Ongoing Nakba

Part of a series on the
Nakba
Precipitating events Background Mandatory Palestine 1947 partition plan 1948 Palestine war Civil war in Palestine Plan Dalet Deir Yassin massacre Battle of Haifa Israeli Declaration of Independence Arab–Israeli War Timeline Expulsion from Lydda and Ramle Transfer Committee
1948 expulsion and flight Palestinian refugees Camps Palestinian return to Israel Right of return Present absentee UN Resolution 194 UNRWA Geographic erasure Paraguay plan
Discourse Causes New Historians Nakba denial Ongoing Nakba Palestinian genocide accusation
Notable writers Aref al-Aref Yoav Gelber Efraim Karsh Rashid Khalidi Walid Khalidi Nur Masalha Benny Morris Ilan Pappé Edward Said Tom Segev Avraham Sela Avi Shlaim Constantin Zureiq
Symbols and memory Key Handala Nakba Day
Lists List of depopulated towns and villages List of estimates
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"Ongoing Nakba" (Arabic: النکبة المستمرة, romanized: al-nakba al-mustamirra) is a historiographical framework and term that interprets the Palestinian "Nakba" or "catastrophe" as a still emerging and unfolding phenomenon. The phrase emerged in the late 1990s and its first public usage is widely credited to Hanan Ashrawi, who referred to it in a speech at the 2001 World Conference against Racism. The term was later adopted by scholars such as Joseph Massad and Elias Khoury. As an intellectual framework, the "ongoing Nakba" narrative reflects the conceptualisation of the Palestinian experience not as a series of isolated events, but as "a continuous experience of violence and dispossession", or as other have termed it, the "recurring loss" (Arabic: الفقدان المتكرر, romanized: al-fuqdan al-mutakarrir) of the Palestinian people.

Conceptual emergence

The phrase "ongoing Nakba" (Arabic: النکبة المستمرة, romanized: al-nakba al-mustamirra) emerged conceptually in the late 1990s and early 2000 as part of the narrative framework for expressing the "sense of stagnant and suspended historicity" in the Palestinian experience of dispossession over the past century.^[1]

Contributing factors to the precipitation of this narrative included the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)'s "shift from anti-colonial resistance to statecraft", as well as the failure of the 1993 Oslo Accords to realize an independent Palestinian state.^[1] It was also a response to the normalization of the violence inflicted on Palestinians, both within Israel and in the West Bank.^[1]

The first usage of the term "ongoing Nakba" is typically credited to the Palestinian scholar, activist and politician Hanan Ashrawi in her speech at the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances.^[1][2] In it, Ashrawi referred to the Palestinian people as "a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba, as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and victimization".^[2]

The term then saw sporadic usage in English and Arabic up until 2008, when Joseph Massad outlined the concept in greater detail in an article in al-Ahram Weekly in 2008, defining the Nakba as an ongoing process rather than a 1948 event.^[1]

Elias Khoury reiterated this in a 2012 article in both Arabic and English, presenting the "al-Nakba al-Mustamirra" or "continuous Nakba" as both "a regime of material violence" and "ongoing battle of interpretation, a system aimed at silencing and erasing the Palestinian story by relegating it to the past".^[1][3][4]

Shir Alon describes the "ongoing Nakba" as "a means of understanding the Palestinian historical present" that "reconfigures the meaning of the 1948 expulsion: rather than a traumatic rupture ushering in a new period, it posits the Nakba as an ongoing process ... a continuous experience of violence and dispossession."^[1]

As a framework it is "a relatively recent historiographic narrative through which to comprehend decades of Zionist settler colonialism and Palestinian dispossession", that, according to Alon, replaces both the Nakba and the subsequent Naksa (the 1967 "setback", or further displacement) narrative, and the anti-imperialist liberation struggle.^[1]

As an emergent paradigm, the sense of "ongoing Nakba" is also coterminous with what Esmail Nashif has identified as al-fuqdan al-mutakarrir (Arabic: الفقدان المتكررة; literally: the recurring loss) of the Palestinians.^[1][5]

Ilan Pappé references the term in the conclusion to his essay Everyday Evil in Palestine: The View from Lucifer's Hill, which examines daily occurrences of "incremental colonization, ethnic cleansing, and oppression" in Palestine from the perspective of events at Masafer Yatta.^[6] He notes that this "ongoing catastrophe of the Palestinians" is today also quite often referred to by Palestinian people themselves as the "ongoing Nakba".^[7]

Narrative embodiments

One of the key ways in which the Nakba is understood to be an ongoing and continuing process of dispossession is in the continuation of "Zionist settler colonial violence" to this day, seventy years after the violence that originally drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land.^[8]

Rana Barakat asks what it means for the Arab villages that were destroyed in 1948 yet live on in the memories created among the displaced by that same destructive process – one that is ongoing. She notes that with the Nakba, the symbolic value of a "lost past" became not only a settler narrative, but one that now frames the Palestinian experience.^[8]

Barakat gives the example of the village of Lifta, a depopulated Arab village neither destroyed nor repopulated since 1948, as one that embodies both past and present narratives, noting: "Lifta is not only a static symbol of the settler desire to come to terms with the past but also an active symbol for Palestinians who survived (or did not survive) this unending past—the ongoing Nakba."^[8]

Researchers at the Australian Institute of International Affairs have called the Nakba "a historical starting point for still ongoing experiences of occupation and exile" and tied the ongoing nature of the Nakba directly to the nature of Israel's ethno-nationalist statehood, noting that "settler colonialism is not an event; it is a structure, which manifests in cycles of violence, displacement, and dispossession of the native local population ... Israel's settler colonial structure is maintained by a continued drive to dominate and – at times – eliminate the native population of Palestine."^[9]

The terminology of "ongoing catastrophe" has also been related to the experience of Palestinians in resettled camp environments, where the al-Nabka remains perceived as a phenomenon that never stopped. It has assumed the role of "a reverse national myth, a figure of un-becoming", whose impact continues in the erosion of the lives of those displaced.^[10]

Karma Nabulsi has noted that it is due to "the relentless and dynamic nature of the Catastrophe" and the lived daily experience of the Nakba that "the current attempts to destroy the Palestinian collectivity today bind this generation directly to the older one, and bind the exile to the core of the Palestinian body politics". Nabulsi observed in 2006 that the preceding years had "witnessed a phase of violent acceleration in this process of attempted destruction" that had only strengthened the sense of the Nakba's continuation.^[11]

A central aspect of the ongoing Nakba is the "systematic, ongoing and arbitrary forced displacement of Palestinians",^[12] including what has been described as the ghettoization of the Palestinian population through transfers, land confiscation and the concentration and confinement "of as many as possible of those who remain in the smallest possible areas of land".^[12] One example is Israel's creation of seven "concentration towns" for Palestinian Negev Bedouins, which sat alongside a policy of ruling 45 other communities (as of 2008) illegal and the pressuring of their residents (sometime violently) to move to the concentration towns.^[12]

See also

• Nakba denial

References

Citations

Sources

• Alon, Shir (2019). "No One to See Here: Genres of Neutralization and the Ongoing Nakba". Arab Studies Journal. 27 (1). Georgetown University: 91–117.
• Ashrawi, Hanan (2002). "Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances". Islamic Studies. 41 (1). International Islamic University, Islamabad: 97–104. JSTOR 20837166.
• Barakat, Rana (2018). "Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine's History". Native American and Indigenous Studies. 5 (2): 1–15. doi:10.5749/natiindistudj.5.2.0001. JSTOR 10.5749/natiindistudj.5.2.0001. S2CID 166652210.
• Dunning, Tristan; Iqtait, Anas (15 May 2020). "Palestine's ongoing Nakba". Australian Outlook. Australian Institute of International Affairs.
• Jamjoum, Hazem (2008). "Gaza: The Latest Chapter in a Sixty-Year Nakba" (PDF). Al-Majdal (39). BADIL: 2–4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 January 2023.
• Khoury, Elias (2012a). "Al-Nakba al-Mustamirra" [The Continuous Nakba]. Majallat Al-Dirasat Al-Filastiniyya (in Arabic). 89. Institute for Palestine Studies: 37–50.
• Khoury, Elias (2012b). "Rethinking the Nakba". Critical Inquiry. 38 (2). The University of Chicago: 250–66. doi:10.1086/662741. JSTOR 662741. S2CID 162316338.
• Kublitz, Anja (2016). "The Ongoing Catastrophe: Erosion of Life in the Danish Camps". Journal of Refugee Studies. 29 (2). Oxford University Press: 229–249. doi:10.1093/jrs/fev019.
• Nabulsi, Karma (2006). Mac Allister, Karine (ed.). From Generation to Generation (PDF). BADIL. p. 12-18. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
• Nashif, Esmail (2013). "Mawt al-Nas" [Death of the people]. Majallat Al-Dirasat Al-Filastiniyya (in Arabic). 96. Institute for Palestine Studies: 96–117.
• Pappé, Ilan (2021). "Everyday Evil in Palestine: The View from Lucifer's Hill". Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies. 1 (1). Memorial University of Newfoundland: 70–82. ISSN 2564-2154.

Further reading

• AbuZavyad, Ziad (2017). "After 50 years of occupation, it is time for justice and peace: If not sharing the state, then a fair sharing of the land". Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture. 22 (2): 34–43. ProQuest 1908322831.
• Al-Issa, Ferdoos Abed Rabo (2020). "Psychological Resilience among Palestinian Adolescent Ex-detainees in Israeli Jails". Bethlehem University Journal. 37: 85–104. doi:10.13169/bethunivj.37.2020.0085. S2CID 235040419.
• Franklin, Cynthia G. (2017). "Against Erasures: Why Life-Writing Scholars Should Address the Nakba". A/B: Auto/Biography Studies. 32 (2): 311–314. doi:10.1080/08989575.2017.1288958. S2CID 157259967.
• Khader, Jamil (2019). "Dystopian dark tourism, fan subculture and the Ongoing Nakba in Banksy's Walled Off heterotopia (chapter 10)". In Isaac, Rami K.; Çakmak, Erdinç; Butler, Richard (eds.). Tourism and Hospitality in Conflict-Ridden Destinations. Routledge. ISBN 9780429872013.
• Khoury, Elias (2022). "Finding a New Idiom: Language, Moral Decay, and the Ongoing Nakba". Journal of Palestine Studies. 51 (1): 50–57. doi:10.1080/0377919X.2021.2013024. S2CID 246384429.
• Sayigh, Rosemary (2013). "On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba from the "Trauma Genre"". Journal of Palestine Studies. 43 (1): 51–60. doi:10.1525/jps.2013.43.1.51.
• Wermenbol, Grace (2017). A battlefield of memory : the Nakba and the Holocaust as exclusive victimhood narratives. University of Oxford (Thesis).
• Wermenbol, Grace (2018). "Preserving the Part, Mobilizing the Past: The Nakba as a Prospective Media Realm" (PDF). Arab Media & Society (25): 51–89.
• Zubi, Himmat (2018). "The ongoing Nakba: urban Palestinian survival in Haifa (chapter 8)". In Abdo, Nahla; Masalha, Nur (eds.). An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781786993519.

External links

• Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera (2020). The Nakba Law and the Ongoing Nakba (video submission). 7th Annual Conference on Genocide.
• Mac Allister, Karine (2006). Ongoing Nakba. Al-Majdal (magazine). Issue 29. BADIL Resource Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights.
• Jamjoum, Hazem (2008/2009). Palestine’s Ongoing Nakba. Al-Majdal (magazine). Issue 39/40. BADIL Resource Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights.
• Ilan Pappe's 2014 lecture, "Israeli Historian Dr. Ilan Pappe Addresses the Ongoing Nakba (video)"