7 - Preserving the Past, Mobilizing the Past

Summary

Post-Oslo Nakba anniversarial mediation became a means of expressing the communities’ concerns in coherence with the readerships’ cadres sociaux, forming the inverse of Israeli-dictated mediation in the wake of the 1948 War and Six-Day War in 1967. Accordingly, this chapter posits that Kul al-Arab has presented the Nakba as an interpretative framework for contemporary grievances resulting from Palestinians’ status as an involuntary minority in Israel. Inside the West Bank, application of the Nakba as an interpretative framework and, simultaneously, an analogical tool testifies to the mediated expression of what Dennis McQuail defined as “national problems” and “national goals.” Through repeated usage of previously censored symbolic terminology, the readership of the semi-independent Al-Quds and the PA’s mouthpiece, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, is admonished to adhere to these national objectives, which call for an end to “the permanent Nakba.” Invocation of the so-called fixed national principles is equally meant to challenge the main actor deemed responsible for their suspension: Israel. The chapter’s identified mediated convergence of the Holocaust and the Nakba testifies to the actualization of the previously-discussed defensive victimhood theory; the fallacious negation of the former’s historical veracity is symptomatic of its deemed discursive incompatibility with the Palestinian narrative. Incongruously, the Holocaust has also been conjured within Nakba media output as a means of highlighting the depths of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis. Forming a powerful realm of collective social mobilization against “the Zionist entity,” Nakba mediated output thus, at times, makes use of the most tendentious charge to debunk the Israeli aggressor and the perceived “Zionist colonial project”: the execution of a Palestinian Holocaust.