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Independence Day: 26,6356; 3,500, 1,500, 1,455

By Baha Hillo

20 April, 2010
Ma'an News

On 19 and 20 April, Israel will mourn what is says were 26,653 Israelis killed in the past 150 years, 22,682 of which were soldiers.

The Day of the Fallen Soldier sees hundreds of thousands lay flags on the graves of their lost loved ones, and the Minister of Defense Ehud Barak will speak at official ceremonies around the country.

Yom Hazikaron as the Israelis call it, begins with silence and sirens that mourn the deaths of soldiers, but when the mourning is over, the celebration begins. The celebration of Israel’s 'strength,’ and of all the wars it has won: a celebration of racism and apartheid.

That the day of the fallen soldier, and the celebration of the so called victories of the state of Israel are celebrated during the same week as the Holocaust Memorial Day, is a travesty. The narrative string that starts with the Holocaust, passes through the death of those who fought for the state, and ends in celebration.

It is the Zionist narrative, it takes the Holocaust out of Europe and brings it to the Middle East, with Israelis declaring that they must defend the state, that Zionists must rally and defend against the enemy, this time the Arabs.

By juxtaposing the Holocaust Memorial Day with Israel’s Yom Hazikaron/Independence Day, the Arabs become those who are denying Jewish existence. In fact, however, it is the very same narrative that denies Palestinian existence.

The way the story is told means that when Palestinians assert their right to exist, they activate a constructed binary that somehow denies Jewishness.

Palestinians everywhere have to put up with the reality of being oppressed, expelled, occupied, divided, fenced in, controlled and so on, without being allowed to commemorate their miseries, or , god forbid, try to repair them. This is very clear when it comes to certain historic events like the Nakba (the Catastrophe of 1948).

In Israel this is celebrated as Independence Day, and if Palestinian populations dare to mourn their loss of life, land and liberty, they are criminalized. The word Nakba is not even mentioned in Israeli schoolbooks, though it was a forming experience for 25% of its country’s citizens. That is only the beginning of the story, however.

It is not only Palestinian history which gets obliterated in Israel, but Palestinians themselves. Evidence of this is in scrupulous Israeli record keeping, which documents each Jewish life lost. The 26,653 killed in the past 150 years and the 6 million victims of the Holocaust are painstakingly documented.

Looking hard at the records, however, reminds me that the 6 million were not Israeli. They were German, Polish, French, and Dutch Jews, they were Jews from all over Europe. And there is the point.

Europe; where nationalism and ingrained discrimination towards Jews sparked genocide.

Israel makes sure we do not forget, and indeed we shouldn’t, but guilting Europe with one hand and quashing a national Palestinian identity on the other is unacceptable. Moreover, Israel’s own treatment of its Holocaust survivors serves to highlight the state’s actual stance.

Where Yad Vashem has a budget of millions, Holocaust survivors are paid pennies in compensation, and treated as outcasts or labeled "self-hating Jews" if they speak out.

150 years of Israel?

The first number quoted here, the 26,653 Israelis killed in the past 150 years, requires further explanation.

As Israel celebrates its 62nd Anniversary, how, one wonders were there Israelis being killed 90 years before the state existed.

The number refers to people who identified as Jewish, killed on the spot of land which is now Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. The Jews here during the 1880s and 1890s, however, identified as Arabs, Palestinians, and later on Zionists.

The artificial expansion of Israeli history over these peoples who speak out clearly from the historical record as Arabs or Palestinians, nullifies their actual identity, and makes it easier for them to be subsumed into the Israeli myth that Israelis have 'always’ been fighting the Arabs. The story would fall apart if the state recognized that Jews here were first Palestinians.

In fact, during the dozens of pogroms that went on in Europe during the 1800s and early 1900s, Palestinians gave Jews a safe place to be, just as they did with the Armenians, Assyrians and Circassians during their times of crisis.

One could perhaps start counting dead Israelis retroactively from the start of the Zionist project, when Jews no longer sought refuge among a friendly population, but rather swapped coexistence with replacement and started to take from rather than share with the indigenous population.

But again, describing this as the death of an Israeli mistakes the point. The men and women who were killed during the first battles for Zionism were killed because they were thieves, not because they were Jews.

By making it seem Arabs hated Jews even before European Anti-Semitism reached its peak, retroactively takes the Holocaust out of Europe and places it solidly in the Middle East.

A celebration of genocide

What is looked over in Israel, on Independence Day of all days, is that it is a celebration of ethnic cleansing, a celebration of the expulsion of a people from their homes and a perpetuation of the mentality that caused the horrors of the Holocaust to begin with.

The sense of national pride, superiority, and indeed, anti-Semitism (we Palestinians are Semitic too, you know - if you count the Palestinian Arabs as Semites, which they are) were the very sentiments in which thoughts of genocide bread and inched across Europe.

When Israel’s minister of defense stands to deliver his speeches, he will not think of the Palestinians he personally killed, nor the Palestinians who were killed by those under his command. He will repeat 26,653, not 3,500, the number of Palestinians killed in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon as the Israeli army looked on; or 5,901, the number of Palestinians the Israeli Army killed during the Second Intifada; not 1,455, the number of Palestinians killed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

But Israel will never commemorate those it killed, for the narrative of Israeli grief has been bound to its identity as a warring nation, a nation that kills.

So on this day, and in the years to come, Israel will mourn the six Israeli soldiers killed during their most recent war on Gaza, even the three killed by friendly fire.

Including Alexander Meshbitzki, 21 years old, who will be commemorated as a hero and not as a young man whose life was wasted in service of a racist oppressive entity.

It took Russia more than 50 years to acknowledge responsibility in the slaughter of thousands of Polish citizens in the Katyn Massacre of 1940 and now Russia finds it possible to remember its soldiers who were killed during that period as well as the memory of those Polish killed in the same war. This leaves us with two questions, how long will it take Israel to acknowledge its role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? And how long will it take until we can stand together and mourn the loss of our peoples?

Baha Hilo works for the Joint Advocacy Initiative