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Di 06.03.12
20 h
Bern, Le Cap (Französische Kirche), Nicolas Manuel-Saal, Predigergasse 3
Marlène Schnieper Nakba – die offene Wunde
[mehr ...]
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55 Years After the Massacre
April 7, 2003 |
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Remembering Deir Yassin
by Jules Rabin |
Deir Yassin was a large human tragedy and it belongs to the whole world, just as the Holocaust belongs to the whole world. Everyone who has an inch of space left in the part of his consciousness that reckons with the grim things of life, should attend to Deir Yassin, as we have attended to the Jewish Holocaust which was its companion-event in the dark 1940's.
I feel called upon, especially as an American Jew, to keep Deir Yassin and all its spawn of smaller Deir Yassins, in my thoughts. Even without being a Zionist, I retain, as a Jew, a kinship with the people of Israel. They, from their side, certainly claim me as a kinsman, and offer me the prize of automatic citizenship. The state of Israel assures me that all that it does, it does in my behalf, inasmuch as I am > a Jew, too.
All that Israel does .... But what if I find abhorrent a great and growing roster of the acts which have been carried out by the Israeli state, for my benefit, as it claims, and in my name? It is then that I am obliged especially and am singled out, as a Jew, to object, to speak, to clamor -- as I have been clamoring, as much as my average selfish nature has allowed and goaded me to do, at intervals, for two years now, against what I would now call the constant Deir-Yassinization of the Palestinian people.
Primo Levi, the distinguished Jewish-Italian writer who survived Auschwitz and later, as some people believe, took his own life because his grief at the world we have become was too great for him to bear, with his death-camp wisdom said a curious thing. He said, with oracular directness, that today, the Palestinians have become the Jews of the Israelis.
I think Levi was right. And I think that this perverse Judaization of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state, which is to say the subjection and casting down and casting out of them by that state, is one of the mordant ironies of the last half century, a turning of history that is enough to make the devil laugh.
That is why I, a Jew, have come here today to speak with remorse about the calamity of Deir Yassin. Because some of my people were responsible for that atrocity. And because they have made the devil laugh at all of us Jews for that. And because as Jew calls to Jew, I am called by the Judaized Palestinians of today to look deep down into the stony, dry well they have been dumped into, and tell what I see there.
Jules Rabin lives in Marshfield, Vermont.
He can be reached at: jhrabin@sover.net
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