The Holocaust and Palestine
By Matthew Rothschild, September 2, 2009

Edward Said would not be pleased.
The towering Palestinian American intellectual had no patience for Holocaust deniers in the Arab world or in the Palestinian liberation movement.
He understood the calamity that was the Holocaust, and he believed in telling the truth about it, and about everything else.
Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1998, Said noted: “Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism.”
He went on to say, quite rightly: “But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts.”
But he returned to the necessity of telling the truth.
“We must recognize the realities of the holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged,” he wrote. “. . . The real issue is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid and racial discrimination, no matter who does it. There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. One thing must be clear in my firm opinion: we are not fighting the injustices of Zionism in order to replace them with an invidious nationalism (religious or civil) that decrees that Arabs in Palestine are more equal than others. The history of the modern Arab world - with all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development - is disfigured by a whole series out-moded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much currency.”
So Edward Said would be especially dismayed this week as leading figures in Palestine are denying the Holocaust and remonstrating about the U.N.’s plans to teach children about the Holocaust in the schools it runs in Gaza.
Hamas’s spiritual leader Yunis al-Astal said this would be “marketing a lie” and a “war crime,” if you can believe that.
A Hamas legislator, Jamila al-Shanti, added, “Talk about the Holocaust and the execution of the Jews contradicts and is against our culture, our principles, our traditions, values, heritage, and religion.”
This insistence by Hamas on denying the reality of the Holocaust is as reprehensible as it is astonishing.
And it will only harden the opposition in Israel to reaching any true peace with the Palestinians.
Denying history gets you nowhere.


A REPLY TO ARAB INTELLECTUALS
Israel-Palestine: a third way
This summer’s decision by the Israeli government to accelerate settlement of occupied Palestinian territories - and judaise East Jerusalem, confirms the failure of the Oslo accords, if confirmation was needed. The impasse has revived the debate among Arab intellectuals concerning their responsabilities regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of them - with some rather rare and brave exceptions - support the French writer, Roger Garaudy, convicted earlier this year for holocaust denial, for defending an Islam now under siege from the West. Edward Said incisively debunks this trend.
by Edward W Said



Now that Oslo has clearly been proven the deeply flawed and unworkable "peace" process that it really was from the outset, Arabs, Israelis and their various and sundry supporters need to think a great deal more, rather than less, clearly. A number of preliminary points seem to suggest themselves at the outset. "Peace" is now a discredited and fraudulent word, and is no guarantee that further harm and devastation will not ensue to the Palestinian people. How, after all the land confiscations, arrests, demolitions, prohibitions, killings that occurred unilaterally because of Israel’s arrogance and power in the very context of the "peace process", can one continue to use the word "peace" without hesitation? (1) It is impossible.

The Roman historian Tacitus says of the Roman conquest of Britain that "they [the Roman army] created a desolation, and called it peace". The very same thing happened to us as a people, with the willing collaboration of the Palestine Authority, the Arab states (with a few significant exceptions), Israel and the United States.

Second, it is no use pretending that we can improve on the current deadlock, which in the Oslo framework as its stands is unbreakable, by returning to golden moments of the past. We can neither return to the days before the war of l967, nor can we accept slogans of rejectionism that in effect send us back to the golden age of Islam. You cannot turn the wheel back. The only way to undo injustice, as Israel Shahak (1) and Azmi Bishara (2) have both said, is to create more justice, not to create new forms of vindictive injustice, i.e. "They have a Jewish state, we want an Islamic state."

On the other hand, it seems equally fatuous to impose total blockades against everything Israeli (now in fashion in various progressive Arab circles)and to pretend that that is the really virtuous nationalist path. There are, after all, one million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens: are they also to be boycotted, as they were during the l950s? What about Israelis who support our struggle? Are they to be boycotted because they are Israeli? Obviously, to do so would be to pretend that the South African triumph over apartheid hadn’t occurred, and to ignore all the many victories for justice that occurred because of non-violent political cooperation between like-minded people on both sides of a highly contested and moveable line. As I said in a recent article (3), we cannot win this struggle by wishing that all the Jews would simply go away, or that we could make everything become Islamic: we need all those on the other side who are partisan to our struggle. And we must cross the line of separation - which has been one of the main intentions of Oslo to erect - that maintains current apartheid between Arab and Jew in historic Palestine. Go across, but do not enforce the line.

Third and perhaps most important, there is a great difference between political and intellectual behaviour. The intellectual’s role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly and as honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarasses, pleases or displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intellectual’s constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth unadorned. Political behaviour principally relies upon considerations of interest - advancing a career, working with governments, maintaining one’s position, etc. In the wake of Oslo, it is therefore obvious that continuing the line propagated by the three parties to its provisions, Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government is political behaviour, not intellectual.

Take, for example, the joint declaration made by Egyptian and Israeli men (mostly men) on behalf of the Cairo Peace Society and Peace Now. Remove all the high-sounding phrases about "peace" and not only do you get a ringing endorsement of Oslo, but also a return to the Sadat-Begin agreements of the late 1970s, which are described as courageous and momentous. Fine. But what does this have to do with Palestinians whose territory and self-determination were removed from those courageous and momentous Camp David documents? Besides, Egypt and Israel are still at peace.

What would people think if a few Israelis and Palestinians got together and issued ringing proclamations about Israeli-Syrian peace that were meant to "appeal" to those two governments? Crazy, most people would say. What entitles two parties, one who oppresses Palestinians and the other who has arrogated the right to speak for them, to proclaim peaceful goals in a conflict that is not between them? Moreover, the idea of appealing to this Israeli government, expecting solutions from it, is like asking Count Dracula to speak warmly about the virtues of vegetarianism.

In short, political behaviour of this sort simply reinforces the hold of a dying succubus, Oslo, on the future of real, as opposed to fraudulent American-Israeli peace. But neither, I must also say, is it intellectually responsible in effect to return to blanket boycotts of the sort now becoming the fashion in various Arab countries. This sort of tactic (it is scarcely a strategy, any more than sticking one’s head in the sand like an ostrich is a strategy) is regressive.

Israel is neither South Africa, nor Algeria, nor Vietnam. Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism. But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts. I have been saying for twenty years that we have no military option, and are not likely to have one anytime soon. And neither does Israel have a real military option. Despite their enormous power, Israelis have not succeeded in achieving either the acceptance or the security they crave. On the other hand, not all Israelis are the same, and whatever happens, we must learn to live with them in some form, preferably justly, rather than unjustly.

The third way avoids both the bankruptcy of Oslo and the retrograde policies of total boycotts. It must begin in terms of the idea of citizenship, not nationalism, since the notion of separation (Oslo) and of triumphalist unilateral theocratic nationalism whether Jewish or Muslim simply does not deal with the realities before us. Therefore, a concept of citizenship whereby every individual has the same citizen’s rights, based not on race or religion, but on equal justice for each person guaranteed by a constitution, must replace all our outmoded notions of how Palestine will be cleansed of the others’ enemies. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing whether it is done by Serbians, Zionists, or Hamas.

What Azmi Bishara and several Israeli Jews like Ilan Pappé (4) are now trying to strengthen is a position and a politics by which Jews and Palestinians inside the Jewish state have the same rights; there is no reason why the same principle should not apply in the Occupied Territories where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by side, together, with only one people, Israeli Jews now dominating the other. So the choice is either apartheid or it is justice and citizenship.

We must recognize the realities of the holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged. And we must also recognize that Israel is a dynamic society with many currents - not all of them Likud, Labour, and religious - within it. We must deal with those who recognize our rights. We should be willing as Palestinians to go to speak to Palestinians first, but to Israelis too, and we should tell our truths, not the stupid compromises of the sort that the PLO and PA have traded in, which in effect is the apartheid of Oslo.

The real issue is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid and racial discrimination, no matter who does it. There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. One thing must be clear in my firm opinion: we are not fighting the injustices of Zionism in order to replace them with an invidious nationalism (religious or civil) that decrees that Arabs in Palestine are more equal than others. The history of the modern Arab world - with all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development - is disfigured by a whole series out-moded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much currency.

Why do we expect the world to believe our sufferings as Arabs if (a) we cannot recognize the sufferings of others, even of our oppressors, and (b) we cannot deal with facts that trouble simplistic ideas of the sort propagated by bien-pensants intellectuals who refuse to see the relationship between the holocaust and Israel. Again, let me repeat that I cannot accept the idea that the holocaust excuses Zionism for what it has done to Palestinians: far from it. I say exactly the opposite, that by recognizing the holocaust for the genocidal madness that it was, we can then demand from Israelis and Jews the right to link the holocaust to Zionist injustices towards the Palestinian, link and criticise the link for its hypocrisy and flawed moral logic.

But to support the efforts of Roger Garaudy and his holocaust-denying friends in the name of "freedom of opinion" is a silly ruse that discredits us more than we already are discredited in the world’s eyes for our incompetence, our failure to fight a decent battle, our radical misunderstanding of history and the world we live in. Why don’t we fight harder for freedom of opinions in our own societies, a freedom, no one needs to be told, that scarcely exists?

When I mentioned the holocaust in an article I wrote last November (5), I received more stupid vilification than I ever thought possible; one famous intellectual even accused me of trying to gain a certificate of good behaviour from the Zionist lobby. Of course, I support Garaudy’s right to say what he pleases and I oppose the wretched loi Gayssot under which he was prosecuted and condemned (6). But I also think that what he says is trivial and irresponsible, and when we endorse it, it allies us necessarily with Le Pen and all the retrograde right-wing fascist elements in French society.

No, our battle is for democracy and equal rights, for a secular commonwealth or state in which all the members are equal citizens, in which the concept underlying our goal is a secular notion of citizenship and belonging, not some mythological essence or an idea that derives its authority from the remote past, whether that past is Christian, Jewish or Muslim. As I said, the genius of Arab civilization at its height in, say, Andalusia was its multicultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic diversity. That is the ideal that should be moving our efforts now, in the wake of an embalmed, and dead Oslo, and an equally dead rejectionism. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, as the Bible says. ;

In the meantime, we should concentrate our resistance on combating Israeli settlement with non-violent mass demonstrations that impede land confiscation, on creating stable and democratic civil institutions (hospitals and clinics, schools and universities, now in a horrendous decline, and work projects that will improve our infrastructure), and on fully confronting the apartheid provisions inherent in Zionism.

There are numerous prophecies of an impending explosion due to the stalemate. Even if they turn out to be true, we must plan constructively for our future, since neither improvisation nor violence are likely to guarantee the creation and consolidation of institutions.

You're right.

Of course . . .that is what the article is about . . . . :blink:

Holocaust deniers are terrific people. Glad to see the Palestinians want nothing to do with th.....oh wait....

Yeah, they're right up there with people who claim that Israel didn't deliberately ethnically cleanse their new nation in order to establish a Jewish majority.

Ah, nothing like collectivist bigotry, eh?

Sorry I disagree with your dad, Rand.

"My dad"? "Rand"? Having what, exactly, to do with your willful denial of historical facts?

Wait, you're NOT Rand Paul?

:?:

Well that hardly answers my question. What, exactly, does Rand Paul, or Ron Paul for that matter, have to do with your denial of historical facts?

It's getting to the point where I hope the Palestinians and Israelis blow each other up for good, Harry.

Both sides have been acting like petulant little bitches for more than 2 millenia, and they'll continue to fight over a piece of shitty worthless land until the year 4,009 if given the chance.

"My God is the best!"

"No, MY God is the best!"

"Oh yeah?" *blows self up in crowded bus stop*

"Fuck you!" *orders airstrike on civilian neighborhoods*


It's the joke of the world, and maybe one day, people's patience will start to wear thin and we don't ever have to hear about a bunch of backwards religious extremists having a dick-measuring contest for as long the world exists.

A good way to end this pissfest? Get an independent third party to turn Jerusalem into a goddamned DMZ, and allow visitation rights to both sides for religious holidays and appearances.

If neither side can play nice, then neither side should be favored.

This much is true. They would have been much better off being completely surrounded and outnumbered by people who think they're worse than scum and would like nothing better than to spill the blood of every last Jew.

How dare they prevent a recurrence of what happened to them in Germany just a few years earlier.

"The Palestinians . . " all of them.

Reduce them all to a packaged stereotype.

So a majority of voting eligible Palestinians didn't elect Hamas?

Based upon this logic, a majority of Americans want universal health care as they voted for Obama.

Except unlike Americans protesting ObamaCare, I don't see any Palestinians out en masse protesting Hamas' extremism.

Of course, that'll never happen.

If FOX isn't covering it, it is not happening.

Drudge does on occasion . . . . :rolleyes:

Please. I beg of you.

Find me pictures or video of Palestinians protesting against Hamas.

Then show me the dead bodies where those protestors used to be.

Yeah, the Holocaust TOTALLY justifies them moving to someone else's homeland and murdering and expelling the people who live there. How DARE those dirty Arabs attempt to defend themselves against foreign aggression. What do they think they are, human beings with a right to exist and to defend their own existence?

Bottom line, the Zionists were nothing more than European colonists, and groups like Haganah, Irgun, and Levi waged terrorist campaigns to get themselves a new nation, and then committed ethnic cleansing in order to create a Jewish majority in their new country. They had as much of a legitimate claim to "self-defense" as would someone who breaks into your house to steal your property and murder your family.

A jewish police officer probably robbed Harry at one point in time.

This would explain everything.

How would that explain my refusal to deny historical facts?

Perhaps this man roughed you up?

Hey, the jews have done some awful shit. Nobody is denying that.

Except you're the one that's trying to justify the response by the arab world, completing ignoring the awful shit that they've done.

Both sides are wrong, yet you only go after one side. Hmmm...

Say, you never answered my question. What, exactly, would Ron Paul, Rand Paul, a Jewish cop, or a professional wrestler have to do with your refusal to acknowledge historical facts?

"The Jews"? As in, all of them? Your collectivist bigotry is showing again.

SOME Jews have done awful things. SOME Muslims have done awful things. SOME white people, SOME black people, SOME Asian people, etc. Just because SOME people from any given ethnicity/religion/nationality do something, doesn't mean that ALL persons from that group are responsible.

And again, as I've pointed out many, many, many, many, many, many times before, I'M NOT TRYING TO JUSTIFY TERRORISM. Unlike you, I'm not someone who considers terrorism to be a justifiable thing. Terrorism is wrong, period. Israel's brutality towards the Palestinians does NOT justify the use of terrorism by Palestinians, nor does Palestinian terrorism justify Israel's brutality and ethnic cleansing campaigns.

Nor am I "going after" either side. I am arguing with the people who post here, who DO attempt to justify Israeli brutality and savagery. People like Champs and logo, who apparently don't consider Palestinians to be human beings with a right to exist and to defend their existence. People who think it's perfectly OK for European Jews to go to someone else's home and slaughter and expel the people who live there, who think that one group of Europeans' savagery towards another group of Europeans somehow justifies the second group of Europeans committing acts of brutality against a third group of people who had nothing to do with it.

People have got to be pretty fucking naive if they ever think that Israelis and Palestinians will live in peace.

Square pegs, round holes. Been that way for 2,000+ years. I don't expect it to change anytime soon.

so none of the land was sold to the jews?
none of the land was abandoned when in 48, the arab nations promised to wipe the jews out of palestine and told the palesinians to get out and outof the way



the dynamics of israel and the west bank isnt solely based on dirty jews stealing poor paletians land

that area has never had an honest broker nor had people in power that had their interest come first, and that goes way back, even before the greeks control the land

It was "abandoned" because Israeli forces were forcibly expelling people from their homes, slaughtering anyone who resisted. Palestinians were fleeing the brutality of the Zionists, who intended to reduce the Arab population of Israel by at least two thirds.

Seriously, how the f*ck do you think they were going to create a "Jewish state" with a majority Muslim population? Serious question, do you REALLY think that's what they intended?

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/origin.html

Israel was created by the UN, not Jewish Zionists. You know that organization you and Iron pimp out with the Geneva Conventions? Denying history indeed.

Also gotta say that those Zionists are doing a terrible job stealing land. I mean they basically gave back all that land they won from the 1940's and 1960's or so.

BTW calling the Jews in Israel: Zionists is the equivalent of calling blacks: thugs.

That's actually false. The original UN mandate called for both a Jewish and a Palestinian state. The Zionists didn't like the deal, so they created their own state by means of terrorism and ethnic cleansing.

Are Hunters stupid?

:whistle:

so in 48, when israel declared their independence , when six countries invaded the newly formed israel, the arabs never told the native palestinians to abandon their homes because the invading armies were going to create a blood bath there?


man, here i was thinking you were more moderate on this

you are far lost meth head...you have no sense of reality anymore

i want nothing more for the pals then peace, their children are sent to be martyrs by those that are supposed to care for them for political or religious or whatever reasons, i thnk we would all be better off if they focused on improving their lives

then we could make peace

as golda said, we will have peace when the arabs love their chlidren more then they hate the jews (or something like that)

Precisely.

Arab orders to evacuate non-existent

“The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.” Erskine Childers, British researcher, quoted in Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/origin.html

perhaps you have a source that doesnt have an agenda

i know to you opinions and conclusions based on drug induced hallucinations count as facts.....

and i raise you one exodus

like ive said harry, some left willingly, some left by force, some left to allow the ensuing arab armies to leave a blood bath of israeli blood.


the dynamics of israel and the problems of the area isnt just a dirty jews fault. when honest, realistic brokers come in from both sides, and both are willing to negotiate, than a true peace meeting can happen. and if that were to happen, its so complicated there, a peace between the two isnt guaranteed.


its a perfert storm, IMHO

If you count fleeing before the advance of a murderous army of racial/religious fanatics as "voluntary", then yeah. Sure. They left "voluntarily". .

Not sure why you'd link to a page that pretty much supports what I said. Here, from YOUR link:

The claims that Arabs were told to leave by their own people, to return after "all the Jews had been slaughtered" has never been true. It never WILL be true. That was, in fact, an outright lie, started by terrorists, who have been using the Holocaust exactly the same way Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton uses slavery and segregation.

As far as "honest brokers" go, they HAD their opportunity. Rabin and Arafat. Rabin got murdered by one of his "own people" for trying to make peace, and every Israeli leader since then has just been pretending to work towards peace.

MY point, however, is directed towards those who wish to pretend that this entire conflict started for no other reason than that anti-Semitic Arabs tried to exterminate peaceful Jews who were just minding their own business. That narrative is factually incorrect. It is untrue. It is, in fact, bullsh*t. And yet that's what many people in this country use as their basis for how they believe the conflict should be resolved.

The truth is that the Zionist leadership who became Israel's "founding fathers" NEVER had ANY intention of living peacefully with their Arab neighbors. Again, I will ask you the same question I ask every single Israel supporter, and never get an answer:

HOW THE F*CK DO YOU THINK THEY WERE GOING TO CREATE A "JEWISH STATE" WITH A MAJORITY ARAB MUSLIM POPULATION?!?

There weren't, that's how. They were terrorists, they were racial/religious extremists, but they weren't idiots. They knew full well that if they were going to move from Europe to the ME and create a Jewish state, they would have to somehow get rid of the people already living there. And so they did.

"Get rid of".

So they killed them all? No? They didn't?

Oh.

You did not read the article.


Precisely.

Hunters were not reduced to anything.