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Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu Lughod, eds. Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. 356 pp. ISBN: 978-0-231-13579-5, $75.00.
Published in 2007, just antedating the sixtieth anniversary of the Israeli state, this book is a timely and wide-ranging collection of essays concerning the Palestinian catastrophe-Nakba-and subsequent questions of Palestinian identity and existence. The mass-expulsion and the uprooting of 600,000 Palestinians (80 percent) in 1948 left a nation in exile, in continuous statelessness and refugee squalor. Hence, the rules that came to govern the lives of the Palestinian refugees are necessarily different from those of formal state citizens, and equally different are the tools necessary to record the modern history of the Palestinian people. In this book's treatment of the Palestinian refugees, it juxtaposes the standard (Israeli) narrative of the cataclysmic events of 1948-afterwards the "Western" narrative-with the oral and recorded histories of the Palestinian Diaspora, and hence a direct contrast to the Israeli history of the victors.
Ever since the violent beginnings of Israel in 1948, outlets of western media have propagated the Israeli standard narrative of a "return from exile, after millennia, with people with memory of suffering redeemed in . . . their own modern nation-state" (286). This projection of a mythical past onto a contemporary state project, wherein the name of the Palestinians-let alone their tragedy-is expunged from the history, has become the standard narrative that western peoples have internalized as established fact.
Hence, over five decades, Israel and its supporters have rejected any moral/legal culpability for the Palestinian Nakba, weaving this historical blackhole into the national myth of the Israeli state. The displaced Palestinian nation has been, comparably speaking, unable to present a counter-narrative to the Israeli national myth, since much of...