anna’s Reviews > The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory > Status Update

"Zionism had ambitions to create a new Jewish society that would be different from Jewish life in the Diaspora and did not see multi-religious and pluralistic Jerusalem as the appropriate place for the founding of such a New Society. Not only was it full of aliens (native Arabs), but it was also inhabited by the peaceful ‘old Jewish Yishuv’, whose members were part
of the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox community."

"the term for an Israeli-born Jew free of all the ‘maladies and abnormalities of exile’ is in fact the Arabic word for sabar, Hebrewised as (masculine and tough) tzabar or sabra, the prickly pear growing in and around the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in '48. Even the ‘national anthem of the Six Day War’, No‘ami Shemer’s song ‘Jerusalem of Gold’, was a plagiarised copy of a Basque lullaby song"

"This book argues that to write more truthfully about the Nakba is not just to practise a professional historiography; it is also a moral imperative of acknowledgement and liberation. The struggles of the millions of Palestinian refugees to publicise the truth about the Nakba is a vital way of protecting Palestinian rights and keeping alive the hope for peace and justice."