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Remembering the Nakba
Contributed by Noraa Kaplan

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

As we break the middle matzah tonight, we remember the break in Palestinian life that happened when the State of Israel was established in 1948. That year, Israeli settlers did irreparable damage to the Palestinian people. Haganah, the militia that would later become the Israeli Defense Force, attempted to force Palestine’s rightful inhabitants out of their homeland. Israeli settlers destroyed hundreds of villages, leaving 15,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people displaced in an event known to the Palestinian people as the Nakba, the catastrophe. 

On April 21, 1948—the first night of Pesach—Haganah and the Irgun (another Zionist paramilitary group) commenced Operation Bi’ur Chametz. Its name bi’ur chametz, means “burning the leaven,” a sickening reference to the Jewish ritual of eliminating all traces of chametz from the home before Passover. With incendiary bombs, gunfire, and psychological warfare, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian citizens from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and the surrounding areas. Historian Ilan Pappe recounts:

Israeli loudspeakers urged the Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late. The orders were plain and simple: ‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives’. When these orders were executed promptly within the 1.5 square kilometres where thousands of Haifa’s defenceless Palestinians were still residing, the shock and terror were such that, without packing any of their belongings or even knowing what they were doing, people began leaving en masse… as soon as they had fled, Jewish troops broke into and looted their homes. When Golda Meir visited Haifa a few days later, she at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen in an instant. In the early hours of April 22, people began streaming to the harbor. We can learn what happened next from the horrifying recollections of some of the survivors: “Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.”

The effects of the Nakba are still felt in Palestinian communities. The occupation of Palestine continues to this day, as does Israel’s project of ethnic cleansing. In the apardheit state of Israel, Palestinians are second-class citizens, subject to perpetual violence. In addition to military operations, bombings, Israeli settler terrorism and vigilante killings, Israeli police and prisons are weaponized against them.

There is an epidemic of mass incarceration among Palestinian people, especially Palestinian youth. Israel is the only country in the world where children are tried in adult military courts. Since 2000, more than 12,000 Palestinian children have been imprisoned, mostly for throwing stones, an offense punishable by 20 years incarceration. One in five Palestinian people have been incarcerated. Israeli police also regularly kill unarmed Palestinian people, mistaking them for ‘terrorists.’ During the George Floyd riots in June 2020, Israeli police killed an autistic Palestianian man named Iyad Halaq. Palestinian protesters compared his death with Floyd’s and stood in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

As we break the middle matzah tonight, let us recognize the finality of death. The precious lives stolen by carceral states can never be replaced. Yizkor, the Jewish memorial prayer for the dead said on Passover and other major holidays, teaches those in mourning to honor those we’ve lost by “binding their souls up in the binding of life” through practicing tzedakah in their names. By redistributing resources to those in need and building a better world, the dead live on through us, and their lives become intertwined with our own and the lives of those we’ve touched.  
haggadah Section: Yachatz
Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan

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