Palestine Think Tank

WRITTEN BY BENNY ZIFFER for Haaretz Hebrew Edition

On Sunday, one of my students (I am a lecturer in a course from four to six at Tel Aviv University) approached me after the class and told me that she was the producer of an alternative Memorial evening, which also takes into account cruelty to Palestinians, that would take place on the eve of Memorial Day at the Tmuna theatre. And they would be very honoured if I went. I went.It was filled to capacity with Tel Aviv leftists. There was a handful of Palestinians, activists from the Combatants for Peace organization. There was just a handful of them because the Occupied Territories are under closure and the others were not permitted to come. One of the female Palestinian activists from Combatants for Peace was filmed beside her house in Tul Karem and the film was shown in the Tmuna theatre. The evening had all the aromas of an evening of latte-sipping Sheinkin Street “beautiful souls”. Beside me sat a group of scary and aggressive masculine women of the type spoofed on the show “Eretz Nehderet”. But at the same moment I felt that I should not be finicky, as everyone in this camp of people must be in agreement at least to do this one simple thing, that is to share with our Palestinian neighbours the right to feel the pain of bereavement and loss.That is no small matter, because we have been taught from a tender age that for Arabs, life is not valued as much as it is by Jews. That lie was forcefully drilled into our heads in order to convince us, the Jews, that to kill Arabs is maybe not nice but on the other hand it is also not all that dreadful either. Because, after all, there are a whole lot of Arabs all of whom look alike, so what’s the difference if one or two or ten or a hundred of them get killed. In order to be cured of this lie we need a lot more than one evening a year. We need to travel to the Occupied Territories and meet Palestinian bereft parents, we need to knock down the walls that we have built in our minds.

Before I went to that event I bought three bouquets of flowers for the regular Memorial Day ceremony that we participate in every year in the military cemetery in Kfar Warburg. My uncle Binyamin, a victim of the War of Independence, is buried there, and beside him, in the civilian section, are buried my grandfather and grandmother Vitaly and Becky. One thing I am certain of is that if my uncle were alive he would surely participate in the alternative memorial ceremony, because he was what is called a “leftist” - even a communist. And after he died, I never, ever heard at home a word of hatred for Arabs spoken by my grandparents or my parents. I received a humanitarian education at home, but school and the street and the institutions of the State ruined it with outrageous lies that I have been trying to slough off ever since.

I am appalled at the fact that the main Memorial Day ceremony was held last night at the Western Wall plaza. That in itself is the essence of falsehood. The Old City of Jerusalem is basically an Arab city, and to use it as an empty setting for the stories of Jewish bereavement is an act of spiritual dispossession. Besides, there is something disgusting about mixing the losses of Israel’s wars with the Shekhinah or whatever they call it and to compel God, as it were, to participate in the ceremony by setting it up right in His face, right in front of the Western Wall. How can we continue to live in such blindness, my friends? No state in the world recognizes our right to have Jerusalem as our capital, and they certainly do not recognize the Old City as a legitimate place to be converted into a Cinecittà set, with the Dome of the Rock etc., for a movie starring Shimon Peres.

How is it possible to hold such an emotional ceremony in a place that symbolizes the most boorish trampling underfoot of the feelings of others. Indeed in the place in which the ceremony was held, in front of the Western Wall, there once was the Mughrabi Quarter, which was knocked down and erased, in order to create that ugly expanse of paving-stones. And after all, what could be more anti-Jewish than that whole Wall Plaza, that looks like an unhealed wound in the middle of the Old City of Jerusalem.

In my ideal world I would be happy if a great leadership would emerge that would restore Tel Aviv to its status as the true capital city of the State of Israel. It would be the first step towards opening our eyes after sixty years of blind disregard of the fact that no state in the world recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. If Tel Aviv were the capital of Israel, that alone would change the character of the Memorial Day ceremonies. They would shed their aggressive nature and go back to being humane events.

But maybe I’m dreaming in Technicolor. My ideas are the inheritance of a marginal minority within the nation. Most of this nation is a bunch of ignorant fanatics, led by the nose by cynical leaders who use the Memorial Day ceremonies to reinforce their deeply-rooted lies to the effect that “there is no choice” and we have to continue to sacrifice more children to the Moloch of the State. It does not look to me like the day will come when anybody in this nation will sober up on a sufficiently massive scale to collectively say: “Enough!”

It is much easier to block all the senses and to barricade oneself within fake ideas, such as: it is our fate to fight a war for our existence, and that those who were killed died of necessity. It is not true. Those who were killed did not die of necessity because wars are not a necessary thing, and to educate this nation that in principle, death is a necessary thing so that we might live, is inhumane in itself. It converts human life into a relative and not an absolute value. It makes Israel a sick country, the residents of which have been taught from their earliest childhoods that they are guilty due to the very fact that they are alive. And that is what Memorial Day nurtures on a national scale: that every Israeli should feel guilty. Nothing is easier than to break peoples’ spirit by constantly telling them that they are guilty.

What I felt at the alternative Memorial Day ceremony of the Combatants for Peace at the Tmuna theatre last night is that it was an attempt to break away from those games of imposing burdens of guilt on people, towards psychologically healthier horizons. To stop the death-cult and to begin to think about life and about how to prevent death in the future. I am convinced, by the way, that my uncle Binyamin, if he could have spoken from his grave, would not object if we were to put a stop to this whole farce called Memorial Day and begin to concern ourselves less with sterile memory and more with opening our hearts.

You young naïve soldiers in the wings, who stand at attention when Shimon Peres passes: wake up. Just as decades ago, your grandfather arose and thought revolutionary thoughts about the need to change reality and made his thoughts reality and founded a Jewish state in order to solve the Jewish problem that existed then, you too, young people, must now rescue our nation from this state that has turned into something dangerous, superfluous, loathsome and fatuous.

Grab big hammers and whack away at it, open holes in it so fresh air can come in, so the shouting voices of the neighbours can be heard. The great Zionist project today must be the weakening of this state, not its strengthening. Only a weak Israel will put us back on the right track and remind us to think again about just what it is we are doing here. And so, young people: abandon the cult of power, because power is death and the causing of death. And Israel was not created in order to cause death. Be weaklings, be fairies, be anything but don’t be heroes of the type that Israel wants you to be.

Haaretz
7 May 2008

Translated by Mark Marshall and published in Kibush, Occupation Magazine

Original Hebrew: http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/981606.html