Not a day goes by when I don't think about their tragedy. How can I not? When I walk around the beautiful Jerusalem neighborhood I've lived in half my life, their houses gaze at me. When I stroll through Jaffa's alleyways, their absence strikes me. When I hike in the Judean Hills, the ruins of their villages won't let go of me. The vanishing fig trees, the wilting prickly pear cactuses, the debris.
The Palestinians were here and the Palestinians are no longer here, and their tragedy is an inseparable part of me. The Nakba is flesh of my country's flesh.
You don't have to be an anti-Zionist to remember the Nakba. Moshe Dayan remembered, poet Natan Alterman remembered, MK Eliyahu Meridor remembered, and so did storied editor Azriel Carlebach. The people who really grew from this land cannot forget that it conceived twin nations. The people who really live this country know that at the moment of birth one twin defeated the other and pushed him aside. The twin who was pushed out of the country was the one who left behind Talbieh's beautiful stone houses, Jaffa's ancient alleyways and the villages' rubble. The fig trees, the prickly pears, the ruins. A civilization that had been here and is no longer. A nation that went into exile.
But Nakba Day is aggressive. Had the Palestinians wished to commemorate the humanitarian tragedy that befell them in 1948, they would have chosen the Deir Yassin massacre (April 9 ). Had the Palestinians wished to mark the pain of going into exile, they would have chosen the massive eviction from Lod (July 13 ). But the Palestinians decided that Nakba Day would be on the first full day of Israel's existence as a state (May 15 ).
By so doing, they declared that what they have in mind is not their villages but our state. What they are mourning is not their catastrophe but the revival of our sovereignty. When the Palestinians decided that their memorial day will occur on a day symbolizing our independence, they created a headlong collision between the two peoples' national ethos.
Official Israel is trying to deny the Palestinian tragedy. The facts are known but suppressed. No, what happened wasn't our fault. No, it didn't really happen. And if we only instruct Tel Aviv University to ignore Sheikh Munis, Sheikh Munis will disappear.
But political Palestine is doing something even worse. It is not commemorating the past but using it to strike Israel and disintegrate it. It is turning the (Palestinians' ) right of return into the right to destroy (Israel ). It is raising Sheikh Munis' memory to deny Ramat Aviv of its future.
This is a difficult story. When all is said and done, there will be no peace here unless we recognize their tragedy. But we cannot recognize their tragedy as long as they're using it to bring tragedy upon us. As a state and a nation, we cannot remember the villages as long as they seek to restore the villages and push us aside.
The Palestinians' inability to let Sheikh Munis go prevented peace in 1993, 2000 and 2008. The Palestinians' inability to let go of Sheikh Munis is now preventing the land's partition, perpetuating the occupation and pushing us all to an abyss.
It so happens that I'm a son of this land according to the Palestinian National Covenant, too. My forefathers lived in the Galilee long before large numbers of Arabs migrated to the Land of Israel and became Palestinians. But the story of the Old Yishuv - the Jewish community that lived in the Land of Israel before the Zionist immigration - is unusual and atypical. The real Israeli story is the one of the Jews' disaster in the West and in the Arab states, and Israel's desperate need of both these diasporas.
When the Palestinians finally recognize the grand Jewish narrative and the grand Jewish catastrophe, we too can recognize their narrative and their catastrophe. When our twin brother recognizes that we're here and we have a right to be here, we can share the pain of the one who was here and has gone away, never to return.
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