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<font size="1"><a href="https://english.palinfo.com/news/2020/5/21/How-memory-became-Palestine-s-greatest-weapon" target="_blank">https://english.palinfo.com/news/2020/5/21/How-memory-became-Palestine-s-greatest-weapon</a>
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<h1>How memory became Palestine’s greatest weapon</h1>
<div>By Ramzi Baroud - May 21, 2020<br></div>
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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.<p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
“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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
The Nakba commemoration and Pompeo’s visit to Israel are a stark representation of Palestine’s political reality today.</p><p>
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?</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.”</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
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.</p><p>
<i>- 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.</i></p></div></div>
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