Mandatory Madness closes with an epilogue, focussed squarely on 1948, which marked the end of the British mandate, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the Palestinian nakba or catastrophe. By reconstructing a series of psychiatric encounters, which attended the end of the mandate period, the epilogue draws out the profound and violent rupture of this moment, as well as the longer processes of partition, erasure, and pathologisation which surrounded it. While the epilogue traces some of these processes into the post-1948 period, it ultimately concludes that this rupture radically diminishes the possibilities for continuing any unitary, entangled history of psychiatry within the territory of what had once been mandate Palestine.

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.

This chapter critically examines the distinctive institutional and normative regime created by the UN for the Palestinian refugees in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba in the form of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. It juxtaposes that regime against the international institutional and normative regime applicable to all other refugees in the world, as administered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The special regime for Palestinian refugees is widely regarded as reflective of the UN’s unique responsibility for their plight. Yet, a critical examination of the UN record on the early history, mandate, and regulatory framework underpinning this regime reveals that it was never intended to give effect to Palestinian refugee rights as established under prevailing international law, including as affirmed by the UN itself. The resulting ‘protection gap’ that has consequently emerged for Palestinian refugees, marked by uneven and confused state practice concerning their plight as well as ongoing gender discrimination against them by the UN, is demonstrative of the Organization’s role in the maintenance of Palestinian legal subalternity on the international plane.

The end of the British Mandate created a vacuum. The Zionist leadership was better prepared and Britain betrayed its obligations under the mandate and disregarded the Palestinian quest for independence. The result was a free hand to the Zionist movement to carry out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that led to the expulsion of half of its population and the destruction of half of its villages and most of its towns.

Arguing that literature requires alternatives to genres such as cli-fi – that focus on the ‘after’, the catastrophe, rather than causes or solutions – this chapter examines Palestinian literature. It draws on Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun (1962) to narrate a tradition of writing that has emerged from interconnected processes of resource extraction, colonialism and fossil capital; and, historically, from the nakba (‘catastrophe’) – the displacement or ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Palestinians in 1948 – and enforced migration to, for example, an unbearably hot Iraq. He notes that a twentieth-century literary tradition – of poets (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Marwan Darwish) and novelists (Susan Abulhawa, Liyana Badr) – both recalls a fecund Palestine, pre-oil, and resists the forces and interests of the fossil economy. With the experience of displacement and environmental devastation increasingly globalised, the enduring resistance that characterises Palestinian literature can be an exemplar for literature not as resignation but as resistance to the accelerating, imperialising forces underlying the Capitalocene.

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

The conclusion provides a comprehensive overview of the mnemonic plasticity and the societal usages of exclusionary in the two case studies under review. The conclusion emphasizes the different political frameworks that have driven the rise and perpetuation of the exclusionary narratives in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian society within the mnemonic realms reviewed while also highlighting the context-specific manifestations of the ensuing denial practices. Although this work does not propose a method of fusing the two foundational narratives or suggest ways in which the identified exclusionary narratives can be challenged and modified, the conclusion does set forth the practical and theoretical applications of this work, both in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and beyond. In addition to offering a practical applicability to non-regional scholarship and cross-cultural initiatives, it is the intent of this work to provide fertile ground for future scholarship on Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian mnemonic discourse in an effort to challenge the idealization of the past’s invocation and, instead, expose its neurasthenic and disabling effects in “service of the nation.” Concluding remarks to A Battlefield of Memory thus also address existing scholarly voids and potential future application of this work as a result of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

The Textbook of Memory, the first of three parts that make up this work, examines the state educational systems in the post-Oslo era in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian society. In contravention with the stipulations of 1993 Declaration of Principles, which declared that Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) should foster mutual understanding and tolerance, Part I reveals the existence of incompatible narratives in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks based on a negation or minimization of the other’s seminal history. Beyond examining the presentation of the other’s historical narrative in the Israeli and Palestinian curricula, the two chapters that make up Part I emphasize the exclusive and ethnocentric presentation of both societies’ own foundational history. Through an analysis of the presentation of the in-group’s own history and (the existence of) the out-group’s historical narrative, Part I of this study identifies the ways in which schooling contributes to – and justifies – the continuance of conflict narratives. By outlining the existing content pertaining to the 1948 War and the Holocaust in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, the chapters’ dual analyses illuminate the mechanisms that remain hidden from those socialized and indoctrinated by these narratives.

Chapter 2’s analysis of fifteen textbooks published since 1993 for Israeli middle and high-school students demonstrates that an exclusive presentation of the Holocaust in the curriculum has relied on the explicit portrayal of the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish tragedy with universal relevance to the entire Jewish nation and, therefore, pertinent to every Israeli-Jewish youth. Simultaneously, the overt minimization of other groups’ suffering as a result of Nazi genocidal policies is deemphasized through the conveyance of anachronistic historical information and the usage of numerical aggregation practices. The chapter’s identified Zionist metanarrative lays the foundations for further exclusionary manifestations, namely the minimization of Palestinians’ fate in the 1948 War. Textbooks that illustrate a teleological movement from the center(s) of Jewish destruction, “there” in the galut (Hebrew: exile), to revival “here” in Israel, advocate a post-Holocaust justification for the Zionist enterprise and, consequently, necessitate an untainted recovery from the preceding crisis. By differentiating between Zionist, Zionist-critical, and revisionist narratives of the war, the chapter’s secondary analysis illustrates that while new historiographical writings on the 1948 War have emerged, the beneficial and practical effects of the mass Palestinian exodus are stressed in textbooks. In line with this narrative, a systematic policy of expulsion is firmly cast aside and, instead, overt reminders of traditional Zionist historiography formulating a miraculous rebirth remain.

This chapter by Elias Khoury, who is one of the most important living Arabic novelists and a perennial candidate for the Nobel prize in literature, is adapted from an essay first published in the cultural supplement Mulḥaq, in the Lebanese newspaper al-Nahār, in 1997. The chapter, which has as its starting point a description of Sa’dallah Wannous’ funeral as a means of explicating his significance as a playwright and public intellectual, offers a particularly vivid portrait of Wannous. It includes descriptions of Khoury’s first reading of An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June in the cultural journal al-Mawāqif in Beirut in 1968, a meeting with Wannous in Paris at Farouk Mardam-Bey’s house, and of being informed of Wannous’ premature death in 1997 on May 15, which, in the Arab world, is Nakba Day, the ‘day of catastrophe,’ when the state of Israel was created.

The British devised a variety of schemes to try to make their Palestine mandate work before they threw up their hands and gave in. During the lead-up to World War II the British proposed dividing the territory between Jews and Arabs. Then when the Great Revolt threatened to spiral out of control they gave up that plan and offered one that would lead to a single state. During World War II, conditions in Palestine actually improved, and the situation temporarily calmed. But with the end of hostilities and an upsurge in Zionist violence, the British dumped the Palestine issue on the United Nations, which voted to divide the territory. The vote sparked two wars: the first, a civil war between the Jewish and Arab communities of Palestine; the second, an invasion of Palestine by surrounding states. The victory of the Zionists in both had two results: the creation of the State of Israel in its internationally accepted borders, and the nakba, the flight of 720,000 Palestinians across ceasefire lines. Many of the refugees and their descendants remain in refugee camps throughout the area supported by the United Nations and various donor states and organizations.

This chapter analyses a specific case study, in an effort to discover localised versions of moral remembrance. Whereas the European Balkan states have faced financial conditionalities during the various steps of the EU accession process, Israel and Palestine were much less pressured by the international community to exhibit an even nominal acceptance of a cosmopolitan history, through which global concerns and values become part of local experiences. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and in 1995, which projected an independent state of Palestine by 1999, were of great importance in leading to new memorialisation agendas, never discussed per se in any of the legal documents but indirectly promoted in multiple ways. Even in 2000, when it became clear that the Oslo Accords had failed, memorialisation practices, promoted by human rights institutions and funds, continued to blossom. This chapter deals with the ways in which the memorialisation agenda was promoted in Israel and Palestine, demonstrating how specific historical and political conditions affected it and shaped it in several ways.