George Bisharat has an excellent essay on the Palestinian Nakba. This part in particular struck me...:
Unfortunately, remembering the Nazi Holocaust -- something morally incumbent on all of us -- has seemingly become entangled with, and even an instrument of, the amnesia some would force on Palestinians. Israel is enveloped in an aura of ethical propriety that makes it unseemly, even "anti-Semitic" to question its denial of Palestinian rights.
As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently observed: "Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred."
What this demonstrates is that memory is not just an idle capacity. Rather, who can remember, and who can be made to forget, is, fundamentally, an expression of power.
...since it exactly echoes my own misgivings about the misuse of the Holocaust to justify and provide ethical cover for the numberless crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians--crimes which are not just historical, but which are repeated and augmented every single day.
Bisharat makes his points elegantly and eloquently, and perhaps with enough understatement that even Americans who are routinely bombarded by pro-Israeli propaganda might be able to understand. Ironically, the article by Amira Hass that he cites--which is also well worth reading--is far more caustic.
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