[Marxism] SFGate: For Palestinians, memory matters/It provides a blueprint for their future

["Dennis Brasky" <DBachmozart@xxxxxxx>]

 For Palestinians, memory matters
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/05/13/INGQDPOOUD1.DTL
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, May 13, 2007 (SF Chronicle)
For Palestinians, memory matters/It provides a blueprint for their future
George Bisharat


   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.
   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. Contact us at
insight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2007 SF Chronicle


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism