Nakba

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Demonstration on "Nakba Day", Hebron , West Bank , 2010

As Nakba ( Arabic النكبة, DMG an-Nakba , Hebrew הקטסטרופה), German catastrophe or misfortune , is used in Arabic to describe the flight and expulsion of around 700,000 Arab Palestinians from the former British mandate of Palestine , which in part gained its independence on May 14, 1948 as the State of Israel .

background

The UN partition plan for Palestine provided for the establishment of an Arab and a Jewish state, which should make up more than half of the mandate area. The exodus of the Arab population began during the Arab-Jewish civil war that followed the adoption of the UN partition plan in November 1947. It continued in the Arab-Israeli war that began immediately after the independence of the State of Israel from the Arab states . From the Israeli point of view, which most western states have joined, the wars are referred to as the "Israeli War of Independence". The reasons that led to the flight of the Arab population from the former British Mandate Palestine are controversial. The Jewish Nakba refers to the flight and expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab and Islamic countries since the Israeli War of Independence from 1948 until today.

Events

Palestinians commemorate the Nakba annually on May 15, the day after the Israeli declaration of independence, as "Day of the Nakba", while in Israel and in many Jewish communities of the Diaspora the foundation of Israel according to the Jewish calendar as " Yom haAtzma'ut ", as National Day of Israel, is celebrated.

term

The expression Nakba was coined by the Arab nationalist Constantin Zureik , a history professor at the American University of Beirut . He first used it in his 1948 book Maʿnā an-Nakba , German: the meaning of misfortune . In the context of the flight and expulsion of the Palestinians, the term can be identified for the first time in July 1948 on an Arabic-language leaflet from the Hagana to Arab residents of Tirat Haifa. Together with Naji al-Alis Hanzala (the barefoot child who is always drawn from behind) and the symbolic key to the house in their old homeland, which many Palestinian refugees still keep, the Nakba is perhaps the most important symbol of the Palestinian discourse .

According to 2010 UNRWA data , Palestinian refugees and their descendants make up around 40% of the total population of the Israeli-occupied territories and 2/3 of Gaza's residents . Among the Palestinians , they are to a greater extent affected by poverty, unemployment and insecurity in food supplies.

The "Day of the Nakba" (May 15) has a special place in the Palestinian calendar as a day of remembrance. With it, the history of Palestine should be thematized and visualized and the historical events should be remembered.

Based on the Nakba, the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries , mostly to Israel, is sometimes referred to as the Jewish Nakba .

Nakba day

In 2004, the President of the Palestinian Territories, Yasser Arafat , introduced May 15 as Nakba Day, which is celebrated in many countries. There are often violent protests in the autonomous regions.

Zochrot

In 2002, an association called "Zochrot", German remembering in the female form, was founded in Israel, which aims to bring the problem of the Nakba closer to the Jewish population of Israel. To this end, the association publishes a magazine with the title “Sedek” (German: Riss), organizes tours to former Palestinian villages and city quarters and provides information with events on the subject of the Nakba. He also distributes teaching material to interested teachers and university lecturers via the Nakba.

Israeli Legislation

In 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sports banned the use of the word nakba in Arabic-language school books. Minister Gideon Saar said there was no reason to portray the founding of the State of Israel as a disaster in official teaching programs. Right-wing Israelis are a thorn in the side of Arab Israelis as they commemorate Nakba Day on Israel's Independence Day. In March 2011, the Knesset therefore passed a controversial law that, although not forbidding commemoration, penalizes those institutions that hold or support such commemorations. The Nakba Act, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2012 , allows the Treasury Department to cut government subsidies for such institutions. Those who do not want to recognize Israel as a Jewish state are also affected.

classification

In the Jewish Virtual Library , the exodus of the Palestinian population is presented as largely voluntary: They fled the war or because they were asked to do so by the Arab leaders. Only a small minority were affected by displacement .

By contrast, some scholars, including the New Israeli Historians Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe , portray the Nakba as ethnic cleansing . Several journalists also hold this view. The Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas rejects this classification, since in view of the considerable proportion of Arabs in the Israeli population there can be no question of a "purge"; those who left fled the war; In addition, the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine provided for ethnically separated settlement areas.

British sociologist Martin Shaw and the website of the Center for Constitutional Rights , an American human rights organization , describe the Nakba as genocide . An equation with the Holocaust can often be found in German right-wing extremism . The Israeli historian Omer Bartov considers the description of the Nakba as genocide to be inadmissible: On the one hand, this extends the term genocide to such an extent that it becomes meaningless; rather, it is important to differentiate between genocide and ethnic cleansing . On the other hand, the thesis that the State of Israel was founded in 1948 with genocide is not motivated by historical evidence, but by the "urge to delegitimize the very existence of the State of Israel ."

literature

  • Benny Morris : The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-00967-7 .
  • Ilan Pappe : The ethnic cleansing of Palestine , translated from the English by Ulrike Bischoff. Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2007, 6th edition February 2009, ISBN 978-3-86150-791-8 .
  • Marlène Schnieper: Nakba - the open wound. The displacement of the Palestinians in 1948 and the consequences. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-85869-444-7 .

Movies

Web links

Commons : Nakba  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Warren Hoge: Group seeks justice for 'forgotten' Jews. In: The New York Times . November 5, 2007, accessed December 3, 2012 .
  2. ^ Eitan Bronstein Aparicio: No future without memory. The Nakba in Hebrew. In: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Israel Office. September 14, 2016, accessed March 4, 2017 (Historical summary of the Nakba discourse within Israeli society by a Zochrot co-founder).
  3. ↑ Nadine Picadou: The Historiography of the 1948 Wars . In: Jacques Semelin (Ed.): Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence . 2008, p. 2-14 .
  4. ^ UN agency for Palestinian refugees seeks $ 323 million for 2010. UN News Center, accessed June 27, 2010 .
  5. ↑ Karin Wenger: An-Nakba - the unforgotten catastrophe of the Palestinians. NZZ Online , June 5, 2009, accessed March 5, 2017 .
  6. ^ Anneliese Fikentscher, Andreas Neumann: An attempt by Israel to erase the memory of the Palestinians. Nakba commemoration soon to be punishable? Neue Rheinische Zeitung , June 5, 2009, accessed on March 5, 2017 .
  7. ^ Lyn Julius: Recognizing the Jewish 'Nakba'. Acknowledging the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries - written out of history - could be the key to Middle East peace , The Guardian , June 25, 2008.
  8. ↑ Nakba protests quieter than a year ago. In: Israelnetz .de. May 15, 2019, accessed May 18, 2019 .
  9. ↑ FAZ of August 24, 2010, page 29
  10. ↑ "One cannot forbid commemoration". Interview with Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli organization Zochrot (Remember) , Neues Deutschland . November 4, 2010. 
  11. ↑ Ian Black: 1948 no catastrophe says Israel, as term nakba banned from Arab children's textbooks , The Guardian , July 22, 2009, accessed June 25, 2017.
  12. ↑ Minister tells Israeli university to rethink ceremony marking Palestinian Nakba , Ha-Aretz on May 13, 2012
  13. ↑ Mitchell Bard: Allegations and Facts: The Refugees . jewishvirtuallibrary.org, accessed July 2, 2017.
  14. ↑ Ari Shavit: Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris , logosjournal.com (2004), accessed June 25, 2017; Ilan Pappe : The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Haffmans & Tolkemitt, Berlin 2014; Yasmeen Abu-Laban: The "Israelization" of social sorting and the "Palestinianization" of the racial contract. Reframing Israel / Palestine and the war on terror. In: same, Elia Zureik and David Lyon: Surveillance and Control in Israel / Palestine. Population, Territory and Power. Routledge, New York 2011, pp. 281 ff .; Petra Wild: Apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Zionist settler colonialism in word and deed. Promedia, Vienna 2013, p. 17.
  15. ^ Ian Black: Memories and maps keep alive Palestinian hopes of return . The Guardian , October 26, 2010, accessed June 25, 2017; Marlène Schnieper: Nakba - the open wound. The displacement of the Palestinians in 1948 and the consequences. Rotpunktverlag, Zurich 2012; Gideon Levy: Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians, Or, Democratic Israel at Work . Haaretz.com , May 12, 2011, accessed July 2, 2017; so also the brochure Association Refugee Children in Lebanon eV (Ed.): Booklet accompanying the traveling exhibition “The Nakba - Flight and Expulsion of the Palestinians 1948” , p. 13.
  16. ↑ David Matas: Aftershock: Anti-zionism and Anti-semitism. Dundurn Press, Toronto 2005, pp. 55 f.
  17. ↑ Martin Shaw: Palestine and Genocide. An International Historical Perspective Revisited . In: Holy Land Studies 12, No. 1 (2013), pp. 1-7; The Genocide of the Palestinian People: An International Law and Human Rights Perspective , August 25, 2016. Center for Constitutional Rights website, accessed June 25, 2017.
  18. ↑ Fabian Virchow: Against civilism. International relations and the military in the political conceptions of the extreme right . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, p. 184 f.
  19. ↑ Martin Shaw and Omer Bartov: The question of genocide in Palestine, 1948. In: Journal of Genocide Research 12, No. 3-4 (2010), pp. 248, 252 and 258.