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E-mailOstensible “the only democracy in the Middle East” has a thought police running around. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial, has fired a an employee for comparing the trauma of Holocaust survivors to that of Palestinians whom went through the al-Nakba; the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians with the violent establishment of Israel over Palestine.
Yad Vashem.
A resident of Jerusalem, Itamar Shapira, 29, was an instructor at Yad Vashem. A tour guide for visitors, Itamar has stated that his goal was not to convey any personal views, but, simply, to present history as it is. “I only tried to expose the visitors to the facts, not to political conclusions,” he stated.
A group of Jewish students complained to administrators when they heard the comparison and Shapira was subsequently fired. He has since accused the museum of hypocrisy because it refuses to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians.
“Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors’ arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world’s Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation,” he was quoted at saying to Ha’aretz.
He added, “The Holocaust moved us to establish a Jewish state and the Palestinian nation’s trauma is moving it to seek self-determination, identity, land and dignity, just as Zionism sought these things.”
What Shapira experiences is a great irony: the victims become the victimizers. AS Palestinians laureate Edward Said once noted, the Palestinians are victims of history’s greatest victims: the Jews. That often makes it hard for Palestinians to attract sympathy. But just because one has suffered that they not give him permission to inflict suffering on an innocent people.
Many Holocaust museums refuse to draw the parallel between the oppression the Nazis inflicted against Jews and that which the Jewish state of Israel is inflicting against the Palestinians. Of course, parallels have to be appropriate. It would be false to suggest that Israel is committing a genocide akin to the Nazis. The Holocaust was the 20th century’s greatest tragedy and supporters of the Palestinians should not politicize it or in anyway insult the dead by making them a prop, the way that Zionists do. But just as some people can go to far in making parallels, others refuse to acknowledge any. Instead, some centers, such as the Simon Wiesenthal center, are not only opposed to any pointing out of similarities but also use the Holocaust to give Israel cover to commit its crimes.
And they attack any referencing of Palestinian history because they fear the consequences of such a debate. As Shapira noted, “If Yad Vashem chooses to ignore the facts, for example the massacre at Dir Yassin, or the Nakba [”The Catastrophe,” the Palestinians’ term the events of 1948], it means that it’s afraid of something and that its historic approach is flawed.”
They should end their fear, and embrace a humanistic rather than tribal approach to human suffering and injustice.
People like Shapira prove that there is still good in this world. God bless him.
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Take, for example, Dir Yassin: in 1990, Bir Zeit University (a Palestnian University) published a study declaring that Dir Yassin was not a ”massacre”, but a pitched battle with high casualties on both sides. This was the result of a 5-year study in which hundreds of Arab survivors and witnesses were interviewed. After publication of the study in Arabic and an abstract in English on Bir Zeit’s web site, the PLO demanded that it be removed. A 1998 documentary by the BBC (no friend of Israel) reached the same conclusion independently.
The ”Jenin Massacre” of 2002: Initial Palestinian reports of casualties claimed 5,500 civilians killed, but independent investigations by the UN and Human Rights organizations found a total of 56 dead, of whom less than 20 were civilians.
There’s no need to lie about the scope of deaths in the Holocaust: 6 million Jews, 10 million Christians from Eastern Europe and Russia, almost 1 million gypsies, several thousand Catholic priests and Christian ministers from all the conquered countries and tens of thousands of partisans and civilians murdered in the Nazi-conquered countries make it the most infamous wholesale murder spree in history.
On the other hand, comparing Palestinians claims against actual comfirmed casualties over the years shows an exaggeration factor of at least 2, and in some isolated cases a factor of as much as 100 (like the ”Jenin Massacre” that never happened). Parenthetically, more Palestinians have killed Palestinians over the years than the IDF has– although here, too, there are many lies in Palestinian claims. Hundreds of cases investigated have shown deaths initially claimed to be due to IDF actions have turned out to be ”work accidents” (incompetent bomb-makers killing themselves and others), internal feuds, extralegal lynchings of ”suspected collaborators”, honor killings and even natural causes totally unrelated to any political situation.
If the Palestinians were suffering a real Holocaust, there would be no need for them to lie in this manner. Making such a comparision, as this employee did, is just perpetuating lies invented for propaganda purposes - while perhaps giving visitors the impression that his words represented the museum’s official policy. Making comparisons to the Armenian genocide by the Turks or the genocide in Somalia would have been more appropriate– and much more accurate.
Now before you ask, no, I am not denying that Palestinians get killed by the IDF. What I AM saying is that the Palestinians often exaggerate the numbers and lie about the circumstances– and this has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt too many times to be debatable.