The slopes of Mount Carmel:
My (Israeli) Nakba story of the 1948 fall of Haifa 1
Ronit Lentin
Department of Sociology
School of Social Sciences and Philosophy
Trinity College Dublin
rlentin@tcd.ie
Prologue
All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one
story in place of another story (Hélène Cixous, 1997: 178).
In April 1948 the Jewish militia, the Haganna, overcame the Palestinian
population of Haifa, bringing about the fall of Arab Haifa and the
decimation of its Palestinian community, in the course of the 1948 IsraeliPalestinian war, which the Israelis call their War of Independence, and the
Palestinians their Nakba, or catastrophe.
Like Carolyn Ellis (2004), who defines autoethnography as ‘writing
about the personal and its relationship to culture… an autobiographical
genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness’
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(p. 37), I refuse to apologise for foregrounding the personal or to try to
persuade sociologists that my writing is sociology. This paper combines my
story – a Jewish-Israeli woman born in Haifa, Palestine prior to the
establishment of the Israeli state, brought up in Israel and working and living
in Ireland – with the story of my father, Miki Salzberger, who was one of the
Jewish foot soldiers who conquered Haifa, set against the contested accounts
of the fall of Arab Haifa. More precisely, it is an autoethnographic account
of the consequences for me of my father’s involvement in the war of Haifa.
As Hélène Sixous (1997) would have it, this is a story about someone
else’s story, a story about memory, someone else’s memory, but also my
own memory and postmemory, received through fragments of nearly
forgotten fragments. Maurice Halbwachs (1992) reminds us that ‘it is in
society that people normally acquire their memories… [and] recall,
recognise, and localise their memories’ (p. 38). But as memory is always an
act of collaboration, hence co-memoration, this is the story of co-memory,
memory acquired not only ‘in society’, but also in conquest, constructed,
unlike history, in collaboration with the conquered other’s ‘another story’.
This is a story about Palestine – indelibly woven with the history of Israel –
co-memoration of victor and vanquished.
Father, an introduction
Of all his immigrant friends my father had been in the country the longest –
he migrated to Palestine in 1925 as a child of thirteen from Vienna, his
parents having moved there in 1915 from Gura Humorlui, a country town in
the northern Romanian province of Bucovina, then part of the AustroHungarian Empire, into which Jews were imported to form the commercial
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and cultural German-speaking elite. Of all his stories about the Vienna of his
childhood, I particularly liked the story about cheering Kaiser Franz Joseph,
whose gilded carriage and white horses he had never forgotten. Having
moved to Vienna at the age of three, he knew little about his Bucovina
birthplace. The only thing he, or someone else, told us, his three children,
was that his mother had him late, embarrassed at becoming pregnant at 45. A
sickly baby, he was named Michael after the angel. What a start, life as a
mistake…
In 1925 Michael-Miki and his parents were brought to Jerusalem by
his brothers – 20 and 24 years his elders. His father Jacob Salzberger was a
luft mensch,2 married off to Bertha Shapira, the daughter of a wealthy
family, because he was said to be scholarly. He turned out to be neither
scholarly, nor a businessman. He managed to somehow send his oldest son
to medical school, but his second son, like him, was a dreamer and a
schemer.
The Salzberger family history demonstrates how biographies often tell
larger social stories, raising public questions in their social, economic and
political organisation (Back, 2007: 23). Miki’s oldest brother, Motti, an ear
nose and throat specialist, who was often called to fish out bones from
Jewish throats on Friday nights, became a respected Jerusalem physician,
with many wealthy Jerusalem Palestinians among his patients. Motti married
Vera, a beautiful Jewish Russian revolutionary, but he left her for another
woman; after his death, his second widow married one of his wealthy
Palestinian patients and his children met their Palestinian half brothers and
sisters only after East Jerusalem was occupied by Israel in 1967.
Miki’s was a typical immigrant Jewish boyhood in Jerusalem,
Palestine. He studied at the best Jewish secondary school, where he was
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mocked for his foreign accent, yet worked hard at passing for a sabra 3 and
resemble his school friends – most of them also children of recent
immigrants. I look at his early photographs and see a dark eyed, European
boy in a sailor suit (see figure 2), so different from the ideal type rougher,
barefoot Israeli children of the time. But Miki loved to speak about being
amongst the founders of Hamachanot Haolim youth movement, constructing
a nativist sabra auto/biography from what was an immigrant childhood
(Lentin, 2000). But then everyone was an immigrant – apart, that was, from
the local Palestinians.
Miki’s Jerusalem childhood had always seemed magical to me,
invoking a longing for Palestinian East Jerusalem, the city beyond the wall
which I got to know only after the 1967 occupation when it became possible
for Israelis to visit the Old City. But Miki did not stay in Jerusalem. Having
studied engineering in Prague, he worked for the British state oil company in
Iraq and then found a job in Haifa, where he met my mother Lia Schieber,
the daughter of a wealthy timber merchant from Bucovina. Lia got a job
with the British airforce in Haifa, rented a room from Miki’s brother’s
family, and so Haifa became my accidental birthplace.
Identity and co-memory
I am currently researching the co-memoration and appropriation of the 1948
Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe. The Israeli Jewish intellectual network
Zochrot 4 focuses on the Nakba in Hebrew, not merely in relation to taking
responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (Pappe, 2006), but also to
its members’ Israeli-Jewish identity.
4
Though I agree with Zochrot that taking responsibility for the Nakba
is crucial to being a Jewish Israeli (even though very few Israelis
acknowledge this responsibility), I am determined to remember that this is
not the main part of the story. Elsewhere I document Zochrot’s activities
which include a focus on the testimonies of Palestinian refugees (Lentin
2007; 2008). However, while using victims’ testimonies offers the Israeli comemorators of the Nakba a certain feel good factor, my premise in this paper
is that the testimonies of Israeli perpetrators are much harder to collect.
Since the 1980s, the work of so-called Israeli ‘new historians’ (e.g., Flapan,
1987; Morris, 1987, 1994, 2000, 2002, 2004; Pappe, 1988, 2006) began
mining Zionist and Israeli state archives for accounts of the perpetrators’
acts. However, there has been little serious attempt to excavate the personal
stories of Jewish pre-state soldiers who carried out the expulsions,
expropriations, massacres, rapes and ethnic cleansing.
There are few exceptions. One is the Masters dissertation by Theodore
Katz in which he studied Israeli veterans’ testimonies of the massacre in the
Palestinian village of Tantura, which, however, provoked much acrimony
and a legal challenge (Katz, 1998; Esmeir, 2007). Another is Benny Morris’s
study of the diaries of Yosef Nachmani, one of the architects of Jewish
settler-colonialism in Palestine (Morris, 2000; Karpel, 2005). Nachmani’s
diaries in particular open a window on Zionist dualism, between Jewish
idealism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Having served in the
underground Jewish policing force Hashomer in the 1920s and 1930s,
Nachmani purchased arms for the pre-state militias and Palestinian lands for
Jewish settlers. Differentiating between ‘good Arabs’ and ‘bad Arabs’, he
believed in co-existence, albeit one based on Jewish domination and on the
transfer of Palestinians beyond the boundaries of the putative Jewish state.
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Nachmani’s diaries denote a deep moral consternation shedding light on the
dark side of the 1948 war, from the massacres and expulsions of innocent
villagers, to the looting and robbery which accompanied almost every
Jewish victory. Yet, according to Morris (2000), he omitted to mention ‘the
link between these events and his own actions, which, for decades, aimed at
the expropriation and expulsion – albeit legally and with financial
compensation – of the Palestinian villagers’ (p. 102).5
Nachmani’s story reveals Zionism’s Janus face: on the one hand a self
perceived morality, consideration, and compromise – wishing for ‘coexistence’ with the Palestinians on what both peoples call ‘the land’; and on
the other, a destructive, selfish and power-drunk racism – which, according
to Morris (2000), accord Zionism its ‘internal self righteous force… making
it unstoppable’ (p. 103). I read Nachmani’s biography as a prism through
which to co-memorate the Nakba, and link the story of the dispossessed
Palestinians with the perpetrators’ story, with particular emphasis on the
story of the 1948 war in Haifa and my father’s part in it.
This autoethnographic paper, which tells, as Cixous (1997) puts it,
one story in place of another story, is part of my attempt to find clues to
what led me to a lifetime of opposition to Israeli state policies. Most antiZionist Israeli Jews have their ‘road to Damascus’ tale, as to when the penny
dropped, usually in the wake of the 1967 war, or the 1982 Lebanon war.
This story is part of my rather longer Damascene realisation, which has to
start with the Haifa Nakba and my father’s part in it. However, accessing the
perpetrators’ testimonies remains fraught and, in father’s case, an impossible
task, since I never interviewed him before his untimely death at 62 in 1974,
my own age now. In Les Back’s (2007) book on sociology as the art of
listening he reminds us not only that ‘thinking, talking and describing is
6
always betrayal’, but also that ‘as a partner in thought, death may offer an
orientation to life itself’, citing Saul Bellow’s remark that ‘Death is the dark
backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything’ (p. 4). My father’s
premature death, but also the deaths of so many Palestinians, make writing
this paper necessary, though it is far from being an apologia. Rather, against
the background of the parallel narratives of the battle for Haifa, it is an
archaeology of the involvement of one reluctant perpetrator in the fall of
Haifa, and the consequences for his anti-Zionist exilic daughter.
Critical autoethnography is ‘located within a larger historical,
political, economic, social and symbolic context … Such writings often offer
a passionate, emotional voice of the positioned and explicitly judgmental
fieldworker’ (Van Maanen, 1995: 9-10, cited in Ifekwunigwe, 1999: 43).
However, I must constantly remind myself that in researching Palestine, as
in co-memorating the Nakba in Hebrew, the Palestinians often get erased,
their voices subsumed by the voice of the powerful coloniser. Israeli
autoethnographic accounts such as this one, while motivated by empathy and
solidarity, always involve a degree of appropriation which we are all guilty
of, because too often, in speaking about Palestine we speak about our own
subjectivity, our own politics, our own identity.
Haifa, Palestine
I am not sure why Haifa never felt like home. Perhaps, like the tortured, and
much loved, Israeli poet Leah Goldberg, I always felt there like a ‘wild
flower’, a ‘weed’, or, in my better moments, like ‘a tree in the darkness of
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the forest, chosen by the light to reflect upon’ (Goldberg, n.d 6). This foreign
feeling might have been due to the thick shadows cast by the Haifa Nakba,
but as soon as I could, I moved to Jerusalem, which I regard as my Israeli
home.
There is a gap between the Palestinian image of Haifa as a Nakba
symbol and the Israeli image of the city as a model of Arab-Jewish coexistence, an image that wilfully ignores the complete destruction of Haifa’s
old city and the erasure of its Ottoman past (Yazbak, 2007). In her study of
the Palestinian neighbourhood Wadi al Saleeb, destroyed during the 1948
war, resettled by North African Jewish immigrants and demolished in the
1970s (Weiss, 2007: 18), Yif’at Weiss suggests that the work of memory
needs to slow down the near-total erasure of Palestinian Haifa, so as to put
the mirror to its previous inhabitants, whose existence continues to cast a
long shadow on the city which became Jewish in one fell swoop. I want to
put the dark backing to the mirror of Haifa’s previous inhabitants, making
visible the contested histories of the city and its 1948 battle. Because of the
deep personal resonance the story of the fall of Haifa has for me, I am
inspired by Liz Stanley’s (1996) theorisation of ‘research as necessity’, and
Donna Harraway’s (1998) ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘embodied objectivity’,
both of which make the juxtaposition of contested narratives a vital
component of this story as it unfolds.
Though mostly agrarian, a third of pre-1948 Palestine’s Arab
population lived in cities. Manar Hassan (2005) critiques the erasure of the
Palestinian city from both Israeli and Palestinian collective memory,
resulting in ‘imagining Palestinian society as a rural society… (making it is
hard) to believe that historic Palestine, that is pre-Nakba Palestine, consisted
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of real cities’ (p. 197). 7 Haifa, situated on the Mediterranean Sea at the foot
of Mount Carmel, was the largest of these real Palestinian cities.
The Palestinian story tells of Haifa gradually developing from a
fishing village to a major seaport due to its strategic importance to both the
British who had a mandate to govern Palestine, and to the Zionists. Though
Haifa’s origins are ancient, the present day city dates to the late eighteenth
century when it was established by Zahir al-Umar, the strongman of
northern Palestine. Haifa was briefly conquered by Napoleon’s army in 1799
before coming under direct Ottoman rule in 1840. In 1869 German farmers
from the religious Templar Society settled in Haifa and in the 1880s, before
the onset of political Zionism, Jews began migrating from Europe. Haifa was
transformed by the period’s global economy – by World War I, Haifa
replaced Beirut as the main port serving northern Palestine, southern Syria
and Transjordan. The city’s development was accelerated during the British
mandate, as Haifa became the terminus of an oil pipeline extending from
Iraq, housing an oil refinery (www.palestineremembered.com).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were 4,000
Palestinians in Haifa, and between 1918 and 1944, the year of my birth,
Haifa’s population grew from 15,000 to 130,000, half Jewish and half
Palestinian, mostly Muslim but with a significant Christian minority (Goren,
2006). By the time I was born, most Jewish people lived in Hadar
HaCarmel, half way up the mountain, where my parents had their first
apartment, and on the mountain itself, where we moved as father’s business
improved. Most Palestinians, employed in British army bases, the oil
refineries, the port and railway services, lived downtown, with a significant
wealthy professional and business Palestinian elite, living on Mount Carmel.
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The Israeli story gives a different version of Haifa as a model of coexistence, a rich texture of nationalities and ethnicities living together in
harmony and tolerance in a secular atmosphere (Goren, 2006), a city of
immigrants, both Jewish and Palestinian, who established a mixed economy
based on Haifa’s strategic position, with Jewish people using their
‘professional skills and international connections’ and Arabs their ‘labour,
and links with the Arab markets’, making Haifa a ‘working, open city’,
whose many industries lay the foundations for Arab-Jewish cooperation
(Goren, 2006: 37-8). Israeli scholars also narrate Haifa as an ‘urban Zionist
project’, the only city constructed as a ‘semi-kibbutz’ or ‘semi-city built of
suburban units’, a mixture of western city-centre welfare garden-city
neighbourhoods and Bolshevik industrial suburbs, enabled, after 1948, by
the re-allocation of what was designated ‘deserted’ Palestinian property to
poor North African Jewish immigrants (Weiss, 2007).
However, Arab Haifa disappeared instantly in April 1948.
comprehensive
study
of
the
parallel
accounts
and
A
contradictory
historiographies of the 1948 battle for Haifa, and of the events leading to the
de-Palestinianisation of Haifa and the ghettoisation of its remaining
Palestinians (Pappe, 2006) is beyond the scope of this paper. However, in
order to flesh out and re-imagine my father’s role in the fall of Palestinian
Haifa, I need to briefly describe the battle.
The battle for Haifa: Israeli versus Palestinian narratives
The fate of ‘the mixed city’ of Haifa was sealed on the night between 21 and
22 of April 1948, when members of the local Palestinian national committee
met in the home of the manager of the Arab Bank of Haifa. Having
10
understood that defeat was imminent, the following morning they went to
the British commander of Northern Palestine, Major General Hugh
Stockwell, asking him to convey their surrender to the Jewish leadership.
That afternoon the Palestinian national committee met the Jewish leadership
in the town hall to applause by scores of Jews, Haifa having already been
conquered by the pre-state Jewish militia, the Haganna, to sign away their
city.
The positivist Israeli historian Tamir Goren (2006) tells the Jewish
story of the battle for Haifa; his, and probably father’s, is a story of Arab
‘riots’ in reaction to the rise of the Zionist movement and the support of the
British. According to the revisionist Israeli ‘new historian, Ilan Pappe
(2006), however, operations in Haifa were retroactively approved and
welcomed (though not necessarily initiated) by the Consultancy, an ad hoc
group of Zionist leaders assembled solely for the purpose of plotting and
designing the dispossession of the Palestinians.
The Haganna’s report of the coordinated operation in Haifa is a story
of heroism and danger:
As the British evacuated the city, our units began to immediately take
key positions, capturing transport routes and army posts. Our units
took… the governor’s house, Hadar HaCarmel’s police station, the
railway offices… Yesterday afternoon our units attacked and captured
the Headquarters in Salah A Din Street overlooking Wadi Rushmia
and the eastern city exit. The enemy tried several times to take the
building from us, but was defeated… The boundary between us and
the enemy moved forward and most of our new positions were in
Arab houses. Many enemy bases were captured by our forces…At
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dawn our units attacked Arab Halissa… all houses were captured after
heavy fighting. Arabs are abandoning the neighbourhood… getting
women and children out… The enemy suffered many losses in life
and property… (HaHoma, cited in Goren, 2006: 206).
Goren’s book has photographs of armed Haganna soldiers patrolling
Arab Haifa harassing the local Palestinians (see figure 3). Although
extremely difficult for me, I am intent on editing father into these pictures.
Dressed in khaki shorts and knee-length khaki stockings, he could easily
have been one of those part-time soldiers who believed passionately in the
need to Judaicise Haifa. He said little, but I know he was one of the foot
soldiers guarding Wadi Rushmia; my bother, born in 1948, five days after
the declaration of the Jewish state, remembers being told that while father
was on guard duty in the Wadi, mother, in labour, was brought by
ambulance to the hospital and the ambulance was shot at.
The Jewish operation in Haifa was given the ominous name of
‘Operation Scissors’ indicating a pincer movement and cutting the city off
from its Palestinian hinterland. Since Haifa was allocated in the 1947 UN
partition plan to the Jewish state, the Jews were determined to gain control
of the port, but without the city’s 75,000 Palestinian inhabitants; in April
1948, they achieved this objective (Pappe, 2006). Pappe outlines the part
played by the British in the fall of Haifa – intended to leave the city in May
1948, British troops were present as Jewish units captured the Palestinian
parts of the city. According to Pappe, British politicians later admitted that
the British conduct in Haifa forms ‘one of the most shameful chapters in the
history of the British Empire in the Middle East’. 8
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Pappe’s (2006) description of the fall of Haifa is far less sanitised than
Goren’s: ‘The Jewish campaign of terrorisation, begun in December 1947,
included heavy shelling, sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down
the mountain-side, and detonated barrels of explosives, and went on for the
first months of 1948…’ When, on 18 April, the British informed the Jewish
authorities that their forces were to leave the buffer zone between the Jewish
forces and Haifa’s Palestinians, the road was open for the de-Arabisation of
Haifa (p. 93-4).
I am trying hard not to sound sanctimonious, but I have a desperate
need to speculate whether father was one of the 2,000-strong well armed
Carmeli Brigade Jewish soldiers facing a poorly equipped army of 400 local
and Lebanese volunteers who had inferior arms and limited ammunition, a
poor match to the armoured cars and mortars on the Jewish side.
The removal of the British barrier led to ‘Operation Scissors’ giving
way to Operation ‘Cleansing the Leaven’.9 While the city’s Jewish mayor, a
decent man by all accounts, beseeched Haifa’s Palestinians to stay,
promising no harm would befall them, Haganna loudspeakers were urging
Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late, and the
Carmeli commander issued explicit orders to his troops to ‘Kill any Arab
you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with
explosives’ (Pappe, 2006: 95).
Though painful, I must imagine father as one of those who torched
objects and forced doors open, and even killed, as the bewildered
Palestinians, without packing their belonging, or knowing what they were
doing, began leaving en masse, heading towards the port. But I would never
know whether father was one of the troops who, once Palestinians left their
homes, broke into and looted their houses.
13
Pappe (2006) reports that at dawn on 22 April, the people came
streaming into the harbour. The streets in the Palestinian part of the city
were overcrowded and the Arab leaders tried to instil some order in the
chaos. Loudspeakers could be heard asking people to gather in the old
marketplace near the port until an orderly evacuation by sea could be
organised. The Carmeli Brigade war book shows little compunction about
what happened next. Aware that people were advised to gather by the port,
Jewish officers ordered their men to station three-inch mortars on the
mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port and bombard the
gathering crowds below. The idea was to ensure that the flight would be in
one direction only; as Palestinians gathered in the beautiful old Ottoman
marketplace, they were easy targets for the Jewish marksmen (Eshel, 1973:
147, cited in Pappe, 2006: 96). As the shelling began, the crowd broke into
the port, storming the boats moored there. According to the Palestinian
historian, Walid Khalidi: ‘Men stepped on their friends and women on their
own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The
overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their
passengers’ (cited in Pappe, 2006: 96).
House to house searches, arrests and beatings meted out to those who
did not leave during these fateful days in April meant that even those who
delayed decided to leave. By 1 May only some 4,000 Palestinian were left in
Haifa (Morris, 2000: 35-6).
Why did they leave Haifa?
Every Palestinian must have asked his or her parents the same
question: why did you leave? I imagine that the answer comes always
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in two stages: first, there are the obvious explanations, the threats, the
bombs, the rumours of massacres, the death of close ones, as well as
the great fear of rape, the traditional Palestinian man and woman’s
paramount anxiety about the loss of honour. Then, after a moment’s
silence, there comes the doubt as he or she examines his or her
memories, which have, perhaps, begun to fade. Guilt then sets in,
embarrassment, a whispering, nagging scepticism: what if I had been
cowardly, what if… (Al Qattan, 2007: 203).
The story of the de-Palestinianisation of Haifa is debated around the
key question of whether, as argued by Israeli historians, and as my father
told it, Haifa’s Palestinian population was instructed by its leaders to
evacuate the city despite being asked to stay by the Jewish leadership; or
whether Haifa’s Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, as argued by
Palestinian historians and revisionist Israeli scholars such as Ilan Pappe
(2006).
Typically, Goren (2006) argues that the Jewish leadership tried hard
to prevent mass evacuation and that the testimonies of Jews, British and
Palestinians alike confirm that ‘no steps were taken to encourage the Arabs
to leave the city’ (p. 228). But in recent years the story has become more
nuanced. Israeli scholars report the desertion of Haifa by the Palestinian elite
who evacuated their families even before hostilities broke, resulting in
Haifa’s Arabs remaining leaderless (Pappe, 2006: 93). Israeli historians also
stress the structural weaknesses of Palestinian society (Morris, 2000) and the
Palestinian national committees which were unable to bring about unity and
prevent Palestinians from leaving (Goren, 2006) as major factors in the
defeat. According to Goren: ‘Haifa’s Arabs were cut off… the committee
15
brought about the fall of Arab Haifa. ..’ (p. 244). However, current Israeli
historiography supports the Palestinian insistence on the active role the
Haganna played in the de-Arabisation of Haifa (Weiss, 2006).
But what about father’s version? I remember him telling me that
Haifa’s Jews begged the Palestinians not to leave the city. By all (Jewish)
accounts, some Jews did try. Weiss (2006) says the Jewish leadership was
hugely embarrassed, though she notes that the embarrassment might have
been due to Haifa’s Jews worrying about losing cheap Arab labour. After the
initial embarrassment, however, Haifa’s Jewish leadership stopped calling
upon the Palestinians to stay. Morris (2000) argues that mass Palestinian
evacuation wetted the Jewish appetite: ‘everyone… understood that a Jewish
state without a large Arab minority would be stronger…Jewish atrocities …
also contributed to the evacuation’ (p. 27). A month after the fall of Haifa, a
Jewish commentator declared, ‘at first [we] were interested in keeping the
Arabs… then another idea set in, better without Arabs, it’s more convenient’
(Morris, 2004).
Interviewing my dead father?
I do want to come back to Miki, who never spoke about his childhood, and
who did not say much about his wars. Like the lives of so many twentieth
century Jews, his life was punctuated by wars. He was born two years before
the onset of World War I on the outskirts of the Habsburg Empire. Unlike
mother’s family who escaped Romanian Bucovina to the safety of the
Hungarian part of the province during World War I, Miki’s father took the
family to Vienna, where Miki saw his Kaiser. But this is all I know. Once or
twice, when, as a picky eater, I refused to eat chicken or potatoes, he
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muttered something about how lucky I was not to have experienced hunger,
said he had to eat potato skins, though he never made it clear whether this
was during his Vienna childhood, or his time in Prague as an impoverished
engineering student. He would also say that we were lucky to be the first
generation of Jews not to experience antisemitism – probably granting me
the confidence to rebel against that very state of majority rule over the
occupied Palestinians. He said little and only insubstantial narrative
fragments survived. The old Parabellum pistol he hid in the linen cupboard
for mother to defend herself when he was on Haganna guard duty was
returned to the police in the 1960s, after it was discovered by my teenage
brothers. He never said whether he had used it and if so, doing what.
But the photographs in Goren’s (2006) book keep troubling me as I
desperately edit Miki into the picture. I know he stood guard at the Haganna
posts, but was he there when Palestinian refugees were led in lorry-loads to
the harbour? Did he patrol the demolished old city? More crucially, did my
father, the sensitive young immigrant whose family escaped the outskirts of
the empire, witness his city’s Palestinian refugees leave their homes with
hastily packed belongings, carrying them in sack loads on their bent backs
(see figure 4)?
I cannot ask him now, but it probably never occurred to father to tell
us about his role in the Haifa Nakba. The comparison with ‘ordinary people’
who served in the Nazi Wehrmacht troubles my mind, as does the discovery,
in the late 1960s, by the ’68 generation, children of German soldiers, of what
their fathers did during the war. Listening to an Israeli interviewee in Dalia
Karpel’s (2005) film about Yosef Nachmani talking about shooting a dozen
crouched Palestinian refugees hiding in a deserted building, and saying he
17
has no regrets even though some of this friends called him ‘Nazi’, it may not
be such an odd comparison after all.
Building auto/biographical memory sites: Co-memory, post memory
Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are
asked to forget? … No ethical person would admonish Jews to forget
the Holocaust… yet in dialogue with Israelis… Palestinians are
repeatedly admonished to forget the past… ironically Palestinians live
the consequences of the past every day – whether as exiles from their
homeland, or as members of an oppressed minority within Israel
(Bishara, 2007).
Pierre Nora’s article on memory sites, which helped inaugurate a
‘memory boom’, can be read as an elegy for the decline of ‘authentic’
memories. Nora argues that we continue to speak of memory because there
is so little of it, and contrasts ‘real memory – social and unviolated’ (Nora,
1989: 8) in so-called ‘primitive’ societies and among peasants, with
contemporary memory. Claiming that we can retain sites of memory because
this is the best we can do now there is no spontaneous memory, Nora writes
that ‘lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments
of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that
calls out for memory because it has abandoned it’ (p. 12). According to
Nora, with archives being kept not only by states and large institutions, but
by everyone, memory becomes an individual duty, and lieux de mémoire
come in various shapes as ‘memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history
attaches itself to events’ (p. 22).
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Debates on the centrality of memory in theorising catastrophic events
have proliferated in relation to the Holocaust. Marianne Hirsch (1997) posits
the ‘postmemory’ of the second generation, mediated through photographs,
films, books, testimonies, and distinguished from memory by generational
distance and from history by deep personal connection. James Young (2000)
calls this ‘the afterlife of memory represented in history’s after-images: the
impressions retained in the mind’s eye of a vivid sensation long after the
original, external cause has been removed’ (pp. 3-4). Postmemory is one
facet of ‘collective memory’, theorised as different from ‘history’ in being
shaped by society’s changing needs, or, conversely, as shaping both political
life and history itself. The politics of remembrance in the current ‘era of
testimonies’ includes the trauma experienced by contemporary bystanders. It
also entails collective forgetting, which ‘we’, who survive after the event of
genocide, have to struggle with in the face of our shame (Agamben, 1999).
The question is whether Nora’s (1989) theorisation of ‘memory sites’
encompasses ‘sites of silence’, where the landscape itself becomes the site of
memoricide rather than memory, as Pappe (2006: 226) argues in relation to
the reinvention and Hebraicisation of Palestine’s geography by the Israeli
state. Whether or not Arab Haifa is such a ‘site of silence’, it is certainly a
site of co-memory, a memory site I have constructed in collaboration with
the vanished Palestinians, with those Palestinians who did remain in the city
I grew up shadowing my Israeli-Jewish childhood and youth.
In reality, Arab Haifa, and in particular Wadi al Saleeb, was largely
demolished. The story of the 3,500-5,000 Palestinians left in Haifa after the
Jewish troops cleansed the city on 23 April 1948 exemplifies the tribulations
of the Palestinians under occupation since that war. Pappe (2006) tells that
on 1 July, the Israeli commander of the city summoned the leaders of the
19
remaining Palestinian community to ‘facilitate’ their transfer from the
various parts of the city where they were living into one downtown
neighbourhood, Wadi al Nisnas, one of the city’s poorest areas. Some were
told to leave their residences on the slopes of Mount Carmel within four
days. The shock was enormous – many of Haifa’s Palestinians belonged to
the Communist Party that had supported partition and hoped that now that
the fighting was over, they would live peacefully in the Jewish state whose
establishment they did not oppose. Despite protests by the leaders, who
called the move ‘ghettoisation’, the Palestinians were commanded to leave
and told they would have to cover the cost of their forced transfer. In their
new abode, Wadi al Nisnas, which serves today’s municipality to cynically
celebrate the convergence of Hanuka, Christmas and Id al-Fitr as ‘the feast
of all feasts for peace and coexistence’, they were continually robbed and
abused by Irgun and Stern Gang 10 members, with the Haganna standing by
and doing nothing (Pappe, 2006: 207-8).
Today, above al-Istiklal mosque and below Hadar HaCarmel stands
the large demolition site of Wadi al Saleeb. According to Weiss (2006),
Israelis know it because of the ‘riots’ by its North African Jewish immigrant
residents in 1959, but few remember it had been a Palestinian Muslim
quarter. Over the years there were various plans to turn it into an artists’
quarter, but as the Palestinian academic Raef Zreik (2007) says, ‘fifty years
have passed and a new quarter has not yet been built for the Palestinians in
Haifa. We have not demanded a new quarter in Haifa’.
For me Haifa is a lieu de mémoire, or perhaps a lieu de silence, where
I attempt to co-memorate Haifa’s Palestinian past together with my
Palestinian friends and colleagues, dreaming the impossible dream of a
secular democratic Palestine. But this is another story for another day.
20
Reflections: My father, his daughter
If Cixous (1997) is right and all narratives tell one story in place of
another story, then perhaps Zochrot is also right that telling the story of the
Nakba is telling our own, my own story. Does telling it as an
autoethnography and speaking about father rather than about the Palestinian
survivors of the ethnic cleansing of Haifa make me as guilty as Theodore
Katz, who, according to Samera Esmeir (2007), argued that the
contradictory, recursive testimonies of the survivors of the Tantura massacre
constituted a ‘failure’ of memory? I keep wondering if I should have
concentrated on reading testimonies of the Palestinian survivors of the fall of
Haifa? Or would doing this perpetuate their victimhood?
There are many dilemmas involved in representing my father through
my ‘ethnographic I’ (Ellis, 2004). Like Ellis, I believe I was always
predisposed to thinking like an ethnographer. I identify with her when she
writes: ‘as a child, I constantly listened in on conversations among adults… I
suspect my ethnographic instincts were present from a young age… my taste
for ethnography makes life interesting, as long as I remember to balance
living in the moment with writing and reflecting on the moments in which
I’ve lived’ (p. 333; see also Lentin, 1989, 2000). Though my father is not
available to me to check his version of events, nor am I able to seek his
permission to quote from his letters to me, this paper is ultimately about my
own Damascene trajectory, from an ‘ordinary’ Israeli post-Holocaust
childhood to a lifelong opposition to Israeli state policies and solidarity with
the Palestinian ‘other’. I borrow from Ellis (2006) the notion of taking
‘retrospective field notes’ of my life, since, apart from his letters to me, and
21
a few photographs, some of which are reproduced in this article, I have no
documentary evidence to substantiate my strong feeling that my life and
political commitment have been shaped by his life (though not necessarily
his political commitment). Auto/biography and autoethnography are not
history but rather representations of past events, assisting us in constructing,
rather than re-constructing lives. Because I have no access to his version of
events, this is my attempt to construct a fraction of my father’s life in
relation to the political issue which I regard as central.
While father migrated to Palestine not as a Zionist idealist but because
his father could not make a living in pre-Nazi Vienna; he became a Zionist,
bequeathing me what must be described as an ‘ordinary Israeli childhood’,
compete with pre-military school training, hikes aimed to ‘conquer the land
with our feet’, and a conviction that, as the Israeli popular song goes, ‘we
have no other land’. But growing up in Haifa, where some Palestinians were
allowed to remain, albeit concentrated in their downtown ghetto, meant
seeds of doubt were sown early on. Just as I heard the stories that mother’s
relatives were telling about their Holocaust experience, which they didn’t
want us, the ‘real Israeli’ children, to hear, and which, having visited
mother’s home town in Northern Romania, I documented in a novel (Lentin,
1989), so I also heard the background music of the Nakba. I heard it through
mother telling me repeatedly how she used to mutter ‘I hate Arabs’ as she
rushed to the pistol father had hidden for her in the linen cupboard when he
was on Haganna guard duty, while holding me, her asthmatic baby, and
minding his old mother. And through the fragments father never spoke
about, but which were in the air.
We were an argumentative family – from an early age father called
me ‘the leader of the opposition’. Did this preordain my lifetime of dissent?
22
For years I argued with him, and after the 1967 war our arguments became
politically bitter.
Towards the end of his life, father became despondent. His huge
achievements – he designed and produced the first Israeli-made washing
machine, even though his business never prospered fully, and was an
accomplished painter – did not assuage his depression. In the last year of his
life, after I had migrated to Ireland, Miki wrote me a series of letters, the
first just after the outbreak of the 1973 war, his last war. These letters,
honest and painful articulations of his love for me and deep commitment to
Israel, but also of his doubt, worry and despair, resonate for me with
Nachmani’s fluctuations between revulsion at Jewish acts of wanton murder
and looting and his conviction that the Jewish struggle was ‘hard, but
moral… If we are to establish a state, we need… to prevent unjust
revenge…’ (Morris, 2000: 71). Research always entails appropriation, and to
regard his letters as mine to cite is fraught. But these letters are important to
my attempt to understand him, to understand me. After his death, my mother
and I have talked a lot about his depression and doubts, and about my
politics, so I hope he may have agreed to my quoting some fragments
(emphases added):
 ‘I was hoping they would mobilise me, but apparently they have
enough old men…’ (7/10/73).
 ‘What happened this time was really awful; the fate of the nation was
in doubt. There is no family in the country who has not experienced
losses… everywhere you go you see tearful eyes. Let us hope that the
losses would help us to move towards peace…’ (8/11/73).
 ‘We are all looking for developments in Geneva, even though the
opening speeches were not encouraging. Hatred sounded from every
23
word and I feel we are really isolated. This makes me think that
perhaps we are to blame after all’ (23/12/73).
 ‘As far as I am concerned, I am tired of all the victories. I would like
to think that the future might bring some peace, although I am not too
sure if we can live in peace. It seems to me that if the Arabs want to
liquidate us, all they have to do is make peace with us…’ (22/1/74)
By May 1974 his doubts were more explicit:

‘Hard times… on the one hand, the war with Syria continues, on the
other, the internal situation contributes to our political isolation…Is
humanity really that cruel and selfish, or is the blame in us? I find it
hard to decide... After all, we did not seek wars and conquests, we
merely wanted to live in peace with our neighbours, or perhaps I am
wrong and we sought imperialism and oppression? … I can see no ray
of hope and I don’t know what to do, how can a simple man like me
express his views’ (22/5/74)
I have not kept my own letters to him. I was a young mother at the
time, struggling with life as a migrant in my adopted country, but I want to
hope that my letters were kinder than my arguments with him had been.
In his last letter, written just four days before he died of a sudden
coronary, father, who had just enlisted in the civil guard, described himself
as the ‘brave soldier Schweik patrolling the streets once a week… they may
even give me a gun ‘(23/6/74).
It is as impossible for me to fathom what went on in his mind in these
final days as it is to gauge the extent of his participation in perpetrating the
Haifa Nakba. Probably, like Yosef Nachmani, he believed in the justice of
24
the Zionist cause while at the same time feeling moral revulsion at the
excesses of the power-hungry army.
But, like Nachmani, my father bore responsibility for his part in
perpetrating the Haifa Nakba, and I, his daughter, take on this responsibility,
even though I believe that it was his legacy as a migrant and his assigning
me the role of an oppositionist from a very young age that shaped my lifelong career of political dissent and solidarity with my Palestinian sisters and
brothers. From this distance in time and place, it is Miki’s self image as the
‘brave soldier Schweik’, a comic World War I reluctant soldier, that enables
me to make some sense of his soldiering – making his Nakba days somewhat
easier to equate with what Esmeir calls ‘the year of conquest’, whose
survivors lived on out of death, ‘their memories, as articulated by the
silences, the multiple experiences, the various perspectives, are all indicators
of the historical, of that which took place’ (Esmeir, 2007: 249).
Notes:
1
I thank Andrew Sparkes and the two reviewers for their helpful comments. Thanks also, as ever, to my
dear friends Eli Aminov and Nitza Aminov.
2
Yiddish for ‘insubstantial man’ without proper occupation or business.
3
Sabra, the Arab name of the prickly pear cactus, is an appellation used by both Israeli and Palestinian for
natives of Palestine (Almog, 2000).
4
Zochrot means ‘remembering’ in the female form. For details see www.nakbainheabrew.org.
5
Interestingly, like several right-wing Israeli intellectuals who are increasingly comfortable with the idea
that their country was built on ethnic cleansing, in 2004 Morris himself, despite having been one of the
pioneers in uncovering the true extent of the Zionist plans to dispossess the Palestinians, declared his
disappointment that the Nakba was not more thorough, saying to Ha’aretz journalist Ari Shavit: ‘When the
choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it’s better to destroy’ (Shavit, 2004).
6
The full verse reads: ‘But if it happens that the gate opens / and all my body cries: here he is! / I would be
like a tree in the darkness of the forest / chosen by the light to reflect upon’ (Leah Goldberg, ‘Experience’)
7
Eli Aminov (2007) goes further, critiquing the Zionist de-urbanisation of Palestine as a governmental
technology.
8
Rees Williams, the Under Secretary of State’s statement to Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons
Debates, vol. 461, p. 2050, 24 February 1950, cited in Pappe, 2006: 93.
9
The Hebrew word stands for total cleansing, and refers to Jewish religious elimination of traces of bread
before the Passover (Pappe, 2006: 94).
10
Irgun and Stern Gang were right wing paramilitary organisations banned by Israel’s first Prime Minister
after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
25
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