May 19, 2012

The Sorrow of the Nakba

Joan Nestle blogs: "This is not an ethnic cleansing from the far distant past, this is not a forced expulsion from two centuries ago, the Nakba is lived everyday and we all lose our human way when we do not say its name, when we do nothing to bring the Palestinian people home."

"So many of our present lands have been ripped away from other peoples, from indigenous peoples who failed the invaders' notion of humanity. In my first country of America, most native Americans struggle to survive hopelessness so severe the United Nations has taken up their cause and yet no national politician includes their exile from hope on his or her agenda and in my second country, Australia, while the needs of Aboriginal people are discussed almost every day in the newspapers and the national culture honors the Aboriginal concept of dream time, deep daily deprivation of  basic living securities haunts the inner cities and the bush where Aboriginal elders try to hold the past and the present together. These expulsions from land happened so long ago, many say, that we are not responsible for these overwhelming losses. But still it is possible to study these histories of loss in school and say the words, European invasion or manifest destiny, without breaking a national law, without being arrested, without being seen as a traitor to the only allowed historical narrative.  Other countries, such as Turkey, forbid the discussion of ethnic cleansings carried out by the national state, as if mass collective suffering was a wisp of bad air in the national rooms. And then there is Israel and its forbidding of the word "Nakba," its refusal to recogonize in any way that its creation was bought on the back of another people, that this solution to the crimes of the Holocaust was to create another people's mass suffering that goes on and on."
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