Narratives of our past: Day 2 Day of Remembrance

An image means something different to everyone, for the state of Israel, this image as you walk out of the Holocaust museum is a symbol of hope and future possibilities, what does this image mean to others?

Today my tour guide was Einav, she is pretty cool, she was in the Israeli Army where they trained her to be a tour guide to better educate her fellow soldiers about Israel and its history. I learned quite a bit from Einav and how her perspective works. She is very personable and very intelligent, and she had so much to tell me about all of the places that we went. The fact that she was an Israeli soldier and that today is the day of remembrance did very much effect the way that our touring went today. From my perspective of working in a majority Muslim community in Minneapolis, it is very hard to understand the animosity that exists in Jerusalem between Muslims and Jewish people. After spending the day with Einav, I came to understand where this animosity comes from. I remember hearing before I left to come to Israel that divisions between Palestinians and Israelis was very much deepened by the British role in this land. From that division came violence, and from that violence came retribution and now, decades later so much has happened that everyone feels personally effected. The words explaining animosity are useless with out seeing it manifested in society, I could see this in Einav, and her openness and willingness to share her thoughts with me is something I will always value. Studying this last semester about the same division in India between Hindus and Muslims, incited by the British. It amazes me the differences we create between each other when in reality we are all humans and have much more in common than we do in differences.

Through out my day, from the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem to the Friends of Zion Museum all the way to Mount Herzl, the narrative of divisions and unity continued to come up in my mind.

To jump ahead to the end of the night, I just spent 2 hours listening to a Holocaust survivor speak about his experience as a 'horse' at Auschwitz(a group of boys chosen to live because they could be utilized to pull a cart in place of a horse). His ability to tell these stories with out an emotional breakdown is as impressive as it is haunting. He talked about a loss of humanity that everyone in Europe experienced to a certain degree at the time of Nazi Germany. At the end of his history, one of the men in the room asked a question filled with passion, "if in the Torah it says, an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth a hand for a hand and a leg for a leg, how can you as a victim of this atrocity speak of the moments of kindness you experienced from SS officers? I say, we build an Auchwitz in Israel and invite the Germans here" he was then cut off and asked to leave. The holocaust, happened and it needs to be remembered and recognized, yet the means of remembering and recognizing can lead to as much hatred and separation as it can lead to remembrance and unity in insuring that something like this does not happen again.

When we utilize a history to create unity, that unity cannot be created with out the counter balance of separation. At least, after today that is the conclusion I have come to. Whether it be this man, and his anger towards the German people, who by the way are generations passed, or it be the Israeli Palestinian conflict. This is a place where people from all over the world have come for sanctuary from persecution. The survival of the Jewish people in its self is amazing, 6 million Jews died in the holocaust, yet they continue to thrive here in Israel now. This unity, I have realized exists as a yin and yang situation, for togetherness to exist, an 'other' also must exist. This seems to be the crux, to my understanding of Israel and its history.

As I walked through the Holocaust museum, I wanted to label the Germans as evil, as I was taught too. Yet I continued to draw similarities to other tragedies all over the world to the happenings of the Holocaust. The way that European settlers treated the Native Americans, was an atrocity, and they are a people that have not returned to thriving like the Jewish in Israel, they are a people who's history has been erased for the most part. How amazing is it that so much was recovered from the Holocaust, and that it is an event that can be remembered through out our history. What about the way the Dutch ripped through the Congo, we do not learn about that in our history classes, and I do not consider the Dutch from that time period to be evil or the European Americans, so how can I consider the Germans to be?  Our speaker tonight made a point to mention that SS officers gave him salami once and soup another time, and that though these officers were brutal and they committed atrocities, no one is pure evil. So what is the function of a narrative that shows a good people and a bad people, it is easy to read, it is easy to understand, and you can always alter the story to feel as if you are on the right side. Is that what history is for? I mean WE create history, it only exists in the present, in our minds, so is their value in this good verse evil ideology? What purpose does it serve other than to comfort, and make sense of life as it is now? What if life is not meant be comfortable, a definite good and bad, black and white is not meant to exist? Then how do we approach history, do we squirm in uncertainty or create a sense certainty to put our minds at ease.

Yehuda Bacon, I cannot explain how cool of a man this person is, google him. 

so far I have come to the conclusion that the inability to recognize legitimacy with in each others narratives is where the Israeli Palestinian problems seem to stem. Also, as Palestinian unity strengthens, the label of Israeli's as 'other' also strengthens and vice versa. With a love for your home country comes a distain for another.

This is a deep post, and maybe it does not make perfect sense, because my ability to convey thoughts onto a computer screen is hard. Also, if anything in this upsets or offends, that is not my intentions this is my thought process as an outsider looking in on Israel, I have my own perspectives and prejudices that exists no matter how hard I try to be objective.

A question to leave on, what are things with in your life that you define as a black and white issue, something or someone who is good and something or someone who is bad? What needs of yours are fulfilled through this definition that you have created? How can you challenge yourself to look beyond these simple explanations?