership, their own extremists and the way they vote when given the chance. Israel cannot, nor should it be expected to take responsibility for these contributing factors.
If a Palestinian leader was to stand up tomorrow and recognise Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, if Palestinians were able to unite and reject the extremism of groups like Hamas and if they really sought to co-exist with Israel, peace would quickly follow.
It doesn’t mean Israel doesn’t make mistakes. Nor does it mean the Palestinians are not suffering. It only points out that the beating heart of the conflict is in Palestinian attitudes towards Israel and not the other way around.
At one-point Ehab rejects the term ‘conflict’ as a description because Israel has the power and the Palestinians do not. He is mistaken. Almost all the power in this conflict is with the Palestinians. They just need to do what they have not been able to do for a hundred years. Accept the right of the Jewish state to exist. Once they do this, peace will quickly follow and Ehab’s ‘Nakba’ will come to an end. That step isn’t ours to take.
DC”
