Norma Musih, Zochrot and the Nakba

By Robert Hirschfield


	Norma Musih of Zochrot (Photo R. Hirschfield).

NORMA MUSIH, a young, soft-spoken teacher from Jaffa, does not look like a woman who would elicit telephone death threats. But she and the members of her group, Zochrot—which means “remembrance,” and which was founded in 2002 by Israeli activists and scholars—have devoted themselves to commemorating, understanding and teaching about a subject that in Israel is plainly subversive: the Palestinian Nakba.

Musih recently stood in front of a mostly progressive New York Jewish audience, brought together by Brooklyn Parents For Peace, and talked about Zochrot and the Nakba.

“For us,” she explained, “1948 was the independence war, the State of Israel being created. A great event for the Jews. For Palestinians, it was the loss of everything, the big catastrophe—Nakba! Most Israelis don’t want to know this word, don’t want to hear it.”

Zochrot works to get that word through to Israelis, to get it heard, to have it understood.

Musih showed her audience slides she brought with her—graphics of displacement. One was of the Etzel Museum at Manshiyye, built on the ruins of a Palestinian house.

“There is nothing there about the story of the house,” she said. “The house tells its own story.”

In another slide, Adnan Mahmid, from the village of Lajjun, points to where his house had stood. Now it’s just an empty space.

One of Zochrot’s activities is putting up signs in places where there once were Arab villages, naming them, commemorating them.

“They are usually removed after 15 minutes,” Musih said. “At best, two hours.”

Less easy to destroy are the oral histories Zochrot gathers from Palestinians, stories of places and lives before the Nakba. Zochrot members go to Arab villages taking testimonies that then appear in booklets and videos.

Zochrot is similar in a way to groups in Poland and Germany dedicated to understanding and atoning for the destruction of Jewish life and culture in their countries.

“At first, the Nakba was something I couldn’t understand,” Musih said. “But I felt there was something there I must face. I had to explore what that was. Now I see that the Nakba belongs to us as well as to the Palestinians. It is part of our healing process.”

Musih spends much of her time trying to educate Israelis, especially children, about the Nakba. In one of her exercises with children, she hands each child a card on which are the names of Palestinian villages that were destroyed, or from which Arabs were driven out. The children are to put their cards in their proper places on the map.

“One Israeli girl put back on the map the village her father had destroyed,” Musih recalled.

A Palestinian child, whose card had the name of Birrem, his village, told its story, as well as restoring it on the map.

On one of Musih’s slides, an Israeli girl asks the question: “Who does my house belong to?”

Zochrot commemorates Nakba Day by bringing together Jews and Arabs in Tel Aviv. The event is publicized with a light touch. Stickers are put up with cartoon balloons emerging from people’s mouths, saying, “I almost forgot—today is Nakba Day!” One of the balloons—Musih laughed, pointing to it—emerged from the mouth of a stern-faced Theodore Herzl.

Robert Hirschfield is a free-lance writer based in New York City.