Nakba and the rebranding of humiliation

A seven-nation army couldn't...

Syrian historian Constantine Zurayk used the word Nakba (catastrophe) to describe the failed 1948 Seven-Arab-nation army invasion of Israel. His 1948 book, Maʿnā al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Catastrophe), framed the event as a humiliating, civilisational rupture.

“Seven states seek the abolition of partition and the subduing of Zionism, but they leave the battle having lost a not inconsiderable portion of the soil of Palestine, even of the part “given” to the Arabs in the partition. They are forced to accept a truce in which there is neither advantage nor gain for them.” (Zurayk, 1948).

Zurayk’s Nakba is not the Nakba we hear about today. To understand the difference, we need to better understand Zurayk.

Zurayk was a US-educated intellectual. He cared about Arab unity, and argued that Arab society needed to engage fully with the modern world in order to overcome backwardness and decline. (Zurayk, 1948).

The coiner of the Nakba chastises the Arabs as they “continue to dream the dreams of the past and to stupefy ourselves with its fading glory.” Zurayk attributes the failure of the invasion in part to the Arabs’ “primitive, static mentality”.

Ethnographer and historian Raphael Patai cites Zurayk’s The Meaning of the Catastrophe (1948) as a source of Arab ‘self-criticism’ after the seven-nation army’s humiliating attempt to invade Israel only hours after its establishment.

Patai, 1973, p. 271.

Shortly after the failed invasion, Zurayk outlined several conditions for a meaningful regional transformation:

i. Widespread adoption of modern technology;
ii. A clear separation between political authority and religious institutions;
iii. Cultivation of a strong scientific mindset at both the individual and societal level; and
iv. Openness to the intellectual and ethical contributions of other civilisations. (Zurayk, 1948, p. 39).

Zurayk didn’t see Arab unity as something predetermined by shared ethnicity or religion. He saw it as a galvanising, region-wide ascension achieved through modernisation; a sharing in political and social needs. He considered that an Arab shift towards democracy and progressivism was fundamental to protecting Arab dignity and prosperity. (Kassab, 2009, pp. 65–73).

According to Zurayk, “The reason for this [Zionist] victory is that the roots of Zionism are grounded in modern Western life while we for the most part are still distant from this life and hostile to it.” (Zurayk, 1948, p. 39)

The invasion should have laid a new, modern, collaborative footing in a pan-Arab struggle against a perceived incursion into Arab dominion—a narrative with Ottoman and European imperial orders still on the tip of its tongue.

The Nakba—the catastrophe—was not one of humanitarian concern, but one of humiliation. Jewish sovereignty had emerged in a region where it had been denied to the tune of slaughter and exile for centuries.

This is not to say Zurayk didn’t hold concerns for the Palestinian Arab population. He details the injustice of the loss of land and property, and the displacement of between 400,000 and 950,000 ‘Arabs of Palestine’.

But to conflate Zurayk’s concerns for the Arabs of Palestine with what he calls the ‘Nakba’ is to misunderstand Zurayk’s priorities:

Indeed, this moral and spiritual relapse is more important than the material loss, no matter how great the latter might be: for if the resolution of a people crumbles and its confidence in itself is lost, it loses the best that it possesses and is impotent to rise after a fall or to shake from itself the dust of humiliation and defeat. (Zurayk, 1948, p. 7)

For Zurayk, the battle against the Zionists was supposed to be an exercise of Arab unity and cohesion. His primary concerns were with the modernising of Arab culture and thought, placing national and spiritual unity as a cornerstone of this process.

“Is it just to ask the Arabs to give up their land and their sovereignty in order to atone for the crimes and tyranny of the Western peoples?” (Zurayk, 1948, p.75).

To Zurayk, whether it’s in relation to the human rights of Arabs or Jews, humanitarian concerns come after political concerns. The Nakba is the name given not to a humanitarian disaster, but a political disaster.

Today, the invocation of the Nakba continues to invert the Holocaust against its victims. Modern antizionism attempts to provide a case for the retroactive abortion of the Jewish state by misrepresenting the ‘Nakba’ as a word used to describe as a humanitarian disaster.

Jews call the Holocaust ‘Shoah’, which means catastrophe. Is Zurayk’s choice of word a coincidence? For someone so dedicated to narrative, strategy, and political positioning, it remains possible. But for those who have come after him, using his work to pit Jewish suffering in the Holocaust against the plight of Palestinian Arabs, it seems unlikely.

Zurayk’s catastrophe described the moment when an assumed order failed under pressure.

The system that followed continues to return to that moment, reconstructing its assumptions and sustaining the expectation that its outcome can still be reversed. This is what is really meant by ‘The Ongoing Nakba’.

None of this is designed to limit empathy for the circumstances with which Palestinian Arabs now find themselves, nor for the circumstances these people have found themselves in for decades. To seek clarification of the usage of the word ‘Nakba’ is to reveal what is at the heart of the Palestinian Arabs’ ongoing struggle. It is the politicisation of these people, for the ends of others, that has turned them from a displaced people into cannon fodder.

That a seven-nation army’s humiliation is at the heart of the word Nakba may come as a shock to many. What should not come as a shock is that the ‘ongoing Nakba’ is better described as an ongoing reaction to, and reinforcement of, the same humiliation.

A unified loyalty can only be subdued by a more complete unity and a stronger loyalty. A system steadily pursuing modern civilization can only be conquered by a system which is more thorough in its pursuit of it and which is more completely armed with it. A progressive, dynamic mentality will never be stopped by a primitive, static mentality. (Zurayk, 1948, p.75).

The ‘static mentality’ continues to place Palestinians in a hopeless, un-winnable forever war. It is the regressive, theocratic Iranian dictatorship—one whose ‘morality police’ beat women in the street for what they wear; one whose Guard Corps mows down tens of thousands of its own civilians for protesting—that funds proxies across the region tasked with championing the Palestinian cause.

Any serious reading of Zurayk’s The Meaning of the Catastrophe (1948) warns, in no uncertain terms, that the humiliation—the Nakba; the catastrophe—exists not at the behest of ‘the Zionists’, but at the behest of a refusal to engage in the self-reflection necessary to modernise.

The ‘ongoing Nakba’ is a dynamic produced not between factions rendered incompatible by a difference in ethnicity or religion, but factions with opposite responses to Zurayk’s instructions.

Ironically, it is the Israelis who have, to a T, done exactly what Zurayk deemed necessary to build a nation in the Levant.

Those who act today to create Arab nationalism and Arab union on the basis of the present social structure are attempting it to no avail because their efforts do not run parallel to the course of history and the laws of society.
These efforts will never bear fruit unless the struggle for
union is bound up with the struggle for an internal revolution and is built on its foundation.
For nationalism and national union both arose during a definite period—the modern period—and neither they nor that development of thought and action which parallels them are in any way compatible with the institutions or the mentality of ancient times or of the Middle Ages. (Zurayk, 1948, p.75).

---

Please consider upgrading to a US $4.80 / AU $6.70 monthly subscription. It makes a huge difference.

---

---

References

• Kassab, Elizabeth Suzanne. Contemporary Arab Thought: cultural critique in comparative perspective. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 65–73. Print.

• Makdisi, J. S., Eddé, D., & McCarthy, R. (Eds.). (1988). Arab civilization: Challenges and responses: Studies in honor of Constantine K. Zurayk. Beirut: American University of Beirut.

• Patai, R. (1973). The Arab mind. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

• Zurayk, C. (1948). Maʿnā al-Nakba (The meaning of the catastrophe). Beirut.