In Clear Sight of Yad Vashem
(January 2006)
By Paul Eisen
Over the years, our attention has been drawn to the close proximity of the
village of Deir Yassin to the Jewish Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem. Jews have
been encouraged to visit Deir Yassin, the symbolic starting point of nearly six
decades of Palestinian dispossession, and from there to look across to Yad
Vashem. Palestinians (if only they could!) have also been asked to visit Yad
Vashem - the symbol of Jewish suffering - and to look across the valley toward
the birth site of their own tragedy.
Everybody was happy. Jews of conscience were of course pleased to see Jewish
suffering again at the centre of the discourse but also happy to extend their
narrative of suffering to include Palestinians. Palestinians were perhaps less
pleased at having - yet again - to acknowledge Jewish suffering in order to help
achieve their own liberation, but they recognized the importance of the
publicity that the link between Deir Yassin and Yad Vashem brought to their
cause.
Of course, one had to be careful. As is so often the case with these things,
there was always a but. After all, who in their right mind would compare the
massacre of a hundred Palestinians at Deir Yassin with the industrial-scale
slaughter of six million Jews? And who would dare draw comparison the 1948
expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians to the near-successful attempt at
physically exterminating every last Jewish man, women and child in Europe?
Both atrocities have seen their fair share of deniers over the years. Many
Zionists, either with conscious intent or out of ignorance, have denied Deir
Yassin. "There was no massacre at Deir Yassin," they say; "It was simply a
battle - a battle that the Palestinians lost. These things happen in war and
anyway, they did the same to us." Also, "No, the Palestinians were not expelled;
they ran away, and anyway, they didn't love the land as we love the land - just
look how neglected it was until we came along to make the desert bloom."
The Holocaust too has come under assault. Over the last fifty years, revisionist
scholars have amassed a formidable body of substantial evidence, which runs in
direct opposition to the traditional Holocaust narrative. "Where is the
evidence," they say, "for this alleged gargantuan mass-murder? Where are the
documents? Where are the traces and remains? Where are the weapons of murder?"
These revisionists all acknowledge of course, that there was a terrible assault
on Jews on the part of the National Socialist government, but disagree as to the
scale, motive, and methods cited in the typical narrative, a narrative that most
of us choose or are obliged to accept. "What befell the Jews", they say, "was a
brutal ethnic cleansing accompanied by dispossession, pillage and massacre."
A brutal ethnic cleansing accompanied by dispossession, pillage and massacre...
terms surely familiar to any Palestinian.
But no matter how similar the Jewish and Palestinian histories of suffering may
seem, the similarities conceal important differences:
First, by all accounts, and according to any version of the events, what was
done to the Jews of Europe took place a long distance from Yad Vashem, while
what was done to the Palestinian people took place right there at the village of
Deir Yassin and right there throughout the whole of Palestine.
Second, the perpetrators of the atrocity against Jews had nothing to do with
Palestine or Palestinians, while perpetrators of the Palestinian tragedy were
and are Jews.
Third, the perpetrators of the atrocity against Jews have been roundly condemned
over the years and punished for their crimes, and have mostly shown contrition,
while the perpetrators of the massacre at Deir Yassin have been honored for
their crimes, continue to take pride in them, and live on in their ideology and
in their deeds.
Fourth, what befell the Jews had a beginning, a middle, and an end, while the
assault on the Palestinians goes on with no end in sight.
And one final difference: If the living evidence for the veracity of the
Holocaust narrative is a safe, secure and empowered Jewish people, at home
wherever they may be, the living evidence for the veracity of Deir Yassin and
the Nakba is a Palestinian people dispossessed and exiled and longing to go
home.
Paul Eisen, Director
Deir Yassin Remembered
paul@eisen.demon.co.uk