by Jo Roberts
I discussed Palestinian negation of the Shoah with Marzuq Halabi, a Palestinian-Israeli lawyer and journalist, in a quiet, shadowy Haifa café.[18] A writer for Al Hayat, a leading pan-Arab daily newspaper, Marzuq is also involved with Adalah (“Justice”), the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel. He has little patience for Holocaust denial, which he believes obscures the deeper truth of Israel’s conflictive engagement with the Palestinians.
Few Palestinian writers or intellectuals deal with the Holocaust from a humanistic perspective. Palestinians either refuse to deal with it, or begin to question the numbers. To have as our narrative that we are victims of the victims of the Holocaust — surely that is stronger than asking questions about whether it was six million, or five million, or four million. That’s stupid.
Because of this experience, Jews have the fear of being destroyed, all the time, even though they have the strongest state in the Middle East. It’s not an ordinary fear, it’s the fear of being destroyed, because they’ve had the experience of the Holocaust.
And if you are afraid, and you have power, then you can be very violent, as with the Israeli occupation.
This fear that Jews have all the time closes them to thinking about our citizenship. They see us as an enemy, as someone who comes to change their status. They see themselves as always victims, so they must be stronger than the Palestinians, and the situation must always be under their control for them to be safe.
Ultimately, a nation’s collective sense of itself is formed by myriad individual experiences, the complex intertwinings of the personal and the political. I knew this, but only in the abstract — it became much more real for me when I interviewed Daphne Banai.[19] Sixty years old, Daphne is a businesswoman and grandmother. She’s also a peace activist: as a member of Machsom [Checkpoint] Watch, she drives into the West Bank to monitor army behaviour at the checkpoints.¶¶
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Daphne was ardently Zionist in her youth, but her political perspective shifted as the lives and struggles of Palestinian Israelis, barely visible to her at first, began to come into clearer focus. Our conversation illuminated how social memory shapes the present — how fear of the outsider can twist into violence, or transform into coexistence.
On the deck of her home in the Carmel Mountains, Daphne talked about how the Holocaust had shaped her family, and her childhood:
My family comes from Berlin, from Germany, and my close family got through the Holocaust, but with a lot of difficulties. My mother ran away when she was thirteen, the Nazis were coming for her. She didn’t know whether her parents and sisters were alive. They were hiding in Italy. She had to flee on her own, and she got to Israel — it was very traumatic for her. She turned out afterwards to be a very hard person, you know? somebody who had to survive at the age of thirteen. She had to cross the border between Germany and Switzerland as a child on her own, because the man who was supposed to cross her over betrayed them, and she managed to run away. All my wider family was killed — my grandmother had thirteen brothers and sisters, and only two survived.
So, I was very, very taken as a child by the Holocaust stories. When the Eichmann Trial was on, I had a little transistor, and during that time I didn’t learn, I was sitting in class with an earphone in my ear, and I heard all the testimonies. I really lived the Holocaust in my imagination as a child, and felt it very, very strongly.
But at home, we never talked about it. My parents didn’t, and it seemed normal, though they talked freely about other problems. It was very hard for people to talk about it — they were seen as weak, as not having resisted. Our family had a lot of problems; I’d say there was a level of paranoia. Certainly my parents were over-protective. I’ve heard exactly the same thing from children of the Nakba generation.
Daphne’s home is in the artists’ colony of Ein Hod, on the outskirts of the village. The view from where we sit is beautiful, stretching down a steep green valley to the sea. The history of the Nakba is a little more raw here — the original occupants of Ein Hod were Arabs, who left during the fighting in 1948. One extended family remained nearby, in the shepherds’ huts on an adjacent hilltop, and others eventually returned to join them. Now a village of some 250 people, Ayn Hawd (the Palestinian-Israeli village is known by its original Arabic name) is still there. For decades it was unrecognized by the Israeli government, and the villagers had to survive without basic utilities. Ayn Hawd was finally hooked up to the electric grid in 2007.
When I asked Daphne what she’d heard about the Nakba as a child, her reflections opened up the dynamic interplay between the Palestinian catastrophe and the Holocaust in contemporary Israel.
I didn’t hear about the Nakba at all. What I was brought up with was that we Jews came to Israel to work the land and make it fertile, and we wanted to live in peace with the Arabs. The Arabs didn’t accept us, and in 1948 they declared war, with all the Arab states, and their leaders told them to flee Israel, and they fled. I grew up in a very right-wing family of Holocaust survivors, and it was more or less the same story that I heard in school and at home.
I had an uncle, a religious Jew who lived in London, who refused to come to Israel because of Zionism and because of what happened there. He was an outcast in the family and we had no contact with him all that time. I don’t know why, my parents decided to take me to meet him when I was sixteen. And we had dinner, and he told me that, you know, what I learned at school is not as it seems. He told me the story of Deir Yassin [in 1948] and the massacre of Kfar Kassem [in 1956], and I got so mad at him; I didn’t believe him, and I got so upset that I asked to go home, and I never saw him again. I never thought that maybe there was a seed of truth in what he said.
Daphne’s parents moved back to Europe when she was a teenager. She chose to return to Israel, alone, at the age of eighteen so that she could still do her national service in the army. “That was right after the ’67 war. I was very Zionist, very. My biggest wish was to die for my country. That’s how we grew up.” But gradually, she began to have doubts.
I remember one thing that affected me terribly. As a child, I lived near the beach, you know where the Hilton is in Tel Aviv? I lived nearby, and it was a Muslim cemetery. And when they built the Hilton, that was when I was in my early twenties, I remember that it took me terribly that no one said anything about the fact that this hotel is built in a Muslim cemetery, in a graveyard.
That cemetery was part of the landscape of Daphne’s childhood. Raised as she was in a culture of memory, its silent destruction shocked her into asking why the dead beneath those familiar gravestones were less worthy of remembrance than others.
That was one of the things that I found it very difficult to understand: how we, as Jews who, you know, protecting all our holy places and every grave and every stone that was carved two thousand years ago, have this disregard for other people’s religion.
This dissonance led her to a deeper questioning.
What struck me most was … I never spoke to an Arab. I didn’t know any Arabs. I didn’t know what they feel, what their life is like, their reality, their emotions. I mean, I saw people, you know, building houses and doing all our dirty work, but I wanted to meet somebody on a personal, on a social basis, and no one in my family, in my immediate or even wider circle — my neighbours, my acquaintances, my friends — no one knew Arabs. And I started feeling very, very bad — you know, you live in a country, 20 percent of the population is Palestinian, and we have no contact whatsoever with them.
She kept asking around until one day, at a parents’ meeting, she heard of what she was looking for: a group of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis who met socially, once a month, to talk. The group, no longer in existence, was called Bridge to Peace.
And that’s when everything started changing, because I started hearing completely different narratives than the ones I grew up on. I started very gradually realizing that I understand nothing about what it’s like to be a Palestinian in Israel. And I be
came very, very close friends with a woman called Taghrid. I think it’s twenty-five years that we’re friends, and she and her family and my family. And through her eyes and others, my eyes opened.
I’ll give you an example. I used to have a party on Independence Day, and when we became closer friends, I invited Taghrid and her family to the Independence party, and there was a silence, and she said, “You know, we don’t celebrate Independence. It’s not a happy day for us.” Especially since they themselves are refugees. Their village was destroyed: they live in Tira, but originally they were from Miske. I was really surprised. I thought all Arabs are very happy on Independence Day. And since then, I don’t have a party on Independence Day, but I go to the commemoration of the Nakba in her village.
For Daphne, acknowledging that the Nakba is part of the common history of all Israelis is a fundamental aspect of working towards peaceful coexistence. Living where she does, that history and its consequences are more immediate. Ein Hod and Ayn Hawd are only a mile apart but the villagers have little contact. “There’s a terrible fear that if people from Ayn Hawd will come here and see their houses, they will come knocking on doors and say, ‘Get out of here.’ It’s fear mixed with guilt feelings.” As in other cultures based on settlement, such as the United States and Canada, that aspect of local history is not often discussed in Ein Hod.
We had an argument here in Ein Hod — some people were very upset about Ayn Hawd’s website. They have a project now of planning their village, and when you go into the site, it’s wonderful, because it’s a view into the future: “We’re going to build our village; we’re going to make the best of what we have.” And someone from Ein Hod started reading, and she found a sentence that said that the artists of Ein Hod fancied the Palestinian houses of the old village of Ayn Hawd and are living in them. And there was a whole uproar about it. You know, she started saying, “Why do those people of Ayn Hawd live in the past? Why don’t they leave the past alone and move on?” This coming from a Jew here in Israel, where we chew and chew and chew on the Holocaust…. To say that they are living in the past?
So Daphne wrote an open letter to her neighbour and to the people of Ein Hod, telling them about her own experience of political remembrance in Germany.
My family went back to Germany: one of my aunts lives in Düsseldorf, another in Baden-Baden, and my parents lived for the last twenty years of their lives in Frankfurt.
Why did they go back? I asked, curious, side-tracking her for a moment.
Well, each had their story, but my aunts went back because it was an economically difficult time in Israel, they were unemployed, and they were looking for a job. But mainly because they didn’t learn Hebrew — their language was German, we spoke German at home. They felt German was their culture and they couldn’t get along with the Levantine rudeness and roughness and all that. They had great difficulty adjusting to Israel, so they went back.
Were they afraid?
Yes. I remember when I was sixteen, I went to visit my aunt in Düsseldorf, and she had a little coffee house, and I came in and opened the door and I said, “Shalom!” and she got so pale. And she came to me and she said, “Don’t shalom! Nobody knows we’re Jews.” If you live in such fear, how can you live that way? They still do.***
But anyway, my parents lived in Germany. And I came to visit them, and I found it very, very hard to be there. I was thinking constantly about the Holocaust, about how life in Germany is so normal; everything is so okay, and that was only one generation after what has happened. And I found it very difficult, I said to my parents, “I’m not going to come and visit you. It’s not a boycott or something. I just feel bad.” So when my parents lived in Germany, I used to meet them in London.
And my mother wanted me very much to go with her to Berlin. She wanted to show me where she grew up, and I always found excuses not to go. I just didn’t want to go to Germany. And I’m very sorry about it because now she’s dead.
About two years ago I decided to go to Berlin, and the thing that amazed me was how much the Holocaust is out there in the open, how it is acknowledged. With the Holocaust memorial just next to the Brandenburg Gate, which is the most important place in Germany, with the marking of the laws that Hitler brought out, and with the little plates showing “Here lived this and that family.” And after that, I could enjoy Berlin. Once my pain was acknowledged, I could see the Germany that is beyond it.
And that’s why I say that, you know, people try not to talk about the Nakba because they say it will only make the Palestinians remember more and talk about it more. That’s bullshit. They remember. They talk about it. It’s there. To them, in terms of remembering, it doesn’t matter whether we remember or not. But for our relationship, if we won’t acknowledge what happened to them and ask for their forgiveness and try and work to reconcile the injustice and the terrible tragedy that has happened to them, there will never be an understanding between us, like there wasn’t between me and Germany.
And this, really, is the heart of the matter. Acknowledging — and repenting — the suffering inflicted on another is a precondition to a genuine peace. I asked Daphne what she thought that reconciliation might look like.
I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far. It’s so unreal that I think the first stage has to be just to listen — to listen openly, not defensively. But we don’t talk at all, so where are we going to start talking about their hardship? Israelis don’t talk with Palestinians. There is no contact. The only contact is in riots.
Our conversation took place during four days of race riots in the mixed city of Acco (or Acre) — for Daphne, another sign that the divide between Israel’s Jewish majority and Palestinian minority is widening. While the Nakba is increasingly visible for the Jewish-Israeli Left, at the same time the idea of “transfer,” a sanitized way of referring to the removal of Palestinian-Israeli citizens outside the borders of the state, is now openly discussed within mainstream Jewish-Israeli public discourse.
Fifteen years ago, very few of the radical Left ever mentioned the Nakba. More and more parts of the moderate Left today acknowledge the Nakba, are willing to hear about and discuss it. On the other hand, it’s become more and more legitimate to say, “Let’s find a way to get parts of the Israeli population out of Israel”: in other words, transfer. Like the idea of the government Minister, Lieberman, who says, “Let’s take the [Triangle] and move it to the Palestinian Authority and get rid of all the Arabs.” It’s become more legitimate, and more and more people say, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
People who listen to the story of the Nakba feel more for reconciliation. Those who want to transfer are the ones who will not let you tell the story of the Nakba. The mere fact that other people listen to it is already posing a threat to them. But listen, those people are threatened by the demographic demon. They are all the time busy with “How are we going to keep the Jewish majority in Israel: in the Galilee, in Acco, in Jaffa?” Instead of saying, you know, “We won’t be able to keep our majority here.” We bring people from Russia and from Ethiopia,††† but ultimately we are a minority in the Middle East. If we don’t work to assimilate here — not assimilate, because I want to keep my identity, but — to live in harmony with the original inhabitants of the area…
We can’t artificially keep our [numerical] superiority. And we will eventually lose it. So instead of building grounds for living in peace in the area with the people here, we try to keep our position with force. And the more we’re losing the position, the more aggressive we become, because it’s scary. It’s very much like South Africa, except the whites in South Africa knew how to let go at a certain point. And I don’t think that we will know.
I thought about Jewish collective memory of persecution, and Zionism’s vision of a haven state for Jews. To what extent, I asked Daphne, are Israel’s national identity and policy decisions shaped by fear? And how much of that fear is a natural response to Israel’s troubled relations with its neighbour states, and how
much is provoked by the past?
I think a lot of everything that is going on here is shaped both by the past and by a feeling that, you know, if we don’t have a very strong army, the Arabs are going to throw us into the sea, and all that. It’s being manipulated, too, by the government. A fearful nation is an obedient nation, and this fear is being manipulated to extents that are totally irrational. The media and the government are working very hard at making everybody feel that we are in terrible danger of the Arabs who are living here in Israel.
I remember the first time I went to visit Taghrid, I was terrified. Going into an Arab village was going into a battlefield. And my husband made me call immediately when I got there safely, and call before I leave so that he knows that if I don’t arrive within half an hour he’d have to call the police … and that’s just fifteen minutes from my home. And now I go there and we sit till one, two o’clock at night, and I go home alone and there’s nothing.
Or, I’ll give you another example: In the same town where Taghrid lives, I took an Arab course. During the day, we studied Arabic, and after school we went to spend our time with Palestinian families. And it was amazing how people received us. They were so warm when we went out in the evening to get a falafel or something. People didn’t want to take money from us, because they said Jews coming to live with them was such an extraordinary thing. And when I talked to people afterward, they looked at me and said, “Weren’t you afraid they were going to stab you in your back at night?” That’s the feeling in Israel. Most Israelis don’t go into Arab villages in Israel. It’s not rational. But the fear is tremendous.