November 13, 2001

St. Andrew’s Church in West Jerusalem hosts the ex-patriate women’s club.

A day spent somewhere between Apartheid and the Holocaust. We got word last night about the monthly meeting of the ex-patriate women's club of Jerusalem, largely made up of spouses of NGO and other international workers in the wider Jerusalem area (including Ramallah and Bethlehem). They met this morning at St. Andrew's, and the speaker was a lawyer for LAW, a Palestinian Human Rights and Environmental organization. They have been quite clear in documenting and decrying injustices, both those committed by Israelis and Palestinians. Even so, they have been accused of collaboration and bias. LAW has been very involved with building connections with South African leaders who participated in the fight against Apartheid. Our speaker said that after several of them visited here, to a one they agreed that the situation for Palestinians is far worse and more devastating than Apartheid was for black South Africans (it is a sentiment we heard before, last year at the Sabeel conference, listening to South African Imam Farid Esack).

After the talk and chatting with the ladies, we got a call that our paperwork came through from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, so we went to the Latin Patriarchate to pick it up and to have lunch.

The eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem.

Afterwards, we made a trip out to Yad Veshem, the Holocaust Memorial in West Jerusalem. The importance of this monument cannot be underestimated - foreign dignitaries visit it before - and often instead of - the Wailing Wall. Even the Jerusalem Post, the right-wing voice box, has said that the Holocaust is the "Civil Religion of Israel." In many ways, this trip was overdue. Marthame had been to both Dachau and Auschwitz in the '90's, but neither of us had visited a memorial to the Holocaust since our arrival here.

The moving children’s memorial at Yad Vashem.

We were oriented to the place by a volunteer, himself a Holocaust survivor. The first memorial was that to the 1.5 million children who were killed - a haunting, beautiful place lit up by candles, and reflections of candles in the darkness. Walking into it was like walking into the sky, surrounded by the stars, and hearing the names and ages of the children who were killed. It was very moving. There were several other monuments as well as an exhaustive museum. The Holocaust's scale is just so difficult to get your mind around - 6 million Jews killed...

While there are many parallels between the Ghettos of Europe and the situation under Israeli Occupation, the parallels break down under the collective weight of the scale of calculated cruelty and annihilation by the Nazi regime. Palestinians are not being sent to gas chambers; they are not being rounded up and sent to work/death camps. Thank God. When discussions focus on the situation of Palestinians in the Territories, they often turn to the Holocaust, the ultimate trump card. It overshadows any other experience of injustice or cruelty. In light of the Holocaust, it can be hard to hear other suffering, especially that caused by Jews. It seems sometimes as if the world is still dumbfounded - struck blind and deaf by that horror - and cannot (or refuses to) see or hear the plight of the Palestinians. Little surprise that Palestinians are not very interested in hearing Jewish tales of persecution. As one Jewish Israeli friend suggested, "perhaps if we acknowledge their suffering they can begin to hear our narrative of suffering." Hopefully.

We joined a dear friend of ours for dinner in the Old City and complained about our current troubles with the multi-headed hydra named bureaucracy. He is a Jerusalem resident whose wallet (with his ID) was stolen last year. As he worked to reinstate it, he was stonewalled. He kicked and screamed until he eventually got a supervisor, at which point it was revealed that his entire file had been "lost". As bad as things have been for us, at least we still have a file...