‘Ailabun: The Prominence of Local, Religious, and Communal Identities

The massacre of October 1948 made the ‘Ailabun municipality one of the few that accepted the FUC's call to build a memorial monument for the Nakba victims. The charismatic mayor, Dr. Hanna Sweid, considered a new monument an opportunity to strengthen the ties between the Christian and Bedouin segments of the village by including names of all the victims on one site. Presumably, the upcoming local elections and the traditional role of Bedouin votes as their deciding factor helped spur his support of the monument.

At this point, some explanation regarding the Bedouin victims is necessary. Immediately after their deaths their bodies were buried in a cave adjacent to where they were killed. In the 1950s, the Israeli National Water Project was dug through the cave and the Mawassi people took the bones to another cave. During the 1980s, presumably influenced by the monument built to the Christian victims, the bones were moved to a common grave in the small Muslim cemetery in ‘Ailabun. A tombstone was erected that records only the date of the deaths.

The tomb of an IDF soldier from the Mawassi tribe, located several feet from this grave, is a sharp reminder of the severance of the northern Bedouins from the Palestinian national narrative. Military service in the IDF is common among ‘Ailabun's Bedouin residents, as it is among other northern Bedouin communities. The IDF is one of the rare channels of employment for Israel's Bedouins, the country's least-educated Arab population. Their distance from the mainstream Palestinian narrative is even more pronounced than that of their Christian neighbors. Thus, even though the victims' families cooperated with the municipalities in building the monument, only a handful of the Bedouin residents showed real interest in it.Footnote ³⁰

The 1998 monument was actually a reshaped brick wall near an old church where the IDF soldiers had executed some of the victims. Copper tablets bearing the victims’ names were installed on the wall. A few spotlights under the wall were supposed to illuminate it at night.

The monument was unveiled on 30 October 1998 in a ceremony commemorating the massacre's fiftieth anniversary, which included a speech by Mayor Sweid. He emphasized both the cross-communal solidarity in ‘Ailabun and the bond of the village with the Palestinian people: “In this project, we share the 50th memorial day of the Nakba with our Palestinian people, and by building the monument we confirmed the unity of ‘Ailabun.”Footnote ³¹ The monument's life was short and miserable. The martyrs’ names gradually disappeared and less than five years after its unveiling the monument looked like just another wall. Above it was built the new ground floor of a private Christian-owned home (Figure 2). When I visited the town in December 2006 I asked the home's owner about the monument which had once stood there. He answered bluntly: “We are Christians here. They put here names of Bedouins. Nobody wanted it so some children came and removed it. We don't want Bedouins here. Fuck them! Next thing they will start to pray here and will ask to build a mosque here.” The Bedouin residents with whom I discussed the issue were unaware the monument had been virtually effaced, since they rarely visited that area of the village. In any case, they did not seem to care.

Figure 2

What remained in July 2003 of the monument built in 1998 for the Nakba's victims in ‘Ailabun. Author's photo.

The case of ‘Ailabun sharply illustrates the gap between a political leadership which strives to promote a Palestinian nationalist discourse and the wider social circles which have no enthusiasm for it. The mayor intended to nurture a cross-communal local pride in ‘Ailabun, and this localism was supposed to be interwoven in the Palestinian national narrative. This plan was incompatible with aspirations of significant segments of the Christian population. As evidenced by Srour's book, a nurtured local identification can replace Palestinian national identity rather than enhance it. In addition, unlike the destroyed 1998 joint monument, the Christian monument from 1983 is still in good shape. It has a clear local and religious character that people do not identify with the Palestinian Nakba and it is not oriented toward the construction of a unified Palestinian identity common to Christians and Bedouin.

Shefa'amr: The Battle over the Monument

The first Arab municipality to decide to establish a Nakba memorial monument was the Muslim-Christian-Druze town of Shefa'amr. On 1 April 1998, the municipal council decided to build a monument in a traffic circle to commemorate the town's victims of the 1948 war. This was also a municipal election year. The town mayor was Abu Hatem (Ibrahim Nimer Hussein), who had ruled since 1969 and had served as the FUC chair since its establishment in 1982. Since 1983 Abu Hatem had led a coalition with members from all three religious communities (Al-Haj Reference Al-Haj1987: 76), but he faced growing dissatisfaction among Christians, who felt excluded from most positions of power.Footnote ³² He assumed (mistakenly, as it turned out) that the monument would improve his deteriorating political fortunes.Footnote ³³ The municipality and the NCS published a call for Shefa'amr inhabitants to assist the project by collecting the names of victims from Shefa'amr and the neighboring villages Hawsha and Khirbat al-Kasayir, destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948.Footnote ³⁴

By July 1998, the monument had been erected, consisting of a vertical marble tablet with copper embossments of people wearing traditional Palestinian peasant clothing. A second marble tablet angled at the base of the main tablet bore the victims’ names. However, the monument was never even officially unveiled. In the elections, Shefa'amr's residents, fed up with Abu Hatem's three-decade-long authoritarian rule, overthrew him and elected by default the other main candidate, his son-in-law ‘Orsan Yasin. Although the ruling right-wing Zionist Likud party unofficially supported Yasin, his election reflected not an ideological shift but rather communal and familial struggles of interests. Although Muslim, like Abu Hatem, he enjoyed disproportionate support from the Christians, who found in him a suitable means for overthrowing his father-in-law.Footnote ³⁵

After Yasin's election, his pro-Zionist line was further emphasized. It became clear that he represented the view that in order to be considered good citizens, Arabs in Israel should refrain from identifying themselves as Palestinians and should distance themselves from a Palestinian national narrative. While this perception is common among Arabs in Israel, Yasin's formulation was extreme. His aspirations to gain greater resources from the government for his city were articulated in a cynical strategy that included hanging Israeli flags near the municipality far beyond what is required by the law, making pro-Zionist declarations in the media, and actively opposing strikes organized by the FUC.Footnote ³⁶

His main step in this context was to reshape the Nakba monument such that its commemorative national aspects would disappear. Under the (unnecessary) protection of the Israeli police, the main marble tablet was plastered over and decorated with embossments of flowers and a turret-like structure was attached to it. The small square around the monument was turned into a pool with fountains in such a way that water covered the victims’ names. Later, Yasin sarcastically explained his decision to a reporter from the Hebrew newspaper, Ha'aretz: “What do they want? That I allow an ugly tomb in front of the municipality? I made a renovation, so everyone feels good under the water.” In the same interview, he explained his instrumental political philosophy: “I had enough of the extremists. We, the moderates, will overpower them. I expect that the Prime Minister will support the moderate Arabs more significantly.”Footnote ³⁷

Feeble protests by the monument's supporters, mainly members of the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE)Footnote ³⁸ and the National Democratic Assembly (NDA),Footnote ³⁹ were ineffective, and by the following summer the site had become an unofficial bathing pool for the town's children. Later the water was removed for safety reasons and the empty pool became an improvised garbage dump (Figure 3). In the local election held in October 2003, Yasin's opponents attempted to use the monument's reshaping in their campaign, but in vain: his victory was clear cut with more than 65 percent of the votes. Once more, the communal division played an important role as Yasin received disproportionate support among the Christians and Druze.

Figure 3

The monument to commemorate Shefa'amr's victims of the Nakba, built in July 1998 and modified in March 1999. The picture was taken by the author in summer, 2003.

It seems that, beyond Yasin's political motivations, the transformation of the commemorative monument into a water playground or garbage dump was enabled by its feeble status among the residents. Shefa'amr's residents did not do all they could, to say the least, to defend the monument. Judging by the unassertive opposition to Yasin's actions, it is possible that this indifference reflected opposition to the former mayor who built the monument. It is more likely, however, that only a minority had adopted the FUC's view regarding the national importance of a memorial monument. ‘Abed ‘Anbetawi, the FUC secretary and a former member of the Shefa'amr municipality, who tried to organize opposition to the monument's destruction, told me: “We felt alone in the battle.” In his view, this had something to do with the collective character of Shefa'amr: “We did not have a militant opposition. The public in Shefa'amr is different from the public in Sakhnin or Umm el-Fahem. It is not a city where the nationalist atmosphere reigns.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Anbetawi's complaints are clearly borne out in Ibrahim's study (Reference Ibrahim2000), which ascribes the primacy of religious allegiances over Arab-Palestinian identification in Shefa'amr to the successful ‘divide and rule’ policies of Israeli authorities.

In my visit to Shefa'amr in December 2006, I found the monument covered with commercial ads, signifying the complete failure of the attempts to construct it as a commemorative site. I asked some local residents what they knew about this monument. H., a fifty-year-old man active in the local Christian Scouts club, located 100 yards from the monument, told me: “There was a monument here for those who died a long time ago—but we should move forward, go ahead. The world is changing, people progress. There is pain, but it was a long time ago—who needs that?” Later, when several scouts and guides assembled around us, I asked them if anyone knew why the monument was built. Everyone said that they had no idea, except for M., a twenty-four-year-old student at Haifa University, who said confidently that the monument was built to commemorate the victims of October 2000, and was later distorted. Although misinformed about the monument's history, M. thought there was a need for this kind of monument, since, “Every group in society should be able to express its identity.” When I insisted that nobody had seriously resisted its distortion, he replied: “People are afraid. Although we seemingly live in a democracy, people's minds are still shaped by many years of surveillance and they prefer not to get into troubles. For example, if someone is employed by a Jewish employer he doesn't want to annoy the boss, so he distances himself from political issues.”

In August 2005, an IDF deserter killed four Shefa'amr residents in a calculated attempt to prevent the withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip. Immediately after, two members of the local council demanded that a memorial monument be established to commemorate the victims.Footnote ⁴¹ This time, eager to satisfy the angry Arab public and prevent the recurrence of October 2000 events, the state authorities even participated in financing a monument. However, Mayor Yassin and the victims' families disagreed about the text that should be inscribed on it. The families, supported by the NDA municipal representative, wanted to contextualize the commemoration in the political struggle, whereas the mayor insisted on a personal and apolitical framing.Footnote ⁴² At the end of 2006, the monument was still only half-built, with no text. Only time will tell what the broader implications of the events of summer 2005 will be on how the Nakba is remembered in Shefa'amr.

Kafr Kana: The Successful Monument

Of the three monuments built following the FUC's call, only that at Kafr Kana has survived. It was unveiled in September 2000 a few days before the eruption of the al-Aqsa Intifada. The Kafr Kana municipality, headed by the secular NDA party, decided to build the monument at the main entrance of the village near the new mosque. Since its foundation, it has functioned as a gathering point for events with national significance: Land Day ceremonies, ceremonies to memorialize the events of October 2000, and political demonstrations like that held against the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The monument was built as a round plaza with a wall on its eastern side and a stone column in its center. The martyrs' names are listed on the wall. Although the secular-dominated municipality promoted the monument, the power of political Islam in Kafr Kana in 2000 was evident in its structure and content. Human figures are absent, and although two of the dead are Christians the list of names is headed by the BismAllah Islamic opening and the most famous Qur'anic verse on martyrs: “And reckon not those who are killed for Allah's way as dead; nay, they are alive… .”

Although the original intention of the FUC was to commemorate the Nakba, the monument in Kafr Kana commemorates all the martyrs of Kafr Kana since 1936. Hence, instead of taking part in constituting national memory through a common supra-local experience, Kafr Kana's municipality chose to emphasize the status of Kafr Kana in the Palestinian national experience by a multi-generational monument that binds together the dead from the rebellion of 1936–1939, the Nakba in 1948, and Land Day. After a local boy, Muhammad Khamaysi, was killed during the October 2000 event, his name was added to the list.

In this way, the monument in Kafr Kana became the first multi-generational memorial. It was preceded by a multi-generational exhibition of martyrs in Sakhnin that has been held every Land Day since 1999 (Sorek Reference Sorek2005) and by memorial books produced in several villages in the Galilee. This characteristic of the Kafr Kana monument is especially interesting since multi-generational commemorations are widespread in Israeli Jewish society. In Israel there are more than 300 such monuments, and they are particularly common in Jewish rural settlements where the proximity between the dead and the commemorators is high (Shamir Reference Shamir1996: 147–48). Indeed, like the ‘Ailabun monument's creator, the person who initiated the Kafr Kana monument, Mayor Wasil Taha, argues that he was inspired by Zionist memorial monuments.Footnote ⁴³

Following October 2000

During late September and early October 2000, with the beginning of the Palestinian uprising, the flames spread inside the 1967 Green Line and the country witnessed a wave of demonstrations, stone-throwing, blocked roads, and police gunfire against demonstrators. Inside Israel, the police killed thirteen Arab-Palestinians (twelve of them Israeli citizens); two of the victims were killed when a frenzied Jewish mob stormed down from Upper Nazareth and attacked the eastern neighborhood of Nazareth, after which the police intervened by opening fire against the Arabs.

The memorial monuments of the post-October 2000 period have little in common with one another. Most were built on the initiative of the municipalities, but some victims’ families initiated. Most of them project a religious Islamic tone, which is compatible with the growing importance of Islam as an element of Arab political identity in Israel, and with the Islamic spirit of the second Intifada. This tendency is expressed in the religious texts inscribed on the monument, the lack of human figures, and in figurative elements such as an iconic statue of the Dome of the Rock mosque. A monument built in the village of ‘Arabeh, by contrast, has a human sculpture in its center and no Qur'anic verses.Footnote ⁴⁴

In almost every locality, controversies regarding who should be commemorated preceded the building of a monument. Should it commemorate only the local victims of October 2000? Should it mention all the local victims in history? Or should it commemorate all thirteen Arab youngsters killed in Israel in October 2000? The victims’ families tended to prefer to contextualize their sons' deaths in the al-Aqsa Intifada together with the other Arab citizens killed in the same events, while municipalities tended to prefer the multi-generational local pattern highlighting the historical sacrifice made by their town or village. Some did adopt the multi-generational model of Kafr Kana, and seem to have used the commemoration of October's victims to compensate for the local ‘memory deficit.’ This was an opportunity to commemorate all the locality's dead from conflict-related events. One example is the monument built by the Kafr Manda municipality that mentions all local martyrs from 1936 through Hasan Bushnak, who died in October 2000. In contrast, a private memorial monument built by the Bushnak family at the junction where their son was killed refers to all thirteen martyrs of October 2000.

In Sakhnin it was decided after some controversy to commemorate the thirteen martyrs together, partly because Land Day martyrs already had their monument and the other dead from 1948 and 1936–1939 are commemorated by an annual memorial exhibition. The caution in Sakhnin was reflected in the gap between the height of the monument according to the initial plan, which might have reflected a spontaneous anger (105 feet) and its final height (less than 10 feet).Footnote ⁴⁵ The monument in ‘Arabeh commemorates all thirteen victims of October, as well as the village's victims since 1936, and other Palestinians killed in ‘Arabeh as part of the conflict. In Kafr Kana, the name of Muhamad Khamaysi was added to the central monument but the family also initiated a separate monument on the site of his killing dedicated to their son, “The martyr of the al-Aqsa Intifada.” Only in one locality, Umm al-Fahm, were the local victims of October 2000 commemorated alone.

The two patterns, the diachronic local commemoration and the synchronic supra-local commemoration, do not necessarily represent a deep ideological schism. Nevertheless, the fact that most of the monuments followed the synchronic supra-local pattern and mentioned the thirteen victims of October 2000 revealed the exceptional status of the Arabs in Israel as a ‘trapped minority,’ since this practice compresses the geographical space of the Palestinians in Israel into the monuments and marks them as belonging to one distinct destiny. Although during the same period, between 28 September and 8 October 2000, an additional sixty-four Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the monuments ignore them and mention only those Palestinians who were killed inside Israel. Even the familial monuments commemorating Hassan Bushnak in Kafr Manda, which refer to the victims as martyrs who died in the “Al-Aqsa” battle (indicating solidarity with the uprising of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip), mention only the thirteen ‘Israeli’ victims.

Identity Strategies as Caution Measures

The mobilization of local and communal allegiances is a strategy to cope with particular political circumstances. The idea that expressions of identity can be instrumentally deployed at the collective level as a political strategy is common in the study of social movements. These studies pay attention to the dialectic between the emphasis of differences from the majority versus similarities with the majority, with any specific location on this continuum reflecting different levels of organization and access to the polity (Bernstein Reference Bernstein1997). By commemorating Palestinian martyrs, the FUC leaders, who lack access to the polity, aspired to highlight differences in collective memories from the Jewish majority in order to pursue political self-empowerment. While this strategy fits the above-mentioned model, the mobilization of localism and communalism is a completely different type of ‘identity as strategy.’ These affiliations have been mobilized as cautious measures to deal with the state's opposition to Palestinian national commemoration and as counter-measures to the FUC strategy, which could have led to confrontation with the state and the Jewish majority. In the terms of Rogers Brubaker (Reference Brubaker2004: 13), social categories such as “Christians in ‘Ailabun” or “Bedouin” were transformed into groups in a way that diminished the “groupness” of the category “Palestinians” and hindered the ‘group making’ project of this category. These communal allegiances, therefore, both explain the partial failure of the memorial monument project and, at the same time, their mobilization is a byproduct of the need to be cautious.

Cautious commemoration represents a wider set of strategies implemented by Arab-Palestinians in Israel. It is not a coincidence that the titles of books written about this population frequently reflect a quest for a delicate balance: Emil Habibi's famous novel The Pessoptimist, or Sleeping on a Wire, David Grossman's book about the Palestinians in Israel. The realm of memorial monuments, however, requires exceptional caution because of the particular sensitivity of the state and the Jewish majority to Palestinian commemoration. This high sensitivity can be explained by the implied responsibility that this commemoration conveys, and the questioning of the state's legitimacy inherent in this responsibility.

Regarding the first element, Israel is not unique in its sensitivity to minority martyrological commemorations that emphasize state responsibilities for atrocities against minority members. One relevant example is the French government's active repression of attempts to commemorate the massacre of Algerian demonstrators that took place in Paris in October 1961. In the years following the massacre, French police interrupted public commemorative events like the screening of an underground documentary movie which included related testimonies (Einaudi Reference Einaudi1991: 274). Therefore, stories of the massacre were first transmitted mainly through family memories and were gradually constructed as a “narrative of resistance” by the North African immigrants only from the late 1970s (House Reference House2001).

Even then, the massacre's memory was not spatially carved until October 1991 when the association “Au Nom de la Mémoire” established a memorial pillar at the Bezons bridge (Nordmann and Vidal Reference Nordmann, Vidal and Grandmaison2001). This pillar was later removed by the local authority of Val-d'Oise, which signified the ongoing refusal of the French state to recognize its responsibility for the crime (Einaudi Reference Einaudi2001: 14). Accordingly, not even one official lieu de mémoire (Nora Reference Nora1996) was dedicated to the victims until October 2001, when a memorial plaque was inaugurated by the municipality of Paris at one of the massacre's major sites (Jelen Reference Jelen2002). Though no representative of the French government attended the ceremony, this time the plaque was not removed. In Algeria, by contrast, martyrs of the Algerian independence war (1954–1962) are extensively commemorated by monuments, although ironically many of these are old French memorial monuments, appropriated and redesigned (Benslama Reference Benslama1995).

Nevertheless, some minority memorial monuments in Israel, like the Land Day monument in Sakhnin and the post-October 2000 memorials, did survive and gained public status as memorials. An interesting theoretical question is: under which circumstances do monuments become sites of national mobilization, or fail to do so?

One important factor is timing, or more precisely, the proximity of a triggering event that overrides caution. The Kafr Qassem massacre in 1956 was followed by a wave of political commemoration, which was intensive but still did not result in permanent occupation of the public space. Land Day in 1976 resulted in the first wave of memorial monuments, with three built over the next six years. The October 2000 events had the strongest effect: Between 1948 and September 2000, the Palestinians in Israel had established no more than eight memorial monuments for their dead, and two of them did not survive as memorials. But during the three years following the killing of the thirteen Palestinians inside Israel that October, ten monuments were built (Figure 4).Footnote ⁴⁶ In addition, the time elapsed between deaths and the foundation of memorial monuments shrunk to minimum. The dead of 1936 waited sixty-two years for a monument (when the names of a few were inscribed on the Kafr Kana monument); the dead of Kafr Qasim were commemorated after twenty years; the Land Day victims after two years; and it took only one year for the October 2000 victims to be monumentalized (Figure 5). Later, the decision to establish a monument to commemorate the victims of the August 2005 Shefa'amr attack was made days after the event.

Figure 4

Accumulative frequency of monuments for martyrs built by Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Figure 5

Time difference between the event and the establishment of the first monument to commemorate it.

This quantitative transformation indicates two processes: first, the memorial monument has been gradually added to the cultural “tool kit” of the Palestinians in Israel. Second, and more important, is the shocking effect of October 2000. Yiftachel (Reference Yiftachel, Ben-Ami, Peled and Spectorowski2000) and Robinson (Reference Robinson, Makdisi and Silverstein2006) show that commemoration among Arabs in Israel is also an important form of political protest. This protest, as I have shown in several examples, was restrained not only directly by the state but also by self-imposed barriers, and many of the latter were removed by the political earthquake of that October. The unbearable ease with which demonstrators were killed and the indifferent reaction of the frightened Jewish public to the police brutality invoked popular frustration and a growing awareness of the fragility of the civil and political rights of Arabs in Israel.

Suddenly, the risk taken by nationalizing public space seemed less frightening. In the past, people were hesitant to establish monuments because they feared the Jewish majority might perceive them as a threat, but after 2000, monuments became a necessary form of protest because they were considered defiant. October 2000 accelerated the crystallization of distinct versions of Palestinian national consciousness and reduced the gap between intellectuals and the wider public concerning this issue. One expression of this process was a growing popular recognition of a standard set of symbols of national identity, which includes carving the memory of national martyrs into the public space. Significantly, there is no central monument—every municipality commemorated its own martyrs, while a few monuments mentioned also the other twelve dead. Nevertheless, the post-October 2000 monuments are clear examples of parallel productions of local and national pride.

The killings of October 2000 intersected with the growing recognition among the intellectual elites of the political role of collective memory. The adoption of the monument form is related to an increasing realization that writing history is a political practice, and that the production of specific lieux de mémoire controlled by the minority can be a potent strategy for pursuing its struggle. This recognition has been expressed in a proliferation of historical writings by Palestinians in Israel since the early 1990s, and in the establishment of a research institute in Haifa (Mada al-Carmel—The Arab Center for Applied Social Research) that dedicates special attention to historical research aimed at constructing a Palestinian historical narrative.Footnote ⁴⁷ Especially since 1998, books, studies, and press articles about the expulsion and destruction have mushroomed. People have commemorated Nakba day, 15 May, with public rallies and organized pilgrimages to the ruined villages. They have also exhibited a readiness to initiate political struggles to preserve historical Palestinian sites.Footnote ⁴⁸

A second major common feature that distinguishes the successful monuments is that they were built in towns that had post-1948 martyrs, and the monuments are not dedicated exclusively to 1948. The monuments in Kafr Qasim (for the massacre of 1956), Sakhnin (for Land Day and October 2000), and in ‘Arabeh and Kafr Kana (for all local martyrs) still stand and even serve as gathering points for commemorative ceremonies. Nonetheless, some self-censorship continues. Most municipalities have not adopted the FUC initiative to establish “Nakba memorials,” and the two monuments built especially for the victims of the Nakba no longer exist. The extreme case is that of ‘Ailabun, where the ‘national’ memorial for the victims of 1948 was effaced within a few years, while the ‘religious’ monument is respected and remains in good shape. As mentioned earlier, the Nakba commemoration project has been successful in some realms. Therefore, the failure of the Nakba monuments stands in contrast to both memorial monuments for other events and other forms of the Nakba's commemoration.

I suggest that many Palestinians are more cautious about commemorating Nakba, especially by spatially carving its memory in their own backyards, because Jewish Israelis are particularly sensitive to the event's memory. Unlike the other events I have discussed, since 2000 only commemorations of the Nakba have continued to evoke tangible threats by Israeli authorities. In 2001, for example, the Minister of National Infrastructure, Avigdor Liberman, instructed the ministry's functionaries to avoid any contact with public figures who participated in Nakba commemorations.Footnote ⁴⁹

This sensitivity is related to the fact that commemorating the Nakba puts in question the legitimacy of the state's existence. Most Jewish Israelis remembered the 1948 war as “the war of independence,” as a constitutive redemptive moment. They commemorate it as a heroic defensive fight of a small and poorly armed community who, with their backs against the wall, defeated seven Arab armies against all odds. The remembrance of the expulsion, however, “continues to hover in the twilight zone between the conscious and unconscious, between repression and recognition” (Shapira Reference Shapira2000). Commemorating the Nakba interferes with this present/absent status. It is a reminder that it was not just the ‘the war’ that established the Jewish state; only the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians enabled the creation of a stable Jewish majority. Those who mourn this same event can be interpreted as questioning the legitimacy of state sovereignty. In this regard, Walid Sadek, an Arab Member of Parliament of the Zionist liberal Meretz party, said that while he did not oppose commemorating the Nakba, he was concerned about the “timing,” referring to the implicit linkage between such commemorations and the fiftieth anniversary of Israel's independence.Footnote ⁵⁰

This Israeli sensitivity to the Nakba commemorations is similar to that of the Turkish state to commemorations of the Armenian genocide. There is still a tiny Armenian minority in Turkey (about 70,000 people), but of about 140 memorial monuments built in twenty-five countries to commemorate the Armenian genocide, not one is found in Turkey.Footnote ⁵¹ In both Israel and Turkey the authorities deny the state's responsibility for the collective tragedy of the minority. In both cases, as well, this denial is fundamental to the legitimacy of the state. The expulsion of the Palestinians was necessary for the establishment of a Jewish state, and the elimination of ethno-religious minorities was necessary for the establishment of a relatively homogenous ethnic Turkish nation-state (Akcam Reference Akcam2004: 150). Israeli sensitivity, however, has another crucial element that does not exist in Turkey—the anxiety of reversibility. The commemoration of the Nakba is related to the most sensitive controversy over the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, and Zionists consider that to recognize this right would mean the end of the Jewish state.

Finally, the caution of Palestinians is linked to the medium of the martyrological monument itself. Commemoration of the fallen soldier and other conflict-related dead is central to Israeli national identity (Shamir Reference Shamir1996), and Israel likely has the world's highest ratio of monuments per victim (Segev Reference Segev1990). Jews have built most of them to commemorate their victims in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since Israeli Jews utilize monuments as objects that legitimize and validate Israeli sovereignty (Handelman and Shamgar Handelman 1997), and as the ultimate spatial representation of patriotism, the use of monuments by Palestinians to commemorate their victims is deemed threatening, and the authorities react accordingly.

The intellectual elite who promoted the commemoration project were partly motivated by a desire to question the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Among wider circles of citizens, however, this same questioning played an inhibiting role, since they feared there would be negative repercussions for their rights. Significantly, even in those contexts where Palestinian belonging is emphasized, it is done simultaneously with a reminder of the Israeli citizenship of the victims: The identity of those commemorated in Palestinian monuments in Israel draws the geographical boundaries of a national minority. This minority is consistent in distinguishing itself not only from the Jewish majority of society but also in maintaining its distinct identity within the Palestinian collectivity. This pattern is common to all monumental commemorations of Arabs in Israel, which have never referred to Palestinians killed beyond Israel's borders. The significance of this phenomenon is two-fold. First, the culture of martyrological commemoration among Palestinians in Israel is connected to the emergence of an ethno-regional identity with strong affinity to the Palestinian struggle outside Israel but with distinct characteristics and agendas. This emergence can be traced back to the annual Land Day commemoration (Yiftachel Reference Yiftachel, Ben-Ami, Peled and Spectorowski2000), and it gained further momentum after October 2000.

Second, Palestinian commemoration inside Israel is part of a dialogue between the Arab minority and the Jewish majority. Muhammad ‘Ali Taha, the Nakba and Steadfastness Committee chair, unambiguously stated that the Nakba commemoration project aimed to target both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli audiences.Footnote ⁵² In light of the importance given to memorial monuments within the Zionist ethos, monument building is considered a means of communication that Israeli Jews might understand. A former mayor of one of the towns where a monument was built to commemorate a local martyr told me explicitly that he sees it as a message to the Israeli authorities: “Look what you have done, you cannot escape from responsibility.”Footnote ⁵³ While Israel denies its responsibility for Palestinian suffering, when the victims are Israeli citizens, the denial becomes more complicated, since it contradicts both Israel's claim to sovereignty and its aspiration of being considered a liberal democracy.