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The production of self and the destruction of the Other’s memory and identity in Israeli/Palestinian education on the Holocaust/Nakba

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, University of Haifa

Education in general, and education in nation-building projects in particular, is the production of subjects who will essentially function as agents and victims of the system. As such they are objects for manipulation, committed to the destruction, exclusion, marginalization, or “salvation” of the external and the internal Other (of whom they too are part). As agents of the system, educators are committed to abolish the otherness of the Other, her identity, knowledge, collective memory, desires, rights, and interests - in short, her counter-educational potential.[1]

In the Israeli/Palestinian case this logic of hegemonic education is dramatically manifested in the mutual refusal to acknowledge the otherness of the Other. This refusal/inability is a manifestation of what the Enlightenment thinkers understood as the immaturity of human beings.[2] Such immaturity also has positive dimensions: it leads to the construction of a collective identity, to ethnocentrism, to a general commitment to pay the cost of building and protecting collective aspirations, and to the possibility of the struggle for their realization at the cost of the very existence of the Other and the self’s human dimensions and potentials. A special role is played here by the Other and her sufferings as well as by the refusal to struggle for mutual acknowledgment and dialogue which might open possibilities for a common, multicultural, peaceful coexistence. Such a possibility is the task of counter-education, which by definition challenges hegemonic normalization education.

Israeli and Palestinian representations of the Holocaust normally mirror each other in relation to the otherness of the Other. Each side is committed to the constitution of the collective identity that will block the possibilities of questioning “its” current realm of self-evidence. The Israeli instrumentalization of the memory of the Holocaust is totally committed to the nation-building project.[3] The educational uses of the historical memory, its representation, distribution, and political realization are instrumentalized to negate the Palestinian identity, collective memory, rights, needs, and hopes, the evils inflicted on the Palestinians within the process of the Israeli nation-building project are veiled under the banner of the morality of undoing Jewish eternal victimhood as represented only recently in the Holocaust. Within Israeli education the Palestinian are recognized, albeit without their otherness, as part of the natural features of present-day Eretz Israel, along with springs, mountains, and rivers, in a non-historical and unrealistic way, as an ornamental and passive context for the Zionist endeavor. Their otherness is only as something totally evil that is to be negated and destroyed. This commitment to the destruction of otherness is addressed by Hegel’s Master and serf’s dialectic,[4] and also in Jewish traditional thought. Palestinians are regarded as “our” generation’s Amalek, after the Jews recover the tragedy inflicted on them two generations ago by the Amalek of the Second World War, namely the German Nazis. Holocaust studies are of vital importance for today’s hegemonic Israeli education and for a discursive practice that negates the legitimacy and the humanistic potentials of engaging and dialogically responding to the otherness of the Other. Such an acknowledgment, if and when constituted, should refer to the centrality of the suffering, history, aspirations and needs of the Other. It could start a dialogue which would be open for acknowledging the Other’s rights and identity on an equal, receptive, and joint level of critical and transcending engagement. The hope for such a dialogue includes a place for the Palestinians’ being acknowledged within a general, unconditional responsibility for the Other.

Within such a dialogue the Palestinians would have to acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust and the historical injustice done to the Jews in Christian and Muslim societies. They would acknowledge the uniqueness of the Holocaust while taking note of its universal moral implications. A counter-educational dialogue is impossible without the Palestinians’ critically reconstructing the instrumentalization of the Jewish Holocaust memory in the Arab world, and on the other hand, the manipulations by Palestinian intellectuals and the political establishment of the memory of the pre-1948 Palestinian existence and their 1948 Nakba (collective tragedy).

It is of vital importance to challenge the educational hegemonic ideology in the Israeli system, which uses its control of the Holocaust memory as an instrument to justify its evil industry and veiling its apparatuses for manipulation. In the Israeli/Palestinian arena counter-education’s hope and its responsibility for the totally other than the present historical “facts”[5] is realized by its challenging the institutionalized refusal to acknowledge the historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinians and the Jews. It must address the Palestinian’s unacknowledged tragedy, and the political, philosophical, and educational implications of admitting the Palestinians as Others whose otherness is legitimate[6] and as potential partners in mutual emancipation from all enforced collectivism. Counter-education has to critically reconstruct and struggle to overcome the dialectics of mutual commitment to the destruction of the Other, and fight for the legitimacy of the otherness of the Other. Addressing the manipulation of power as educational practice, and unveiling the violence of normalizing education, is a pre-condition for the mutual struggle for acknowledgment and dialogue, where otherness is not only acknowledged and respected, but conceived as a precondition for self reflection and transcendence and as an unconditional moral commitment.

In a non-dialogical, normalizing education, meaningful progress toward such acknowledgment of the Other is impossible. Acknowledgment of the Other cannot be divorced from acknowledgment of her suffering and of ethical responsibility for her recovery not only from her tragedy as inflicted from the “outside”. It also bears on her overcoming her daily, self-evident reality and the “normal” order which systematically negates, marginalizes, destroys, or perverts her human potential, needs, and oppressed aspirations: this is a systematic oppression which results in a collective identity, a false “we” opposed to a threatening “they” which prevents dialogue, transcendence and challenging the self-evidence, the other “I” than the I produced by normalization education, “the ethical I” as Levinas calls this utopia, a concrete utopia where responsibility for the Other, openness and dialogue become an actuality, even as a negative utopia, or as the presence of the absent. The production of the subject as object, agent, and victim of the system is secured by her commitment to deny or refuse to acknowledge (the legitimacy) of the otherness of the Other and her system. This is secured by the construction and control of the memory. The collective memory, however, is never produced as a sole and isolated element. Normalizing education comprises the memory as part of a conceptual apparatus which limits the possibilities for interpretation and minimizes the possibilities for reflection, resistance, and transcendence. Part of this symbolic violence, which ensures and reproduces the hegemonic realm of self-evidence, is the control of the representation of the Other and her memory. It reassures the hegemonic realm of self-evidence in each of the systems which reproduce the subjects and their mutual hate and suffering. This is so because they refer to themselves through their negation of “their” Other. The Israeli/Palestinian dialectics manifests how educational violence uses memory and suffering within its normalization/oppression processes which produce pleasures, truths, victories, hierarchies and strategic orientations within which there is no room for counter-education.

Obedience to the injunction “Zachor et asher asa lecha Amalek” (“Remember what Amalek has done to you”), as God’s command, a warning, and a constitutive element of collective identity through identifying “Amalek” with any “other”, is the grand mission of Israeli public education. Within this project it is imperative to remember historical events in which Amalek has a special role. This is because “Amalek” is not only conceived as a terrible enemy of Israel on its Exodus from Egypt for Israel in the time of Moses, but also a permanent “tendency among the goyim [non-Jews]”. In Israeli education this remembrance has become a central element in reproducing its ethnocentrism, its violence, and its rejection of the traditional Jewish refusal to enter earthly politics and power games, instead waiting for messianic redemption. It was internalized in the negation of the Diaspora and become an essential dimension early on in the constitution of the myth of the halutz (pioneer), and later in the creation of the myths of the Sabra (native-born Israeli) and the Israeli soldier. The Zachor as remembrance of the Holocaust victims became fused with the Zachor in “Remember what Amalek has done to you”. The remembrance of German National Socialism was integrated into the concept of the Jew as an “eternal victim”. In hegemonic Israeli education this concept implicitly conceives of any “other” or goy as historical realization of “Amalek” [7] as an idea, and as an unconditional justification of Zionism and its practices.[8] Under suitable conditions, in times of crisis, or for social groups in rapid decline or constant crisis, it is easy to concretize personally or collectively: namely, justification of the fate of Amalek is fitting the “fate” of the Palestinians, the “Amalek of our time”.

In varying degrees of magnitude these ideas are very popular in Israel. Research into democratic and humanistic positions shows that Israeli teachers are alarmingly clear on this issue.[9] This is not an accident or some misfortune. It is one of the manifestations of the great success of Zionist education, especially of (Jewish) orthodox religious education in Israel. Zionist education was very effective in producing the self-evidence and moral knowledge that the state of Israel is and should be the state of the Jews alone and not the state of all of its citizens, Jews and non-Jews alike. In this matter, Professor Ben-Zion Dinur, architect of Israeli education and Minister of Education in the 1950s, who constituted the hegemonic educational ideology of secular Israeli society, was not an extremist or exotic ideologue. On the contrary, he represented the mainstream in Zionism. He explicitly identified “Amalek” as an idea with the enemies of Israel in their historical context; after the Holocaust the identification became self-evident in Israel: “The striving to annihilate the Jews did not start with Hitler...it found in Hitler its messenger and performer. Yet that was not all. Amalek is the symbol of Hitler, and his paradigmatic character lies in destroying those who are backward, the tired, and the exhausted”.[10]

In Israeli arena the Holocaust memory has been applied to equalize the Nazi “Amalek” and the Arab “Amalek” by the special use to which it put the traditional Jewish Zachor. At the same time, the memory, itself is conditioned by effective violent education; it is that which creates the conceptual apparatus, the mental structure, and the memory, and, through their manipulation, the formation of self-identity and collective identity.[11] The same process took place in parallel in the Arab world: instrumentalization of the memory of the Palestinian tragedy, with refusal to acknowledge the Jewish tragedy and its universal ethical implications, or the need for local dialogue and non-violent coexistence.

David Grossman, a prominent Israeli writer, describes his impressions from visiting Arab schools in Israel and listening to the Palestinian students’ opinions about the Jewish Holocaust. When he asked 17-year-old students at the high school in Jat about the Holocaust, they did not understand the Hebrew word for “Holocaust”. After it was translated into Arabic some students started to reply. The general reaction was to instrumentalize the event, minimize its memory, give it an ethnocentric orientation, and describe the Jewish survivors as the Nazis’ successors. One of the students recalled an Israeli TV program on the Holocaust and said, “What people say about the Nazi’s is not true. Maybe they killed, but they certainly did not kill more than one million”.[12] Another student shouted angrily “Why are we forced to study it?.... We are taught only about the miseries of the Jews!”[13] Other students in the class equated the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba. When Grossman suggested that they think again about this comparison, stating that Israel did not intend to conduct a genocide of the Palestinian people, one student replied, “This is just the same thing, here and there! The state of Israel want’s to get rid of the Arabs, wants to carry out genocide and kill us”. Grossman: “To eliminate you?” The student reflected and then replied; “OK, if not to eliminate us in body, then destroy our spirit! Israel wants to eliminate our history and our literature! The state prevents us from studying our national poets! It destroys us morally!”[14]

Since the establishment of the state of Israel Arab intellectuals and the Arab establishment have traditionally sided with the antisemitic tradition, have widely published the fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, have sided with the Holocaust deniers or, if willing to acknowledge the Holocaust, have minimized its dimensions and implications or explained it as a pragmatic-political maneuver. A central trend in this tradition is the representation of the Israelis as present-day Nazis.[15]

The new trend of acknowledging the Holocaust in its full dimensions and universal moral implications belongs to a new educational setting. This view, while critical of the traditional Arab refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust, represents a new version of ethnocentrism. It complements the Israeli educational effort at expressing a moral monopoly on suffering and controlling the ethnocentric collective memory, which can justify any act against the Palestinians, indeed against any other “Amalek”. In the Palestinian system, as manifested by Eduard Said,[16] the new trend insists on the universal implications of the Holocaust within a narrative where the ultimate victims of the Holocaust are the Palestinians who were victimized by the victims of the Holocaust, who made possible the Nakba, and actually made the Nakba inevitable outcome of the Holocaust. This Palestinian conception of the Holocaust and the Nakba, like the Israeli hegemonic conception of the Nakba and Holocaust, reveals in each system how the violence of normalizing education creates the memory and the identity which will reproduce the current realms of self-evidence, its immanent ethnocentrism, and its commitment to destroy the Other and her memory, identity, and interests, and the potential for cultural and political colonization. In other words, this conception, reproduces the triumph of normalizing education. Holocaust/Nakba education, for all the differences, manifests suffering as a philosophical category which is violently prevented from being addressed by normalizing education.

This is the aim of counter-education. Counter-education cannot justify or victimize one party or another: it is a transformative power that will allow both anti-human versions of ethnocentrism to be overcome. Counter-education deems it is wrong to start the reflection from this or that historical point. The starting point is the question of life and the meaning of suffering in relation to our responsibility for the Other[17] as someone and not as something, as the totally other, as ethical negativity and transcendence whose elaboration is always a challenge for the individual and her only way to struggle to become other than constructed (as a mere thing) by the normalizing education. The individual in her relation to the concrete otherness of the Other is the starting-point of the historical struggle over the possibility of dialogue and reflection - and not the forced collective, its ethnocentrism and the evils inflicted upon the Other. This historical event is at the same time also transcendence from history and a possible openness for the tension between the ethical I and transcendence which presides reason, moral law and political involvement[18] and critical dialogue, where reflection, critique and resistance to instrumental “truths” and “facts” meets as part of a kind of vita activa that is a realization of philosophical life. The destroyed individuality, however, is systematically situated by hegemonic education within collectives and power relations which constitute the actual individual limitations, and we cannot overlook their significance even when introducing counter-education, which is always a Utopia. This Utopia is in negative, relates to the absent and is in conflict with the false (positive) utopia, reflectivity and transcendence as represented by normalizing education.

From its beginning, Zionist self-consciousness negated the Palestinian identity of the land,[19] and referred to the Palestinian identity from an orientalist perspective[20] as a deterioration of the old Hebrew identity of the land and its people, or to the Palestinians as natives who should be recognized and helped as long as they do not develop into “Amalek”. The Zionists developed the ethnocentric military dimension of the Zachor concept that characterized all Jewish history, and realized it “in peaceful ways” in regard to the Palestinians. Normalizing education ensured the inability of the Israeli collective to address the suffering of others and especially prevented the acknowledgment of the Palestinian identity, memory, interests, and suffering. The ghetto has been ontologized and transformed from a physical environment and on element of a reach mentality into an aggressive collective ethnocentrist and colonialist-oriented entity which is committed to victory, success and power which is committed to control even the memory of the past and the present absence of Spirit.

The Palestinians too refuse to address the dialectics of the Holocaust and the Nakba in a non-ethnocentric moral and conceptual framework. The violence of the system in the Palestinian case likewise prevents its agents/victims from critically reflecting on the instrumentalization of the Nakba memory and on the violent reproduction of the Palestinian identity, memory, and suffering.

This normalization process of symbolic violence within the Palestinian educational system facilitates the military violence which counters/initiates the direct Israeli violence, which for its part is also conditioned by the symbolic violence of Israeli education. Palestinians and Israelis alike are subjects who become the objects of manipulation by “their” system, which constitutes both collectives simultaneously and their mutual total commitment to destroy the Other. This is part of a process where violence is internalized and bares self-negation and dispossession of human potentials. It is easy to show how education works within the Palestinian system by referring to the Mufti Haj Amin and his collaboration with the Nazi regime, or to his followers in the Arab world who themselves deny the very existence of the Holocaust or side with Holocaust deniers, or minimize its implication for the present day. It is more important, however, to show this through the most advanced Palestinian and Israeli conceptions of the production and control of collective memories and the destruction of the Other’s otherness as part of the production of objects/agents of the system who conceive themselves as free, reflective, devoted subjects. Here we refer to Azmi Byshara and Eduard Said as representatives of this new trend.

Azmi Byshara calls on the Palestinians to acknowledge the Jewish Holocaust. This call is strategically based on the acknowledgment that “the Palestinians are its indirect victims, since their homeland was taken from them by its direct victims”.[21] Byshara’s position is far from representing a humanist moral stand, even if he declares himself as “one who tries to constitute out of the Holocaust a universal lesson, a lesson that the Arabs too would be able to identify with,” in order “to build a road for a more realistic Arab understanding of the collective Jewish memory”.[22]

While Israeli education controlled the Holocaust memory to create an emotional and conceptual inability to acknowledge Palestinian suffering as part of a collective identity, or the very existence of the Nakba, Palestinian education worked hard to dispossess the Jews as the victims of the Nazi regime and as historical national entity with special links to Israel. In its more advanced “humanist-oriented” versions it exchanged its traditional refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust with a representation of the Palestinians as the ultimate victims of the Holocaust. The Palestinian poet Almaktukal Taha represents this new trend: “Many years ago you were collapsing under the murderers of Dachau / Your father was slaughtered in the Warsaw Ghetto / You suffered the agony of your sister’s rape at Auschwitz / Have you forgotten? How could you erect a new Auschwitz in the center of the desert / How could you dare to transfer a people from his land ? How did you dare to burn the children / Have you forgotten?”[23]

Eduard Said, like Azmy Byshara, represents this new, progressive trend in Palestinian cultural politics and education. Their Israeli counterpart is Yair Auron, who prepared an alternative, humanist-oriented historical curriculum which is explicitly committed to education for sensitivity to others’ suffering and genocides.[24] But neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli project can be considered counter-education. They refrain from criticizing ethnocentrism and are not committed to challenging the violence of educational normalization that victimize human beings and prepares them to be capable of functioning as perpetuators and the victims of their victims as agents of symbolic violence, as mere elements of historical process, as part of the victory of the mere life, of the nothingness. As something and not as someone each of them is an agent who does not allow the possibility of transcending the power apparatuses of the system and the collectives that it produces as part of the reproduction of the current realm of self-evidence. To my mind, any educational position which does not challenge the self-evidence and its manipulation apparatuses may not be considered counter-education. Said presents a courageous critique of the Palestinian refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust.[25] However, at the same time he shares Byshara’s disregard of Jewish history, its legitimate identity and interests, and the central role the return to Israel played in it, as well as disregarding the constitution of the Palestinian national identity in parallel, if not by the Zionist project and its negation of the Palestinian Other. Still without reaching the stage of counter-education, even as post-modernists Byshara and Said might be expected to adopt a post-ethnocentric position on Palestinian education. Yet in fact, within this context, even the critique of the Palestinian refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust ultimately serves the traditional Palestinian educational normalization: for Said, as for Byshara, there is only one legitimate representation of the national locus: Palestine, which has no dialectical relations with an other equal “valid” representation of this space, Israel, as there is only one legitimate “owner”, the Palestinians. Within this educational framework acknowledging the Holocaust leads directly to understanding the uniqueness of the Nakba. Its true meaning engineers within this framework the possibility of a “just” solution to the Palestinian/Israeli question by overcoming the Zionist success and allowing an ultimate Palestinian victory as a precondition for a new kind of coexistence.

The Palestinians’ refusal to acknowledge the specifically Jewish and the universal meaning of the Holocaust collides with and fertilizes the Israelis’ ethnocentristic acknowledging of “their” Holocaust and refusal to acknowledge the holocausts, genocides, and suffering of others. The victims and their victims alike have not overcome the logic of educational violence. Hitler was not really defeated.

How ironic is the current situation, where the central trends of today’s multicultural discourse attempting to raise their marginalized “voice” have found their alternatives in the philosophies of Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida. The current hegemonic multiculturalist discourse is united in its attack on the arrogance and violence of the Enlightenment’s project and its “Kantian” moral philosophy, which in the end must become violent and ethnocentric. In its consistent version, this attack sums up a new, extreme ethnocentrism, equipped with a self-glorifying rhetoric about the empowerment of marginalized groups, raising the silenced voices, and so on. The demand for a non-abstract equation of all cultures, all values, all parameters, and all concepts of discourse between the differences cannot be stopped at the edge of the general theory about anti-general theories and the equal value of all different conceptions of discourse. In such a theoretical framework, Zionists’ and the Palestinians’ ethnocentricities become legitimate, and their refusal to acknowledge the other’s suffering and the universal implications of the Holocaust inflicted on the Jews receives its philosophical justification and becomes equally moral as its negation. Lyotard’s conception of the production and realization of identities and morals reaffirms power as the ultimate and supreme moral criterion. This is power not in its negative, anti-ethical sense but in its positive sense. It constitutes “the good” and “the evil” as well as the conceptual criteria for their identification, reproduction, and destruction, and the extermination of the human subjects that are their agencies; humans who, according to Lyotard, are to be conceived as mere agencies and products of this system, and who, according to Foucault, are its eternal and determined victims.[26]

These understandings might become a central element for counter-education. Counter-education strives not solely to understand but actually to challenge the “power’s” modes of presence and its specific ways of constituting different moral conceptions, their life-and-death collision, and their reactions. In its ethical dimension it realizes what Levinas sees as religion.[27] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno understood this level of human (possible) existence as “total negation” of the present actuality within a Utopia where evil and not the good is the aim of the theory.[28] Such understandings might be helpful for understanding and resisting the hegemonic conceptions and practices of Palestinian and Zionist moral education and their control over representations of collective memory and identities as well as formations and realizations. Although anti-metaphysical and anti-foundationalist, this resistance is not anti-religious and it might redeem from its Diaspora the forgotten memory, the “voices” that were silenced, digested and falsely represented.

The starting point of counter-education is counter-memory. But counter-memory cannot stand by itself - it can be constructed only within a commitment to dialogue and transcendence which sees in the Other, her otherness and the negativity and not the sameness of the otherness of the Other as the presence of Utopia: openness, reflection and transcendence which can create its language and resistance within a dialogue with the Other. As such the Other is a vital partner in this project. Counter-education cannot be realized by one party “liberating” the other’s identity, consciousness, and potentials. Only self-emancipation is possible, if at all. This self-emancipation, however, is dialectically always within a dialogical process and under specific psychological, conceptual and material conditions yet it cannot be reduced to rational analysis and political positioning. This does not minimize the responsibility towards the Other, her suffering, and her unrealized potentials. In the Israeli arena counter-education should struggle to overcome hegemonic education and its structural social, political, cultural, and existential injustice. It should look for the Palestinian’s otherness and start a dialogue with its traces in within the Israeli arena. Palestinian counter-education should move in the same direction against the Palestinian institutionalized ethnocentrism and anti-humanism, and open a critical dialogue within its own framework as a first step toward an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. Within the Jewish-Israeli arena the motivations and justifications for such a project are not to be found in the present reality, in the realm of self-evidence. It is a Utopia, a particle of the Hope Principle.

A Jewish-humanistic stand of the sort held by Leo Baeck, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rozenzweig calls for the development of the central ideas of Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer. In a different rhetorical framework and transformed, they continue Jewish universalistic utopianism. Within the horizons of a Critical Theory they refer to the unity of the reason and the unconditional commitment to the Other as a framework for the plurality of its legitimate voices. It is possible only within the framework of a philosophy where the individual, and not the collective, is the starting point and the end. They developed this concept without being swept into a multicultural rhetoric, or on the other hand, a violent ethnocentrism responsible for perpetrating the Holocaust, refusing to acknowledge the Holocaust, or refusing to acknowledge the other’s Holocaust. Jewish humanism, if possible today, should meet an Arab humanism or post-humanist dialogical commitment for the sake of a mutual acknowledgment and transformation which will open the possibilities for a more humanist future. Jewish religious counter-education can be realized in face of the absent Arab humanism, in recognition of the Palestinian otherness and the responsibility towards the evils inflicted on the Palestinians. Such counter-education must take the form of a non-violent ethics, against all the facts of reality and the possibilities introduced by discourse, where the more aggressive side is the one “to win”.

Counter-education is a Utopia, yet it is a concrete Utopia, namely it is possible to struggle for its realization in the current reality, changing the cultural, social, and existential context and the possibilities of a more humane Palestinian-Israeli coexistence. However, it is an abstract Utopia without the serious response to the Hope Principle. Since this principle represents an alternative to the prevailing power that governs reality, in principle each new moment contains the infinite as countless unredeemed possibilities for its outburst into historical time and open new possibilities. In this sense, and only in this sense, are the possibilities for a peaceful Israeli-Palestinian coexistence not totally blocked. Within such an encounter “Palestinian” and “Israeli” identities will necessarily be overcome, transformed, or abolished for the sake of new conceptual, existential, cultural, and social dimensions in a new reality the aim of education will be not to abandon human potentials for being other than directed and controlled by the system; counter-education will lead to an effort to struggle for new concepts, reflections, and human coexistence. The daily Holocaust of its negation constitutes the ontological, epistemological, and historical pre-condition for the Jewish Holocaust, the Palestinian Nakba and the violent dialectics among both of them.