GAZA - before the wars...

Memories and Gaza

We know it is important to remember the Holocaust,  but Palestinians are told not to live in the past, to forget their own history, to forget the Nak'ba, the "Catastrophe" that happened after we decided "Never Again" would we have a Holocaust of Jews and so gave the Jewish community the lands the Palestinians had inhabited from the times when the Romans renamed Judaea as Palestine, dispelling many of the Jews. The survivors of that time were the many local Pagans, some Jews and a few of the first Christians.  A few hundred years later many of these became Muslim.

We forget that to be anti-Arab is also to be anti-Semitic - for the Arabs are the major Semitic nation of old. Arabic is the major Semitic language according to linguists,  but even the name of their ancient nation is stolen.

We the British  issued the Balfour Declaration, recognizing the rights of Jews in Europe to go to live in Palestine  - but we said we hoped this would not be at the cost of the inhabitants. Then, in 1948, after a savage war during which Jewish fighters took a terrible toll, many Arab Palestinians fled a short distance from their lands in terror, clustering in towns where they were given shelter. One of the towns they fled to, from the rich orchards of  Jaffa and nearby towns, was to Gaza city.  Half of the people who now live imprisoned behind high walls in Gaza are these refugees.  

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.

We cannot expect the people in Gaza to forget this. 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.

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).\

 George Bisharat reported: "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." 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.

He went on to say: "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.

George Bisharat concluded: "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."

* with thanks to George Bisharat, a  professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He wrote the article that inspired this.  For Palestinians, memory matters. It provides a blueprint for their future  Posted  on May 13 or 15, 2007 in the San Francisco Chronicle  - now - listen to a powerful and informative speech he gave - highly recommended...