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Technology Cannot Wipe Out MEMORIES
What is happening in Lebanon and Palestine
brought back a long chain of memories. It
reminded me, in particular, of when I was 4
or 5 years old. I was born in Lower Baq’a
quarter in Jerusalem in 1941 (i.e., before
Israel was created). There was a Jewish
settlement – Mekor Haim – next to our
neighborhood. What is happening in Lebanon
reminded me of the nights when my parents
(as a result of shelling from the Jewish
settlement) would make my sisters and me
stand under doorframes, believing that they
were the safest places to be, in case a
shell fell on our house. Like all
Palestinians, we did not have shelters. What
is happening today reminded me very vividly
of those days and nights. It is not easy to
forget standing for several hours over a
period of time, totally terrified by the
possibility that a shell may fall down any
minute. Such memories cannot just disappear,
especially when they are accompanied by
feelings of unfairness and injustice.
Unfairness and injustice at that time were
felt more towards the British who gave the
promise to the Zionist organization to help
them build a Jewish state in Palestine –
contrary to the mandate given to them by the
League of Nations, which was to “help”
Palestinians build their own state. Not only
did they not help us build a state but made
us lose more than 82% of the land of
Palestine and take refuge in neighboring
countries – exactly like what is happening
to hundreds of thousands of people today in
Lebanon. One difference between then and now
is that Britain is replaced by the US. All
subsequent attempts and wishes to make us
forget only succeeded in making the memories
sink deeper and become more alive. They
stayed alive not because Palestinians are
stubborn people but because pain,
destruction, and feelings of unfairness and
injustice can never go away. They may recede
for a while, but as soon as something like
what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon takes
place, they become again very vivid. In
response to what happened in 1948, Ben
Gurion, the PM of Israel in the 1950s, said,
“the fathers will die and their children
will forget”. John Foster Dulles (US
Secretary of State then) when asked in the
mid 1950s ‘what about the Palestinians’, he
repeated the same sentence: “fathers will
die and children will forget”. [The same
relationship still persists today: Condalesa
Rice (US Secretary of State) merely repeats
whatever Olmert (PM of Israel) says!] Ben
Gurion and Dulles were able to forget, but
not those who went through the pain,
destruction, and terror. Probably, the only
memories lost are those of the perpetrators,
for they don’t feel the pain of what they
have done. Jews, out of all peoples, should
understand the power of memories, but it
seems that when people become militarily
powerful, they forget the role and depth of
memories in forming people. It was a 16-year
old Lebanese girl who said to her science
teacher, “we are made of stories, not
atoms”. Every person and every community is
made of stories, experiences, memories,
dreams, and of what embodies hope and
captures the imagination in terms of
inspiration and dignity. That’s why, when I
hear people talk about Palestinian identity
in an intellectual abstract sense, I feel
the shallowness of the concept compared to
memories and dreams. That’s why I felt
Israel was so shortsighted to claim, for
several decades, that there is no such thing
as Palestinians; “they did not exist” – as
Golda Meir insisted in 1970! More than any
one else she knew the hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians who were forced out of their
homes, and the more than 400 villages that
were totally destroyed between 1948 and
1952. Just like what is happening now, those
false words were for the ears of Westerners
so that Israel could go on doing what it was
doing. At that time, there was no Hamas or
Hizbullah to justify the attacks. The way to
deal with the facts then was to deny that
Palestinians ever existed!
My parents became especially scared about
our lives as a result of terrorist acts by
Jewish organizations. I remember when my
father took my sisters and me to see the
King David Hotel and, later, the Samiramis
Hotel (both not very far from our house)
that were blown up by Jewish organizations.
My family knew personally the Abu Suwan
family (husband, wife and their five
children) who were killed in the Samiramis
massacre. On the 9th of April
1948, the Deir Yassin massacre was
committed, where most of the inhabitants of
that village were killed. As a result of
that massacre and the threats that the same
would happen to those who would not leave,
my parents decided to take us to Jericho,
believing it would be only for a week or
two. Two months later, they took us to
Ramallah. During that summer, the
inhabitants of Ramla and Lydda were evicted
from their homes; many walked all the way to
Ramallah in the heat of July. They lived in
the fields under trees for a while. We
played with their children. In 1967, more
than another quarter of a million
Palestinians were forced to leave the
refugee camps near Jericho and become
refugees (for the second time) in Jordan.
What is happening in Lebanon today brought
back to my mind all those massacres and
exoduses. Between 1948 and 1967, I lived in
Ramallah, which is less than ten miles away
from our house in Jerusalem, but could never
go there. After the 1967 war, when Israel
occupied the rest of Palestine, I was able
to go and see our home in Jerusalem, but the
people in it did not allow me to go in and
see the inside, where I had a lot of
memories of playing with my sisters and
toys. My mother and my aunts, however,
emotionally could not make the trip; it was
too painful for them. They worked for more
than 20 years (sewing clothes) in order to
build it. It was completed in 1933.
It is worth mentioning two more images that
are stuck in my memory. In 1977, my American
wife was in the center of Ramallah when she
saw an Israeli soldier holding a young boy
by the seat of his pants and his shirt and
slamming the top of his head against a wall.
She honked the horn so he would stop, but he
cussed at her. She was in the last month of
pregnancy with our second son, so she left.
A similar event took place in 1978, when my
father came back after a demonstration,
where he saw two Israeli soldiers holding a
little boy by his hair and smashing his face
against the wall. He stopped the car and
went down. One soldier pointed his gun at
him and ordered him to get back in his car
and leave. He came home very disturbed and
his face was very red. I will never forget
his comment after he told us what he saw:
“these cannot be Jews”. In a sense, he was
defending Judaism against the behavior of
the Israeli soldiers!
What is happening today in Palestine and
Lebanon will add new memories to new
millions of people. It I were an Israeli, I
would be more worried about memories that
the current Israeli onslaught will create
than about falling missiles. Missiles will
eventually end but memories will remain to
determine a lot of what will happen in the
future.
That feeling of the power of memories was
confirmed in my mind during a visit I took
in 2001, to visit my friend Gustavo Esteva
in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, for the first
time, I came face to face with memories that
extended over 500 years (not only 60). The
story of the indigenous populations of
Oaxaca and nearby Chiapas (where the
Zapatistas have been busy transforming their
memories into inspiring and beautiful dreams
and visions of “a world that embraces many
worlds” – as they put it) was a very
inspiring and hopeful story for me. What
struck me most was the fact that all
attempts to completely wipe out memories and
cultures of indigenous peoples in the
Americas failed. Education was a key element
in trying to wipe out memories and cultures.
The motto that was coined by Richard Henry
Pratt, who founded the first Native American
Boarding School, Carlisle Indian School in
Pennsylvania, was “Kill the Indian and Save
the Man” (its purpose was “to reject their
Native American culture”). The “Gradual
Civilizational Act” – introduced in Canada
in the 1840s – is a very revealing story of
how the state, church, business, and
education collaborated in tearing apart
families and communities and in trying to
make children forget their cultures: the
state enacted the policy, education designed
the curriculum, business provided the money,
and the church took care of the execution!
The role of education in dismantling
communities, belittling cultures, and
occupying minds was manifested in different
ways in different places and different
times. In most cases, it was done in ways
that were subtler than in residential
schools. It was done, not only by imposing
certain curricula but also, and more
importantly, by disvaluing what people have.
When the World Bank was allowed to get into
Palestine in 1993 after the Oslo agreement,
one of the first things it got involved in
was education! Similarly, after the
occupation of Iraq, “winning the minds and
hearts of Arab and Muslim youth” was
launched by the US – through education, TV,
newspapers, and books. The main difference
between the various attempts to dismantle
societies – through “helping” them – is in
the words used and the actors accomplishing
the task. The church in the case for Native
Americans was replaced by the World Bank (in
the case of Palestine) in overseeing the
process of imposing a certain view of the
world on students. And, instead of using
‘saving’ and ‘civilizing’, which the church
used, the World Bank uses ‘developing’ and
‘empowering’. The logic is the same. In the
words of Black Hawk, a Sauk chief, in 1832:
"How smooth must be the language of the
whites, when they can make right look like
wrong, and wrong look like right." The World
Bank has been much more successful than
churches and armies in shattering societies,
disvaluing cultures, and stealing resources:
they do it through ‘national’ states,
‘national’ banks, ‘national’ curricula, and
development projects! It is safer, subtler,
and more effective. Distractions it uses are
harder to detect. Again, it is history that
is crucial in understanding the modern
world, and it is history in the form of
memories that can protect us from falling
again into false promises – such as the
promise given to the PLO in 1982 that if
they leave Beirut, the US would protect the
Palestinians, which the Sabra and Shatilla
massacres proved false. Not a single promise
to Palestinians by Britain or the US was
honored. Soon, no doubt, Arabs will be
hearing new and numerous promises. It is one
tool that has been used to defeat people.
The history of promises given to indigenous
peoples in North America testifies to this.
Technology can wipe out villages and towns,
and can kill and silence people; it can
destroy fields and distort facts in official
books, journalists’ reports, and experts’
presentations, analyses, and debates. But it
cannot wipe out memories; it would only make
them sink deeper.
While bombs destroyed what was around us,
words destroyed what was inside us, by
disvaluing our ways of knowing, learning,
relating, and living. Although I experienced
bombardment by shells since I was a little
child, over the years I felt we have also
been bombarded by words. Bombs and words
have been bedmates. Words are crucial in
forming perceptions, conceptions, and
meanings. Monopolizing who is a terrorist is
just one example of how words shape
perceptions and control minds. However,
words such as “underdevelopment” and
“reform” have done much more harm than
obvious ones, because they are subtler and
go deeper. It was at this level – the level
of bombardment of words – that I personally
put my effort to respond to onslaughts from
outside. As a person who worked most of my
life in education and learning, and with
children and youth, dealing with such
bombardments, and healing and protecting us
from them, have constituted my thinking and
work for many years.
Finally, I would like to mention an aspect
that is part of my memory – though ignored
and forgotten from most discussions about
Palestine. It is an aspect that I consider
extremely crucial: the fact that 1948 was
the first time in history when Jerusalem was
practically emptied from its Christian
inhabitants. The creation of Israel uprooted
what (in my opinion) is the most special and
precious Christian community in the world.
We are special and precious not in
any intrinsic, superior, or privileged
sense, but in the sense that we are the only
indigenous Christian group in the world.
What I mean by this is that we are the only
group that embodies the spirit of Jesus,
through living it from one generation to
another since Jesus walked on the land of
Palestine. Most Christian families from
Jerusalem went to Jordan, Lebanon, the US,
and Europe.
No one can predict where what is happening
today is going to lead to but, judging from
past memories, I can say that the following
is almost certain:
1
The current Israeli
assault on Gaza and Lebanon will not solve
any problem; if anything, it is going to add
new ones… and huge ones for that. It is
going to add more pain, more misery, more
refugees and, thus, more memories – not only
for Arabs but also for Israelis.
2
What is happening is
going to stick as vivid memories in people’s
minds, just as what happened in 1948, 1956,
1967, 1982, 1987, 1996, 2000, and 2002 and
all in between stuck in my memory. Memories
are swelling all the time, and feelings of
unfairness and injustice are deepening all
the time. My guess is that this time,
feelings of unfairness and injustice will go
deeper than before because, while in 1948,
most people around the world didn’t know
what was happening, no one can make such a
claim today. The indifference and silence
that the official world shows today is too
much to bear.
3
Just like in the
past, every time Israel thought it succeeded
in eliminating one group, other groups came
into being. As long as the grievances are
not addressed, the problem will keep
emerging in different forms. People are
incredible and unpredictable. Hope cannot be
wiped out from people’s lives. It is
probably the strongest human emotion.
4
Israel’s
technological capacities have advanced a lot
over the years. In terms of political
visions, however, it seems it is still stuck
with what was there since the 1940s, which
itself is a leftover of European dreams of
building empires. A society that has no
visionaries other than those who seek more
control and more means of destruction is
doomed.
5
People are moved by
memories, dreams, and by what captures their
imagination. Current events are increasingly
leading to making Islam central in such
capturing of imagination. No matter what
happens, my guess is that Islam is going to
be a main inspiration. Any attempt to crush
that will be naïve and short sighted. Unlike
national and socialist movements, which
lacked rooted-ness in people’s lives, Islam
is rooted deeply in people’s ways of living.
US and Israel have been ignorant in dealing
with Islam the same way they dealt with
nationalist and leftist movements. Western
and Israeli experts on Islam seem to be only
interested in how to defeat Islam the same
way they defeated communism and national
movements. Islam is not just a movement and
not just a religion or ideology; it is a way
of living that is very deep in millions of
people and communities. When communism was
made illegal in Russia, few hundreds of
people went to the streets to protest. No
one can make Islam illegal or reduce it to a
vision of having a nation state – like what
happened to the Palestinian dream.
6
Human problems
require human solutions; insisting on
“rational” and military solutions is unwise
and self-defeating.
7
Dominating others is
increasingly becoming a disastrous project.
This leaves us with two options: one that
comes from the depth of 500 years of
memories, articulated by the Zapatistas as
“a world that embraces many worlds” (i.e., a
world that embodies respect, dignity,
fairness, and pluralism), OR – the second
option – continue to try to dominate others,
which most probably will lead to destroying
life on this earth.
A basic conviction I have is that the human
spirit is undefeatable. This timeless spirit
is very rarely talked about. It embodies
both dignity and hope. It is difficult to
understand what is happening in the Middle
East without seeing it through dignity and
hope. This human timeless spirit stands in
contradiction with the logic that is
increasingly invading societies around the
world: the logic of winning, control, greed,
and profit. Humanity can be suppressed in
some places at certain times but, as long as
there is injustice, it will always be
boiling underneath the surface, and it will
erupt by various peoples, taking various
forms, depending mainly on the living
culture of the people. Injustice cannot
last. Just like a volcano where boiling
energy has to erupt, and like an earthquake
where a fault has to be corrected, humanity
will also erupt and become alive, until
justice is regained. There is no way to
suppress it completely. This is the beauty
and miracle of life.
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