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The Nakba Law and the Ongoing Nakba

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By introducing and analyzing the Nakba Law, I wish to suggest that laws constructing Palestinian citizens as feared Others can become a tool to silence the native’s history, and further control and discipline Palestinians living in Israel. Statements by politicians, such as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement at the annual Herzliya conference on security in 2003 when he said that “Israel’s growing demographic problem is not because of Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but of Israeli Arabs,” demonstrate how Palestinians are considered a “demographic problem.” Calling Palestinians citizens of the state, or as Netanyahu calls them, the “Israeli Arab demographic problem,” and finding them to have harmed the state’s fabric, as a threat to the “Jewish and democratic” nature of the state, led him to suggest in his speech at the Herzliya conference on security that “A policy is needed that will balance the two.”

A close examination of the Nakba Law allows us to uncover the way in which the politico-legal system operates to erase the Palestinian experience and deny collective traumas and atrocities. Locating the Palestinian collective memory and trauma in the realm of something to be banned by law and feared—and therefore to be monitored and disciplined—operates as an impetus for the Israeli necropolitics. As Fanon tells us, “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation” (p. 60). Like the distinction between “the letter and spirit” of laws, the Nakba Law and its spirit, mainly the surveillance of memory/thought, creates a gray area between law and society, justice and judicial procedure. Israeli law cannot be taken at face value, but rather one should look into the law’s fine print—precisely the determination of authority as colonial and the power to carve oppression into the thought and commemoration of one’s losses.

I wish to argue that the imposition of surveillance over memory through legislation that points to risk behavior, became an additional tool to otherize Palestinians in Israel while creating affects, mistrust, senses of insecurity and emotions that constructs what Isin (2003) calls the neurotic citizen. To understand the way laws construct a feared other and capitalize on citizen’s fears, I examine the Israeli Nakba Law.

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The Nakba Law and the Ongoing Nakba

By introducing and analyzing the Nakba Law, I wish to suggest that laws constructing Palestinian citizens as feared Others can become a tool to silence the native’s history, and further control and discipline Palestinians living in Israel. Statements by politicians, such as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement at the annual Herzliya conference on security in 2003 when he said that “Israel’s growing demographic problem is not because of Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but of Israeli Arabs,” demonstrate how Palestinians are considered a “demographic problem.” Calling Palestinians citizens of the state, or as Netanyahu calls them, the “Israeli Arab demographic problem,” and finding them to have harmed the state’s fabric, as a threat to the “Jewish and democratic” nature of the state, led him to suggest in his speech at the Herzliya conference on security that “A policy is needed that will balance the two.”

A close examination of the Nakba Law allows us to uncover the way in which the politico-legal system operates to erase the Palestinian experience and deny collective traumas and atrocities. Locating the Palestinian collective memory and trauma in the realm of something to be banned by law and feared—and therefore to be monitored and disciplined—operates as an impetus for the Israeli necropolitics. As Fanon tells us, “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation” (p. 60). Like the distinction between “the letter and spirit” of laws, the Nakba Law and its spirit, mainly the surveillance of memory/thought, creates a gray area between law and society, justice and judicial procedure. Israeli law cannot be taken at face value, but rather one should look into the law’s fine print—precisely the determination of authority as colonial and the power to carve oppression into the thought and commemoration of one’s losses.

I wish to argue that the imposition of surveillance over memory through legislation that points to risk behavior, became an additional tool to otherize Palestinians in Israel while creating affects, mistrust, senses of insecurity and emotions that constructs what Isin (2003) calls the neurotic citizen. To understand the way laws construct a feared other and capitalize on citizen’s fears, I examine the Israeli Nakba Law.