On 15 September this year, Elias Khoury, one of the most prominent contemporary Arab novelists, passed away at the age of 76. Khoury was born in Beirut on 12 July 1948, the year of the Nakba, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

One of his last books to be published, Al-Nakba Mustamirra, moves from politics to literature and back again, arguing that there is more to the Nakba than the May 1948 events generally identified with it, part of a war that went on from November 1947 to March 1949. Such thinking about the Nakba is in tune with the author’s iconic fiction on Palestine, such as Gate of the Sun (1998), which documents five decades of Palestinian plight. The Nakba is seen as an unending saga that started with the 1948 War but didn’t end with the defeat of Arab armies and the establishment of the state of Israel on a large segment of historic Palestine.

Al-Nakba, as Khoury wrote, is a word that cannot really be translated from its original Arabic because it goes beyond the idea of a specific calamity with specific consequences. Khoury’s main argument, in this book, and in a paper he published a few years earlier, is that the Nakba has been unfolding – actually, on a larger scale and possibly with more grave consequences than those of what happened a little over 75 years ago – continuously since 1948.

It was the Syrian intellectual, Costantin Zureiq, who coined the reference to the appropriation of a large segment of the land of historic Palestine as the Nakba. However, Khoury argued that this was a rather insufficient take on what the 1948 War was really about. What happened in that “first phase” of the Nakba, Khoury argues, was shocking and huge, for sure. The eradication of entire Palestinian villages, the forced transfer of large numbers of Palestinian villagers and the killing of many Palestinians all admittedly indicate a war of ethnic cleansing – as admitted by the Israeli New Historians.

The point, however, is that it did not end there because what happened in 1948 was only the first shot of the Zionist scheme that had far more objectives. More Palestinian territories were seized by Israel – actually the entirety of historic Palestine was seized – during the subsequent defeat of Arab armies before Israel in 1967 in what was dubbed by Egypt’s journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal the Naksa (or Setback).

Al-Nakba and Al-Naksa sound too similar. They actually differ in only one consonant. However, in reality, Khoury wrote, they are both parts of the Zionist scheme that continues to unfold in new chapters up until the current Israeli war on Gaza, which started on 7 October 2023, shortly before the book was published.

What Palestinians specifically lost with their Nakba, which Khoury argued eventually grew to be a wider Arab issue, is not just the land that was captured by the Israelis. Palestinians, the prominent Lebanese novelist argued, lost the very association between their name and their land – “and this is specifically why only the Palestinians have a day to celebrate their association with their land: Land Day in March”.

The land and the association between Palestinians and their land, Khoury argued, would therefore be the core of the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation, as against the endless Israeli attempt to erase the very existence of the Palestinians as a people who lived on the land in question. Khoury’s book also reflects on Palestinian representation, or rather the lack thereof, in Israeli literature to find that Palestinian existence is always negated, one way or the other.

Neither the defeat nor the subsequent negation of Palestinian identity/existence, Khoury wrote, were strictly an Israeli act. They were the outcome of a world and Arab complacency that was designed to both whitewash the Europeans’ involvement in the Holocaust and to conceal the failure of Arab dictatorships to avenge repeated Israeli violations of Arab land and Arab rights despite the claims of pan-Arabism.

Upon the 1967 defeat, Khoury wrote, the Arab regimes of Egypt and Syria, who supposedly championed the call of pan-Arabism, claimed that the objective of the war that enabled the full occupation of Palestine along with parts of the territories of Egypt and Syria was to eliminate the regimes in Cairo and Damascus, and that Israel failed to achieve that objective. This, he argues, was a newer manifestation of the Nakba whereby losing territories to Israel was not particularly significant compared to regimes’ survival.

This defeat, Khoury wrote, was not so hard to anticipate despite the endless claims of pan-Arabism. It was actually forecast in three literary pieces between 1963 and 1966: the Lebanese Poet Khalil Hawi’s Eleizer, Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun and Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell.

According to Khoury, what Al-Naksa did was to launch a literary surge on the Palestinian story, especially through the works of Edward Said, who rightly presented the Zionist scheme as part of a wider colonial scheme, and the poems of Mahmoud Darwish. Those authors, Khoury wrote, managed to break the silence about the Palestinian story. They defeated consistent attempts by Israel to subdue the Palestinian narrative in favour of the narrative of the Holocaust that was often used to disguise that of Zionism.

According to Khoury, Said and Darwish gave those Palestinians who still lived in the Occupied Territories, in Israel, in the refugee camps and in the Diaspora, a voice. “They made them present after they were made to be absent,” he wrote. By giving voice to the Palestinian story, the works of Said and Darwish also examined the choices of Palestinian politics as exercised by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, which was for a long time the only voice the world could hear speaking on behalf of the Palestinians.

Said, Khoury wrote, was particularly perceptive in criticising the PLO for signing the Oslo Accords in 1993, on the grounds that this deal did not grant the Palestinians, or for that matter a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, the right to exist. Khoury is in agreement with Said that the Oslo Accords denied the new Palestinian narrative that was being formulated in 1988, with the First Intifada.

Four decades after the Nakba, Khoury wrote, the First Intifada was giving the Palestinian story a wider scope. The First Intifada, he argued, added to the Palestinian narrative that had for a while been confined to the scope of Al-Nakba, Al-Fedai and Al-Kaffiya. It added two other words that were as hard to translate as Al-Nakba itself: Al-Intifada and Al-Shabab. This lexicon, he argued, defied the many myths that Israel tried to promote for a long time over the real story of Al-Nakba.

The story has not come to an end yet – neither that of the Zionist scheme nor that of the resistance. “We are still living in the Nakba,” Khoury tells us.  

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly