One week ago, the 23^rd of March, the Knesset passed a bill banning the holding of events commemorating the Palestinian Nakba within the territory of Israel. The Nakba is yearly celebrated on the 15^th of May, the day the creation of the State of Israel was announced: it commemorates both the flight and the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their villages – the great majority of whose turned into Israeli neighborhoods and towns – in 1948. All the authorities hosting events related, in the small villages of the triangle of the Galilee where Arab-Israelis are the majority or in the still disputed East-Jerusalem, will be subjected to fines and other penalties.

The draft bill, advanced by Lieberman`s Israel Beitenu Party, was approved by 37 votes and 25 opposing it. In its final reading, it has been emended by the Parliament, introducing the limitation of the final supervision of the Minister of Finance and the non-binding advice of the Attorney General and of a ad-hoc committee of judges and officers of the Ministry of Finance on the withdrawal of funds to those organizations publicly calling for or setting up related events.

The Knesset claimed that celebrating the Nakba is a matter of incitement against the State, a proof of disloyalty of its Arab citizens and a pretext for further violence. People supporting the bill state a sovereign state should obviously cut the budget to those groups rejecting its basic democratic values (Ynet, 28/3/2011). The Bill was opposed by a minority of Israeli forces, comprising the Labour party, Hadash and Arab parties and some dozens of intellectuals and Israeli citizens who took the streets of Tel Aviv to protest against it.

The Bill, aiming at blotting out the Nakba from Israeli history, represents an additional step in the erosion of Arab collective rights and is finalized at further weakening the claim to the right of return uphold by Palestinian refugees as well as at blunting the identity and the lasting social bonds in the Arab-Israeli community. It will also harm further, as Minister Braverman stated on the day of its approval, “the (already) fragile fabric of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and also defame Israel in the world”.

The Editorial Staff of Medarabnews is willing to join those opposing the Bill by publicly denouncing it from its columns. The attempts to rule out the saddest page of history” advocating a specious social peace, won’t contribute to reconciliation and a fair appraisal of the past by both communities. In the peculiar case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, banning the Nakba commemoration won’t rule out neither the refugee problem nor the memory of an historical event – the expulsion of Palestinians from the land of Israel – which constitutes no matter of opinion.

Generally speaking, we denounce the intervention of governments in writing or re-writing history imposing a codified, homogenous and collectively binding account of events that constitute an object of further research committed to academic objectivity and should be opened to the competing narratives of different groups.