Posted by George Bisharat on May 15, 2007
Sunday, May 13, 2007 - San Francisco Chronicle
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. 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.
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.
Source; www.palestineremembered
Showing posts with label www.palestineremembered. Show all posts
Showing posts with label www.palestineremembered. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2011
A bitter memory of a child
by ibrahim Naoum Ebeid on January 20, 2002
Ibrahim Ebeid watanarabi@hotmail.com
We were living peacefully in our towns and villages until the Zionist entity was created in our land and we were brutally evicted from our homes to make room for the colonialist racist settlers. Thousands of our people were murdered and hundreds of our villages were demolished. Those foreigners now are living in our homes and on our farms and we are refugees scattered around the world. Millions of us are living in miserable camps waiting patiently for the conscience of the world to wake up. But will it?
When I was eleven years old, in Jaffa, I witnessed few Zionist terrorist acts that I have never been able to forget. They dwell in my mind and never depart; they have become part of my experience of the Palestine tragedy.
Once I was with a few kids from my school ؟playing hockey؟ or skipping classes, our favorite hide out was the busy and crowded vegetable market in Jaffa. A pushcart exploded. The explosion was very powerful, few people were killed and scores were wounded, some so seriously, that later on died from the severe wounds.
In intent to blow up ؟The Barracks؟, a large building, used to house some British Police Officers in Jaffa, located in Al Ajami section, few meters behind our house, the Zionists dressed like Arabs were driving a caravan of camels loaded with bombs. The bombs were exploded, the camels were killed and their parts were flown all over. Our house was cracked right from the corner. Luckily we were not hurt and I wonder if anybody was killed or seriously injured, I do not remember.
Fouad Kobti, a kid from my school living in my neighborhood, was shot in the chest but he survived.
Palm Sunday 1948. The worshippers were praying in a procession around St. Anthony Roman Catholic Church when Zionist mortar bombs stared to fall all around the churchyard and Terra Santa School, The Prayers were disrupted and the people were panicking.
A bullet pierced our wooden door and struck against the wall missing my father؟s head by one inch.
Omar ibin al Farran (Omar the son of the baker) was about fifteen years old and used to assist his father in the community bakery where we used to bake our bread. Like any other child of his age he had his hope and dreams. But alas his dreams were not fulfilled, the bakery was blown up by Zionist gangs artillery fire on the residential area where the bakery was located. His life was cut short and his body was torn apart into many pieces. Young Omar was gone and we were not able to see him any more neither were we able to carry the dough to the bakery to bake bread. Omar and the bakery were gone and Jaffa too.
On May 1948 my family was forced to leave Jaffa and left the beautiful orange grove of the Jallad family behind to settle in our village, Bir Zeit, in one room apartment that we used to spend few days every summer.
Summer 1948. Thousands of refugees, mostly women, children and elderly, hungry, thirsty and overwhelmed with panic and fear were filling the highway from Lyddah to Bir-Zeit. I joined scores of people from the village to help them. We offer them water and food. Thousands settled in caves and under olive trees. They made hasty shelters from rags and bushes to protect them from heat and to give them some sort of privacy.
Winter 1948. It was bitter cold. Most of those refugees who have never seen snow before, found themselves under a heavy blanket of that cold stuff that made them desperate and fearful for their lives away from the warmth of their homes.
Bir-Zeit with a population that did not exceed the two thousands swelled to fourteen thousand or more. Seeing this human tragedy befalling their brethren and the tragedy widens, the people of Bir-Zeit opened their homes, schools and churches to shelter the victims of Zionism and Western imperialist which helped create this catastrophe.
Schools were closed and the situation was unbearable and every one felt pain and despair. Fear was very dominant. The hope for immediate return to their homes was shattered and they were forced to go to live in permanent camps which lacked running water and other basic facilities.
Years later the refugees started building their dwellings with tin, mud, and stones collected from the surrounding areas. These refugees with their descendants are still living in these miserable conditions impatiently waiting for the conscience of the World to wake up, if it ever does.
________________________________________
Ibrahim Ebeid watanarabi@hotmail.com
We were living peacefully in our towns and villages until the Zionist entity was created in our land and we were brutally evicted from our homes to make room for the colonialist racist settlers. Thousands of our people were murdered and hundreds of our villages were demolished. Those foreigners now are living in our homes and on our farms and we are refugees scattered around the world. Millions of us are living in miserable camps waiting patiently for the conscience of the world to wake up. But will it?
When I was eleven years old, in Jaffa, I witnessed few Zionist terrorist acts that I have never been able to forget. They dwell in my mind and never depart; they have become part of my experience of the Palestine tragedy.
Once I was with a few kids from my school ؟playing hockey؟ or skipping classes, our favorite hide out was the busy and crowded vegetable market in Jaffa. A pushcart exploded. The explosion was very powerful, few people were killed and scores were wounded, some so seriously, that later on died from the severe wounds.
In intent to blow up ؟The Barracks؟, a large building, used to house some British Police Officers in Jaffa, located in Al Ajami section, few meters behind our house, the Zionists dressed like Arabs were driving a caravan of camels loaded with bombs. The bombs were exploded, the camels were killed and their parts were flown all over. Our house was cracked right from the corner. Luckily we were not hurt and I wonder if anybody was killed or seriously injured, I do not remember.
Fouad Kobti, a kid from my school living in my neighborhood, was shot in the chest but he survived.
Palm Sunday 1948. The worshippers were praying in a procession around St. Anthony Roman Catholic Church when Zionist mortar bombs stared to fall all around the churchyard and Terra Santa School, The Prayers were disrupted and the people were panicking.
A bullet pierced our wooden door and struck against the wall missing my father؟s head by one inch.
Omar ibin al Farran (Omar the son of the baker) was about fifteen years old and used to assist his father in the community bakery where we used to bake our bread. Like any other child of his age he had his hope and dreams. But alas his dreams were not fulfilled, the bakery was blown up by Zionist gangs artillery fire on the residential area where the bakery was located. His life was cut short and his body was torn apart into many pieces. Young Omar was gone and we were not able to see him any more neither were we able to carry the dough to the bakery to bake bread. Omar and the bakery were gone and Jaffa too.
On May 1948 my family was forced to leave Jaffa and left the beautiful orange grove of the Jallad family behind to settle in our village, Bir Zeit, in one room apartment that we used to spend few days every summer.
Summer 1948. Thousands of refugees, mostly women, children and elderly, hungry, thirsty and overwhelmed with panic and fear were filling the highway from Lyddah to Bir-Zeit. I joined scores of people from the village to help them. We offer them water and food. Thousands settled in caves and under olive trees. They made hasty shelters from rags and bushes to protect them from heat and to give them some sort of privacy.
Winter 1948. It was bitter cold. Most of those refugees who have never seen snow before, found themselves under a heavy blanket of that cold stuff that made them desperate and fearful for their lives away from the warmth of their homes.
Bir-Zeit with a population that did not exceed the two thousands swelled to fourteen thousand or more. Seeing this human tragedy befalling their brethren and the tragedy widens, the people of Bir-Zeit opened their homes, schools and churches to shelter the victims of Zionism and Western imperialist which helped create this catastrophe.
Schools were closed and the situation was unbearable and every one felt pain and despair. Fear was very dominant. The hope for immediate return to their homes was shattered and they were forced to go to live in permanent camps which lacked running water and other basic facilities.
Years later the refugees started building their dwellings with tin, mud, and stones collected from the surrounding areas. These refugees with their descendants are still living in these miserable conditions impatiently waiting for the conscience of the World to wake up, if it ever does.
________________________________________
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