Technology Cannot Wipe Out MEMORIES
By Munir Fasheh
Harvard University, 25 July 2006
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.