This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
Well I’ve found Rabbi Forman’s High Holidays’ diatribe against me. I retrieved it by way of a newspaper article which was published in the local press. You see I had the audacity to invite – along with the local Rabbi – a German and a Palestinian to speak in my Holocaust class in 2001. During the High Holidays in 2004, Forman heard about this from the local Jewish informants. He went ballistic.
The German speaker was Susanne Scholz, a “Diasporic German feminist” as she calls herself and a friend of many years. Her story about what her relatives went through as the war drew to close is horrifying. Understandably, Scholz and her generation want to distant themselves from the Holocaust. They want to get on with life. Yet there is little room in the vaunted halls of German academia for women in general and feminists in particular, thus their conflicted voice is sounded mostly in the United States. Scholz is one of those Biblical scholars who deconstructs the Hebrew Bible into fragments yet, in my view, is quite the traditionalist in matters Christian. She’s also a gamer on the Middle East. As you might imagine, Susanne and I have an interesting relationship.
The Palestinian speaker was Muna Hamzeh. She came to me via a friend’s recommendation. Muna is another story altogether.
Dispensing with Scholz, Forman focused on Muna: “I was in shock that she would be your guest to commemorate the murder of 6 million Jews. I found it not just inappropriate but obscene.” Forman took “great” offense that I would invite “someone who would dare put forth the comparative drivel between Nazi Germany and the Jewish state in order to make some lame social comment about Israeli guilt and responsibility. Such a comparison defies logic, fact and truth.”
Well the truth of the matter is that Muna didn’t make any such comparison, but, hey, why let the facts of the matter get in the way? What she did do, as the article states, was, with Scholz, talk about the after-effects of the Holocaust on their families and communities. This is accurately stated in the article: “Hamzeh’s experience as a refugee in her homeland is an after-effect of the Holocaust, she told students then. She even compared her people’s treatment at the hands of the Israelis with other oppressed minorities throughout history, Ellis recalled.”
Muna’s book had just been published when she spoke in my class. Forman is right; it is an “obscene” read. To begin with, check out the title: Refugees in Our Own Land: Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. Form the title you can see where that “obscene” indictment is leading. She daresto speak her own history in relation to Jewish history. Who does she think she is?
On the topic of who she thinks she is, here is the “obscene” description of her book:
This book is an eye-witness account of what it is like to live in Palestine as a refugee in your own homeland. Born in Jerusalem, Muna Hamzeh is a journalist who has been writing about Palestinian affairs since 1985. She first worked as a journalist in Washington DC, but moved back to Palestine in 1989 to cover the first Palestine Intifada – the war of stones. She then settled in Dheisheh, near Bethlehem, – one of 59 Palestinian refugee camps that are considered the oldest refugee camps in the world. Immediately accessible and fully up-to-date, the first part of the book consists of a diary which Hamzeh wrote between October 4th and December 4th 2000, telling the story of the second Intifada.
Facing the tanks and armed guards of one of the best equipped armies in the world, the Palestinians have nothing. They fight back with stones. The anguish and terror that Muna and her friends face on a daily basis is tangible. Who will be the next to die? Whose house will be the next to burn down?
This deeply moving personal account brings to life the harsh realities of the Palestinian struggle. The second part of the book provides the background to these current events. It describes what life has been like for Dheisheh’s refugees since 1990, and explains why the second Intifada was a natural development of the Oslo peace accord. “Refugees in Our Own Land: Chronicles from a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem” is a rare insider’s look into the heart and minds of Palestinian refugees. It is a tribute to the bravery of the Palestinian people, and a wake-up call to the world that has ignored so much of their struggle and their suffering.
Muna doesn’t stop there. As she spoke at my Center, she was about to embark on yet another “obscene” book about an event that occurred after she spoke her “drivel” at my Center. This also contained some “lame social comment about Israeli guilt and responsibility” for her people’s plight. The title: Operation Defensive Shield: Witnesses to Israeli War Crimes.
On March 29, 2002 the Israeli army launched Operation Defensive Shield, the largest military offensive against Palestinian civilians since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. During the operation, the military used the most advanced weaponry at its disposal: Merkava tanks, Apache attack helicopters and F-15 fighter jets. When the operation ended on April 21, Israel had destroyed the Palestinian economic and social infrastructure, leveled large swathes of residential area, killed 220 people, and injured hundreds more and arrested thousands.
This book documents these events through a collection of electronic witness narratives written by Palestinians who were under attack and by Israeli and international peace activists who witnessed the results of these attacks. Deeply moving and courageous, these narratives offer a uniquely powerful and intimate account of the daily reality for Palestinians who endured Ariel Sharon’s military strategy, and the death and destruction that strategy has caused throughout the Occupied Territories.
Most important, the witnesses’ voices bring to life the aggressive nature of this strategy — they belie the noble motives ascribed to Sharon and those in his government and military that designed and carried it out. The editors argue that Operation Defensive Shield is a prelude to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. They provide historical context, a chronology, and an analysis of the conflict that situates the horror of these days in their proper perspective. Operation Defensive Shield: Witnesses to Israeli War Crimes is an essential record for those who want to understand what happened in the West Bank in the spring of 2002, and what it portends for the future of the region.
Note this passage: “The editors argue that Operation Defensive Shield is a prelude to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. They provide historical context, a chronology, and an analysis of the conflict that situates the horror of these days in their proper perspective.” Israel’s ethnic cleansing – can’t be, can it?After the “lynch” incident in Zion Square, the Rabbis for Jewish RightsaskedJewish educators to spend a few minutes with the Jewish children in their care. Will they now issue a statement that Jewish educators should discuss this historical charge of ethnic cleansing in the founding of the Jewish state?
The bigger question. The question that unlocks other questions. This is exactly what Jewish leadership, including the Rabbis for Jewish Rights,wants to keep a lid on. Forman’s mission: allow criticism up to a point; declare the deeper question off-limits. Rabbinic limits of thinkable thought.
I miss Muna. Haven’t seen or heard from her in ages. She appeared one day, black hair out there in a Palestinian Afro, and started the class with a simple evocation. As a child she read Anne Frank. She wondered out loud what Anne Frank would say if she looked around and saw Muna and her people on the run.
She told her true life story. Like Anne Frank.
In the last internet mention of Muna, I can find, she is at a peace rally in Portland, March 18, 2007. She wrote of her time there the following year:
Now it is fast and easy. You hear the news on cyberspace. You let your friends know on cyberspace.They can’t see your shaky fingers. They can’t hear your choked voice.
You tell them about Zeinab’s mother. She was kidnapped and tortured in Baghdad on April 12, 2007.She was shot six times in front of her family. But not all her family because Zeinab wasn’t there. Shedidn’t have to see the mutilation, the warm blood and the mangled corpse of the woman who carried herfor nine months.
Zeinab is safe in America. She looks out the window to a well-manicured lawn. She can tell what timeof the morning it is when she sees the mailman. He always shows up on time. Her neighbor walks hisdog and bends over to scoop the poop in a plastic bag. He would be fined if he did not. Will they weargloves when they scoop the pieces of her mother’s flesh? Will they place them in plastic bags? Will they fine the men who made her scream in torment before they shot her dead?
I search online for news about her. She is nowhere to be found. She’s lost in the latest Baghdad bombing and the number of US soldiers killed. She is now a statistic added to the count. Have we reached 600,000? Is it more than 40,000? Or is the number less? Do we feel safer now? Are the Iraqis liberated? If they don’t democratize, will they meet their death? Is Zeinab glad to be here, or is she wishing she were dead?
The sun has risen. It is the dawn of a new day. The trees are in bloom and the roses are beginning to bud. The tulips fill the landscape with their white, yellow and pink. Welcome to America. We have beauty here and a multitude of color. Over there in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, they see only one color. It is always red.
Muna’s“lame” social comment about American guilt and complicity. Muna was still on the hunt.
Missing Muna. It isn’t like Muna to disappear without a fight. Maybe Muna went corporate. Or maybe Muna took up arms and went to the hills of Palestine or Iraq or a dozen other places. Perhaps, instead of Anne Frank, she began thinking of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters.
Muna’s “obscene drivel.” Missing it. Missing her.
Sorry about missing Muna. OK, here’s articles I found that can give us some clues.
She ends one of her articles this way:
Her biography says her parentage is half Christian and half Muslim. And she did emigrate. So maybe she is talking about her experience as losing hope, giving up, and emigrating?
In 2009 she wrote in the Portland monthly:
Perhaps like a star, it begins white and small, becomes big and red… and then?
The silence of stories not told is lies. If heaven is a place where truth is told, hell must be the place where nothing is told but lies.
Oh, these stories that we need to hear and mostly don’t hear. Stories that are often not heard due to official (or economically imposed) censorship, especially of the mainstream media. What the rabbis who support Israel don’t want to be heard by Jews. What Americans are not told so that Bush’s endless-war can continue endlessly.
if we’re at the historical moment, what about intifada iii right now?