This op-ed piece by a Palestinian-born, American professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, George Bisharat, argues that people (Israelis, Americans) want the Palestinians to forget their past in order to move on. He passionately and indignantly defends the right and duty of Palestinians to remember their past for the sake of their future. But instead it illustrates exactly how not to learn from past.
After all, it’s not whether you remember the past that has so great an impact on your future, but how.
The Past is a Blueprint for the Future
For Palestinians, Memory Matters
By 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.
No one is asking the Palestinians to forget what happened to them. We are asking them to remember honestly rather than bathe themselves in myths of (their) victimization and (Israeli) demonization. As Nietzsche pointed out long ago: Everyone remembers and forgets. The real issue is how you do it: what you choose to remember and what you choose to forget. Memories that forget the unpleasant (self-critical) and remember the pleasant (self-justifying) details, are dangerous precisely because such memory makes it impossible to learn from past mistakes, and guarantees a future of repeating mistakes, of perduring misery.
The question is not, was there a war in 1948 which created hundreds of thousands of Arabs refugees, closed up in wretched camps? That happened. It was a tragedy. The Palestinians suffered greatly. The question is, why did it happen?
Were the Arabs, for example, innocently going about their daily lives when the predatory, imperialist Israelis swooped down upon them (they way, say, the French swept down on the Algerians, or the British on the Indians), eager to take their property and drive them from the land? Or was that population mobilized for war with promises of precisely that — the ability to drive the Jews into the sea and to plunder their property? Was the Israeli motivation for driving Arabs from their lands the imperial dream of conquest or the clear realization that co-existence was not possible with the dominion of such enmity among their neighbors?
Did the Israeli Declaration of Independence preclude a Palestinian Declaration of Independence, and the beginning of a land shared by two sovereign entities, both free and self-determining? Or was the zero-sum choice, in which one side had to recall that date in sorrow even as the other did in joy, made by the Arabs, who then failed to win the gamble with violence they so eagerly undertook?
Was it the Israelis who shut up the Arabs in camps and kept them in grotesque conditions? Or was it the Arab elites who shut them up to use their suffering as a weapon in a war where the Naqba would be reversed, so the Arabs could rejoice and the Jews wail in sorrow?
Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees’ right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason (Beirut al Massa, July 15, 1957).
These are significant questions because if Palestinian suffering derives from the bad and foolish choices of Arab and Palestinian leadership (who gambled on getting everything and got nothing)… if the Israelis are not the demons Palestinians imagine… then how Palestinians escape the internal cycle of violence now so clear in Gaza, may not go the same route as one might imagine.
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.
Note again that there’s no mention of how the war started. Here the Palestinians forget all by themselves the Arab contribution to their wretched condition. No mention that, even as in some places the Israelis were expelling and urging to flight, in others — how many? — Arabs were urging flight, even threatening those who stayed with the treatment of turncoats when the Arab armies swept over the land…
As for the “living, breathing” Palestinian society that had existed for centuries, no progressive (like, say, the editors of Counterpnch) who is not terminally romantic can look at the misery, grinding poverty, pervasive class and ethnic divisions and oppression that characterized Arab life in this part of the world (say in the 19th century, when pilgrims took the condition of Jerusalem as a prophetic sign of how God had cursed the land) and wax sad at its passing. On the contrary, from almost any point of view, society quickened considerably when the Zionists arrived, drained the swamps — they really did, check the historical record — and created an economy that, within half a century, by the time of the Naqba (1948), had taken a stagnant population and more than tripled the combined Jewish and Arab population.
For the Arab inhabitants of this region (say Jordan and Israel) to live in dignity and freedom, much of the “living, breathing society” of the time had to change… dramatically. As long as Palestinians live in a fantasy world where in the past life was great until the European Jews started to show up, their future is bleak. They expend all this energy getting rid of the Jews, counting on the “living breathing” society they once were to carry them through, and none facing the real problems they need to deal with.
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.
Yes, well few Israeli families from that time lack a personal narrative of loss from that period, including the 800,000 or so who fled an Arab world that did not hesitate to take its rage at losing to Israel on its own Jewish minorities. That’s what happens when you choose war. That’s the consequences when a leadership bent on conquest and dominion decides not to take half (at that time by far the better half) of the loaf, but whips its people into a frenzy to take the whole loaf.
For the Palestinians, these warmongers I evoke are, of course, the Israelis. And given the extraordinary self-criticism of the Israelis/Jews, there is no lack of historians willing to tell the Palestinians that their narrative is right. That they — the losers — are also the innocent.
But what if that’s not the case? What if these self-critical Israelis are not really being honest? What if they are engaging in some combination of “therapeutic assumption of blame” (see below) and a messianic fantasy of masochistic omnipotence (if it’s all our fault, then we can change it by changing ourselves). What if, whatever these Israeli historians think they are doing, they are not acting in your best interests? What if your leadership — Haj Amin al Husseini, his nephew Yassir, the new generation of warlords and Jihadis — played a key role in the disastrous choices which have consistently led to your suffering? Obviously it’s easy and gratifying to blame Israel. But will that help you remember the past in honest and productive ways?
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.
I am unaware that the Jews of 1930s Germany had declared war on Germany and promised to slaughter the Germans till only a handful remained. I do know that the Germans, convinced in their anti-modern paranoia, that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were true, believed that the Jews were dedicated to their destruction and that they believed in “exterminate or be exterminated,” so that ultimately, by projecting their own vicious intentions on the Jews, they justified genocide.
So let me suggest that, given the prominence of the Protocols in Palestinian and Arab culture, the rampant genocidaL anti-semitic paranoia in your schools, television and publications, perhaps before you invoke parallels with the Nazis, you might consider the possibility that the comparison does not work to your advantage. Again, it may feel good; and it may get you the support your friends on the “progressive left” who do not tire of comparing Israel with the Nazis — but that, again, may not be what you need to think about if you want to help your people.
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.
This is an extremely interesting remark because I think it illuminates what may have motivated many of the “post-Zionists” to scour their history for cases of massacres and expulsion — in some cases, inventing them. The initial Israeli explanation for the Palestinian refugee problem was that the larger Arab world — headed by the Arab League which declared a genocidal war — urged them to leave. (This has since been questioned, although sufficient evidence makes it clear that this phenomenon did happen.) In an attempt to honor and respect the pain that Palestinians experienced in this time of tragedy, progressive Israeli historians tried to find ways to affirm — honor — their narrative, to show the respect that Bisharat calls for here.
Tbis was part of the Israeli contribution to the Oslo “Peace Process.” The government even changed its educational curriculum in the schools to honor and respect the Palestinian narrative, despite the damage it did to the kinds of solidarities that a nation needs in times of war. But they thought these were the wages of peace… the sacrifices necessary to go to the next stage. Little did they suspect that the Palestinian leadership considered Oslo not as a platform to transform the conflict into a cooperation, but as a Trojan Horse, and that they prepared their children not for peace but for war.
The Oslo War of 2000 — a particularly vicious and stupid war (if it were aimed at creating a state), a particularly vicious and clever war (if it were aimed at launching a globla Jihad) — has cost the Palestinians an enormous amount — was the result of these Israeli efforts at good will. When they “respected” the Palestinian claims by admitting guilt, the Palestinian response was not to say, “thank you, I needed that… and by the way, we’ve done some pretty nasty things to you for which we apologize,” but rather to seize upon the admissions and further demonize the Israelis.
Now I’m not suggesting that you, Prof. Bisharat, were even part of this dastardly deal. But I do think that you owe it to everyone, and most especially your people, to acknowledge what went on only a decade ago, rather than renew calls for the kind of apologies and recognition that your people have already received, and have treated with such contempt.
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.
This paragraph illustrates to perfection how thick the misunderstanding. The Americans and Israelis are not talking about forgetting the past, but about forgetting your grudges, about letting go of your need for vengence which so profoundly informs your notions of “justice.” Not only is that good advice — people who spend their energy trying to get vengeance have precious little remaining for constructive pursuits — but it’s also, in this case, appropriate. The injustices the Israelis have inflicted on you, in the context of your people’s assaults on them, are paltry compared to the injustices inflicted upon you by your own people. Why can you forgive your own people for betraying you, but not the Jews for defending themselves against the vicious assaults of the same people who betrayed you?
As for the irony of Palestinians living with the consequences of the past every day, I note first that, among the sufferings of the Palestinians you fail to mention the worst, most scandalous suffering inflicted on the Palestinians. You only mention their life among their Arab brethren in other lands as “exile,” with no mention of the appalling — indeed apartheid — conditions imposed upon them by the Arabs to whom they fled.
Lebanon and Egypt did not permit them to become citizens, kept them in (concentraction) camps, limited their ability to get jobs, travel, etc. When the Palestinians tried to get out, or protest, or establish their own self-administered areas, the Egyptians machine-gunned them down, and the Jordanians massacred — according to Palestinian sources — over 10,o00 Palestinian men, women, and children in one (Black September) month in 1970. That’s more than the Israelis had killed in the previous three decades of war with the Palestinians.
As for the Arabs who are an “oppressed minority in Israel” — they have more rights than Arabs in any land ruled by Arabs — a higher standard of living, education, opportunity, freedom, political participation and ability to dissent. Israel treats its Arabs notably better than Arab countries treat their own people, much less how they treat their Palestinian refugees. And at the bottom of that Arab hierarchy of oppression and degradation, are the few Jews who have not fled.
Now you may scoff at such an assertion, and (again with the eager consent of your “progressive” “friends” including self-critical Jews) dismiss such claims as pitiful excuses for not living up to the demands of a modern civil society dedicated to equal rights for all citizens. But however many points you may score in debate, such rhetorical moves will not alter the awful reality that no Arab nation has come anywhere near the demands of a civil society, no Arab commoner living in an Arab country has anything remotely resembling the freedom and opportunity Arabs in Western societies do. And for you to condemn Israel for not treating their Arabs as “equal” when the Arabs treat their own Arabs much worse is a good example of what I call demopathy.
But none of that figures in your “memory” of your people’s suffering. With such selective memory, you make yourself vulnerable to a fantasy: “if we get rid of Israel, we will solve our problems.”
Just look around you at the misery of Arab commoners all over the Middle East, and you’ll begin to have an idea of how much the suffering of Arab people has far less to do with Israelis, than it does with Arab elites.
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.
Excuse me for being blunt, but the systematic extermination of 6 million people by a nation consumed with the most vicious and merciless paranoia the world has ever seen, does not have the remotest resemblance to what happened to the Palestinians, whose population has continued to grow every year the Zionists have been around.
I know that this is a fashionable comparison. I know that you get enormous mileage in the ideological sweepstakes by invoking this comparison, by presenting yoruself to the world as the “new Jews” and the Israelis as the “new Nazis.” So it’s obviously not going to be easy to suggest that, for your own sake, you try not remembering the past by packaging it in so inaccurate — indeed morally revolting — a comparison. It bathes you in a sense of self-pity and righeous indignation that paralyzes your ability to live, and the outsiders who encourage you to do so by parroting your claims — for reasons of their own — do you no favors.
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.
Let’s again be honest. The checkpoints were neither as numerous nor as onerous before the Palestinians embarked on their insane Oslo War of 2000, with its suicide terrorism. As for those poor Palestinian children, they’re going to schools that make Nazi curriculum seem multi-cultural. They are taught religious hatred, violent vengeance, genocide by abusive adults who would happily see them die for the cause of Arab and Muslim honor.
To present the Israeli “occupation” as independent of innocent, rather than a response to depraved, Palestinian behavior in a paragraph aimed at undermining the “rationalization” that Israel’s takeover of Palestinian lands is defensive is dishonest. It can only succeed with the uninformed reader. It’s like arguing that both 1948 and 1967 were examples of Israeli aggression rather than of stupid Arab aggression that backfired.
Again, you can get away with it, because you are pitching to an audience of well-intentioned useful fools and naive ignoramuses. But is this the right way to remember the past — as dishonest and self-justifying propaganda? Will your leadership ever begin to make choices that benefit rather than sacrifice your people if they can always scream: “The Zionists made me behave so viciously and stupidly!”?
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.
Don’t be absurd. The world is constantly challenging the Israelis. The World Court decided against Israel on the matter of the Security barrier/Apartheid wall, precisely on these grounds. The media and the NGOs constantly worry about Palestinian rights. During the intifada, editorialists waxed indignant over the notion that more Palestinians died than Israelis in a war the Palestinians started and pursued with a vengeance, pushing their children to the forefront as cannon fodder. So why are you saying these things? Because you believe them? Or because it fits into the Palestinian victimization narrative to which you and so many Palestinians are so profoundly attached, regardless of its accuracy?
And the notion that a Palestinian government will address the questions of property, education (not indoctrination), health care, the chance to make a living, and security when they have the opportunity has been disproven repeatedly. Remember the Sewage Tsunami on Hamas’ watch.
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.
More of the same. Too few people question Palestinian claims to the legitimacy of their “rights,” which, by their very irredentism, their very zero-sum insistance on destroying Jewish rights, resemble the annihilationist policies of the Nazis far more than they do the legitimate rights of a civil society ready to live at peace with and respect for their neighbors and their own minorities. The very notion — unquestioned as far as I can tell by any Palestinian — that any eventual Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip be free of Jews, Judenrein, underlines the profoundly illegitimate nature of Palestinian claims to their “rights.”
Indeed, no polity resembles the Nazis more today than the Palestinians, not in terms of their power and efficiency — on the contrary — but in terms of their paranoid genocidal ideology, their addiction to blood libels and conspiracy theories like the Protocols, their admiration for Hitler, their pervasive brainwashing of their children with a death cult. Of course, unlike the Germans of the 1920s, who had not been stabbed in the back, the Palestinians have been stabbed in the back — just not by the Jews, but rather by their own people, and by a “progressive left” in the West which, rather than urge you to grow up, has infantilized you and encouraged all the worst scape-goating tendencies and mythomania.
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.”
And what if… the Holocaust need not be “turned into a political asset,” but stands to any fair and compassionate observer as the definitive proof that the Jews need (and deserve) a homeland where they can defend themselves from the waves of anti-Semitism which, rarely missing a generation, continually threaten their existence. Let’s not forget that the leader of the Palestinians at the time — Haj Amin al Husseini — who was a key player in the decision to fight a Jihad against Israel in 1948, was an ally of the Nazis with plans to build concentration camps if the Nazis had defeated Montgomery and Patton in North Africa. Any fair observer would have to agree that the Jews need and deserve a sovereign state to protect their rights to freedom and to survival in an environment where their Arab neighbors represent one of the major threats.
With the Palestinians as the leading neo-Nazis of the world today, openly proclaiming (and as far as they can acting upon) their desire to commit genocide, nothing illustrates the legitimacy of this argument better than the current situation. If anyone is trying to illegitimately trying to “turn the Holocaust into a political asset,” it’s the Palestinians (as you, in a mild form attempt here).
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.
Well, yes and no. It is true that (most) often, in history, those with power have tried to determine who remembers and who forgets… as in “History is the propaganda of the victors.” On the other hand, one of the major dimensions of modern history — which among others gives us science and technology — is the recognition that the truth, even (especially) when it hurts, will set you free. As a result, modern history has all kinds of techniques for sifting fact from fiction (including forgery), honest narratives from myth-making, and detecting the multiple narratives (points of view) rather than reducing everything to the self-congratulatory tale of the victor (or self-pitying and self-justifying tale of the vanquished). The very success of modern civil society to grow, to mature, to acknowledge the validity of other cultures, religions and ethnicities, comes from this self-critical capacity to step out of the narcissistic ego-centrism so characteristic of most earlier civilizations. You Palestinians systematically refuse any self-criticism and use Israeli self-criticism to attack the enemy you demonize.
Modern historiography, particularly of the “radical” variety is dedicated to accurate and fair-minded historiography, to telling the story of the populace, the underdogs, the losers, the oppressed. And sometimes they go overboard, making “loser” a privileged category. All losers tell the truth; all winners lie.
Palestinians — and here I include you on the basis of this essay — are the undeserving beneficiary of this excessive generosity. Because you lost, the “progressives” privilege your narrative, assume you must be right, and the Israeli victors must be wrong. But, no. Losers often lie to themselves as much if not more than the winners, telling themselves, for example, comforting tales about how they were unjustly screwed by mean bastards, when they are just failed mean bastards. Thus they need not face the unpleasant details of the past. I wish the Palestinian people did not have the leaders they have, or the suffering that those leaders inflict on them with their zero-sum choices and the demonizing and scape-goating mythology they feed them when those choices fail.
And to be blunt, that designates you as one of the Palestinian leaders who repeatedly betray their own people in order to soothe their narcissistic injury.
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.
Now I couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of everything I’ve been trying to say so far, than this concluding whopper. Not to impugn the honesty of your father — maybe you should watch the movie Big Fish — but either he lived in a small and remarkable community with virtually no contact with the outside, or his memory has become subservient to his desires. Jerusalem was nothing like he told you about. Jews, Christians, and Muslims did not live in peace and mutual respect. On the contrary, Muslims were on the top of a hierarchy of power and ethnicity that made everyone the subject of someone else. And at the bottom of the heap, were the Jews, the majority of the population who could not, nonetheless, pray at the Western Wall, their most sacred site.
Now here we’re dealing with relatively clear and observable data.
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.
This article opens with a bold italic line: The Past is a Blueprint for the Future. It sums up the problem perfectly: an imperfectly (dishonestly, self-indulgently, fantastically) remembered past is a blueprint for a catastrophic future. That’s precisely what the Palestinians face whether or not they have Israeli neighbors. Indeed the only thing the destruction of Israel will bring (after the initial gratification of the urge to vengeance) will be the loss of the scape-goat on whom to blame their misery.
The essay embodies everything that is problematic with the Palestinians’ demopathic discourse, which has become so pervasive that it’s not even clear that Bisharat is a demopath rather than a dupe of the so-oft repeated and affirmed “victim narrative,” nor that the editors of Counterpunch are dupes rather than demopaths dishonestly pushing their revolutionary agenda.
There are many narratives and we need to listen to them all. But not all narratives are equally honest or accurate. No one, not the listener nor the reciter of a dishonest narrative, does anyone a favor by affirming them.