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Pathologising Memory
Yosefa Loshitzky
Published online: 24 Jan 2007.

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 CTTE_A_185308.fm Page 327 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:52 AM
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1 See Charles S Maier, The
Unmasterable Past:
History, Holocaust, and
German National Identity,
Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1988
2 Andreas Huyssen,
‘Monument and Memory
in a Postmodern Age’, in
The Art of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials in
History, ed James Young,
Prestel, New York, 1994,
p 11
3 For a further discussion of
the globalisation of the
memory of the Holocaust
see Yosefa Loshitzky, ed,
Spielberg’s Holocaust:
Critical Perspectives on
Schindler’s List, Indiana
University Press,
Bloomington and
Indianapolis, 1997.
Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 3/4, May/July, 2006, 327–335
Pathologising Memory
From the Holocaust to the Intifada
Yosefa Loshitzky
Third Text
10.1080/09528820600853761
CTTE_A_185308.sgm
0952-8822
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2006
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yosefal@blueyonder.co.uk
YosefaLoshitzky
and
& Article
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(print)/1475-5297
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Ltd (online)
I think about the Holocaust every day
A B Yehoshua
But the Holocaust ended nearly 60 years ago, and how long can a
nation live on the memory of past victimisation when it is itself now the
victimiser?
Linda Grant
We became the Jews of the Jews
Mahmoud Darwish
Most studies of memory tend to view it positively, in particular its derivative
ceremonial acts of memorialisation and commemoration. Memory in all
its ritualised forms is seen as possessing the therapeutic power to heal collec-
tive traumas. Notions such as coming to terms with the past and mastering
the past – what the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewaltigung1 – are familiar
themes in the scholarly literature on collective memory, as is the postmod-
ern institutionalised cult of memory characterised by an excessive cultiva-
tion of ‘memorial, or museal, sensibility’.2 Within this cult of memory a
big gap opens between memory cultivated by the victims of past atrocities
and the perpetrators of these crimes. No nation is in a rush to ‘commem-
orate’ its past sins, because selective uses of the past are necessary in the
process of building and forging collective and national identities.
Among the flourishing memory cultures, the Holocaust has enjoyed a
privileged if not the most privileged space in recent academic, scholarly
and intellectual forums, as well as in many public and institutional
forums that transcend national contexts through processes of globalisa-
tion (museums, films, etc). The phenomenal success of Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List (1993) is a case in point, perhaps epitomising the trans-
formation of the Holocaust from a Jewish memory to a global memory.3
Yet despite this boom, there are very few studies that are critical of the
way Holocaust memory is used, particularly by those who assume the
role of victims, and the legitimate and unchallenged representatives of
the victims.
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2006)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820600853761
 CTTE_A_185308.fm Page 328 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:52 AM
328
4 Norman G Finkelstein, The
Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the
Exploitation of Jewish
Suffering, Verso, London–
New York, 2001
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5 Peter Novick, The
Holocaust in American
Life, Houghton Mifflin,
New York, 1999
6 Finkelstein, op cit, pp 6–7
7 Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Hannah
Arendt in Tel Aviv’, New
Left Review, no 21, May/
June 2003, p 139. Review
of Idith Zertal, Ha-Ummah
ve ha-Mavet: Historia,
Zikkaron, Politika (Death
and the Nation: History,
Memory, Politics), Dvir,
2002, [in Hebrew]
8 The first significant
criticism of the ‘cult of the
dead’ and the breeding of
nationalistic, racist and
xenophobic feelings in the
Israeli public mind by the
over-prescription of
Holocaust memory was
levelled by Yehuda Elkana,
then a Professor of
Philosophy at Tel Aviv
University (who, as a
young child survived both
Auschwitz and the ‘March
of the Dead’). See Yehuda
Elkana, ‘Bizchut
ha’Shichcha’ [For
Forgetting], Ha’aretz, 2
March 1988.
9 The argument regarding
the Nazification of the
Arabs is not entirely new.
Ella Shohat has argued that
the Arabs in Israeli cinema,
in what she calls the
heroic-nationalist genre,
have been represented as
Nazis. See Ella Shohat,
Israeli Cinema: East/West
and the Politics of
Representation, University
of Texas Press, Austin,
1989. A similar argument
is raised in Yosefa
Loshitzky, Identity Politics
on the Israeli Screen,
University of Texas Press,
Austin, 2001.
One of the most critical studies of the use of Holocaust memory by
certain alleged indirect victims is Norman G Finkelstein’s The Holocaust
Industry,4 which acknowledges its critical debt to Peter Novick’s book
The Holocaust in American Life.5 Finkelstein believes that invocations
of the Nazi genocide are not only often opportunistic, as Novick argues,
but exploitative; it is ‘used to justify the criminal policies of the Israeli
State and US support for these policies’.6 He also argued that the
‘Holocaust industry’ invents memory to increase the negotiating leverage
of Israel and to silence postcolonial voices and revisionist histories of
indigenous genocides.
Israel, the self-appointed sole proprietor of the Shoah (the Hebrew
word for the Jewish Holocaust), is the state which has ‘appropriated the
authority to remember the Shoah, to speak on behalf of its victims (those
who had perished and those who survived), and to teach the nation and
the world its lessons’.7 Few critical voices arise to argue that forgetting
could be blissful and that obsession with the memory of victimhood may
not only be counter-productive but pathological. It not only endangers
the community of commemorators and victims but also the recipient
communities that become the dumping grounds of the lessons of this
memory.8
The culture of memory and the critique of this culture become all the
more difficult and complex when ethno-national groups who have
traditionally occupied the role of history’s victims find themselves in a
position of power over other groups. Such is the case of the State of
Israel, which, despite its own self-adulating discourse as ‘the only
democracy in the Middle East’, is in fact an apartheid state, an ethnoc-
racy in which one ethno-religious group (the Jews) exercises domination
over another minority group (the Palestinian Arabs).
I would like to provide some reflections on the uses and abuses of the
memory of the Holocaust by Israel with particular emphasis on the
current al-Aqsa intifada. The abuse of Holocaust memory in the context
of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict has already been discussed in a number
of studies, notably Idith Zertal’s recent book Death and the Nation.
Zertal analyses the creation, mobilisation and manipulation of a hege-
monic national memory and historical consciousness in the process of
constructing the Israeli nation-state during what she calls ‘the short
Zionist century’. The use and abuse of Holocaust memory is, according
to Zertal, the major locus of this process. The Israeli discourse on power
has been perceived in the state public sphere not only as a necessary and
inevitable derivative of the reality of the Arab–Israeli conflict, but also as
a redemptive act that retroactively assigns meaning to the Holocaust and
to the history of the Jewish Diaspora. One of Zertal’s major arguments is
that the Shoah has been misused in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians
and the neighbouring Arab states to the extent that the Arabs have been
Nazified.9 Zertal completed her book after the eruption of the al-Aqsa
intifada on 28 September 2000, but ends it thematically and symbolically
with the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the icon of the Israeli
Labour-leaning peace camp, on 5 November 1995.
A displacement occurred in the course of Israel’s effort to galvanise
the Israeli/Jewish nation and construct its collective identity. The Arab,
and particularly the Palestinian, was to become the container of Jewish
fantasies of power and revenge. Jewish powerlessness and vulnerability,
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10 Ari Shavit, ‘Ha’Pasion shel
Yehoshua’ [Yehoshua’s
Passion]. An interview with
A B Yehoshua, Ha’aretz,
Friday Supplement, Friday,
19 March 2004, p 27
11 On the ideologically laden
terms ‘Israeli Arabs’,
‘Israeli Palestinians’, etc,
see Dan Rabinowitz,
‘Oriental Fantasy: How the
Palestinians Have Become
Israeli Arabs’, Theory and
Criticism, 4, Fall 1993,
pp 141–51 [in Hebrew].
See also Marwan Bishara,
Palestine/Israel: Peace or
Apartheid, Zed Books,
London, 2001, note 1, p
39. For a very interesting
article that explores the
highly complex
relationships between the
Arabs (including the
Palestinians) and the
Holocaust, see Azmi
Bishara, ‘ha’Aravim
veha’Shoah: Nituah
Beayatiyuta shel Ot Hibur’
[The Arabs and the
Holocaust: An Analysis of
the Problematics of
Conjunction], Zmanim: A
Historical Quarterly, 53,
Summer 1995, pp 54–7 [in
Hebrew].
12 Nakba is the term adapted
by the Palestinians to mark
the catastrophe
experienced by them as a
result of the tragedy of the
1948 war. For the
relationship between the
Nakba and memory see
Nur Masalha, ‘Nakba,
Memory and
Commemoration’, in Nur
Masalha, The Politics of
Denial: Israel and the
Palestinian Refugee
Problem, Pluto Press,
London, 2003, pp 165–9.
329
epitomised by the Holocaust, was transformed into a fantasy of absolute
power exercised against the Palestinian as a substitute for the European
goy (gentile). The disavowal of the old Jew and the displacement of the
revenge fantasy from the powerful Gentile to the powerless and dispos-
sessed Palestinian, from whom the land was taken by force, resulted
ironically in the oppressor turning himself into a victim. This act of
inversion can be viewed either (according to a generous reading) as an
expression of a suppression of guilt or (according to a less favourable
reading) as a cynical attempt to perpetuate the traditional role accorded
to the Jew – that of the victim – in order to score political and moral
gains over the Palestinians.
Before the eruption of the al-Aqsa intifada, Israel was on the verge of
a cultural civil war whereby different identity groups – ultra-orthodox,
Mizrahim (Oriental Jews), Russian immigrants and others – were
competing for political and cultural hegemony and contesting narratives
of national memory, sacrifice and victimhood. Yet, with the outbreak of
the al-Aqsa intifada, this fragmented Israeli society, facing what it
prefers to call ‘the war against the Palestinians’, has turned itself once
again into a united nation, transcending former rivalries in its struggle
against a unifying enemy.
The resurrection of the memory of the Holocaust played a crucial
role in this most recent stage of amalgamating an Israeli united front –
‘the cement floor’, in the words of Israeli writer A B Yehoshua10 – thus
showing again the power of memory in consolidating the nation and
perpetuating its self-constructed myths about itself and its enemies.
How did memory play into this old and new paradigm of ‘us’ versus
‘them’? How has identity politics, based on competing narratives, been
suppressed, erased and homogenised in the service of national unity?
And how has the memory of the Holocaust been invoked by the Israeli
state and its hegemonic apparatus to dehumanise and destroy the
Palestinians and to re-create Israeli Jews as history’s victims once
again?
THE ENEMY WITHIN
One of the major fears of the Israeli public triggered by the al-Aqsa inti-
fada was the ‘other within’, the so-called ‘Israeli Arabs’ who constitute
twenty per cent of the Israeli population and who for the first time in the
history of the state of Israel protested on a large scale in solidarity with
their brethren in the Occupied Territories.11 The mass demonstrations
that broke out on 28 September 2000 were provoked by the notorious
visit of Ariel Sharon to the Haram al-Sharif on Temple Mount, a
contested place of religious significance to both Muslims and Jews, a
palimpsest site loaded with religious, mythical, ‘authentic’ and invented
memories. The protests that erupted at Haram al-Sharif were violently
suppressed by the Israeli security forces. The Palestinian citizens of Israel
reacted by organising other large-scale protests within Israel and as a
result thirteen young men, all holding Israeli citizenship, were killed and
in some cases deliberately murdered.
These demonstrations were literally and symbolically a culmination
of the emergent culture of Nakba memory that has been cultivated,12
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330
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13 It is beyond the scope of
this article to discuss
the distinctions between
the different sectors of the
Palestinian people,
particularly between the
Palestinians who remained
in historical Palestine after
the 1948 exodus, and the
Palestinians of the West
Bank and Gaza. Suffice it
to say that the status of the
Palestinians who live in
Israel is particularly
complex (though less
difficult than that of the
Palestinians who live in the
occupied territories),
mostly because of the
pressure put on them by
Israel to prove their
‘loyalty’ to the Jewish state.
For a discussion of the
state of the Palestinian
minority in Israel see
Marwan Bishara, ‘Israel’s
“Enemy Within”: The
Million Forgotten
Palestinians’, in Palestine/
Israel: Peace or Apartheid,
Zed Books, London, 2001,
pp 28–40.
14 For a short discussion of
the Palestinian
intellectuals’ appeal to
recognise the Jewish
Holocaust see Loshitzky,
Identity Politics, op cit,
note 21, p 189.
15 See Masalha, The Politics
of Denial, op cit
particularly in the last decade, by the Palestinians who remained in
historical Palestine after the establishment of the state of Israel.13 This
was a new development only in the sense of becoming formally and
ritually more pervasive and public among the Palestinians in Israel.
The culture of memory expressed to a large extent an attempt to
subvert and resist the so-called ‘Israelisation’ of the ‘Israeli Arabs’.
Prior to the al-Aqsa intifada there had been a limited degree of toler-
ance in Israel towards the revival of the memory of the Nakba, but
the outbreak of the second intifada was a frightening experience for
most Israelis who became conscious – after many years of living under
the delusion of relative ‘peaceful coexistence’ – that the ‘enemy’ was
still within. These Israelis, including the liberal Zionist Left, realised
that the symbolic annihilation of the Palestinians by attempting to
convert them into ‘Israelis’ had failed – the Palestinians were still
there.
THE COUNTER-MEMORY OF THE NAKBA
The emergence and revival of the Nakba memory can be viewed as a
counter-memory to the Jewish memory of the Holocaust, which has
been the major foundational myth of the Israeli state. It was also a
reaction to the abuse of the Holocaust memory in justifying the
continuing oppression of the Palestinians and the ongoing occupation
of the territories conquered by Israel in the 1967 war. It is important
to emphasise that despite the abuse of this memory by Israel in its
war against the Palestinian people, the Palestinian intellectual elite
has not countered by creating a simplistic comparison between the
Holocaust and the Nakba.14 The Nakba as a political-historical
concept signifying the tragedy suffered by the Palestinians has been
acknowledged by the international community and even by some
progressive sectors of the Israeli public. The immediate political
implications for the acceptance of the Nakba as a term marking
national trauma inflicted by one ethno-national group on another
have been catastrophic for the mainstream Israeli point of view,
based as it is, in the words of Palestinian historian Nur Masalha, on
‘the politics of denial’.15 The recognition that the Palestinians have
indeed suffered a catastrophic tragedy as a result of the Zionist settle-
ment in Palestine meant that the international community, Europe in
particular, where historical anti-Semitism and the Holocaust had been
most ferociously enacted and executed, bears the main responsibility
for the solution of the ‘Jewish question’, which has ironically trans-
formed into the ‘Palestinian question’. This meant engaging with the
long-suppressed issue of the Palestinian refugees and the right of
return that has been consistently denied and disavowed by Israel.
Israel, threatened by this turn of events that shifted the boundaries of
victimhood constructed by its national mythology, responded by
claiming that the Jews are again the victims of non-Jews. Conse-
quently, a new discourse on Israeli victimhood, actively supported by
leading Israeli academics and intellectuals including the repentant
New Historian, Benny Morris, has emerged since the eruption of the
al-Aqsa intifada.
 CTTE_A_185308.fm Page 331 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:52 AM

331

A PASSPORT TO EUROPE

The Israeli discourse on victimhood, supported by the growing post-9/11

paranoia in the American Jewish community as well as the intensifying
tensions in France (the largest Jewish community in Western Europe)
between Muslims and Jews as a result of the al-Aqsa intifada, has
exported the Palestinian–Israeli conflict to Europe where the ‘original
sin’ of anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust. A discourse has flour-
ished on so-called ‘new anti-Semitism’ in Europe, a misleading term for a
phenomenon that is not related to historical European anti-Semitism,
reinforced by anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments that characterise
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the post-9/11 Western zeitgeist. Israeli policy has aspired to globalise the
Palestinian–Israeli conflict so as to include it in the larger ideological and
political frame of the so-called ‘war on terror’. This in turn helped Israel
to delegitimise the Palestinian resistance and to gain international
political and moral support.
Sharon’s inflammatory rhetoric warning that the Muslim presence in
Europe is endangering the life of Jewish people capitalised on growing
European xenophobia and Islamophobia fed by fears of terror and anxi-
eties about Europe being ‘swamped’ by undesirable immigrants.16 This
rhetoric was cynically calculated to decontextualise and delegitimise the
Palestinian struggle by presenting it as part of a larger Muslim/Arab
conspiracy to invade and control the Western world. In an ironic twist to
Jewish history, Sharon’s intervention in the European debate on immigra-
tion would seem to raise the spectre of The Protocol of the Elders of Zion
from the graveyard of Jewish memory of racial persecution. In Sharon’s
hands the ‘Elders of Zion’ have become the ‘Elders of Arabia’ and Islam.
Sharon’s words of incitement were also planned to guilt-trip the Europeans
on the Holocaust and consequently to silence any criticism against his
government’s policy by identifying the fight against anti-Semitism with an
unconditional and non-critical support of Israel. The equation between
anti-Semitism and criticism levelled at Israel (or even only at its current
government), which underlies Sharon’s racist attack against Muslims, has
become an acceptable norm in the European public sphere, not to mention
the Jewish communities of Western Europe, which have consistently failed
to recognise that anti-Semitism is only one form of racism.
The export of the conflict to the European scene followed by Israel’s
demonisation of Europe reintroduced not the new but the old Europe, the
historical cradle of anti-Semitism. This new discourse on the new anti-
Semitism, which invokes the memory of ‘bad Europe’, still perceived by
many Holocaust survivors as the biggest Jewish cemetery in the world,
served other Israeli interests as well. Since the eruption of the second inti-
fada and the growing wave of suicide bombings many Israelis have tried
to emigrate from the country or at least secure a second passport just in
case, a trend that received little publicity, particularly in the international
media. Queues of Israelis in pursuit of European passports have flooded
the foreign consulates in Tel Aviv, the most popular among them being
16 See http://
www.HAARETZ.com, the German and Austrian consulates. Since Poland’s recent membership
from Reuters, ‘Sharon: in the EU, the Polish consulate has become the new Mecca for Israelis of
Muslim Presence in Europe Polish background. This panic to get a foreign and preferably European
is Endangering the Life of
Jewish People’, Monday passport is odd in light of official Zionist and Israeli ideology, which has
24 November, 2003 engraved the image of Europe (and particularly Poland) in the minds of
 CTTE_A_185308.fm Page 332 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:52 AM

332

Israelis as ‘the land of the dead’. Furthermore, as Zionist ideology is based

on the ‘negation of exile’, of Jewish life in the Diaspora outside the ‘land
of Israel’, this push for European passports signals a serious crack in
the Zionist edifice. Zionist ideology claims that ‘the land of Israel’ is the
only suitable place for the survival of the Jewish people because ‘the
whole world is against us’, yet Israeli people feel insecure and vulnerable
in this ‘land of Israel’ despite subscribing to the promises of the messianic
Zionist utopia.
This evident tension between growing ultra-nationalism on the one
hand and insecurity on the other unmasks the pragmatic failure of Zion-
ism to provide personal and collective security for Jews. The new
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discourse on anti-Semitism, which portrays the new Europe as invaded

by fanatic Muslims, attempts to repair the fragile Zionist masquerade
and discourage Israelis from emigrating. Sharon’s inflammatory rhetoric
implied that there is ‘no place like home’ and Europe, despite its facelift
in the form of the expanding EU, will always be Europe, ie, anti-Semitic
and inhospitable to Jews. Zionist opposition to Jews returning to Europe
has combined with a growing denial of the right of Palestinians to return
to their homeland, thus reinforcing the symbolic link between the memo-
ries of the Holocaust and the Nakba. We should note the coincidence
that Zionist opposition to European return came as a response to critical
voices among European Jewish intellectuals who, in reaction to the
events of the al-Aqsa intifada, called for the return of Jews to Europe,
one of their major cultural homelands.
The distress felt by the Israeli elite facing the threat of exodus to Europe
was best expressed by the writer A B Yehoshua, a faithful representative
of the Israeli Zionist Left:

There are moments of panic about identity. Particularly now when I see
one million Israelis asking for Polish passports, it depresses me so much.
Sometimes I am afraid that I’ll stay here all by myself, alone. Paradoxi-
cally, they [ie, the Ashkenazi Jews; Yehoshua is from a Sephardi back-
ground] who came here with all this terrible Shoah will become European
again and I’ll stay here, all alone with Jerusalem of the old Yishuv [the
Jewish minority who lived in Palestine prior to Zionist settlement]. It
angers me to death.17

We might recall Hannah Arendt’s prophetic words of warning in the

1940s: ‘Rather than organizing a powerful popular movement of world
Jewry, relying on their own power to achieve their aims, and allying
themselves with the oppressed people of the Near East’, the Zionist
movement, ‘sold out at the very first moment to the powers to be’. The
ideology of eternal anti-Semitism led the Zionists into ‘another typical
response of the persecuted Diaspora Jew: rather than fighting anti-
Semitism on its own ground, the Zionist solution was to escape’.18

17 Ari Shavit, ‘Yehoshua’s

Passion’, op cit, p 27 THE MEMORY OF POWERLESSNESS AND THE FANTASY
18 Hannah Arendt, The Jew OF ABSOLUTE POWER
as Pariah: Jewish Identity
and Politics in the Modern Upon one of the many reinvasions of the West Bank during the second
Age, intro and ed Ron H
Feldman, Grove Press, intifada, an Israeli army officer said to members of the foreign press that
New York, 1978, p 30 he was glad to reconquer the Palestinian cities because by doing so he was
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19 For a discussion of the
‘militarisation’ of the
Holocaust by Israel see
Loshitzky, Identity Politics,
op cit, pp 20–1 and note
23, p 182.
20 Israel ranks fourth or fifth
in world military power.
According to Israel defence
minister Shaul Mofaz,
Israel accounts for ten per
cent of the world’s arms
exports (published by
Globes, http://
www.globes.co.il, accessed
23 May 2004).
21 David Grossman, ‘Israel
Has Won for Now, But
What Is Victory When It
Brings No Hope?’,
Guardian, G2, Monday,
30 September 2002, p 3
22 Mary Beth Stein, ‘Berlin/
Berlin: The Wall in the
Expressive Culture of a
Divided City’, PhD
dissertation, Indiana
University, 1993, p 5
23 Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism,
Verso, London–New York,
1991, p 6
24 Liliane Weissberg,
‘Memory Confined’,
Documents, 4/5, 1994,
p 82
333
ensuring that what happened to his mother, an inmate at Bergen-Belsen
during the Holocaust, would never happen again. Was this officer
reciting the official line of the Israeli army, which in recent years has
consistently ‘militarised’ the Holocaust,19 or was he ‘authentically’
convinced of the truth of his statement? What is clear is that his words
express a strong belief in the victimisation of the Jewish people and a
complete failure to recognise the real power imbalance between the two
parties in conflict. This officer was in charge of a massive ground and air
offensive launched by Israel, a nuclear power estimated to have the fifth
largest army in the world, against an occupied people with only a few
lightly armed resistance fighters.20
This inversion of power astounds any objective observer. Yet it
exposes one of the pathological manifestations of the perpetual cultiva-
tion of the Holocaust memory by the Israeli state. This Israeli officer,
like many other Israelis, believed he had to re-occupy Palestinian land
and destroy life and property because, if he did not, Israel would turn
into Bergen-Belsen. The mighty oppressor and not the occupied is in this
case the victim and his deeds are performed in the service of preventing
re-victimisation. Despite the discrepancy of power between Israel and its
neighbours, Israel persists in viewing itself as a victim. In the words of
the Israeli author, David Grossman:
The Israelis, the citizens of the strongest military power in the region, are
once more, with strange enthusiasm, walling themselves up behind their
sense of being persecuted, vulnerable victims. The Palestinian threat –
ridiculous in terms of the balance of power, but effective in its results –
has returned Israel, with depressing speed, to the experience of living in
fear of utter destruction. That, of course, justifies a brutal response to the
threat.21
BEYOND THE WALL: THE MEMORY OF THE GHETTO
The most powerful as well as symbolic symptom of the Holocaust
syndrome, as manifested in the Israeli discourse on the al-Aqsa intifada,
is the resurrection of the Apartheid Wall or what Israel prefers to call in
sanitised language the ‘security fence’. As Mary Beth Stein argues, in her
discussion of the Berlin Wall: ‘Walls divide up space, and in doing so
they create places that are bounded, claimed, named and contested.’22
Boundaries have long been recognised as not only creating physical
space but also organising national and cultural identity. Boundaries, to
use Benedict Anderson’s term, construct ‘imagined communities’.23
If the Berlin Wall concretised Winston Churchill’s famous metaphor
of the ‘iron curtain’, then Israel’s wall is a concretisation of Israeli para-
noia nurtured by growing ultra-nationalist, racist and genocidal senti-
ments in words and actions. The ‘security’ rhetoric behind this
monstrous monument, deemed like its German counterpart ‘to be hostile
to human beings’,24 cannot mask its ideological agenda, which goes far
beyond Israel’s immediate ‘political gains’, such as confiscating the most
fertile lands of the West Bank, separating Palestinian villagers and their
lands, disrupting the day-to-day life of the Palestinian population and
controlling water resources as part of Israel’s attempt to ethnically
cleanse the Occupied Territories. Much like the Berlin Wall and despite
 CTTE_A_185308.fm Page 334 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:52 AM
334
25 Edward Said, Orientalism,
Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London, 1978, p 54
26 Yosefa Loshitzky,
‘Constructing and
Deconstructing the Wall’,
Clio: A Journal of
Literature, History and the
Philosophy of History, 26/
3, Spring 1997, p 276
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27 Ibid
28 I am borrowing the term
‘superimposed boundary’
from Stein, ‘Berlin/Berlin’,
op cit
29 James Clifford, ‘Traveling
Cultures’, in Cultural
Studies, eds Lawrence
Grossberg, Carry Nelson
and Paula Treichler,
Routledge, London, 1992,
p 109
30 The Warsaw Ghetto revolt
has been an icon of heroism
and martyrdom for the
Zionist Israeli state. In the
early days of Israel the
‘shame’ projected by the
Holocaust as a
manifestation of Jewish
humiliation and weakness
was suppressed and
transformed into the cult of
Holocaust military-style
heroism epitomised by the
Warsaw Ghetto rebellion.
The Holocaust
Remembrance Day in Israel
is called ‘Yom Ha’Shoah
Ve’hagevura’ (Day of the
Shoah and Heroism). The
Jewish State perceives itself
as the heroic redemption of
the Holocaust. For a further
discussion see Loshitzky,
Identity Politics on the
Israeli Screen (particularly
chapters 1, 2 and 3), op cit;
Tom Segev, The Seventh
Million (particularly the
section on ‘Holocaust and
Heroism’, pp 421–45);
James Young, The Texture
of Memory: Holocaust
Memorials and Meanings,
Yale University Press, New
Haven–London, 1993. See
in particular Part III, ‘Israel:
Holocaust, Heroism, and
National Redemption’,
pp 209–81.
31 Young, The Texture of
Memory, ibid, p vii
its relatively short ‘life-span’, the Israeli wall has already acquired
symbolic meanings that transcend its seemingly pragmatic political
intention. The Berlin Wall was ‘a demarcation line between East and
West’ that played a significant symbolic role in the ‘imaginative geogra-
phy’25 ‘of the Cold War, détente, and finally the collapse of the Commu-
nist regimes in Eastern Europe which brought to an end the dominance
of a bipolar world system’.26 The brutality of the Berlin Wall, the ‘Wall
of shame’ as it was called by Western media, ‘and its arbitrary status as a
metaphor of the bipolar world system – the geographical dichotomy of
freedom/repression’27 – turned the concrete wall into a phenomenon that
captured the public imagination through its construction of a ‘geography
of fear’.
Walls function as a ‘superimposed boundary’,28 a specific place of
‘hybridity and struggle, policing and transgression’.29 Walls raise ques-
tions regarding the creation of the politics of otherness by generating a
binarism of ‘Us versus Them’. The Israeli wall functions in this way by
erecting a boundary between self and other, the ‘civilised’ (the Israeli)
and the ‘barbarian’ (the Palestinian), the coloniser (the Israelis
masquerading as the righteous owners of Palestinian land) and the
colonised (Palestinians ‘contained’ under curfews and locked behind
electrified barbed-wire preventing them from ‘invading’ their historical
homeland).
The Israeli ‘separation wall’ is the materialisation of a fantasy of
absolute power and its ultimate revenge against the historical powerless-
ness and racial exclusion suffered by the Jewish people throughout their
history, best symbolised by life inside the ghetto walls. This fantasy has
been projected on the powerless Palestinians as a replacement for the
powerful goy. But, by building a Palestinian ghetto, the Israelis have
unwittingly built a ghetto for themselves, a ‘voluntary ghetto’, further
isolating Israel from its neighbours, from the Middle East region and the
rest of the world, thus reinforcing and perpetuating their self-prophesis-
ing perception that ‘the whole world is against us’. If the original Zionist
dream was to liberate the ghetto Jew – to get the Jew out of the ghetto
and the ghetto out of the Jew – then reality has proved that dream
wrong. The European ghetto has been replaced by a pariah ghetto state,
a highly militarised ghetto in the Middle East.
Marek Edelmann, whose role as one of the leaders of the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising was downplayed by Israel and Zionist historiography due
to his affiliation with the anti-Zionist Bund, has compared Palestinian
fighters with Warsaw Ghetto Jewish fighters. It is not surprising that his
comparison caused much controversy in Israel. A third wall goes up in
Israel’s refusal to see the tragically ironic resonance of Israel’s ‘separation
wall’, designed to preserve the ‘purity’ of the Jewish State, with the walls
of the Warsaw Ghetto separating ‘pure’ Aryan and ‘polluted’ Jewish
blood.30
The Berlin Wall was regarded as an ‘involuntary’ war memorial,
‘Germany’s greatest, if unintended, monument to the Second World War’
in James Young’s words.31 The view of the Wall ‘as an imposed punish-
ment on the German people for their horrendous crimes was quite perva-
sive in post World War II German historical consciousness’ and ‘the
division of Germany was, psychologically speaking, perceived as a just
punishment for Nazi crimes’, although in reality ‘this state of affairs was
 CTTE_A_185308.fm Page 335 Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:52 AM
32 Loshitzky, ‘Constructing
and Deconstructing the
Wall’, op cit, p 286
33 Ibid, p 287
34 Ibid, p 288. Pierre Nora,
‘Between Memory and
History: Les Lieux de
Memoire’, trans Marc
Roudebush,
Representations 26, 1989,
p 19
35 For some of the more
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interesting sources on this
issue see Masalha, The
Politics of Denial, op cit;
Meron Benvenisti: Sacred
Landscapes: The Buried
History of the Holy Land
Since 1948, University of
California Press, Berkeley,
2000; Susan Slymovics,
‘The Memory of Place:
Rebuilding the Pre-1948
Palestinian Village’,
Diaspora, 3/2, Fall 1994,
pp 157–68; Jonathan
Boyarin, ‘Ruins, Mounting
Towards Jerusalem’, in
Palestine and Jewish
History: Criticism at the
Borders of Ethnography,
University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis–
London, 1996, pp 238–51.
36 Masalha, The Politics of
Denial, op cit, pp 32–3
37 Avot Yeshurun, Ha’Shever
Hasuri Afrikani [The
Syrian–African Rift:
Poems], Siman Kria, Tel
Aviv, 1974 [in Hebrew,
translation mine]. It should
be clear to the reader that I
am definitely not
suggesting here a simplistic
comparison or analogy
between the Jewish Shoah
and the Palestinian Nakba,
nor am I interested in a
competition over
victimhood. Rather I am
trying to problematise and
criticise the use of the
memory of the Holocaust
by Israel and to propagate
a new politics of
recognition. Furthermore, I
strongly believe that as
long as the memory of
Palestinian dispossession is
not recognised by Israel,
there is no return from the
primary scene of the
‘return of the repressed’.
335
rooted in different causes’.32 But, for the Germans, the Wall was consid-
ered a symbol ‘of the Nazi past whose influence spilled over into the
present. As such, the Wall was the concrete expression of punishment.’33
Although the Berlin Wall ‘was not recognised as a war memorial, it had
the power to evoke war memory, however subliminal. After all, modern
memory, as Pierre Nora suggests, relies entirely on the materiality of the
trace.’34 The Israeli attempt in the post-Berlin Wall era to build a bigger
and ‘better’ wall than the German monument to disgrace (when
completed the Israeli ‘separation wall’ will be twice the height of the
Berlin Wall) invites some disturbing reflections on the transfer of guilt.
Perhaps Israel’s wall of shame is the Jewish state’s involuntary monument
to its crimes against the Palestinians.
CONCLUSION
The constant references made by official representatives of Israel, its
leading intellectuals and academics, as well as by ordinary Israelis, to the
Holocaust in the context of this Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada demonstrate
a repetitive and consistent ideological pattern that has reached the status
of a pathologically dangerous myth. Israel suffers from a ‘surplus of
Holocaust memory’ that has been systematically exploited to support its
denial of Palestinian rights and suffering. The transmission of the trauma
of the Holocaust from survivors’ memory to successors’ memory has
been mediated and manipulated by the Zionist state apparatus of Israel
in order to justify its continuing oppression of the Palestinian people.
The excessive nurturing of Holocaust memory and its mobilisation
towards ultra-nationalist and racist ends has been counter-balanced by
what the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha calls ‘the politics of denial’
based not only on the political denial of the rights of the Palestinians but
also on the negation of the memory of the Nakba. Since 1948 Israel has
practised a politics of repossession of the place of atrocity by destroying
the physical remains of Palestinian habitation in historical Palestine, and
by physical and cultural erasure of Palestinian memory and presence in
what is today the State of Israel.35
The narrative of the Holocaust as displayed in most Holocaust muse-
ums, and in Yad Vashem in particular, represents the establishment of
the State of Israel as the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem, the
closure of the Jewish narrative in the ‘short Zionist century’. Yet, Yad
Vashem, it should be remembered, is located not far from Deir Yassin,
the site of the most notorious massacre of Palestinian civilians in 1948
by Jewish militias, which, in the words of Masalha, ‘became the single
most important contributory factor to the 1948 exodus’.36 The site
where the Deir Yassin village once existed and in which between 120
and 254 unarmed inhabitants, including women, the elderly and
children, were murdered, can be seen from Yad Vashem not only on a
clear day. ‘The Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of
the Arabs of the Land of Israel are but one Holocaust of the Jewish
people’, Avot Yeshurun, the Polish-Jewish Israeli poet, reminds us. ‘The
two Holocausts stare one another straight in the face.’37