Forcing Racial Amnesia?
Israeli lawmakers are insisting upon making the commemoration of the Nakba illegal.
Recently a number of Israeli cabinet and Knesset Members proposed a “draft law” that would criminalize the remembrance of 1948 Palestinian holocaust (Nakba) by Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship. Interestingly enough, the Jewish state that sets its raison d’être around the remembrance of Jewish suffering is attempting to ban Palestinians from doing exactly the same with their own.
As Khalid Amayreh pointed out, “one Israeli Palestinian parliamentarian compared the proposed law with an imagined promulgation by Germany of a law banning all Jewish activities commemorating the holocaust.” The equation between the Nakba and the Jewish holocaust is well placed. We are talking about two racist crimes of a colossal magnitude. Yet, it is rather obvious that while Germans came collectively to terms with their past, the Jewish state is advancing into its seventh decade of denial bonded with total abuse of an innocent civilian population.
Palestinian villages, towns, orchards, fields and cultural assets were erased soon after 1948. Now Israeli lawmakers are taking the war against Palestinian heritage one step further. It is not just a physical expulsion and erasure of facts on the ground, it is not just racially motivated ethnic cleansing, starvation, land confiscation, house demolition, bombing schools or spreading white phosphorous over populated neighborhoods; now Israel wants to invade the Palestinian mind. Israeli Knesset members seem set on eradicating the Palestinian collective memory. They are trying to officially ban the right to remember.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:09 am
nice! i’m gonna make my own journal