Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Understanding the Nakba through Arab Drama – Documentation and Symbolism in al-Taghreba al-Falastinya

This paper draws on, and heeds the call to recognise, the idea of the Nakba as an international legal concept. In his highly censored article Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept, Rabea Eghbariah compellingly argues that current international legal concepts such as occupation, apartheid and even genocide fail to completely capture the multi-layered complexities (historical and contemporary) of the Palestinian condition. Al-Nakba, which literally translates from the Arabic language ( النكبة)as 'Catastrophe,' is a well-known phrase denoting the events (UN partition, war, massacres and displacement) that led to the destruction of Palestinian lives, lands and dreams of statehood to make way for the establishment of Israel in 1948. But recognising Nakba as a legal concept, Eghbariah maintains, involves more than a simple failure to deny the 'historical calamity' of the Palestinians – as rare as that might be within Western political and intellectual circles. Insisting that the lexicon of International Law needs a legal concept that can encapsulate the historical and analytical distinctiveness of the Palestinian experience, Eghbariah proposes that we see Nakba as a unique crime against humanity. Eghbariah's proposal is powerful, his arguments certainly compelling. But this paper contends, and seeks to demonstrate, that although this understanding of and approach to the issue of Palestine and the Palestinian experience might be new to international legal scholarship, it has been part of Arab consciousness for decades. Through a close and critical discursive and cinematographic deconstruction of a highly popular and ground-breaking Arab television series from 2004, al-Taghreba al-Falastinya, this paper seeks to explore how the three dimensions that makeup Eghbariah's 'legal anatomy' of Nakba (displacement, fragmentation, and the prevention of self-determination) are narrated and documented. The paper demonstrates how the writer and director's choice to narrate the story of Palestine through the story of a rural family allows for the Arab viewer to recognise Eghbariah's idea of the Nakba as an experience of subjugation that is simultaneously collective and individual. The temporal dimensions of the series, spanning the decades between 1933-1967, and its spatial symbolism of the village, the refugee-camp and the diaspora captures poignantly Eghbariah's idea of the Nakba involving a transformation from violent rupture to an ongoing, forever evolving structure of fragmentation that keeps Palestinians forever captive within a liminal state between freedom and oppression, genocide and endurance, elimination and survival.