The sea symbolism and the Palestinians’ traumatic memories of departure, displacement and death
Wael J. Salam & Ghassan Aburqayeq
Received 10 Mar 2025, Accepted 11 Nov 2025, Published online: 15 Dec 2025
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2025.2602436
ABSTRACTThis article examines the sea as a literal and metaphorical emblem of Palestinian trauma and the imperative not to forget the individual and collective memories of flight and homelessness in the works of two Palestinian writers, Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish. As eyewitnesses to cataclysmic events, including the Nakba or the 1948 Catastrophe of the Palestinians’ expulsion, Kanafani and Darwish repeatedly represent the sea as a port of entry for European Jewish settlers of the Palestinian land and a port of deportation for Palestinians, rendering this symbolism a site of mourning, death, departure and identity formation. Kanafani and Darwish creatively respond to the occupation of their homeland by hammering home the bleak reality of settler colonialism. They associate the sea with the Palestinians’ ongoing trauma of expulsion and flight—a dissident memory that, while traumatic, preserves the Palestinian right to resist, exist, and return to their homeland.
The sea was indeed a motif in 1948 - but it was an Arab motif about throwing the Jews into the sea!
I've collected several contemporaneous articles about how the Arabs made that threat to the Jews as early as this AP dispatch from December 19, 1947:
An AP analysis from February 8, 1948, uses quotation marks for the phrase referring to Arab leaders in 1947:
This article from the News York Daily News in April 1948 quotes Fawzi al Kaukji directly making that threat:
A British memo from August 1948 from Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin:
It is quite untrue to suggest that we have let the Arabs down or failed in any obligations towards them. We did not urge them to intervene by force in Palestine, nor did we promise them support if they did so. They went in of their own accord, in most cases without telling us beforehand. Very small measure of military successes which they achieved shows that their forces, while capable perhaps of occupying friendly territory, were not prepared for and incapable of undertaking major military operations, which would have been necessary to achieve the announced object of the Arab states, namely to drive the Jews into the sea.
And this rhetoric didn't end in 1948 - here is an Egyptian propaganda poster from 1967 literally called "Throw the Jews Into the Sea:"
To Arabs before the 1967 war, the sea didn't symbolize defeat - it symbolized impending victory over the Jews.
I cannot see the full paper but based on the footnotes it is apparent that this issue isn't even addressed in the article.
This paper is an inversion of reality.
In fact, I cannot find a single academic article about the "drive the Jews into the sea" phrase that was used so often in 1948 and afterwards. I researched it here and here and Yisrael Medad did here.
Which brings up another problem in academia: there are hundreds of papers analyzing the most peripheral angles of the Palestinian experience but relatively few on Israel, and those few are concentrated in a very few Israel-centric journals while the anti-Israel papers are spread over dozens of journals on disparate topics. There is a feedback loop - there's no demand for papers describing Israelis charitably so none are written.
Once again, academia is being used for propaganda and erasing history, not real research.
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