Zionism and the Nakba: The Mainstream Narrative, the Oppressed Narratives, and the Israeli Collective Memory

Abstract

The Israelis call what happened in Palestine in 1948 “the War of Independence” (Milhemet ha-‘atzma’ut) whereas the Palestinians refer to it as “al-Nakba” (the catastrophe). The contrast between these two names is telling, for it reveals the presence of two conflicting memories of 1948, Jewish and Palestinian, which are not politically equal. While Israel has consistently justified the establishment of the Jewish state in its official narrative, it has rarely mentioned the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem and the destruction of over 400 Palestinian villages in 1948, thus deliberately denying Palestinian memories of the Nakba. Only in the late 1980s was this denial criticized and the rewriting of the 1948 history started by the New Historians, who dramatically shattered longstanding myths of the 1948 War and the Palestinian exodus. Against this historical background, I try to explain how the Nakba has been addressed in the Israeli (Zionist) mainstream narrative in order to shed a light on the basic logic and assumptions underlying the mainstream narrative of the Palestinian exodus. I shall also explore the dissident narratives related to the Nakba, which have long been neglected due to their contradictions with the mainstream narrative, and reflect on the meaning of the new narratives from the late 1980s to the present.