CHAPTER 10
DURING ONE OF the lessons in the twelfth-grade class in the village high school, in the center of Israel, I asked the students what they knew about the Holocaust. At first they could not figure out what I was talking about. Maybe they didn’t know the word. I translated it into Arabic. Most of their expressions were still blank. One girl said hesitantly, “What the Nazis did to the Jews?” When I confirmed this, everyone remembered. They had spent four hours studying World War II, and they knew. “That they put them in the ovens? I heard that he killed six million Jews.” She smiled. “That’s what they say.”
A boy named Munzir, who sat in the first row, said, “I saw a television documentary on that. In my opinion, what they say about the Nazis isn’t right. They killed maybe only a million.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because human beings can’t kill so many people. He wasn’t as cruel as you say.”
“Do you see anything good in what Hitler did?” I asked.
“First of all, he brought the whole German people together under him, and wanted to unite all the nations of the world. But the Jews were a problem for him, because they’d gotten control of all the money in Germany. Hitler wanted the Germans to be in control, and the Jews interfered with that. So he killed them. But certainly not more than a million.”
Most of the students in the classroom nodded their heads in agreement. I thought, Arabs have so often accused us Jews of guilt in the deaths of the six victims of the Land Day massacre in Sakhnin in 1976. They saw the murdered men as symbols, as a myth, and made demands in their name.
I asked, “And do you think it is justified to exterminate a minority that interferes with a majority?”
“Well, not eliminate it. But deport it, yes.” Munzir chuckled. “All they did was a population transfer.” But here another boy, Amir, spoke up: “Population transfer isn’t legitimate! What Munzir is doing is to justify the Israeli regime that wants to do that to us. After all, we interfere with Israeli rule here!”
I asked if they feel that the Jews in Israel treat them the way the Germans treated the Jews. The young people had no doubts. Cries of agreement came from all directions. When I noted that Israel is not trying to physically destroy the Palestinian people, neither from racial nor from other motives, a boy named Naim threw this out at me: “It’s exactly the same thing there and here! Israel wants to get rid of the Arabs, wants to exterminate us!”
“Exterminate you?”
He thought for a minute. “Okay, maybe not physically, but spiritually! It wants to eliminate our history and literature. They forbid us to study our national poets. In a moral sense, they are destroying us!” As he spoke he grew feverish. “They want us to assimilate, to become Israelis, to detach ourselves from the other Arab nations, to forget what it is to be Palestinian. Isn’t that destruction to you?”
“Of course, they don’t know anything about the Holocaust,” said Mohammed Handuklo, a history teacher at the Jat school. “What do they know? That the Nazis were against the Jews and wanted to evict them from Europe, and they know some of the solutions that Hitler, let’s say, made use of. I’ll tell you straight out, we don’t give that any special attention. We study it the way we study, say, the Vienna Congress. We talk about it for as long as the curriculum says we should, give assignments; the students debate a little about whether he was right or not, if he should have done it or not. Various opinions are expressed, and that’s it.”
“How many hours, on the average, does the Arab student spend studying the Holocaust during his time at school?”
“There’s no average.” He laughed. “Exactly one lesson. I teach one lesson about it.”
In other words, fifty minutes.
I asked Dr. Ali Hidar, the director of Arab education in the Ministry of Education, why so little attention is given to the Holocaust in the Arab curriculum.
“I can understand it if they don’t go into the Holocaust in depth,” he said. “Because it’s a sensitive matter.”
“Very sensitive,” I agreed.
“In everything that relates to the extermination of the Jews,” he went on, “the Arab teacher is afraid that they’ll say that he—you know—that is, who knows, maybe some of the students will suspect him of, you know, being glad of what happened …”
“But the teacher can present the Holocaust objectively, according to the facts, and that way he can teach what happened there.”
“No, no …” Hidar mumbled.
“He can find universal lessons in the Holocaust; he can also tell them that the Arabs were the next ones in line for extermination, according to Hitler’s book.”
“Yes, that’s the way I explained it when I was a supervisor and I was once invited to a school where they had painted swastikas on the road. I explained it all to them—until they cried. But I have the background. I’ve visited the Ghetto Fighters Museum, and I know. But another teacher, whatever his position is, there are those, his enemies, who will claim that he taught the Holocaust and favored the extermination. With us, in the Arab sector, there’s no small problem of informants.”
Does the situation seem immutable? I asked. He said that he, together with Lapid, an organization that seeks to educate the public in the lessons of the Nazi extermination program, had recently begun to formulate a lesson plan for Arab teachers, to help them give their students the facts about the Holocaust. “It all depends on the teacher.” He sighed. “But not every teacher is able to cope with it. It’s a big problem.”
“Why should we learn about it?” a girl from the Jat twelfth-grade class shouted at me. “They’re always teaching us about how the Jews suffered!”
I prefer to answer her by quoting an Egyptian, Tahsin Bashir, formerly President Mubarak’s personal ambassador. “The Arabs have no consciousness of the Holocaust,” he told me. “At most we see it as the way you justify what you are doing to the Arabs, and for that reason we have little patience for it. Before we made peace I always argued that we lacked a serious book about Judaism in Arabic, a scientific and well-documented book. Not propaganda. We also lack any acquaintance with Israeli literature, especially that part of it that deals with the Holocaust. There is not, for example, an Arabic translation of Anne Frank’s diary [actually, there is, translated by Mohammed Abassi]. How can we understand you? The Holocaust is, after all, one of the main keys to the Jewish soul. As long as the Arabs do not hold that key, we will not be able to gain entry.”
“Last year I took an organized tour of Eastern Europe,” Dr. Nazir Yunes of Kafr Ara told me. “The group included the children of Holocaust survivors, people whose families had been murdered there, people who themselves had been there, and partisan fighters. Obviously, the tour was centered around the extermination camps. I heard their stories, and they’d talk on the bus rides. They made everything I’d read in books very concrete. I went with some of them to look for their old houses. I took a cab with one member of the group and we went to his hometown, in Czechoslovakia. He remembered every street and every house. We reached his house, and his nurse was there, old and blind. In the extermination camps we visited I stood in front of the gas chambers. We lit candles, and all of a sudden everything you knew about the suffering and the history of the Jews runs through your head, and you tremble, almost enough, I’d say, to make you cry. At the gas chambers I asked a friend of mine, an Arab who was there with me, ‘What does it mean to you that entire villages, whole towns were erased there in a single day?’ And he answered me, ‘What do you want, look what they’re doing to us now.’
“Now, I’m not willing to make that comparison,” Yunes said, “but the link between the two things certainly exists. The principal impetus that led to the establishment of Israel was Jewish experience in the Exile and in the Holocaust. That traumatic experience affects all of life here. When you see those things you understand it in such a concrete way, and you realize how much the element of fear in Jewish society was deepened by the Holocaust. Fear of the foreigner. Fear of everything.”
When Nazir Yunes was fourteen, his father sent him to study at the agricultural boarding school at Pardes Hannah, together with Jewish children. “Father knew that we had to have strong ties with the Jews. To learn about them and learn to live with them. If we don’t know each other we won’t be able to live together.” Nazir entered the school not knowing Hebrew, and found himself studying about the early Zionists and the ‘redemption of the land,’ and singing ‘Hatikva’ devotedly. When his father found numerous mistakes in the Arabic of his letters home, he said, ‘I’ve lost my son.’ Today Yunes, forty-four years old, is a surgeon in the general and plastic surgery department of the Hillel Yafeh Hospital in Hadera. He speaks with a perfect Hebrew accent, reads for the most part in Hebrew, dreams in both languages, and counts in Hebrew.
“If I remember that 26,000 out of the 36,000 dunams of my village’s land were confiscated; if I remember that until the end of 1966 I needed a special permit to go from my village to the neighboring one, because of the military government; if my village received electricity twenty years after the Jewish settlement next door received it; if the road to Ara was paved only three years ago; if the ‘nationality’ and ‘religion’ entries on my identity card raise eyebrows in every office; if I see Arik Sharon’s maps in the newspaper showing how he wants to surround me with thirty to forty thousand Jews, to cut me off like a dangerous criminal; if every day more voices are calling for my, an Israeli Arab’s, eviction from the country—if I put all those together, I should hate you. But I just can’t hate you.” He nods his heavy, prematurely gray head. “I grew up within your culture. I was educated in a certain way. I can no longer hate you.”
He is a brave man. In 1991 with Palestinian-Israeli leaders declaring that the PLO, not Israel, represents them in the peace talks, Yunes rose at a stormy political rally in Um Elfahm and said, “The PLO does not represent us. The people that should be representing me in the negotiations with Israel over my fate as a Palestinian are we ourselves, the Palestinians in Israel.” This opinion is certainly that of many Israeli Palestinians, but Yunes was among the first to express it openly. In doing so he revealed the divisions among the Palestinians in Israel as to their role in the future peace treaties. Why am I relating this? Because it is all woven up with the central point, the special Israeli identity that might someday be created here.
“My children have a hard time understanding me,” he continued. “It’s strange for them to see me and my wife crying out of emotion and compassion when there’s a film on television about Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. What do they know about the Holocaust? My daughter, thirteen years old, never heard of the Holocaust. They also don’t understand how I can have a party at home and have twenty Jewish guests, colleagues from work, when the same night the Jewish army has been conducting searches and abusing people in the Nablus refugee camp, where their aunt lives. It all gets mixed up with them.
“Or one day I took the kids to the swimming pool at Gan Shomron, the Jewish settlement next to us, and bought them tickets, and the woman selling the tickets suddenly heard the children speaking Arabic and said, Just a minute. Wait outside. I have to find something out. Then she comes back and says, I’m sorry, this is a private pool.
“I took my children to one side,” Yunes related. “They were already in their bathing suits. I explained to them that the woman said that it’s a private pool and that we need special permission to enter. My two older children said, No, it’s because we’re Arabs.
“I took the woman to one side, and I told her that what really irked me was that I didn’t know how to explain it to my kids on the way home. You tell me what to say to them.
“So she said, I don’t know. It’s not my orders.
“I kept insisting: The children want to know why you aren’t letting us in. And I hope that because of this refusal my children and your children will not meet on two sides of a rifle fifteen years from now.
“She burst out crying. Afterward it turned out that she is a Holocaust survivor, and maybe she saw herself in a situation that seemed like somewhere else. I don’t know. We went home. They called later from the pool and apologized, and invited us to come again, for free, but we didn’t go. That is, I go there regularly. I’m the doctor at Gan Shomron. I care for them. Give their women their periodic breast examinations and stand in for the regular doctor when he’s not around.”