|
CounterPunch
February
12, 2003
Partners in
Pain
Arabs Study the Holocaust
by AVIV LAVIE
Even before the present intifada, Yasser Arafat
was never seen as a sympathetic figure in Israel. Oddly enough,
one of the times he incurred especially vitriolic criticism was
when he sought to demonstrate solidarity with the Jewish people
in relation to its most painful subject--the Holocaust. In January
1998, pressure from the U.S. administration led to an invitation
being issued to Arafat to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
The possibility of such a visit had the Knesset in an uproar.
MK Shmuel Halpert of United Torah Judaism called it "a defamation
of the memory of those who were killed in the Holocaust, a trampling
of Jewish dignity and a terrible insult to the last remaining
survivors." The late Rehavam Ze'evi harshly rebuked representatives
of the museums at Yad Mordechai and Lohamei Hagetaot, who had
also issued invitations to Arafat. He called them "stooping
Jews who groveled before this villain," and asked: "What
is this murderer looking for at the Holocaust Museum? Does he
want to have his picture taken there while, lips trembling, he
cries crocodile tears at the sight of the horrors so that we'll
think that he's human? Does he want to study Adolph Hitler's
exploits so he can learn from him?"
Naturally, these comments could not go
unanswered. Azmi Bishara remarked in astonishment: "Finally
someone wants to recognize your collective memory and you say
no." The next day, in an interview with Haaretz, writer
and journalist Salem Jubran said: "I ask those who object
to Arafat's visit to the Holocaust Museum--What would they have
said if he'd turned down the invitation to visit the museum?"
Jubran suggested that Arafat also be invited to visit Yad Vashem.
As announced at a Jerusalem press conference
this past Monday morning, a large group of Jews and Israeli Arabs
plans to venture into this volatile triangle of Jews-Arabs-Holocaust.
Together, they will attend a series of seminars and lectures
about the Holocaust, and then go on a joint visit to Auschwitz.
This extraordinary initiative was the brainchild of an Arab priest
and teacher; the enthusiastic reception it has received from
Jews is fairly surprising, given the general atmosphere of wariness
and despair.
Two months after the October 2000 riots
in the Arab sector, Father Emil Shufani realized that he was
facing a new reality. Shufani, from Nazareth, serves as archimandrite
at the Greek Catholic Church in the Galilee. A few years ago,
he was the Netanyahu government's leading candidate to replace
the community's retiring archbishop, but the Vatican had other
ideas. Netanyahu's support for Shufani surprised many people,
since Shufani had been closely identified with Hadash. For many
years, Shufani has been running the St.
Joseph High School in Nazareth, which
is one of the most prestigious Arab schools in Israel. He has
always advocated dialogue between Jews and Arabs and he practices
what he preaches. In recent years, he has conducted regular meetings
between students from his school and students from the Hebrew
University High School in Jerusalem.
This tradition was not interrupted by
the events of October 2000. At the December 2000 meeting, Shufani
heard some things that really knocked him for a loop: "We
were in Jerusalem for the weekend, and we talked about the painful
things that had happened. A teacher whom I'd known for 15 years,
someone who had always presented himself as an Israeli who supports
democracy and equality, started to talk about the fact that he
is above all a Jew, and he mentioned the Holocaust. And he wasn't
the only one. I felt that the Holocaust was coming back to people,
that the feeling of persecution and the palpable fear of the
Jews was not just a historical event that belongs to the past,
but very present right now. It pained me to see this teacher;
there was a disparity between the values that he supported intellectually
and what he felt on the emotional level. That was the moment
when I realized that there is no chance for true dialogue and
reconciliation unless we have an in-depth understanding of this
matter of the Holocaust, unless we touch the suffering, the memory,
the terminology. It may not be sufficient to get us out of the
mud we're stuck in, but it's definitely necessary."
Binational
project
Shufani, who became interested in the
Holocaust when he was a student in France in the 1970s, started
to toss around some ideas. One person he shared his thoughts
with was Nazir Majli. Majli, also from Nazareth, is a well-known
figure among the Arab public in Israel. A journalist for 30 years,
he was for seven years editor of Al-Ittihad, the Communist movement's
newspaper, a position he took over from his "teacher and
mentor," writer Emil Habibi. In recent years, Majli has
been analyzing events in Israel for a variety of media outlets
in the Arab world, and is also part of an Internet project in
which Israeli newspapers are translated daily into Arabic.
Shufani and Majli decided that their
project had to be binational, so they searched for Jewish partners.
Four months ago, they contacted Ruth Bar-Shalev. Bar-Shalev,
from Tel Aviv, specializes in teaching individuals and organizations
how to make breakthroughs, or "take a stand and create a
new situation where there seemed to be a dead end," as she
puts it. She took it upon herself to put together the Jewish-Israeli
group that would take part in the project.
The effort to recruit participants is
now in full swing. So far, the list includes more than 100 Arabs
and 80 Jews. Bar-Shalev expects the final number to be about
300: "Our guiding thought was to reach a critical mass.
Granted, it's not an intimate framework, but if we were to work
with just 20 people, they wouldn't change the thinking of the
broader public. We want a mass of people who will write, act,
lead and live within the new paradigm. Our goal was to enlist
people who are leaders, entrepreneurs, trendsetters--not politicians."
The Arab participants include prominent
attorney Ahmed Masalha; bus and tour company director Ahmed Afifi;
Sheikh Nimr Darwish, leader of the northern section of the Islamic
movement; actor Salim Daw; soccer player Walid Badir; singer
Amal Murkus; writer Naim Areide and a long list of academics
and educators. An initial, partial list of the Jewish participants
includes:
Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau, singer Ahinoam
Nini, singer Ehud Banai and poet Agi Mishol. This is an expensive
project; a nonprofit organization called Mizikhron Leshalom ("From
Memory to Peace") has been set up for fund-raising purposes,
and a Web site where participants can exchange views and experiences
has recently been inaugurated. Bar-Shalev says that sizable contributions
have already been received from several private donors.
The project's Arab founders formulated
its goals in a document they entitled "Remembering the pain
for the sake of peace": We, the undersigned, a group of
Arab citizens of Israel, who are concerned about the deterioration
in relations between Jews and Arabs in our country ... are going
out to feel the pain of the other side. The two peoples will
not be able to abandon the path of bloodshed until each understands
and internalizes the other's pain and the other's fears, which
pushed them to the line of fire, conflict and war ... We wish
to study and to get to know the suffering, the hardships, the
torture and the destruction ... to fully identify with and express
solidarity with the Jews."
In upcoming weeks, the participants will
attend three weekend seminars dedicated to study and discussion
of the Holocaust from various angles. On the first day, only
the Arabs will participate. The Jews will join them after that.
As part of the seminars, the participants will hear lectures
about the historical background of World War II and the Holocaust,
will meet Holocaust survivors, learn about the syndrome of second-
and third-generation descendants of survivors and also devote
time to a particularly loaded subject--The Arab world and its
attitude toward the Holocaust. The project is supposed to reach
its climax toward the end of May, when the group will leave for
a five-day visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
They will be joined there by a 150-member delegation from France
that includes leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities.
Why now?
As expected, the initiative, and especially
its timing, is eliciting a lot of questions from the Arab world.
Ever since October 2000, Israelis and Palestinians have been
expending considerable energy vying for the right to be perceived
as the real victim of the conflict. Each side does its best to
diminish the enemy's pain and suffering. Then along comes this
group of Israeli Arabs that seeks to bond with Jews in the one
place in the world where Jews clearly hold exclusive rights to
the title of victim--the place that epitomizes the Holocaust.
A good number of Israeli Arabs object
to this move, but are reluctant to voice their criticism publicly;
they know that the Holocaust is a sacred cow in the Israeli discourse.
One Arab public figure, who requested anonymity, said the following:
"I don't for a moment question the evil of the Nazis or
the fact that the Jewish Holocaust was a horrific event. But
everything has a context. When the two peoples are competing
for victim status, and when the Jews cynically exploit the memory
of the Holocaust in order to commit war crimes in the territories
and to imprison an entire nation with closures and curfews, I
feel that there's an almost immoral element in traveling to Auschwitz
and showing solidarity with the Jewish victim right at this time.
Personally, my heart is with the Jews who suffered and were exterminated
in the concentration camps, but there's a difference between
feeling solidarity--which is an intimate human emotion--and making
a public display of this solidarity, which is an act that has
political significance."
Nazir Majli is well prepared to respond
to such criticism. Over the last
months, he has frequently been asked,
"Why are you going to Auschwitz when the Israelis are killing
our children in Jenin?"
How do you reply?
Majli: "I tell people that we mustn't
let ourselves be prisoners of the existing modes of thinking,
that we shouldn't be fettered to outmoded concepts. Yes, we are
trying to turn things inside out, which is good, because the
present situation and all the hatred that exists will destroy
both peoples. We know we'll get clobbered by critics and perhaps
even pay a heavy personal price, but the hope for a better future
in this region is worth more. We're living in hell and we want
to breathe a little clean air, to be more pure. I'm out to cleanse
myself and my people from the hatred that exists today."
Majli and his friends were anticipating
a barrage of criticism as soon as the project was announced--not
only within Israel, but primarily from the Arab world. In a bid
to soften the expected blow, Majli went to Egypt a few weeks
ago to meet with a group of prominent intellectuals. "I
explained to them that this wasn't about a Zionization of the
Israeli Arabs, that it wasn't sycophancy, but rather a patriotic
Arab deed of the first rank that was intended to demonstrate
our humanity. The overwhelming majority of the people we met
there gave us their blessing and we also were able to meet with
the foreign minister, Amr Moussa, who told us it was a very important,
even obvious, step to take in terms of the Arab world. He also
promised us that if we were attacked when the project was launched,
he would make a public statement of support."
Poet, writer and journalist Salem Jubran
(he is the editor of the weekly Al Ahli, based in Sakhnin), is
a participant in the project and has been dealing with these
issues for some years now. In the early days of Oslo, when it
appeared that normalcy was finally on
its way to the region, he lectured on the Holocaust at the Givat
Haviva Institute, to West Bank Palestinians who were interested
in the subject. He currently teaches a seminar at Beit Lohamei
Hagetaot to mixed groups of Jewish and Arab teachers.
Jubran: "As a person, as a humanist,
as a leftist, I cannot be indifferent to an ideology of extermination.
In my seminars, at first the people do not let go of their national
affinities, but after two or three sessions, it becomes harder
to think in terms of being only Jews or only Arabs. We are human
beings first of all."
No doubt you've been accused of obsequiousness.
"There are those who would even
call the aspiration to live in coexistence obsequiousness, so
what can one do? I find that one of the most moving moments is
when people come up to me at the end of the course and tell me
that learning about the Holocaust has actually made them more
Arab, more
proud. Learning about the suffering of
the Jews doesn't take anything away from our national identity.
Is that what national identity is--hating another people? In
the course, we strive to understand the difference between patriotism
and chauvinism, between loving oneself and hating the other.
If I say that you are a true victim, does that have to mean that
I am not a true victim? Maybe we both can be victims simultaneously.
To me, visiting the
Lohamei Hagetaot museum isn't obsequiousness
and it doesn't mean that you're distancing yourself from our
own nationality. Rather, it's a distillation of all that is humane
and moral in the Arab nation."
Arab attitudes
Grappling with the Holocaust has always
been a complex challenge for the Arab world. In the collective
Israeli consciousness, the Arab attitude toward the Holocaust
is embodied by the Mufti of Jerusalem, who maintained ties with
Adolph Hitler during the war. The reality is more complicated,
of course. Contrasting forces were actually at work in the Arab
world then--those who held a positive view of the Nazis' rise
to power and those who doggedly opposed it, led by the members
of the Communist movements.
Prof. Moshe Zimmerman of Hebrew University:
"Because of their connections in the Arab world, such as
the Jerusalem Mufti and with Iraq, and the hope of forging cooperation
with officials in Egypt, at a certain stage the Nazis started
to refrain from using the term `anti-Semitism,' since the Arabs
are also Semites, and instead talked about `anti-Jewishness.'
In their propaganda, they also tried to emphasize that the rivalry
between Islam and Judaism was just as great as that between Christianity
and Judaism, which, of course, was supposed to be a testament
to the Jews' nature. On the other
hand, Zionist propaganda tends to imply
that the connection between the Mufti and the Nazis is representative
of all the Palestinians and that's a problematic generalization.
One should be careful about that."
Salem Jubran: "The Mufti's attitude
toward Hitler was `The enemy of my enemy is my friend.' There
were also a lot of Palestinian intellectuals who proudly and
publicly took a stand against the Nazis. It's a terrible tragedy
that the right-wing Zionist establishment sought to blacken the
reputation of the
entire Palestinian people. All Arabs
are not the same, just as all Jews are not the same. Today, you
won't find a single person in the top ranks of the Palestinian
national leadership who would justify the Nazi movement, even
tacitly. In the days before Oslo, when I traveled to Tunis, Arafat
asked me to lecture to his people about the Jews, the Arabs and
the Holocaust. He wanted me to help them understand the Jews'
psychology, to learn how to soften the toughness."
Two years ago, the Arab world was roiled
when a number of Holocaust-denial organizations were scheduled
to hold a conference in Beirut. Fourteen prominent Arab intellectuals,
including poet Mahmoud Darwish, published a petition saying,
"We are appalled by this anti-Semitic initiative" and
demanded that the Lebanese government stop the conference from
taking place. An editorial in Al-Hayat said that "The conference
degrades Lebanon" and that "in the name of the Palestinian
victims, the conference will seek to defend the Nazi executioner
and his crimes against the Jews." Israeli Arab MK Ahmed
Tibi wrote a letter to the Lebanese president in which he said,
"We cannot agree to any step whose objective is to express
understanding for Nazism and its crimes as genocide of other
peoples, including the Jewish people, who suffered greatly from
the crimes of the Nazi executioner." The Lebanese government
caved under the pressure and the conference was canceled.
In May 2000, only a few months before
the outbreak of the intifada, MK Tawfiq Khatib (Ra'am) was part
of a parliamentary delegation to the concentration camps in Poland
and the March of the Living at Auschwitz. "I consider my
participation an important mission. In
doing this, I represented the true Arab face. The few who criticized
me are a distortion of our true face," he said at the time.
When Khatib spoke about his critics,
he was referring mainly to Tamim Mansur, a high school teacher
in Tira and lecturer at Beit Berl, who published a scathing article
in the Balad party newspaper. Mansur argued that by joining the
delegation, Khatib was lending a helping hand to Israeli and
world Zionist propaganda, which stages annual "tearjerker
productions at the camps in order to cover up their past and
present crimes against the Palestinian people."
Mansur is not very enthusiastic about
the new educational project either: "Just because I'm opposed
to it doesn't mean that I'm for the Nazis. I'm a graduate of
Tel Aviv University with a degree in the history of the Land
of Israel and the Jewish People. You can't say that I don't know
the subject. But I think that going to Auschwitz now is assisting
Israeli propaganda. I don't recall seeing a Jewish leader, from
the left or right, visit Sabra and Chatila or one of the cemeteries
that are full of Palestinian corpses.
"There are enough leaders in the
world who display solidarity with the Jewish people in everything
regarding the Holocaust, and I think that the Jews have exploited
it well and used it as a clearly political issue and done a lot
of terrible things in the name of the Holocaust. They built a
state here at the expense of the Palestinian people thanks to
the Holocaust, so I am not obliged to show solidarity with them."
If there were peace, would your view
be any different?
"Obviously, it's also a matter of
timing. The timing right now is very bad, because the Jews do
not recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people and the
oppression and the occupation are getting worse every day. I
deal with the subject of the Holocaust all the time, because
I teach history in high school. I have a problem, because nearly
every morning when I enter the classroom, the students have recently
heard on the news that a few more Palestinians were killed in
Nablus or Gaza. In this situation, if I start talking to them
about the suffering of the Jews, they'll say, `It's too bad they
didn't kill all of them."
So what do you do? After all, Holocaust
studies are a required subject in Israeli schools [including
Israeli Arab schools].
"I teach them what's in the book.
I stick close to what's written there and am careful not to show
empathy or solidarity, because as soon as that happens, they
scold me: `While they're killing us, you're crying for the Jews.'
If I were to talk about how the Jews suffered, they'd chase me
out of the classroom. I gently try to convey the message to them
that there's no point in hating others, that we have to be ethical
and only when one of the kids says something like, `They deserve
it,' do I confront him head-on."
Mixed feelings
MK Azmi Bishara: "When I was in
Germany, I visited almost all of the concentration camps. I had
an obsession against the Nazis. At first, it was as a Communist.
Later, this feeling extended to Communism itself and against
any totalitarian regime."
Nonetheless, Bishara has mixed feelings
about the new project: "Several of the people who are involved
in it are friends of mine and they also consulted with me. If
this interest in the subject contains a genuine and honest desire
to know about the historical and collective memory of the majority
in the state we live in, then I think it's a good thing. Any
such effort is welcome.
"The problem is that I'm a little
skeptical. For example, I suspect that there's an attempt here
to be `okay.' As if this by itself will open hearts and affect
public opinion among the Jews--that as soon as they see that
we're interested in them, they'll start to be interested in us.
The problem is that, up to now, when other nations have shown
an interest in the Holocaust, the result was that Israel turned
this solidarity into a tool for justifying its own actions. This
is the instrumentalization of the Holocaust. There are two great
offenses related to the Holocaust--denial of it and the use that
is made of it. Both contain an element of denial, because as
soon as you compare the Holocaust to all kinds of other things,
you're also diminishing it."
After the crisis of October 2000, what's
wrong with an effort finally being made on the part of Israeli
Arabs to reach out to the Jewish public?
"It's not something bad, I'm just
not sure that it's the right way. It could blur the fact that
the main factor in the worsening of relations between Jews and
Arabs is the occupation--not a lack of knowledge about Jewish
history. In my experience, when I've shown sensitivity, I've
ended up being attacked even harder, because then they can't
neatly categorize me as they'd like. They want an Arab who will
listen when Jews talk about the Holocaust. I remember the one
time I was part of Dan Shilon's famous circle on Channel Two.
Benny Katzover was there, too, and he said, `What they did to
us in Yamit was a mini-Holocaust.' I was outraged--not as an
Arab, but as a human being. I asked him what remarks like that
do to the memory of the Holocaust, how he could be so insensitive.
Not only did no one else there back me up, they all started shouting
at me--`Who are you to defend the victims of the Holocaust?'
and hurling all kinds of collective accusations about `you Arabs'
and all that we did or didn't do during the Holocaust."
Jewish reciprocity
Ruth Bar-Shalev has been busy trying
to increase the number of Jewish participants in the project.
She says she is surprised anew each time from people's "responsiveness
and willingness to come and work. They don't just say yes--They
immediately get to work and take on responsibilities."
One such person is retired police superintendent
Aryeh Amit, a former commander of the Jerusalem police. "Since
October 2000, I've felt that the divide between Jews and Arabs
in Israel is a strategic problem," he says. "We don't
know one another. We don't know each other's culture, each other's
dreams, each other's poetry and literature. They're actually
ahead of us in terms of knowing the other side, and still they're
the ones who are saying, `We're going to be the first to learn
about you. We are taking this step.' Last week, I was at a meeting
in Nazareth where the project was discussed and after two minutes
I knew that I wanted in. Not as a member of the Council for Peace
and Security, but as a citizen who is very excited by it and
wants to help, to be a soldier--though soldier probably isn't
the right word to use in this context."
In the next stage, would you be prepared
to learn about and show solidarity with Palestinian victimhood,
regarding the Nakba for instance?
"I don't know about showing solidarity,
but I'd definitely be ready to learn. They decided that they're
volunteering to go first, and I have no doubt that this group
will afterward study the Arab issue with courage and thoroughness."
The matter of reciprocity could prove
to be the project's undoing. The Arabs are coming to express
solidarity; for now, Amit is only ready to learn. Luckily, the
Arabs did not make reciprocity a condition and, at this point,
nothing of the sort has been made part of the plans for the project.
Nazir Majli: "We're coming to recognize
your victimhood. Will you recognize ours afterward? I wouldn't
be telling you the truth if I said that I hadn't thought about
this, but I try to ignore such thoughts. I'm doing this to serve
my people, so should I be expecting something in return from
the Jews at the same time? We're pursuing this initiative for
the sake of the Arab people. You [Jews] do what you want to do
for the sake of your people. If we succeed in changing something
in the relations between the two peoples, then we've accomplished
something. If not, then we did something for ourselves personally."
Emil Shufani: "We leave it to the
Jewish street to say how it wishes to make the parallel move.
No conditions are being set. The time has come to put an end
to the ping-pong dialectic that we've been stuck in for the past
two years. I don't know what the Jews' answer to this will be,
and I'm not waiting for it. Whoever wants to offer an answer
is most welcome to do so."
This article originally appeared in Ha'aretz.
Yesterday's
Features
Douglas Valentine
An
Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King
Wayne Madsen
In
Material Breach of the Constitution
Bush's War on the Soul of America
Mahir Ali
The Dupes
of War: Blessed are the Peacemakers
Gordon Solberg
We Want Our Country Back
Wayne Saunders
Inside
Bush's Brain: a Pathology of Fear and Lies
Joshua Ruebner
An
Iron Triangle:
Raytheon-Israel-Congress
John Troyer
An
80s Flashback: Of Shuttles and Air Raids
Lee Waters
Inside the Bush White House
"Armageddon is Long Overdue!"
Website of the Day
Electronic
Iraq
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
February 8
/ 9, 2003
Bill Christison
The
US Gameplan for Iraq
Intelligence Officers for
Sanity
Memo to Bush on Iraq
Olive Lowell
Homeland Insecurity
Champaign-Urbana Shaken by New INS Rules
Michael Neumann
Nonviolence: Its Histories and
Myths
Alison Weir
A Thousand Professors
David Krieger
On the Brink of War
Muqtedar Khan
The Logic of the Hawks
Anthony Gancarski
Pakistan on the Brink?
Jason Leopold
GAO Surrenders to Cheney
Anis Shivani
A Post-Liberal Theory of Consciousness for the Starbucks Habitué
David Vest
Dive Bomber
Norman Madarasz
The New Brazilian Cinema
Poets' Basement
Handleman, Smith, Engel
Website of the Weekend
Cities for Peace
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|