German Memory and the Palestinians
Written by Khaled Kasab Mahameed and A. Dirk Moses
Friday, 12 October 2007 09:44 -
German Memory and the Palestinians
By Khaled Kasab Mahameed and A. Dirk Moses
The controversy about the statements of some German bishops during their recent visit to Israel
and Palestinian territories was remarkable for the absence of Palestinian voices. Like colonial
subjects, Palestinians were spoken about but never consulted about their feelings or
perspective. That may have been because one of the object of the bishops’ visit – the
situation of Palestinians in the West Bank – was marginalized by a seemingly more important
issue: the verbal equation that one of them made between the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II
and the occupied Palestinian city of Ramalah today. It is now well known that the bishop quickly
retracted his statement and apologized profusely in the face of fierce public criticism by the Yad
Vashem Holocaust authority in Israel and the German-Jewish leadership.
No-one should have been surprised if Palestinians welcomed the equation made by the bishop.
They feel crushed by the Holocaust that killed and traumatized the parents and grandparents of
many Israelis over 60 years ago. Everything they endure pales by comparison with the
Holocaust. The temptation for Palestinians is strong, though wrongheaded, to strenuously deny
its existence, to equate it with their own experience, or to otherwise play it down. The result,
paradoxically, is to diminish their own suffering in the eyes of the western public that does not
accept these relativisations of the Holocaust.
Palestinians ignore or belittle the Holocaust at their peril. They need to know what happened
then so they understand why they are in their predicament today. And they need to understand
its status in western consciousness as an ultimate symbol of evil. The excessive Israeli security
measures, the messianic attempt of the Jewish settlers to colonize even more Palestinian land,
and even the very existence of Israel itself are products of the Holocaust trauma, the memory or
which defends or protects these developments both in Israel and the west. Palestinians should
know this.
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German Memory and the Palestinians
Written by Khaled Kasab Mahameed and A. Dirk Moses
Friday, 12 October 2007 09:44 -
So should Germans. But are they really aware of the Palestinian Nakbah catastrophe and the
German contribution to it? By 1948, massive immigration from Nazi Germany and postwar
Europe had dramatically changed the demographic balance in Palestine. Whereas in 1900
Jews had constituted about 10% of the population, now they comprised over 30%. German
Jews became the engine of the Jewish economy on which the future economy of Israel would
be based.
The United Nations partition of Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust had devastating
consequences for the Palestinians. Over 700 000 were driven from their homes before and
during the fighting between the nascent Israeli army and Arab armies in 1948/49. Over 500 of
their villages were destroyed, and Jewish forces committed many massacres of Palestinian
civilians. Now their villages either lie in ruins amid forests or have been built over by Israeli
urban development. Only the refugees remember their ancestral homes.
For all that, the Palestinians have not suffered a Holocaust. Expulsion, expropriation and
occupation do not amount to extermination. Their numbers have actually grown in exile: the
refugee community now numbers six million.
However oppressive the occupation, the equation between Israelis and Nazis is also false and
misleading. It also harms the Palestinian, as we saw in the case of the German bishops, by
drawing attention away from the Palestinians onto the profanization of the Holocaust’s
sacred status in Israeli and western memory.
But if the west considers these equations as outrageous, why does it accept another without
contention, namely the equation between Nazis and Palestinians? The Israeli ambassador to
Germany made this equation when he said that Palestinians have killed one thousand Israelis
for the same reason as six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust: solely because they
were Jews. He did not mention that many Arab fatalities were included in the figure. Nor did he
mention that the aims of Palestinians are not those of the Nazis. Violently removed from their
land by Israelis, they seek justice. They do not want anything that their grandparents’ did
not own. These are not Nazi aims.
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German Memory and the Palestinians
Written by Khaled Kasab Mahameed and A. Dirk Moses
Friday, 12 October 2007 09:44 -
What is the German responsibility in this situation? Does making amends to Jews mean
supporting excessive Israeli security measures and effectively condoning the relentless growth
of settlements in the West Bank, as many Germans feel they must? Does it mean participating
in the equation between Palestinians and Nazis, thereby displacing a German legacy onto
another people that has to bear the consequences of previous German actions?
We think Holocaust education is an important part of the answer to these questions. Germany
should promote Holocaust awareness among the Palestinians so they understand the traumatic
memories that drive Israeli policies and the western defence of them. If Germany wants to end
Holocaust denial in the Arab world, it needs to promote Holocaust education there.
In promoting Holocaust awareness, German authorities could also try to explain why
Palestinians should suffer the indirect consequences of the Holocaust. It was not perpetrated by
Palestinians, after all. As the great historian Arthur Toynbee wrote, ‘The genocide of the six
million European Jews was not committed by Arabs; it was committed by Germans. Yet it is the
Palestinian Arabs, not the Germans, who have been made by Germany’s
fellow-Westerners … to pay for Germany’s crimes. The Palestinian Arabs have, in fact,
been treated as if they did not have human rights’. Historically-sensitive Holocaust
awareness would educate Germans as well as Palestinians.
We can see this need for such awareness in the ruins of the Palestinian village of Sataf.
Emptied and destroyed by Israelis in 1948, the village has been partially restored by an Israeli
environmental agency to promote ecology and tourism, although Israeli schoolchildren are not
told it was built and inhabited by Arabs. Germans have helped both the reconstruction and
effacement of the Arab presence. In 2000, the German ‘Working Group of Christians for
Israel’ donated a ‘Peace and Reconciliation Forest’ of 20 000 trees, which are
planted within the foundation walls of the ruined Palestinian houses. The Palestinians of Sataf
are not mentioned on the plaque commemorating the German gesture of peace and
reconciliation, which did not include them. If Israelis and Germans are bound by remembrance
of the Holocaust, this bond does not yet extend to those who lost their homeland as a result of
the German-caused Jewish trauma. As currently constituted, this bond not only actively
excludes Palestinians, but enables the their continuing persecution.
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German Memory and the Palestinians
Written by Khaled Kasab Mahameed and A. Dirk Moses
Friday, 12 October 2007 09:44 -
Critics of the German bishops complained that they were effectively denying the Holocaust by
equating the Warsaw Ghetto and occupied city of Ramalah. From a Palestinian perspective, the
denial of the Holocaust includes its unique power to cause and then smother over their
catastrophe since 1948. Every new settler ‘outpost’ in the West Bank appears to them as
a Holocaust-defended theft of land, that is, as action motivated and justified by memory of the
Holocaust, and condoned as such by the international community. How can Germany
participate in this destructive discourse, they ask.
Germans urge Palestinians to cease violent resistance that targets Israeli citizens. They are
right to do so. In urging peace, however, Germans need to ask themselves a question. If
Palestinians protested peacefully at the continual seizure of their land, destruction of their crops,
humiliation at checkpoints, and discrimination within Israel, would the German government and
public listen? When will Palestinians be included in the German-Israeli community of
remembrance?
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*Khaled Kasab Mahameed is a lawyer and founder of the Arab Institute for Holocaust Research
and Education in Nazareth. He is the author of "The Palestinians and the State of the
Holocaust" (Arabic)
*Dr. A. Dirk Moses teaches history at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of
German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge University Press, September 2007).
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