On both sides are misrepresentations of reality, the reality of the Palestine question as a stark case of settler-colonialism, as an ongoing anti-colonial struggle, as an ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Therefore, I oppose Nakba and “War of Independence” as misnomers to the actuality of ethnic cleansing. In the following sections, I first provide a theoretical background for how discursive/lexical representations play a role in the perception and construction of reality, then highlight the analytic method and discuss the findings and implications, and conclude with recommendations.

Theoretical Background: Lexical Representations and the Construction of Reality

In his 1989 book, Beyond 1984: Doublespeak in a Post-Orwellian Age, William Lutz mentions what a US military officer during the invasion of Cambodia in 1974 said to American journalists: “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing. It’s not bombing, it’s air support” (124). So, it is not, as he sees it or as he knowingly phrases it, aerial bombardment; “it’s air support.” Colonialists have always invested in language to help enact and sustain domination. Since the 15th century, European invasions and military occupation of the peoples of the largest continents of the world—Asia, Africa, and the Americas—have never called such territorial occupation and foreign domination as such, but rather: “duty of the white man;” “colonialism;” “protectionism;” “mandate;” “tutelage” (AlMesdi). In the same vein, it can be observed that the atomic bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War and reduced them to ruble were referred to as “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” (Cohn). Repeated occupations of Iraq: “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Machiavellian colonial discourse producers have never called their invasions and exogenous domination of indigenous peoples “occupation” and “terrorism.” It became “terrorism” later when those nations under the yoke of injustice and the heat of exploitation began to rise against the occupation of their lands and the plundering of their livelihood. Colonial discourse technologists have always resorted to language to find a way to enact and sustain domination.

Territorial occupation of foreign nations—the elimination of the native, and the economic exploitation and the siphoning off of wealth and freedom from indigenous peoples too weak to resist the juggernaut and onslaught of modern canons—has always been enacted and maintained linguistically (Said). The tool has been language, or more accurately discourse: the ideological use of language. Nations of the world were occupied and exploited by colonial powers who sought to expand their sphere of influence under the linguistic guise of bringing “enlightenment and civilization,” “democracy” and “freedom,” and other misleading euphemistic colonial constructions.

Observing the colonial legacy of the lexical constructions of occupation and foreign domination and their sister concepts, one can recognize the subtle workings of language, the violent selections made to achieve nefarious colonial interests. Enacting and reproducing language and discourse establish and maintain ideologies, states of affairs, in distorting reality, sustaining domination and asymmetrical relations of power (Simpson; Fairclough; Van Dijk).

Our selection of certain lexical and structural iterations, one choice among a set of other choices, encodes a certain conceptualization of the world, with a certain positioning and a certain responsibility and an accountability. Thus, language is brought to the heart of the political event, not as a mere epiphenomenon or tool of description or neutral narration, but as an actual construction of the event through various argumentative and interpretive frameworks, and discursive legitimation strategies—legitimation, delegitimation, and pre-legitimation of political actors and actions (Van Leeuwen; Krzyżanowski 2014). Choosing, for example, to represent a displaced and bereaved young Palestinian woman who blows herself up among Israeli soldiers as a “martyr” or a “suicide bomber” and her act as a “terrorist attack” or a “martyrdom operation” in defense of the defenceless, would entail different positioning, “responsibility and blame attribution” (Amer 2009, 11).

Lexical representations construct social actors (Wodak and Meyer). Such representations include: “fedayee,” “jihadist,” “fundamentalist,” “freedom fighter,” “resistance fighter,” “militia.” Such terms legitimate or delegitimate, incriminate or glorify, criticize or deflect criticism, attribute blame or exonerate. They suggest defensive or offensive, apologetic or stigmatizing, sympathetic or accusing, condemnatory or celebratory attitudes. Their use actively conceptualizes such acts as: war crimes or heroism; terrorism or self-defence; weapons of the weak and tools for resisting oppression (Gavron) or crimes against humanity; noble hara-kiri and kamikaze acts to be glorified, or criminal and terrorist acts to be condemned and punished. Such concepts construct an interpretive framework for us to consider events as martyrdom operations or acts of terrorism, thus legitimizing or pre-legitimizing or delegitimizing. Such nominations or linguistic representations entail different types and levels of mitigation, condemnation, legitimation, positioning, and responsibility, and hence the construction of reality. Such discursive conceptualizations “entail particular ways of looking at the world and particular ways of defining reality which have social and political consequences” (Montgomery et al. 73).

In all these examples of lexical selection, construction, and representation, the same occurrence can generate two different stories, “a difference in perspective” (Thomas et al. 63), and hence reactions with significant political and ideological implications. Each discourse producer wants the masses to interpret and react to the event in a particular way: to experience it and conceptualize reality from their own perspective or ideological stance. While the event, or the people represented, is the same, the way they are being represented is not the same. In the words of Martin Montgomery (et al. 1992 73), “[s]election of one term rather than another often entails choosing particular modes of conceptualizing the reality in question.” Representation, in the words of Mosheer Amer (2009 26), could delegitimize the powerless as “violent, confused and irresponsible” and legitimize the powerful as “peaceable, rational and flexible,” completely reversing and distorting reality. Therefore, the lack of critical language awareness is, in certain contexts, disastrous. Language is far from a neutral tool of communication; it is “instead a channel for how we see and construct the world around us” (Thomas et al. xviii), a medium of domination and social force (Wodak and Meyer). It is “the key carrier of conceptual dynamics and change” and the structuring and restructuring of society, social reality, and history (Krzyżanowski 2016, 312). Hence, “the central object of historical inquiry” and critical discourse studies “should not be events or occurrences” as such as emphasized by studies on Begriffsgeschichte, or “conceptual history,” but rather “social and political concepts which come to define societies and various facets of social order” (Krzyżanowski 2016, 312). It is not the political event or occurrence that shapes our life, but rather the discursive event.

Domination and oppression, then, take place in linguistic forms. They are discursively enacted and forged through the state or colonial power’s ideological apparatuses, which subject the natives or individuals to the hegemony of the dominant ideology of the discourse producer (Thomas et al.). They are also discursively reproduced, legitimized, and perpetuated (Titscher et al.; Fairclough). Social control and power are “exercised with increasing frequency by means of texts” (Titscher et al. 152-53). Power is “exercised and enacted in discourse” (Fairclough 61), which influences our perception of people, events, objects, processes, and phenomena. Our mental development, behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes are all shaped and constructed by discourses, systems of thought (symbolic orders), or habitual ways of thinking and acting that make certain things thinkable and sayable and regulating who can say them (Foucault). We encode in such discourses our mental picture of reality and how we account for our experience of the world (Simpson). We stabilize or even intensify injustices and inequalities in society discursively. “It is through discourse” then, as Amer states, “that political actors create, maintain, assert or resist social conditions or the status quo … and seek to construct and reconstruct social identities, relations and structures” (2012 181).

Material and Method: Discourse-Conceptual Analysis

In critical discourse studies (CDS), it is generally agreed that there is “no accepted canon of data collection, but many CDA approaches work with existing data, i.e. texts not specifically produced for the respective research projects” (Wodak and Meyer 32). The discussion to follow uses CDS’s discourse-conceptual analysis (DCA): an approach within the pluralistic framework of CDS, developed by Michał Krzyżanowski (2016) by proposing a methodological merger between the discourse-historical approach (DHA) in CDS and the branch of historical inquiry known as conceptual history. This approach will highlight how some lexical representations and constructions have the capacity to legitimate and galvanize action against injustice—others delegitimate, dehumanize, and stifle action. “War of Independence,” and its Palestinian counterpart concept, Nakba: two terms selected for critical case sampling, a type of purposive sampling useful when a single case (or small number) “can be decisive in explaining the phenomenon of interest” (Rai and Thapa 8). Accordingly, I examine the terms Nakba and “War of Independence” used by Palestinian people and Israelis since 1948, respectively, along with a genealogy of related sister concepts, to conceive and represent ongoing ethnic cleansing. See Table 4 below.

Nakba vs. “War of Independence”

The lexical representations Nakba and “War of Independence” and related sister concepts, as used in Palestinian and Israeli discourses, are misnomers or misrepresentations for ethnic cleansing. Not the result of a miscalculation or a fluke (circumstances or the vagaries and momentum of war), but rather the result of longstanding harboured Zionist premeditation (Pappé 2006b), the 1948 ethnic cleansing was meant to eliminate the Palestinian people and replace them with Zionist olim or immigrants—constructed later as Israelis. Being unable to completely remove all the Palestinian people from their native land in 1948, however, the new settler-colonial state embarked on a continual process of ethnic cleansing whenever possible. Benny Morris, a “great documenter of the sins of Zionism” and one of the few “figures in Israeli public life” who “has done more to recover the historical truth of the fate of the Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist movement” states that what stops the settler state from eliminating the remaining 20% of Arabs it “regretfully” failed to “cleanse” in 1948 are “purely temporary and tactical” reasons (Piterberg 28-29).

What was perpetrated in Palestine in 1948 was neither a “War of Independence” as propagated by the founders of Israel nor a Nakba as inappropriately called by the affected, but rather a predetermined scheme, a well-defined policy of forced mass population expulsion and killing, a method known in modern political parlance as ethnic cleansing. 3 Nakba has done more harm than good to the Palestinian people as it has served to obfuscate the cause of their ongoing homelessness and statelessness, and undermined the legitimacy of their colonial struggle. At the same time, the newly found state worked on the memoricide of such ethnic cleansing from the Palestinian and global public consciousness, whitewashing through concepts and discourse, on the one hand, and the transformation of the original landscape of Mandate Palestine, on the other hand, effectively wiping historic Palestine off the map and from global public memory (Grmek 157).

Connotations and Consequences

The term Nakba was first used by the Syrian historian Constantine Zureiq in his 1948 book: Ma’na al-Nakba (the meaning of “catastrophe”) to record the atrocities perpetrated by Zionist militias between 1947 and 1948 against the unarmed native population of Palestine. Nakba is a misnomer as it means a catastrophe or calamity—a natural disaster of some sort, but not genocide. In other words, the nomination objectifies an act of ethnic cleansing into a natural disaster. To be saddened at, rather than as with the work of perpetrators, to be deplored, condemned, and reversed. The concept Nakba is thus non-agentic. It removes any reference to those who caused such homelessness and dispossession. It obfuscates causal agency or the fact that Palestinian dispossession and uprootedness were the product of a perpetrator. In other words, representing this crime against humanity (Saleh; Pappé 2006b) as the Nakba, the Palestinians have inadvertently helped in the mystification of the cause and context, and the nature and magnitude of this human crime, and in so doing, the nobility and legitimacy of their struggle as a colonized people for their inalienable haq4 to resistance, freedom, and national self-determination.

Pappé (2006b, xvii) explains that the term “Nakba might have been adopted, for understandable reasons, as an attempt to counter the moral weight of the Jewish Holocaust (Shoa)”—the Hebrew word or concept for “catastrophe.” So this may explain why the concept Nakba—a counter-concept then to the Jewish key social and political concept of the Holocaust—has been used by the Palestinian people and Arabs.

Nakba distances Zionist-British cooperation in premeditated depopulation of Palestine. It hides the heavily-mechanized Zionist Goliath. It obscures the veteran Zionist leaders’ onslaught against the horror-struck native inhabitants of the land. It muffles the anguished cries of pain and the defencelessness of a people in the face of Zionist terrorism. It does not refer to the mass expulsion from their homeland of more than 750,000 Palestinians (Pappé 2006b) from a population of 1.9 million at the time. Nakba mystifies the homelessness of 85% of Palestinians living in what became the state of Israel (Badil Resource Centre). It does not refer to the mass depopulation of 560 Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed at the hands of the then predecessor of the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF): the Zionist gangs of the Hagana, Stern Gangs, and Irgun (Saleh).

Colonizer vs. Colonized

What happened was not a visitation from God. It was settler-colonialism and elimination of the native; it was “destruction and replacement;” the fulfillment of the founding father of Zionism and Israel, Herzl’s ideology and praxis: “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct” (Qabaha and Hamamra 31).

The Palestinians and Arabs in general—who, unlike colonialists “do not have a military culture or tradition” (Kuttab, ctd. in Gavron, 105)—while having mastered since time immemorial the literary and especially poetic uses of language and appreciated the aesthetic glamour of grammar in a manner probably more profound and ingenious than any other language community, have failed to grasp and manipulate the subtleties of language in relation to power and domination. They have perfected the rhetoric of “the horse, the sword, the gun” (Kuttab, qtd. in Gavron, 105), but all from an aesthetic angle. They are fully conscious of the aesthetic qualities of language and are adept at its art and artifice, but not as an instrument of control and power.

In terms of linguistic representation, Palestinian discourse is far less effective than that deployed by Israeli counterparts who have perfected the discourse of “peace;” the “Shalom this, Shalom that, Shalom the other thing” (Kuttab, qtd. in Gavron, 105); the discourse that has made the Palestinian people, in their despair to live like other free people, compromise the compromise. The Palestinian narrative has failed to construct, articulate, and propagate a paradigm of ethnic cleansing at the hands of a settler-colonial apartheid regime. Nakba as the designation for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been a debacle.

In contrast, Israeli colonial discourse (or the Israeli official narrative) has successfully managed to reverse reality. Consider, for example, Der Judenstaat, the concept Zionists selected when they (re)presented their question in 1896. An instant success, Der Judenstaat or “The Jewish State,” (capturing of the then “Jewish question” at the level of discursive conceptualization) not only evoked “a widespread interest among the intellectuals of the day” (Herzl 13) but also “brought “Jews out of the ghettos and made them conscious” of a vision of a pure state of their own race (Herzl 13). The title was promising, revealing, and galvanizing: it was inspirational. More importantly, it prompted action—popular and official—and accelerated steps towards the realization of such a vision. It provided momentum. It was a rallying cry of a political movement, of action, of destiny. It was the creation at the level of discourse and conceptualization—a step that precedes action—of such thing as a state, a Jewish state. “The Jewish State,” with the as definite article. It was a cry for action, not a cry for acquiescence. It was a cry to end a status quo, not to prolong it.

A settler-colonial movement always needs to construct a narrative to help it enact and sustain its exogenous domination. Unlike the colonized, the settlercolonialists have made expedient use of logos. Israelis have mastered manufacturing discourse. Israelis are adept at misrepresenting reality and distorting facts. “War of Independence” is a far cry from what happened. Independence from whom? Liberation from whom?

Implications

1948 was neither an act of God nor was it a “War of Independence.” Premeditated “transfer” is a euphemistic Zionist sister concept for ethnic cleansing. 5 What Zionists perpetrated against Palestinian society was not a cataclysm of seismic proportions, nor was it accidental. It was an ethnic cleansing, envisaged and premeditated (Morris 1988; Masalha 1992; Pappé 2006b). The war was the means for such cleansing, or, as Pappé states, it was:

not that the Zionist movement, in creating its nation-state, waged a war that ‘tragically but inevitably’ led to the expulsion of ‘parts of the indigenous population.’ It is the other way round: the objective was the ethnic cleansing of the country the movement coveted for its new state, and the war was the consequence, the means to carry it out. (2006a 17-18)

The designation Nakba, however, makes it sound as though it was a singular event that happened when in reality it launched a process of ongoing nakabat (Arabic plural) or acts of racial elimination. Thus, in “The Nakba Continues: The Palestinian Crisis from the Past to the Present,” Qabaha and Hamamra state:

The wounds of the Nakba are still open, and they are getting deeper, not only because Israel is not allowing refugees to return, but because the Israeli military occupation continues to expel and relocate Palestinians to build its own settlements and populate them with Jewish migrants and settlers. Israeli domination obliges Palestinians to dwell in their memories of loss and to “re-live and re-imagine the Nakba, a memory that is more than a memory as it is lived and re-lived in the daily nakbas of the Palestinian people” (Hamdi 2021, 33). The Palestinian Nakba is a living presence that is communicated and enacted through the ongoing Israeli displacement and expulsion of Palestinians who share the scars of collective trauma. (31-32)

Such designations—Israeli and Palestinian alike—serve in the mystification of the process of ethnic cleansing, and hence the continuity of the status quo. They project to the outside world an image contrary to what happened and is still happening. Nakba, being such an elusive non-agentic term with divine implications, has obviated the need for blame attribution, responsibility and accountability, and action and rehabilitation, helping perpetuate the status quo. Indeed, “in leaving out the actor … it may in a sense have contributed to the continuing denial by the world of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and after” (Pappé 2006b, xvii). Nakba, by way of such mystification and objectification or naturalization has played a major role in “the absence so far of the paradigm of ethnic cleansing” (Pappé 2006b, 17). Nakba does not have the shocking and galvanizing legal implications that the concept ethnic cleansing as a crime does, and so does not warrant any commensurate action or attempt at rehabilitation. It does not have mobilizing force. It makes the criminal premeditated act of deracination or uprootedness an act of God or nature—a fait accompli; in other words, nothing could be done to redress it apart from passive acceptance.

The imagery of “War of Independence,” on the other hand, not only legitimates what happened in 1948, but also celebrates it as an act of heroism and freedom-fighting rather than terrorism and aggression. “War of Independence” implies “a heroic Jewish struggle for survival against all odds” (Pappé 2009, 6) and makes those veteran Zionist leaders behind it into brave national heroes to be celebrated rather than vile war criminals to be condemned and tried in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Israeli representation paints the perception they were colonized and, following their “noble and brave” “War of Independence,” redeemed a usurped territory from Palestinian colonizers. Such an image always places “Israel” in the semantic patient position of defence.

Labeling what Zionists did in and to Palestine and its people in 1948 as ethnic cleansing brings, conceptually at least, Israel to the ICJ. Israel—an ethnocracy— despite its policy and pursuit of a purely Jewish state, is fully aware of why it must master symbolic production, of why it must insist on calling its racist settler actions this, not that. It would never call them acts of ethnic cleansing or ethnocide or even forced displacement as this would incriminate it and expose its colonial practices in Palestine.

Conclusion and Recommendations

I have argued here that the non-agentic concept Nakba used by Palestinians to conceive and represent the 1948 atrocities, along with its equally mystifying Israeli counterpart “War of Independence,” have helped perpetuate the status quo: they have prolonged injustice, obviated responsibility, and removed causal agency. Both narratives—the victim’s Nakba, and the victimizer’s “War of Independence”—have helped in the mystification and continuity of the premeditated process of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. While the victim’s representation suggests a lack of critical language awareness (CLA), the victimizer’s mythical narrative of Israel’s birth bespeaks a heightened awareness of the power of the linguistics of representation in enacting and sustaining domination. These designations have played a major role in the mystification of the cause of the Palestine question and the perpetuation of ethnic cleansing.

The first step towards social change and decolonization is a conceptual change in nationalist discourse, which necessitates a heightened consciousness of the linguistics of representation as “the key carrier of conceptual dynamics and change,” and the structuring and restructuring of society, social reality, and history (Krzyżanowski 2016, 312). We need a replacement for the non-agentic term Nakba, and increased awareness of Palestinians to the instrumental role lexical (and thereby discursive) representations play in both “colonialism and the process of becoming emancipated from the strictures of foreign domination” (Divine 3).

The Palestinian narrative needs a counter-discourse renaming and restructuring the world’s understanding of key events in the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Palestinians need to tread a novel trajectory: a language-conscious and critical one. We need a J’accuse (Morris 1988; Masalha 1992; Pappé 2006a/b) against the perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Get rid of signifiers that do not work. Project and foreground the paradigm of occupation, settlercolonialism, and ethnic cleansing, in place of paradigms that objectify and naturalize human actions. Palestinian intelligentsia, expunge such misnomers from Palestinian consciousness, from Palestinian literature and school and university curricula, and replace them with the paradigm of ethnic cleansing. Palestinian narrative needs to feature the Palestine question as an anti-colonial-occupation struggle. A narrative that exposes Israel worldwide as an apartheid regime.

In closing, one cannot but admit that there are many forces working against the Palestinian people, not merely discourse. Nonetheless, discourse remains crucial, instrumental in initiating the first step, mobilizing the nation behind a national cause. Discourse is a rallying and mobilizing tool for resistance and renaissance.