Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Understanding the Nakba through Arab Drama – Documentation and Symbolism in al-Taghreba al-Falastinya

[Fatima Ahdash is an Assistant Professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar. Previously, Fatima was a Lecturer in Law at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests lie in national security, family law, child rights and human rights and their various interactions. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE).]

[Safaa Sadi Jaber is an S.J.D. Candidate at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar. Her dissertation examines the intersection between international law and new technologies. Her main research focus is international humanitarian law and occupation law.]

Introduction 

This paper draws on, and heeds the call to recognise, the idea of the Nakba as an international legal concept. In his highly censored article TOWARD NAKBA AS A LEGAL CONCEPT, Rabea Eghbariah compellingly argues that current international legal concepts such as occupation, apartheid and even genocide fail to completely capture the causes and multi-layered complex realities (historical and contemporary) of the Palestinian condition. Al-Nakba, which literally translates from the Arabic word النكبة as ‘the Catastrophe,’ is a well known phrase denoting the events (UN partition, war, massacres and displacement) that led to the destruction of Palestinian lives, lands and dreams of statehood to make way for the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. But recognising Nakba as a legal concept, Eghbariah maintains, involves more than a simple failure to deny the ‘historical calamity’ that befell the Palestinians – as rare as that might be within Western discourses. Insisting that the lexicon of International Law needs a concept that can encapsulate the distinctiveness of the Palestinian experience, Eghbariah proposes that we should see Nakba both as a historical event and an ongoing system of oppression.

Eghbariah’s proposal is a powerful one. Although this understanding of the Palestinian experience might be new to international legal scholarship, it has been part of Arab consciousness for decades. Through a close and critical analysis of a highly popular Arab television series Al-Taghreba Al-Falastinya (التغريبة الفلسطينية), this paper seeks to explore how the ‘legal anatomy of Nakba’ that is identified and explored by Eghbariah is represented and documented in Arab popular culture. The paper demonstrates how the writer and director’s choice to narrate the story of Palestine through the story of a rural family echoes Eghbariah’s idea of the Nakba as an experience of subjugation that is simultaneously collective and individual. The temporal dimensions of the series (spanning the decades between 1933-1967) and its spatial symbolisms (first the village, then the refugee-camp and finally the diaspora) capture poignantly Eghbariah’s idea of the Nakba involving a transformation from violent rupture to an ongoing, evolving structure of fragmentation that keeps Palestinians forever captive within a liminal state between freedom and oppression, genocide and endurance, elimination and survival (p.974).  

Nakba as a Legal Concept

Nakba, as a legal concept, seeks to grasp the Palestinian tragedy as a distinct form of domination and a separate crime against humanity. To Eghbariah, Nakba has a distinct ‘legal anatomy’ that is composed of three main pillars (p. 957). The first pillar, that of foundational rupture, necessitates an acknowledgement of the historical fact that the modern state of Israel was borne out of the destruction of Palestinian cities and villages. The Nakba’s foundational violence displaced Palestinians with the aim of replacing them with another group whose domination depends on the constant perpetuation of ethnic cleansing, conquest and apartheid against Palestinians (p.972-978). This dispossession of Palestinians and their subsequent disintegration, between those who remained in their lands and those who became refugees has, according to Eghbariah, produced one of the characteristics of Nakba: fragmentation.

But, Eghbariah stresses, Nakba does not – and cannot – just belong to the past. What makes Nakba a distinctive legal phenomenon is the second pillar: the idea that the  Nakba was not just a moment in time that caused displacement but is an ongoing structure of fragmentation. This ‘Nakba regime,’ as Eghbariah calls it, established various forms of oppressive control on the subgroups of Palestinians created as a result of the historical events of the Nakba, dispersing them in different areas with distinct legal statuses (i.e. citizens of Israel, residents of Jerusalem, citizens of the West Bank and Gaza and the diaspora) (p.979). Here Nakba progresses from a foundational event to constantly evolving legal and governmental regimes of group domination to ensure that Palestinians are kept in a permanent state of fragmented dispossession. The purpose of this regime of oppressive domination, the prevention of Palestinian self-determination, is the third pillar of the Nakba. 

Whilst incidents of genocide, military occupation and apartheid have been important constituent parts of the Palestinian tragedy, Eghbariah’s main contention is that they do not sufficiently capture nor convey the idiosyncratic entirety of the Palestinian condition. So that International Law can properly recognise and begin to finally actually address and effectively redress the injustices faced by Palestinians, we must understand and approach Nakba as a legal concept, one that encompasses but exists independently of comparable international legal concepts such as genocide, occupation, apartheid and so on. This is important not only as a matter of legal accuracy but as a necessary unmuting of systematically ‘muted’ Palestinian voices (p.888): a late, yet welcome, recognition of Palestinian agency when it comes to actually defining their own suffering. 

The Legal Anatomy of the Nakba in Al-Taghreba Al-Falastinya

Tracing legal themes within popular culture, especially television and cinema, can help us better understand how legal concepts operate at the human level – how they relate to and how they are lived and perceived by those most impacted by them (p.326). If we are to take the proposal to treat Nakba as a unique legal concept seriously, then, exploring how it is depicted in Arab drama is important since the proposal itself is explicitly premised on the assumption that ‘legal concepts do not exist in a vacuum, but within narratives,’ including, in our case, popular cultural narratives ‘that assign them meaning’ (p.900). Importantly, moreover, it achieves Eghbariah’s vision of the Nakba being a calamity that befell Palestinians as people (p.890), as individuals and families, and not just Palestine as a place, a nation or even a dream. 

Al-Taghreba Al-Falastinya (or ‘The Palestinian Alienation’) is a Syrian television series that first aired exactly two decades ago in the Ramadan season of 2004. Those familiar with Arab popular culture know that this series was produced at the height of Syrian drama’s immense productivity and popularity, quickly becoming one of the most successful and widely viewed Arab series in history. To an extent, the series’ enormous popularity and wide critical acclaim resulted from the fact that it represented the first comprehensive dramatisation of the Nakba, with the explicit aim of documenting and (thereby) preserving Palestinian collective memory by retelling the Nakba story – or stories – from a distinctly Palestinian perspective. This perspective was all the more authentic because the events and characters of the series were based on the Palestinian writer, Walid Saif’s, own family history and the series’ artistic vision was inspired by the director, Hatem Ali’s, own life experiences as a refugee from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. 

Spanning 31 episodes, the series portrays Palestinian history through the story of a rural, working-class family (the Sheikh-Younis family) from an unnamed, and therefore symbolically representative, Palestinian village. Ali, the youngest and only educated member of the family, which consists of the father Abu Ahmed, his wife Om Ahmed, their other sons Ahmed (known also as Abu Salih) Masoud, Hassan and their only daughter Khadra, narrates his family’s trials and tribulations as they experience the British Mandate, the Nakba and the beginnings of the 1967 war (the Naksa). 

The narrative time-frame captured in the series encapsulates Eghbariah’s proposal of the Nakba as a structural phenomenon, spanning from 1933 to 1967. Instead of focusing solely on the moment of the Nakba of 1948, the series portrays the entire process of the Zionism movement, from the British Mandate to the 1967 war. The refined, classical Arabic of Ali’s narration as he manoeuvres between recalling anecdotal childhood memories and reflecting on major historical events and political decisions contrasts against the strong rural Palestinian dialect spoken by the series’ main characters in their dialogue with each other. In intentionally making the distinct Palestinian experience intelligible to the wider Arab audience, the series poignantly expresses Eghbariah contention that the Nakba is – and continues to be – a specific, Palestinian manifestation of the wider, more general ‘Arab tragedy’ (p.959).

 Palestinian Life Before 1948: ‘Zionism as Nakba’ (p.901)

The first half of the series chronicles the rural life of Palestinian farmers, their daily struggles and their unique albeit complex relationship to their land. Importantly, the series’ depiction of pre-1948 Palestine is not sanitized. We see the working-class family at the center of the series suffering bitter poverty and social ostracisation as it attempts to better its social standing through the education of its sons in a society fraught with brutal divisions between social classes, tribal tensions and patriarchy. In demonstrating that a complex Palestinian society existed, the series does the important work of countering what Eghbariah terms ‘mythical accounts of Zionism’ that deny Zionism’s purposeful decimation of an existent, thriving Palestinian society (p.902). 

The series is careful to highlight how these economic struggles and political tensions of pre-1948 Palestine were aggravated by British Mandate policies direct and indirect promotions of settler-colonialism. We see how the British Mandate acts as an ‘incubator for the Zionist settlement project’ (p.912),  imposing undue taxes on poor farmers such as the Sheikh-Younis family, facilitating settlement-building around the village and granting Zionist settlers sophisticated weaponry.  But, the series insists, Palestinians did not quietly acquiesce to British Mandate policies and Zionist plans. Main and minor characters join both the armed and political factions of the Great Palestinian Revolution of 1936, most notably Ahmed (Abu Salih) who is transformed from a simple yet fiery farmer to a resistance fighter and eventually a leader of the Revolution.

The personal and the political exchange focus as the Revolution is fizzled out and eventually suppressed by empty British promises and the series’ attention turns to the lives, loves and losses of Khadra, Hassan and Ahmed. This relatively “normal” domestication of the family’s struggles is short-lived, however, as the UN endorses the partition plan in 1947 and the spectre of the Nakba looms large over the family, the village and Palestine as a whole.

Nakba as Rupture 

The significance of Nakba as a historical event, Eghbariah suggests, is in the rupture it caused to Palestinians individually and collectively, violently dividing the Palestinian (and entire Arab) experience and reshaping lives into a before and after 1948 (p.901). And whilst the rupture of the historical Nakba is foundational in terms of shaping the dispossession, displacement and replacement that makeup the core of the Palestinian reality, it is ignored, minimised or even outright denied within mainstream international legal discourses.

The series’ genius is contained within its treatment of the historical Nakba on these two intertwined levels: i.e. as a national (Palestinian and Arab) disaster and a sequence of painful personal and familial traumatic losses. Graphic dramatised portrayals of the ethnic cleansing and mass murders committed against different cities, towns, and villages are interspersed with real archival footage of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their localities. 

As Ahmed and his brother Hassan fight against Israeli incursions into their village with the sparse begged and borrowed weaponry they manage to obtain, news of the Deir Yassin massacre propels the rest of the family to join the fleeing villagers on their onward march into permanent refugeehood, holding onto nothing more than the key to their house. In the midst of the chaos of war and displacement, Khadra is separated from the rest of her family, including her only son Rushdi, Ahmed is severely injured and Hassan is killed. 

The emphasis on the violent, intentional, expulsion of Palestinians through in the episodes of the series depicting the 1948 war deliberately upsets prevalent Western narratives that have sought to minimise the foundational violence of the Nakba by insisting that displacement was a simple, natural byproduct of war (p.932). The enormity of the loss experienced by the Sheikh-Younis family reflects the fact that the immediate aftermath of 1948 war ushered in ‘a dramatically new reality’ whose foundational hallmark is displacement and the denial of the right to return (p.930).  Yet, as traumatic as the violent experience of the events that made up the historical Nakba is for the characters, the narrator, Ali, reflects that the magnitude of the collective national, familial and individual catastrophes (or nakbas) that befell them dawns on them rather slowly: 

‘It was necessary for some time to pass before we became aware of the scale of the catastrophe, before its features became clear and we internalised it in our souls, before we coined the term “the Nakba” …before we realised that we were the Palestinian Nakba’s generation, its witnesses and its victims.’

Nakba as Structure 

This mass displacement that ripped apart Palestinian life, the ‘seismic rupture’ of the Nakba as Eghbariah sees it, metastasized into an ongoing reality – in fact structure – of fragmentation (p.978). The fragmentation at the national level is mirrored at the individual level through the characters of the series. Each member of the Sheikh-Younis family represents a subgroup affected by the Nakba: whilst most of the family members are displaced into refugee camps in the West Bank, Khadra remains in 1948 lands; eventually, different characters join the ever-sprawling Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Gulf.

The series captures, in a searingly vivid manner, how this new lived reality that the characters inhabit centers around their newfound status as refugees living the difficult, harsh and degrading life of the camps. Ali reflects on the family’s inability to accept the centrality of refugeehood to this reconfigured Palestinian identity:

‘Refugees… This is not how we viewed ourselves in those anxious, hectic circumstances… After only a while, this word will jump into the dictionary to become our historical identity and our social framework, just like other new words such as setback, lost homeland, and lost paradise.’

 ‘We are discovering new dimensions of misery.’

But while members of the Sheikh-Younis family, like many Palestinians, refuse to accept the reality of living in tents, awaiting their return to the village, Masoud, the more pragmatic son/brother, learns to live as a refugee, first by making the tents liveable through various “renovations,” then by replacing the tents with mud-huts. In urging his parents and siblings to move beyond the psychological paralysis of the Nakba, Masoud ironically embodies the Nakba’s normalisation – the entrenching of the fracture and fragmentation caused by Israeli  denials of the right to return back home. This banality of the Nakba is also reflected in the series’ chronicling of the development of an international legal and governance architecture (i.e. the establishment of UNRWA and its role in Palestinian education, the involvement of the ICRC in reuniting family members etc) that ‘managed’ (p.889) the ongoing Nakba, entrenching the status of refugeehood as undeniable, rendering exile permanent. 

The Purpose of Nakba: The Dream of Return 

To achieve the purpose of the Nakba, (ensuring that Palestinians can never obtain real or full self-determination)  Eghbariah argues that the Nakba regime maintains the structure of oppressive fragmentation by developing a variety of legal constraints preventing refugees from returning to their lands or reuniting with family members with a different legal status (p.986).  This is reflected in several heartbreaking scenes that litter the last few episodes of the series, such as Masoud’s attempts to cross the armistice lines to get some oranges from their old farms or when Rushdi sneaks into 1948 lands to search for his mother. 

As the different characters, including the new generation of grandchildren, attempt to deal with a post-1948 Palestinian reality, the series concludes with the premonition of the 1967 war, showing that the 1967 Naksa was indeed a continuation of the Nakba (p.960), further diminishing their long-held dream of returning to ‘the lost paradise’ of their lands. 

If this series were to be recreated, or rebooted, in 2024, undoubtedly the last year of genocide in Gaza, and Israel’s recent aggressive acts on Lebanon, would also be represented as the latest manifestation of the ongoing Nakba: the Catastrophe that fractures the Arab world in and through Palestine.