[wvns] For Palestinians, memory matters
For Palestinians, memory matters
It provides a blueprint for their future
George Bisharat
Sunday, May 13, 2007
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/13/INGQDPOOUD1.DTL
Why do some people have the power to remember, while
others are asked to forget? That question is
especially poignant at this time of year, as we move
from Holocaust Remembrance day in early spring to
Monday's anniversary of Israel's declaration of
independence on May 14, 1948.
In the months surrounding that date, Jewish forces
expelled, or intimidated into flight, an estimated
750,000 Palestinians. A living, breathing, society
that had existed in Palestine for centuries was
smashed and fragmented, and a new society built on its
ruins.
Few Palestinian families lack a personal narrative of
loss from that period -- an uncle killed, or a branch
of the family that fled north while the others fled
east, never to be reunited, or homes, offices,
orchards and other property seized. Ever since,
Palestinians worldwide have commemorated May 15 as
Nakba (Catastrophe) Day.
No ethical person would admonish Jews to "forget the
Holocaust." Indeed, recent decades have witnessed
victims of that terrible era not only remembering, but
also regaining paintings and financial assets seized
by the Nazis -- and justifiably so.
Other victims of mass wrongs -- interned Japanese
Americans, enslaved African Americans, and Armenians
subjected to a genocide that may have later convinced
Hitler of the feasibility of mass killings -- receive
at least respectful consideration of their cases, even
while responses to their claims have differed.
Yet in dialogues with Israelis, and some Americans,
Palestinians are repeatedly admonished to "forget the
past," that looking back is "not constructive" and
"doesn't get us closer to a solution." Ironically,
Palestinians live the consequences of the past every
day -- whether as exiles from their homeland, or as
members of an oppressed minority within Israel, or as
subjects of a brutal and violent military occupation.
In the West we are amply reminded of the suffering of
Jewish people in World War II. Our newspaper featured
several stories on local survivors of the Nazi
holocaust around Holocaust Remembrance Day (an Israeli
national holiday that is widely observed in the United
States). My daughter has read at least one book on the
Nazi holocaust every year since middle school. Last
year, in ninth grade English literature alone, she
read three. But we seldom confront the impact of
Israel's policies on Palestinians.
It is the "security of the Jewish people" that has
rationalized Israel's takeover of Palestinian lands,
both in the past in Israel, and more recently in the
occupied West Bank. There, most Palestinian children
negotiate one of the 500 Israeli checkpoints and other
barriers to movement just to reach school each day.
Meanwhile, Israel's program of colonization of the
West Bank grinds ahead relentlessly, implanting ever
more Israeli settlers who must be "protected" from
those Palestinians not reconciled to the theft of
their homes and fields.
The primacy of Jewish security over rights of
Palestinians -- to property, education, health care, a
chance to make a living, and, also to security -- is
seldom challenged.
Unfortunately, remembering the Nazi Holocaust --
something morally incumbent on all of us -- has
seemingly become entangled with, and even an
instrument of, the amnesia some would force on
Palestinians. Israel is enveloped in an aura of
ethical propriety that makes it unseemly, even
"anti-Semitic" to question its denial of Palestinian
rights.
As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently observed:
"Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves
Israel primarily in its fight against the
Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the
scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so)
conscience of the West, the dispossession of the
Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is
minimized and blurred."
What this demonstrates is that memory is not just an
idle capacity. Rather, who can remember, and who can
be made to forget, is, fundamentally, an expression of
power.
Equally importantly, however, memory can provide a
blueprint for the future -- a vision of a solution to
seek, or an outcome to avoid. My Palestinian father
grew up in Jerusalem before Israel was founded and the
Palestinians expelled, when Muslims, Christians and
Jews lived in peace and mutual respect. Recalling that
past provides a vision for an alternative future --
one involving equal rights and tolerance, rather than
the domination of one ethno-religious group over
others.
Thus, what Palestinians are really being commanded is
not just to forget their past, but instead to forget
their future, too. That they will never do.
George Bisharat is professor of law at Hastings
College of the Law in San Francisco. He writes
frequently about the Middle East. Contact us at
insight@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/13/INGQDPOOUD1.DTL
This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San
Francisco Chronicle
===
Flee, Freedom Fighter, Flee
by Yonatan Pollak; Haaretz;
May 11, 2007
The basis of my political education, on the price one must pay for
the struggle, was very close to home - within the family in fact. My
grandfather, Nimrod Eshel, was among the leaders of the seamen revolt
in the early 1950's. In a desperate attempt to break the strike and
with no reason to arrest them, Ben Gurion instructed that he and
others should be conscripted into the army. He was 27. My
grandfather and his comrades saw the conscription as de facto
administrative detention, but decided to go to the recruiting office
anyway. This was a purely tactical decision, taken only after they
had discussed going underground and the influence of such a step on
the strike.
A few years earlier, my grandfather was arrested by the British in
Latrun and Cyprus for his part in smuggling Jews from Europe. He
often refers to these periods of arrest by saying "I had nothing
against the British. It was a war - they arrested me and I tried to
escape". Indeed, the prisoners had planned their escape from both
places, though the plans were never executed, but nonetheless clearly
showed their feelings as to the duty to fulfill their period of
punishment.
When I grew up a little the anarchist movement became my political
home, and with it the ethos of the Spanish Underground fighters who
were forced into exile, many of whom crossed the border back and forth
to harass Franco's army in the hills. To the stories of the past,
other peoples' memories, I want to add my joy at the end of Apartheid
in South Africa, at the return of that country's exiles. Together
with the release of prisoners, those who had managed to escape from
the Boers' jails to Mozambique or Botswana, came back.
Those who escape from the clutches of a repressive regime, whether
they are guerrilla fighters or political leaders, deserve support and
even admiration from dissidents for the sacrifice they made. Exile,
one must remember, is not an easy choice even for those who despise
the political regime in their country of birth.
Due to its inability to deal with the demand that the state change
from a Jewish ethnocracy to a real democracy, Israel is these days
opening a new front in the attack on its Palestinian citizens. This
front has taken shape in the form of Shabak [Israel's General Security
Services - equivalent to the US FBI] statements to the effect that
the demands of Israeli Arabs for equality is subversive and will be
terminated even if it is not against the law, in the definition of
Israeli Arabs as a strategic threat, and most of all in the invention
of a criminal case against one of the most prominent leaders of the
the Palestinian public in Israel - Azmi Bishara.
Any rational person with eyes in his head can see that that case
against Bishara was made up by the Shabak. Despite this, in the
current political atmosphere, Bishara's trial (had he decided to show
up for it) would have turned into a show trial and would have
concluded long before the investigation was over. Even before the
start of the the trial, while a ban on publication - full or partial -
was still standing, Bishara was attacked by right-wingers, some more
extreme than others, from Lieberman to Steiniz through Tamir and to
Beilin. Many will be delighted to have rid themselves of the
articulate challenge Bishara puts forth to Zionism and to the
character of Israeli society. It is convenient for them to attempt to
showcase him as one who has fled from the just punishment he deserves.
It is not surprising when the chorus of voices calling for Bishara
to come back and receive his punishment comes from the right-wingers
who see him as a strategic threat, but for some reason some of those
who do understand the false spirit of the investigation are calling
for him to come back and recognize the validity of the law, to come to
terms with it in the name of civic responsibility. Those are the
people who are abandoning him by the roadside and making him stand
alone against the storm. In doing this, they are are abandoning the
entire Palestinian Israeli public.
Bishara's civic responsibility demands in fact that a spade is
called a spade, that is to say that the treatment of the Palestinian
minority by the Jewish majority in Israel, especially towards its
political freedoms, has forced Bishara into becoming a refugee, and is
leading to a dangerous situation. Everyone knows that in the face of
political desperation, these are those who turn to using the pen as a
weapon, and there are those who will be pushed into choosing other means.
It is pointless to return to a trial whose result has been
predetermined. It was just for Bishara to leave into forced exile,
from where he will be able to continue to point arrows at the enemy of
all human beings - racism. All that remains for us to say is: flee,
freedom fighter, flee.
Yonatan Pollak is an activist with Anarchists Against Walls in Israel
(Translated to english by Rann Bar-On)
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