My late friend Ibrahim Abu-Rabi was a proud Palestinian from Nazareth. “The home of Mary and Jesus,” he would often add with a gentle smile. He came into the world in 1956, some years after Israel had annexed the storied Palestinian city. The inherited memory of that experience had instilled in Ibrahim a perpetual sense of exile. “I was in exile when my mother gave birth to me,” he wrote in a poem.
The 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine stipulated that Nazareth would be part of an Arab Palestinian state. The next year, however, the city was captured by the newly established state of Israel. The city’s population, most of them Palestinian Christians, were permitted to remain. That option was not extended to other Palestinians whose towns and villages Israel annexed. Upwards of 750,000 of them were forced to flee their homes, and never allowed to return. With the passage of time, the vision of two separate states in historic Palestine became a faint specter of itself. What remains of Palestine on the map today is but dashed lines marking the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And these dashed lines too may soon pass into oblivion.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it a habit in his U.N. speeches to hold up maps on which the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is labeled Israel. The maps visualize the Likud Party charter, which asserts that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The realization of this vision has been the primary purpose of Netanyahu’s government. In the West Bank, ever-expanding illegal Israeli settlements continue to push Palestinians out of their lands. In Gaza, already devastated by what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch call a “genocide,” Israeli leaders and their American backers are openly flaunting their agenda to force 2 million Palestinians into neighboring countries.
But the commitment to the total erasure of Palestine did not begin with Israel’s current administration. In 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meir, a Labor Party politician, famously told a reporter, “There was no such thing as Palestinians.” Her sentiment has been reiterated ad nauseam by Israeli politicians. Among them, Bezalel Smotrich, while serving as finance minister in 2023, said the notion that Arabs ever lived “in the Land of Israel” was mere “fiction.” Others have pushed the envelope of lunacy even further, suggesting the absence of the letter P in the Arabic alphabet is proof there was never such a place as Palestine with Arab inhabitants.
The smoke and mirrors of these absurd assertions has one intention only: to make the world forget that the land on which Israel was founded has long been home to a people who love it dearly and who call it Falastin, the Arabic word for Palestine. In the late 19th century, when the Zionist movement designated Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land,” Palestine had a population of approximately half a million, the vast majority of them Muslim and Christian Arabs. Most of them were peasants living in the countryside. Others were urban dwellers residing in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Gaza, Hebron and other towns.
Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of modern Zionism, knew all too well that Palestine was not a land without a people. Although he considered Palestine as one viable option — another being Argentina — where European Jews could create a state of their own, he nevertheless worried that “attempts at colonization” may result in conflict with the “native population.” An astute political operative, Herzl tried to enlist the support of the great European powers. A Jewish state in Palestine, he once wrote, would be a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”
Herzl’s efforts ultimately bore fruit. In 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced his government’s decision to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Three years later, Palestine came under British rule and remained so until May 15, 1948, one day after Israel’s formal establishment. For Palestinians, May 15 marks the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the day they were uprooted from their ancestral homeland through mass expulsion and dispossession.
The dashed lines marking the Occupied Palestinian Territories on the map are a reminder of a land whose native inhabitants have never stopped calling it home. The gradual disappearance of these lines through the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people is one of the great tragedies of our age. But the story of Palestine is also that of a people’s stubborn refusal to be erased. It was this stubbornness that Ibrahim embodied when he insisted on his Palestinian identity. It is the same resolve that inspires people as far away from Palestine as right here in Korea. Wherever resistance to injustice is waged, the spirit of Palestine is summoned. “Palestine is everywhere” has become the slogan of a global solidarity movement.
Where is Palestine? It is wherever Palestinians may be. It lives in the sound of the lullabies that Palestinian mothers sing to their babies, in the taste and smell of a freshly cooked plate of musakhan that you may be served at a Palestinian home and in the rhythmic movement of the dabke dance that Palestinians perform on joyous occasions. It exists in Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, in Elia Suleiman’s films, Ghassan Kanafani’s novels, Laila Shawa’s paintings, Adania Shibli’s essays and Kamilya Jubran’s music. It survives in the delicate roots of the young olive trees that farmers in the West Bank plant in the soil after their ancient olive groves have been burnt to the ground by mobs of Israeli settlers. And it breathes in the bricks and stones of demolished Gaza homes to which Palestinians return with a determination to build anew.
Siavash Saffari is a professor of West Asian Studies at Seoul National University. The views expressed in this article do not represent those of The Korea Times.