How does the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow!...
She weeps sore into the night, and her tears are on her cheeks:
among all who loved her she has none to comfort her.
(Book of Lamentations)
Last week, after murdering 1400 people – of whom 400 were children –
after bombing hospitals and mosques, schools, universities and
humanitarian supplies, and tens of thousand of homes, Israel declared a
cease-fire. A shameful parade of European leaders immediately went to
Jerusalem to embrace the mass murderers and to pledge their support for
the continuing siege of Gaza.
The primary purpose of this massacre was to break the spirit of the
Palestinian people until they surrender and accept their fate as lesser
human beings. As former Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon said in 2002, "The
Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of
their consciousness that they are a defeated people." European leaders
support this goal, as did previous U.S. administrations, as do the
ruling elites of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi-Arabia, despite the fury of
their peoples. We wait to see if the freshly inaugurated Obama
Administration will break with sixty long years of attack on the
Palestinian people armed and financed by the U.S. and Europe.
We grieve with the people of Gaza. We see the faces of the children, of
the women and the men; we hear their voices. We also hear the silence
of the leaders of Western countries, intermittently broken by evasive
platitudes. And we are reminded of the time when the world turned a
blind eye while our forebears, our families, were slaughtered.
100,000 Palestinians were made homeless in Gaza this month. Most of
them became refugees in 1948 when they were expelled at gunpoint from
their towns and villages. Now they are homeless again, even in their
land of exile, and at risk of being driven out from Palestine
altogether.
Yet on January 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the leaders of the U.S.
and Europe will be joined in honoring the memory of our dead. Even as
we seek to remember and to honor the immensity of that loss, we
struggle to find words to convey the hypocrisy of these ceremonies, in
which those who are silent today pay homage to the victims of
yesterday’s silence.
The radical Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, who died while fleeing the
Nazis, wrote, "not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is
victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." The Third
Reich was defeated, and yet, "the enemy has not ceased to be
victorious." Racism, mass murder, and genocide continue to be accepted
tools of statecraft. Even our dead are not safe. They have been called
up, disturbed, dredged from their mass graves and forced to testify
against their fellow human beings in pain, to confess a hatred that was
alien to them and to offer themselves up as justification for a new
cycle of suffering in Palestine. Their ghosts have been enlisted to
help displace fellow Jews from Arab homelands, and to bequeath to them that
same alien hatred, conscripting those of us descending from Arab
lands to become enemies of our own memory and past.
The Jewish British MP Gerald Kaufman spoke in anguish while the
massacres in Gaza were taking place: "My grandmother did not die to
provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers
in Gaza." We share and echo that refusal. Let not the memory of Jews
murdered by the Nazi regime serve as cover for the attempted
destruction of the Palestinian people!
Although the guns are relatively silent, this genocidal assault on the
Palestinian people isn’t over. The siege, the lack of food and fresh
water, the disease-threatening broken sewage system, and economic
collapse and humanitarian crisis persist in Gaza with the full support
of the U.S., Europe and the Egyptian government. As the siege of Gaza
continues, so does the slow ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, the home demolitions, the building of the apartheid wall,
the settlement build-up, the economic devastation of the towns and
villages strangled by checkpoints, the assault on Palestinian
neighborhoods in Jaffa, Akka, Lydda, the Galilee and the Negev, the
mass imprisonment of Palestinians (over 11,000), and all the large and
small ways by which Israel is seeking to crush the spirit and erase the
presence of the Palestinian people in their homeland.
Faced with the threat of annihilation in Europe, Jews resisted. From
ghettos to concentration camps and within countries under occupation,
Jews led resistance to the Nazi regime. Today, from the ghetto of Gaza
to the Bantustans of the West Bank and from the neighborhoods of Jaffa
and Akka to cities across the globe, Palestinians resist Israel’s
attempt to destroy them as a people. On January 27th, honoring the
memory of our dead is for us inseparable from honoring more than sixty
years of Palestinian survival and resistance. Only when the Palestinian
people regain their freedom will the dead rest safely. Then we will all
celebrate another victory for life.
(read more...)
