[PAA-Discuss] FW: Podur / N. and the Memory Wall (On a day in the future)

[Lee Loe]

ZNet Commentary -Aug. 12, 2006
N. and the Memory Wall (On a day in the future) 
By Justin Podur 

N., a young Palestinian/Israeli Jew, was late for her meeting with her
friend H., the child of Palestinian Muslim refugees who had returned from
Lebanon on a bus a few years before. N. was still preparing her gift for H.,
a hat to cover his prematurely bald head. She was meeting him at the new
Museum of Jaffa, which she called the Museum of Tel Aviv. 

That was the binational reality: most cities and town in Israel/Palestine
had two names. She'd learned in school that the settlers had in some cases
deliberately named towns to taunt the inhabitants they had displaced: Levi,
for example, had been Lubia, the sounds chosen to echo a reminder of
displacement (1). She had read about the passionate debates and
disagreements at the constituent assembly about whether the old place names,
including the name "Israel" itself, could remain, or whether they would be a
bitter reminder of the past of dispossession. But in the end, when Israel
acknowledged the crime of displacing and imprisoning the Palestinians and
made its apology, the Palestinians who had remained steadfast in their
territories and those who had returned from their harsh exile had decided
that recognition was sufficient, that they did not want any more memories to
be erased, but wanted instead to build on all the memories, good and bad.

So the refugees had come back, and the Israeli residents had not left, so
now it was Levi to its Israeli residents and Lubia to its Palestinian
residents. And sometimes it was both, or neither, and much of the time it
didn't matter.

A lot of things that seemed to matter a lot to her parents, who had been
born here to parents who had come very young from Russia, were hard for her
to understand. Sometimes they lapsed into talk about "the Arabs", and she
didn't get it. Hebrew was her first language, of course, but she was fluent
in Arabic too. Her best friend had Arabic as a first language and spoke
Hebrew quite well. Most of the kids she grew up with spoke both languages,
switching back and forth with fluidity and ease, as she did. A lot of them
learned English as well, and Farsi, and French, and Kurdish.

She packed her gift and got on the bus, enjoying the short ride. H. was
already there. It was really nice to see him wearing shoes. She had met him
when he'd first arrived and he had always seemed to be in bare feet. Worse,
his feet were always swollen, his pant legs and shirt sleeves ragged (2).
But not today - today he had a neat set of clothes and shoes, and presented
his bald head to her with a smile, his hands clasped behind his back.

She had, of course, visited the Museum many times on school field trips, as
had H. But they always enjoyed visiting the Memory Wall together. The Memory
Wall was made of pieces of what was once called the "security fence" or the
"apartheid wall". Artists from different parts of the country had taken
these pieces and painted and sculpted a mural on it, depicting the whole
history of the two peoples in the land. H. found some of the medieval
history distasteful. With his interest in history, he thought that the
Memory Wall's artists overstated the common oppression of Jews and Muslims
by Christians. The crusades and inquisition were a historical wrongs, he
would say, but many of us are Christians, after all. After everything we've
all been through, surely we don't want to make Christians out to be the
villains.

N. thought he had a point. But the art work in the section that chronicled
the history of Arab-Jewish civilization was spectacular, as the joint
achievements had been. With her Jewish background, she spent a lot of time
at the section commemorating the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians and
the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. H., for his part, spent a lot
of time studying the large section depicting the horrors of the Holocaust.
These were always powerfully moving moments for both of them. They were
silent for some time as they followed the exhibit along.

They followed along through the 1956 and 1967 and 1973 wars, the occupation
of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights. They followed the 1982 war in
Lebanon depicted, the war some of H.'s grandparents had survived. The
Palestinian Intifada of the 1980s was celebrated on the wall, and the
strange false start of Oslo. Why had her ancestors not negotiated in good
faith, she wondered? And why did Israel's allies, instead of helping, pour
fuel on the flames and provide weapons so that our parents could kill one
another? Why were they so foolish as to believe that weapons and killing
could solve such important problems? 
Why did they think building walls and fencing people in and trying to starve
them would protect us, their children and their future?

The Second Intifada was also commemorated here, with its thousands of
victims. The findings of the Truth Commission of the war crimes committed
during Israel's operations in that era, 2000-2006 were not rendered
artistically, but provided in blocks of text. In the end, the punishments
had been relatively light, N. thought, compared to the crimes committed.
She'd had an uncle who spent some time in jail. She'd refused her parents'
pleas to visit him, until H. and other friends of hers suggested that she do
so. One of H.'s uncles had had trouble leaving resistance behind, had
trouble accommodating to secularism, he told her. H. would sit with him,
talk to him, calm him down, listen to his stories, listen to his lectures
about religion. But that was different, N. had argued. Yes, H. had said, but
we all have our duty.

This time, N. and H. lingered a long while at the section on the 'Summer
Rains' operation in Gaza and the Lebanon war of 2006. Such terrible,
murderous folly. Killing thousands of people, displacing much of the
population. So many children. And in the end, disgrace. How close it had all
come to the unthinkable, with nuclear weapons and inflamed hatreds and
America pushing for more destruction.

How fortunate, N. and H. thought, that Palestinians had been able to hold
on, and that the true friends of the peoples of the region were able to show
the way. It was slow, and barely perceptible during that 2006 war, that the
process had already begun. There had already been conferences - small,
poorly attended - in Israel and elsewhere on the right of return. Many
Israelis had already spoken out against what was happening and stated their
belief that the future was for Israelis and Palestinians, sharing the land,
together.

Warmongers in America and Israel who thought they enjoyed total support and
impunity were pressured by a growing campaign of popular boycotts,
divestment, and sanctions. Eventually they could no longer present Israel's
wars as "self-defense" or dehumanize Palestinians, Lebanese, and other
victims. People in those countries gained a new political maturity, so that
even several attacks by militants on Israeli and American civilians that
happened in the years that followed could not be used to derail the process,
especially since the legitimate resistance groups began to adhere strictly
to the laws of war, even though America and Israel did not. Within a few
years, just as politicians in both countries had to worry about losing
voters if they supported apartheid in Israel, generals in both countries had
to worry about their soldiers refusing orders to fight. When that started to
happen, apartheid started to unravel quickly.

How strange, that even her parents - who later had been so caught up that
they participated in tearing down a section of the apartheid wall the day it
came down - had worried so much about demographics, that if they couldn't be
a "majority", even at the cost of imprisoning and starving and bombing all
of their neighbours, Jewish life wouldn't be safe. How wrong they were: Jews
were safer now, here, than they had ever been, and Jewish cultural life an
established reality, a part of the Middle East. She'd visited her Jewish
family in Iran, Iraq, in Syria and Lebanon, all of whom were living freely,
openly, as part of the wider community of Jews in the Middle East, as part
of their own countries, and as cosmopolitan citizens of the world.

N. gave H. his hat, and they went to class - water management - before they
had the chance to look at the years after 2006, the years when the tide
turned in the world and everything was pulled back from the brink, when the
electric fences and apartheid walls were torn down, when the refugee camps
emptied and when no one, not one person, was thrown into the sea.

Justin Podur is a writer based in Toronto. He can be reached at
justin at killingtrain.com


1) See this interview with Israeli historian Ilan Pappe: 
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7281
2) H. has actually been around for some time: 
http://www.palestineaidsociety.org/www/najiali.htm