I’m joined again by friend of the pod Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian researcher who specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations. We talked about Nakba Day (May 15), about the importance of reflecting on the past while also trying to plan for the future, and how we can commemorate the Nakba by building bonds across nations and struggles.
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Episode Credits
Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Elia Ayoub
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Elia Ayoub
Episode design: Elia Ayoub
Transcript prepared by Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:
There’s something Mahmoud Darwish said, how there’s something particularly painful about realizing that a lot of the people who did your ethnic cleansing have some connection to one of the most traumatic, if not the most traumatic, event in the recent century.
Elia Ayoub: Nakba Day is something very special, for all the wrong reasons. For many people of a certain generation, it’s a day that is frozen in time. Many Palestinians of a certain age are still with us, and many have unfortunately passed away because we’re talking about seven and a half decades of settler colonialism in what is now Israel-Palestine.
But the Nakba for me is a Nakba of silence. And I want to emphasize that, because my grandfather never talked about it. The only things I managed to collect, information-wise, has been either trying to get my grandma to say a few things, or maybe other older relatives. And I was able to patch together a bit of his story here and there, just enough to know that he was indeed part of that expulsion, and that they had difficulties integrating into the almost-as-young state of Lebanon back then, to the point where part of their “integration” has been erasure. You integrate by erasing where you come from, by basically not talking about it, by creating a different biography or autobiography for yourself and your family, and just telling that story. And so for a very long time, really the first two decades of my life, I had no idea that we were Palestinians. Not just Palestinians for that matter, but we’re also part Italians.
I actually thought that we were from (I mean in the patriarchal sense of where my paternal grandfather is from) this place somewhere in Zahlé, which is in the east of Lebanon. I remember very clearly going there on a school trip and thinking, I’m going back to my roots. Little did I know back then that this was simply not so. And if I did want to go back to my roots, I would probably get shot by the IDF, because the southern border of Lebanon, which is bordering modern Israel, is in the top five most dangerous borders in the world.
I wanted to have Dana on to talk about the Nakba. How do we relate to it? And Dana has published a piece about it. Crucially, we wanted to make sure that this is not an episode that is exclusively about the past. Kind of keeping to the same theme as a good chunk of this podcast: the past is important, nostalgia is important, remembering is very important, but so is the future. Thinking about the future is something that I hold dear. And I hope in this episode you’ll get to see why that is the case.
Dana, can you introduce yourself?
Dana El Kurd: I’m an assistant professor at the University of Richmond. I work on authoritarianism in the Arab world, Palestine, and international intervention.
EA: This was kind of a last minute thing, but it’s the seventy-fifth year commemoration of the Nakba, so there’s been a bunch of stuff being talked about on social media. And you’ve been writing this piece about your own thought process when it comes to remembering the Nakba, thinking about the Nakba, commemorating the Nakba.
The Nakba, for those who don’t know, means “catastrophe” in Arabic. And it refers to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians, mostly from the areas that are now part of the state of Israel. And these include my grandfather, who passed away a couple of years ago, and many other grandfathers and grandmothers.
Tell us a bit about your own thought process on this: commemoration, what has it been like for you? And why did you feel the need to write that piece?
DK: I’m Palestinian. My grandmother also passed away a few years ago, but we grew up hearing about the stories and hearing about how it impacted the family. And when I was a young adult, politically aware, every year I would participate in the commemoration of the Nakba, whether that’s the protests or vigils, whatever is happening wherever I am.
We’re coming up to kind of a milestone: seventy-five years, good round number. I worried that Nakba commemoration was becoming a bit of a stale dynamic, that people were starting to engage in activities around the Nakba and I didn’t feel like we were pushing forward towards anything. The wheel turning every year seems the same. And then every milestone hits harder.
Hopefully we don’t need to be in the same position as we are now, but imagine the eightieth anniversary, the eighty-fifth anniversary. It started to feel like, I don’t know that we’re learning much from each commemoration. I was actually asked to write that piece and I didn’t want to write another piece being like, the Nakba was terrible and we deserve justice. Everybody knows this. Can we use this moment to help us learn something?
We should capitalize on the point of remembrance and the point of commemoration to push our ideas forward, to strategize, to reflect critically about what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong.
EA: I was in in Yerevan in 2015 on the centennial of the commemoration of the genocide. I went there with a couple of Lebanese Armenian friends. I went there as a journalist and I had some knowledge of the subject matter because growing up in Lebanon, there were quite a few Armenians, and I kind of know that story. And I did some research before going.
When I went there, there was this feeling that a milestone has been reached. For whatever reason, our brain functions with round numbers. But it’s big, you know, one hundred. It felt at the time that If nothing is done now, who cares about one hundred and one, and one hundred and two. There’s something very fragile about how important specific numbers are. It kind of puts extra pressure for us to do something by a certain date.
Something that’s called a genocide, the Armenian genocide, has this kind of finality to it. Most folks’ demands were demands for recognition: We need the Armenian genocide recognized. This was especially in the US, with the Armenian American community there. For those who don’t know, Obama was supposed to do it and he didn’t, and then Joe Biden ended up doing it, and so it was a decade late. Politics was involved, as of course; Turkey was opposed to it and was threatening using its NATO status. All of these things heated up when the US did finally officially recognize it.
In the end, it’s symbolic. It’s not just symbolic—there are concrete things that happen, but the symbol of it is very important. And when it comes to the Nakba, we’re dealing with a different situation. Not better or worse, just a different situation. That situation requires a response that is concrete. When we speak about accountability, about justice, about the right of return, those are very concrete steps that supposedly should lead to concrete goals. From the literature I’ve read, since roughly the Oslo Accord process in the early nineties, there’s been a sense of: Something has been achieved, and something else has to happen now. And whatever that something else is has been delayed, and now it’s a stalemate.
Especially right now, the “representative” of the Palestinian people, being the PA, or technically the PLO, but all of the problematics of that given their role right now, especially in the occupation in the West Bank—I think it’s true that this has also impacted how the Nakba is commemorated and thought about outside of modern Israel-Palestine, like in the diasporas in Lebanon. There is the “return day” every year. I attended one in 2012. The March of Return is when a bunch of mostly Palestinians, but also some supporters, refugees, or those who have citizenship (in my case, the Lebanese one) would go down to the south, to the modern border, and basically try and return. Usually it’s symbolic because most people know that they won’t manage, but there’s a lot of physical efforts, and some people get shot down. There was a person who was shot in front of me when I was there. It can get quite violent because of that, because the Israelis obviously just shoot to kill.
DK: When I was writing this piece and when I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of years, I’ve really been reacting and trying to wrap my head around the stagnation that the Palestinian cause has found itself in. A large part of it has to do with the Oslo Accords derailing the national liberation movement and distracting a large chunk of Palestinian society with this process of quasi-governance, and attempting to build a state without a serious partner on those negotiations on the Israeli side. So I’ve been thinking about stagnation for quite a long time.
I often think about the Armenian experience because I used to live in Glendale. There are Armenians in Palestine, but the first time I lived with so many Armenians was in Glendale. I’m still in touch with some folks from there, and I was always impressed and in awe of Armenians for their ability to continue remembering and to continue commemorating.
In the piece I refer to Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s discussions of remembrance, and the function that remembrance plays. It plays a communicative function and a social function. It creates a sense of community. I was always in awe of the Armenians around that. Like you said, it is a different process, but it has been a longer time frame than the Palestinians have been dealing with, and yet they still continue and they’re still committed.
But at the same time, I feel the same reservations I feel about ourselves, which is, What is this achieving? Aside from that communicative function, aside from the social function, what is this commemoration actually going to achieve? Under the right administration, we do get recognition for the Armenian genocide, but it’s not the same as a demand for reparative justice. I often think about what we can learn from the Armenian or any other commemoration, while still bearing in mind that in our Palestinian case, it’s a settler colonial context. It didn’t start with the Nakba, and it didn’t end with the Nakba, that moment in 1948. And so what does that also mean?
I think that you’re right that there is this political fragmentation, and that large segments of Palestinian society, in historic Palestine or outside, are pursuing different objectives. Some people are talking about national liberation, and some people are talking about decolonization, and some people are not. Because of that, I don’t think that this moment, this impetus that the state should serve as, is used effectively.
It honestly feels like a chore, almost, to some segments of the Palestinian political spectrum. Like, OK, we’re checking a box, we’re commemorating, we’re going to put on our keffiyeh and sit and listen to a lecture. It just doesn’t seem that useful.
I was reading this political scientist who works on memory and remembrance and the functions that they play in the context of Holocaust commemoration in Eastern Europe. Her name is Jelena Subotić at Georgia State University. She talks about how there’s a couple of reasons why remembering is important and why it should be tied to accomplishing justice.
First is the creation of a reliable record of past events to offer a platform for victims to tell their stories and restore the dignity of victims, exposing the truth and public remembrance. The idea is essentially to repair the injuries suffered by victims through restitution, reparations, or apologies.
If we think about it that way, and still in the context of something that’s ongoing rather than something that has happened in the past, I don’t know that our Nakba commemoration accomplishes all of those tasks. That’s not on Palestinians alone; the international community bears a lot of blame for that, but given that we know that context, that the international community is Western-focused and US-driven, and that we’re not going to get an apology, or that’s not in the short term, what can we use Nakba Day for?
That’s essentially what my whole point was, and I have ideas.
Palestine is a part and parcel of a global anti-authoritarian struggle. When we don’t frame it that way, we find ourselves on the wrong side of things. We should have done a better job of engaging with what’s happening in Syria and how that connects to us. Or what’s happening in Iraq. Or what’s happening in Iran.
EA: I wanted to make an additional point with Turkey and their Armenian communities. The one that is in Turkey is the one that struggles the most, and of course there have even been threats. Hrant Dink, an Armenian Turkish journalist, was even assassinated some years ago. The Armenian community who have been active on the front of recognizing Armenian genocide for the most part doesn’t expect the Turkish government to do so, because the Turkish government is the main party against any recognition of Armenian genocide, especially because it might imply actual legal and financial reparations of some kind, since they see themselves as the legal successors to the Ottoman empire. And then there is the usual nationalism: We did nothing wrong, we are amazing. That’s definitely not something unique to the Turkish republic, although it takes specific forms there.
I study a lot about memory, past hauntings, all of that shit. I’ve been talking a lot about it on this podcast, but I haven’t quite had the opportunity to talk about what it is about that subject matter that felt so true to me, or so poignant.
My master’s thesis (and this sometimes surprises people, and my godfather says that I was just trying to be outrageous) was on the politics of language, and the languages I chose were Yiddish and Hebrew. So in the case of Hebrew, “the language of the enemy.” It is a really fascinating topic. Yiddish, when it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, was spoken by the majority of Jews pre-Holocaust, mostly in Europe and of course in Eastern Europe. A significant percentage were killed off during the Holocaust, and then Yiddish survived primarily in the US. Now it’s associated with an older generation.
But it also survived in what ended up becoming Israel. The thing about Yiddish is that because it (and this is a quote that was actually used by a number of Zionist leaders in what became Israel) “stank of the ghetto,” they actively made an effort to suppress the speaking of Yiddish in Mandate Palestine. They did that with all of the non-Hebrew languages that Jews were speaking, and to some extent still do. Arabic being a known example.
But I always found Yiddish interesting because it’s not as “otherized” in the mythos of Zionism as, let’s say, Arabic is. If you want to do a binary between all Arabs and Jews—You cannot be both—then obviously you have to cast away the Arabic part. You have to say, This is the language of the other. But with Yiddish, it was quite difficult to do so because it was, and still is, a very specifically Jewish language, that was created in Jewish circumstances and context. It had a very specific role in political activism at the time, especially up until the First World War when it got a pretty huge hit, and of course, the Second World War when there was the final blow.
This already complicates the story. That doesn’t mean cheapening it or reducing the acknowledgement of other people’s pains, or the Nakba. But I had a lot of pushback when I said that I wanted to understand: I had read somewhere that Yiddish was suppressed, and this really it stuck with me. Why would it be suppressed if they survived the Holocaust and it wasn’t completely killed off? Surely it should be the subject of a revival movement.
DK: It represents the failure before the Israeli nation-state, and they want a new sabra identity.
EA: Exactly. “Sabra” meaning the people who were born in the land.
DK: The strong colonizer, yeah.
EA: There’s a lot there, in that picture. If we understand it, we are able to understand certain obsessions that we see still present among Israeli Jews today, and especially in the form of the Israeli state, the sort of rhetoric that is used, why it is used in this way. There is a context to it; no one is born like that. And for me, understanding that, and even learning a bit of Hebrew, allowed me to also understand my own experience better.
Because as I said, my grandfather was exiled, and I lived with that in the background for a number of years now. I found out pretty late. I didn’t even know we were Palestinian up until my teenage years. For me, Nakba commemoration is silence. It’s the fact that it was not talked about. There’s a very specific Lebanese component to that, because we’re Lebanese Christians, middle class, and after the civil war it became taboo. That’s a topic for another conversation.
I’m mentioning all of this because when I try to understand the complexity of a situation, it’s not actually to reduce the pain and suffering that was instilled from the Nakba. On the contrary, there’s something Mahmoud Darwish said: there’s something particularly painful about realizing that a lot of the people who did your ethnic cleansing have some connection to one of the most traumatic, if not the most traumatic event in the recent century. There’s something very difficult about that, because if it was like, the Nazis, it’s a simpler story in some sense: there was white supremacy, obviously Aryan supremacy. They embedded the character of the Jew in their ideology, and in Mein Kampf they had become the main enemy, and they had to purify the race, all of that shit. So we’re able to trace a story; like, If it starts like this, maybe it’s going to end like this, and we’re able to rationalize it.
But when it comes to the Nakba, part of me still has a lot of difficulties understanding—of course, not everyone was a Holocaust survivor and became a Zionist, but in the narrative Israel itself portrays, There was the Holocaust; three years later, war of independence; the Arabs wanted to kill us, we won; and we got Israel. That’s basically the narrative. And you have a lot of Israelis, including Netanyahu himself, who have said: Actually, Hitler didn’t even want to kill the Jews! After speaking to Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti—
DK: This is such a nonsense propaganda point: It was the Arabs at fault the entire time! It can’t be just white supremacy!
EA: Exactly. But this shows that even in the case of the “survivor” (I hope people know that I come from a good place here, but this type of language is very tricky), for Netanyahu, in the mythos that he himself put forward, it was more convenient to focus on the Arabs than it was to focus on the Germans. It’s more convenient to do so today because Germany is no longer Nazi Germany. It’s our ally.
DK: The Israeli discourse relies on having to replace the Nazis with the Palestinians. There’s been much written about this, but the Palestinian is the Nazi for them. A Palestinian is not a national identity, it’s somebody who prescribes wanting to kill Jews. That is how they view a Palestinian, which is why they get so angry when somebody identifies as a Palestinian. Their first thought is, You’re an antisemite. To be a Palestinian is to be an antisemite; to be a Palestinian is to be the reincarnation of Nazism. And they need it in their ethos, because otherwise, like you said, how do you rationalize, in 2023, a government and a regime that engages in this way, but has the Holocaust in its past? How can you engage in both things? These people must be the reincarnation of our old enemy.
EA: Exactly. Netanyahu’s comments were slammed by a number of Holocaust historians as a form of Holocaust denialism. Because there’s different forms of that, and one of them is to just deny it, which Nazis usually do. But there is a different way of denying it, which is to downplay the role of the Nazi.
DK: And the Jewishness of the issue!
EA: Yes, exactly. I’m mentioning this because in my own work, we’re focusing on post-war Lebanon. For one, a bunch of Lebanese elites at the time were part of the colonization efforts, and this is not something that they want to think about too much. The Sursock family is a known example who sold land they had in what became Israel to the Jewish National Fund. So there’s a lot of these nuances that we can get into, but I’m mentioning this because there are a number of concepts, like the concept of “remembering”—I forgot which scholar said this, but you can cut it into “re” and “membering,” in the sense that we’re thinking about the past, but we’re focusing on the present. What is it about the past that can inform the present? What is it about the present that can render justice to the past? It’s a relational identity.
It’s not just something that’s static, that’s in the past and we just need to repeat it on a on a yearly basis, like a religious ritual. Just some stale charade. And when it comes to nostalgia, Svetlana Boym, who’s one of the main scholars on this topic, had written a book called The Future of Nostalgia, in which she focused on two types of nostalgia. For those who don’t know, the term nostalgia was first used to describe Swiss mercenaries, because Switzerland had mercenaries that would be sent off to the rest of Europe to fight and they would feel this homesickness towards Switzerland. And that’s how it stuck.
It was seen as a psychological disorder, something to be treated. But nostalgia has two components: restorative nostalgia, in which you would put emphasis on Nostos, a Greek word for “returning home,” which “proposes to rebuild the last home and patch up the memory gaps.” Like, Something wrong happened in history, and we need to effectively turn back the clock in one way or another, and then everything will be fine. I’m simplifying, but that’s the whole Kill baby Hitler and the rest wouldn’t have happened thing.
So that’s the “restorative.” It’s about nostalgia that seeks to restore a past glory, which is pretty common. Arabs do this quite often, like with the “Golden Age of the fifties and the sixties,” especially with Nasser, Oum Kalthoum, etc.
DK: Or the monarchists.
EA: Yeah, it’s a very specific breed of that. So that’s restorative nostalgia, but then there’s reflective nostalgia. Reflective nostalgia focuses on the second part of that term, algia, which means aching. So longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance; i.e. it inherently acknowledges that the process of nostalgia, which is a type of remembering itself, is by definition incomplete. It can never be completed. And we shouldn’t act as if it can ever be completed, as if we can ever do something that says, OK, we have stopped this thing, now we no longer need to remember.
Of course, this generationally changes. Remembering the Holocaust today is not the same as remembering the Holocaust in the fifties. But the reason why I bring that up is that I do think, when it comes to Nakba commemoration, at least the ones I have been to (in Beirut and a couple in London), the Beirut one is a bit more informative. But the London one probably speaks a bit more to the experience of the ones in the US, because it’s a more distanced, diaspora thing, whereas with the one in Lebanon, there is that physicality of it, of going up to the border.
I mentioned this religious aspect of it. It’s almost like, at the time when I would still go to church, I had certain hymns to memorize, I knew when to stand, when to sit. There was a sort of a ritual aspect to it. I’m not saying ritual is bad—I actually think there’s value in ritual. But there’s something that happens when the ritual becomes an end in itself, when the ritual becomes just something to do. Even the religious would say so.
You know, the people who just fast in Ramadan because you’re supposed to do it, versus a friend of mine who’s not religious but of Muslim background, who does fast in Ramadan because he sees some cultural significance in it. He has actually added value to it that wasn’t necessarily there, or he could have just not done it.
DK: The way that Nakba day has been played out in my life—in different contexts: in the United States, and there have been a couple of times I was in Doha—obviously it’s going to be a sad day, but it’s felt defeating. Aside from the side effect of building that community, especially now in the United States, there’s a lot of focus on regenerating the commitment of young people to the national identity—absolutely, the Nakba commemorations are all accomplishing that.
But I feel like we’re not engaging in that second type of nostalgia. We’re engaging in a lot of the first. To make it useful, I think that Nakba day should be a kind of taking stock. Especially in the last couple of years. We had the Unity Intifada; what have we learned? Where have we failed? What can we do more? Where are we now? We could do this on any day, but human beings like round numbers and we like commemoration dates and things like this.
This is not a personal failing necessarily; I’m not saying that the Palestinians are uniquely failing at something like this, but there are obviously structural reasons why, in the diaspora context, in the context of increased repression of pro-Palestine sentiment all over the world, that you can fall into a rut. You can take the safe thing, and do a small protest, do a lecture and move on with your life.
The more challenging thing to do would be to self-critique and to say, Let’s try to move forward from this. We’ve talked on this podcast about how we Palestinians have been shying away from that kind of critique, and there are many reasons for that. In the piece, I’m like, Here are the things that I think we need to think about; Here are the things that I think are the main impediments to us using this day effectively.
EA: We talked about the impediments, and we talked about the structural reasons. We do, as humans in general, I think, have a tendency—because it’s easier to focus on what’s wrong than focusing on what can be done. What are the things that can actually be improved, and can actually yield concrete results?
Obviously “solving the crisis” is difficult. It will be difficult regardless. But difficult doesn’t mean impossible. And it doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. It’s not like everything has to be done, otherwise nothing can be done. There is this all or nothing situation, which is difficult. In no way is this a recognition that people are “failing,” it just is what it is.
DK: But even recognizing the geopolitical context, there is space to move.
EA: There’s space to move in the geopolitical context, there’s space to move within the US context. There’s a different way in the UK than there is in mainland Europe, for that matter. And in the Arab world there’s a completely different thing happening. I think it’s even easier to talk about Palestine right now in the US than it is to talk about Palestine in much of the Arab world, if it means anything actually concrete. I’m thinking about Egypt, for example.
You mentioned Yassin al-Haj Saleh in your article, and the Syrian experience. What was it about that experience that you felt can inform your own assessment of where we are now as Palestinians?
DK: Yassin is brilliant, and I think the way that he thinks about remembrance, and the almost inability to remember, how when something is just so traumatic and, especially in the Syrian case, ongoing, that there becomes a failure to represent and to express. Which is what the Syrian people have been dealing with under this most vicious of regimes. He’s thinking about it in a different direction, which is, What happens when we can’t even remember? What does that mean for the people who can’t express, who can’t represent, who can’t remember? They turn to violence.
I don’t think that the Palestinians are actually in that space. I think the Syrians are dealing with something much, much worse. I’m not saying the international community is friendly to the Palestinians by any means, but I think that we have won a lot of narrative victories. I think it’s easier for people to recognize and understand the Palestinian issue in a way that I don’t think the Syrians, unfortunately, get that kind of recognition.
And like you said, there are Palestinian communities in the diaspora in places where, of course, it’s imperfect; we face criminalization, all of those things. But at the same time, we are allowed to express. There’s no question. We’re not in Assad’s Syria, unable to express. We are able to express, and face consequences. For example, the Palestinians in the German context, they do face consequences for that expression. But we are able to.
When I was reading Yassin, I was like, This is actually much more extreme; we’re not dealing with that level. Thankfully, we have more space to maneuver than the Syrians. The Syrians are still much earlier in this process. But also the reason I read Yassin, or people like him or who come from that kind of positionality, is because that’s one of the things that I critique.
I think with Nakba Day, we need to take stock and recognize where we’ve been succeeding. We’ve succeeded on the narrative front. We’ve succeeded even in academia. Amongst historians, and Khalidi said this, nobody seriously engages in Nakba denialism. It’s for the extremist market.
EA: It’s not that serious of a conversation to deny it completely. The debate is more like, What type of colonialism is this? Is it settler? Is it this? Is it that? How bad exactly?
DK: Nobody’s saying anymore that this didn’t happen, that Palestinians don’t exist, but they used to. Only the most unserious people engage in that kind of conversation. So we’ve won those battles. We’ve won the battle of regenerating a commitment amongst young people.
But then also, let’s think about where we need to improve. And when we think about the Syrian case—this is my biggest thing where we need to improve: we are still parochial. We are still not connecting the Palestinian issue with other issues. It’s not just an anti-colonial struggle. Palestine is a part and parcel of a global anti-authoritarian struggle.
When we don’t we don’t frame it that way, I think that we find ourselves on the wrong side of things sometimes. With the Syria example, we should have done a better job of engaging with what’s happening in Syria and how that connects to us. Or what’s happening in Iraq. Or what’s happening in Iran.
That failure on our part is, I think, why we haven’t been able to build as effective of a transnational solidarity. A lot of our attention when it comes to the international sphere, or any kind of transnational activity, has been towards the West. And we really fail when it comes to people closer to home; we don’t know how to engage in transnational solidarity with our own region. It weighs heavily on how I see Palestine organizing spaces engaging and developing.
Indigenous people around the world say this, and African-Americans have also been saying this: we need to be better ancestors. We need to acknowledge our ancestors and what they went through, but we need to also recognize that we will be ancestors.
EA: That’s why I’m pretty interested in the Kurdish experience, because it’s quite literally divided by four modern nation states. There is an identity that crosses these nations, clearly, but I’m thinking of some of the more consequential differences between Kurds, specifically in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. I’m slightly less familiar with the Iranian case, with the exception of what’s been happening more recently with the death of Jina Amini. I know that Iranian Kurds are suppressed and oppressed, and even the language is suppressed.
But for example, in Northern Syria there’s actually more similarities between a supporter of the YPG [People’s Defense Units] or the SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] and a supporter of the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] (a supporter in Turkey and a supporter in Syria), than there is with the KRG [Kurdistan Regional Government] in Iraq. So it’s not the Kurdishness of it that separates them, because there is that in common. But what separates them is effectively political, regardless of which side people want to be on. Analytically, clearly there is a border, and the border obviously has an impact, but there is also a cross-border exchange. And sometimes there is a physical exchange, where people are actually crossing, whether refugees from Syria to Turkey or Kurds who are citizens of Turkey going to Syria to fight ISIS at the time.
That has created a very interesting dynamic, especially when it comes to the Armenian example I mentioned before. There is an interesting intersection between the Armenian experience and the Kurdish experience. For one, a common oppressor, for the most part being the modern Turkish republic. But also, historically, there weren’t necessarily very good ties between Armenians and Kurds, because Kurds were seen as the foot soldiers of the genocide, because they were conscripted by the Ottoman Empire at the time. There is a lot of bad blood today. One of the examples I use in my own thesis is that in the early days after the revolution in 2011, I think this was in 2012 or 2013, a number of Syrian Kurds who were refugees in Lebanon were discriminated against by Lebanese Armenians, citing that a hundreds years ago a crime was committed by the ancestors of these Kurds.
We say, Of course we shouldn’t actually blame descendants for what happened a hundred years ago, but other people are doing that in one way or another. There is a political component to this, is what I’m trying to say.
For me, this is something that I’m trying to wrap my head around in a way that’s very complicated, and I haven’t quite managed to find all of the words; I want to write something longer on this topic. But when I think about it, whether it’s the Holocaust, whether it’s the history of Zionism, whether it’s the post-’48 dynamics, whether in the Arab world or in terms of Israel’s relations to the rest of the world, there’s just so many threads being created there that linking them in one way or another feels to me less about creating a straight line, because that’s probably not possible, but more about creating some kind of web, in the sense that you could be on this position and this is your experience.
Maybe your experience as an American Jew who has Holocaust survivors and Holocaust victims in your background has created historically some connection between you and African-Americans. And we know this has happened. There is that link—American Jews were disproportionately involved in the civil rights movement to give Black Americans more rights. This is actually documented, and there are these historical reasons.
But if you’re a Palestinian, you read about this and say, Well, what are these historical reasons? Both of our ancestors suffered, right? Both our ancestors as Jews and as Black Americans suffered in these gruesome ways. They would be thinking about the Holocaust, and maybe about the repression under the Soviet Union, and in the case of African-Americans, slavery and then Jim Crow and all of that stuff. So that link has been created there. What can then be created from that experience, with other experiences?
One chapter that I wrote some years ago was looking at Black-Palestinian (African-American and Palestinian-American) links. Mariam Barghouti and other folks have written about this. We saw this with Ferguson in 2014, right? You have these two communities on this side, and these two communities on this side, and the only thing they seem to have in common is that they’ve built bonds with African Americans. But where are the bonds between Jewish Americans and Palestinian Americans?
Now we’ve been seeing that. We’ve seen it in Jewish Voice for Peace, and the magazines +972 Mag and Jewish Currents. There is that recognition that there is trauma in our past, but that does not mean that we haven’t also inflicted trauma on other people. Those two don’t have to be contradictory. In fact, they’re often not. They don’t have to cancel each other out, which is a bit how the Israeli state acts.
My argument is that the Arab states have just played the other side of that coin, post-’48, in the sense that there was a binary created: the Jew on one side, the Arab on one side. That is something that the Arab regimes (I’m thinking of the monarchy in Iraq at the time, even Gamal Abdel Nasser to some extent) played along with, like every Arab Jew was potentially a spy for Israel. Many of them were accused, and many of them were then expelled.
And of course, the population has basically shrunk compared to what it was pre-seventies. For example, pre-seventies there was a sizable population of Lebanese Jews, and post-seventies, post-eighties especially, there were very few remaining. I think it is a couple hundred officially now.
All this to say that a historical wrong that was done does not mean that everyone involved on the other side of that historical wrong—I’m specifically talking about Arabs broadly, not necessarily Palestinians, because Arabs broadly have also taken on the mantle of saying the cause ‘awlawiyatna; it’s “our priority.” This means we have baggage that I think is difficult to completely unload. I think there has to be an aspect of the way forward to recognize this baggage—it doesn’t mean that your baggage is unjustified; on the contrary, it’s very justified. But there is baggage, and it colors the way you act. It colors your perceptions of the future.
The book Palestine +100 came out a few years ago. I did a review on it some years ago. That’s one of the early indications that I saw of this kind of futurism thinking. People who know the podcast know that this is something I’m trying to engage in a lot. Thinking of, What does 2048 look like?
You know, now we’re at seventy-five. What does one hundred look like? These are science fiction short stories and a lot of the stories, I would argue, haven’t gone out of that mental prison. If I want to put it that way, it’s still like what’s happening now but worse, essentially, like Israel has just found more creative ways of being Israel. While a couple of others have thought of very creative alternatives, and I think this kind of exercise is extremely necessary.
The past has to be a starting ground towards something else. Indigenous Americans, Indigenous people around the world, say this, and African-Americans have also been saying this: we need to be better ancestors. We need to acknowledge our ancestors and what they went through, but we need to also recognize that we will be ancestors. And we need to to recognize that and wrestle with that, because it’s not easy.
DK: It’s really difficult recognizing your role, your position in the web. It’s incredibly difficult in this context, because it is ongoing. Mahmood Mamdani makes a similar claim that to find a common future, you have to get rid of the binary between victim and perpetrator. And that sounds great, but in the context of ongoing aggression, it’s not just difficult, it might be almost premature to discuss because right now there are perpetrators.
Historically speaking, if we’re talking just about the Palestinians and Israelis, I’m sure there is this attack or that attack or victims lost on this side or civilians lost on that side. So I’m not claiming only one side was violent or anything like that. But at the end of the day, the settler colonial project started from one side, and it’s difficult to have that discussion about where you are in that web before the violence ceases.
That’s a separate matter, I think, from engaging in these adjacent communities, these connected communities, like American Jewish communities. A lot of the American Jewish establishment is implicated, but it’s not in the same way as somebody who lives in Israel or serves in the IDF. That’s where I think that kind of work can be more meaningful. On the ground it’s more difficult.
But in terms of Arab regimes, these are the most morally bankrupt, autocratic systems. It’s not so surprising that they are engaging in a binary, and weaponizing Palestine like that. That’s what they do. And now, in the context of the Abraham Accords, it’s very interesting because now there’s an opposite weaponization. Now there’s a weaponization of tolerance and a weaponization of peace—the word peace, the word tolerance—to justify increased suppression of Palestinians and increased authoritarianism and authoritarian linkages.
So I don’t take anything that Arab governments say at face value. They’re not a serious part of the discussion.
EA: The reason I brought it up is that, when I speak about futurism, let’s say ideally we want to get rid of the perpetrator-victim binary. We know that it’s not going to happen now, and we know why: because the aggression is ongoing; the occupation is ongoing; the colonization is ongoing; the blockade is ongoing. But what can it look like if we give ourselves permission to imagine a future in which that’s possible?
And yes, there is privilege in that. There is a sort of, Oh, well, you have time to sit back and think about that.
DK: And be more separate.
EA: I think this isn’t historically unusual. A number of people who had the time to organize were middle class. Not always, of course, and in no way would I want to erase working class efforts.
If we want to think of this web in a specific positionality in which they have more privilege and more time and more resources, I think this has to come with more responsibilities as well. And you have those who recognize it and those who abuse it.
DK: I’m speaking generally here, but I feel like we Palestinians engage in litmus tests. We engage in this puritanical Who is really Palestinian, who is a good representative, who really has skin in the game? instead of recognizing that we Palestinians are this large diaspora, a large population with a variety of lived experiences, and we all have different positionalities and different points of privilege, and that’s something that can be leveraged.
Instead of being seen as The intellectuals and the middle class are going to be engaging in that kind of thinking of the future and trying to imagine alternatives, they’re seen as somehow problematic, or something that shouldn’t be engaged with, or something that should be made distant from the cause, when actually we should totally capitalize on those kinds of privileges.
Back to Palestine +100, this is one last one last comment. This is not my area of expertise, but I remember reading that and feeling very unsatisfied. Feeling like it’s very suffocating, actually, to think about the fact that this was what was imagined for one hundred years after the Nakba, and I don’t remember a single story being a positive imagination.
EA: For those who may challenge the premise of my argument that we need to think about the future and engage in futurism, even if you’re not a science fiction person, the best examples I can give are the ones that already exist: Indigenous futurism, Afro-futurism, disability futurism, queer futurism, all of that stuff.
These are coming from points of departure that are so laden with trauma and horrors. Very few things can be compared to the African-American experience, just in terms of the horrors of the past, and Indigenous experience as well. Not just in the US for that matter, but also in Latin America and other places.
There is a post-sixties thing that Baldwin talks about, and Martin Luther King himself, and lots of other folks from Nina Simone to Angelou and so many other people. James Baldwin talks about how white supremacy clearly creates a perpetrator and a victim, and white people are also trapped; e.g. KKK, Jim Crow, policing today, Nazis. Recognizing also that white supremacy makes white people sort of fragile—that’s where the term “white fragility” comes from. As in, the very idea of an autonomous Black person or just a Black person can be a threatening thing to that fragility.
Baldwin recognized this and he said, Well, if that’s the case, that means that we in some ways have more power than we thought we have. And that there is something in us that seems to scare them.
What is that thing that scares them, and why does it scare them? And it’s not about me. I didn’t do anything. I was just born. It’s not like I caused anything. I’m not the N-word, I’ve never been the N-word, it’s not something that has ever been part of my identity. This is just something that the white people have created.
I’m just mentioning this because it’s a known example, especially in the West, and I think it’s a very interesting case study because it’s ongoing, as we know, with policing and with the prison system in the US. There’s a lot of talks of reparations. There’s a lot of things there that are definitely worth studying and learning from because they are managing to do things that we haven’t necessarily managed yet.
That doesn’t mean that we are failing. We’re just at a different point in history, in that web; there’s certain things that we’ve managed to do. There’s this contest mentality that I don’t like. I’m just saying that this is what happened. This is all part of their struggles, and part of the way forward in their own story is to think in the future. That’s the whole I Have a Dream thing: to think of a future where my kids, or my grandkids, or someone else’s grandkids don’t have to go through the things that I have to go through.
That’s what I mean by being better ancestors. I think that specifically in our context, there is a bit of that lacking. It does exist here and there, but it lacks this wider framework in which we understand that what we need is to build some kind of power. You can do so in the right way, in a healthy way, a grassroots way, bottom-up way, a moral way. Or you can do it like, I’m just going to stick with my friends regardless of how butcher-y they are.
DK: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I think it takes such a strong and radical outlook to be able to engage in that kind of futurism. I am a depressive person and it’s difficult sometimes for me to engage in any kind of optimism. That’s just a me problem.
But it is a little scary because I really want people to engage in that line of thinking. I think it’s really important, and I think you’re right that it’s necessary. But at the same time, the Arab world has been falling apart, and the rules of the game in the world are also becoming increasingly vicious. We had a very brief respite in modern human history, and now it’s becoming increasingly vicious, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with ongoing occupations, and escalating repressions in places like Kashmir and Western Sahara.
I’m concerned that it can go very, very bad. We might not even have space or an opportunity to engage in that futurism. We might see another ethnic cleansing, and unfortunately, that’s the context that we are operating under. Sorry to leave it on such a negative note, but it’s terrifying.
EA: These are open things being said right now by the Israeli government, where it almost feels like they are building up to something more coherent.
DK: Or even when the Russian forces steal Ukrainian children and say that they shouldn’t exist. These are the standard operating procedures now in the world, when it used to be something that was condemned. It’s incredibly concerning.
That again goes back to how Palestine needs to be connected with a broader anti-authoritarian struggle, because if these are the standard operating procedures, we are so screwed. The power imbalance between us and the people who would see us erased is really wide.
EA: Just to go back to that web, I think we need to find a way to position ourselves in a more ethical way and also in a more long-lasting way. Like, there are ways to think about, Who are our “friends,” and are they good friends? Are they friends with whom maybe we need to question our friendship?
Usually I ask folks to recommend three books in the end, but I forgot to do it this time because we decided at the last second. But I will recommend Timothy Snyder, who I’ve been reading recently. My mind is on Ukraine a lot these days because of what’s happening, but also because of where I live. There is a lot happening there that is so consequential that it’s actually a bit dizzying to think about. It’s arguably as consequential, if not more so, than the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example. And that’s something that we take for granted that it just collapsed, but it wasn’t it wasn’t taken for granted up until the second it did.
A lot of things are happening, and this can have some kind of domino effect. Who the fuck knows? The trends in the Arab world towards both normalization of Israel and also normalization of the Assad regime, normalization of a shitty state of affairs, and We’re fine with it, we’re going to profit off of it. I find it fascinating in a purely intellectual way, and depressing in a moral way, that they’re happening at the same time.
It’s so incredible that people are happy that Syria is going to be welcomed back into the Arab League. Who are these states welcoming it back? Many of the most powerful ones are also the same ones who have normalized with Israel recently. And Saudi Arabia will just do it at some point. It’s like, who is doing the talking here? Who are we even? How are we still pretending that there is an “our side” here
in terms of the big states?
I don’t understand this. I am generally as invested in dismantling, or the very least significantly reforming, the Arab League, as I am thinking about the state of Israel, the state of fucking Syria. I’m at this stage right now where I’ve seen all of these experiments reach a sort of natural end. Maybe that’s too optimistic, I don’t know. I’m trying to think of a thing that we can build in the future that doesn’t rely on the same mistakes that were caused in the past.
This is a super vague and vaguely optimistic take on this. But anyway, I’ve been reading Timothy Snyder, because he has a very good way of talking about Eastern Europe. That’s his specialty, especially Ukraine. He’s someone who has reframed Ukraine for me in a way to understand why it is so central. What is it about that country that most Europeans who are not directly impacted by it, who never really thought about it before the full scale invasion—why is it so significant? Why were both Hitler and Stalin so obsessed with Ukraine? Why is Putin still obsessed with it? What is it about that place that’s so obsession worthy?
Poland used to occupy that space as well, up until the Second World War, and even after. And today it’s just Ukraine when it comes to Europe. There’s something very interesting happening there, in addition to something very horrifying happening there. Snyder has an interesting way of framing it that has helped me, so I’ve been reading The Road to Unfreedom. I’ve read Bloodlands, which is a one of the most difficult books I’ve read on the Holocaust.
If you have anything that you’re reading, feel free to share.
DK: Just off the top of my head, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance After Communism by Jelena Subotić. And then Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices by Ella Shohat. It’s an older book, but still has sections that are very useful. That is relevant to the discussions we were having, and interesting perspectives from an Arab Jewish perspective, as well as how memory works and how memory is weaponized in Europe.
EA: I should also mention the book, The Holocaust and the Nakba. It’s a very interesting series of essays. The essays are very different from one to the other. It’s very interesting to use as points of departure, to do different explorations for those who are interested in that kind of thing.
There’s a book that I haven’t read yet called Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War. How were both the “War of Independence” and the Nakba reflected in the literature of the time? I don’t even know if I can recommend it. I have not read it yet, folks, so do not sue me if you do not like it. I will read it at some point.
With that in mind, Dana, thanks a lot for this. As always, this was an interesting and fascinating chat.
DK: Thank you. Take care, man.
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