This chapter revisits UN General Assembly resolution 181(II) recommending the partition of Palestine. It undertakes critical international legal analysis of the resolution with reference to the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine whose report formed the basis of the resolution. Contrary to the traditional historiography, this chapter posits that the resolution was neither procedurally ultra vires the General Assembly, nor were its terms substantively consistent with prevailing international law as regards self-determination of peoples. Set against the larger context of the international legal status of Palestine from WWI to the end of the British Mandate, this chapter argues that resolution 181(II) was the opening act in the reification of Palestine’s legal subalternity within the newly minted UN system. It demonstrates that the resolution was an embodiment, in legal terms, of the lingering tension between the rule by law of late-European empire and the ostensible rule of law of the post-WWII era. It also shows that the resolution helped hasten the dissolution of Palestine and the dispersal of its people, the consequences of which remain with us today.

Iran’s simultaneous relations with Israel and the Arab world left it in a precarious position. After World War II, Iran had to adapt to the shifting power plays in a politically charged Middle East. The thirty years between 1945 and 1975 witnessed the waning of Iran’s influence in the Persian Gulf and the rise of Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. During much of the Nasser era, until Egypt’s defeat in 1967, Iran’s relationship with Egypt remained tense. Fervent Arab nationalist ideologies identified the shah’s Iran as a state aligned firmly with America and the West. Iran’s support for Israel became a frequent negative target of the Arab press. In the Persian Gulf, however, Iran did not see eye to eye with America or Britain and tried to forge a separate path with Saudi Arabia and the newly configured countries of the region. Iran had to tread gingerly to maintain amicable relations with its neighbors. In the end Iran could only adequately safeguard its security as its regional isolation became a new reality.

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

Chapter 3 examines the development of the first Palestinian curriculum in the aftermath of the establishment of the first Palestinian Ministry of Education in 1994. A close reading of Palestinian educational plans’ content and the elucidation provided by officials reveals that the incorporation of the 1948 War and its catastrophic effects on Palestinian society – highlighted in the continual usage of the term al-Nakba – were considered crucial to furthering national identification and a historical consciousness among Palestinians. Nevertheless, this chapter reveals that the conservative educational outlooks favored by the Palestinian Ministry of Education coupled with the influence of Israeli lobbying efforts led to the production of educational content that lacks an in-depth historical analysis of the 1948 War and the mass displacement that ensued. Notwithstanding the existence of a tepid Nakba narrative, the latter part of this chapter illustrates that the Nakba’s societal significance can be found in the overt and intentional omission of the Holocaust in the Palestinian curriculum. Reactionary educational policies in the domestic sphere are deemed a materialization of Zygmunt Bauman’s victimhood politicization – a quid pro quo, which, as a result of Israeli educational and societal treatment of the Nakba, brings about a retributive omission of “their narrative.”

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.

No problem has proved more intractable for the United Nations than that of the former British mandate of Palestine. Seventy years after the organisation first dealt with the problem, Israel occupies some of the territory of one of its neighbours, has poor relations with others, and has an unresolved relationship with the Palestinian state that was meant to have been born in 1947, but which has still not successfully emerged into the light. It is possible to argue that UN policy in the area has been wrong-headed from the start: certainly, it has not been successful. Only Kashmir can rival it for longevity on the United Nations’ agenda: seven decades after the organisation took up the issue of Palestine, there is no solution in sight.