JACQUELINE ROSE
“The Holocaust and the Nakba”—already that “and” speaks volumes of the difficulty this collection has chosen, boldly and thoughtfully, to address. Innocent as it might appear at first glance, the word “and” in this context issues a challenge, uncovers an often-silenced history, and makes links that for many will be scandalous, unwelcome. In Israel’s dominant discourse, the Holocaust will tolerate no such linkage. The Nakba must not be named or commemorated as Nakba, catastrophe. It must not be acknowledged as the event—the expulsion of the Palestinians—which accompanied, indeed was the precondition for, the founding of Israel as a nation-state, whose creation followed so closely on the Nazi genocide. The Holocaust stands alone as the unique suffering of the Jews. Instead of this argument in which one historic suffering, however incommensurate, can only be acknowledged at the expense of another, this book argues that unless we can hold these two moments in our hearts and minds as part of the same story, there can be no moving forward in the seemingly unmovable conflict that is Israel-Palestine. We need a new historical accountability and a new form of generosity. In the words of Edward W. Said in his essay “Bases for Coexistence” (1997), “there is suffering and injustice enough for everyone.”1 Twenty years later, this argument has not gone away. If anything, it has intensified. Among other things, this collection stands as testament to the passionate and dogged persistence of scholars and writers on this vexed topic ever since.
One of the first things that struck me as I read through the volume was the question of language, as essay after essay draws attention to how fraught, delicate, and political is our choice of words (this is always true, of course, but has a special resonance in this case). Whether the term used is “analogy,” “comparison,” “equation,” or “link,” each one represents a decision, a struggle over what it feels possible and permissible to say. In their introduction Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, the editors of the volume, speak of the need to “honor” the unique nature of each of the two events, their circumstances and consequences, as well as the difference between them.2 Similarly, in his foreword Elias Khoury insists on their “essential” and “inherent” distinction: because of the enormity of Hitler’s evil and because the Palestinian dispossession cannot be assigned to history but continues unremittingly to this day, even while the rise of government-sanctioned racism across Europe and the United States should warn us that the risk of fascism is not simply past (in September 2017, for the first time in five decades a nationalist party, Alternativ für Deutschland, was swept by electoral victory into the German Bundestag).3 For Bashir and Goldberg, there must be understanding but not “complete identification,” no illusion that, simply by an act of will, each of the two peoples could enter the place of the other, as if the history that binds them does not also push them apart—inexorably, as it sometimes appears.
Wherever you look, this complex, anguished topic is surrounded by pitfalls—such as the risk, in Omri Ben-Yehuda’s formula, of a “stagnant equation.”4 “Who,” to cite Said again, “would want morally to equate mass extermination with mass dispossession?”5 Crucially, Arab writers, as is perhaps little known, have been among the most outspoken voices against Holocaust denial: prominent among them are Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Elias Khoury, and Said (who can be placed alongside Palestinian intellectuals like Najati Sidqi, who spoke out, at huge personal cost, against Nazism at the time).6 “But,” Said continues, “they [the Holocaust and the Nakba] are connected.”7 The question is how to think about this connection “insightfully,” how to make it “meaningful.”8 What is our best response to what Hannan Hever describes as this “acute aporia of comparison and distinction, simultaneously impossible and essential”?9 How can we enter a place that seems aberrant, unthinkable, while at the same time ushering it—historically, politically, ethically—into the realm of what can and must be thought? To this question, each of these essays offers its own distinctive reply.
There can be no moral equivalence then, but the profoundest, most historically attested lineage between the two events cries for our attention.10 Despite the caveats, there have been moments in Israel’s history which have called up the most unyielding allusions to the Holocaust, when the distinction—inherent, essential—between the plight of the Palestinians and the Jews in Nazi Germany has been put under intolerable strain. The fact that such allusions have issued from places which may seem unlikely only makes them all the more resonant. After the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila in 1982, when the Israeli army in Lebanon allowed the Christian Phalange militia entry to the refugee camps, novelist Yitzhak Orpaz wrote: “I shall never forgive you for leading the country which I love into a dreadful debauchery of blunders and death. In the camps of Sabra and Shatila my father and mother, whom I lost in the Holocaust, were murdered for the second time.”11 Standing twenty meters from the camps, Israeli soldiers claimed not to have known what was happening. A. B. Yehoshua compared their ignorance to that of the Germans stationed at Buchenwald and Treblinka.12
These lines from the poem “Hanmakah” (1958), by Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun, are cited several times in this book: “The Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of the Land of Israel are one Holocaust of the Jewish people. Both look [one] straight in the face. These are my words.”13 As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin points out, this is a Zionist affirmation which bundles both episodes together as the story of the Jews (“one Holocaust of the Jewish people”). One might argue that in that gesture, the dispossession of the Palestinians is at once acknowledged and erased. And yet, as Hever argues, by the mere act of wedding the two destinies, these lines fuse the two peoples and fly in the face of the principle of separation at the heart of Zionism, giving voice to a form of accountability which exceeds the boundaries of the state (“Both look [one] straight in the face”).14 This in-mixing Yeshurun also enacts on the page by using Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic in his poetry.
The link and difference between Holocaust and Nakba is also one of language, of Hebrew and Arabic, which again has the profoundest political resonance given how unequally these two languages, despite their shared Semitic origin, have been weighted in the history of the nation: from the systematic abolition of Arabic place names on the creation of the State of Israel to the new law currently making its way through the Knesset which would demote Arabic from its status as an official language.15 What happens when you try to translate the two languages into each other? How do you translate the Arabic word shahid, with no equivalent in Hebrew, which instead uses the Latin source martyr or draws on the Biblical term for the sacred slain? What happens when the only term available for the remains of the people of al-Lydd, Palestinians who survived the Nakba, is Sh’erit Ha-Pletah, a Biblical term for post-Holocaust Jewish survivors and refugees? “I do not use the Holocaust lexicon,” writes Yehouda Shenhav on the translation of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam, “except for the places in which Khoury forces me to do so.”16 At moments he felt that the narrator was playing with him as translator and even sentencing him to fail. But the painstaking account he gives of this process also reads like an act of devotion: to Khoury’s novel, which is the topic of no less than three essays in this book, and above all to the project of creating a pathway, a rite of passage, between these two historically conflicted tongues.17
Committed equally to both voices, the essays in this volume therefore refuse the discriminatory rhetoric which tolerates no in-mixing of language or peoples—or, in the words of Mark Levene, no “mixture of populations to cause endless trouble.”18 As Levene notes in his contribution, these are the words of Churchill in 1944. Drawing on the Greco-Turkish exchange of populations as precedent, Churchill did not hesitate to use the word “expulsion” to describe what he viewed as the most “satisfactory” and “lasting” means of resolving the problem of the dispersed German communities of the east. The idea of population transfer, as Ben-Gurion noted as early as 1941, had become “respectable.”19 The creation of the State of Israel cannot be separated from this wider context. This in itself should rebuff the common and groundless objection that Israel, out of all the unjust regimes in the world, is unfairly singled out for critique.
While a shared commitment drives this book, one of its most important achievements is to allow a common space for what might seem superficially to be incompatible demands: to register the singular scope and horror of the Nazi genocide; to acknowledge the urgent need of the Jewish people for collective self-determination; to recognize, and then call on Israel to redress, the cruel price exacted from the Palestinians; and at the same time to insist that the story on both sides is one chapter in the struggle for ethnic exclusivity inscribed into the often genocidal birth pangs of the modern European nation-state.
It is an irony of this fraught history that Churchill made his comment three years after he signed the Atlantic Charter calling for self-government for peoples hitherto deprived of it, so that all men “may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”20 The impulse was generous, the need pressing, the methods ruthless, inhumane. The options, Levene suggests, were limited. If different ethnic groups could not be accommodated on equal terms inside a single nation, then the alternatives were stark: revised frontiers to reduce their demographic weight, emigration, population exchange, or slaughter. How then, in Yochi Fischer’s formula, can we work against the “thick boundaries of collective nationalistic sentiment and the fear of its trembling”— “fear” and “trembling” indicating the psychic and spiritual depths which any such venture has to face?21 Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that so many of the pieces in this collection turn to personal narratives or literary and artistic work to refute what can feel like entrapment, to press back against the deadly weight of the official histories (though the absence of any mention of the Israeli New Historians, who have done so much to challenge Zionist historiography, is in my view an oversight).
There are stories here that I found overwhelming. A Jewish couple from Poland, who met after Auschwitz, arrive in Israel in 1949 and are given the keys to an apartment in Jaffa by the Jewish Agency. Finding a table laid with empty plates in the yard, they become frightened and decide to leave. It had reminded them of their own abandoned home: “The Germans kicked us into the ghetto, and [now] they wanted to give us a house of Arabs who left, food on the table. They did to us the same thing.”22 A young Israeli whose mother was born in Buczacz, in the Ukraine, also the home of Israeli poet S. Y. Agnon, travels to Germany after the war to try to answer the question of how young men in uniform can be induced to enact the most horrific deeds (half the victims of the Holocaust were killed not in the extermination camps but face to face, vast numbers of them right where they lived).23 Expecting to be called on for reserve military service during the first intifada (1988), he writes a note to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the back of a postcard circulating at the time that showed a Palestinian boy thrown out of a moving jeep and killed, expressing his fear that the Israeli army is in danger of becoming brutalized.24
Lea Grundig, one of the first artists to depict the Holocaust in her work, leaves Israel for Dresden in 1948 when her paintings are negatively received by the Israeli art world as too realistic, too aesthetically mired in a subject which the new nation at first tried desperately to ignore.25 In the 1960s she will befriend and profoundly influence the Palestinian artist of the Nakba Abad Abdi, sent to Dresden to study art by the Haifa branch of the Israeli Communist Party. This unlikely encounter is the result of tragedy (the plight of the refugee) and privilege (the communist, cosmopolitan, a-national identity they share), but it is above all fueled by their unswerving commitment to political and social justice.26 And the Palestinian writer Rashid Hussein stages a poetic, romantic encounter between a young man from the city of Yaffa, destroyed during the Nakba, and a young girl, Jaffa, who has survived the Holocaust and who bears the newly Hebraized name of what once had been Yaffa. Hussein does not hesitate to draw on the Holocaust’s most incendiary images to evoke the intensity of the characters’ love, which the young girl prays will be a redeeming passion. His use of the image of the oven pushed me too far. But I also had to remind myself of the wrath provoked—unjustly, as I have argued elsewhere—by Sylvia Plath’s evocation of the Holocaust in her late poetry.27
From Breziny in Poland to Jaffa (the city), from Buczacz to Petah Tikva, from Haifa to Dresden, from Yaffa (the city) to Jaffa (the girl), all these stories, in the words of Alon Confino, make a crack in the world as they “[straddle] the tension between the cunning of history, which is beyond one’s control, and the individual’s moral choice.”28 In each of them there is an anguish that can only be assuaged—tentatively and never completely—by a reckoning with this dual history. In telling these stories, the authors enact this book’s wager, its perhaps most fervently held belief: Israel’s misuse of the Holocaust as the rationale of state power, which tramples over the rights and dignity of the Palestinians—as if one people’s memory could be enshrined inside the body politic at the expense of another—must once and for all be challenged and broken. “I attach no conditions,” Said wrote of his call for mutual compassion and comprehension between the two peoples in relation to the Holocaust and the Nakba. “One feels them for their own sake, not for political advantage.”29 But there is no doubt that the voices gathered in this book share the conviction that simply knowing this much, which is in itself a mountain to climb, is the unnegotiable precondition for creating a just polity.
The writer S. Yizhar, the “godfather” of Israeli letters, who also appears repeatedly here, was one of the first to break the mold—a mold that was barely, but perhaps already irrevocably, set at the time he wrote his most famous work, Khirbet Khizeh (1948), in which he describes in harrowing detail the expulsion of Palestinians from their village by young Israeli soldiers. I note that, with one exception, a critical consensus emerges in these essays: that Yizhar’s critique of the army represents a kind of “narcissistic” bad faith, that he proposes a “baseless” analogy between the Jewish conqueror and the diaspora Jew, or worse, between the Palestinian victims and their perpetrators, which returns the Jew to his status as victim and obfuscates the truth of power.30 I disagree. In my reading, Yizhar is drawing a very different analogy: one between the diaspora Jew and the condition of exile—galut—which the conqueror is now imposing, violently, on the Palestinian people: “What had we perpetrated here today?” There is no obfuscation of power: “Two thousand years of exile. The whole story. Jews being killed. Europe. We were the masters now.”31 As a result of this war, the newly empowered Jew will no longer be able to tell himself the story of his eternal oppression (“We were the masters now”)—which does not mean, as Israel’s history has since confirmed, that he will not try. Yizhar wrote Khirbet Khizeh in the heat of battle. With chilling prescience, he projects himself into an unknowable future and predicts that the new nation will deny what it has done: “True, it all happened a long time ago, but it has haunted me ever since. I sought to drown it out with the din of passing time.”32 The young soldier dulls the sounds of history and joins “the great general mass of liars.”33 Covering up this founding act of violence, which will ever return to haunt it, the new nation will forge its future, Yizhar suggests, on the basis of a lie.
Inevitably, I liked some contributions to this volume more than others (it is no less inevitable that I sometimes disagreed or felt uncomfortable). What they all taught me, in their different ways, is that it is the hardest of tasks to be unerringly faithful to the tortuous complexities of this history. More than once I found myself wanting to take both paths when faced with a writer who proposes we take one. When Raz-Krakotzkin affirms, in a powerful argument, that the real source of Israeli anxiety is not the Holocaust but the Palestinian refugees—“Israeli anxiety is Nakba anxiety” (my emphasis)—I want to join in the conversation: Why not both?34 I have a similar impulse when Hever, in a poetic rendering of the kind which is his hallmark, insists that Abba Kovner’s “A Road of Cyprus on the Way North” is describing the plight of the Palestinian refugees rather than that of the fallen Jewish fighters, and that this is the “primary and essential reading”—though, by his own later account, “both antithetical meanings” are indeed present in the text.35 In response to such moments, the psychoanalytic term I would call on is “overdetermination,” which describes the process whereby two meanings or unconscious memories barge, angrily and incompatibly, into the same symptom or psychic space. For me, these essays are at their most effective when they have the courage of uncertainty—the hesitant, ambivalent reading, the unanticipated encounter, the sorrow communicated between people who have been taught to hate each other. But I also realize these writers are offering counterreadings against the dominant Israeli narrative, which never relents in its project of making the Jewish experience paramount. In this context, to be nuanced can seem like an act of betrayal, although, as every essay in this book attests, it is the scramble for priority that is deadly.
Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto makes a distinction between two types of silence—the silence of the traumatic experience too painful to make the passage into words and the silence imposed by the conqueror on his victims (there is also another silence, a form of resistance, that can fill the void it seems to create, as Raef Zreik points out in his reading of the novel).36 There are also, Khoury suggests in his foreword to this volume, two temporalities—the time of the Nazi atrocity that belongs to the century that is over and the time of the Nakba, which is the injustice that never ends. Whole futures hang on these political distinctions, which I recognize. But, perhaps because of my own history as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I find myself less sure that time and tide can be neatly distinguished and distributed in this way. Jean Améry, Holocaust survivor, and Charlotte Delbo, writer out of Auschwitz, describe the endless endurance of pain. “Whoever is tortured,” writes Améry, “stays tortured.”37 And this holds true not just for the one who endures the torture, since both psychoanalysis and epigenetic science now tell us that trauma is passed down from parent to child to grandchild. Delbo also makes a distinction between common memory, which passes into public life and onto the street (always a type of bravado and a bit full of itself), and deep memory, which flows beneath the surface and persists for all time. Only the first enters the register of speech, while the second remains viscerally, and often silently, bound to the unconscious, to the senses and body parts.38 Charting how Israel has progressively enshrined the former type of memory of the Holocaust at the expense of the latter, Idith Zertal suggests that the nation’s work of mourning—Freud’s trauerarbeit—has yet to begin.39 This is another reason, perhaps, why Israel will not allow the Palestinians to grieve.
Israel’s claim on a monopoly of suffering is the transcript for its continuing oppression of the Palestinian people. This must be stated—loudly, as it is here—over and over again. At the same time, we must be careful not to find ourselves ignoring the way that the worst of history, for whoever has been through it, persists and then passes silently through intergenerational time. Perhaps, finally, the hardest challenge to issue from this book—what must happen for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples—is to find a way of communicating across the space and time of silence.
NOTES
1. Edward Said, “Bases for Coexistence,” in The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (London: Granta, 2000), 207 (emphasis in the original).
2. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, introduction to this volume.
3. Elias Khoury, foreword to this volume. See also the chapter by Gil Anidjar on the indissoluble link between Muslim and Jew forged in the camps, a link revived today by the twin ills of resurgent anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
4. Omri Ben-Yehuda, chapter 11, this volume.
5. Said, “Bases for Coexistence,” 208.
6. Yehouda Shenhav, chapter 15, this volume, Mustafa Kabha, chapter 7, this volume. See also the famous account of the Arab response to the Holocaust by Gilbert Achar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Metropolitan, 2010).
7. Said, “Bases for Coexistence,” 208.
8. Alon Confino, chapter 6, this volume.
9. Hannan Hever, chapter 12, this volume.
10. See chapter 5, by Nadim Khoury, for a historical account of the link between the Holocaust and the Nakba. See also Motti Golani and Adel Manna, Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba 1948. Two Narratives of the 1948 War and Its Outcome, English-Hebrew ed. (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2011).
11. Amnon Kapeliouk, Sabra and Shatila: Inquiry into a Massacre [Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un massacre], trans. and ed. Khalil Jehshan (Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1984), 76. The same passage in the French edition (Paris: Seuil, 1982) is on p. 112.
12. Kapeliouk, Sabra and Shatila, 83.
13. In this volume, see Bashir and Goldberg, introduction; Raz-Krakotzkin, chapter 3; Confino, chapter 6.
14. Hannan Hever, chapter 12 this volume; see also Hever, “‘The Two Gaze Directly Into One Another’s Face’: Avot Yeshurun Between the Nakba and the Shoah—An Israeli Perspective,” in “History and Responsibility: Hebrew Literature Facing 1948,” special issue, Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2012): 153–163.
16. Shenhav, chapter 15 this volume.
17. See the chapters by Raef Zreik, Yehouda Shenhav, and Refqa Abu-Remaileh.
18. Mark Levene, chapter 1, this volume.
21. Yochi Fischer, chapter 8, this volume.
23. Omer Bartov, chapter 9, this volume.
25. For the best accounts of this, see Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: The Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, trans. Chaya Galai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
26. Tal Ben-Zvi, chapter 10, this volume.
27. Honaida Ghanim, chapter 4, this volume; Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991).
29. Said, “Bases for Coexistence,” 209.
30. Bashir and Goldberg, introduction; Fischer, chapter 8; Hever, chapter 12; Shenhav, chapter 15.
31. S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, trans. Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck (London: Ibis, [1948] 2008), 105, 109 (my emphasis).
34. Raz-Krakotzkin, chapter 3.
36. Shenhav, chapter 15; Zreik, chapter 14 this volume.
37. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (London: Granta, [1966] 1999), 34.
38. Charlottle Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont, introd. Lawrence L. Langer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1946, 1965] 1995), xi, xiii.
39. Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power, 274 (these are the last lines of the book).