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Opinion
A Debate
on the Above article – 2 Dear Mr Gaurang Bhatt/Mr Rajender Krishan, Thank you for forwarding the article by Robert Fisk to me. This article reminds me of Pierre Vidal Naquet’s book Assassins of Memory on website www.anti-rev.org, which I read recently. Naquet argues at length to show how Germans couched the entire Holocaust in semantics, denying that any mass extermination of Jewish people ever took place. Naquet and other French writers mentioned on the website through their ‘scholarly’ work attempt to save the ‘memory of the Holocaust’ from earlier ‘obfuscation’ and recent questionings by ‘revisionist’, who want to open a ‘fresh’ chapter on what really happened at the concentration camps (I must add a note of caution that some border on anti-semitism). I am amazed at the ferocity with which this particular Jewish memory is defended/protected by the (Jewish) writers on this website and at other places, epitomized in the symbols and narratives employed by the State of Israel, and the ease with which Palestinian narratives and symbols are sought to be annihilated by Jews/Israelis. For instance, in total derogation of al-naqba (Palestinian dispersal and devastation in 1948), there is an Israeli documentary movie called “Reunification of Jerusalem” (which I saw on the eve of Israeli Independence Day, Hatzmauth, celebrations in Jerusalem). It is about the Six-Day War of 1967 in which the Israelis seized and occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The note of ‘fated-ness’ of the reunification of the ‘Land of Israel’ and ‘breast-beating’ triumphalism in the documentary was nauseating, to say the least. Jerusalem was united, we were told. The ease with which the entire narrative of the movie left out the Arabs stood out starkly. I wonder which ‘unification’ the Israelis were driving at? If it were the people, the East Jerusalemites, the Arabs rejected the whole occupation in various ways and given the restriction imposed on Arabs on travelling to Jewish West Jerusalem, the unification narrative was but a tool to subjugate the Palestinians. More from my own experiences in Israel The house in Ein Karem, where my friends and I had dinner on the New Year’s Eve in 2002 belonged to an Arab family, who was forced to abandon it in 1948. It was occupied by a Jewish family, who later sold it to a Jew of Indian origin. The property is worth millions at the current market rate. In a minor altercation, which my friend, Ahmed, an Israeli Palestinian, got into with an Israeli security guard is instructive how the memory of the pre-1948 Palestine lives in the mid and hearts of the Palestinians despite attempts to destroy it. Ahmad was asked by the Hebrew University student security personnel to remove his car parked near the gate that led to the dorm complex (I must say that the car was neither obstructing traffic nor people; possible the security guard’s fear was whipped up by the fact that it belonged to an Arab and during that time intifada was at its height). An infuriated Ahmad yelled, “Ha aretz le mishpakha sheli. Ataa lo yodaat? (This land belonged to my family, don’t you know?) My friend Miriam always wore a chador to the university. She told me that she wanted to assert her Arab identity. While Israel seeks to preserve itself by narratives, counter-narratives, myths, and symbols, it forcefully denies the same for another national group, namely the Palestinians. From Golda Meir’s (in) famous statement “Who are the Palestinians … they do not exist,” through Begin’s, “Palestinians are two-legged beasts,” to Netanyahu’s ‘Hashbarah’ (propaganda) industry calling Jordan Palestine and seeking population transfer – the denial of Palestinian identity and their dehumanization continues unabated. And no wonder a colony becomes a benign neighborhood, occupation becomes merely (legal) dispute over land and an apartheid wall becomes a measly fence. The process of distortion of history and inversion of lives and continues unabated…!! January 10, 2006 3.11 pm The above is a reply to the 'debate' initiated by Mr. Gaurang Bhatt
The Week of January 8, 2006
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