There are still some people alive today who saw the massacres of Palestinians, the destruction of Palestine and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. Many people may also have seen a documentary or read about the tragedy, but this is never the same as seeing and bearing witness to it firsthand. Yet, on the morning of 18 January this year one could have seen a re-enactment of what the Palestinians mourn every year: The Nakba, or catastrophe. The re-enactment was in the Israeli-controlled Palestinian village of Atir-Umm Al-Hiran in the Naqab (Negev) Desert. The details of the re-enactment, orchestrated by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were as follows. Having killed two Palestinians, the Israeli colonial machine razed the village to the ground and made its citizens homeless, or refugees all over again. All the elemental claims that have been behind the implementation of Israel's vision and Palestine's nightmare were there. But two in particular were conspicuous: It was claimed that Umm Al-Hiran was uninhabited, and when its inhabitants, unlike Zionist settlers, who, we are often told, are “pioneers” cultivating the land, could not be blocked from view they were written off as “nomads,” people who roamed the land without cultivating it and thus did not make any contribution to it. The history of the village renders it possible to dispute the implications of this ideological erasure, however. The village was established in 1956, and its inhabitants belonged to the Qian family that during the pre-1948 period lived in Khirbet Zubaleh “which they had cultivated for centuries,” according to a 2011 report by Adalah, a Palestinian legal centre, entitled “Nomads against their Will: The Attempted Expulsion of the Arab Bedouin in the Naqab: The Example of Atir-Umm Al-Hiran.” The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 meant, thanks to the Zionist Plan Dalet, the expulsion of Palestinians from around 500 villages, one of which was the village inhabited by the Qians. The inhabitants had no choice but to move to other places. When they decided to go back to their village, they were prevented from doing so and were relocated under military orders to Atir-Umm Al-Hiran. The Israeli colonial state later decided to make their alleged nomadism permanent, slowly but surely as the cliché goes, a cliché that is constantly being reinvigorated by Israel's draconian measures that target the Palestinians. The Israeli state sued the local inhabitants, putting forward two arguments. Mohamed Bassam, a lawyer working for Adalah, succinctly explains the first: “Because the state had granted the Bedouin permission to use the land, it was also entitled to revoke it.” The second argument, even more preposterous, had to do with the inability of the Zionist authorities to contact the inhabitants. They concluded that the state “was unable to identify or reach the inhabitants,” and the locals were therefore considered “trespassers who were squatting illegally,” transforming through sleight of hand a land specified by Israel itself for Palestinian refugees into an “unrecognised village.” As a result, the 1,000-plus inhabitants of the area were thought of as “a special obstacle,” according to the Israel Land Administration, to “developing” the land. Relocation without compensation was inevitable. The decision was made to move the inhabitants, now turned into “nomads” despite their long years of settlement, let alone the derogatory use of the word “nomad” to suggest criminality, to “a small number of specially-designated reservation-like towns,” among them Hura. This move set a precedent for further relocations. The thread running through these is clear: To “contain” and “concentrate” the so-called Bedouin. The end game of this strategy is to push the inhabitants of the Naqab Desert out into another place, perhaps even the sea. ISRAELI REASONING: One of the underlying reasons for this constant relocation is pragmatic, being Israel's interest in the oil reserves in the Naqab Desert. The expulsion of the Palestinians will empty the land for exploration, a word synonymous with theft. Another reason is that the relocations are reminiscent of Israel's sadistic strategy of persecuting Palestinians wherever they are to be found, making lives unlivable so that they become like the “living dead” even as they are accompanied by constant movement. Israel has long been invested in “nomadising” the Palestinians. After all, nomadising, though this is not to suggest that there is anything inherently wrong about nomads, the inhabitants of Umm Al-Hiran is meant to pave the way for Israeli settlers or Israel's allegedly civilised population. Israel now wants to establish in the village's stead another village, read settler colony, under the name of Hiran. University of London professor Neve Gordon, who has visited the Israeli community that is going to replace the Palestinian one, reports that it consists of “about 30 religious families” already living in good conditions and making real before our eyes the re-enactment of what happened in 1948 – in other words the substitution of one community for another. Greed and power aside, how can one understand Israel's behaviour? It is time to turn to psychoanalysis, as Sigmund Freud, its founder, whose stance on Zionism was ambivalent, may provide a deeper understanding of Israel's designs. In his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud writes that “the patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. Thus, he acquires no sense of conviction of the correctness of the construction that has been communicated to him. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.” Freud's analysis can be used to understand Israel's acts vis-à-vis the inhabitants of Umm Al-Hiran. Israel has a disorder: The compulsion to repeat. Indeed, it “is obliged to repeat” its originary moment over and over again and cannot avoid it. This is Israel's “primal scene,” to use the Freudian terminology. It is worth recalling that Freud's dystopian vision is not only meant to account for the behaviour of patients, but also of the human condition as a whole. In his book Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud claims that “men [read human beings] are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus.” The translation of the last Latin sentence is “man is a wolf to man.” But history flouts Freud's vision, as it suggests that human beings can and do support one another. A case in point is the support that the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa received from all over the world. I therefore disagree with Freud's tendency to generalise. Nevertheless, his analysis perfectly diagnoses the Zionist behaviour and mentality. And what a sick mentality it is. The writer is a Jordanian academic.
