“When you have a birthday, you don’t go out and say, ‘Oh, you remember when you did that?’ You just say congratulations.” These are the words of a NYU Realize Israel board member. He is responding to anti-Zionists efforts to disrupt a public gathering celebrating Israel’s Independence Day on Washington Square Park on April 27, 2018.

“You just say congratulations.” Blue-starred flags are demanded to be swung in peace and compliance as if Israel exists in an innocuous parallel reality separated from yet another year of Palestinian dispossession. Roadblocks robbing freedom of movementand time. Farmers stripped of their ancestral lands. Countless killed, hundreds injured while protesting behind fences. These systemic forms of violence do not relax on festive occasions - Israeli or otherwise - but remain the daily rhythm of life in what remains of Palestine. The insistence to “Let us celebrate in peace!” echoes of a refusal to sincerely confront the events of the past and instead lends itself to perpetuate the historical misconceptions regarding the very inception of the Israeli state project. To expect anyone to treat Israel’s independence as an event in isolation, an incubator party, requires a violent denial of the very womb out of which Israel was born and the ground which Israel stands and continues to march forward on: The ruins of Palestine. It is in this context, Students for Justice in Palestine at NYUAD displayed the installation “Unerasing Towns of Erasure” on the East Plaza of the NYUAD campus.

As the video above illustrates, “Unerasing Towns of Erasure” is an installation that flags and names hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed or depopulated by Zionist paramilitary organisations in 1948. This took place during the process of and in order to make way for the establishment of the State of Israel. Israel was not created in a peaceful manner or through a legal process. The Partition Plan, or General Assembly Resolution 181, did not constitute legal authority for Israel’s creation. Moreover, the United Nations neither granted the Zionist leadership land nor did they create the State. Zionist militias took care of this. When the UN General Assembly passed the Partition Plan on November 29, 1947, it remained that: A plan, a recommendation. Regardless, after the passing of Resolution 181, Zionist militias took matters into their own hands. They translated and expanded the Plan into facts on the ground through different military operations. Zionist forces did not execute operations of seizure in an empty land. Palestinians lived on the land. There were cities, towns, villages. People. But in the process of creating Israel, much of this was obliterated in a systematic and planned fashion. Haifa, a bustling Arab city of 75,000 residents was reduced to a mere 3,500. In Dawaymeh about 145 children, women and men were killed. Over 450 went missing, of which 170 were women and children. By May 16, 1948 Zionist militias had killed or caused the fleeing of more than 400,000 Palestinian Arabs in the six months since the passing of the Partition Plan and the Zionist leaders unilateral decision to actualise it. By 1949, this number climbed to at least 700,000 people. These people left behind hundreds of homes. On the ruins of villages, new Jewish settlements were established and in many of the emptied villages, non-local populations settled. Several locations were renamed from Arabic to Hebrew.

“We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognise the Arab’s political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognise their spiritual proprietorship and their names,” Israel first Prime Minister Ben-Gurion wrote to Negev Names Committee following the seize of the Naqab - then renamed Negev - in 1949. A new state was on the map and new names, or names reviving ancient Hebrew, was needed. Partly to incorporate these places into the Hebrew lexicon, partly to efface the Palestinian or Arab, presence in and on the Land before 1948.

The international community’s reactions to the crimes of 1947-1949, the uprooting of an entire society, can at best be described as complicit silence. Israel was admitted to the UN in 1949 and gradually established diplomatic relations with states worldwide. The recognition of the State allowed for Israel to claim an irrevocable right to the land in which it had unilaterally and violently declared and imposed statehood. This recognition also transformed the Arabs inhabitants, who had fled their homes in what went on to become Israel, from inhabitants in their own land into stateless persons before they truly became refugees.

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nakba (in Arabic ‘the catastrophe’, the forced expulsion of Palestinians to create the state of Israel in 1948), the installation “Unerasing Towns of Erasure” attempts to bring to life the magnitude of the crime of 1948. ‘Unerasing’ the uprooted, Palestinian society is achieved through the labeling and mapping of said society’s destroyed and depopulated towns. ‘Unerasing’ is employed as a method to resist omission regarding Palestinian history and presence on the Land. Or, as Edward Said puts it, to assert that “we were there”.

While this installation might give the impression that erasure is an encapsulated story reserved for 1948, territorial dispossession carries on 70 years later. Since 1948, Israel continues to acquire more territory. Throughout the Negev or Naqab desert, Israel attempts to demolish and displace Palestinian citizens of Israel in order to make way for new, Jewish towns. Currently Currently 350 Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of Umm al-Hiran fight their battle against impending homelessness. These Palestinians do not have the luxury of time to wait for Zionists to finish another birthday celebration. When the NYU Realize board member claims that birthdays are inappropriate settings to ask ‘Oh, you remember when you did that?’, it assumes the wrongdoings of the celebrated are a matter of a distant, resolved past. But the Nakba is not a history of the past. Instead it remains an active process of erasure and encroachment persisting till this day.

Insisting to speak about the Nakba is therefore pivotal in understanding how the articulation of Zionism in the past, as well as now, leaves little to no room or consideration for the indigenous Palestinian population. In 2011, 63 years after Israel unilaterally declared its independence, rather than moving towards expanding the conversations about the Nakba, the Israeli parliament legislated against its commemoration. This law permits the Finance Minister to revoke state funding from any institution that marks “Israel’s Independence Day or the day on which the state was established as a day of mourning.” The installation “Unerasing Towns of Erasure” seeks to participate in a larger web of efforts by Palestinian and non-Palestinian advocates to push for greater recognition of the Nakba. This serves as resistance to the Israeli government’s continued efforts to ignore the Nakba and its ramifications. After all, to establish any viable future solution, it is important to know and acknowledge the histories of how Israel became a state and Palestinians in turn were dispossessed. Until then, how can “you just say congratulations”?

Further readings:

From Palestine to Israel by Arielle Azoulay

Before their Diaspora by Walid Khalidi

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé