My contribution to SNOW-WHITE Ed. Dror Feiler. The book was published 10 years after ISraeli ambassador Mazel destroyed Feilers sculpture in Stockholm. On the symbolic elimination of Palestinians Nurit Peled-Elhanan The first ambassador of Israel to Scandinavia was my maternal grandfather Dr. Avraham Katznelson-Nissan. He was sent to Sweden immediately after Jewish terrorists murdered the count Bernadotte who came to Palestine on a peace mission. My grandfather, who was the minister of Health for a short time, was sent to Scandinavia for two reasons. First because he was a man of culture, a gentleman and an excellent diplomat; But more important to us here - he was sent away by Ben Gurion, who wanted to distance him for his humanist views regarding the indigenous people of the land of Palestine. My grandfather belonged to Brith Shalom, a clandestine movement headed by Martin Buber that advocated a bi-national state in Palestine. He considered the Palestinians as the people of the land and could neither disregard nor disrespect them. My grandfather was a great lover of the arts. He had, as the story goes, saved a months salary from the Tzarist army where he served as physician, in order to buy a ticket for Isadora Duncans performance whose nudity he had covered chivalrously with his coat at the end of the performance. He supported the Philharmonic orchestra and the Israeli theatre. And while in Sweden, he and my grandmother, Dr. Sima Kaplan-Nissan, learned Swedish and befriended artists and painters, whose works adorned their house. My grandfather was a liberal Jew and a Zionist. I was thinking of him and of what I remember from Stockholm and the ambassadors house when the appalling story of ambassador Mazels aggressive behavior made headlines. And I thought how ashamed and angry my grandfather would have been at the bestialization Israeli diplomacy has undergone in only one generation. Mazel is a product of Israeli education and culture, while my grandfather was part of the Jewish liberal intelligentsia of Eastern Europe, who embraced Jewish tradition with modern democratic culture and values of which very little has remained in Israeli culture today. Racism was not part of his kit of values, while it is the prime value in Israeli social discourse today. The bestiality of Israeli diplomacy as represented by a Mazel or a Liberman, is only a reflection of the bestialization of Israeli society, especially regarding others. Mazel was applauded in Israel by the prime-minister Sharon, himself responsible for the killing of hundred times more human beings – Israeli , Palestinian, Egyptians , Lebanese, Druze and Bedouins - than any suicide bomber, by Nathan Sharansky who was mistakenly thought of as freedom fighter and human rights militant when he fought for his own freedom and human rights back in Russia, and by the Almagor organization of terror victims in Israel – a right wing group the government uses in order to demand and execute in their names brutal revenge for the death of their loved ones. Mazel was praised for being a Jew before being a diplomat. For all his admirers, as for Israeli official authorities, showing off Jewish muscles is the highest goal of Israeli diplomacy today. In their infantile barbaric way, they see the demonstration of brutal force as an act of revenge for the Holocaust. Hiding behind the flag of the Holocaust, Israel commits the gravest crimes against humanity today. However Israels victims, the Palestinians, are never seen as victims either in Israel or in most Western states that support the occupation and profit from it. Palestinians are problems-to-be solved and eliminated, potential killers of Jews, and nothing else. After Mazels barbaric act the papers were full of venom against the late woman-terrorist whose photograph was part of the work of art he destroyed, naming and enumerating the people she had killed along with herself. No one in the world dared say that at least she had the decency to kill herself along with her victims, which is more than one can say for Israeli or American killers, who return home after their daily murderous routine, to their families and their pleasures. Had anyone dared saying that they would have been denounced as anti-Semitic. In Israeli culture, all others are potentially anti-Semitic, and that is why no international law or decision should be respected. The picture engraved in Israeli minds, and perpetuated in Israeli schoolbooks – and which is transmitted to and adopted by the whole world including Sweden - is of an immutable reality where Jews are persecuted and have to defend themselves against Arab-Palestinian aggression. Israelis don’t know, don’t want to know and don’t want to teach their children anything about Palestinian or Arab cultures. Education consists of inculcating prejudgments and ethnic prejudice about this enemy that includes not only the subjugated and out-of-sight Palestinian non-citizens in the occupied territories and Gaza but also the Palestinian citizens of Israel, often termed by Israeli officials ‘the enemy within’ or ‘fifth column.’ However, Israel declares and most of the enlightened Western states endorse its statement, that as long as it does not commit genocide, no one can reproach it for perpetrating extra-ordinary evil. But genocide is not the only crime states should stand trial for. Israel is definitely guilty of the crime of apartheid, and when the crime of sociocide is recognized by the International Criminal Court it will be guilty of Sociocide as well. The definition of Sociocide is as follows: ‘Sociocide’ means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a population of people living in non-self-governing territory or a territory under foreign military occupation, with intent to prevent the people from exercising their collective right to self-determination: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to prevent its continued collective existence and, in particular, from governing itself or exercising its right to self-determination; (d) Annexing territory; (e) Separating people with the purpose of disintegrating or fragmenting a society of people so as to prevent it from governing itself or exercising its right of self-determination; (f) Transferring the civilian population or military forces of an occupying power to an occupied territory with the purpose of disintegrating or fragmenting a society of people so as to prevent it from governing itself or exercising its right of self-determination; Sociocide in the case of Israeli policy towards Palestinians is nothing more nor less than seeking an end through violent and non-violent means to the collective existence of Palestinians and preventing them from ever exercising their right to self-determination. It provides a general frame that helps to explain all the violations of Palestinian rights. […] sociocide emphasizes the will, the deliberate plan of Israel to eliminate the existence of the Palestinians as a collective group, albeit falling short of genocidal intent to physically exterminate the group’s members. Israel, with the help of the most illustrious institutions of the West, deprives Palestinians of their past and their future and forces them to live on their land with no water and no monuments. None of their cultural or historical symbols are displayed in public spaces. This way their present is but an unending harassment; their destiny is futurelessness and their life is diminished to survival. The symbolic elimination of Palestinians is one of the core values of Israeli cultural, social and educational institutions. This is the ground on which people like Mazel are brought up and to which Mazel himself was so faithful. This elimination is meant as illan Pappe explains, to lead to their effacement from the narrative, from the economy and from the culture, as they are eliminated from schoolbooks and from maps. Symbolic elimination is always the first step towards physical elimination. Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have been living under Israeli regime in a constant state of exception, namely as Homini-Sacer or “bare life” (Agamben 1987) , people who lack, or are forcibly denied, all social or legal status, and whom anyone can do away with. This is evident from testimonies of soldiers. All civil functions in the Palestinian occupied territories are transferred to the army. Especially the power to issue decrees with the force of law. These decrees are meant first and foremost to silence their voice of resistance and erase their identity. Palestinians state of exception is considered normative by Israel and its allies and is endorsed by Israeli law and Supreme Court of Justice, which treat the Palestinians as beings whose lives are dispensable with impunity. This state of affairs is neither anarchy nor chaos on the contrary, it is an outside of the law within the law. Nevertheless Israel succeeds in advertising itself as a democracy. But as Giorgio Agamben said, The state of Israel is a good example of how when the state of exception is prolonged then all democratic institutions collapse. This is also what happened in the Weimar Republic. In the Israeli apartheid regime, which may rightfully be called Ethnocracy, children are educated to see as legitimate the expulsion and killing of Palestinians, presented in schoolbooks and media as actions that comply with norms that are both Israeli-specific and generally Western, such as the ‘war on terror’, eye-for-eye or the protection of citizens. For example, one can find in Israeli schoolbooks phrases such as ‘Infiltrators penetrated Israel to commit terror acts, and the state was forced to protect its citizens’, or ‘The operations [one of which was the Kibya massacre] were also intended to strengthen the feeling of security and the morale of the citizens of Israel, who suffered from a constant threat on their lives – at home, in the fields, on the road and on excursions’, or These actions contributed to the strengthening of the feeling of security among Israeli citizens. Schoolbooks include such indoctrinating questions as: 50 Egyptians were killed, 40 were taken prisoners – the greatest operation since the War of Independence. In what way can such a headline influence the morale of Israeli citizens? The state of Israel has never encouraged peace education or official mixing between Jewish and Palestinian students. On the contrary, the topic of peace and co-existence has never become part of the formal academic curriculum, the Naqba, the Naqsa and the 67 year occupation is hardly ever studied or taught or discussed in educational and academic settings. Teachers who try to discuss these topics risk losing their jobs. The lack of contact, encouraged by intentional ignorance and physical and mental barriers, between Israeli-Jewish and Israeli Palestinian youth enhances the image of the Palestinians as potentially blood thirsty desperados, yearning for violent revenge, pushed to act against their own interests if they can only harm as many Israelis as they can (cf. Rabinowitch 1992 in Rabinowitch 2001) which is prevalent in textbooks as in the general discourse. All the educational and cultural institutions work in concert to convince Israelis and the world, that Israels subjugated subjects, who constitute nearly half the population dominated by Israeli government, cannot have a human face like ours, cannot strive for freedom or dignity like us and cannot be elegant or beautiful like our heroes and heroines. The only image of Palestinians in Israeli mentality is that of violent, primitive and irrational peasants or nomads, which, as Rabinowitch (2001:76) puts it, nourishes an amalgam of right-wing anti-Arab reasoning, and conceals an image of Palestinians which Israelis can identify as persons like themselves: rational and educated, possessing the positive characteristics Israeli students tend to associate with their own collectives, well spoken, responsible Arab – a civilized, stereotype-busting native, with a jacket, a degree and an understanding smile. What enraged the ambassador was the symbolic and realistic representation of a Palestinian woman, a warrior at that, as a sympathetic all made-up young woman, who looked like his wife or his sister, an image of a young woman that may evoke feelings of empathy and compassion. She had no blood smeared on her face or hands; on the contrary, she was clean and elegant though swimming in blood, like all of us, like every Israeli or American woman is. The work of art did not make it clear whether she was the source or the victim of this blood. This enraged the Israeli bull even more and he did the only thing Israelis are taught to do when they encounter Palestinians physically or symbolically – eliminate them. He burned her, he electrocuted her, and he turned her off. Beautiful killing and beautiful death Israeli culture and education promote beautiful death for the motherland or for God. Suiciders or martyrs who refused to be subjugated to cruel occupiers of the land are, from biblical Samson to the heroes of Masada, highly venerated in Israeli education. People who killed themselves in order not to eat pork, or not to serve the Greek and Roman occupiers, not to stop studying the Torah or to protect the land are the jewels in the crown of Israeli bravery. Even a mother, Hannah, who preferred to kill all her seven children and not deliver them to the hands of the occupying Roman soldiers, is worshiped. The phenomenon of suicide killing is therefore not foreign to Israeli mentality. But since the establishment of the state, beautiful killing is also honoured and admired. Expressions of social esteem and positive social valuation are used in order to depict the perpetrators of the massacres of Palestinians as competent and morally upright members of Israeli society: the notorious soldiers of Ariel Sharons unit 101 who committed several massacres in 1953 until the unit was disbanded, are described in school books as heroes who ‘excelled in their audacity’ and ‘were all volunteers’ or ‘superb warriors’; they were ‘endowed with extraordinary courage, improvisation, perseverance in the hardest conditions, tenacity and loyalty to wounded friends’. Their heroic pictures where they are seen as our beautiful soldiers – clean and handsome and sun tanned, adorn all books and posters. But as national narratives usually have it, such heroes cannot exist on both sides. While ours are martyrs and saviours theirs are terrorist murderers. This line must never be crossed. This is why the ambassador was shivering when he saw the beautiful made-up suicide bomber in Feilers work. She looked like our heroines, not like a monster, and accepting this would be a gross crossing of lines that is equaled to treason. Therefore he had to immediately wipe the treacherous image off the earth. In doing so he was being faithful to his upbringing and to the regime he was serving as diplomat, to the government whose latest decision of symbolic elimination is to turn off the Muezzin call for prayer and silence the voice of the east that has been chanting every morning for hundreds of years over the holy land of Palestine.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 07:41:45 +0000
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