Israel Matzav

Trying to help 'Palestinians' get the Holocaust

A 'Palestinian' went off to college in New York and discovered a new understanding of Israelis by learning about the Holocaust. On Wednesday, 21-year old Mujahid Sarsur brought 22 'Palestinians' to see Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Did it change their attitudes? Slightly. But it will take a lot more for things to really change.

On Wednesday, he led a delegation of 22 students to Israel's official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. The students, fasting for Ramadan, listened closely to their Arabic-speaking guide's explanations, and were left wide-eyed by the gruesome images of the death camps.

Girls in Muslim head scarves turned away in horror at the sight of Jewish corpses being shoveled into pits. They huddled together as they watched film from Auschwitz, where about 1 million Jews were put to death.

"The Holocaust is a huge part of Israeli society. We live so close to them and we need to understand them better if we are ever to live in peace," said Sarsur, a junior at Bard College in New York. "If we change the way we think about the Holocaust, we can create bridges."

Arab sentiment toward the Holocaust ranges from ignorance about its details to outright denial. Some hold a more complex belief system, acknowledging that the Holocaust did happen, but that they are paying the price by the loss of their land with the creation of the state of Israel after World War II.

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Noor Amer, a 15-year-old Palestinian who attends high school in Jordan, said he compares Jewish suffering in the Holocaust to Palestinian suffering in the West Bank and Gaza. While he still rejects Zionism, he said the Yad Vashem visit helped him understand that "the Jews had nowhere else to go" after the Holocaust.

He said Palestinians have trouble seeing their enemies as victims to be sympathized with.

"The conflict is so complicated that people cannot forget it or put it aside," he said. "If we say that the Holocaust happened, if we accept it, then we accept that Israelis are human just like us and I think that here is the twist — we do not want to consider Jews as humans because of all the suffering that we go through we cannot believe that human beings can do such a thing."

Palestinians maintain that Israelis generally have failed to come to grips with their responsibility for the Palestinians' six decades of dispossession and exile, though a new generation of Israeli historians has challenged their country's widely held narrative of blamelessness.

Surveys show that Holocaust denial is common even among the 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are Arab and grew up under the Israeli educational curriculum.

Aumamah Sarsur, 22, an Israeli Arab and cousin of Mujahid Sarsur, said the Yad Vashem visit taught her that Jews were tortured and killed by the Nazis.

"I am not giving them legitimacy to come here and make their own country, but I get their point of view," she said.

There's a long way to go.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:06 AM