In support of a straight shooter: Susan Abulhawa is right about ‘Apeirogon’

CULTURE

Note: This post appeared first on Mondoweiss where. one can see the deleted images.

Susan Abulhawa is right about ‘Apeirogon’

BY HATIM KANAANEH  AUGUST 5, 2020

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COLUM MCCANN. (PHOTO: RANDOM HOUSE) 

I hadn’t intended to read Colum McCann’s “Apeirogon: A Novel,” (Random House, 2020) at this time. Till I read Raja Shehadeh’s article in Mondoweiss. My admiration and trust in the judgement of the human rights lawyer and prize-winning Palestinian writer compelled me to read the book. But first I read Susan Abulhawa’s critical assessment of the same book in her Al Jazeera article. That made my self-assigned task doubly difficult: I equally admire the lead living Palestinian novelist and poet and have read and reviewed all of her published books except for her forthcoming “Against the Loveless World,” which is high on my current reading list.

In his novel, McCann does a great artistic and creative job of reaching far and wide across time and space, constantly borrowing from world literature, history, folklore and sacred texts to impact his reader with the depth of the personal tragedies that two families, one Palestinian and the other Israeli, had suffered with the loss of one lovely young daughter each in the ongoing violence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Both of the fathers have committed to pursuing peace through joining the activist circle of bereaved families on both sides of the ‘conflict.’ And McCann’s tersely poetic writing style is a cross between dwelling at length on the suffering and inner struggles of the two sets of parents of the assassinated promising young girls, and straying far afield in unpredictable directions in literary and popular cultural accounts on both sides of ‘the conflict’.

“Apeirogon” is an appropriate name for a novel that seems to aspire to transcend definition in space and time, a tense poetic tangle with a stylistic mix of William Faulkner’s stream of consciousness and the repeatedly mentioned Thousand and One Nights. Yet, as I read it with the intent to judge its author’s partiality to one side or the other in the assumed Israel-Palestine “conflict,” or his lack thereof, I kept stumbling across reminders that Bassam Aramin, the bereaved Palestinian father (with the repeated but never substantiated Israeli accusations of terrorism and his time in jail under a military court system with a record of 99.8% of all accused being found guilty as charged, as mentioned by the author), his wife, Salwa, and I are all operating at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Rami Elhanan, Bassam’s Israeli counterpart, with his Israeli fighter’s heroic image  which the author visits repeatedly, and his wife, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, the daughter of a famed Israeli general turned peace activist in retirement. And Rami’s sympathetic image is further fortified with details of his Jewish underdog status as a “Holocaust graduate,” the European Nazi crime against humanity which the countrymen of its own perpetrators use as a curse to smear Palestinians. Witness, if you will, Germany’s (and other Western countries’) current criminalization of Palestinian peaceful civil activism against Israel.

BASSAM ARAMIN AND RAMI ELHANAN WITH COPIES OF COLUM MCCANN’S BOOK “APEIROGON: A NOVEL.” (PHOTO: PARENTS CIRCLE FORUM)

Think about it: To start with, the capable Irish author is European aesthetically and in terms of his natural milieu, his elementary frame of reference and his acculturation. That automatically makes us oriental creatures, and especially the long-derided Palestinians whose main role in the successful Zionist portrayal across most Western media, going back to the earliest church Zionist teachings, has been their absence from the imagined Holy Land till after the unleashing of the Zionists’ settler colonial project when the Palestinians were needed to show up as terrorists. Then comes the novel, “Exodus,” and the most successful film based on it confirming our non-existence except as terrorists. No wonder I still remember demonstrating against it along with my fellow high school mates in Nazareth as it was being filmed. Now, the film rights to “Apeirogon” have been bought by Steven Spielberg before the book was published. The famed film director, even when some of his critics deride him as “no friend of Israel,” is sure to visualize and present the whole mystic blur of “Apeirogon” through Zionist-glinted 3-D glasses. He has famously expressed his willingness to die for Israel but is sure to land alive on the Israeli side of the equalized “conflict.” 

Does no one but the Palestinian writer, Susan Abulhawa, find that alarming? On account of that film’s threat alone, I am compelled to join her in sounding the alarm. The most I can credit McCann with is to give him the benefit of the doubt as a misguided and honest bystander who is practicing his artistic gifts based on his lifelong inherent partiality. 

AUTHOR SUSAN ABULHAWA. (PHOTO: GOODREADS)

Pointing this is the minimum I, as a Palestinian, can do. After all, most Westerners are just waking up to the suspicion that they may have been duped by the Zionists’ clever alignment of their own settler-colonial scheme with the God-ordained white man’s burden as colonialists. Given the success of the ploy, it is left up to the Palestinians to sound the alarm and call on their fellow-colonized dark skins to stand up socio-culturally if not politically to their further debasement through the guise of sharing the blame with their oppressors, their settler colonialists, as “equal partners” in a “conflict.” It is the acuity of their ongoing plight that lends urgency to the Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba and obligates their vocal objection to the continued blame as equal partners to a ‘historical conflict’ whether such blame is intentional or out of inbuilt sociocultural partisanship as is the case with McCann in “Apeirogon.” In her piece in Al Jazeera, Abulhawa shines the light on such standard equating of settler and colonized as follows:

“Imagine this (to borrow from McCann’s writing style): Somewhere on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a little girl from the Oglala Lakota Nation, whose head was shattered by a white settler’s petulant son, bleeds to death in her father’s helpless arms. Another white settler befriends the Native girl’s father (it has to be at the white man’s behest because the father can’t leave the reservation), and a friendship between the two men flourishes from their common anguish of having lost a child. The white man’s daughter had been killed by a group of young Braves who attacked an encroaching settlement. The friendship between the two men is real. The loss that haunts them for all their days is the same.”

There is much to quote in support of my contention of the inborn and life-long cultivated partiality to Western values and folkways of McCann, perhaps through no intended bias on his part. He simply is comfortable in his own Western skin. Such bias is nearly worldwide. But that is exactly the problem. Let me quote from a field with which I am more familiar: In his introduction to the current special issue of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies focused on Settler Colonialism: The Palestinian/Israeli Case, Martin Kemp concludes at one point:

Silence, going with the flow, avoiding controversy above all else—taking the role of the bystander—does not absolve us of responsibility. It is a choice in itself that can lead us into collusion with injustice and harm of a kind that could never be openly acknowledged. … Like viruses, the political threats to life and liberty have no respect of national boundaries. In a period in which the specters of fascism and militarism once again haunt the world, this places the Palestinian struggle in its proper context. To join with Palestinians on their path to self‐liberation might then be considered to take one’s place in the unending struggle for universal emancipation.”

The obligatory outcome of McCann’s “neutrality” is that the highly artistic product that he puts in our hands is more empathetic with the characters with European values and behavior, i.e. the Israelis, than otherwise. Let me illustrate by quoting from two engaging moments from the lives of the two bereaved mothers. Here is Salwa, the Palestinian mother:

“Once she was filmed carrying her youngest, Hiba, through the apartment. She had stopped to look at a photograph of [the murdered] Abir and the cameraman caught her crying. If they could have understood her anger, if they could somehow have captured it without making a spectacle of it, she would have talked with them, but she knew, she just knew: a Muslim woman, a Palestinian, the crime of her geography. She supported what Bassam did, Rami too, Nurit as well, but she wanted only to pursue the ordinary. She would find blessing there.”

Compare this, if you will, with the Jewish mother’s less inward directed demeanor: She, Nurit, is loud and clear in her crying out to the world, accusing Israel of killing her daughter by maintaining the occupation of Palestinian Territories, a laudatory and just outcry. Nurit’s scream reverberates across the international media to all regions of the world and over one full month of articles and quotes in the media in various world capitals, as the author documents. That is the manner in which the West understands a mother’s outcry and not in the classic pained reticence of the Palestinian mother. Nurit and Israelis generally are not satisfied “to pursue the ordinary.”

A similar conclusion can be reached even in studying the school report cards of the two lost bright girls, Abir’s abstract grades of A, B and C, compared with Smadar’s more “modern” discourse regarding her performance and interactions with classmates and teachers in each subject. Modern Westerners are automatically drawn to the latter’s lively depictions than to dry grades. And the text is rich with similar contrasts playing in favor of Israel’s more familiar patterns of Western acculturation.

When the author comes to negative portrayal of killers on the two sides, the prominence is in reverse proportions, the Palestinians given the lion’s share. We are presented with the cruel portraits of the three Palestinian suicide bombers, Abulhawa’s “braves,” with considerable details of their horrid refugee camp lives and environment. The author goes on to explain the details of the explosive belts that they wore and the angle at which the explosives must have torn their bodies. He even details how the eye of one of them was found later hanging by its nerve over the edge of a shop’s awning in Jerusalem; utter disgust! When the author comes to the soldier who murdered the Palestinian girl with a rubber bullet to the back of her head just outside her school gate, the murderer’s identity is not known and he never really materializes in the account; the reader never meets or him or her. Little cruelty or gore is flung at the reader in association with the Israeli killer. In fact, the one character who shines most in that account is the Israeli woman judge who insists on visiting the site and ends up ruling in favor of a monetary compensation to the Palestinian family for the loss of their little daughter, a rare outcome for Palestinians in Israeli courts.

To be fair, a surprising exception has to be mentioned here: few people, whether Palestinian or Israeli, are featured in the book with recognizable presence outside of the members of the two victims’ immediate families. 

Yet, two Palestinian young women gain entry into the poetic milieu of the book, both unrelated by blood or circumstance to the victims at the center of the book. One is the well-known Palestinian artist, Emily Jacir, who is featured pursuing a project with a connection to Thousand and One Nights. The other is Dalia el-Fahum who, presumably, dies while pursuing her musical ambition of recording bird songs in nature. Yet those most sympathetic sketches of young Palestinian artists fail to balance the account, especially since they both are only tangentially-related to the book’s central theme.

To be honest, reading “Apeirogon,” I could sense Orwell’s presence at the edges tampering with its central premise and carefully balancing its weight and impact. “A swan can be as fatal to the pilot as a rocket-propelled grenade,” is an illustrative casual assertion in the book. It stands alone as one of its thousand chapters of varying length. The author has a fascination with migratory birds that fill many pages all through the novel. This brief statement, I feel, sums up the essence of his “balanced” political stand. Might he, for example, be equating the impact of the peaceful Great March of Return in Gaza with Israel’s frequently fatal and disabling reaction to it? At the end, I find myself in full sympathy with Susan Abulhawa’s stand especially because of the novel’s artistic refinement and inventiveness and the expected worldwide impact of the film based on it, quietly concealing the Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba and denied rights, collective as well as individual ones, witness, for example, Israel’s recently passed apartheid constitutional Nation-State Law.

To use a local Palestinian expression, Susan Abulhawa’s pronouncements “never hit the ground”; her aim is perfect and her fire power is deadly. I find her powerful discourse, centering on refuting the standard Western-style equivalency between the Zionist settler colonialists and their native Palestinian victims, flawless. Confirming and celebrating such unfair equivalency between victim and perpetrator must be decried, challenged and corrected by whoever has the conscience to fathom the depth of its disservice and the media outreach to attempt correcting it. Seeing the current success of the Netflix travesty, Fauda, for example, it is clear that Israel and its hired contractors, especially in the film industry, are retooling their old attack fleets. Raising the alarm, at the earliest possible time and with the loudest possible means at our disposal is the least that all of us, Palestinians and colonized and ethnically-cleansed natives everywhere, must do. Susan Abulhawa did that in her most eloquent style and I humbly second her opinion.

BASSAM ARAMINCOLUM MCCANNPARENTS CIRCLE-FAMILIES FORUMRAMI ELHANAN

A Portraiture of the Nakba:

Here is the link to an abridged version of this review below. It appears in the Middle East Eye today, the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinians. The good people at MEE also added some photos and skipped few points that I consider particularly significant:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/survivor-s-review-1948-creation-catastrophe-1036212750

What follows is my original full-length piece:

A Portraiture of the Nakba:

a survivor’s review of the documentary

“1948: Creation & Catastrophe.”

Let me open with a clarification: I am not neutral on the subject of this documentary; a Palestinian who survived the Nakba can never be. It is like asking Elie Wiesel to take a neutral stand on the Holocaust. Of course, there is a difference. But to one who, during much of the formative years of his childhood, had heard daily the first-person accounts of tens if not hundreds of premeditated massacres against his kin to drive them out of their homes and farms, the difference is mainly quantitative. Time and again, members of the Jewish militias who participated in the atrocities of the Palestinian Nakba, state in the documentary that even then they were aware of committing crimes similar to what had been perpetrated against them in Europe. Take a look, for example, at 00:55:10 of our documentary: Joseph Ben Eliezer (Haganah Veteran) describes searching Palestinians for valuables that he and his fellow soldiers purloined. Again and again, the Israeli veterans admit to being aware of their committing the same atrocities against the Palestinians that were committed against them in Europe. “We all were depressed. We simply remembered our own exile.” Such admissions are in the infamous typical “shooting and crying’” style of Israel’s humanitarian sensibility.

And a second admission of my complicity: I assisted minimally with some of the field work involved in producing the documentary. My name even appears in the credits. I share in the excitement of the producers in their recent announcement that “Our documentary is now available for streaming on Kanopy (the Netflix of schools and libraries).”

Unjustified Equivalency:

            In their one-and-a-half-hour documentary, 1948: Creation & Catastrophe, Andy Trimlet and Ahlam Muhtaseb offer a wealth of first-person accounts of survivors as well as of perpetrators of the Palestinian Nakba and of the establishment of the state of Israel. The documentary opens with a forced attempt at balance and at equating the two themes announced in the title: the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel, both culminating in 1948 but rooted in the earlier belligerent Zionist settler colonialism and the native Palestinians’ pushback against it. The assembled cover photo illustrates what that balance really looked like: An aggressive looking armed young Israeli man on one side with a traditionally attired old Palestinian protecting and guiding a child on the other. To take a balanced stand on the conflict, even the mere reference to a ‘conflict’ and not to an aggression is to favor the belligerent, of course. And that is my first gut-level reservation about the documentary even though it immediately allows the eloquent Palestinian Nakba witness, Samia Khoury, to state her conviction regarding the chronicity of neglect and injustice meted out to the Palestinians. That then is reinforced by the wish of a counterpart, Yakov Keller, not to be reminded of 1948.

An idealized portrait of Samia lodges in my memory as the elegant and savvy cosmopolitan Palestinian. The portrait gains relevance as I notice the paucity of women among witnesses in the documentary. Especially rural Palestinian women must have played a critical role in the survival of their families in their exile and diaspora. The social cohesion of rural Palestinian communities and the centrality of the woman in her household and family structure allow me to speculate that a richer patina can be woven around their accounts, had more of them been tapped for the project.

But again, the sham of balance returns when another contemporary of Samia’s explains the elation he and his fellow Israeli fighters felt at establishing a Jewish state. Now, step back with me to the present and consider what the current permutations of that creation of ‘a Jewish state’ has meant to a Palestinian citizen of Israel like me. As practiced by Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist settler ministers and all of their predecessors since 1948 and before, it has meant driving out my kin and erasing an entire nation and its culture. And it has meant the imposition of their superiority on me with apartheid legislation peaking most recently with the passage of the Israeli constitutional law of the Jewish Nation State. And that is the soft edge of implementing the Zionist plans, witness the daily abuse the Jewish State’s military rains on the Palestinians under its occupation in Jerusalem and the West Bank or, worse yet, in its open Gaza prison.

            Like it or not, the historical justification for a Jewish state had little to do with the Palestinians. The documentary marshals factual information and historical testimonies of the likes of Benny Morris to explain the compelling forces across Europe leading to the creation of the Zionist colonial movement, most notably the rampant anti-Semitism throughout Europe fueled by the church and by Europe’s xenophobia. 

The Belfour Declaration:

            Take a look, if you will, at the photo of Arthur Belfour in the first few minutes of the documentary. It is the one of that is commonly displayed in the media. Something about the photo, perhaps the man’s haughty self-assuredness, and the way he seems to look down on me, irritates me. What right did he, his government, and the British elite have to promise my homeland to the Zionists? Who the f…k did this colonialist miscreant think he was to reduce me and my people to mere “non-Jewish communities” of Palestine? Let him go to hill. Had I been already born and able to throw a stone in 1936, I would have joined the Great Revolt against him and his Zionist masters.

            Then, the photograph of Yusef Weitz follows soon after, looking bitter and determined. Except that his bitterness is born out of his kin’s suffering in Europe while his determination is to exile me and my people out of our homes forever. “The only way is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them, except perhaps Bethlehem, Nazareth and old Jerusalem. Not a single village or a single tribe must be left,” he wrote in his memoirs in 1940 summing up the Zionist leadership’s collective plan. Mind you, as the Director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Department, Weitz was in the best position to act on that decision. History, Europe, America and presumably God colluded with Weitz against me. Otherwise, why were Jews prevented from setting roots in the lands where they were driven by the Romans or whomever and had to shift to banking so that the likes of Edmond Rothchild could finance the purchase of my land from under my feet by paying an absentee landlord in Beirut? The longer I contemplate his problem, the more complicated mine gets. In the meantime, Zionist armed bands proceed to organize into a veritable military force in Palestine and to plan their takeover of the colony Belfour and his imperial army of rapists had started pacifying for them. (My late sister narrowly escaped a gang rape by British soldiers and needed daily incantations of holy verses from the Quran over a long period before returning to sanity.)

            Historians from both sides attest to the premeditated Zionist transfer plan of the native Palestinian population: At the start, Zionist leaders kept it to themselves. Then they discussed it openly as Weiss’s memoirs show. Then, in 1948, they proceeded to implement it to a T with all the required premeditated scores of massacres. A chunk of that plan was conveniently postponed to 1967. Of late, extending that loosely fitting design of a Jewish homeland to the parameters of the imagined Greater Israel is gaining popularity again with Netanyahu and his extremist settler ministers. Currently, it looks likely the entire land of Greater Israel will be purchased from the Saudis and the puppet heads of the UAE and the like in exchange for American and European smiles, handshakes, pats on the back and the occasional sword dance, all supplemented with Israeli and American arms deals, at a profit, of course.

Random Portraits:

            The number and expertise of the interviewed historians and analysts from both sides of the divide for the documentary is impressive. And they delve deep into historical records and relevant documents. Yet I find it more meaningful to concentrate on some of the silent portraits that abound in the eloquent documentary. Many of those are of anonymous individuals, most likely dead or, if alive, unaware of the role their silent photos play in illuminating my history.

            Take, for example, the haunting photo at 00:13:52. I presume the young creature is a Jewish man in a concentration camp: I focus on the eyes and am scared. The expression is several levels beyond cold, starved and scared. In fact, there is an edgy threat in the scared-fox way that he stares back at me, a contained animalistic outrage: ‘Don’t fuck with me or I’ll scratch your eyes out,’ he warns me. That was what Europe discharged to our Palestinian ports: the just but misplaced fury of the holocaust survivors. Fast forward to 00:57:00 where Yuram Kaniuk, a veteran of the Jewish Haganah militia forces, describes the night the Palestinians were driven out of Lydda and Ramla. In a meeting with Ben Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, the officer in charge, had asked him what to do with the residents of the two Palestinian cities. Ben Gurion responded with a sweeping wave of his hand. Out of 50-70 thousand residents, only about 100 remained. That night, 10-15 truckloads of immigrants arrived from docking boats bringing concentration camp survivors. “Within minutes they took over the homes,” Kaniuk states. “It is not that we tried to harm, but it is just a fact.”

And there is the pitiable image of Hava Keller we first meet narrating Acre’s fall when, to her thinking, “the war got ugly.” That ugliness is symbolized by a child having left its shoes behind and Hava, then a young soldier, finding it as she enters the abandoned home. She now wants to know where the child had gone and how had she faired. Hava has a winning sincerity to her concern. I cannot but join her emotionally in the search for that child. We see such a child shortly afterwards in Lydda lost between the soldiers and the crowd of Palestinian civilians they were evicting. Then again, we and Hava are given a glimpse of that destitute child with a sibling, hungry and scared. The scared look on the children’s faces says it all. The film directors’ stringing these images shortly after Hava’s Acre segment is a media master’s stroke of effectiveness and brutality. Over a dozen different Palestinian children show up after that figuratively claiming ownership of the shoe in Acre.

It suddenly dawns on me that it is my late friend, Miriam Petrokowski of Naharyya, whom I see every time Hava shows up on the screen. A friendlier, milder-mannered and more sympathetic woman is hard to imagine. I remember Miriam in 1982 going door-to-door in her Jewish neighborhood to collect food and clothing items for Palestinian refugees in Israeli occupied South Lebanon. Of course, she and her husband had played a part in driving those refugees out in 1948. In fact, they lived off those refugees’ colonized fields. Like my friend Miriam, Hava obeys orders: In the current documentary, after helping evacuate Acre of its Arab residents, Hava moves on to Beersheba to help streamline the expulsion of its natives to Gaza. But her core of decency is persistent: At 1:18:13, she is back again. “Where are they? The Palestinians?” she asks. Apparently, she hadn’t forgotten the barefoot child of Acre. And Hava reflects on another Israeli imponderable, one the world usually forgets: “When the war started and the Arabs were thrown out of their villages, not one kibbutz said that they don’t want to take their land. Everybody was very happy to steal their land.” Obviously, Hava must be a Holocaust survivor, like my friend, Miriam. One can’t be that obedient to authority, to the point of piety it appears, except after having come back from the dead. Elie Wiesel toed the line as well. He followed and defended the Zionist colonialist logic to a T. 

Hunting Infiltrators:

Benny Morris is an Israeli historian and a hardened racist who had first documented much of Israel’s war crimes in 1948. He thinks that it was a fatal error to have left any Palestinians in Israel. In the documentary, at 1:06:50, we see the collective Portrait of four generations of Palestinian refugees. I look at the still photo and think: “There, but for the grace of God, goes my family.”  Benny Morris identifies such a group as “the Palestinians that have been fighting us.” He proceeds to justify Israel’s decision to exile Palestinians forever and to kill those among them who attempt to return to their homes. Many returned to steal their own blankets or food.

“The notion of having this state empty of Arabs was already part of my life,” says Israeli historian and veteran Haganah fighter, Mordechai Bar-On. He proceeds to casually relate an incident in which he shot pointblank with his revolver a Palestinian returning to reap the harvest in his field. Bar-On surprised the Palestinian so suddenly that the man embraced him. “I didn’t blame myself. I didn’t have any feeling of remorse,” he declares smiling. Bar-On does preface his account with the standard victorious Israeli explanation: “You wanted a war? OK. Now you run away. You’ll never come back.”

For example, the orders for such crimes are spelled out in a military document specific to the village of Magdal in the south of Palestine. Photos of the document are presented in the film. They include the following:

“a. Sweep the village …

 b. Expell the refugees…

 c. Burn the village and demolish any stone structures.

 d. Check [for] enemy scouts and arrest them.

 e. Check the refugees’ travel routs and mine those roads.”             

On this issue of principle, Uri Avnery, the famous Israeli peace activist and founder and head of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom, simply states that he obeyed orders and “that was that.” But he claims, rather apologetically, that he felt happy when a hunted Palestinian escaped alive across the hills. Seen from the Palestinian’s point of view, the difference between his timid acceptance and Morris’s impudent justification is academic. Throughout his later-life peace activism, Avnery drew a line under 1948. He apparently didn’t want to face up to some of the massacres, like Deir Yassin, in which he personally took part. Only 1967 was open for discussion with him and his fellow liberals. Still, to the day he died of natural causes, he was the recognized face of Israel’s left. To Palestinians with sound memory like Salman Abu-Sitta, Avnery’s left liberalism must have seemed of the same fabric as Shimon Peres’s nuclear-weapons-fraught world peace efforts.

Follow-up Plans:

Towards the end of the documentary there is a sense of the narrative being rushed through: The story of depopulating, erasing and hiding over 500 Palestinian villages with parks and new settlements is compressed into summary statements, even if powerful ones by the likes of Exeter historian Ilan Pappe. This forces the submersion of so many memorable accounts of cruelty, massacres and occasional heroism: Tantura, Lubya, Ezzeeb, Elbassa, Iqrith, … and scores more.

Then the documentary concludes with the present when Israel controls nearly all of historic Palestine.

“Here is the question,” Farid Abdel-Nur, a Palestinian American political scientist sums up: “Was the establishment of the state of Israel so important that, no matter what price the Palestinians had to pay for it, it was worth it? Or was there something fundamentally wrong with a project that can only be realized by displacing hundreds of thousands of people?”

I, of course, have an answer. But, in the documentary, the question is left hanging in midair.

The focus of 1948: Creation & Catastropheis more on the Nakba’s major events in urban Palestine: Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, lydda, Ramla, Nazareth, Beersheba, and more. Yet, in 1948, the majority of Palestinian refugees were driven out of rural communities. For years, the Haganah had gathered detailed intelligence on their demographic, social, geographic and military conditions. Despite their minimal fighting power, such villages resisted expulsion tenaciously. Consequently, they suffered a long list of massacres specifically designed to scare them out of their homes and across the border to neighboring countries. In Deir Yassin, one of the earliest and vilest, the Irgun and Haganah had set a precedent: the village even had a peace treaty with the adjacent Jewish community. Our elders repeated such accounts in whispers of fear, distrust and secrecy. In some such semi-secret tales, Palestinian women feature heroically. In his newly published Arabic-language book, Nakba Wabaqa’a, (Institute for Palestine Studies, 2016) the Palestinian historian Adel Manna exposes several such massacres committed in my home turf of Galilee, with excellent and thoroughly referenced oral historical accounts. In them he lists names, dates and geographic locations. For its ‘native’ eloquence, this scholarly treatise deserves translation to English for a wider readership.

It seems fitting to end with these tales. There is the eyewitness account of the execution of Aziza Shrida of Sufsaf, a heroin who resisted rape to the point of death. Her 17-year-old firstborn son and her husband were executed to prove the rapists’ seriousness of intent. She refused to surrender to rape before their eyes and the eyes of her brood of younger children. This is narrated by Aziza’s personal friend who went on to name her own daughter after her.

Or take the potential romance woven in our imagination around the miraculous survival of Sa’ad, one of the fourteen Mawasi tribesmen selected for execution outside of Eilaboun, shot and presumed dead. (This was a separate massacre from that of Eilaboun of the same number of victims.) Zhayya Elfawwaz, a Bedouin cowherd, hears Sa’ad groaning, discovers him alive with a shot through the head, steals him to a secret cave where, for weeks, she nurses him to health, enough to return him to his mother who smuggles him on horseback across the border to Syria, all while resisting the Haganah’s interrogations. Sa’ad remembers to send her fond messages from Syria every chance he has.

I have an even closer connection to this memorable tale: The Mawasi massacre took place at the edge of the Battouf Valley, the fertile agricultural lifeline of my village. Farmers from Arrabeh know the very spot where the massacre took place: For years, the wheat they planted grew exceptionally tall in a circle five-paces across.

More typical are the repeated accounts of treachery and willful murder of men that the Haganah considered the backbone of communal resistance and staying power, population eviction being the intended final outcome. In Sa’asa’a, (and the details are not in Manna’s book), a conveyer-belt execution style was practiced to expedite the disposal of bodies in a readymade mass grave, originally a rainwater cistern: One Haganah soldier stood astride the open pit and helped push the flailing bodies in as they were shot pointblank in the back of the head. The account was embellished with such details as the assertion that the Sa’asa’a villagers had reached a peace agreement with their Jewish neighbors. In fact, they had prepared a communal reception for them, a veritable feast with food and sweets. The inventive style of mass burial of fifty men or so was convincing enough to affect a total ethnic cleansing of that village leaving the stone homes unscathed. The liberal American new residents of Kibbutz Sa’asa’a are on record debating the ethical issues involved in their takeover of those intact homes. [See Noga Kadman’s Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948(Indiana University Press, 2015.)]

Here then is the place to recommend to the producers of this documentary a second and parallel project: There is a lot of remaining footage dealing with the Nakba’s rural events that merits a second documentary, perhaps with Adel Manna as advisor. The Galilee could be its focus and Palestinian rural women its protagonists. Samia Khoury should narrate, I insist.