Abstract
Visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum in Poland
Credit: William Manning / Alamy
Palestinian academic
I was still abroad in Auschwitz when my secretary emailed me, saying students on campus where I worked were demonstrating against me and had stormed my office to deliver a letter threatening my life. Upon my return, the university president informed me my life was in danger and said he would provide security for me on campus, but not outside the university. My car was torched. Had I stayed in Palestine, I have no doubt I would have been physically hurt or assassinated. Even months later, after I moved to Washington DC, the threats to my family continued.
Before embarking on the trip, in March 2014, the question uppermost in my mind was: why should I take the risk of being labelled a traitor? Meanwhile, the students were wondering: why should we learn about the Holocaust when Israel’s government has made it unlawful to teach about the Nakba in its schools? To me, the answer was simple: to do the right thing.
The two terms, the Holocaust (Shoah) and the Nakba (al Karitha), share two things. The first is that they both mean catastrophe and the second is they are both taboos: the Holocaust in Palestinian society and the Nakba in Israeli society.
Nakba is the term used to describe the loss of nation, state and national identity, the displacement of more than 800,000 refugees and the demolition of hundreds of villages and residential neighbourhoods, during and before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1947-48. In Israel, the same period is celebrated as their war of independence.
Among Palestinians, the dominant narrative blames the Holocaust for the 1948 Nakba. There is a tendency among Palestinians to perceive the Holocaust as Zionist propaganda, and so deny it happened and exclude it from the educational curriculum. However, there are no legal restrictions imposed on learning about or teaching the Holocaust, or even about having a memorial celebration on its anniversary as Israelis do.
On the other hand, the Nakba is excluded from the curriculum in Israeli institutions. The so-called “Nakba law”, officially the Budget Principles Law (Amendment 39): Reducing Budgetary Support for Activities Contrary to the Principles of the State, passed by the Israeli Knesset in March 2011, denies funding to any organisation, institution or municipality that commemorates the founding of the Israeli state as a day of mourning. The teaching of the Nakba was deleted from all educational textbooks. The aim was to intimidate and forbid Israelis or Arab-Israelis to study, remember or express empathy with the Nakba.
I was working at Al-Quds University, a Palestinian university with campuses in Beit Hanina and Abu Dis in Jerusalem, when I organised the six-day study trip to Poland, with visits to the Jewish ghettos in Krakow and the concentration camps at nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau. The project was arranged with three other universities, one German and two Israeli, and the project also arranged for 30 Israeli students to meet those Palestinians living in the Duheisheh Refugee camp in Bethlehem since 1948. The project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with the aim of learning about how suffering shaped the historical consciousness of both sides.
When the news of the trip to the concentration camps was published in the press, there was an instant backlash from the Palestinian community. First, two Palestinian universities issued statements distancing themselves from the trip, asserting they did not sponsor it and had no knowledge of it. Then, the trip’s participants were subject to scathing attacks via social media. “I don’t understand how the students accept normalization with Israel,” wrote one Palestinian journalist on his Facebook page. He concluded: “This professor is the king of kings of normalization.”
There were accusations of trying to change the Palestinians’ mentality, “by brainwashing generations and teaching them big lies and fabrications such as the Holocaust and the suffering of Jews so that they would accept the theft of their Land”, as one person commented on Facebook. A Palestinian journalist called for academics to stop the “pilgrimage” to Nazi death camps, writing: “I felt pain over the visit by Palestinian university students to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yes, we are human beings who reject genocide. But our humanity rejects any attempt to bypass the suffering of our people, who are being slaughtered every day at the hands of occupiers. Wouldn’t it have been better had our professor and students visited Yarmouk refugee camp [in Syria] or refugee camps in Lebanon to see the real suffering?”
My response to these tirades, published on my page on Facebook, read: “My duty as a teacher is to teach – to open new horizons for my students, to guide them out of the cave of misperceptions and see the facts, to break walls of silence, to demolish fences of taboos. In doing so, I adhere to the verse in the Holy Quran, which says: ‘And say My Lord increase my knowledge.’ I will not budge by those who attack me. I will not hide, I will not deny. I will not be silent. I will not remain a bystander, even if the victims of the suffering I show empathy for are my occupiers. I do not regret for one second what I did and I would do it again.”
I resigned from my posts at Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University, a month after the trip, because I felt what I did was an integral part of my career as a teacher and researcher. One of my students asked me afterwards what were the most painful repercussions of the trip: “losing your academic career or being labelled as ‘traitor’ to the Palestinian cause?” My response was: “Neither. The most painful were that not one single Palestinian professor stood by me, publicly declaring that this was education, freedom of expression and academic freedom.” On the contrary, there were teachers who attacked me viciously, claiming I forced the students to participate in the trip and that students did not know where they were going. The university Employees and Teachers’ Syndicate expelled me from their union, even though I was not a member.
In teaching the Holocaust to Palestinians, one needs to try to separate the subject of the Holocaust from the Nakba and from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in order not to get dragged into discussing the question of how much Jews know about the Nakba or the pains of life under the ongoing Israeli occupation.
The Holocaust is the tragedy of the Jewish people, but it is also the tragedy of humanity. It is not a Jewish concern only, but a human concern. Palestinians do not want to hear the truth about the Holocaust, because they do not want their Holocaust narrative destroyed. Similarly, in outlawing Nakba education, Israelis do not want to hear the truth about the Nakba because they do not want their Nakba narrative destroyed. To break these taboos, Palestinians and Israelis need to become better acquainted with each other’s history, culture and religion.
Linking the Palestinians to the Nazi atrocities or comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is factually wrong, historically inaccurate, and intellectually dishonest. For the Nazis and Jews, negotiations and reconciliation were not an option, but for Israelis and Palestinians negotiations and reconciliation are the only option. Teaching and learning about the suffering of others does not make one less nationalistic but it makes one more humanistic.
The trip caused a big crack in the wall, opening up a long-needed heated dialogue about why Palestinians should not learn about the Holocaust. It is my hope that the day will come, sooner rather than later, when both Israeli and Palestinian students will be learning about the suffering of the other. Feeling empathy with the other would pave the way for moderation, reconciliation, peace and prosperity.
Case Study
Head in the sand
The Palestinian displacement and the Israeli army are off limits to criticism in Israel.
Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s flagship television satire, included a startling skit in its independence day special this year.
Regular characters were shown transported back to 1948, the year Israel was founded, in a sketch about the destruction of a Palestinian village.
“Do I have to leave my home?” asks an Arab woman.
A Jewish soldier reassures her that she can come back tomorrow, before adding in a slapstick aside that “there won’t be anything here left for her to come back to”.
The satire introduced humour into one of the most exquisitely sensitive issues surrounding the founding of Israel, whether the nascent Zionist state had an organised policy of expulsion.
The overwhelming Jewish Israeli narrative is that some 800,000 Arab residents simply ran away, incited to do so by their leaders who vowed they would “push the Jews into the sea”.
The Nakba (catastrophe), the creation of Israel and the resulting Palestinian displacement, remains a tough topic for the Israeli media to tackle, even though the Israeli media is markedly free across its whole spectrum.
As in any other democracy, it’s self-censorship that limits the discussion of taboo subjects, and some things remain too delicate for the country’s media to approach head-on.
Chief among these is any overly severe criticism of the Israeli Defence Forces. An attack on the army is seen as an attack on the nation’s children, so IDF action is overwhelmingly described as responsive rather than aggressive. Brutal behaviour is generally explained as the responsibility of rogue elements.
When this consensus is broken, the response can be harsh. Haaretz newspaper journalist Gideon Levy received death threats after writing an article at the height of the 2014 Operation Protective Edge accusing Israeli air force pilots bombing Gaza of “the most despicable deeds”.
There are a handful of other subjects deemed threatening to the Zionist narrative. Positive discussion of a one-state solution, at least from a secular left-wing perspective rather than a religious settler perspective, is very rare. Any debate about the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is similarly seen as outside the bounds of common decency.
Recent bouts of legislation indicate that society and the media may be under some pressure to define more rigidly the limits of acceptable discourse. In 2011, Israel passed a number of laws that targeted some of the most sensitive topics in Israeli society. The so-called Nakba law required the state to fine or withdraw funding from any state-funded group that commemorated the Nakba on Israeli independence day. Another law exposed Israeli individuals and groups to civil lawsuits if they advocated an economic, cultural or academic boycott of Israel or the West Bank. In 2013, a right-wing Israeli lawmaker proposed a bill that would allow a person or group to be sued for libelling the IDF.
Societies usually self-regulate their own most stringent taboos. It seems that in Israel, the state is now stepping in.