The story of the Nakba—the expulsion and dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians, and the destruction of more than 400 villages, by the Zionist movement and then Israel from 1947-1949—has been well-documented by Palestinian as well as Israeli and other international sources. However, not only in Israel but also in the United States and within the American Jewish community, the story of the Nakba is often disregarded or ignored, focusing, instead, on the creation of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, without acknowledging the dispossession of the Palestinian people that began prior to and with the founding of the State.
We created the “Facing the Nakba” (FTN) curriculum specifically to engage with U.S. Jews, as well as a general U.S. audience, about the foundational event of what the state of Israel calls the War of Independence and what Palestinians call the Nakba (Catastrophe).
Since 2002, the Israeli organization Zochrot (“remembering” in Hebrew) has attempted to deepen Jewish Israelis’ understanding of the events that took place in the period before, during, and after the creation of the State of Israel and “to promote acknowledgment and accountability for the ongoing injustices of the Nakba.” After a group of New York City activists attended a moving presentation by a staff member of Zochrot who came to the United States, several of us continued to meet to discuss how we could bring some of this important work to U.S. Jewish communities.
Inspired by Zochrot’s work and that of the Palestinian organization, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, we—a group of five Jewish women, all of whom are educators in the United States—decided to come together to develop “Facing the Nakba” (FTN). Some of us had grown up learning about Israel as a “land without a people” and were immersed throughout our childhood and early adult lives in a Zionist narrative without ever having heard about the Nakba. As we began to challenge and explore our own views and become part of movements for justice in Palestine and Israel, we recognized how critical learning about the Nakba was for our own political development and for understanding more about the consequences of Zionism on the Palestinian people. We also thought that this work would be meaningful for many activists and organizers within the organizations we were part of—Jewish groups committed to justice for Palestinians. We spent the next years creating a curriculum that we hoped others in our communities would be able to draw upon to facilitate workshops and classes.
Through videos, slides, first-hand testimonies, historical documents, readings, discussions, and exercises, the FTN curriculum offers an historical lens for understanding the root causes of the call for justice for the Palestinian people. We believe that understanding the history that has led to today’s reality is important not only for historical accuracy but for what it means for our own organizing and for the road to achieving justice.
We originally designed the FTN curriculum for Jewish groups and individuals interested in exploring and perhaps rethinking their positions on Israel and Palestine, many of which they learned, like some of us on the coordinating team, while growing up and studying in Jewish educational settings. In many cases, for those who are Jewish, it means unlearning and re-examining many of the stories we were told about Zionism and about the creation of Israel. But, soon after we created the resources, it became apparent that many who weren’t Jewish but who had been raised in the United States were subject to the same gaps in education about Israel and Zionism and so it became clear to us that the curriculum and resources could be relevant for those outside Jewish communities as well.
The curriculum can also easily be adapted for more formal classroom use or for after-school workshops or other forms of community education. The variety of materials and exercises are designed to maximize many different forms and styles of participation, from adult education and synagogue classes to workshops in high schools and on college campuses.
The “Facing the Nakba” curriculum is particularly relevant for those studying what is happening in the Middle East; U.S. foreign policy; Jewish history and Zionism; Palestinian history; the relationships between Islamophobia and Israel politics; settler colonialism; and/or indigenous struggles. It challenges narratives that are part of dominant discourse and ideology in the United States and requires a deeply critical, reflective process of learning and engagement.
As Jews living in the United States and working on this project to bring the FTN curriculum deep within our communities and to hold ourselves accountable for making the Nakba visible, we wanted to be sure at all times to honor and draw upon the extensive work on the Nakba that has been done by Palestinians, whose lives and communities have been directly impacted by the Nakba until this day. Therefore, our resources and materials are heavily drawn from first-hand accounts and histories shared by Palestinians. We also received critical feedback from Palestinian educators and historians with whom we shared our curriculum as it was being developed.
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The curriculum: an overview
The “Facing the Nakba” curriculum, which has seven sessions, begins with an exploration of participants’ personal relationships to the Nakba and presents an historical overview of the events of 1947-1948. It includes testimonies through videos from Israeli Jews and from Palestinians who lived through the Nakba and addresses the question of how we interact with such personal testimonies. It considers how the Nakba impacts Palestinian life today, including in the Palestinian diaspora, and looks at issues related to Palestinian refugees, international law, and the right of return. Each of the sessions is an hour and a half to two hours in length.
The seven sessions include the following themes: Session 1: Introductory Session; Session 2: Encountering the Nakba; Session 3: The Nakba in History; Session 4: Testimony; Session 5: In the Archives; Session 6: The Right of Return; and Session 7: Art and Resistance.
The FTN website describes the seven sessions, their objectives, and methodology.
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Encountering the Nakba: Sample Slides from the Curriculum
Slide 1: What is the Nakba? “Nakba” is an Arabic word that means “great disaster” or “catastrophe.” On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved a plan to partition Mandate Palestine between Jews and Palestinian Arabs to follow the end of the British Mandate on May 14, 1948.
Approximately 750,000 Palestinians were ejected or fled from some 450 villages inside the areas that became the State of Israel. The war’s end found less than half of the Palestinians in their original homes—fewer than 150,000 in Israel, some 400,000 in the West Bank, and 60,000 in the Gaza Strip, with many more constituting a new diaspora. ● Palestinians commemorate the Nakba on May 15, the day after the anniversary of Israel’s Independence Day.
In this slide, for example, we see a 1943 photo of the tents and buildings in an early Zionist settlement, Kvutzat Yavne. The intention of the founders was to make the area near ancient Yavne the site of a religious kibbutz and a yeshiva. What we don’t see in the photo is the nearby Arab village of Yibna. The country is typically portrayed as one that was clean, empty—a land without people for a people without a land—while, in fact, a substantial Palestinian society existed here living a rich life. You can see Yibna in the map below, part of a 1941 map of Palestine. In the late nineteenth century, a visitor described Yibna as a large village partly built of stone and situated on a hill. In 1944-45 there were 5,420 villagers living in Yibna and 1,500 nomads living on its outskirts. The map on the top left, prepared by the “Religious Kibbutz Fund” (1946), shows other Jewish localities in the Yavne area. Between 1948 and 1955, five other Jewish villages were founded on Yibna’s land. The photo on the bottom left is from 1991 and it shows what remains of Yibna’s mosque.
Slide 2: Much of Israel bears traces of the Nakba, even if people aren’t aware of them. These pictures testify to the ways in which Palestinian life has been erased. This slide shows a postcard of vacationers on the beach at Achziv Park; those ruins in the background are the remains of the village of AlZeeb. AlZeeb was captured by the Haganah’s Carmel Brigade prior to the engagement of armies from other Arab countries in the 1948 War on May 14, 1948, as part of the same operation that resulted in the capture of the city of Akka (now Acre).
Slide 3: According to then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan: “Jewish localities were established in place of Arab villages. You don’t even know the names of those Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, because those geography texts no longer exist. Not only the books are gone; the Arab villages are gone: Nahalal in place of Ma’lul; Kibbutz Gvat in place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in place of Huneifis; Kfar Yehoshua in place of Tal Al- Shuman. Wherever Jews built, they built on land where Arabs once lived.” (In fact, the maps and texts do exist in various archives and collections, though often hidden from public view.)
Palestinian place names were often echoed in the new names Israel gave the localities (for example: Baysan – Beit Shean; Yaffa – Yafo; Bir alSaba – Beersheva; Yajur – Yagur; Ayn Hawd – Ein Hod). People in Jerusalem still call some neighborhoods by their Arab names despite the fact they had been renamed into Hebrew. For example: Talbieh (“Komemiut” in Hebrew); Katamon (“Gonen”); al-Maliha (“Manahat”). Most Israelis don’t know that they’re calling these neighborhoods by their Palestinian names.
Slide 4: In these next few slides, you can see the physical replacement of the old Palestinian villages and cities with the new.
Slide 4 shows: Saffuriyya – Zipori, Slide 5. AlMusrara – Morasha, Slide 6. Ayn Karim – Ein Karem, Slide 7.Al- Lydd – Lod. After the slide show, ten images are displayed as part of a Museum Gallery with a series of notes and reflection questions printed below each picture. The pictures show structures and places that were Palestinian and are now Israeli and Jewish, giving the participants an opportunity to tangibly see and get a feel for what the dispossession has actually looked like and what the impact of it has been. Participants walk through the gallery with a series of questions to explore the meaning of the images they are encountering.
Throughout this and other sessions, we create the space and time for taking in and reflecting upon the materials and images being presented.
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Conclusion
The Facing the Nakba curriculum tells the story of the Nakba and of the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homes and land. We wanted to create an accountable, accessible curriculum for educators, organizers, and communities to draw upon in their classrooms and educational settings.
This curriculum speaks to our conviction that making visible the injustices of the Nakba, both past and ongoing, is necessary to achieving justice. Not incidentally, it speaks also to current organizing, including the Palestinians’ call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), which has as one of its commitments the right of return for Palestinian refugees. And it also speaks to the implications and relationship of the Nakba and the call for Palestinian rights to other struggles for social justice within the United States and globally.
While the Nakba is fundamental to understanding the experiences and lived realities of Palestinians before, during, and since the creation of Israel, it has been suppressed and ignored in Israel’s narrative of national emergence. And that one-sided Israeli narrative is what is echoed by many Jewish communities and others within the United States. We hope that the FTN curriculum will enable participants to engage openly and deeply in a learning process that promotes honest reflection, analysis, and action toward justice.
The full curriculum and facilitator guide can be found at https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/facing-the-nakba/
Excerpted from, and originally published in, Radical Teacher. Note from the Radical Teacher editors: This piece is a combination of an article and annotated curriculum offered as a resource and model for flexible use by readers.
Donna Nevel is a community psychologist, organizer, and educator who is a member of the Facing the Nakba coordinating committee. The other members of the coordinating committee include Julia Kessler, Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark, Nava Et-Shalom, and Rabbi Alissa Wise.