Remembering the 'nakba'

Mondoweiss has been fascinated lately with the term "nakba," an Arabic word that means "catastrophe" and refers to the creation of Israel, including its appearance in mainstream American journalism like The New Yorker and New York Times. This got me wondering: How often has this term appeared in The Jewish Journal?

The answer, since our online archive began 10 years ago, is 14 (three more if you include the alternative spelling). This piece from 1998 -- the 50th anniversary of Israel's modern statehood and before the Second Intifada -- was the most interesting.

The Nakba is an event burned into the memory of all Palestinians. In a low-key way, with lectures and exhibits, they are commemorating it in some cities of Gaza and the West Bank. It is a somber, bitter commemoration, in starkest contrast to the celebrations Israel has in mind.

The 600,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948 left about 100,000 Arabs behind -- those who did not flee. These 100,000have grown to nearly 1 million today -- Israel's Arab citizens, who,ever since the intifada, have become more open and defiant about their identification with their former countrymen -- in many cases their blood relatives -- now living in the territories. As American Jews say of their relationship with Israelis, so Israeli Arabs say of their relationship with the Palestinians: "We are one."

That leaves the question: When Israel's Jews are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of their country,what will Israel's Arabs be doing?

Mourning the displacement of their Palestinian brethren and protesting the 50 years of discrimination they've suffered themselves, say Arab members of the Knesset and other leaders of the community.

As Israel has its committee to plan the anniversary celebrations, Israeli Arab leaders have set up a preparations committee of their own. During the panel's meeting this week, members considered declaring Israel's Independence Day, May 15,as "The 50th Anniversary of the Palestinian Calamity." Proposals were made to treat it as a day of mourning, and to publish a "Black Book"that listed the Arab villages which emptied out and vanished during the war.

No coordinated plan has been adopted, but,clearly, Israeli Arabs see their country's 50th anniversary as a day of anger and grief. "What exactly does Israel want me to celebrate?"said Knesset Member Taleb a-Sanaa, who recommended that Israeli Arabs mark the day with "a minute of silence in memory of all the Palestinians killed between 1948 and today."

The Palestinian refugee crisis remains a tragic affair. So, too, was the Jewish exodus -- quick and slow -- from Arab countries after the Arab-Israeli War.

Jews, power and the Palestinian refugee crisis

At the Hillel Summit in Washington last month, I listened to Ruth R. Wisse, a Harvard professor of Yiddish and author of "Jews and Power," deliver a passionate 40-minute lecture on why American Jews should stand up for that imperiled sliver of Mediterranean coast we have been fortunate enough, for almost 60 years now, to call Israel.

You can listen to the lecture here.

Wisse's talk was moving, and I had wanted to read her book, so I picked a copy up on the way out and worked through it on my flight back. (It's 184 pages and a very quick read.) In "Jews and Power," Wisse makes a point that she repeated during her speech -- that Arab countries, not Israel, are responsible for the Palestinian refugee crisis. From pages 140-141:

Palestinian Arabs are to be pitied with the tens of millions of refugees of the twentieth century. But Palestinians are doubly unfortunate because theirs is the only such displacement that is prolonged for political advantage. Originally, the Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948 were a relatively small and easily assimilable group, moving often no more than several miles among people who spoke their language and shared their religion and culture. Leaving aside the refugees of the two world wars, as well as Jews driven from Arab lands in numbers equal to the Arabs who fled from Israel, the two massive conflicts that framed Israel's War of Independence -- India's war over the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and the Korean War of 1950-53 -- produced more than 20 million refugees between them, yet most of those refugees were reabsorbed within a generation. Only in the Arab case did a coalition of rulers, with millions of square miles and great wealth at their disposal, foster and cultivate the state of emergency as a means of sustaining a casus belli.

Look no further for an example of such politicking than the life and times of Yasser Arafat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and common crook. The consequences, of course, have been significant and seemingly incessant.

Less than a week after I returned, I came across this article, and this image, in the New York Times:

GAZA — In the Katib Wilayat mosque one recent Friday, the imam was discussing the wiliness of the Jew.

“Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.”

At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.

Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.

Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Hardly an eye-opener -- in fact, a bit surprising in its gee-whiz tone -- this article reiterated what we already know. But it made me think of Ruth Wisse, whose latest book, without question controversial with the Jewish left, begins its final chapter (page 173) by discussing the contradictions of Jewish power:

Just as no Jewish initiative could have solved the German problem that culminated in Nazism, no Israeli initiative could correct "what went wrong" in Arab societies. Jews could only hope to enhance their own security through the avoidance of fatal mistakes and nudge the Arab world to greater maturity by making it clear that Israel was in the region to stay.

The second -- internal -- problem that could not be alleviated by the creation of Israel alone was the relation of Jews to political power. Zionist thinkers had expected sovereignty to result in political normalization without being able to anticipate the role that a tiny Jewish state might play in the international struggle for power. In trying to withstand the Arab assualt, Israelis, Jews, and concerned third parties tripped again and again over the same issue of power that had impeded the development of Jewish political history to begin with. If historians once mistook the absence of sovereignty to mean that Jews stood outside politics, modern students of the problem too often assumed that the resumption of sovereignty guaranteed political parity between Israel and the nations. Jews were said to have reversed their political fortunes once they began governing themselves and an Arab minority in a country of their own. Equating "statehood" with "power," the new experts confused Zionism's potential with its achievement, as if the acquired option of Jewish self-defense had erased Arab advantages in numbers, resources, and land.

Not faces but an 'unrecognizable pulp'

I came across this 7-year-old Time article this week while reporting along feature on StandWithUs, which will run Thursday, and, man, does this story make me feel sick to my stomach. Kobi Mandel and Yosef Ishran were but two of the more than 1,000 Israelis -- and almost 5,000 Palestinians -- killed during the Second Intifada, but they died in such a brutal, carnal manner.

Miro Cohen stayed up all night searching for two missing 14-year-olds. The sheep farmer who doubles as security officer for the small West Bank settlement of Tekoa figured Yossi Ishran and Kobi Mendel had just gotten lost as they hiked through the desert. Then, at 5:30 a.m., his walkie-talkie crackled with terrible news: the boys had been found dead. "Were they shot or stabbed?" Cohen asked. The caller hesitated. "It's worse than that," he said. "Come and see, Miro."

In the thin dawn light, Cohen raced to a nearby cave once home to an old hermit. Inside, the sight was indescribable. A rock the size of a computer rested on Kobi's smashed skull. Both bodies were covered with stones. Blood smeared the walls, and the dirt floor was muddy with it. When the searchers rolled the rocks away, they didn't see faces but unrecognizable pulp. "I had only one thought," Cohen says, standing in the cave two days later. "To get my hands on the killers."

Christians approaching zero in PA-run parts of Holy Land

The ever-dwindling Christian communities living in Palestinian-run territories in the West Bank and Gaza are likely to dissipate completely within the next 15 years as a result of increasing Muslim persecution and maltreatment, an Israeli scholar said Monday.

"The systematic persecution of Christian Arabs living in Palestinian areas is being met with nearly total silence by the international community, human rights activists, the media and NGOs," said Justus Reid Weiner, an international human rights lawyer in an address at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, where he serves as a scholar in residence.

He cited Muslim harassment and persecution as the main cause of the "acute human rights crisis" facing Christian Arabs, and predicted that unless governments or institutions step in to remedy the situation - such as with job opportunities - there will be no more Christian communities living in the Palestinians territories within 15 years, with only a few Western Christians and top clergymen left in the area.

"Christian leaders are being forced to abandon their followers to the forces of radical Islam," Weiner said.

The rest of the article from the Jerusalem Post is here. A Christian exodus has been a constant fear in not just Gaza and the West Bank but also Lebanon. (This to go with the fact that the Jordan River has become too toxic for baptisms.) Two years ago, the LA Times reported that Christians were becoming a scarce site in of Bethlehem, the West Bank town with a special meaning to Christians this Advent.

(Mayor Hanna) Nasser, 68, who is Catholic and displays a photograph of himself shaking hands with Pope John Paul II, gestured toward the church and considered a gloomy future for Palestinian Christians, most of whom are Greek Orthodox. "I'm afraid we'll come and see nothing but stones here -- the stones of the churches, but no people," he said.

'Hook-nosed, bloodstained Jews out to trick peaceful Arabs at Annapolis summit'

This is from my colleague Dennis Wilen, who runs JewishJournal.com and the blog Funny, you don't look bloggish:

OK, Olmert says it's no big deal the Saudis and their pals won't 'shake hands' with the Jews at the conference; at least they won't be trotting out shopworn stereotypes about conniving Jews hoodwinking the Arab world and the international community, right?

Or will they?

Yes they will, according to this batch of editorial cartoons from Mideast newspapers compiled by the Anti-Defamation League.

There was obviously far more from today's peace conference. Start here with the Jerusalem Post's home page. The liberal daily Haaretz also has wall-to-wall coverage, and American papers like the Washington Post and NY Times did their thing.

Now, let's see where this goes ...

Peace: Now or never?

Regarding the Annapolis peace summit, which will be held tomorrow, Time magazine reports:

When Middle East adversaries meet in Annapolis this week, will it be a peace conference, or rather a conference that ends all peace? Nearly 60 years since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that may well be the stark choice that awaits the conference's participants.

Doomsday predictions, of course, have long been a staple of Middle East commentary. Every negotiation seems to be the "last chance" for peace. Every crisis seems to threaten the outbreak of a major war, if not the great apocalypse. But there's reason to pay attention to the warnings this time. The 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel planted the seed for resolving the core of the conflict: the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arab territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. But if the Annapolis conference fails to provide urgently needed nourishment, the two-state solution and its hope of peace may die forever.

Saving Israel from Annapolis

Robert Avrech at Seraphic Secret has posted an impassioned piece about saving Israel from the Israeli prime minister and the peace summit he will attend with Arab leaders Monday.

Annapolis is coming up tomorrow and a stew of Judenrein Arab countries are going to show up in order to pressure Israel to, well, cease to exist.

Yep, let's face it, that is the end game.

Look, our friends the Saudis won't even shake hands with Jews. Now that's how to negotiate. And the left are so desperate for petro-approval they are willing to hand over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, expel something like 85,000 Jews from their homes, hey Gaza Redux, that worked out really well, and offer citizenship to like a zillion jihadist Arabs—all for a handshake, and some vague promises of recognition.

Gee, what a bargain.

If I was offered a deal like that in Hollywood—I'd fire my agent.

No handshake to the infidel Jooz. Not surprising from a country—well not really a country—more like a massively corrupt family corporation that officially does not allow Jews to set foot on its soil, and soaks its people in the most ghastly Jew-hatred imaginable.

But the Saudis have a peace plan.

These people who condemn a gang rape victim to be whipped .

Yes, we're supposed to listen to their geo-political wisdom.

Who else is coming to Annapolis?

Algeria.

Oh goody. Now there's a model of state craft. Not a Jew left in Algeria. You know why? Because after the blood-soaked Algerian revolution against France the Muslims murdered or expelled the entire ancient Algerian Jewish community. Any reparations ever paid for property and money stolen?

You have to be kidding.

Who else is coming to Annapolis?

He goes on to discuss Yemen, Syria and Sudan, and suggests that PM Ehud Olmert "can be counted on to give away everything but a strategic coffee shop or two in Tel Aviv."

Regardless of what Olmert offers, it's unlikely he or his equally unpopular Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, can implement anything.

Hollywood's Arab typecast: terrorist

Welcome to the post-9/11 minstrel show. The LA Times today dedicates its Column One to the plight of Arab and Arab-American actors looking for work in Hollywood. It's an interesting chapter in the old tale of typecasting. Sayed Badreya's saga embodies the issue well:

The burly, bearded Egyptian-born actor has played an array of menacing characters in a 20-year Hollywood career. He'll appear with Robert Downey Jr. in next year's "Iron Man" as an Arab arms dealer who kidnaps the hero. In 2003, he and Issawi made a short film called "T for Terrorist" in which an Arab actor, frustrated with endless terrorist roles, takes over a movie set at gunpoint.

Badreya recalls when he first arrived in Hollywood in 1986. "I couldn't work. I was too handsome," he laughs. "So I put on some weight and grew a beard, and suddenly I was working every day and playing the angry Arab."

Some of the younger Arab newcomers to Hollywood look down on Badreya's career as one spent reinforcing stereotypes. Badreya, however, makes no apologies.

"I never played something that didn't happen. We hijack airplanes, I play a hijacker," he said. "I do my work. I'm not going to sit and cry about it."

I did, however, find a remark in the lede to be odd. See if you can find it:

"What kind of a name is that?" the voice coach asked at the end of the lesson. The name on the check he'd been handed by his student didn't match the young actor's European-sounding stage name.

The actor hesitated. He was fairly new in town and leery of any missteps. "Umm, my grandfather was Middle Eastern," he said.

The actor said the room temperature seemed to drop. The teacher took him aside and spoke urgently. "Look," the teacher said, "I see big things for you, but if you tell people this, you will not work in this town." Recently, the actor landed a prominent role in a big-studio film. But he still feels compelled to keep his heritage under wraps. Only his closest friends know his ethnicity; he tells others that his parents are Italian, French, anything but the truth.

"I'm really proud of who I am, but I'm constantly having to lie about it," said the actor, who didn't want to reveal his name for fear that he would be relegated to playing terrorists, the new Arab acting ghetto.

Did he really say his grandfather was Middle Eastern? Not that his grandparents were from the Middle East -- one from Iraq and the other from Lebanon -- but that granddad was from somewhere between the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea. Well, if you go back far enough, we're all from the Middle East; I wonder if the actor said what country his father was from, but asked the reporter to change it as a condition for quoting him. Or maybe he really said "the Middle East," which would further drive home the point that this actor is really aware of Hollywood's supposed sensitivities to all-things Arab.

(A year ago, NPR broadcasted a segment titled "Filmmakers Shatter Arab Stereotypes in Hollywood," focusing on Badreya, who had just finished shooting AmericanEast, a film that has yet to be picked up.)

* Updated: Anti-Jihadist at Pedestrian Infidel emails:

Hollywood can't type cast Arab Muslims as terrorists enough. Besides, it's overhyped as a 'problem'.

I think Hollywood's more insidious type casting is always making the US Government (or some 'disgruntled' or 'rogue' employee/agent[s]) out to be the real bad guys. Syriana, Diehard 4, Xmen 2, the list of movies that exemplifies this bad guy paradigm goes on and on. Even the recent movie on Daniel Pearl, a story about the horrific true-to-life torture and barbaric beheading murder of an American reporter in Pakistan became just another pathetic cinematic exercise in asking typically pointless questions. Questions like "why do they hate us so much?" If you have to ask or wonder about such things, six years after 9-11, I sincerely suggest that you go and get your head examined. Common sense is in sadly short supply.