2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
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The ghetto is calling
The time to act is now: Haim Bresheeth* urges the world to remember the Holocaust
They keep coming, streaming in through the invisible system of cables, lines, aerials which are so far away from their lit screen. They are in a room shaken by the repeated shelling, bombardments, shooting and the bestial brutality of the occupation forces. Men and women who I know and love are sending their pleas from Palestine on the net -- a far cry from the isolation of Warsaw ghetto, where some of my family perished -- and yet, their story is so disturbingly reminiscent of the ghetto, fighting to the bitter end. But their attackers are the grandsons of those who died in that other struggle.
A Palestinian school teacher inspects the damage in her classroom at the Al-Fatteniya School on 24 April in Nablus when schools reopened three days after the Israeli army pulled out of the heavily damaged city. photo:AFP
From Ramallah, Gaza, Hebron, Bethlehem -- from all over Palestine, people are writing and asking for help. They are all amazed, and so am I, at the measured calm with which the world accepts their demise and growing catastrophe, their second Nakba (catastrophe). What will it take for a change to occur? The news-readers have lost all interest in what is now called "the cycle of violence" -- as if there is a symmetry between the occupier and occupied -- as if the violence of a mighty army destroying all before it is equal to the despair, hopelessness and anger that forces people to kill others by committing suicide.
Those who criticise the Palestinians for suicide attacks would do well to dwell on what it takes for a person to commit suicide in this way. Israel has persuaded the Palestinians, quite efficiently, that there is no hope for them to live normally in the Middle East. They seem to have heeded this cruel and inhuman message, and some of them, seemingly many (and numbers are growing by the day as Israeli atrocities mount) are prepared to give their life in order to hurt the occupiers of their country. But then, this was always true. Nations around the globe have shown that self-sacrifice is an integral part of an independence struggle.
What is more surprising, more enraging, is the mental and moral degradation of Israeli Jews at this time. The peace movement of old is gone, gone are the voices of reason, of total opposition to the continued brutality of occupation, to the lawlessness that this occupation has created, and to its dehumanising effects, not just on Palestinian society, but first and foremost, on the Israeli polis itself. In league with Sharon sit the Labour Party, with Peres as their historical leader. They take equal and full part in the atrocities, in the blind stupidity of bloodshed, of trying to bludgeon a whole people into submission.
Every child who sees his father killed, mutilated or humiliated, every woman who is not allowed into hospital to give birth, every family gradually starved into submission -- they will remember, they will tell the tale, they will hate their oppressors with new vigour. And so will the rest of us. For this blindness, the "left" in Israel shall pay for a long time to come, as will the whole region.
Do Israelis not realise that in good time, their leaders also may face the International Tribunal for War Crimes? What has happened in the occupied territories since 1967, not to mention what is now taking place, are war crimes of every single sort imaginable. And all this for what? Have the Palestinians given up their claim for sovereignty and independence under the inhuman pressure of continued attacks? Have they accepted that Israel has a right to do what it likes anywhere in the Middle East, or are they ever likely to accept that?
They were ready to settle for 22 per cent of their country, realising that this was all that may be on offer, only to find that there was not a single Israeli leader prepared to vacate the occupied territories and all the illegal and damaging settlements. The Israeli public, now terrified of leaving their homes, should really spend some time thinking about what they have made of Palestinian life, of the hell that nation has been meted out since 1948, and especially since 1967.
Justice, peace, security, are all indivisible. There will be no Israeli security without security for Palestine. This, at least, should be clear to all and sundry, but it obviously is not. Israelis can no longer be trusted to identify their own good and proper interests, not to mention those of the Palestinians. The rest of the world needs to step in, and quickly.
So the time has come to say so clearly. Those who may yet stop this messy situation from deteriorating into further bloodshed, ethnic cleansing, population transfer and genocide, namely the Western powers, will also suffer the results of a merry-go-round of blood and irrationality. The anger now collecting in the Arab world, in Islamic countries, in the Third World, the South -- that anger may well be released at a time and place that cannot be foreseen, like the attack on 11 September. It is a time for all rational leaders to regroup and quickly force Israeli withdrawal and the immediate setting up of a viable Palestinian state, affording its citizens peace, security and prosperity.
At this time Jews who remember the Holocaust should stand up and be counted. They should clearly say that they are totally against Israeli occupation and totally for liberation of the Palestinians from the Israeli yolk. If the future life of people in the region is dear to them, they should help Israel to free itself from the diseased and debilitating cycle of brutality that they have plunged themselves and the Palestinians into. They should clarify that Israel has not got them on its side, and is not acting in their name. It is not the Palestinians who need to be under pressure after all these years of atrocities, but the short-sightedness of the Israeli public, and its refusal to face reality.
What must come now are sanctions of every kind, withdrawal of help and cooperation from Israeli organisations, up to the point of sending an international force into the region to force the evacuation of the territories. The time has come to take a stand.
If, despite the pressing need to force an end to the violence by ending the occupation, nothing will be done -- well, we know well enough what will follow. We have seen it time and again on our screens in the former Yugoslavia. Do we want to wait until all is lost? Our Palestinian friends are calling out to us. Please, let us not abandon them as European society of the 1940s abandoned my own family to their fate.
*The writer is an Israeli academic and peace activist living and working in London. He is the co-editor (with Nira Yuval-Davis) of The Gulf War and the New World Order, published by Zed Books, and co-author (with Stuart Hood) of Introduction to the Holocaust, published by Icon Books .
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