Touching Memories

Memory is often sparked by touch

“NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT” 

Tel Aviv, May 14. 1948

“In a subued atmosphere caused by Jewish military reverses in the last 48 hours, Mr. David Ben-Gurion, Premier of the new provisonal Government, to-day read the proclamation of independence and creation of the Jewish State of Israel”

– Manchester Guardian 1948

Throughout the Western World papers like the Manchester Guardian proclaimed the independence of the new state of Israel.  Many newspapers went on to describe the struggle that the Jews went through to achieve independence, how Judaism could now prosper in safety, and what the future government of Israel would look like. However, many of these newspapers conspicuously left out how the Arab populace living in the new boundaries of the new state felt. If mentioned at all, the Arabs were likened to spoil sports who didn’t recognize the historic right that the Jews had over the land.  When violence erupted over the right of Palestinians to stay in their homes, two immensely different perspectives into being, the Jewish perspective of natural and historic right to Israel, and the Palestinian perspective of a Jewish invasion.

Author Ghassan Kanafani describes in his story Returning to Haifa, a Palestinian husband and wife who return to their home of Haifa after fleeing the city twenty years before in 1948. Kanafani describes the violence that occurred between the resident Palestinians and the Jews, and how Palestinians were forced to flee the cities and homes that they had grown up in. Those who fled from their homes experienced a true sense of loss and nationality, as they were not allowed to come back to Israel for decades.  Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian-American professor writes in her article Return to Half-Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and Living History in Palestine “‘Awda means return. For diasporic Palestinians, the charged term evokes nostalgia for the homeland they were forced to flee in 1948 and a reversal o f the traumatic dispersion that sundered families, ruined livelihoods, and thrust Palestinians into humiliating refugee camps” (Abu-Lughod, 77). For many Palestinian refugees, the memories of their homes became memories of their nationalism, separated from their old houses and cities they became separated from the idea of Palestine itself “He inserted his memories o f Palestine directly into the present, into a living history. My father’s insertion o f memory into the historical present made possible a different knowledge and identification for his children as well”  (Abu-Lughod, 79).

For many of the Jews settling in Palestine, they felt that their people had earned the right to Israel, that their ancestors once owned the land and that they had a “right, to return”. Many of the newly arrived Jews had just escaped the Holocaust and knew little to nothing about the area they were settling in. Often occupying houses of recently fled Palestinians, some Jews only read about the violence that occurred to take those houses in newspapers “So the fighting he heard and read about every morning in the Palestine Post seemed to be taking place between men and ghosts, nothing more” (Kanafani, 167). It was not the houses of ghosts that the Jews now occupied however, but the homes of Palestinians who were forced to flee and now lived in foreign countries, dreaming of their old lives. Twenty years after the creation of Israel, many of those Palestinians would come back to visit their old homes.

In Returning to Haifa the two Palestinian protagonists have a set image of what their house looked like twenty years before they had to flee  “Suddenly, the house loomed up, the very house he had first lived in, then kept alive in his memory for so long. Here it was again, its front balcony bearing its coat of yellow paint” (Kanafani, 161). Overtime, many Palestinians’ memories of their homeland became a static image of the reality they had lived in. Finally being able to go back to their homes after twenty years changed the image that they had had in their mind for so long, and changed their sense of the Palestine that they had lived in “Then his gaze fell on Safiyya and he saw that she seemed confused. She was examining the corners of the room as though counting up the things that were missing. Kanafani, 163). Seeing and touching the homes that used to be their own, the reality of what had changed finally dawned on the Palestinians who returned to visit their old houses in Israel. Though the memories of Palestine had been forever altered by the presence of new inhabitants, some Palestinians were able to move on beyond the cold stillness of the past, to a future that still held the promise of change “I’m looking for the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories” (Kanafani, 186).