Navigating the TDSB: An investigation into the document's aims and source (part 4)

Our journey into the wild and wacky world of Palestinian influence operations continues with a look at the Nakba concept as conceived by its chief architect, Constantin Zureiq.

In my last post, I zeroed in on the incoherence of the anti-Palestinian racism (APR) definition promulgated by the Arab Canadian Lawyer’s Association, which as Terry Glavin recently commented on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, is an organization that appears to have done little more than that (not that we’re asking for more!).

In this post, I want to consider the purported examples of APR, including APR in the TDSB, laid out in Navigating the TDSB document.

Cognitive tricks for budding influence operators

Let’s begin with a familiar tactic in which one incontrovertibly discriminatory act is bundled with a second act that is supposed to be discriminatory by association.

As we see directly below the definition, APR is exemplified by “denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians.” Now, most people would probably agree that justifying violence against Palestinians is wrong. Presumably, since the document pertains to what might be going on in the TDSB, the author is talking about justifying violence against Palestinians in Canada. We could return to this point since the statement is left sufficiently vague permitting other interpretations (e.g., to the author, does Israel’s war in Gaza count as “violence against Palestinians”?), but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this is what justifying violence against Palestinians means in this context.

So, in this statement, the incontrovertibly discriminatory act would be justifying violence against Palestinian Canadians. But notice that this is bundled with something else: “denying the Nakba”. And here is where things get incredibly dicey. The authors could have said “Denying the Nakba or justifying violence against Palestinians” or even better, the authors could have listed these examples on separate lines since they really quite different kettles of fish. Rather, the author chose to bundle them in that particular order. Why? Of course, I cannot say for sure why, but I suspect the reason is that by creating a union of one incontrovertibly discriminatory act with another that is highly questionable as to its status as a discriminatory act, the author makes it more difficult for the reader to question the validity of treating “Nakba denial” as a form of “racial discrimination” (i.e., APR).

Indeed, this hypothesis is strengthened by the author’s choice of ordering the two examples for it would be far less effective to state “justifying violence against Palestinians and denying the Nakba.” In this case, one might agree with the first claim but then be confronted with something that seems unfamiliar and which would cause one to pause and think, hey, wait a minute! But in the other order, as presented in Navigating, one first reads the cognitively dissonant statement but it is quickly “smoothed over” by the second resonant claim. One might not fully grasp the meaning of the first claim, but it now seems more acceptable since the second claim, which is comprehensible is likely to elicit agreement. So, in effect, you get at least tacit agreement by association.

Origin of “the Nakba”

But you might say, what is “Nakba denial” anyway? You might never have heard of the Nakba and might not deny it but also not agree to blindly affirm it either. If you were new to the concept, you would, of course, be wise to learn about it first and then make up your mind. You might naturally be suspicious of people who were willing to call you a racist for not affirming the Nakba right off the bat.

I don’t mean to single out what Palestinians and Arab nationalists before them call the Nakba here. The same applies to any historical event and to any group that would try to use stigma as a cudgel to compel you to believe something out of fear rather than because the idea had merit. In other words, you would want to learn the facts, consider alternative interpretations of the facts, and then make up your mind.

Now, since “Nakba denial” is supposed to be a very bad thing, a racist thing that apparently goes hand in hand with "violence against Palestinians”, I figured it is important to look into the origins of the term. The term was coined by Constantin Zureiq (also written Zurayk and in Arabic, قنسطنطين زريق) in a book he published in 1948 titled The Meaning of the Nakba (Nakba itself meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic).

I had been led to believe that the Nakba was a catastrophe that had befallen the Palestinians. It is often described as a forced displacement of Palestinians from the fledgling state of Israel. However, I realized when reading Zureiq’s book that he was not focused on the displacement of Palestinians. Instead, by Nakba, that is, by the term catastrophe, Zureiq was referring to the fact that the Arab armies that had set out to destroy the Jews in Israel’s War of Independence were utterly defeated. The catastrophe was not about Palestinians but, rather, about the fact that the Arab world has failed to prevent the Jews from re-establishing a territorial foothold in their ancestral lands.

This was a crisis since it signalled the weakness of the Arabs. After all, if they—the Arabs—could not destroy a beleaguered people who had been nearly exterminated in Europe and left to languish in displaced persons camps (like my parents did, even marrying in a camp) because the nations of the world had closed their doors to Jews in their darkest hour of need—if even these wretched of the earth, could not be wiped out by the Arab nations that attacked their fledgling state, then it diagnosed how far the Arab world had fallen.

If the Arabs could not defeat those Jews and the other Jews who had been under the thumb of multiple empires in the Middle East for two thousand years or more, what did it say about their weakness? This was the catastrophe Zureiq addressed when he introduced the term Nakba. The catastrophe was being defeated by a weak people. An Arab victory, to Zureiq, should have been easy, but it proved unattainable. That was the tragedy, the Nakba.

The Nakba, according to the father of “the Nakba” concept, was not the plight of Palestinian refugees as we would be told today. No! It was rather about the inability of Arab states to exert fate control on the Jews living in the former “Mandate of Palestine”, that odd name for the eternal homeland of the Jewish people, Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, as referred to in the Old Testament.

I encourage anyone curious about the origins of “the Nakba” to read Zureiq’s little book, which I found a free copy of in PDF on the internet. You will see that what is described as the Nakba today is not what Zureiq meant by the term. I also encourage anyone interested in the topic to read Hussein Aboubakr’s essay titled The Perennial Power of the Nakba. Aboubakr, an Egyptian-American writer, explains in painstaking detail how the Nakba concept was developed by Zureiq and how it was transformed for different political purposes over time. As Aboubakr writes,

“In fact, before the Nakba became the founding myth of Palestinian nationalism, and before it became a progressive call for human rights, justice, and equality, it was meant for something very different. It was meant neither to refer to Palestine as a lost territory nor to the Palestinians as a displaced population in need of basic human rights. It was meant for nothing less than the formation of the vanguard of Arab revolution—and then world revolution too.”

Aboubakr clearly explains how Zureiq oriented himself:

He opened The Meaning of the Nakba with a statement of mourning. “The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is not a small setback or a transient evil, but it is an unequivocal catastrophe,” he wrote. “Seven Arab states declared war on Zionism in Palestine, yet they stood impotent!”

One can understand why Zureiq saw the outcome of the war as a catastrophe. After all, Zureiq was one of the foremost Arab nationalist thinkers in the early 20th century. In 1939, he published Nationalist Consciousness, and as Aboubakr explains:

It was the first clear, coherent, and modern articulation of the Arab nationalism that soon came to dominate the Middle East. Inspired by German Romantic nationalism and by socialism, Arab nationalism sought to unify the fractured Middle East into a single pan-Arab state that could wield power on the world stage.

However, as Aboubakr noted, by 1948, when The Meaning of the Nakba was published, the world had changed:

In 1939, the target audience of Zureiq’s writings was Arab colonial subjects ruled and controlled by warring European powers without any clear path to their political future and distracted by a bevy of ideologies. Nine years later, when Zureiq wrote The Meaning of the Nakba, major events had again transformed the political reality of the region. Britain and France were on the way out, and new states were being born: Lebanon in 1942, Jordan and Syria in 1946, and Israel in 1948. His audience were no longer colonial subjects but citizens of their own nations—which meant that Zureiq did not need to create an Arab political reality but instead to transform an existing one.

As Aboubakr notes, the transformational force for Zureiq lay in the Arab defeat by Israel, and quoting Zureiq:

Challenges, difficulties, and catastrophes are motivators for people and a cause of their renaissance and awakenings. . . . Thus, the catastrophe that we [Arabs] are facing today is a test for our internal and external conditions. If reaction and impotence are our prevailing conditions, then this catastrophe will make us weaker, more impotent, and more disunited.

Unlike Holocaust scholars who painstakingly described the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis, Zureiq was unconcerned in Meaning with the plight of refugees or with Palestinian nationalism. As Aboubakr explains, “This was for the simple reason that the very idea of a distinct Palestinian identity was antithetical to Zureiq’s vision of Arab nationalism.”

In short, the Arab scholar who coined the term Nakba couldn’t care less about Palestinian refugees. The Nakba was, for Zureiq, a political tool for mobilizing Arab nationalism by using anti-Zionism, not to mention overt antisemitism, as his lightning rod. Again, Aboubakr articulates the point clearly:

Looking back, it makes perfect sense why the Nakba and the struggle against Zionism was the perfect tool for Zureiq. Following the departure of the Ottomans after World War I, and the British and French after World War II, only Zionism offered a non-Arab antithetical force that Arabs could join together to fight. Or, to put it in the terms of the era, the military conflict with Zionism offered a field for unified effort and struggle that would help dissolve inter-Arab contradictions. On top of this, the legacy of anti-Semitism, which was inflamed during the war thanks to Nazi propaganda, provided a rich and popular vernacular that lent itself easily to revolutionary mobilization. Thus, the struggle against Zionism appealed to the statesman, the intellectual, and the man in the street alike.

Aboubakr went on to describe the subsequent phases of political activism that drew on the Nakba concept and the key political writers, such as Nadim al-Baytar, who, as Aboubakr writes, argued that

“defeat is preferable to peace, for defeat keeps the revolution alive while peace ends the struggle.”

In this regard, the use of the Nakba by Arab nationalists and, later, Palestinian nationalists was one of the single greatest weapons against the prospect of a peaceful two-state solution ever being realized. For those promulgating the Nakba, as Aboubakr elucidated so clearly, this was never the goal and, further, it was entirely antithetical to the goal of seeking Israel’s full and utter destruction.

For anyone interested in the origins and use of the Nakba concept and mythology, I strongly recommend reading Aboubakr’s essay. However, for the present purposes, we do not need to trace the entire history of the concept. It is sufficient to see with whom and why it started. We can now question the claim that Nakba denial is APR if by denial one means a rejection of the Nakba mythology that has been used by Arab nationalists initially and by Palestinians later, both of whom sought Israel’s destruction as a primary goal.

It is certainly not racist to object to that mythology. Nor does one have to “deny” the account to object to it. I understand that that account of the Nakba is real. I understand how that account mutated as the political objectives to which it was put changed over the years from 1948 to the present. There is no denying that such accounts exist. However, it is precisely because I understand it and do not deny it that I am morally required to speak out against it for it is, and has always been since Zureiq coined the term, nothing less than an influence operation meant to destroy Zionism and the connection of Jews to their ancestral land. Do I want that celebrated or honoured in my son’s or daughter’s school? In their classes? Anywhere in the TDSB? Or in any school board in Canada? The answer is firmly and unapologetically, No.

How dare the author of Navigating insinuate that to stand up for my right in Canada to be a proud Zionist—for our rights to be proud Zionists—I—or we—the more than 9/10ths of Jews in Canada and many more non-Jews—should be labelled racists. How dare the author try to pull such a cheap fast one on us, believing that by putting one reprehensible act in the same sentence as another that is far from it, the latter will develop a comparable potency to stigmatize.

Seeing through this nonsense isn’t racist, my friends. It’s our job. Calling it out is our duty. If we fail in this duty, we will suffer. Our children will suffer. I know this because I am a second-generation Holocaust survivor. I learned early on in life how Jewish children not only suffered but were murdered simply because they were Jews. My parents were Holocaust survivors and refugees in UN displaced persons camps after the Shoah. My daughter is named after an aunt of mine who was murdered at the age of 14 in a gas chamber and disposed of in a crematorium at Auschwitz just for being Jewish. She was the same age my son is now.

We have been docile creatures in the face of an assault on our reason for far too long. It’s time to start thinking again. Question everything. Do not accept fate control by those who mean you harm.

This year, on Hanukkah, whether you are Jewish or Gentile, I urge you to rekindle the fighting spirit of the Maccabees to defend the liberal traditions of the West. Nothing less than our civilization is at stake, and that is not a luxury item.