Ghosts of the 1948 Palestine-Israel War

Abstract This article examines the enduring impact of the 1948 Palestine-Israel War through the conceptual lenses of hauntology and intergenerational transmission. It focuses on the legacy of Netiva Ben-Yehuda, a Palmach veteran who challenged the prevailing Zionist myth of purity of arms by documenting her participation in war atrocities. While the state-sanctioned narrative celebrated the war as a semi-mythical resurrection, Ben-Yehuda’s public testimonies revealed the ghosts of massacres and executions. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theory of spectrality, the study explores how these suppressed truths seeped into the lives of Ben-Yehuda’s descendants. Through qualitative interviews with her daughter and grandsons, the article traces the manifestation of these ghosts across three generations. Findings suggest that for the second generation, the trauma manifested as an embodied presence of the war and the mother’s untreated PTSD, shaping a childhood lived in the shadow of a momentous event. For the third generation, these ghosts triggered historical inquiries and public political dissent, reflecting a refusal to conform to social codes of silence. The article also refers to the work of Mahmoud Darwish on Palestinian ghosts who roam the landscape and haunt the living Israelis. The encounters between the dead and the living highlight the interconnectedness of Palestinian and Jewish-Zionist narratives. By centering the voices of the perpetrator’s descendants alongside the haunting presence of the victims, the study demonstrates how the unresolved injustices of 1948 continue to demand accountability. The ghosts of 1948 bind the two societies together, challenging the national silence surrounding the Nakba.