Photos by: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org

Palestinian citizens of Israel, joined by Jewish Israelis organized by the activist group Zochrot, return to the destroyed village of al-Ruways, March 30, 2013. All structures in Al-Ruways were destroyed and the original residents forcibly displaced to nearby Tamra by Jewish militias in the Nakba in 1948.

The Israeli group Zochrot organizes many tours of Palestinian villages depopulated during the Nakba of 1948. What made this Saturday’s tour of Al-Ruways particularly remarkable was the large number of displaced Palestinians and their descendants who made the event more of a return than a simple tour.

Zochrot, whose name means “remembering” in Hebrew, aims to educate Israeli Jews about the history of the Nakba and the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees. Typically, they will arrange for one or two refugees to help guide a tour of their home village, telling those who attend about life in their village before the Nakba, and the events leading to their displacement in 1948.

This week in Al-Ruways, dozens of local Palestinian residents of Israel were on hand for the return to Al-Ruways. Led by village elders who lived through the Nakba and experienced the displacement firsthand, the large group walked through the land of the village, marking various sites with signs to remind future visitors of the town’s existence. Such a large turnout of Palestinians was possible because when this village was forcibly evacuated by Zionist forces, they were simply pushed to the nearest town, Tamra, which remains until today. The residents of Al-Ruways were told by the Jewish militia leaders that after two weeks, that they would be able to return to their homes. Of course, as in many similar cases throughout what became the State of Israel, the displaced Palestinians were never allowed to return to their homes, even though they continued to live just a few kilometers away. The village itself was completely destroyed, with few visible traces remaining other than the cemetery and occasional pieces of rubble.

Recently, the mayor of Tamra has attempted to negotiate with the Israeli Interior Ministry to have the land of Al-Ruways added to Tamra’s village lands. Though the change has yet to be finalized, the tentative agreement hinged on one condition: that there would be no new building on the land of the long-demolished village of Al-Ruways.

Palestinian Israelis plant a sign marking the destroyed village of Al-Ruways.

A village elder leads the group as they walk through the remains of Al-Ruways.

A local resident holds a shell casing found in the destroyed village of al-Ruways.

Palestinian Israelis mark the site of the mosque in Al-Ruways near a patch of saber cactus, itself a symbol of Palestinian steadfastness.

Children explore the cemetery of Al-Ruways, one of the few remaining visible traces of the village.

Palestinian citizens of Israel find a grave marker pictured in a guide book published by the activist group Zochrot, whose primary mission is to educate Jewish Israelis about the history of the Nakba.

The word “Palestine” is written in painted rocks on land belonging to the destroyed village of Al-Ruways.

Read also:
Displaced Palestinians return to village after 64 years
For Palestinians, the Nakba is not history
Why the inconvenient truths of the Nakba must be recognized 

Remains of the village Al-Ghabisiyya, north of Acre. (photo: flicker / gnuckx CC BY 2.0)

By Danit Shaham

A book always makes a statement.  Whether it’s resting on the table or visible on a shelf, it’s making a statement – cultural, political, or both. Space, on the other hand, represented by maps, hiking trails, signs, is usually viewed as something objective.  Neutral.  Not subordinated to social, historical or other forms of power.

“Once Upon a Land,” published by Zochrot and Pardes, offers 18 tour routes to depopulated Palestinian villages across Israel, from Zib (Achziv) in the north to Bir Saba’ (Beer Sheva) in the south. The book is written in both Hebrew and Arabic, and is laid out in such a manner that the text flows easily and continuously in either language.

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 I wrote 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.

This video was produced by Israel Social TV, an independent media NGO working to promote social change, human rights, social justice and equality, and to mobilize its viewers towards activism.

In his 2004 book The Case for Democracy, Natan Sharansky (with co-author Ron Dermer, head of Bibi Netanyahu’s brain trust) popularized his “town square test,” which he called the threshold test of whether a society is free or not. It went like this:

If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a “fear society” has finally won their freedom.

The town square test was adopted by George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice and the rest of the war-on-terror crowd; it flattered their self-delusion that they invaded Iraq for altruistic purposes. What always got me, though, was that Sharansky, a true-blue Jewish nationalist, didn’t notice that his test was an embarrassment to Israel because it proved that Israel was not a free society, but a fear society. Can an Arab or Jewish citizen enter a public square in this country, especially in Jerusalem, the capital, and denounce the occupation or one of our wars without being physically harmed by people in the crowd? Of course not. If Mohammed Bakri or Uri Avnery, let’s say, were crazy enough to take the town square test, they would be set upon by the rednecks present, mainly young ones, and if they didn’t shut up and get out of there ASAP, they’d be physically attacked. At best, the cops would come break it up and likewise tell Bakri or Avnery to get moving fast, and if they didn’t, they’d be arrested, and if they insisted on going back and taking the town square test again, they’d be imprisoned.

By the renowned standard of the chairman of the Jewish Agency and one of the great heroes of modern Jewish history,  Israel is not a free society, but a fear society.

It was clear enough in 2004 when Sharansky was taking bows at the White House. But today this truth is so in-your-face, it makes itself so plain so often that I doubt Sharansky, not to mention Dermer, want to bring up the town square test anymore except to the safest, most brainwashed pro-Israel audiences.

And the thing is it’s not just the police, the army, the settlers or the McCarthyite right that make this a fear society – it’s in the street, the “faces in the crowd,” the redneck element in virtually every part of this country that’s attracted to right-wing mobs, and which is enabled by the silent majority that’s too scared or indifferent  - or quietly sympathetic – to stand up to them.

If we talk about the Israel Police, it’s true they deny protesters their freedom, often brutally, when they enforce the deepening national ideology that any but the most impotent, Peace Now-style protest is a threat to Israel’s security. But it’s also true that by preventing emphatically pro-Palestinian, non- or anti-Zionist protesters from having their (completely non-violent) say in public, the cops are saving these people from certain mob attack.

Look at this six-and-a-half minute video by The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky from the detention and arrest of Zochrot (Remembering) activists who wanted to go into Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Wednesday night, into the crowd of Independence Day revelers, and remind them of the Nakba by placing cards with the names of pre-1948 Palestinian villages on the ground. Two minutes into the video, people are coming up to the activists and cursing them in the most vile way. At 3:40 a couple of big, burly men start threatening the Zochrot people and the police steer them away. A soldier says he’s there with some of the guys in his unit, and that “if we had the chance, we’d shoot you one by one.” A man smiles and says, “You’re lucky the police are here. You should thank them.”

SOB that he is, he’s right. The cops roughed up a couple of Zochrot folks, but if the police had let them do what they were planning to do in Rabin Square that night, they could have been in serious danger.

This was also the story at the two fly-ins at Ben-Gurion Airport: The cops denied foreign activists and the Israelis waiting for them the right to protest, but if they hadn’t, the protesters would have been at the mercy of the Israeli street. At the first fly-in last July, I saw a few Israelis in the arrivals hall suddenly hold up signs and start chanting “Israel apartheid!” and the cops immediately hustled them outside – while a spontaneous mini-mob of Israelis followed them, cursing and yelling and waving their fists. If the police hadn’t gotten between the protesters and the insta-mob, things would have gotten a lot uglier.

The fear society runs both top-down and bottom up; it’s very deep, it’s in the bloodstream of the nation of Israel, and it’s caused by this Us vs. Them thing we’ve got going with the Muslim world and anybody who doesn’t take our side against it. If you want to party in the town square with everyone else, it’s a free country. But if you want to say something people really don’t want to hear, you’ll find out how free it is.

Related news:
Police besiege, arrest activists planning to commemorate Nakba

Activist arrested while reading names of Palestinian villages (Activestills)

Reports started flowing in at around 22:30 p.m. through text messages and phone calls. Some 15 activists from Zochrot (“Remembering”), an Israeli NGO dedicated to preserving the memory the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) among the Hebrew-speaking public, had gathered in the group’s offices on Ibn Gabirol Street in central Tel Aviv. They were planning a quiet symbolic action entailing placing placards with the names of villages demolished in the 1948 war on the ground in Rabin Square, the epicenter of Independence Day festivities. Actions very much like it have been carried out by the group every year on the same day for at least seven years.

Police fences during the siege of the Zochrot office (Activestills)

However, this time the activists were surprised to see riot police forces building up a barricade around the building while they were inside. When they tried to leave for their quiet ceremony, activists were told by high ranking officers on the site that they are forbidden to do so, and that anyone trying to skip over the fences would be immediately arrested. “They said their goal was to prevent us from disturbing the peace,” says Liat Rosenberg, Zochrot director. “We were held captive for about four hours, and were told we could only leave if each and every one of us shows an ID, turns in all [protest-related] materials, and goes through an interrogation and a physical search. Attorney Gabi Lasky told police that they are unlawfully imprisoning the activists, but they refused to stand down.”

(Update: Short clip in Hebrew showing a man reading out the names of Palestinian villages on which Tel Aviv was built. A riot police officer tells him he is violating the peace, and he is quickly arrested while continuing to chant the names. Shot by: Aviv Sela)

Other protesters on the scene said they were asked to sign a form in which they vowed not to “distribute propoganda” or to disturb the peace. “It’s amazing that a small, quiet action of little more than ten people can be considered a violation of the peace, while the whole street is filled with masses of drunk people celebrating,” said another activist.

Zochrot activist holding a sign with the name of a Palestinian village (Activestills)

As the news spread, a small demonstration of several dozen activists formed in solidarity with Zochrot outside the police barriers. When demonstrators on both sides of the fence started reading out aloud the names of destroyed villages – the refugees of which are still living in refugee camps in neighboring countries, Gaza and the West Bank – police started beating them and making arrests. By the end of the night, three were taken to the local police station, and will probably be brought before a court this evening. At around 2 a.m. police relaxed the siege and allowed people to go home. Rosenberg says that Zochrot will be suing the police for its illegal conduct.

Solidarity demonstrator arrested on Ibn Gabirol (Activestills)

The issue of the Nakba and its commemoration is an extremely sensitive one in Israeli politics. Under the current right-wing government, a law was passed last year forbidding any state-sponsored organization from marking Israel’s Independence Day as a day of mourning, and any mention of the Nakba is kept out of schools by the Ministry of Education. Later today (Thursday), thousands are expected to march in the annual “March of Return” to some Galilee villages destroyed in 1948.

Zochrot activists carried by police (Activestills)

Click here for more on the Nakba from +972

By Eitan Bronstein

Palestinian refugees in 1948 (photo: wikimedia, Israeli copyrights expired)

The Nakba Law that passed at the Israeli parliament recently has a single primary goal: to categoricaly hide the Nakba: Hide it, do not learn about it, do not remember it, and do not take responsibility for its consequences. Put it, word and memory, back and deep into the Pandora box from which it emerged during this past decade in Israel. The illusion in passing this law is that it is possible to lock it away and bury the key at the sea along with other threats buried there recently. Paradoxically, this law, in its overbearing stance, had actually significantly increased public interest in the Nakba.

The language of the law–which allows the state to withdraw state funds from institutions who would mark the Palestinian disaster–refers in its written clause only to the “public” or “state supported” institutions organizing events to mourn at the Israeli Independence Day, but within its message it aims  to create an atmosphere of terror against anyone who dares to touch the event that established the Jewish state. This law does scare people; it terrorizes them. Zochrot, which deals with the Nakba, constantly receive requests from Israelis who want to learn about the Nakba, but are afraid; in their fear they ask if learning about the Nakba is still allowed. Participants at teacher’s workshops and trainings on how to teach about the Nakba at their classes, are more afraid to do so openly than ever before. Last teacher openly interviewed about teaching the Nakba received a threatening letter from the Ministry of Education. Facing this reality, Zochrot had no choice and decided to toe the line to limit any chance of exposure of the hundreds of trained teachers who taught about the Nakba. Protecting the teachers and their livelihood is first priority for us.

The most reasonable response to this law that seeks to prohibit commemorating the Nakba at the Israeli Independence Day is to stand up and take civil disobedience action, commemorating the Nakba at the upcoming Independence Day. This is an unprecedented and disdainful scenario in law to expressly forbid citizens of remembering their past. For one fifth of the citizens – the Palestinians – this law forbids them from remembering their own tragedy, their own dispossession. This racist law is so blatantly anti-democratic that the response to it by any decent human being should be in the unmistaken opossition by physically being at the Nakba commemoration in the Israeli Independence Day.

(If the word Nakba is the barrier to seeing the ramifications of this law), imagine a hypothetical situation in which one of the leaders of the city Tel Aviv – Jaffa offers to drastically limit the annual gay pride parade that has become tradition in the city. He or she would argue that this event harms the sensibilities and feelings of many and therefore should be limited to a closed compound, such as the port of Tel Aviv. Such a position would encounter massive outcry.  If, for whatever rationale, this offer was to be accepted many would be joining the Tel Aviv gay pride parade in solidarity and protest. Many, among them people who aren’t that excited about the parade itslef, but are concerned with the propsoed politics and aesthetics, would join it personally to convey a clear message to city leaders about the rights of all citizens. In fact, something similar did happen when many people from Tel Aviv joined that same march in Jerusalem when it was limited to closed stadium.

The situation with the Nakba Law is much worse than that hypothetical scenario. Israeli state law seeks to prohibit the Nakba memory anywhere within the Jewish state borders. Such a law demonstrates a grave injustice to all citizens, and in partciualr, to one fifth of the state’s population. The right thing, the only decent thing Israelis should do is join en masse the central march organized by the Association for the Defence of the Rights of Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel, to the destroyed villages of al-Damun and Rweis, near Tamra. Every year several hundred Jews join the thousands of Palestinians at that march, but the potential number of Jews to join it is much higher.

True, there are obvious reasons for which many decent Israelis have so far refrained from participation in the main event commemorating the Nakba in Israel in the last fourteen years. Incidentally, the Nakba Day internationally is held on May 15 and only in Israel it’s commemorated on the Hebrew date of the state founding.

For Israelis, commemorating the Nakba at The Israeli Independence Day, seems like a provocative act, one that seeks to place clearly and symbolically the Nakba in opposition to the Independence. Even if this opposition is true to some extent, it is important to know that historically the origin of commemorating the Nakba at The Israeli Independence Day has to do with the Israeli occupation of 1948, i.e. the Nakba itself. After the expulsion of the Palestinians more than 20,000 of them remained within Israel’s borders. Hard to say that they were /are treated as citizens (with full meaning of citizenship) as they were subjected to military rule almost until the war of 67. During this period, the only day of the year in which they could move freely in the country, without a permit from the military governor, was The Israeli Independence Day. Many of them have used this freedom to visit their destroyed villages, which created the tradition of visiting their lost homes at the Israeli celebration day, remmebringa and commemorating their catastrophe. Only fourteen years ago (for reasons I won’t elaborate here) the first “Procession of Return” was organized as a demonstrative and political event to commemorate the Nakba.

The event itself is an impressive national Palestinian performance. Israelis, even those who belong to the peace camp, do not feel at ease surrounded by Palestinian flags and hearing speeches in Arabic for an extended period of time. Perhaps it is prime time to get over this irrational discomfort and live for few hours the minority experience? It seems to me that this lesson in itself is not a bad lesson to learn. Since Zochrot and other organizations joined this event, nine years ago, Hebrew language became present in part of the speeches.

Most difficult challenge for most Israelis is the idea of the right of return. At this procession, while commemorating the Nakba, the call for recognition and implementation of the right of return is unequivocal, not as a mathematical (and a racist) trick as with the Geneva Initiative; not a “symbolic recognition” of the right of return, and certainly not as only “listening to other’s pain”. The Palestinians are telling us loud and clear: the right of return must be accepted in order to have a real chance for peace.

On my part, I understand the recognition of the right of return and its actual realization as an historic opportunity for us to live here as equal citizens and not as colonizers.

I’m calling here on those who (still) do not recognize the right of return: Let’s show solidarity with the Palestinians even though you do not recognize this basic right. In a new reality, with the Nakba law and other anti-democratic laws in place, you might wake up too late to commemorate the Nakba on Israeli Independence Day. Thus, rather than fear the law on one side and the right of return on the other, we can actively and collectively cope with the Nakba and its consequences for the sake of our mutual future.

Eitan Bronstein is the Founder and Director of Zochrot, an Israeli NGO dedicated to preserving the memory of the Nakba.

English editing: Rula Awwad-Rafferty. This article was originally published in Hebrew in Haoketz on May 9, 2011.

Read more in +972 Magazine’s Remembering the Nakba project:

Joseph Dana: Occupation & Nakba: Interview with Ariella Azoulay & Adi Ophir
Yossi Gurvitz: Rightwing group publishes Nakba denial booklet
Dahlia Scheindlin: Nakba Law: Is it time for civil disobedience?
Noam Sheizaf: Why Jews need to talk about the Nakba

In his response to statements made by Yossi Gurvitz and Dimi Reider to a visiting delegation of Rabbis for Human Rights from North America, Shemeolof  points out that Israel’s cultural life – particularly the leftist cultural life -  is flourishing. He offers examples such as ActiveStills, Guerilla Culture and Tell it Not in Gath: the influence of the Palestinian nakba on Hebrew poetry. These cultural initiatives, suggests Shemeolof, should be a source of optimism regarding the future of Israeli democracy.

Shemeolof writes:

It still a very important task to ask why the cultural scene is so far from the political solution and why politicians refrain from using the artistic visions. I think that a great deal of positive and rich art and culture flourish in Israel-Palestine, and we can use its pluralism and multiculturalism to gain hope for the active struggle against fascism.

Shemeolof is absolutely correct about Israel’s Tel Aviv-centered, flourishing cultural life. The vibrancy and variety of Tel Aviv’s offerings in the arts are astonishing – even compared to much larger cities in countries like the United States or Canada. Every day, the city bursts with life: there are  gallery openings, concerts, clubs hosting cutting edge independent music groups from Israel and from locations as diverse as Iceland and Nigeria. There are film screenings, fringe theater, and 12 mainstream theaters performing daily. There are few sacred cows in the largely leftist Israeli artistic milieu; in the Bubble, it is possible to question received narratives, and to live an openly bohemian lifestyle.

There is also a palpably feverish quality to the creativity in Tel Aviv. It reminds me of descriptions I’ve read of Weimar Berlin, which was also the artistic, scientific and financial capital of a new democracy that was threatened and buffeted by an environment of political extremism. Not to belabour the point or anything, but Weimar Berlin did not exactly make Germany more democratic. It was a feverish and brief explosion of artistic and scientific accomplishment that occurred between two episodes of total war, both ending in incomprehensible destruction.

In contemporary Tel Aviv one can attend plays and view films that question the most basic aspects of the liberal- Zionist narrative. One can view contemporary paintings by Palestinian artists. One can view photos shot by a  female Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza – who could not receive a permit to exit Gaza in order to attend the opening of the exhibition in Jaffa. One can read dystopian novels about Israeli society that are written in Hebrew by Palestinian-Arab-Israeli authors, and by Jewish-Israeli authors.

For many Israelis, the existence of this thriving, questioning cultural life is a source of  pride – even when they disagree, to the point of taking offense, with the messages presented by their artists. In some cases, Israel advocacy (hasbara) groups – even the foreign ministry, which is currently headed by Avigdor Lieberman – have used the Tel Aviv arts scene as a means of burnishing Israel’s image.

As if the fact that Israeli artists can still say or perform what they want, without fearing arrest – or worse – is something that a democratic society should boast about, instead of taking for granted.

Of course, the Israel advocacy activists do not mention that actors who announced their refusal to perform in West Bank settlements now face the threat of having their public funding cut off, or even of being fired for contract violation.

But most of the actors agreed to perform at the new cultural center in Ariel, the West Bank’s largest settlement, with only four maintaining their intent to boycott. The debut performance was sold out, too.

So, is the existence of a vibrant, critical cultural life an indicator of democratic values? Do artists have the power to rouse the masses and effect change?

Or are they just the minority one finds in every society – the iconoclasts that comment upon, criticize, document and reflect the society in which they live. That is the artists’ role, is it not?