The Palestinian Nakba and the Arab-Jewish Melancholy: An Essay on Sovereignty and Translation

This chapter begins by discussing the efforts of the State of Israel to suppress both Palestinian assertion of state power and Palestinian spiritual renaissance. Much about these efforts can be understood from relatively recent Israeli legislation that prohibits certain types of discussion of the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophic exile of 750,000 Palestinians from towns, villages, and farms—quickly resettled by Jews—and the consequent uprooting of the social and cultural fabric of Palestinian society. These events, and the debate surrounding censorship of the Nakba, center on questions of Palestinian visibility analogous to those previously raised with respect to Jews. The chapter then analyzes the removal of Modern Hebrew away from its close linguistic ties to Arabic, demonstrating how political forces intervened to choose European languages rather than the linguistically closer spoken Arabic in modeling new vocabulary and grammatical structures.