Co-memory & Melancholia

The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their ‘War of Independence’ and the Palestinians their ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse.

This book explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel’s war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, Ronit Lentin makes a contribution to social memory studies through a critical evaluation of the co-memoration of the Palestinian Nakba by Israeli Jews.

Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin’s central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine.

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Book review: Holy Land Studies 11.1 (2012): 93–105
© Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/hls

Commemorating the Nakba in Hebrew
Ronit Lentin, Co-memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian
Nakba (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Pp.172. Hardback. ISBN:
9780719081705.

After more than sixty years, the Palestinian Catastrophe (the Nakba) and the 1948 Israeli War of Independence still remain at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These events represent a challenging problem within Israeli society and the Zionist left as well, requiring the overcoming of certain taboos before they can be subjected to proper analysis.
Since the beginning of the process which led to the establishment of the Jewish state, the experience of the Palestinian natives, along with the increasing tragedy of the Palestinian refugees’ question, has been ignored by the vast majority of Israeli Jews both at the intellectual and the political level. Despite the rise of alternative perspectives to that of the Zionist mainstream (particularly those suggested by scholars belonging to the group termed the ‘New Historians’), the dominant official Israeli viewpoint in relation to 1948 has consistently removed from public debate the dispossession and expulsion of the eighty per cent of the Palestinian indigenous population. Starting with such a standpoint, Ronit Lentin’s latest book entitled Co-memory and Melancholia focuses on the way in which Israeli Jews have begun to tackle their collective memory, through attempting to commemorate the Palestinian Nakba. In particular, she points out the deep Israeli Jewish sense of melancholia concerning 1948 and the Nakba denial, questioning whether Israeli commemorative initiatives deal with the necessity of self-healing rather than the search for a just political tool with which to address the issue of the Palestinian Right of Return. Borrowing her words, ‘this is an Israeli Jewish story about Palestine – indelibly and dialectically woven into the story of Israeli Jewish dissent – co-memoration of victor and vanquished, ultimately, as this book argues, united in grieving the loss of Palestine’ (p. 18).
As feminist scholar and activist who has decided to leave Israel and to become an ‘émigré Israeli middle class Ashkenazi Jew since 1969’ (p.5), Lentin has mainly published on sociological and political subjects related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as to migrations and racism in Europe. In her latest work she has adopted an auto-ethnographic approach through which she has explored the role of memory, not only in terms of the collective act of commemoration, but also as the political concept of co-memory she sees as emerging from the shadow that has manipulated the entire Israeli Jewish narrative. Throughout the book she refers to the long and gradual pathway she has followed in opposing Zionist policies, illustrating this with stories from her personal and academic life, and including several reflections about her father’s involvement in the Haifa Nakba. In particular, Lentin describes her birthplace as a lieu de mémoire and, at the same time, a lieu de silence, since its culture had been founded on a strong and lasting attitude of silence towards the tragedy of the ‘Other’. In order to introduce her own positioning as an anti-Zionist Israeli1 (with an open criticism towards diverse forms of post-Zionism), she reflects on the meaning of co-memorating the Palestinian tragedy by Israeli peace activists, who need to remind themselves (including herself) that ‘in researching Palestine, as in commemorating the Nakba in Hebrew, the Palestinians often get erased, their voices subsumed by the voice of the powerful coloniser, and that, regardless of our position and politics, all
Israeli Jews are implicated in and must take responsibility for the colonisation of Palestine’ (p.5).
Going in depth into the Israeli melancholia for the destruction of Palestine, Lentin focuses her attention on some Israeli commemorative initiatives: entered in the current Israeli public debate by controversial viewpoints, according to Lentin’s vision the co-memory
of the Nakba has allowed Israeli Jewish commemorators to expiate their sense ofguilt and to reduce their melancholia. After briefly discussing the Israeli ‘New Historians’ literature and their internal differences in challenging the collective memory of the Nakba, Lentin goes on to provide a critical and detailed analysis of the work of the Israeli organisation Zochrot (a word that means ‘remembering’), covering its performative as well as discursive practices that have offered the opportunity ‘to think critically about the complex and problematic relations between Israeli Jews, Palestine and the Nakba’ (p. 128).
Illustrating the context of her study, Lentin outlines both the methodological and the political crises that have characterized what she defines as the ‘Israeli resistance movement’. One of the main problems she highlights is the position of the Israeli leftist peace groups, who have continued to be part of the colonizing supremacy within an environment of unequal power-relations. Following the path of a contentious internal Israeli debate, Lentin examines the performance of the co-memory approach developed by Zochrot, as illustrated by the leading founders, to the recognition of the Israeli Jews’ moral responsibility towards the Palestinians (pp. 133–141). On the other hand, bearing
in mind the position of the vast majority of Israeli peace activists, she explicitly questions whether such a co-memoration of the Nakba has the objective of signifying a political act which can enable the building of a just reconciliation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians or, on the contrary, whether it aims to soften their own sense of victimisation and in this
way to attempt to heal Israel (pp. 149–150).
Within such a framework, Lentin argues that the construction of the Israeli Jewish Nakba co-memoration is based on linkages between memory, melancholia and politics, and has principally provided a means for Israeli Jews to redeem their own Jewish identity. Consequently, she explores the resulting conceptual problems which have arisen from claiming Nakba co-memory as a constitutive part of the Israeli Jewish story: firstly, the
exclusion of Palestinians from this kind of co-memorative practice; secondly, the importance of understanding which ‘we’ Zochrot the activists refer to; and thirdly, the thorny question of replacing the Palestinian loss with Israeli Jewish melancholia (pp. 158–161).
Lentin’s latest book is more than ever related to the current reality of peace oriented political activism inside Israel, where, on the one hand, the recognition of the state of oppression towards the Palestinians and, on the other hand, the complex heterogeneity of the Israeli left have drawn a controversial debate that needs to include the most complex issue, that concerning the Palestinian Right of Return. Lentin’s main argument
1 Not only in her latest book, but all through her writings, Lentin has underlined the racial and class divisions existing inside the Jewish state. In representing the middle-class Ashkenazi, she has admitted the limit operating on the majority of the Israeli Jewish peace activists who have not still recognised the complexity of Israeli society, and in particular the leading and discriminatory role of the Ashkenazi establishment which also persists within the peace movement.has contributed to the proposition of an alternative answer to the Israeli Jewish peace activists’ dilemma that has diverted focus from the Palestinians’ drama to concentrate more on their own melancholic status. By writing from the margin not only of Israeli society but also of the viewpoints of Israeli peace activists themselves, Lentin has been aware of her own limitations and of the difficulties in strongly supporting the Palestinian struggle for resistance. In this direction, by means of both her individual and collective political involvement (that goes beyond her latest writing) she has suggested that the general sense
of melancholia, seen as still belonging to the hegemonic coloniser, can be transformed into an effective politics to give a further feasible chance for a just and egalitarian future for all citizens living on the land of Palestine.

Giulia Daniele
Doctoral student
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies
University of Exeter
Stocker Road, Exeter EX4, England
gd253@exeter.ac.uk