The United Nations estimates that 1.9 million people – about 80 percent of Gaza’s population – have been displaced by the war. For almost all Palestinians, this strongly evokes the Nakba, when Palesstinians were forced to flee their homeland in 1948 following the creation of the state of Israel, leaving behind their homes, their property, and their land. Many expected to return within weeks. But they never did. 

There are strong fears that Gazans will join the seven million Palestinian refugees in the diaspora, a prospect which my previous guest journalist Nour Swirki told me would be a “nightmare” for them. However, in what ways can we think about the current war as a remaking of the 1948 Nakba, what are parallels and what are major differences, especially in light of Israel’s ongoing strategy of expulsion of Gaza’s . Today, we hear from someone whose family survived the Nakba. 

I am joined by Sharif ElMusa, professor emeritus at the American University in Cairo, and Palestinian poet. This interview was recorded on December 13, 2023.

Nadeen Shaker: I wanted to ask you about your thoughts right now in seeing the situation unfold in Gaza? I know when we corresponded weeks back, we had sort of diverging feelings, I thought there was a ray of hope. And you said there was no bright spot to be spotted in the news. I believe that’s what you said. So I wanted to ask you, if you still feel the same way, and how are you seeing the situation on the ground?

Sharif Elmusa: I think you know, this is a very strange moment. A very ironic moment, is what you might think of as an unstable equilibrium, we could go up or down. I feel because on the one hand, the Palestinian question has unprecedented support globally, regionally, everywhere. The Palestinian question has been re-centered. The question of liberation, of a criminalized people. And that’s how it is being perceived now by many people around the world. It is also re-centered diplomatically, after almost, you know, we were fading actually, from the news, from everywhere. And we were under the threat of becoming just a matter of people who are looking for economic betterment. 

So this is a big shift, and a big re-centering, and it’s a very important moment. On the other hand, because of all the death and destruction and the destruction of public institutions, and building, hospitals, etc, the looting, the humiliation, everything, the internal displacement, we are very worried now, and many people are very worried about another forced expulsion, like 1948 that keeps haunting us. The specter of expulsion always haunted the Palestinians, because the Israelis never really abandoned this idea. You have Gaza and if you look at the West back the same specter is there. We are worried about Gaza first and then the West Bank and will be basically if these two huge expulsions, we are lost again and we’ll start from the beginning, but not from inside, which becomes really hard, much harder. And so there is a moment you could win and you could really lose terribly. And that is what I’m saying. You know, kind of like we are at a peak and at the abyss, of our being as a nation, you know, the people.

NS: Yeah, there’s, there’s a lot to follow up on. But speaking of winning, yesterday, we’ve had a little bit of interesting news coming from the UNGA, voting overwhelmingly in favor of a humanitarian ceasefire. And although it’s non binding, but as you say, it depicts the global show of support for ending the war. So, I did want to ask you, what do you think this means for the US and Israel? Do you think they might shift their perspective?

SM: Well, this is a very absurd situation. You have this strongest regional power, partnering with the strongest nation in the world, the empire really, against this very small, you know, 2.2 million people in a 350 kilometer squared of space, it is totally absurd. The gap in power, the gap in abilities, fighting all this type, I mean, the US had been supplying them, you know, without calculation, even violating probably their own laws, you know, going behind Congress to supply them with the most devastating weapons and missiles and everything. Israel does not seem to be really, I mean, from what you read, there may be some people who are beginning to cast doubt about the possibility, there are always a few people around who don’t really like war, who don’t think that war is the way to go. But I think it seems like the Israeli public has been mobilized to basically go for it. And the generals, I mean, you see Gallant, and Netanyahu, and it looks like, they have been hit by a case or bloodlust, they really want to kill, this is what they are doing. And so I don’t really know.

In the US, Biden, you know, almost kind of feels like he is an Israeli rather than an American president. He’s been almost totally deaf to all the calls, even his interns, 30 young interns sent him a letter for a ceasefire. He did not listen to his party members, all the polls tell him people want a ceasefire. And he has been totally oblivious to these calls. I don’t care whether he sympathizes with the Palestinians or to talk about us, and I don’t need his sympathy. But I want him to stop. The US actually now, and Israel, both kind of are what I call in the pit of pariah states. If you look at the United Nations resolution, as you mentioned, the really great majority, only the US and eight other states voted against it. And then the US, was well, the only country that vetoed, of course, the UN Security Council resolution for a ceasefire. That is really, you know, what you call a pariah state.

NS: You mentioned the extreme language of expulsion used by Israeli ministers. And I think a few days ago, Israel published a map of Gaza with it divided into blocks, 2300 blocks. And then they said that they’re going to target one block after the other and ask residents to move from one block to another before they hit that block. But the whole point or you know, this map really struck me as very brutal and just showed the methodological, calculated approach of this war plan. And while a lot of analysts have been saying, you know, Israel’s end game is unclear, it’s not clear what they want out of this war, but I did want to ask you going back to this question of expulsion, what that does this type of plan this type of, you know, complete carpet bombing of Gaza tell us about Israel’s military strategy and is this erasure part of its policy of expulsion?

SM: It is obvious, this is what they want to do. In 1948, first, they expelled people, they expelled us, my family included. 750,000 people, you know, we were a smaller population then. They expelled us, and then refugees always kind of thought they will return, they will go back, people thought they will return. So in order to eliminate any thought in people’s mind that they will return, they destroyed the villages, they destroyed our villages. I actually I did write in the book called ‘All That Remains’, I wrote that the history of all the villages at the time, the team in the field, identified 418 villages that were destroyed. And now, they say about 500 villages were destroyed. And these villages, some of them existed from 3000 years ago, 4000 years ago. And suddenly, oops, you know, nothing is left. They were bulldozed, they were leveled, their names, they changed everything. Israel is kind of what I call sometimes a designer state really, borders, everything has to be planned and done. And it’s not a normal, natural really, situation. 

And if you look at the plans, it was ridiculed. This map, I mean, you are talking about block by block, no one can understand it, I looked at it, what is this? What they want to show is how accurate they are, because the US has been telling them, oh they have to be surgical. Surgical strikes. It is all really like a theater of the absurd, you know, you look at the roads, where is the surgical strike? It is all wanton destruction. I don’t see any surgicalality in it. 

NS: That’s true. I mean, even if we look at, you know, you were saying they’re trying to be surgical, but then there’s a whole myth around evacuation zones and safe zones, which basically doesn’t exist. There’s no place that is safe in Gaza. So

SM: All the UN, I mean, all the humanitarian actors there, the organization, they all said there is no safe place in Gaza. The UN Secretary General said this. Everybody says there is no safe place in Gaza and people say they just moved out of desperation. 

NS: You’ve mentioned the Nakba a few times. And a lot of people have made parallels between the Nakba and what’s happening today in Gaza. And our first episode, I don’t know if you’ve listened to it, but Raja Khalidi said that Palestinians were being Nakbatized. And I thought that was interesting. I wanted to ask you, if you can compare sort of or tell us what are the parallels between 1948 and today and the level of brutality that we’re seeing today, how does it compare to the Nakba, what happens to Palestinian national aspirations? You know, because with the Nakba, even though, it was horrible, but we’ve seen a lot of resistance after that, you know, the imagery of the Nakba always reverberated in Palestinian collective consciousness. And it sort of had this long term ripple effect, I think. How do you see parallels between both in your mind? 

SM: Well, first of all, Israel in 1948, always kind of like hid the intentions about forcing people out because they were still unsure of themselves. There were still regular militias, and gangs, you know, all that stuff. So they were not sure of themselves still, so they hid everything, even after the state was established. We have been saying that it was all done by force, they expelled people, there were all these massacres. But Israel for a long time insisted that it was the Arab armies in ‘48, that told us to leave. And of course, that remained until the eighties when then their archives began to open up and historians found out that actually there were all these plans they went through it, village by village, place by place, day by day. And now it has been established that it was all planned ethnic cleansing. 

So that is now the Ben Gvir and Smotrich, those fundamentalists, cabinet members, both of them threaten us with the Nakba, and Netanyahu had kind of one time suggested they go to Egypt, you know, people go to Egypt, and then, oh no, he had a cabinet member preparing a plan for Europe. Not everybody, but many people to go to Europe. So these are the kinds of more really public [manifestations]. 

Of course, the level of armament then, they didn’t have the same destructive power. So they didn’t really, there wasn’t as many people killed, or as many houses destroyed until later on. The houses were all bulldozed afterwards. But then, they didn’t have the same firepower. So the destruction was much less that way. And there were many places that were kept. Actually the village where I was born, it is still there. The village, many houses, are there, and people who know it when they go there they recognize it, my mother recognizes our house, our uncle’s house, everything. So they are there, and who lives there? I saw a picture in one of the books of a Moroccan Jewish family, you know, with their bags coming to our village. Yeah, so they did not destroy everything. But they lived in it, and they expelled people. 

And this has been a long part of Zionist thought. If you ask Israel, where are your borders, the only state that does not have borders actually or says these are our borders, and I don’t think they would ever entertain a Palestinian state, or coexistence with the Palestinians.

NS: That’s really sad when you say that Israelis never believe or conceive that there could be a Palestinian state. And I think this makes it clear what their goal, at least for me, in Gaza is.

SM: The more you empty the land of Palestinians, the harder it becomes for you to do anything about achieving your liberation or liberty or self-determination or whatever you want to call that. So that is the thing, they want to send us out, you know, they can’t expel everybody and over time, there will be more people but still, but that weakens, at least you know, because their next target is the West Bank and you can see there, everybody’s talking about settler violence, but actually, this only kind of makes us forget about army violence. Army violence is much more serious and widespread and devastating than settler violence. And anyway, settler violence is sponsored by the army.

NS: So I was today listening to a Palestinian journalist talk and she said that she does not recognize her neighborhood anymore. She doesn’t recognize her house. The cafe’s next to her house, like simply it’s all gone.

SM: This is in Gaza?

NS: Gaza, yeah. It just brings up the question, what do we do when the physical landscape dissipates, and it’s not there anymore? And I wanted to read out something from your own experience of displacement and expulsion, especially something you’d written in Jadaliyya about coming back to Al-Karamah refugee camp as an adult, and seeing what had happened to it. And you wrote: 

It was an utterly desolate landscape framed by the United Nation’s scattered, decaying buildings. All had been melted into dusty air by Israel’s erasure machine.The houses were all gone. Their white-washed mudbrick walls did not purr when we lived in them, and perhaps had already looked like ruins to outsiders, but they sheltered the private pleasures and agonies of many families, and stood as testimony and symbol of our expulsion in 1948. 

So I did want to ask you, for residents who might possibly in the future, be returning to the land they’ve been expelled from and not remembering it exactly in the same way, because it’s been erased. How do they reconcile with that? What would place mean in that case? 

SM: It is really hard. A place has many different meanings and many different ramifications and many different ways of seeing and living and thinking about it. And when you go, I mean, everything, all the houses were destroyed, the residential areas. The only thing that was left was the UN. You know, ironic. The UNRWA. The United Nations because that’s who was our grandfather I guess, the UN. Well, now the UN is really next to Hamas, the governors of Gaza, because they provide everything. 

There was still the streets, the main street in the camp and I have a good memory of where we were, who was where, and our house was here, and these were our neighbors on this side and that side, and then you know, as you walk, I knew all the streets, it wasn’t a large camp, it was 5000 people, and it was all organized like in a grid, which, of course, when you live there, you you take it for granted. So sometimes it takes going elsewhere to understand your own place. But it stays in your memory.

The houses all were demolished except we went to the school. I had my two kids and a friend of mine had his two kids with him and they were still young and we went to the UNWRA school. This was not my elementary school but my preparatory school—like 7th grade to 9th grade. So the kids went in and they went to the classroom and they came out and they said: oh we found the blackboard and the chalks and we wrote on the board. My son was, you know, really still young and he said to me: “I really like that going under into the classroom. Did you do that everyday?” But I felt like you know my life for a second was complete here: they went to the same place; they went to the same classroom; it was in its own way a satisfying moment.

NS: That’s very interesting, a way to reclaim place and memory of it.

Thank you for listening to Podcast Palestine: The War on Gaza and to my guest, Sharif ElMusa. This episode was produced by myself and the Cairo Review’s deputy senior editor Omar Auf. 

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