{"id":257642,"date":"2024-03-25T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T12:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=257642"},"modified":"2024-03-21T05:31:59","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T05:31:59","slug":"what-was-palestine-before-the-nakba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/03\/what-was-palestine-before-the-nakba\/","title":{"rendered":"What Was Palestine Before the Nakba?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Three generations from the Palestinian village of Dhahiriyya (located between Hebron\u00a0 and Beersheba), 9 Feb 1940<\/p><\/div>\n

14 Mar 2024 – A stunning photo archive reveals a time before the walls and checkpoints, when Palestine was not defined by its ailments but by its industries and cultures.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am writing this introduction in English and Arabic, and it is in these moments that the profound chasm between these two languages reveals itself. In English, there is a need to riddle the page with facts and figures detailing the essential cruelties of an atrocity that should be\u2014and should have long been\u2014internationally recognized. I\u2019m tempted to squeeze into these lines a history lesson, to list the names of the various terrorist paramilitaries that formed the Israeli military that\u2019s terrorizing us today; the number of massacres, exiles, refugees; the endless hectares of stolen land; the pregnant bellies split open in Deir Yassin. There is no need for such contextualization in Arabic: The Nakba breathes down our necks, invading our national identity and contorting our earliest encounters with our sense of self. It is relentless. It happens in the present tense, everywhere on the map. For some households, it began when a grandfather was dispossessed in Jaffa and sought refuge in Gaza, where it continues in the rumble of the warplanes across the blockaded enclave, introducing his grandchildren to their first\u2014or perhaps third, or sixth\u2014war. Not a corner of our geography is spared, not a generation.<\/p>\n