How to Read a Massacre in Palestine: Indigenous History as a Methodology of Liberation

Authors

  • Author

  • Rana Barakat

Keywords:

Massacres, Palestine, Settler Colonialism, Indigenous History, Violence

Abstract

This article is framed as a question about historical methodology that imagines another way of living with the stories of the past. By investigating two massacres in Palestine (Tantura and Kafr Qasem), the article presents an alternate reading of the past, both in terms of Palestinian voices and relationality with historical sources. By arguing from an understanding informed by Indigenous history as a decolonial praxis, this article relies on the voices and work of two women, Radwa Ashour and Samia Halaby, to map anew the stories of the past through the ongoing violence of the present. Their work forms the basis for engagement with the primary question: Can imagining Indigenous history, of which settler colonial violence is just one branch, be more than the victim’s desperate plea that settlers recognise a people’s humanity?

References

  1. Meena Alexander, “What Use Is Poetry?” World Literature Today (September 2013), accessed on 9/1/2022, at: https://bit.ly/34le3Lv
  2. Seth Anziska, “Sabra and Shatila: New Revelations,” New York Review of Books, 17/9/2018, accessed on 9/1/2022, at: https://bit.ly/34awItc
  3. In particular, see: Bayan Nuwayhiḍ al-Ḥut, Ṣabrā wa-Shātīlā: Aylūl 1982 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2004); Zakaria al-Shaikh, “Ṣabrā wa-Shātīlā ʿām 1982: Muqāwamat Majzara,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya , vol. 14, no. 1 (Fall 1984), pp. 57-90; Jean Genet, “Four hours in Shatila,” Journal of Palestine Studies , vol. 12, no. 3 (1983), pp. 3-22.
  4. This study distinguishes between the concepts of “narrative”to describe the modern and official narrative related to history and derived from colonial legacy, and the concept of “storytelling”to describe the methodology of authentic historical narrative derived from the accounts of the country’s inhabitants. Accordingly, the expression “storyteller”does not refer to the profession of entertainers (storytellers), but rather refers to the practice of storytelling as an intentional and systematic act of providing authentic testimony of the past, present, and future.
  5. The question of “Indigenous and Indigeneity”in Palestine is one that requires a great deal of attention and is complicated. I have written about this elsewhere, but for the purposes of this piece I use the term “Indigenous”as a mythological intervention in how we engage the past and present in the Palestinian context. This is a politics of positionality and how knowledge production is engaged and distinctly not identity politics within the prison of coloniality and European modernity. I attempt to cover this wide-ranging debate in my forthcoming book: Rana Barakat, Lifta and Resisting the Museumification of Palestine: Indigenous History of the Nakba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [forthcoming]).
  6. For literature on the war between 1947-1949, see: Walid Khalidi (ed.), All the Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992); Nur Masalah, The Expulsion of Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer”in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992). The following section will go through much of the literature on this Tantura debate, but it should be noted here that even Benny Morris, a staunch advocate of what he described as a necessity for the use of violence in expelling Palestinians in 1948, recorded some details of the Alexandroni Brigade’s (the unit of the Zionist army, the Haganah) work to empty the village on the night of 22-23 of May. See: Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 119-121.
  7. Samera Esmeir, “1948: Law, History, Memory,” Social Text , vol. 75, no. 21 (Summer 2003), p. 25.
  8. Ilan Pappe, “The Tantura Case in Israel: The Katz Research and Trial,” Journal of Palestine Studies , vol. 30, no. 3 (Spring 2001), p. 20.
  9. see: “‘Nakba Law’ – Amendment No. 40 to the Budgets Foundations Law,” Adalah (2011), accessed on 9/1/2022, at: https://bit.ly/3mUuSTX
  10. Benny Morris, “The Tantura ‘Massacre’ Affair,” The Jerusalem Report , 9/2/2004, accessed on 9/1/2022, at: https://bit.ly/33jIzEM
  11. Ilan Pappe, “Historical Truth, Modern Historiography, and Ethical Obligations: The Challenge of the Tantura Case,” Holy Land Studies , vol. 3, no. 2 (2004), p. 172.
  12. The list of Palestinian scholars in this vein is long. For a sample of them, see the work working throughout the last half of the twentieth century see: Nur Masalah, Saleh Abdul Jawad, Rosemay Sayigh, Bayan Nawahid al Hut, and Walid al Khalidi.
  13. See: Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya , vol. 11, no. 43 (Summer 2000).
  14. “Eyal Sivan,”accessed on 9/1/2022, at: https://bit.ly/3znNbG5
  15. A useful case to read, among many beyond the Katz affair, is the theatre production of The Admission by Motti Lemer, which in passing notes the land of Tantura as a site of Zionist violence in 1948, the play received critical attention and pushback, in particular, in the United States. See: Brett Abelman, “Ari Roth on The Admission at Theater J – Even in Good wars, Bad things Happen,” Dc Theatre Scene , 20/3/2014, accessed on 9/1/2022, at: https://bit.ly/3mWwxbt. This kind of work follows the line that discussing Palestinians in general and the violence of Zionist history need not negate the “righteousness”of the cause or the Israeli state. Doubling down on this kind of righteousness of Zionism even within a light discussion of violence of the state is a trope in Zionist literature, a pronounced version of this kind of Zionism can be seen in Ari Shavit’s work as well. See: Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (New York: Speigel & Grau, 2013).
  16. Ashour’s literary oeuvre includes several novels that deal with historical narratives including Sirāj and Specters (where she writes about the massacre in Deir Yassin of April 1948) and follow her own career from the time of her early engagement with African American literature, politics and her artistic intervention. See: Radwa Ashour, Fī al-Naqd al-Adabī: Ṣayyādū al-Thākira (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi, 2001); Ira Dworkin, “Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry , vol. 5, no. 1 (January 2018), pp. 1-19.
  17. Radwa Ashour, “Eyewitness, Scribe and Storyteller: My Experience as a Novelist,” The Massachusetts Review , vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring 2000), p. 88.
  18. Ashour, Fī al-Naqd al-Adabī , pp. 57-70.
  19. The novel was written in colloquial Palestinian Arabic (not modern standard Arabic). This is an important distinction that Ashour made as the words of Ruqayya were/are how conversations and memories occur over time, in the past and present, in Palestine and among Palestinians.
  20. Radwa Ashour, The Woman from Tantoura: A Novel of Palestine, Kay Heikkinen (trans.) (Cairo: American of University Press, 2014), p. 44.
  21. Ibid., pp. 47-48.
  22. Emile Habibi, Kafr Qāsim: al-Majzara-al Siyāsa (Haifa: Arabesque, 1976). See: Shira Robinson, “Local Struggle, National Struggle: Palestinian Responses to the Kafr Qasim Massacre and Its Aftermath, 1956–1966,” International Journal of Middle East Studies , vol. 35, no. 3, Special Issue: Commemorating the 1973 War (August 2003), pp. 393-416.
  23. Adel Manna, “Majzarat Kafr Qāsim,”in: al-Filasṭīniyūn fī Isrāʾīl: Qirāʾāt fī al-Tārīkh wa-l-Siyāsa wa-l-Mujtamaʿ , Nadim N. Rouhana & Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (eds.) (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel; Arab Center for Applied Research, 2011), p. 76.
  24. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 91.
  25. Joe Sacco’s oral archeology of the Khan Yunis massacre through the genre of the graphic novel Footnotes on Gaza is another exemplar of de- colonising Palestinian history. A graphic novel, here, is another way to tell an inexplicable story, that is, again, a story that holds unspeakable violence but is not defined by it. See: Joe Sacco. Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (New York: Macmillan, 2009).
  26. Robinson, “Local Struggle, National Struggle,”p. 399; Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
  27. Robinson, “Local Struggle, National Struggle,”pp. 399-400.
  28. Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel , Inea Bushnaq (trans.) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); Tamir Sorek, Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendars, Monuments and Martyrs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
  29. Samia Halaby, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre (New York: Schilt Publishing, 2016), p. 8.
  30. Samia Halaby, “Abed Abdi and the Liberation Art of Palestine,” Jadaliyya, 31/3/2013, accessed on 12/1/2022, at: https://bit.ly/3FmPlSh
  31. Halaby, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre , p. 39.
  32. Habiby; Mahmoud Darwish, “Dhāhib Ilā al-Jumla al-ʿArabiyya fī al-Khāmis ʿAshar min Ayyār,” Shuʿun Falastiniya , no. 22 (June 1973), pp. 11-
  33. Halaby, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre , p. 83.
  34. Halaby explained early in the book that Abu Naser (Ahmad Hamdan Amer) is “the”historian of Kafr Qasem whose unpublished work and research as well as her continued conversations with him were the main material that she relied on throughout her journey. This idea of local history is not uncommon in Palestine and further reveal the tension between official History and local historical material as another manifestation of the settler/ Native binary as local is in this sense OF Kafr Qasem and OF Palestine.
  35. Halaby, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre , p. 84.
  36. For example, see: bottom left “Death of a Shepard Boy Fathi, 2012; top right “The Shepard Uthman Easa, 2012; bottom and left right of “The Martyrdom of Saleh Amer, 2012; bottom center of “The Martyrdom of Rayyan,”2012.
  37. Halaby, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre , p. 11.
  38. Zen Read, “General’s Final Confession Links 1956 Massacre to Israel’s Secret Plan to Expel Arabs,” Haaretz , 13/10/2018, accessed on 9/1/2022, at: https://bit.ly/3zoiv7J
  39. Archives in this context is another and related as well as central issue, in the context of this article is both in gratitude for the groundbreaking work on archives (SEE) and an invitation to take that critique into a different direction.
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Vol. 5 No. 011 (2022): Issue 011

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