22 - 28 March 2001
Issue No.526
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 March 2001 Issue No.526 |
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Reflections
History's nightmare
According to the Israeli press, one of the first sentiments expressed by Sharon's new education minister, Limor Livnat, upon taking office was her resolve to expurgate the country's school curriculum of "New Historian" influence. Alleged new historian influence in the Israeli school system is also one of Prime Minister Sharon's pet "demons," to use Ha'aretz's Hana Kim's word. The columnist, however, reassured both Sharon and Livnat that, in fact, there was no new historian influence in the school curriculum, or for that matter, outside it; that almost half of Israel's students do not study history at all; and that a passing reference in a single textbook to the Palestinians having been driven out, rather than leaving of their own accord, does not count as new historian influence.
The extent to which ideology can subsume, manipulate and condition memory is always astounding. In our part of the world, the battle over memory is no less vital to a just and human solution to the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab struggle than resistance actions on the ground. And the battle lines are drawn not just along the Arab/Israeli divide, but within each "camp," and across them.
Take the new historians' revelations about the founding massacres of the Jewish state. These, no doubt, would have found an appreciative audience among most Palestinians and Arabs, had they been adequately popularised by the Arabic press, instead of the usual rubbish about AIDS-exporting Israeli tourists and sexual-depravity-enticing Israeli chewing gum. We have always held that the Palestinians were driven out of their land, though it took the work of the Israeli historians to reveal the gruesome truth of that version of Palestinian/Israeli history. It is something else altogether to conclude that more than a few of us share their critical attitude towards our common history. Indeed, I am continually amazed by the complicity and mutual reinforcement of the Zionist and prevalent Arab versions of that history.
Dismissing the Sharon/Livnat new historian demons, Ha'aretz's Kim recounts the following story: "Several years ago historians Dr Ilan Pappe, Dr Benny Morris and Prof Avi Shlaim shared a car from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Pappe insisted on driving. 'I know how you two drive,' he said. 'If God forbid we crash -- Israel's new history would vanish into thin air." Our equivalent, no less sadly, would probably fill a small van at most.
"The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living," wrote Karl Marx in that most "un-Marxist" (in any conventional sense) of tracts, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. When a fair section of "the dead generations," thanks to modern medicine and hygiene, is also alive and killing, the "nightmare" is even more difficult to shake off.
And it is not just the "facts," though we do share -- with the Zionist version of our common history -- quite a few of those too, most notably the myth that the Arabs actually fought for Palestine. (When was that exactly?) No less important, however, is the reading of those facts. Take Saddam Hussein's attempt to liberate Palestine via Kuwait. One would have thought that anyone who had the least recollection of Nasser's May '67 "bluff," and its disastrous consequences, would immediately have recognised Saddam's escapade for what it is: history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce (to use Marx's Brumaire once again); or merely as the bad sequel to a dubious blockbuster, to use the more contemporary Hollywood-influenced parlance. That ten years on some of us are willing to be taken in by the Iraqi leader's "Jerusalem Brigades" boggles the mind. Memory, rather than an instrument of learning, becomes one endless nightmare.
And the nightmare, as nightmares often do, continues to generate ever new and variously repulsive phantasms. Palestinians in the occupied territories are, according to the International Red Cross, on the brink of starvation; the Israeli army and rampaging settlers continue to do their deadly work on a daily basis (a 10-year old Palestinian child has just been beaten to death by settlers). And rather than underline the full horror of the killing of hundreds, some of us would like to make common cause with those who would try to belittle the killing of millions. In Beirut, from 31 March to 3 April, a conference on "Revisionism and Zionism" is to bring together a motley crew of European and American neo-Nazis and anti-Semites, presumably to give further evidence that the Nazis killed three rather than six million Jews.
But, thankfully, we too have our share of "new historians." Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Mohamed Harbi, Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, Mohamed Verada, Dominique Edde, Elias Khoury, Gerard Khoury, Salah Stetie, Fayez Mallas, Farouk Mardam-Bey, Khalida Said and Elias Sanbar (14 Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Moroccan and Algerian intellectuals) have issued a statement declaring: "Arab intellectuals are outraged by this anti-Semitic undertaking... We wish to warn Lebanese and Arab public opinion about this and call on Lebanese authorities to ban this inadmissible conference."
The Zionist Organisation of America, which among other Jewish and Zionist organisations has been demanding that the Beirut conference be banned, is also -- as Israeli writer Israel Shamir noted in a recent article -- the publisher of a booklet called Deir Yassin: History of a Lie. Shamir protests: "I do not want to repeat the gory tale of sliced-off ears, gutted bellies, torched men, bodies dumped in stone quarries or the triumphal parade of the murderers. Existentially, all massacres are similar, from Babi Yar to Chain Gang to Deir Yassin."
A car or a van: no matter. There is hope so long as there are among us, whether Arabs or Jews, people who will look to memory as an instrument of learning and salvation, rather than of denial and repression. The nightmare can be shaken off yet.
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