Reflections on ‘Mental Harm’, Culture, and Nur Mashala’s Histories of Palestine
By: John Docker* Cultural genocide mental harm Palestine Cultural genocide mental harm Palestine
In ‘Defining Genocide’, my essay with Ann Curthoys, which introduces The Historiography of Genocide, we scrutinized Raphaël Lemkin’s 1944 definition of genocide in the Axis Rule in Occupied Europe describing it as a twofold process of destruction and replacement—a process that entwines genocide and colonization and often include cultural , political, legal, intellectual, spiritual, economic, biological, psychological, religious, and moral considerations. In our essay, we also outlined the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and particularly Lemkin’s lasting regret that cultural genocide was excluded from the final draft of the convention (in an autobiographical essay ‘Totally Unofficial Man’ Lemkin would go on to write of cultural genocide as “very dear to me”). Yet Ann and I were not certain that the final draft of the Genocide Convention does exclude cultural genocide entirely. Pondering Article 2 of the convention—“Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”—made us interrogate the notion of ‘mental harm’ and the interpretational latitude it offers. We wondered whether it is possible to interpret mental harm as both psychological and cultural, i.e. harm to an individual’s sense of cultural identity in addition to the larger harm to humanity itself.
In this essay, I will examine “mental harm” as a term that encompasses collective as well as individual suffering through the lens of Israel’s destruction of Palestinian material, cultural and intellectual achievements in 2023-24. To this end, I will draw extensively from the works of Nur Masalha’s Palestine Across Millennia: A History of Literacy, Learning and Educational Revolutions (2022). I believe, this work, in conjunction with Masalha’s earlier, monumental book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (2018), has significantly challenged and transformed world history. (For an extended discussion of my reflection on Palestine Across Millennia, see my review essay in the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 2023.)
In the introduction of Palestine Across Millennia, Masalha confides that what drove this work—a sustained exploration of wide-ranging histories—was a passionate motivation to respond to Zionism’s ahistorical claim that Palestine is a recent invention, and that Palestinians possess no history of literacy, education, and literary culture. Masalha demonstrates that on the contrary, the term Palestinian is historically inclusive and refers to polytheistic ancient Palestinians as well as to Muslims, Christians, Jews, Samaritans, Arabs and other indigenous Palestinians. The term Palestinian applies to Greek- and Syriac-speaking educational institutions in ancient Palestine and to the Palestinians as a whole under the Romans and Byzantines. He investigates the multifaceted history of education and cultural production in Byzantine Palestine (Third to Early Seventh Century), based on an educational philosophy of ‘civil society’, of citizenship directed towards the creation of an ‘ideal city-state’, an association of educated, self-governing ‘rational citizens’.
Addressing the question of longevity, Masalha points out that the name Palestine is found in numerous and diverse sources of ancient world history and throughout the last 3,300 years; it was used by the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, classical Greek writers, Romans, Christian Byzantines, and medieval Arabs. The toponym Palestine is evident in countless inscriptions, ‘world maps’, ecclesiastical histories, chronicles, letters, coins, and encyclopedias from classical and late antiquity to the medieval and modern ages. Further, the term Palestine acquired official administrative status for a millennium and a half of classical antiquity as well as under Islam in the Middle Ages.
In chapter two of the book, ‘Cities of Learning: The Intellectual Revolutions of Byzantine Palestine’, we learn of the two most advanced and literate cities of Palestine in late antiquity, both coastal Mediterranean. The first is Caesaria-Palaestina, the capital of Byzantine Palestine, and the second is Gaza, one of the most economically, culturally, and intellectually dynamic cities in the region. In effect, Caesarea-Palaestina, with its great library, and Gaza, with its renowned rhetorical school, superseded and eventually replaced both Athens and Alexandria as the premier centres of learning for the whole Mediterranean region. Gaza’s spectacular revival of the classics and Attic Greek, the language of ancient Athenian intellectual luminaries like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle, resulted in its designation as the ‘Athens of Asia’, a title earned by the city’s large walls and carefully planned urban layout. The school of Gaza, Masalha reflects, was modelled on the two famous classical academies of Athens—the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle.
Masalha evokes the lives and thinking of famous Jewish intellectuals such as the historian Josephus (AD 37-c.100), born in Jerusalem to a priestly family, and Philo of Alexandria (c.25 BC-AD c.50). Philo’s rational and syncretic approach was important in the development of the Christian doctrine of the Logos by Justin of Neapolis (Nablus) and Origen in Caesaria-Palaestina in the second and third centuries AD. Masalha writes that the Jewish contribution to the secular Hellenistic traditions of learning in ancient Palestine can hardly be overstated.
Palestine was home to a breadth of prominent intellectuals in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In chapter nine of the book, ‘Humanism and Arab Nahda Education: Khalil Sakakini and Reforming Palestinian Education’, Masalha writes that Khalil Sakakini (1878-1953) was born in the Old City of Jerusalem. He was, according to Masalha, the epitome of a scholar-writer essayist-activist educationist. In an era when Palestine and the Arab world were infamously disciplinarian, Sakakini banned corporal punishment while introducing enjoyment of music, sports, art, dance, poetry, and literature at the Dusturiyya School, which he established in Jerusalem in 1909. Reminding us of his near contemporary A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School founded in the United Kingdom in 1924, in Sakakini’s school, pupils of all creeds were accepted. There were no exams, no grades or prizes; instead, both the teachers and the pupils had to evaluate themselves. Moreover, if pupils felt that the lesson was not interesting, they could leave; physical exercise, walks in nature and visits to historical monuments were central to the curriculum. He stressed education for women. Moreover, Sakakini generally emphasised the emotional dimensions of learning, a ‘philosophy of joy’ and ‘reading for pleasure’. He developed a keen interest in the Socratic method valuing self-questioning and self-knowledge, in the spirit of Socrates’ witty aphorism that “he knew enough to know that he knew very little”.
Masalha relates Sakakini’s philosophy of happiness to the pleasure he took in music, argila smoking, and socializing; he spent a great deal of time in Jerusalem’s coffee houses, the centre of café culture in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, a key space of public life and for sharing news and gossip. Mukhtar’s Café, founded in 1918 within the Old City of Jerusalem, was known to Sakakini and his friends as Maqha al-Sa’aleek, loosely translating to ‘Vagabond Café’ or ‘Café of Bandits’. Sa’aleek refers to pre-Islamic bandits and rebel poets who fought for social justice and is deeply rooted in Arab mythology, folklore, and literature. The concept of Sa’aleek, Masalha suggests, finds echoes in Eric Hobsbawm’s works Primitive Rebels and Bandits. Sakakini’s circle included Muslim, Christian and Jewish intellectuals, before, during and after the First World War.
In Palestine Across Millennia, women’s education is also featured centrally. In chapter two in the section on ‘The Library of Caesaria-Palaestina and Origen’s School’, Masalha refers to Origen in Alexandria being part of its culturally relaxed and pluralistic traditions of education, attracting both male and female students from affluent and middle-class families. Egyptian female students mingled with male students from Palestine and other eastern Mediterranean countries. Because of political tumult in Alexandria in the early AD 230s, Origen left Egypt and went to live permanently in Caesaria-Maritima, where his Alexandrian attitudes to knowledge had a huge impact on his educational activities.
Concerning modernity and women’s education, Masalha suggests that more than any other urban centre in Palestine, Jerusalem embodied the emergence of a modern cosmopolitan education. Higher education has been important in this historical process. The three colleges of the West Bank in al-Najah, Bethlehem and Birzeit all began as schools, then evolved into colleges and thence into universities. Birzeit University grew from a primary and later secondary school for girls founded in 1924 by the three sisters Elizabeth, Victoria and Nabihar Nasir, leading social activists in the country’s movement for women’s equal rights and education. While education of girls during the late Ottoman and early Mandatory periods focused on the urban and upper middle classes, subsequently attention was also given to the education of poor girls and marginalized women.
In chapter eight, Masalha writes that the idea that women could become highly successful professional teachers, nurses, photographers and artists was increasingly taking root in late Ottoman urban Palestine. One such artist was the Palestinian photographer Karima ‘Abboud (1893-1940), who in 1913 opened a women’s photography studio in Bethlehem. After the First World War, she studied Arabic literature at the American University in Beirut. She became the first Palestinian professional photographer/artist who was a pioneer in the field of photography; she left her studio in the early 1920s and drove around in her car documenting the lives of ordinary people, first in the Nazareth region and later throughout Palestine, producing hundreds of photographs, the largest collection of indigenous social photography of Palestine in the modern period.
We come now to the importance of translation in the history of Palestine. Masalha tells us of Khalil Ibrahim Beidas (1874-1949). After graduating from the Teachers’ Training Seminary in Nazareth, Beidas moved to Jerusalem, where he worked as a translator for the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society; he also travelled to Russia in 1892. Beidas’ exceptional linguistic talents and translations from Russian into Arabic were influenced by the works of leading novelists and poets, including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Gorky. Beidas is considered the pioneer of the Palestinian short story. In 1909 he published Ahwal al-Istibdad (The Conditions of Tyranny), one of the earliest critical accounts of tyrannical rule to appear in the Arabic language. Edward Said, modernity’s greatest literary critic, a close relative of Beidas, observed that Beidas’ essays, short stories, historical novels and works of translation in the pre- and post-war periods contributed to the emergence of a new literary and cultural consciousness in early twentieth-century Palestine.
Therefore, Palestinian achievements in design and architecture are part of its spectacular history. Chapter four of Masalha’s book tells us that when the Latin crusaders invaded Palestine in 1099, creating the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187), they found a cultural and technical level of development unknown in contemporary Europe. The crusaders in Palestine, Masalha reflects, would have become intimately familiar with arabesque and other forms of artistic decoration and manuscript illumination that developed in the Islamic world from the ninth century onwards, patterns that were linked to Arabic and geometry. The crusader elites of Jerusalem were acquainted with the exquisiteness and complexity of the interior and exterior of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which was turned into a church by the Knights Templar, who had arrived in the city in 1119. The Knights Templar were impressed by the intricacy of the Dome of the Rock’s tiles and mosaics, combined with light reflected through stained glass windows and rings of Arabic calligraphy and arabesque patterns. Not surprisingly, Masalha reflects, the Dome of the Rock became the architectural model for round churches across Europe, including the Temple Church in the city of London. Arabesque decorative patterns became a mainstream European decorative art, especially from the Renaissance onwards. I confess to my delight in arabesque.
Palestinian cultural life is now facing a huge challenge—genocide. In chapter nine of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Raphaël Lemkin wrote: “Genocide is composite and manifold; it signifies a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of life of a group.” Likewise, the preamble to the Genocide Convention declares: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” In terms of Lemkin and the Convention, everything that the Zionist state of Israel has done in 2023/24 is coloured with intent. It is also part of a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of Palestinian life and history. If anything, the destruction is the reverse of haphazard—every crime is carefully designed and executed.
In murdering approximately 30,000 people (an ever-climbing number), many of whom are women and children, the Zionist state of Israel seeks to destroy Palestine’s future generations, and its capacity to reproduce itself as a historic nation. It actively sets out to cause individual and collective “mental harm” by destroying Palestinian material, cultural and intellectual civilizational achievements. It intends to perpetrate a memoricide, a campaign to destroy cultural memory by bombing educational institutions such as schools and universities, demolishing beautiful historic architecture; killing journalists and photographers; arresting and brutalizing theatre groups and burning down their theatres. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has murdered a significant number of Palestinian poets and writers in Gaza, including renowned poet and academic Refaat Alareer and writer and poet Heba Kamal Abu Nada. An Israeli air strike on Gaza City killed Refaat alongside his family members while an Israeli bombing killed Heba.
Raphaël Lemkin’s theory of genocide and his historical consciousness on crimes against humanity demonstrates his beliefs that humanity should establish and foster a sense of care towards all the peoples and cultures of the world. Lemkin writes that the loss of a destroyed group is a loss to world culture and to the human cosmos. The destruction of one part of culture diminishes humanity collectively and reduces the world’s shared oneness. Thus, the notion of ‘mental harm’ in the context of genocide derives from Lemkin’s understanding of the latter as the destruction of world culture and the oneness of humanity.
The genocide of Gaza, a region with a history of remarkable artistic and intellectual creativity that spans centuries, is therefore harming humanity collectively. Meanwhile, Zionism’s aggressively escalating settler colonialism is disgracing Israel’s own position in history. Cultural genocide mental harm Palestine Cultural genocide mental harm Palestine
John Docker is a genocide scholar who has been contributing to the study of genocide in world history since he co-edited with Ann Curthoys a special issue of Aboriginal History in 2001, entitled ‘Genocide? Australian Aboriginal History in International Perspective’. His other publications in genocide studies include:
(with Damien Short and Haifa Rashed), ‘Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli genocide of Palestine’, Holy Land Studies, 13:1, May 2014.
‘Raphaël Lemkin, creator of the concept of genocide: a world history perspective’, Humanities Research, Vol. XVI, no. 2, 2010, special issue on Key Thinkers and Their Contemporary Legacy, guest editor Ned Curthoys.
The Origins of Violence: Religion, History and Genocide, Pluto Press, in association with UNSW Press, London and Sydney, August 2008, 256 pp.
‘Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-reading Lemkin’, in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide, Berghahn Books, New York, 2008.
(with Ann Curthoys) ‘Defining Genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2008.
‘Raphaël Lemkin’s History of Genocide and Colonialism’, talk given 26 February 2004, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington DC, on their website from March 2004.
Cultural genocide mental harm Palestine Cultural genocide mental harm Palestine
