Heading Toward a Second Nakba
October 1, 2023
If you read only one book about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, I’d recommend it be Nathan Thrall’s, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. David Shulman, whose books and regular articles in The New York Review of Books set a very high standard for morally charged, excruciatingly detailed, and hauntingly poignant testimony on the occupation, writes in his NYRB review of Thrall’s book, “I know of no other writing on Israel and Palestine that reaches this depth of perception and understanding.”
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama dissects and amplifies a 2012 traffic accident in the West Bank. A large tractor-trailer driven by an unqualified Palestinian driver collided with a bus carrying Palestinian kindergartners, killing six children and one teacher. One of the children was Milad, Abed Salama’s five-year-old son. Thrall demonstrates that the deaths of Milad and his classmates and teacher were not simply an unfortunate accident, but an event structured by the mechanisms of occupation that epitomizes the daily violence Israel inflicts on Palestinians. Shulman writes, “the central point of Thrall’s narrative is that this disaster, like today’s ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories in general, was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the occupation system in its quotidian forms. It is a regime of state terror whose raison d’être is the theft of Palestinian land and, whenever possible, the expulsion of its Palestinian owners.”
If you don’t have the time or the emotional fortitude to read an entire book’s worth of horror stories about the “regime of state terror” Israel has imposed on Palestinians, you can read the article-length version (though it’s a very long article) of Thrall’s story that appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2021. That is to say, compelling as the book is, it is possible to have known the broad outlines of Abed Salama’s story and more than enough details to provoke outrage two-and-a-half years ago.
However, too many Israelis and Americans, especially among communal leaders, the political class, and the corporate media don’t know or don’t want to know. And many of those who do know have been shy about calling things by their proper names, fearing (for good reason) that they will be ostracized by the Jewish community, fired from their jobs, or ousted from office. This is very belatedly beginning to change, as words like apartheid and Jewish supremacy are gaining currency.
Israel’s unprecedented social movement of protest against the current government’s assault on the judiciary has opened more critical space than has ever previously existed to discuss the occupation, the limits of Israeli democracy, and related issues. However, the principal leaders of the demonstrations and the centrist politicians of the “opposition” with whom they are aligned seek to narrow and limit the agenda of the protest movement to a restoration of the status quo ante, perhaps with some reforms far short of an end to the occupation and equality for all who live under Israeli rule.
Meanwhile, the increasingly dire facts on the ground in the occupied territories have altered social realities in ways that make a return to the status quo ante unlikely, if not impossible. Messianist settlers supported by the Israeli government are accelerating their forced expulsions of Palestinians from their homes, especially in Area C of the West Bank. Some of the Messianists and their allies have said they hope this will bring about a second Nakba, a mass departure of Palestinians comparable to what happened in 1948.
Since the current Israeli government took office in December 2022, 1,100 Palestinians have been displaced from herding communities. The inhabitants of four communities between Ramallah and Jericho have entirely abandoned their homes. You can read David Shulman’s photo essay on Ein Rashash, a community in that region whose existence is hanging by a thread, here (thank you to David Lewis for bringing this to my attention).
Yet, it would be a mistake to attribute this ongoing forced displacement solely or primarily to the policies and actions of the current government and its violent supporters. In 2022, under the Bennett-Lapid “government of change,” 1,031 Palestinians were forcibly displaced. In both 2020 and 2021 the annual number exceeded 1,000. Thus, forced expulsion of Palestinians at an escalated level has been a constant process under the last four Israeli governments – totaling over 4,000 in four years.
Most of those displaced Palestinians will not return to their homes regardless of the composition of the next Israeli government. Equally importantly, a society that has become accustomed to serial ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (1948, 1967, and the current creeping version) will require fundamental restructuring and massive re-education to find its moral compass. A change of government will not restore the status quo ante. In any case, that is hardly desirable.
Full text of David Shulman’s review of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan Books, 255 pp., $29.99) in New York Review of Books, Oct. 19, 2023