HUSSEIN IBISH: Palestinians and Israelis must be taught the truth
It
is a universal human impulse to shrink from uncomfortable truths.
People instinctively only want to hear what reinforces their existing
world views and their collective identities, which can be unbearably
fragile.
Therefore many deliberately
prefer myth over reality, ignorance to knowledge, and the warm cocoon
of self-satisfaction – especially the supposed moral authority that
attaches to
victimhood – instead of empathy and understanding.
Cultural leadership requires disrupting such impulses. Political
power is more easily gained and maintained by pandering to the lowest
common denominator. But no compatriots are more valuable than those who
decline to tell their
society what they want to hear, and insist instead on telling them what they need to hear.
Mohammed S Dajani Daoudi, a professor at Al-Quds University in
occupied East Jerusalem, is the latest groundbreaking figure to champion
the virtue of historical truth over the seductive allure of national
dogma. As so often befalls those who challenge easy and convenient
attitudes, Prof Dajani is facing an angry backlash when he deserves
thanks and respect.
His “transgression” was to take 30 Palestinian students to Krakow and Auschwitz-Birkenau
to learn about
the history of Jews in Europe and especially the Holocaust, while an
Israeli professor took a similar number of Jewish students to Dheishe
refugee camp in occupied Bethlehem to learn about the Palestinian
experience, particularly the Nakba and the dispossession and exile of
the refugees.
As word
of this
project, which took place in March, spread in Palestinian society, Prof
Dajani has faced a wave of angry denunciations. He’s been threatened
and called a “traitor,” a “
normaliser,”
and similar epithets, as noted by Matthew Kalman in the Israeli
newspaper Ha'aretz. Al-Quds University distanced itself by saying he was
acting in his private capacity. He has received some Palestinian
support, but not enough.
Prof Dajani, who has a deep history of Palestinian nationalist
activism, has long advocated the necessity of teaching about the
Holocaust and its “universal truths” in Palestine. His points are
unassailable. Historical truth has merit simply as truth. Palestinians
deserve to know the truth. Palestinian students, in particular, have a
right to be taught the truth.
Moreover,
Palestinians have
an urgent need to understand the Jewish Israelis who occupy their land
and control so much of their daily lives. Palestinians could justifiably
claim to understand Israelis all too well at a certain register,
through the inescapable lived experience of the occupation.
What’s often missing is a clear sense of the historical experiences that
inform Jewish
Israeli attitudes about the world, their apparently bewildering sense
of constant insecurity when they both seem, and are, overwhelmingly
powerful compared to the Palestinians, and their consequent obsession
with security – a motif that is effectively deployed in Israel to
rationalise many illegal or indefensible practices, typically at the expense of Palestinian human rights.
Palestinians have
nothing to fear from any aspect of the historical truth, particularly
events in Europe that were a culmination of centuries of European
anti-Semitism that do not have any traditional or deep-seated analogue
in either Arab culture or Islamic theology. Palestinians cannot be
implicated in any meaningful way in
Nazi genocide,
so objectively they only stand to benefit from its lessons. But it
still can be an unwelcome intrusion on otherwise reassuringly simple
assumptions about victims and
victimisers.
For some, acknowledging that Jews in Europe were the victims of a
monstrous crime is experienced as an evasion or an inversion of moral
perceptions
moulded by the occupation. It requires those who are
oppressive to be nonetheless understood as belonging to a
people who have been horribly
victimised. It can seem an objectionable distraction, truth notwithstanding.
Prof Dajani challenges Palestinians to
recognise the
complexities of the Jewish experience, while his colleagues who went to
refugee camps ask Israelis to open their eyes to the reality of
Palestinian suffering. Angry resistance to such projects is not merely
the championing of ignorance. It is a
wilful withholding of empathy, and
insistence on an imagined binary reality neatly divided between essentially “good” and “bad” people.
Refusal of empathy is distressingly widespread and can be
disturbingly casual. On April 9, the prominent Jewish-American writer
Norman Podhoretz averred with a twisted nonchalance in The Wall Street
Journal, “I have no sympathy – none – for the Palestinians,” because
they don’t “deserve any”. He describes Palestinians as
harbouring “evil intents” and bizarrely insists they will never
recognise Israel, even though the Palestine Liberation
Organisation did in 1993.
Mr Podhoretz churlishly spurns the complexities of truth, instead
cuddling the comforting fiction of a caricature alternate universe in
which – most conveniently – anything Palestinians suffer under
occupation by his fellow Jews is unobjectionable because these uniquely
wicked people “deserve” absolutely no sympathy. His twisted mentality
perfectly echoes that of those Palestinians who are angry with Prof
Dajani for insisting Palestinians need to learn about the Holocaust in
their schools, just as Israelis need to learn about the Nakba.
By stark contrast, in response to the threats, Prof Dajani declared: “I will not remain a
bystander even if the victims of the suffering I show empathy for are my occupiers.”
That is real cultural and educational leadership and integrity. It
is principled, brave, intelligent and unflinching. It deserves only
support, applause and emulation.
Hussein Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine and blogs at www.ibishblog.com. On Twitter: @ibishblog.
