[News] How memory became Palestine’s greatest weapon

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://english.palinfo.com/news/2020/5/21/How-memory-became-Palestine-s-greatest-weapon
How
memory became Palestine’s greatest weapon
By Ramzi Baroud - May 21, 2020
------------------------------

On May 15, thousands of Palestinians in Occupied Palestine and throughout
the ‘shatat’, or diaspora, participated in the commemoration of Nakba Day,
the one event that unites all Palestinians, regardless of their political
differences or backgrounds.

For years, social media has added a whole new stratum to this process of
commemoration. #Nakba72, along with #NakbaDay and #Nakba, have all trended
on Twitter for days. Facebook was inundated with countless stories, videos,
images, and statements, written by Palestinians, or in global support of
the Palestinian people.

The dominant Nakba narrative remains – 72 years following the destruction
of historic Palestine at the hands of Zionist militias – an opportunity to
reassert the centrality of the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.
Over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes in
Palestine in 1947-48. The surviving refugees and their descendants are now
estimated at over five million.

As thousands of Palestinians rallied on the streets and as the Nakba
hashtag was generating massive interest on social media, US Secretary of
State, Mike Pompeo, paid an eight-hour visit to Israel to discuss the
seemingly imminent Israeli government annexation, or theft, of nearly 30%
of the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

“The Israeli government will decide on the matter, on exactly when and how
to do it,” Pompeo said in an interview with Israeli radio, Kan Bet, the
Jerusalem Post reported.

Clearly, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has American blessing
to further its colonization of occupied Palestine, to entrench its existing
Apartheid regime, and to act as if the Palestinians simply do not exist.

The Nakba commemoration and Pompeo’s visit to Israel are a stark
representation of Palestine’s political reality today.

Considering the massive US political sway, why do Palestinians then insist
on making demands which, according to the pervading realpolitik of the
so-called Palestinian-Israeli conflict, seem unattainable?

Since the start of the peace process in Oslo in the early 1990s, the
Palestinian leadership has engaged with Israel and its western benefactors
in a useless political exercise that has, ultimately, worsened an already
terrible situation. After over 25 years of haggling over bits and pieces of
what remained of historic Palestine, Israel and the US are now plotting the
endgame, while demonizing the very Palestinian leaders that participated in
their joint and futile political charade.

Strangely, the rise and demise of the so-called ‘peace process’ did not
seem to affect the collective narrative of the Palestinian people, who
still see the Nakba, not the Israeli occupation of 1967, and certainly not
the Oslo accords, as the core point in their struggle against Israeli
colonialism.

This is because the collective Palestinian memory remains completely
independent from Oslo and its many misgivings. For Palestinians, memory is
an active process. It is not a docile, passive mechanism of grief and
self-pity that can easily be manipulated, but a generator of new meanings.

In their seminal book “Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory”,
Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod wrote that “Palestinian memory is, at its
heart, political.”

This means that the powerful and emotive commemoration of the 72nd
anniversary of the Nakba is essentially a collective political act, and,
even if partly unconscious, a people’s retort and rejection of Donald
Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’, of Pompeo’s politicking, and of Netanyahu’s
annexation drive.

Despite the numerous unilateral measures taken by Israel to determine the
fate of the Palestinian people, the blind and unconditional US support of
Israel, and the unmitigated failure of the Palestinian Authority to mount
any meaningful resistance, Palestinians continue to remember their history
and understand their reality based on their own priorities.

For many years, Palestinians have been accused of being unrealistic, of
“never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” and even of
extremism, for simply insisting on their historical rights in Palestine, as
enshrined in international law.

These critical voices are either supporters of Israel, or simply unable to
understand how Palestinian memory factors in shaping the politics of
ordinary people, independent of the quisling Palestinian leadership or the
seemingly impossible-to-overturn status quo. True, both trajectories, that
of the stifling political reality and people’s priorities seem to be in
constant divergence, with little or no overlapping.

However, a closer look is revealing: the more belligerent Israel becomes,
the more stubbornly Palestinians hold on to their past. There is a reason
for this.

Occupied, oppressed and refugee camps-confined Palestinians have little
control over many of the realities that directly impact their lives. There
is little that a refugee from Gaza can do to dissuade Pompeo from assigning
the West Bank to Israel, or a Palestinian refugee from Ein El-Helweh in
Lebanon to compel the international community to enforce the long-delayed
Right of Return.

But there is a single element that Palestinians, regardless of where they
are, can indeed control: their collective memory, which remains the main
motivator of their legendary steadfastness.

Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951 that totalitarianism is a system that, among
other things, forbids grief and remembrance, in an attempt to sever the
individual’s or group’s relation to the continuous past.

For decades, Israel has done just that, in a desperate attempt to stifle
the memory of the Palestinians, so that they are only left with a single
option, the self-defeating peace process.

In March 2011, the Israeli parliament introduced the ‘Nakba Law’, which
authorized the Israeli Finance Ministry to carry out financial measures
against any institution that commemorates Nakba Day.

Israel is afraid of Palestinian memory, since it is the only facet of its
war against the Palestinian people that it cannot fully control; the more
Israel labors to erase the collective memory of the Palestinian people, the
more Palestinians hold tighter to the keys of their homes and to the title
deed of their land back in their lost homeland.

There can never be a just peace in Palestine until the priorities of the
Palestinian people – their memories, and their aspirations – become the
foundation of any political process between the Israelis and the
Palestinians. Everything that operates outside this paradigm is null and
void, for it will never herald peace or instill true justice. This is why
Palestinians remember; for, over the years, their memory has proven to be
their greatest weapon.

*- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle.
He has authored a number of books on the Palestinian struggle including
‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’. Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine
Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at
Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of
California Santa Barbara.*
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