“We Know Well, but All the Same . . . ”: Factual Truths, Historical Narratives, and the Work of Disavowal

Abstract

In 1984, Edward Said argued that Palestinians had not yet gained “permission to narrate,” that is, a Palestinian national narrative of exile and colonization remained unintelligible in the Euro-American world. Forty years hence, much has changed. And yet, this essay asks, with what political consequences? What if the epistemological-qua-political ground has changed such that this “permission to narrate” turns out to be far less consequential than Said once believed? Tracing a shift in Israeli historical scholarship, and among the Israeli public, vis-à-vis the expulsion of Palestinians during the war of 1948, this essay queries a long-standing anti- and post-colonial commitment to the political salience of counter-histories, of revisiting the archive. Other forms of (epistemological) power have emerged and they do not require the kinds of ideological closures (denial, official or unofficial censorship) that were central to Said’s analysis. Israeli settler-nationhood no longer depends on the suppression of the historical trace, the state secret—on denial. It can just as easily operate through the embrace of a far more brazen and explicit seizure of power: I know very well, but nevertheless.

In 1984, two years after Israel’s brutal and widely televised invasion of Lebanon that culminated in a massacre of as many as 3,500 Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, Edward Said asked how it was that “the premises on which Western support for Israel is based are still maintained, even though the reality, the facts, cannot possibly bear these premises out.” Israel’s narrative about the Palestinian as terrorist, its wars of self-defense, and its military commitment to a “purity of arms,” survived that war to retain a strong hold over American public conversations and foreign policy. More fundamentally, Said wrote, the very existence of the Palestinians as a people, their “present day actuality—which stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement from Palestine”—remained unrecognized, unspeakable even, in much of the West, and especially in the United States. Despite “facts” that one might presume “speak for themselves,” the Palestinians had not yet gained “permission to narrate” (Said, “Permission”).

Said’s reading of the struggle to authorize “the Palestinian communal narrative” continues to resonate. In much contemporary public discourse, the Palestinian remains the terrorist—now cast most centrally in the figure of Hamas; Israel still acts always in self-defense; the Israel Defense Forces aspire to a purity of arms, even if they cannot always realize that purity given the tactics of their enemies. As Palestinians and their supporters assert their own historical narratives—that is, as they name and narrate “the Nakba” as the foundational event in a story of exile and as the ongoing process of dispossession built into the very structure and raison d’être of the Israeli state—they are charged with anti-Semitism, an accusation that seems to be on steroids today, especially but not exclusively in the United States.

Nevertheless, it is also the case that much has changed over the past forty years. There is far more space for a Palestinian anti-colonial narrative in the Euro-American world. Perhaps better named a counternarrative, it was on display in the US Congress in May 2021 when representatives stood on the House floor and condemned the Israeli assault on Gaza, the attack on Palestinians at the Haram al-Sharif compound, and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah (Rod). US activists and some trade unions came out in support of Palestinians. Even the New York Times published the photographs and names of every child killed during the May 2021 war: sixty-seven in Gaza and two in Israel. Nearly all of the named children were Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes. The Black Lives Matter call #SayHisName echoes through that editorial choice (El-Naggar, Rasgon, and Boshnaq). Political “progress” is evident, as many a fellow academic and activist insists. And yet, I remain skeptical.

Does—will—this counternarrative have political force? What if the epistemological-qua-political ground is shifting beneath our feet such that the “permission to narrate” might turn out to be far less consequential than Said once believed? Within the context of a particular (perhaps, an especially pernicious) configuration of epistemology (of knowing and narrating) and politics today, I wonder: what if the Palestinian narrative can be “officially admitted to Israeli [and Euro-American] history” (Said, “Permission”) and rendered politically inconsequential at one and the same time?

In this essay, I sketch one contemporary configuration of knowledge and power, and I think about the ways in which it might displace commonsense assumptions about the relationships among knowledge, power, and politics that many (in particular, liberals and progressives) have long held. I begin by revisiting a postcolonial studies commitment to the archive and the rewriting of history, in order to rethink that commitment from the perspective of Palestine. The postcolonial historical project—recuperating silences and absences from the colonial archive, producing novel understandings of colonial regimes and their enduring legacies in the here and now—was never a purely academic pursuit. In Orientalism (1979), a (perhaps the) foundational text of postcolonial studies, Said was clear: real-world politics—not just “the politics of epistemology”—was at stake (Said, Orientalism; Abu El-Haj, “Edward Said”). And while on reconfigured, perhaps shakier, ground today, a commitment endures to the political virtue of historical counternarratives, critical accounts of colonial rule, and different histories of the present.

Vis-à-vis Palestine, the struggle over the “permission to narrate” lives on, and, as has been the case for decades, one central axis of that struggle is “the Nakba.” What really happened in 1948? Was the war Israel’s War of Independence or a colonial war to ethnically cleanse the land? Why did Palestinians “leave”? Who is responsible? Is the Nakba an event now firmly in the past, or is it an ongoing project of the Israeli state for which it needs to be held to account?¹ How might different answers to such questions speak to a Palestinian present and future? These queries—and scholarly projects—are inherently political acts. Historical counternarratives insist that the Israeli state’s official historiography erases its foundational and constitutive violence. And they insist that violence needs to be known; that history could have been otherwise, to borrow Theodor Adorno’s felicitous term; that Palestinian rights, however they are imagined, must be recognized and restored. Justice itself is on the table (even if only implicitly), and it is often imagined to rest on a critical, historical terrain.

In what follows, I approach this enduring belief in the critical, political virtue of history within the terms of what Joan Scott has called “the judgment of history.” There is, in Scott’s words, “an abiding faith (at least for the general public, if not for all professional historians), that ‘in the end’ we will be vindicated by History . . . [that] Truth will eventually be recognized, and the record compiled of those actions by historians” (79). That is, the judgment of history indexes a political unconscious (Jameson) that presumes the arc of history bends toward truth and liberation. As Said’s own essay implied, once Palestinians gain permission to narrate, so too might the political ground shift.

To be clear: I do not want to suggest that history has become an irrelevant ground on which political and ethical struggles are staged today; the fight over the Nakba—What happened? Did it happen? Was there such an “event” as the Nakba? What is happening now?—is far from dead, and, what’s more, convincing Israel and its allies of its veracity is not the only goal of efforts to document and engage the Nakba.² Nevertheless, I do want to argue that other forms of epistemological power are operating simultaneously, and they do not require the kinds of ideological closures (denial, official or unofficial censorship) that were central to Said’s analysis four decades ago. In short, given the now widely accepted aphorism that knowledge is power, in actual practice does, or how might “knowing”—in this instance, recuperating a historical counternarrative of Israel’s founding war—inform politics today? Beholden to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of “factual truths”—that is, facts that exist in the “domain of human affairs,” depend on common agreement, and are, thus, always political and decidedly precarious (Arendt, “Truth” 233–34)—I ask: How powerful are historical “facts” and/as narratives in contesting the present and future of Palestine?³ In considering such questions, I turn to the concept of disavowal to help make sense of one perhaps increasingly powerful configuration of the relationships among facts, historical narratives, and political regimes in the here and now. Knowledge of “what really happened/is happening” functions not as a potential disruption to the political present; on the contrary, one response seems to be—following the words of Octave Mannoni—“I know well, but all the same . . . ” (68).

Reading against the Archival Grain

Since the 1980s, postcolonial scholars in a variety of disciplines have insisted on the importance of revisiting “the colonial archive” and reading it against or along the archival grain (Stoler, Along). Recognizing the archive as a colonial institution, an act of power, scholars have combed archives in search of histories silenced, of colonized subjects’ own lives, subjectivities, perspectives, and struggles. In efforts to understand colonial rule against the grain of its own self-image and narration, scholars have rewritten and critiqued colonial histories and categories, revealed the struggles and the fissures within colonial societies, and recuperated voices and forms of life silenced, destroyed, or made unthinkable by colonial regimes (see, for example, Dirks; Comaroff and Comaroff; Chakrabarty).

What came to be known as the field of postcolonial studies was never solely about recovering a lost past, however. To return to Said’s foundational text, Orientalism produced not only a reading of the British and French empires of the prewar era. The book also traced the contours of US imperialism following the Second World War. Specifically, Said wrote about US imperial power and its role in shaping the contemporary Middle East. What’s more, The Question of Palestine (1980), a companion book to Orientalism published at nearly the same time, made his intellectual project’s political stakes eminently clear. He took the same analytic frame and force he used in Orientalism to the question of Zionism, its destruction of Palestine, and the practices of representation that made that destruction plausible, invisible, and unimportant in and for the West. Even if, as Ann Stoler has argued, his Palestine book was largely ignored in the postcolonial field, and even if the field developed around a critique of the earlier empires, by and large setting the question of contemporary American imperialism aside (Stoler, Duress 42), scholars influenced by Said’s Orientalism nevertheless insisted that the “post” in postcolonial studies did not imply that colonialism resides firmly in the past. Projects of historical recuperation are understood to be politically salient because we live among “imperial debris,” to borrow Stoler’s term. Most of the “urgent issues” we face have colonial “etiologies.” The intellectual project of postcolonial studies is (should be) to demonstrate the ways in which “colonial histories matter in the world today,” Stoler insists (3). Scholars in postcolonial studies have been writing “histories of the present” for decades now, and they began doing so at a moment during which the hegemony of white, male voices was being challenged in scholarship and in public, political life at one and the same time. That was the contemporary political configuration within which the field emerged. If in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s words, the “making of history in the final instance” is always about its “retrospective significance” (26), the retrospective significance of postcolonial studies, as was true of the birth of feminist and Black studies a decade or more earlier, was born of its time.

Perhaps not always as self-evident with respect to postcolonial studies as a general field, on the question of Palestine the contemporary political stakes are hard to disguise. The “promise” of the archive—the formal archives of the Israeli state; the documents, stories, and oral histories of villages destroyed, exile, and occupation that have been collected, analyzed, and narrated by Palestinian scholars in various fields—is that “in revealing and affirming truths” they might well be “transformative” (Hochberg viii). To return to Said’s frame, the struggle to permit “the Palestinian narrative” not just into “official Israeli history” but also into an authorized global one has long been a material part of the struggle for liberation itself. And at the center of that narrative is the exile of 1948, which demands “resolution” (Said, “Permission”). By rewriting the past, by reconstructing, if only in fragments, that which has been lost, destroyed, or made unintelligible (for example, the category of the Arab-Jew), scholars have recuperated possibilities and narrated counterhistories that contradict what has long been the authorized history of the Israeli state. In so doing, they have sought to open imaginative spaces that hold out the promise of a political otherwise for the present and the future.

The Ethics of Historical Memory

“Is it possible that the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but Justice?” the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has asked (117). In Yerushalmi’s question, we hear a torquing of a modern historical sensibility that first emerged in the nineteenth century when, as Carolyn Steedman has argued, “the past” emerged as a locus of personal and collective identity. The archive, she argues, is “emblematic of a modern way of being in the world . . . expressive of a more general fervor to know and to have a past” (75). History as fervor and pursuit was essential to (the birth of) nationalisms. As a project of settler-nationhood, Zionism was no exception.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries we live with a second iteration of that historical sensibility. Yerushalmi’s question becomes a command: Remember, you must remember, lest historical—that is, man-made—evil will reappear. By the second half of the twentieth century, remembering was framed as a vital ethical act in the Euro-American imaginary. It speaks a powerful post-Holocaust sensibility, a “moral demand” in relation to the prevention of future evils (Meister). As Joan Scott writes in her account of the Nuremberg trials that followed the Second World War, “U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, promised to document and punish the ‘sinister influence’ of National Socialism in a way that would make it at once unforgettable and unrepeatable” (xxi). Unforgettable, unrepeatable—that is what the “judgment of history” is supposed to be, what it is supposed to promise. Scott explains,

History, of course, is never simply a matter of “what happened.” As Scott writes, “I know that there is no closure for history, no single story that can be told” (x). To paraphrase Trouillot, history is made of sociohistorical processes and their narrativization. With regard to the question of Palestine, to return to Said’s words, history is a struggle over the “permission to narrate”—but pace Said, perhaps, it is also very much a struggle over facts, “factual truths” forever fragile that come into being only insofar as they are named, framed, voiced, and heard. In the context of Palestine, one—perhaps the—central sticking point in the “permission” or authority to narrate has been the factual truth of the founding “event” of the Israeli state: that is, the war of 1948.

The Nakba

In the decades that followed 1948, the Nakba was named and widely discussed among Palestinians. In living memory, people narrated what had happened to them, to their parents, their grandparents, to their towns and villages and lifeworlds, even as Israeli politicians, historians, and the public writ large continued to deny the stories they told. Moreover, Palestinian intellectuals framed Zionism as a project of colonial dispossession that necessarily resulted in the exile of 1948. In Fayez Sayegh’s words (writing in 1965), “The Zionist ideal of racial self-segregation demands, with equal imperativeness, the departure of all Jews from the lands of their ‘exile’ and the eviction of all non-Jews from the land of ‘Jewish destination,’ namely, Palestine. Both are essential conditions of ‘Zionist fulfillment’ and Jewish national redemption” (24).

The destruction of Palestine was first named “al-Nakba” in 1948, in Constantine Zurayk’s seminal essay “The Meaning of the Catastrophe.” As several historians have pointed out, the term “Nakba” was always a concept. In Zurayk’s hands, Nakba signaled “the real and imminent danger that Zionism poses”—that is, a catastrophic defeat of an order never before experienced in the Arab world. What’s more, to name the Nakba was also to call for “introspective self-criticism”—What in Arab society and politics had made such a loss possible?⁴ Al-Nakba was a rallying cry—one that described Israel’s founding as “an unprecedented catastrophe, aiming to ignite a sense of urgency and danger in the public” (Hardan 263). With roots in nineteenth century Ottoman society, the Arabic word—and its conception of political catastrophe—always contained within it “a promise for brighter horizons.” As Adrien Zakar points out, even for Edward Said, “naming the Nakba permitted people to narrate ‘a historical disaster turned into a hope for a better future.’”

While named and recounted among Palestinians, while documented and analyzed by Palestinian scholars, and while a rallying cry for a revolution to defeat Zionism, for decades after the war this other narrative—and the specific factual truths that stood at its core—were silenced and dismissed in Israel and throughout the Euro-American world. That, however, was to change. In 1978 the Israeli state began to declassify documents pertaining to Israel’s “War of Independence.” The “facts”—the authorized facts, that is—began to shift. Israeli historians gained access to previously unavailable documents (what had been “state secrets”), and a few began to rewrite the history of the Jewish state.

The ability of Israeli historians to access those archives marks the privilege of their “imperial citizenship” (Azoulay 163): Palestinians in exile, those rendered second-class citizens in the Israeli state, or living under military occupation, had no access to these state archives and their now declassified records. What’s more, the authority with which the Israeli “revisionist” historians’ writings were received, and not just in Israel, demonstrates the epistemological power of imperial privilege across the Euro-American world. In contrast to their Palestinian or Arab counterparts, Israeli scholars were presumed a priori to be “reliable witnesses” (Shapin). By virtue of their very being as Israelis/Jews, they were trustworthy sources on the history of Palestine. These Israeli historians had “discovered” the already known, albeit with the difference of their own imperial authority, the difference of the authority of the Israeli state archive. If they documented the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, perhaps it was, after all, true. To quote al-Hardan, “The nakbah became plausible in English only after it was articulated by the ‘new historians’ whose ‘new’ scholarship was merely articulating what Arab intellectuals, political leaders and activists had taken up since 1948” (622).

On the basis of newly available documentary evidence housed in Israeli state archives, historians such as Benny Morris (1989), Simha Flapan (1987), and Ilan Pappé (1994), among others, took apart key pillars of Zionist historical denial. Most cardinal to their challenge, they conceded that Palestinians were driven out, expelled by Zionist military forces during the war. There were disagreements among these retrospectively named “New Historians” and the Palestinian scholars who challenged them: Was the expulsion intentional, preplanned, essential to the establishment of the Jewish state? Was it, alternatively, an “event” that unfolded during the fog of war? Despite these not insignificant disagreements, the basic parameters of that “new” history became widely accepted in the Israeli academy, even in the Israeli public domain: during its “War of Independence,” Zionist brigades drove out most of the land’s Palestinian population. The founding of the Jewish state entailed (perhaps necessitated, even) the expulsion of the vast majority of the land’s Palestinian inhabitants.

By the mid-1980s, this so-called post-Zionist scholarship seemed to portend a promise. These “new” factual truths were out there, they were integrated into historical narratives that no longer denied that a collective, now named “Palestinian,” was expelled during the war of 1948. Archival evidence now in the hands of Israeli historians demonstrated what Palestinians had long spoken and written about. Post-Zionism was emerging as a term and a politics. The First Intifada was unfolding on the ground. There was cautious optimism in the air, at least early on, that a political solution (imagined at the time as a two-state solution) would be achieved. Might a Palestinian narrative become more widely intelligible, more authoritative? Might the facts on the ground actually change? Were we at a turning point in the Palestinian struggle against the settler state?⁵

Two decades hence: In the early years of the new millennium, teams sent by Israel’s Defense Ministry began to pore over documents in Israeli state archives, removing some from the public domain. Previously declassified documents were resealed into the vaults of state secrecy. “Hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a systematic effort to hide evidence of the Nakba,” Haaretz reported. Quite specifically, the main document on the basis of which Benny Morris published his seminal 1986 essay, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949,” was disappeared. A Haaretz reporter asked Yehiel Horev, former head of the Defense Ministry’s security department: “Benny Morris has already written about the document, so what’s the logic of keeping it hidden?” Horev responded, “I don’t remember the document you’re referring to, but if he quoted from it and the document itself is not there [where Morris says it is], then his facts aren’t strong. If he says, ‘Yes, I have the document,’ I can’t argue with that. But if he says it’s written there, that could be right and it could be wrong. . . . There’s a difference of day and night in terms of the validity of the evidence” (Shezaf). In the absence of the original document, Horev suggests, what could possibly count as proof? In this understanding, documents—and more specifically, documents held and preserved by Israeli state archives—are object(s) whose presence or absence make all the epistemological, and thereby, all the political difference. They transform matters of dispute into matters of fact.

Horev is not wrong: as official sources housed in the state archive, such documents have an epistemological authority not conferred on Palestinian accounts, memories, or for that matter, perhaps, even documents held in Palestinian archives, such as that of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut. Palestinians, in their very being, by definition, are unreliable witnesses to their own experiences of colonization and war, and this in a state and society in which the authority and reliability of witness testimony is sanctified when it comes to survivors of the Holocaust.⁶ But what if Horev is, nevertheless, also wrong? At this particular historical juncture, is he a little too scared of the power of (documented) factual truths?

State Secrets

In his book The Theater of Operations, Joseph Masco explores the reconfiguration of the US security state in an era defined by the threat of “terror.” The impact of an expansive state secrecy is one thread of his analysis. Following 9/11 and the anthrax attacks carried out about a month later, the federal government removed many previously declassified Cold War security documents from the public domain, now reclassified or, more often, categorized as “sensitive but unclassified” (Masco 113; Galison). What work does secrecy do, especially in a context in which many of these very same documents are already available on the web? Masco answers, “Removing something from public view endows it with social power but . . . the object of secrecy—its information—is often less important than the organizational approach to managing it.” Drawing on Jodi Dean’s work, Masco continues, “Recognition of state secrecy—and the accompanying conspiratorial subtext to everyday life that it engenders—functions today to block political participation and curtail the possibility of truly democratic endeavors” (135); “the national security state’s system of compartmentalized secrecy produces a world in which knowledge is always rendered suspect” (135; emphasis added). In short, What don’t I know?

Masco’s analysis is incisive. Vis-à-vis issues deemed matters of “security,” state secrecy is alive and well in Israel, and it is wielded as a weapon against democratic participation and political critique in much the same way that Masco describes in the US context. More specifically, secret evidence is used regularly in the prosecution of Palestinians before military tribunals and in Israeli courts. The power of these state secrets operates by asking the (Jewish) public to defer to the state in the name of what it does not know—what it cannot be allowed to know. Moreover, if one thinks of “state secrecy” as partaking in the same political grammar as censorship, it would be impossible not to argue that censoring the Nakba is also alive and well in Israel today. In March 2011, the Israeli Knesset passed the “Nakba Law,” a law with Israel’s Palestinian citizens in its sight line. Originally proposed by the radical right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel Our Home”) party, the law penalizes “commemorating Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning,”⁷ thereby penalizing a commemorative demonstration (“Nakba Day”) held annually on May 15 by Palestinian citizens of the state. Where Palestinian citizens are concerned, censorship—with the threat of financial and/or criminal penalties—is alive and well.

Nevertheless, I want to propose that relationships are more multifarious today among matters of fact, narrating, and knowing on the one hand, and matters of power and politics on the other. In the case of Israel, they are more multifarious depending on the intended public. Beyond Israel’s borders, denial and (official or unofficial) censorship remain powerful and pervasive tactics when the subject of address is a Euro-American public.⁸ But as tactics of rule, they may have become less relevant vis-à-vis a Jewish Israeli one. That is, might “democratic” state power also operate effectively without relying on classification and state secrecy, on denial and censorship? Put another way, for the Jewish public of the Israeli settler–“Jewish-democratic” state, the perceived urgency at the turn of the twenty-first century to reclassify documents pertaining to the war of 1948 might misread the actual risks of “knowing” and speaking the Nakba today. What if even in the face of “empirical” factual truths—that the war of 1948 was a foundational act of expulsion, that ethnic cleansing might even be an ongoing project today—the Nakba remains an “impossible history,” to borrow Trouillot’s term?

Disavowal

No material consequences of the Nakba’s ethical or political significance have followed from the work of the so-called New Historians and the circulation of their “new” historical narrative among the Israeli public. It would be hard to argue that Israeli Jews do not know that Palestinians were expelled in 1948, or even that the Nakba is any longer a public secret—that is, something widely known if not widely discussed in public, as was the case in the decades after the war. One sees this most blatantly in the words and political project of Israel’s radical right. In news footage of a riot in May 2021 by settlers in East Jerusalem, one told an Israeli journalist that expelling Arabs from Sheikh Jarrah is no different and no less necessary than what was done in 1948; “we” are acting in concert with what has been done before; and it needs to be done again. And lest such sentiments seem like outliers in the Israeli political mainstream, the Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) Party, now one of three most powerful parties in the new Israeli government, states in its platform that, in defense of the state’s exclusively Jewish character, “War on Israel’s enemies will be total and without negotiation, concession or compromise that have so far led only to more wars, bloodshed, rocket- and gunfire and grief. The establishment of sovereignty over all parts of Eretz Israel liberated in the Six-Day War and settlement of the enemies of Israel in the Arab countries that surround our small land” is the goal (Otzma Yehudit Party; emphasis added). Such speech cannot plausibly be described as embodying a “post-truth” or “alternative facts” sensibility, as so much of the critical conversation about the rise and power of the radical right today has been framed, in Israel and elsewhere. Nor is it captured by Hannah Arendt’s account of fascism in which, she wrote, there was “nothing but propaganda” (Arendt, Eichmann 60). Such speech embraces “the Nakba.” It embraces the practice of ethnic cleansing as necessary for the very establishment of the Jewish state and as an ongoing necessity for its future survival.

It would be far too facile, however, to hide behind the fascist and protofascist parties in thinking about the politics of the Nakba in Israeli society today—and for that matter, among the Zionist diaspora. By the early 2000s, Benny Morris had turned from a reluctant post-Zionist to a staunch defender of the war of 1948. All nations are founded in violence; Israel is no exception, he argued. It had to be done (Shavit, “Survival”). And in taking that position, he was far from alone.

Several years after Morris’s recantation a prominent, left-leaning Haaretz columnist published an account of Israel’s founding and contemporary political impasses. More than a historical account, the book, My Promised Land (2013), is also Ari Shavit’s “ethical” reckoning with the violence against Palestinians on which the state of Israel was built. (The book was published to wide acclaim in the United States and reviewed as a profound and sincere ethical exploration of the state of Israel by one of Israel’s most prominent, liberal columnists [for example, Wieseltier; Freedland].)

Lydda stands at the heart of Shavit’s book. Palestinians were expelled from the city during the war of 1948, but there is more. This Palestinian town endured a massacre. How does a self-fashioned liberal subject reconcile himself to that? In Shavit’s narrative, Lydda stands for a tragic inevitability not recognized by Jewish settlers until it was too late. “Lydda is our black box,” he writes. “In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. . . . If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be.” For a good fifty years, Zionism “succeeded in hiding from itself the substantial contradiction between the Jewish national movement and Lydda. . . . Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, contradiction struck and tragedy revealed its face” (Shavit, Promised 108–9). Palestinians would have to be forced to leave if the Jewish state was to be born.

His narration of the expulsion does not lead to any substantive (auto-) political critique, however. It is an unfortunate truth for which there is no (good) answer, and certainly no political resolution. Shavit represents Lydda as a “tragedy,” unavoidable and a sign of the Jewish settlers’ (if only partial) fall from grace. With the massacre in Lydda, Zionism lost its innocence, he states. But while the massacre might have been avoided, its conditions of possibility—that is, the necessity of expulsion—could not. He asks himself, rhetorically, “Do I turn my back on the Jewish national movement that carried out the deed of Lydda?” His answer?

Shavit chooses to “stand by the damned.”

The stories that the declassified (and now partially reclassified) documents tell are widely known in Israeli society today. Zionist brigades expelled Palestinians from their lands; they even carried out a massacre or two, although that latter point is more disputed than the first.⁹ The facts are out there. Even if it isn’t Palestinians who are doing the narrating, the foundational narrative of post-1948 Arab and Palestinian politics, once consistently denied and censored, is out there for all (Jewish Israelis) to discuss, even embrace: the Israeli state was founded upon the expulsion of the vast majority of its Palestinian inhabitants. By and large, the “Nakba” as a factual truth is accepted among the Israeli Jewish public, perhaps even by much of the American liberal establishment that so enthusiastically embraced Shavit’s book.

Nevertheless, even if known, the Nakba is not acknowledged, to borrow a distinction made by Stanley Cavell. In other words, it does not emerge as a matter of public concern and action. We know, but why are we still talking about it? We know, but what does it have to do with us? We know, but that is what happens in war. In short, it does not appear in such a way as to merit political consideration and judgment.¹⁰ When it does call for judgment, it seems to be in the direction of maintaining its necessity and/or the need for its repetition.

This is not denial: it is not that the narrative of the Nakba is not known. It isn’t even the case that Israelis, by and large, refuse to speak about it. There are those who openly proclaim the virtue of the expulsion in 1948; there are those who also call for it to be done again. And there are those who, like Shavit, admit, document even, with regret, that it happened. And they stop there. This is the work of disavowal. As Alenka Zupančič describes it, “I know something is the case, but I keep behaving, acting, as if I didn’t know what I know, and what I’m able to state, clearly, as my knowledge.” As she elaborates in her reading of contemporary forms of disavowal, knowing is key—after all, in order to engage in disavowal one must begin with the phrase, “I know very well” (Zupančič). Or as described by Lisa Wedeen, even though “‘I know very well,’ I can still be ‘hailed into a position’ that, while no longer denied, can still be dismissed” (164).

The Nakba, in short, no longer needs to be denied. Something has shifted. Perhaps (public) secrecy is no longer really required to sustain the commitment of (most of) its citizens to the Jewish character of the Israeli settler state. Shavit’s story of Lydda demonstrates that Israel was founded on the violence of conquest and expulsion (and massacres) of its Palestinian population—in living memory—and yet, if the Jewish state was to be born, he insists, there was no other choice. Today, there is nothing to be done other than to admit that it did, indeed, occur. There is no demand here that this historical wrong be repaired.¹¹ The existing order needs to be upheld, nevertheless. To quote Wedeen once more, “Undergirded by . . . investments that prove sticky even in the face of knowing better,” the political attachment to Zionism “is reflected in and generated anew through ordinary moments of disavowal in . . . rationalizations that allow us to participate in and uphold existing orders” (8). Although one might ask, From whose perspective does one actually “know better”? Perhaps true of Shavit, knowing better certainly does not capture the embrace of the Nakba among Israel’s radical right.

In her 2022 lecture “Dead Ends,” Alenka Zupančič explores disavowal through the paradox of the prevalence of inaction in the face of the apparent, obvious, catastrophic crises and apocalyptic futures that we all face. “We know that we have already embarked on the train to disaster and know that the train in front of us is really scary and should scare the shit out of us. But as a general rule, this does not happen. It does not wake us up and make us decide to jump off the train even if this kills us.” She continues, “We should jump off even if we are killed.” But we don’t. Why not? Disavowal, for Zupančič, operates at the level of the individual (psyche). “There is no collective disavowal,” and disavowal operating at the level of the individual will never add up to anything more than a powerful mass of inaction. “This moment requires the creation of a collective subject who is capable of jumping off the train.”

But what if there is a collective subject and it refuses to jump off the train? What if there is such a thing as collective disavowal? What’s more, what about those instances in which there is not a shared “we” that knows the future to be catastrophic if we do not jump off the train? Put differently, what if my collective catastrophe is figured as your collective survival? Disavowal vis-à-vis the Nakba operates in Israeli society as a decidedly collective process, one that unites Jewish Israelis across the political spectrum, if with varying forms of ethical self-fashioning and affective attachment. If the Jewish state was to exist as a Jewish state, the Nakba was inevitable, perhaps even the right choice at the time. For some, if the Jewish state is to survive into the future as a Jewish state, perhaps it remains the right choice again today. Déjà vu: there is nothing new here.¹² Expulsion is required, as it was in 1948. The attachment to the Jewish state—framed as a matter of Jewish survival—necessitates the Nakba, at least then if not again now. The catastrophe that looms on the horizon is one that cannot take into account any collective other than the Jewish Israeli self.

Remembering has no relationship to justice here. No longer silenced, no longer forgotten, the catastrophe of 1948 carries no ethical, let alone political, force. (More accurately perhaps, the Nakba has ethical force in the hands of liberal Zionists as a practice of liberal self-fashioning: for Ari Shavit and his American admirers, his very expression of guilt and pain over having “to stand by the damned”—a well-rehearsed trope in the book and more widely, among liberal subjects engaged in the violence of war—produces his standing as a moral subject [Asad; Abu El-Haj, Combat Trauma]). There is a collective here, and it is not jumping off the train. If there is an arc of history in Shavit’s and Morris’s political reckonings, it does not bend toward justice. Yes, the war that Palestinians have long narrated and that Palestinian and Arab historians have long documented based on, among other sources, the testimony and memories of its survivors, is true. That genie isn’t going back into any bottle anytime soon. And yet, reduced in Morris’s and Shavit’s hands to an event that happened in 1948, the Nakba is not a history worthy of consideration and repair. That would require an ethical and political choice, and that choice has a far more tenuous relationship to questions of epistemology (to how we know, to what we know) than many of us might wish to believe. For all the desire to write a countercolonial history, to insist on further declassifying archives, to collect and document the destruction of Palestinian forms of life, questions need to be asked: What does it mean for historians to endlessly document what we already know? Do these interminable iterations actually have (or have the potential to have) progressive political force in the world? What’s more, in the specific case at hand, who is the community of address for all this digging up, documenting, and reiterating the history of Palestinian expulsion? If it is an Israeli public, or for that matter, a Euro-American one, we might want to ask: Don’t they already know more than enough—that is, if they cared to acknowledge what they already know? If they cared “to jump off the train”?

To be clear: There may well be intrinsic reasons for insisting on recovering other traces, other forms of life, now largely destroyed. There may be powerful desires for acts of recuperation—of archiving, even—regardless of their political efficacy. After all, ethics need not be consequentialist. But to insist, as does Yerushalmi, that forgetting is the opposite of Justice—a statement that falls squarely within the grammar of what Joan Scott calls “the judgment of history”—is to operate within a political calculus and rationale that misses one increasingly powerful contemporary configuration of knowledge and power, in this instance, of settler power in Palestine. Settler-nationhood no longer depends on the suppression of the historical trace, the state secret—on denial. It can just as easily operate through the embrace of a far more brazen and explicit seizure of power: Yes, the Nakba. But no, we—Israelis—don’t care. To update Octave Mannoni’s felicitous turn of phrase, it can just as easily operate within the logic of, “We know well, but all the same . . . ”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Naor Ben-Yehoyada for comments on an earlier draft of this article and Alejandro Paz for a discussion of and references to the Nakba Law. I would also like to thank the audiences at the Land Studies Center at the American University of Beirut, SOAS University of London, the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and CensureUofT at the University of Toronto, where I delivered various iterations of the argument I develop here.

Notes

Works Cited