Truth Commission on Nakba

Israelis rattled by search for truth about the Nakba

14 December 2014 

First ‘truth commission’ avoids issue of reconciliation as veteran Israeli fighters due to confess to 1948 war crimes

Middle East Eye – 9 December 2014

The first-ever “truth commission” in Israel, to be held on Wednesday, will feature confessions from veteran Israeli fighters of the 1948 war who are expected to admit to perpetrating war crimes as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes.

The commission is the culmination of more than decade of antagonistic confrontations between a small group of activists called Zochrot, the Hebrew word for Remembering, and the Israeli authorities as well as much of the Jewish public.

Founded in 2002, Zochrot is dedicated to educating Israeli Jews about what Palestinians call the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe, referring to Israel’s creation on the ruins of their homeland more than six decades ago. The group also campaigns for the right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel, probably the biggest taboo in Israeli society.

The commission, which has no official standing, could be the first of several such events around Israel, to investigate atrocities and war crimes committed in different localities, said Liat Rosenberg, Zochrot’s director.

“We have looked to other such commissions around the world as models, most obviously in South Africa,” she said. “But unlike the one there, ours does not include the element of reconciliation because the conflict here has yet to be resolved.

“We cannot talk about reconciliation when the Nakba is ongoing. We are still in a situation where there is apartheid, constant violations of human rights and 70 percent of the Palestinian community are refugees.”

The commission is likely to provoke outrage from the Israeli government, which passed the so-called Nakba Law in 2011 to try to make it harder to commemorate Palestinian suffering. The impact of the law is being widely felt. Just last month, the culture ministry vowed to block a government grant to a Tel Aviv cultural centre that hosted a Zochrot film festival on the Nakba.

Names kept secret

Rosenberg said Israeli veteran fighters and Palestinian witnesses participating in the truth commission had asked for their names to be kept secret until the hearings for fear that friends and family would put pressure on them to withdraw.

The commission is being held in the city of Beersheva, a once-Bedouin town that was ethnically cleansed in 1948 and is today the largest Jewish city in the Negev region in southern Israel.

Zochrot said it had chosen the city to host the first event event because forced expulsions of Bedouin from the Negev had taken place not only in 1948, but had continued on a large scale, out of view of observers, for many years afterwards.

The commission is the latest project by Zochrot that discredits a traditional Israeli narrative that some 750,000 Palestinians left under orders from Arab leaders and that Israel’s army acted only in self-defence. Such beliefs have fed into the common assumption from the Israeli public that Israel’s army is the “most moral in the world”.

Israeli right-wingers try to stop commemoration of Nakba

“This is not just about researching the truth,” said Rosenberg. “The truth of the Nakba is to a large degree known, but the task is to expose the truth to the Israeli Jewish public – both so that it is forced to take responsibility for what happened and so there can be accountability.”

The commission is the direct result of a project launched by Zochrot two years ago to create an alternative archive of the Nakba, based on filmed testimonies from Palestinian refugees and Israeli veterans. Activists fear that, as the generation of refugees and fighters dies off, they will take their secrets to the grave.

Israeli military archives relating to the 1948 war began being opened to academics in the late 1980s. This led to a group of so-called “new historians” overturning the traditional accounts of that period and unearthing written evidence of massacres and ethnic cleansing operations for the first time.

Archives closed

However, historians have reported in recent years that the Israeli authorities have become more reluctant to open files and many of the more controversial episodes of the 1948 war are still unclear.

Rosenberg hopes the commission will begin to fill some of the gaps.

According to Rosenberg, three Israeli fighters and three Palestinian witnesses will testify before a panel of six commissioners. The commissioners will then question them further about events and make follow up recommendations.

The hearings are due to be streamed online.

One veteran of the fighting in the Negev, Amnon Neumann, has already gone on record in testimony that can be seen in Zochrot’s film archive.

He has said the Bedouin in the Negev – contrary to popular Israeli perception – put up almost no resistance to advancing Jewish forces because they lacked “a military capacity” and “had no weapons”. Nonetheless, he said, the Israeli army terrified the Bedouin villagers out of their homes by shooting either at them, or above their heads.

“We drove them out. Women and children went to Gaza. … By the morning there was nobody there. We burnt their houses,” Neumann said.

When villagers tried to sneak back to tend crops or vineyards under the cover of night, he recounted, the soldiers opened fire. “We would shoot and kill them. This was part of the horrible things we did.”

In other filmed testimony, Mordechai Bar-On, an officer in 1948 with the Givati Brigade, confirmed that orders were to shoot “infiltrators” – a reference to refugees who tried to return to their villages. 

“Even if there were women and children. I remember I told myself that we would do it. … There was an order to kill, not even catch them,” Bar-On said.

For the most part, the Israeli veterans are coming forward now out of a feeling of guilt.

“At that time I did not see anything wrong with what we were doing,” Neumann said. “If I was told to do things that I do not want to mention [here], I did them with no doubts at all. … Not now. It is already 50, 60 years that I am filled with regret.”

But challenges remain, and despite veterans coming forward, piecing together events can still be difficult.

Rosenberg said many of those giving filmed testimony, including Neumann, have been reluctant to go into details of the war crimes they participated in. It is now hoped that the questioning by the commissioners will encourage participants to be even more forthcoming.

Put on trucks to Gaza

The commission will also move beyond the 1948 period and examine expulsions in the semi-desert Negev region, comprising nearly two-thirds of Israel’s landmass, for the 12 years following the war.

Isolated from the rest of the new state of Israel, the Negev was largely unmonitored as the Israeli military carried out expulsions of Bedouin throughout the 1950s, said Raneen Jeries, a Zochrot organiser.

More than 2,000 Palestinian inhabitants of al-Majdal, which later became the Jewish city of Ashkelon, were put on trucks and shipped to Gaza nearly two years after the war ended, according to Nur Masalha, a Palestinian historian and expert on Israeli “transfer” policies.

Jeries said the legacy of the events of 1948 was being felt to this day, with policies of expulsion continuing in the Negev and the occupied territories.

Haaretz reporter Amira Hass revealed three months ago that the Israeli military was planning to forcibly relocate for a second time the Jahalin tribe. The tribe was driven out of the Negev in 1948 and fled to the safety of the West Bank, then under Jordanian control. However, Israel occupied the land after the 1967 war, and it seems that Israeli authorities now want to expel some 12,500 Jahalin tribes people, this time to a site near Jericho.

Zochrot had been successful in forcing Israelis to recognise the Nakba and a darker side to the 1948 war, said Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, where the truth commission is to be held.

“A decade ago, if I mentioned the Nakba in a class of 150 students, hardly any of them would have known what I meant. Now 80 or 90 per cent would know,” Gordon told MEE.

Gordon also attributed the change both to Zochrot’s activities and statements by Arab legislators representing Israel’s large Palestinian minority, comprising a fifth of the total population.

Law against commemoration

But as the issue of the Nakba has become more visible in Israel, sensitivity about it has only grown. Ahead of Nakba Day last May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the Palestinian Authority for commemorating the day, saying: “They are standing silent to mark the tragedy of the establishment of Israel, the state of the Jewish people.”

Palestinians were educating their children with “endless propaganda” calling for the disappearance of Israel, he said.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett went further, saying: “We need not tolerate Israeli Arabs who promote Nakba Day.”

The government has backed up its rhetoric with legislation, passing a Nakba Law in 2011 that denies public funds to institutions and organisations that commemorate the Palestinians’ dispossession. The measure is partly seen as a reaction to Zochrot’s growing success.

The original legislation, which would have criminalised any commemoration of the Nakba – making many of Zochrot’s activities illegal – was water-downed after Israel came under strong international pressure.

In Zochrot’s early years, its main efforts were directed at escorting Israeli Jews and Palestinian refugees to some of the more than 500 Palestinian villages that Israel destroyed during and after the 1948 war. The villages were razed to prevent refugees from returning home.

The remnants of most of the villages are now barely traceable, hidden under forests planted by a charity called the Jewish National Fund or lost within gated communities in which only Jews can live.

Zochrot has continued such visits, placing signposts to remind the new Jewish inhabitants that their communities are built on the ruins of Palestinian homes, often belonging to neighbours living a short distance away. A large proportion of Israel’s Palestinian minority were internally displaced by the 1948 war and live close to their original homes but are barred from returning.

Backlash on campuses

Eitan Bronstein, who founded Zochrot, said the current challenge was how to change Israeli Jews’ perception of the Nakba.

“They now recognise the word but what does it mean to them? Many, it seems, think it is simply a negative label Palestinians have attached to Israel’s establishment. We have an Independence Day that they call their Nakba,” Bronstein said.

“We need to educate them about the events of the Nakba, what occurred and our responsibility for it. They have to stop thinking of it as just propaganda against Israel.”

The right wing, including the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, has grown increasingly rattled by Zochrot’s agenda-setting programme of events.

The popularity of a far-right youth movement, Im Tirtzu, has grown rapidly on Israeli university campuses over the past few years, in part as a backlash to commemorations of the Nakba by Zochrot and Palestinian students.

Last month, when Zochrot held its second Nakba and Right of Return Film Festival in Tel Aviv, the culture minister, Limor Livnat, immediately threatened to pull a government grant worth more than $450,000 from the cinema that hosted it.

“The state cannot bear the cost of funding of an entity that encourages debate over what the Palestinians call ‘the right of return’,” Livnat said in a statement. She was reported to have based her decision on her reading of the Nakba Law.

“The antagonism towards Zochrot and the idea of the Nakba is part of the educational process,” said Bronstein. “It is a necessary phase Israel needs to pass through if we are to get to a point of reconciliation.”

Unfazed by threats

Bronstein and others have faced angry opposition from the Israeli public and police as they have tried to stage Nakba commemorations – most notably in Tel Aviv in 2012, when they were surrounded by riot police for four hours. Three Zochrot activists were arrested.

Yet Zochrot’s organisers, whose members include both Jewish and Palestinian citizens, seem largely unfazed by the threats and hostility their group generates.

Last year Zochrot arranged a conference that for the first time examined not just the principle of the right of return but practical ways to implement it.

This year the group launched a phone app, called iNakba, in three languages, which provides users with detailed maps and information on the destroyed villages.

Jeries said it had had thousands of downloads, giving Israelis for the first time the chance to peel away the subsequent layers of construction and forestation to see what was destroyed, often on their doorstep.

- See more at: 

Between anger and denial: Israeli collective memory and the Nakba
A new documentary aims to decipher some of the anxiety that accompanies the Israeli debate over the events of 1948.
By Noam Sheizaf

Ruins of Palestinian Nakba village Qula, 2010 (photo: Deborah Bright / Zochrot.org)

A strange thing regarding the debate on the Nakba: the responses it generates in Israeli society are becoming more and more hostile, while at the same time, the Nakba is mentioned more and more often. Those contradicting elements live side by side, as if the more we work to forget the Nakba, the harder it gets – the recent campaign regarding "the Jewish refugees" that the Foreign Office launched is just one example.
Israeli-Russian-Canadian journalist Lia Tarachansky (from The Real News) is presently finishing up work on a documentary that tries to deal with the complexity of Israeli sentiments towards the Nakba. "Seven Deadly Myths" (working title) tells the stories of four veterans from 1948, linking them to the lives of modern-day Palestinian refugees and to Tarachansky’s own childhood in a West Bank settlement. When Iwrote about the memory of the Nakba on this blog, I also began with my childhood memories. Of all the political and historical issues here, the Nakba has the most intimate feeling to it – another reason it is such a taboo.
Filming has ended, and Tarachansky is now engaged in a fundraising effort to allow her to complete editing and post-production (more details on the film’s website). The project is also taking part in the Cuban Hat competition.
This week, I conducted an email interview with Lia Tarachansky on the roots of her project and the memory of the Nakba in Israeli society. The video below explains how this project was born.

How did you find the people you interviewed? How many Israelis who fought in 1948 were interviewed? Were they eager to speak?
LT: Most of the people in the film I found by word of mouth. I had asked around in the left’s circles. Then I stumbled onto Sergio Yahni of the Alternative Information Center who knew Tikva Honig-Parnass [seen in the above video] from when she edited the journal "Between The Lines" with Toufic Haddad.

Amnon Noiman I met through Zochrot ["Remembering," an Israeli NGO that deals with the memory of the Nakba – N.S], other veterans (some of whom later refused to take part in the film) I met through friends of friends or through the various war museums. At first, most were not willing to speak about the war and that period in general. They reminded me of my grandfather who until his dying years couldn’t talk about his memories of the Holocaust. I realized through their silence the immense power of memory and that’s what drove me to dig through my own.
Did you find regret in the Israelis you interviewed, or a feeling that "we did what we had to do?"Honestly, most of the veterans, both those who are in the film and those who refused, didn’t want to "reopen that file." One particularly profound moment in the film was in my various conversations and interviews with veteran Amnon Noiman. About three years ago, the Israeli activist Amir Hallel convinced him to give a testimony of his experience in 1948 to a small crowd in the Tel Aviv offices of Zochrot. When I heard about it I grabbed my camera and begged to film it.

I was amazed at how critical Noiman was that evening speaking about the general approach of the Israeli forces during the war, but it was clear even through his criticisms that there were corners of his memory that he refused to touch. Eitan Bronstein, the director of Zochrot asked him about one specific place – Burayr. In April 1948 its residents were expelled to Gaza by the Palmach unit Noiman was part of, and yet he refused to talk about it. It was only in our interview months later that he was ready to speak about what happened that April, 65 years ago.

Your question is very interesting for me because in the beginning of the project I interviewed the veteran and former politician Uri Avnery, who published a war diary during 1948. A year later he compiled his dispatches into the book "In the Fields of the Philistines." While in these reports he didn’t spare any details of what was happening on the battlefields, when I interviewed him in 2010 he was really defensive, repeating again and again that "if you weren’t there, you can’t judge it."

This process of opening and closing, which I understood from my own experiences with denial, became really fascinating to me and eventually became the center of the film.

You seem to place an emphasis not just on the events themselves, but even more so on their memory. Why so?I’ve come to realize that to understand the Israeli self-identity it’s important to understand that it’s not so much the events that shape our understanding of reality, but really our memories of them. I believe the Israeli collective memory is deeply tied to our understanding of our culture, our place in the Middle East, and of course our relationship with the Palestinians. I think that my experience and that of the veterans in the film is a microcosm of that collective memory.

Discussion of 1948 is still taboo and therefore incredibly reflexive. What I mean by that is that the main and most effective way the mainstream nationalistic narrative works is to deny the experience, and foremost the memory of the experience, of anyone who dares to challenge it (or as in my case, has slowly strayed away from it).

In that act, which is incredibly violent, the denial of the ruling narrative translates into denial of the objective history that goes along with the memory. That’s how powerful I think it is. And it is because of that power that we as Israelis grow up blind to what is all around us. That’s how I could grow up in a settlement and be blind to the villages around us.

When I grew up in Israel I never heard the word "Nakba." Now I do, often. Do you think Israelis have a better understanding of their past? If there is a denial, what causes it?This is a very important question. When I first started working on the film not only did I never hear the term "Nakba" I didn’t heard anything about expulsions or massacres, or even refugee camps. My family immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1991 so my grandmother didn’t fight in 1948, like most "Sabra" Israelis. That means I didn’t inherit any family narrative of the creation of the Israeli state and the war, not even an augmented one.

That’s why when I set out in making the film I thought most Israelis had the same experience as I did, and knew absolutely nothing. I quickly realized how wrong I was. I think the New Historians have played an enormous role in breaking the monotonous and simplistic history we learn as Israelis – we were innocent, we were attacked for no reason, we fought back and miraculously won.

But I think these historians and the turmoil they caused with their books failed to seriously change the Israeli understanding of 1948 because all reforms to the education system were effectively blocked by the right wing. Ironically, I think it was the right wing itself that made "Nakba" a household name with the proposal and later approval of the Nakba Law.

And even together, the New Historians and the Nakba Law failed to educate the Israeli public on what actually transpired in those fateful years of the war and immediately after it when hundreds of villages were systematically wiped off the map, the Absentee Property and Anti-Infiltration laws were instituted and the Palestinian right of return was legally denied.

Yossi Mekyton, one of the founders of Zochrot, put it best in an interview that will unfortunately not make it into the final film. He described a conversation he had with a young man while riding in a bus past some ruins of a village destroyed in the Nakba. Mekyton said that the difference is that twenty years ago the youth wouldn’t have any clue what these ruins were while today the only thing he knows is that whatever happened, was justified.

This is my feeling too. You grew up in a settlement, and often mention that you yourself were in a sort of denial of Palestinian existence around you. What was it like, and what changed your political thinking?I don’t think I can answer what it is like to live in denial because of course I wasn’t aware that I was in denial. I only know what it is like to crack that wall and come out on the other side. I first realized that something was deeply wrong when I was in university, in Canada. It was during the Second Intifada, and people were constantly asking me what I thought about the conflict when they found out I was Israeli. All my answers seemed rehearsed – we (Israel) have to do whatever we need to do to protect ourselves from terrorists. That’s the narrative I knew.

But then I met a Palestinian student, and had my first real conversation with a Palestinian person. I don’t really remember what he looked like or what his name was, but I remember thinking "huh, he knows I’m an Israeli, but he’s not trying to kill me. Strange." That was my first step in a very long process of unraveling what I was taught and discovering what I myself believed. The more I listened to Palestinian stories, the more they echoed my and my family’s experience from the Soviet Union where I was born. Experiences of racism and discrimination.

I had to shed everything I had taken for granted, my entire worldview and rebuild it from scratch. It was a devastating process and of course very alienating because my childhood friends and family were (and remain) very Zionist. Surprisingly, I came out of this process with a profound sense of belonging. For the first time I could form a logical line in my own understanding of the conflict and discover my responsibility as a journalist and a filmmaker.

1948 is not just a piece of history but a loaded political problem. Do you have your own thoughts on what would be a just solution for the refugee problem?This film doesn’t attempt to give political solutions; it only tries to ask questions. I think organizations like Zochrot, and Badil have invested a lot of thought and work into coming up with just solutions to the historical problems 1948 created, including developing methods for a realistic return. I believe the right of return cannot be denied and that today millions of people live in refugee camps in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in the countries surrounding Israel and that they will never stop dreaming of return and fighting for their right to do so. I think that as a people who carry such a long and painful history, we have a special responsibility to justice and historical honesty.

What responses have you received from Palestinians to this project?When I talk to Palestinians about the film, many support the idea and are glad that I am going to the source – the people who themselves fought in the war. But most Palestinians I speak to simply cannot understand how to this day Israelis refuse to learn about the Nakba and to understand their narrative.

One of the people in the film is my friend Khalil Abu Hamdeh. He is 27 and the grandson of 1948 refugees from the village of Kakun (near Qalansuwa). Today he lives in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Nablus (Schem). After years of applying for permits to visit his ancestors’ lands he was finally allowed to leave the West Bank during Ramadan this year.

In the film we follow him as he tracked the place from which his grandmother was expelled. As he looked at the ruins of the village around the historic Kakun castle, where today a national park exists, he couldn’t understand how generations of Israelis could come to this place and never asked themselves what these ruins are, or where are the people who lived there. These are the questions that guide the film and my journey to try and understand the nature of denial.