The Arab claim is that the Palestinian refugees were illegally expelled by Israel or fled from fear of illegal Israeli actions. The Israeli position is that the refugees fled because they were caught in an armed conflict caused by the aggression of Arab armed attempts to prevent the creation of a Jewish state. As to a “right of return,” the Arab position is that such a right exists in international law, and although many refugees may not wish to return, they have the right to do so. The Israel legal position under international law as being that neither under the general international conventions, nor under the major UN resolutions, nor under the relevant agreements between the parties, do the Palestinian refugees have a right to return to Israel. There does not appear to be any legal precedent or the claim that descendants of refugees also have a right of return. In accordance with international law, the refugees are entitled to be compensated for property they left in Israel. The Jews who fled Arab States are also entitled to such compensation; Israel’s position is that such mutual claims will have to be negotiated in a multilateral forum.

Apart from the issue of forced expulsion, the issue of an obligation to repatriate could have been put to the International Court of Justice. Populations are deemed to have a right to be repatriated when exodus occurs, it was argued. They also have a right to nationality when sovereignty changes in a territory. The United States pressured the Provisional Government of Israel to repatriate. The Provisional Government of Israel denied an obligation to repatriate. It blamed the Arab states for the exodus and said that the populations of displaced Arabs became the responsibility of those states. It said that repatriation while the situation was unsettled would give the Arab states a military advantage. It said that repatriation could be considered only in the context of peace agreements with the Arab states. It said that nationality did not have to be offered to the displaced Arabs because they had shown disloyalty by departing. The General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for repatriation and established a three-nation committee to oversee its implementation.

The introduction to A Battlefield of Memory provides the reader with an understanding of the societal importance of the foundational pasts under review while highlighting existing trends of denial. Readers are also familiarized with polls conducted among Palestinians and Israeli-Jews on attitudes toward the other’s foundational trauma and failed reconciliatory attempts, which shed light on the materialization of mnemonic delegitimization efforts. Interviews conducted with the Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian individuals responsible for these initiatives demonstrate that they have, ironically, been accused of the same perfidious conduct, namely “selling out to the enemy.” The introduction further provides a synopsis of scholarly approaches to collective memory theory and the key research methodologies that have been applied in the collection of primary source material. It is in this particular context that the reader is informed of important caveats that should be taken into account during the reading of this work. One such provision concerns this work’s simultaneous deliberation of the Holocaust and the Nakba, which does not mean equating them or promulgating a causal linkage. Such a conflation would not only be historically – and ethically – erroneous, but equally fail to recognize the divergence in historical culpability. Nevertheless, as this work illustrates, a more relational linkage does exist: as dominant national metanarratives, the Holocaust and the Nakba have bolstered exclusive identities within the two groups, both centering on unique claims of ongoing victimhood and loss and a consequential devaluation – if not denial – of the other’s catastrophe

Through an analysis of the mnemonic activities of three leading civil society organizations – Baladna, ADRID, and Badil – Chapter 4 examines two collective mnemonic Nakba practices established in the wake of the Oslo Accords inside Israel and the West Bank: annual Nakba Day commemoration and collective returns to former Palestinian villages. By detailing the mnemonic symbolism and political goals of these commemorative activities, this chapter illustrates that the established forms of Nakba commemoration in the post-Oslo period articulate the urgent desire to further awareness of the Nakba among younger generations with the specific aim of encouraging the continuing struggle for the right of return (Arabic: haq al-ʻawdah). With reference to the organizations’ varying social and geographical focuses, this chapter also attests to the fact that Nakba mnemonics seek to resist ongoing marginalization while reflecting Palestinian communities’ contemporary political, economic, and cultural grievances and diverging historical mnemonic traditions. The theoretical focus on the confrontational and defensive nature of Nakba mnemonic practices does not denote that the exclusionary narrative unfolds overtly. The analyzed commemorative acts are not “sites” of a narrative collision. Nevertheless, the societal invocation of the Nakba as a “present continuous” – or an “ongoing Nakba” – does shed light on existing trends of marginalization discussed throughout the work, which hinge on a retaliatory screening out of any past suffering of the out-group.

Post-Oslo Nakba anniversarial mediation became a means of expressing the communities’ concerns in coherence with the readerships’ cadres sociaux, forming the inverse of Israeli-dictated mediation in the wake of the 1948 War and Six-Day War in 1967. Accordingly, this chapter posits that Kul al-Arab has presented the Nakba as an interpretative framework for contemporary grievances resulting from Palestinians’ status as an involuntary minority in Israel. Inside the West Bank, application of the Nakba as an interpretative framework and, simultaneously, an analogical tool testifies to the mediated expression of what Dennis McQuail defined as “national problems” and “national goals.” Through repeated usage of previously censored symbolic terminology, the readership of the semi-independent Al-Quds and the PA’s mouthpiece, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, is admonished to adhere to these national objectives, which call for an end to “the permanent Nakba.” Invocation of the so-called fixed national principles is equally meant to challenge the main actor deemed responsible for their suspension: Israel. The chapter’s identified mediated convergence of the Holocaust and the Nakba testifies to the actualization of the previously-discussed defensive victimhood theory; the fallacious negation of the former’s historical veracity is symptomatic of its deemed discursive incompatibility with the Palestinian narrative. Incongruously, the Holocaust has also been conjured within Nakba media output as a means of highlighting the depths of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis. Forming a powerful realm of collective social mobilization against “the Zionist entity,” Nakba mediated output thus, at times, makes use of the most tendentious charge to debunk the Israeli aggressor and the perceived “Zionist colonial project”: the execution of a Palestinian Holocaust.

The process of Israel’s birth in 1948 created a set of structural impediments that made impossible a harmonious relationship between Jewish internationalism and human rights. The creation of the Palestinian refugee problem and the absorption of a large Arab minority combined to circumscribe the range of action of Jewish advocates. They found themselves forced to deploy human rights as a counterclaim to neutralize demands for repatriation and compensation, a dynamic that first revealed itself when petitioning the UN to seek redress for embattled Jews in Arab countries. Human rights, often understood as a moral claims-making language, could also function to neutralize the claims of others. The potential of a restless Arab minority appealing to the UN acted as a break on limitless ambitions for capacious enforcement mechanisms. Even more traumatic was discovering the impact of Israeli military actions: the exercise of Jewish sovereignty could undermine the moral status of claims to authority by Jewish internationalists on human rights.

Following some preliminary remarks on the concept of secession and its status in international law, this chapter examines competing answers to two questions that any theory of state secession must address.First, what sort of actor enjoys a prima facie moral right to secede, and in virtue of what features or considerations does that actor do so?Second, on what particular territory is an actor with a right to secede permitted to exercise that right?It then evaluates arguments for and against several international legal norms that might be adopted to regulate unilateral secession, drawing on both moral theories of secession and empirically informed conjectures regarding the incentives those norms might create for various international and domestic actors.