Countering Israel’s Fiftieth on the Internet

The struggle over the historical record and popular memory of 1948 has reached the Internet. A number of websites and posted materials devoted to the Palestinian experience in 1948 known as the nakba (national catastrophe) offer a wealth of information to counter the virtual media silence about the victims of Israel’s independence. Two comprehensive nakba websites have been created by the Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem (www.arabstudies.org/mainp.htm) and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (www.alnakba.org/), both of which provide historical accounts of the nakba, survivors’ testimonies, chronologies and photo galleries. The Birzeit University home page (birzeit.edu) is a valuable starting point for locating more websites and materials relating to the nakba and maintains a comprehensive guide to Palestinian websites (www.birzeit.edu/links/). Birzeit University’s Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society has a website devoted to the documentation of the 415 destroyed Palestinian villages in 1948 (www.birzeit.edukrdps/village.html). The massacre and expulsion of the Palestinians of the village of Dayr Yasin is commemorated by an online information center called Deir Yassin Remembered (www.deiryassin.org). The plight of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their dispersion around the world is dealt with by the Shaml Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Centre website (www.shaml.org/fimain.htm). Finally, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment (LAW) (www.lawsociety.org/) has a special section of its website dedicated to its conference “50 Years of Human Rights Violations: Palestinians Dispossessed,” which catalogues the myriad human rights abuses and Israeli distortions of the last 50 years.

The Israeli government offers its own self-congratulatory account of 1948, unblemished by any mention of Palestinian dispossession and suffering, in the official “Israel at Fifty” website (www.israel.org/mfa/israe150/index.html). The very existence of a Palestinian counter-narrative of the events of 1948 has generated the predictable rise of “nakba denial” among threatened Zionists such as the Zionist Organization of America (www.zoa.org/) which has posted on its website a revisionist account of the events around Dayr Yasin entitled “Deir Yassin: History of a Lie” (www.zoa.org/archives/pr-980309-99.html).