Catastrophe, Memory and Identity: Al-Nakbah as a Component of Palestinian Identity

Introduction

THE 1948 WAR RESULTED IN Al-Nakbah—the immense catastrophe—for the Palestinian people and changed their life beyond recognition. First and foremost, Al-Nakbah engendered the dispersion [Shatat]. Between 77 and 83 percent of the Palestinians who lived in the part of Palestine that later became Israel—i.e., 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine—were turned into refugees. Thus, for Palestinians, Al-Nakbah represents, among many other things, the loss of the homeland, the disintegration of society, the frustration of national aspirations, and the beginning of a hasty process of destruction of their culture. Rabinowitz has observed that Palestinian identity hinges on the experience of dispossession and exile [Ghurba] as well as mis-recognition international of Palestinian rights and suffering. ¹ In a similar vein, Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian historian, essayist, and novelist, argues that:

The contemporary history of the Palestinians turns on a key date: 1948. That year, a country and its people disappeared from maps and dictionaries . . . 'The Palestinian people does not exist', said the new masters, and henceforth the Palestinians would be referred to by general, conveniently vague terms, as either 'refugees', or in the case of a small minority that had managed to escape the generalized expulsion, 'Israeli Arabs'. A long absence was beginning. ²

The absence and the disappearance to which Sanbar refers was not absolute, however. It has been possible to partly reconstruct the past and regain some of its representations because enough material and fertile memories managed to elude the shattering experience of the society's disintegration and the stifling international silence. Referring to such historical experiences, Kracauer, the German cultural scholar, writes: "There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in." ³ Of the surviving material that somehow evaded destruction is the rich collection of photographs that composes the "hard data" about the Palestinians and their society in a number of photography books that will be discussed later.

Following the pioneering works of Anderson, ⁴ Said, ⁵ and Hobsbawm and Ranger, ⁶ social scientists have begun locating identity in the inter-subjective realm, where belonging to an imagined community is constantly reproduced and bolstered through invented traditions, commemorations, the construction of national museums, and the creation of national cultural canons and national heroes. ⁷ In the following, I suggest that, in addition to these top-down processes, which aim at the nationalization of the mass of a population, there are bottom-up processes, which are generated through localized experiences and sentiments. Dispersed and lacking national institutions, archives, and documents, Palestinians have had to resort to different venues of identity reconstruction. Similar to various Third World peoples who have experienced centuries of colonization, the question of identity among Palestinians has become intimately connected to the "restoration of the individual's subjectivity" ⁸ ; that is, a national narrative has been constructed through life stories, documents, and viewpoints of individuals. Kracauer argues that history, similar to the reality it aspires to represent, is a configuration of segments. ⁹ In line with that, Al-Nakbah is, in the final analysis, about the tragic fate of the men and women whose lives had been shattered, and about their descendants, who continue to suffer its consequences. Random life stories told by individuals, however, cannot create a national narrative with which a whole community can identify unless these stories are located within what Pierre Nora has termed "sites of memory." For Nora,

. . . the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop the time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial. . . . all of this in order to capture the fewest of signs, it is also clear that lieux de memoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications. ¹⁰

Nora...