Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, University of Haifa
 

The quest for homeland, even the reflection on homeland, is never at home. The moment homeland enters the linguistic space and receives its "voice" is the brink of loss, of distance or of exile from what homeland refers too. Entering the language of homeland, quest for homeland or overcoming being exiled from homeland as it is or as it should become is entails entering the platonic cave within which a collective or a realm of self-evidence and Same is created. It is constituted by powers, which are effective enough to secure the invisibility of their manipulations for the collective, whom it creates, activates, represents and victimizes. It is exactly the depths of the evidence of selfhood, orientation, yardsticks and aims of the individual which feel at home in their "homeland" which represents their effective victimization and loss of themselves. In this sense the language of homeland or Heimat as its history reveals, might open also new possibilities of overcoming the hegemonic system.

     Homeland as well as the quest for homeland or Heimat, as part of individual and collective identity formation, representation and reconstruction are one of the products of normalizing education. It reflects the efficiency of the hegemonic educational violence. At the same time, however, the longing for Heimat or for returning to "home-land" manifests also an immanently alternative quest, an antagonistic, totally other then the continuum of the Same of which national homeland is but one, historically short lived, example. This other, non-collectivist, never formed and given quest, enables the never-determined apresence of "the totally other",(1)  as transcendental element. It calls for a struggle, which is also a brake through, for overcoming the temptations of the platonic cave of homeland. Such a call is a challenge and a threat to the triumph of normalizing education and its actualized or promised Heimat. It endangers not only the relation to ones homeland in terms of identification, rest with one's-self, patriotism, willingness for sacrifice or hate/fear of the Other. Much more than that, this possible transcendental call endangers being at home in all other manifestations of the Same, the continuum and the self-evidence, namely of the manifestations of Tanatus. And yet, this call it is a great danger. It includes suffering yet a worthy suffering and transcendence which have no determined "aim", "goal", "truth" or nirvana. This messianic moment is a religious element, which offers not an alternative concept of homeland or sweet Garden of Eden on earth - but an alternative presence of exile or homelessness. In this respect it is inseparable from the presence of the quest for or love of homeland or the miseries of its loss.

     The academic treatment of the issue of homeland is not irrelevant to our topic. "Heimat is where one is born, where one receives an education, comes to consciousness of selfhood, adjusts oneself to family and society, or constructs a 'social entity'".(2)  Sociologists and social psychologists have explained Heimat as a basi8c human need, comparable to eating or sleeping.(3)  According to Celia Applegate political scientists have also spoken of Heimat in terms of natural human tendencies, in particular tendencies to form political allegiances, whether on the local or the national level.(4)  According to this scholar Heimat is not only a source of security in the patria, fatherland, and motherland. It is much more than that: it is, as Karl Phillip Moritz and the romantic tradition understood, an image of "homey tranquility and happiness…"(5)  Rolf Petri too emphasizes Heimat as a social stabilizing element.(6)  He denotes the importance of Heimat as a relation and as a sense of place of origin, as familiar land, as the opposite of being faced with a strange place. Petri is right in emphasizing that the concept of Heimat as being one with oneself (Bei-Sich-Sein) had also a metaphysic element which enabled and fertilized the feeling and the expressions relating to a semantic field which stretches from conceptions such as "father Rhein" to conceptions such as"the German blood"(7)  as unifying and elevating elements. Petri advances the academic discussion on this issue by showing the instrumentalization of the Heimat feelings, conceptions and cultural activities within the framework of changing economic and national struggles.(8)  At the same time, Petri argues Heimat also functions as a subjective space where a person who is not one with himself can introspect and experience himself, meeting and reassuring his or her identity.(9)

     We will try to make clear my conceptions of homeland and the role of the quest for homeland as well as the human situation within two different conceptions of homeland or Heimat by first reconstructing the role of normalizing education in establishing, representing and reproducing notions of homeland. After showing it in relation to homeland as a safe heaven familiarity we will try to elaborate on it in another version, from the point of view of the Exiled. This second version will be in the center of this elaboration while focusing on the case of the Israeli and the Palestinians.

     The Israeli/Palestinian concepts of homeland and exile will be reflected with special attention to the function of the instrumentalization of the memories of the Holocaust and Nakbah as a manifestation of normalizing education. This from a counter-educational perspective which does not offer an alternative concept of homeland but does position itself from an alternative exile as a locus for a struggle for overcoming both Israeli and Palestinian, and actually all normalizing collectivist-oriented concepts of homeland (and loss of homeland/strive to reestablish the lost homeland). This alternative to the concept of loss and victimhood will challenge the concepts of victimhood; suffering and exile of these both rival collectives and the essential Same, which they represent. A different concept of homelessness represents a readiness, sensitivity, for counter-education - and not the victory of its alternative symbolic bombardment. This is the most we can do, and by that too we already represent normalizing education and the Same as our homeland. The acceptance of this contradiction, is a gate to much greater dangers and possibilities of self-articulation and love of the otherness of the Other's exile.

     Normalizing education manifests itself in many ways, arenas and compositions. One of its central manifestations is in constructing collectives and individuals. "Home", here, is essential. The ability of normalizing education to reproduce itself while using its victims as its agents is determined by effectiveness in establishing a totality in which there is no alarming or awakening gap between the normalized individual and the normalizing system. The system produces realms of self-evidence in which the yardsticks to evaluate, identifications and characterizations are self-assurance, of which the individual becomes a part of, an agent, a symbol. If the identification of the individual with the system ensures a safe closure and a comfortable totality the individual, who became some-thing will not feel alienation towards his or her normalizing space of manipulation and he or she will regard it as his or her "home". Concrete and specific contextual, historical, material, and symbolic conditions always determine the construction of such agents of the hegemonic realm of self-evidence.(10)  It is always vulnerable, always on the edge of being colonized by another system and alternative ideologies, collectives, power relations, consciousness'', interests and social formations and interests.

     The collective, as a close grouping of normalized individuals and as a manifestation of the efficient reproduction process of the hegemonic normalizing education is committed to internal and external colonization processes. Its effective violence is a pre-condition for its reproduction and enhancement. The ultimate victory of normalizing education over its alternatives is in its ability to Vail efficiently its creative violence. Its effective violence is tested by its competence in ensuring an unproblematic identification of its victims with its violence, making it into a present or a promised "home". The space of this violent process of normalizing education becomes "home" when the violence is efficient enough. It gives birth and cultivates the safeguards of the horizons of its prisoners. One of the most efficient policing powers is the prisoners' love of this "home" or "home-land", their commitment to disregard, destroy or redeem their own and their Others' internal or external love of homeland. It is of vital importance in constituting peace, tranquility and love of the kind, which will enable the prosperity of the "we". Fundamentally this means the safe reproduction of the hegemonic system and the impotency of its victims to unveil the violences which create their identity, their quests, their fears, their enemies and their love of their selves, their "we", "their" "homeland" and the "they", the "enemies".

     Nationalism is but one of many possible manifestations of the production of collectives by the violence of normalizing education. The concept of homeland or Heimat and the love and devotion to ones homeland are a manifestation of a successful de-humanization of humans, by constructing not only their identity, love, fears and hatreds but also their identification with this process and committing themselves to it as its guardians and agents. Normally such systems and ideologies collide with their Others in a creative meeting in which each side manifests its love of homeland by destroying the Other and colonizing its rivals as heroes, patriots, good citizens or devoted fellows. These clashes must not always brake into an explicit violence, war, or conquest of physical spaces.

     In different historical situations and social and cultural contexts it has different manifestations and is never fixed, stable and secure. The production of collectives and their closure has many different versions. Some of these use the rhetoric of openness, pluralism, anti-dogmatism, kaleidoscopic, hybrid, contingent educational processes and so forth. This is manifested, for example, in the cyberspace, in actualizing consumerism or activating the McDonaldization of intersubjectivity, all which are manifestations of normalizing education which create collectives, their sense of homeland, its horizons and its Others.

     The Israeli-Palestinian context manifests a clash between two normalizing educational systems, which produced and reproduce two collectives who are committed to negate the otherness of the Other as a vital part of each one's self-constitution. This self-constitution of the collective is actually the act of the negation of self-constitution of the individual human. It is the act of robing of robing by the system of the human potentials for overcoming collectivism and false love and relation to Spirit, creativity and responds to a call of something higher then life as the aim of life. It demolishes the potentials for dialogical self-constitution. It is actually the self-realization of the system. It uses the consciousness of self, identity, collective memory and quests for a freed homeland in each collective for self-reproduction which is committed to deny the concept of the homeland of the Other and "liberate" the geographical space as well as the symbolic arena as part of its normalizing education which also has its explicit and sometime military violences. It is not the absence of a common discourse or bridge between the narratives of Israeli and Palestinians which is responsible to the successful veiling of the symbolic violence which is responsible for the visible violence between the two collectives. It is just the opposite: it is their concept of homeland and their concept of the collective and its Other which bonds them together in a common narrative which the conflicting normalizing education daily fertilizes.

     Israelis and Palestinians represent a unique concept of homeland. This model is unique in its composition of the concept of homeland in opposition to the normal concepts of homeland, fatherland, motherland or Heimat as a safe, familiar, tranquil place, which constitutes the identity of the individual and the collective. In the Israeli-Palestinian case it is the Diaspora which is the constitutive element. Both for the Israelis and the Palestinians being exiled as a collective experience and consciousness is the central dimension of normalizing education. Its affects are essential when constituting the collective identity, the memories, the quest for home-land and the commitment to defend its borders, interests and imperatives against the Other.

     The Israelis and Palestinians are also united by another essential element: each of the rival collectives conceives the same space as its home-land and itself as the sole legitimate reflection of its identity and metaphysical meaning, goals and imperatives. With all the differences, and they are of vital importance, both share a commitment to destroy the Other; the rival normalizing education, its narrative and is commitment to struggle against what it conceives as criminal violent practices against the legitimate and original inhabitants of the country. The instrumentalization of the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakbah are essential for this discourse between the two normalization processes and narratives to such a degree that both should be conceived also as one, united process, manifesting and realizing the essence of normalizing education and the mechanism of constructing homeland or Heimat as "home" which has not only "land" but also its Others, who are committed to colonize it and make the land into their "home" as part of destroying the identity and all which is dear and worthy in the "we".

     In Israel the memory of the Holocaust is not left to contingency. It is officially instrumentalized and institutionalizes by a special law. A governmental agency, (Mosad Yad Vashem) was established to preserve and represent its memory and implications. The history of the changing representations of the Holocaust memory and the official educational "lessons" of the Holocaust are beyond the scope of this paper. The focus here is on the centrality of the memories of the Holocaust to the goals of the Israeli normalizing education in general and especially in its relations to the concept of homeland.

     Since its beginning, the Israeli instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory treated the memory of the Holocaust as part of the polemics with the Jewish non-Zionists and the rest of the world, aiming at establishing "the lessons of the Shoa" as an ultimate justification of the Zionist claim for establishing Palestine/Israel as a "national home" or as the realization of "home coming" to Zion, to Israel, both as the only way to secure the safety of the Jews and as the realization of the inner imperative of the Jewish history.

     The mainstream Zionist attitude towards Israel/Palestine is to be understood as a secular political theology. It conceived an undividable connection between the true identity and telos of the Land of Israel and the Sons of Israel. It saw Israel/Palestine as the "historical homeland" of the Jews, which the time did not disrupt their legitimate right to live and recollect themselves in it while building it, or "redeem" it. And more so, "since it is almost a dessert, and almost unpopulated by others, and we, from our part never abandoned our hope to return to this land, as manifested by the 12th of the coulombs of our faith, all our prayers and all our history".(11)  A. D. Gordon, one of the greatest and most influential figures of the Zionist labor movement was very clear on the connection of the secular Zionist claim for Israel/Palestine as a Jewish homeland to the Jewish essentialism of the Zionist project, even in its most radical secular forms. "Judaism", he asserted, "is one of the foundations of the 'I' of each one of us".(12)  And as such he saw in the Bible the assurance of the right of the Jews to the land, as an eternal legitimacy for its being the main source of legitimacy. On top of it he added the argument of work and creativity as manifestations/creating power of the identity of the land, constituting it into an "home": "We have an historical right on the land, and this right remains ours as long as another, alternative, power of life and creativity did not purchase it entirely. Our land, which beforehand was 'the land of milk and honey' or, at any rate, giving birth to a high culture, became wasteland, poor, distressed of all cultural countries, and almost empty. As if it is a sign that the country is waiting for us, reassurance of our right on the land".(13)  The view from which the justification of the "purification" or reclaiming the homeland is the exile and the locus from where it is articulated is the Diaspora, even when in Israel/Palestine. This, in opposition to what we can fine in other Heimat or homeland discussions. In the Israeli case this is where the call for fearless "creativity" and struggle comes from, as manifested in the mytization of Josef Trumpeldor and the halutz (pioneer) as creative, innocent, ethnocentrist, fearless, farmer-warier. The national-religious and the secular nationalist trends in Zionism were united in their essentialism, conceiving the essence of Palestine to be Israel, or, Zion, where Zionism, if succeeded, will realize a renaissance of the nation and its religion/spiritual-cultural creation.(14)  One trend emphasized the spiritual-religious aspects, and looked in Israel/Palestine the revival of Yavene and the rabbinical-Halachatic tradition. Its secular version was represented by Ehad A'am. He introduced a concept of homeland, which divided between a spiritual homeland and a physical homeland. His project too was vitalistic and ethnocentristic, demanding the recapturing the relation to the essence of Palestine/Israel by the Jews. This, however, not in order to guaranty a political domination: within this concept of homeland the imperative was to reestablish Israel/Palestine as a Jewish spiritual center, while most of the Jews could continue their physical lives in the Diaspora as their political, economical and social relevant context. The second trend saw in Israel/Palestine the revival of Beitar and the vitalistic-nationalistic tradition. The third trend looked at Israel/Palestine as an ancient home from a rationalist Eurocentristic orientation, according to the ideals and the self-image of Western bourgeoisie of the day. While conceiving Israel/Palestine as the historical homeland of the Jews Hertzel was prepared to accept any refuge place to solve the immediate threats on the existence and security of Jewish life, and develop it into an independent Jewish state which is freed of emotional, religious, mythological and other irrational bonds of a collective to its homeland. When the Zionist congress defeated his "Uganda program" and he wowed "If I will forget you Jerusalem let my tongue stick to my XXX". While committing himself to struggle for re-making Zion into the homeland of the Jewish people as the ultimate goal of zionism, his commitment was more of an internal political maneuver (to avoid the disintegration of the Zionist movement) then a reflection of his deep sentiments to Israel/Palestine.(15)

     Historically, the forth trend emerged victorious in the Zionist history, while being influenced by and containing elements of the other trends, of which the one represented by Hehad A'am was by far the less influential.

     Both right and left wings of the hegemonic Zionist movement were committed to an uncompromising negation of the Diaspora. The negation of the Diaspora was founded on its being conceived as a perverted, unnatural way of Jewish life, not only unsafe and certainly not firstly on the uneasy conditions it offered Jews or on the actual and potential dangers the Diaspora incubated. Within the Zionist secularized political theology Jewish life had a universal and a national telos. The fulfillment of the historical-cosmic mission of the Jewish nation originating in the revelations and experiences of the founding fathers and their birth by and with the religiously significance of the sites and symbols of the space. Within the Jewish tradition and the Zionist narrative this telos of Israel was not concluded with the presenting to the world the book of books, not by giving birth to Christianity and Islam, and not by t Jewish fertilizing modern Western culture with some of its most important figures and ideas. The imperative of the telos of the Jews is to negate the Diaspora and recreate national political and cultural life in its homeland. The realization of its telos within  its universal and national utopia is formulated in modern Western revolutionary leftist or rightist articulations yet essentially it draws and continues the ancient Jewish religious conception of the special role the sons of Israel have in this world, on its metaphysical foundations on the one hand, and on its Messianic attitude towards the future and its presence, on the other. Moshe Hess, Berdichevsky, Aba Achimeir, Borochov, Uri-Zvi Grinberg, Jabotinsky, Arlozorov, Ben-Gurion and Menahem Begin are all united in this secularized vitalistic political theology.

     It should be noted that the conception of homeland here has three dimensions. One is of seeing Palestine, in its essence, as Israel, namely, seeing its Palestinian identity as an historical stage, which manifests its decline, its downfall, paralleling the downfall of the Jewish people in the Diaspora. It is conceived as an "almost unpopulated land"' or as desolated land ("Midbar shemama") which calls for its flourishing, purifying, and elevation by its returning owners, who are by no means immigrants, and certainly not colonizers. This project of the renewed connection between "the unpopulated land with the until-then homeless people (ERETZ LELO AM LEAM LELO ERTZ") is also a political project of literally conquering the land, establishing a Jewish majority and enforcing a Zionist hegemony. This project was conditioned by the success of Zionist education which was committed to give birth o "the new Jew" as a pioneer, (Halutz), as a Israeli-born (Sabra), or as a soldier. Zionist education had the mission of colonizing the soul of the individual and creating a new collective harmonious totality as a pre-condition to the success of the political and military struggle over colonizing physically, politically, militarily and culturally the space and establishing a Jewish hegemony which will reflect its essential identity and its Messianic mission. Here the concept of homeland as a future political struggle over creating a nation and its homeland is inseparable from a metaphysical foundations of a concept of revolution or struggle as homeland, on the one hand and from the utopian axis or a positive utopian concept of homeland, on the other. In this since the political-activist-present-oriented trend in the Zionist movement is revealed as a movement which is inconceivable outside its orientation towards the past and future and is also to be understood only in its metaphysical foundations and spiritual mission. The violence of normalizing education and its manipulations are reviled here as a precondition to the struggle of the realization of this project of  creating a new collective and a new country on the foundation of the Diaspora identity of the Jewish people and by overcoming the Palestinian identity of the land. The purification of the Diaspora mentality and the purification of Palestine and its transformation into Israel became part and parcel of the project of re-entering history and returning to the track of fulfilling the supra-political mission of the Zionist politics. During the last hundred and twenty years the Zionist hegemonic normalizing education which created the Israelis and Israel could not create this collective and "its" space without the otherness of the Diaspora mentality and the Diaspora economic, social and cultural conditions, on the one hand and without the otherness of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian identity of Palestine, on the other. This clash was a vital element for its self-constitution - as it was for the Palestinian normalizing education and its nation-building project.

     For the Israeli normalizing education it was of vital importance to establish a unified, coherent narrative of a collective memory. Its starting point was biblical Zion and its utopian axis was purified Israel. This narrative, which created the Zionist subject, was constructed by a sense of telos, which was founded on the logic of MIGALUT LEGEULA ("from exile to redemption"). After the Holocaust this narrative placed as central the Holocaust and its lessons and the MIGALUT LEGEULA concept was concretized and realized by the concept of MISHOA LITEKUMA ("from downfall to re-constitution"). In its various articulations this narrative was founded on a concept of the all-embracing presence of the absence of homeland, on the one hand and on the presence of violent injustice against the Jews, on the other. Being the ultimate victim of human history while being the subject of history was essential for this secularized political theology. In both of its poles - historical victims of unredeemed world and as the bearers of the claim for universal and national justice the concept of home was essential. The Diaspora of the Jews and living as permanent victims of human history did not reflect solely the exile of the Jews from their country and their loss of sovereignty - it reflected also a general human condition of living in an unjust, unredeemed world. In this sense Zionism was only one manifestation of a more general and much richer Jewish utopian commitment, realized within various and conflicting revolutionary projects, ranging from anarchism and Marxism to scientific revolutions in modern Western culture and society. In the Zionist narrative the history of homelessness - as the history of overcoming the exile of human reality as a real home for all people - is inseparable from the issue of the presence of historical violence. Historical violence or the whole-presence of the conditions, which Marx called "pre-history", is conceived as manifested with special clarity and unavoidable tall in the evil, which was committed all along history against the Jews. After the Holocaust this secularized political theology became a central challenge for the Zionist normalizing education. It became instrumentalized in support of the Jewish claim for Israel as a sovereign Jewish state as well as against the Palestinian narrative and its concrete challenges for the realization of the Zionist narrative.

     The concept of victimhood and the self-conception of the Jews as the paradigmatic victims of secular history were essential for the fabrication of the narrative of MIGALUT LEGEULA and MISHOA LITEKUMA. Within the hegemonic Zionist narrative the concept of victimhood was historically paralleled to the period of Jewish life in the Diaspora. The normalizing Zionist education presented an equation between the termination of Jewish victimhood and the self-emancipation from the Diaspora mentality (Galutiut) and from the Jewish "unnatural" life in the Diaspora by returning to its "homeland. Within this perspective the land of Israel itself was presented as captive, perverted or deserted by strangers and primitive dwellers who were sometimes conceived as "Arabs" and on occasion as "Bedouins" but never as Palestinians . A special educational and political effort was recruited for GEULAT AKARKA, for "the redemption of the land". The homeland itself, that the return to it was conceived as a emancipatory and expurgation element, was conceived as captive, prisoner in unnatural conditions, deserted and humiliated and it was the grand mission of "the new Jew" to redeem the land and emancipate her/himself: to (re)build and be built (LIVNOT ULEIBANOT BA). There was no way to separate the two, according to the Zionist normalizing education. The memory of the Holocaust was instrumentalized to this conclusion and the central claim of Zionism was presented as tragically and undisputedly manifested by history and AMALEK, its agent.

     The Zionist educators presented AMALEK as an historical agent, which is responsible for Jewish victimhood. "Amalek" wrote Ben Zion Dinner, the central figure in the history of Israeli education, "is constant (element) eternally present within the gentiles" (Mida amealehet bein aumot). The Holocaust was presented as one of the picks of a continuum of the history of Jewish victimhood while living in the Diaspora. Hitler or Hitlerism was paralleled with the eternal essence, which the historical Amalek represented. In this sense while Hitler was presented as synonymous with Amalek the defeat of Nazism was presented as not synonymous with the defeat of Amalek. Amalek, while presented as the agent responsible for the victimization of the Jews in the Diaspora was also and ever more so presented as presence at home too, in Israel. The Palestinians became present-day Amalek and the distorted reality of Israel as Palestine as well as the victims of the effort to reclaim, recapture and "redeem" it were presented as martyrs (Kedoshim) equaling the Palestinian martyrs/their victims/victimizers (Shaid).

     Victims of the refusal to the Zionist road to homeland and the victims of the struggle for "the liberation of Israel" as the homeland of world Jewry were united by the Zionist hegemonic education. Under slogans such as Migalut legeula the school curriculum reflected and fabricated a Zionist subject did not question the foundations, the practices and the aims of this narrative, its rivals and its enemies. History textbooks, school rituals, memorial days, memorial books and special ceremonies, even the art, the media and the museums were committed for the reproduction of the hegemonic narrative and helped to mobilize in a constructive manner daily symbolic and non-symbolic violence. This, for the realization of the lessons and ideals of this narrative against  "the Amalek of our generation, the Palestinians, who claimed to be One of its manifestations is the celebration day of the remembrance of the Holocaust (Yom Ashoa) very close, almost united with the remembrance day of the dead of Israeli solders in the wars of independence (Yom Azikaron Lehalelei Ma'arahot Israel) followed, with no separation by the beginning of celebrating the Independence Day (Yom A'atzemaut) of the Jewish state in Israel.

     While rejecting the Jewish concept of Diaspora as an ontological sign and as a pre-condition for the fulfillment of Jewish mission in the world and as a manifestation of its being the chosen people Zionism rejected exile, being out of the secular/violent history or homelessness, as the homeland of Jews. The negation of the Gola (Diaspora) as a mentality and as social-cultural historical context for Jewish life was a pre-condition for the hegemonic Zionist movements who struggled for a political, historical negation of the Diaspora and for the constitution and development of Israel as the homeland and sovereign state of the Jews. This project could not be struggled for without a parallel negation, that of the legitimacy of the Palestinian claim for Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinians and the negation of their negation of the Zionist project. It is impossible to understand the Israeli-Palestinian explicit and visible struggle from the symbolic and visible violence. The struggle about the names of sites such as Jerusalem/al Kuds or Ein Hod/Ein Hud  and their Israeli or Palestinian identity (and the kind of their "Palestinian" or "Israeli" identity) are inseparable.
     The refusal the acknowledge the legitimacy of the existence of the Other or/and the legitimacy of its claim to Israel/Palestine as its homeland unites the two collectives in a dialectics which simultaneously enables/enhances the visible and the invisible violence among the two rival groups while constituting their very existence as a collective. Each of the struggling collectives sees itself as the sole legitimate owner of the place and accepts the Other as a threat or perversion of the authentic or ideal identity of its homeland. Each of the rival normalizing educational systems gives special place to the relations between the victim and the victimizer. For the Israelis as Jews, the remembrance of their history as a chain of victimizations which manifest the evil in this world and the special goal and the uniqueness of the Jewish people in history, is not only a religious imperative. It is also a constitutive element of their traditional education and the formation of their traditional identity as Jews and it became a formative element in the hegemonic Zionist education, until the changes, which were brought about by the last generation. Here, within the history of victimhood the remembrance of the Holocaust became of vital importance for the Zionists. Within this project the memory of the Holocaust was and is still instrumentalized and reproduced in relation to four interconnected and sometime conflicting challenges: 1. Following the traditional strife with the Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, as the ultimate "proof" of the fundamental claim of Zionism, its negation of the Diaspora and its claim for a Jewish returning to its homeland as the only guarantee for its security as a collective and as a guarantee for its returning into normal national life. 2. The tension between the imperative of "back to national normality" and the self-conception of a unique nation with an unmatched history and human telos among the nations even within the secularized returning home. Not only the fathers of Zionism such as Hess, Borochov, Jabotinsy, Gordon and Arlosorov, but even post independence leaders of the Zionist left and right such as Ben Gurion and Begin reproduced and further developed this secularized political theology. The issue of Jews as the ultimate victims in worlds history and reestablishing a Jewish homeland and a Sabra mentality as opposed to the Diaspora mentality (Galutiut) demanded and justified the instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory. 3. The instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory and its ever greater role in the hegemonic Zionist narrative was enhanced in face of the Palestinian Nakbah, the constitution of a rival Palestinian narrative which challenged the Zionist narrative and in face of the Palestinian (counter) violence and its negation of the Zionist instrumentalization of the Holocaust, its lessons and its commitment to the establishment and strengthening of Israel as a Jewish homeland as the ultimate answer to the Holocaust. The Palestinian transitional denial or minimization of the Holocaust, their denial of the right of Jews to return to Israel as their homeland or for that matter their denial of the legitimacy of any Jewish existence in Israel, along with their violent resistance to the realization of the Zionist project became unified. It became unified into a conceived reality of a new Holocaust not in the Diaspora but in Israel. The respond to this existential and ideological threat was integrated to the refusal to acknowledge the suffering brought about on the Palestinian and the injustice done to them by the realization of the Zionist project. The fear of a new Holocaust and the fear of acknowledging the responsibility towards the Nakbah became inseparable. So was the denial of the otherness of the Other by National Socialism, the denial of the otherness of the Other, his/her suffering and aspirations by the Palestinians towards the Jews as such and as Israelis, and the denial of the otherness of the Other by the Israelis towards the Palestinians, their suffering and aspirations. Palestinians and Israelis were united by their refusal to acknowledge not only historical tragedies and suffering, but also present suffering and aspiration for homeland as a peaceful, secure Heimat. Both side's refusal to recognize each others right to homeland became a constitutive element for collective identity formation and articulates an exiled point of reference for the conception of each collective's homeland. More and more Israelis are aware of this, within a process of the formation of a post-modern reality in which the constitutive myths of Zionism and its creative violences are rapidly being disintegrated. Within this process more and more Israelis recognize Israel as Palestine for the Palestinians, namely, acknowledge Palestine as the legitimate homeland of the Palestinians as well as the historical injustice done to them during the Nakbah, before that tragedy and after that to the present day. Parallel to that process less Israelis see Israel as the legitimate homeland of the Jews alone and a growing minority do not see it anymore as the legitimate homeland (historically or presently) of the Jews. In face of this development and as part of it the mythization of the Holocaust memory has become more efficient then ever. The instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory within this process, however, was not realized so effectively by the hegemonic Zionist normalizing education, which almost disintegrated completely and lost its manipulative potentials for most parts of the Israeli middle-class. 4. Within the post-modern conditions in the Israeli arena and its culture industry the Holocaust memory was not lost. It became integrated to the system and is being produced, distributed and consumed as any other reified merchandize in the representation market. The McDonaldization of this arena makes "Holocaust experiences" and "Auschwitz trips" into goods, which incubates a special value. Here not a modern conception of a given or promised homeland is being produced but its postmodern alternative. This process does not bring along with it many potentials for the Israeli's recognition of the Palestinian Others' suffering and responsibility towards their toll, and even when it does it de-politicizes this recognition. More than that it deconstructs the quest for homeland as well as the sensibility to homelessness, it not only dismantles the commitment towards the national solidarity and willingness to self-sacrifice for the realization of collective ideals and imperatives - at the same time it also dissolves the ability to responsibility towards the Other being exiled, uprooted from the homeland and the potentials for resisting injustice and struggling for a dialogue. Meaninglessness as a pleasure machine becomes an unlimited, omnipotent home.

     Palestinian normalizing education parallels the Zionist one and corresponds to it. Without being a mere reaction to the Zionist project it cannot be conceived without or outside the death and life struggle between the two. For the Palestinians too the formative collective experience is that of being exiled, of being a suffering, homeless people, even when not uprooted from their land.(16)

     Edward Said is very clear on this point: "…There is no doubt that we do in fact form a community, if at heart a community built on suffering and exile".(17)  The point is not that the Palestinians do not give up their identity in face of their tragedy and ongoing daily suffering. Much more than that it is the suffering, the loss of the homeland, which formulates their identity. Mahmud Darwish writes on this issue in his poem "The Palestinian wound": …"We are discharged of remembering, the Carmel hills are within us, and on our RISIM the grass of the Galilee, do not say: I wish we would run towards her like a river, do no say! We are in the flesh of our homeland…and she is within us!"(18)  The longing for the actual Palestine, to the land becomes a formative element of the identity as represented by the normalizing apparatuses and its agents. The representation apparatus, the symbol and its agents as authentic "Palestinians" are united. Darwish himself is partially aware of that in one of his interviews where he writes: "This is an attempt of fixation of the land in the language and in the body. In the Palestinian case there is something specific and special and this is that when the Palestinians went away and were exiled they took with them their keys. They cared to preserve the keys in safe places. Regardless to the fact that it was in exile or in a country to which they immigrated. In this sense the key took along itself the house. In this sense the house is attached to the one who left. Not Man alone left, the land itself was gone out with the Palestinian wherever the Palestinian went. Consciously and unconsciously he had the need to feel that he carries the place with him and the lost homeless was both Man and land. This is why I have many expressions of homeland as a suitcase. My homeland is simultaneously not a suitcase and a suitcase".(19)

     This present experience of homeland is in tragic contradiction of a traditional unformulated homeland as part of self-evidence an inner-self, which was destroyed in the Nakbah or which its distraction is articulated in the word Nakbah. It is to be seen in light of the absence of an Arabic synonymous word to the word Heimat or homeland. In literate Arabic the closest word is Mauten. Another close term is Muskat al Ras (where put my head to rest) or the house of the grandfathers.  This conception of homeland as Mauten becomes much closer, yet very different in face of a direct experience "like the one experienced by the Jafaites and all the others who immigrated from the Palestinian towns and villages - then, the longing and the quest become Mauten or Muskat al Ras. The experience of the town or the neighborhood and the house in which one grow up, in which he tasted the first bits of happiness in his life, part of his inner life that is impossible to strip him from, becomes something much higher then a tangible thing. It becomes a symbol".(21)  Here the Jewish concept of homeland in exile and the Palestinian concept of homeland, as well as their concepts of loss, and victimhood become very close on the one hand (without loosing their differences) and part of a dialectical unity, on the other.

     The Jewish presence is conceived here as a contamination of the pure land of Palestine, and in many cases as a daily rape of the land and its innocence.(22)  Homeland as the place of the most contaminated, distorted, and perverted of raped by its unlawful violent conquerors is shared by the Jews/Israelis and the Palestinians. Some Palestinian thinkers who acknowledge the similarity position the two conceptions within the framework of rival narratives struggling over hegemony in a symbolic fight, which is also a political and existential tragic struggle.(23)  From the Palestinian view, however, there is no symmetry between the two claims for homeland and the two conception of the contamination or blasphemy rape of the land, as there is no symmetry between the two concepts of Diaspora and home returning.

     The Palestinian narrative is not yet formed and there is much struggling over the construction and the legitimate presentation of the Palestinian identity. And yet, all Palestinian political activists, most Palestinian intellectuals and most of the Palestinian population are united in their conception of the illegitimacy of the Jewish presence in Palestine, the Israeli conception of Israel as a Jewish homeland and on the relation of Jews to the Palestinians and their responsibility for the Nakbah.

The ethnocentric attitude of the Zionist hegemonic narrative is reflected in the Israeli Declaration of Independence is matched by the ethnocentrism of the Palestinian narrative and in its realization in its constitutive texts such as the National Code A'amana (1964 and 1968) the Declaration of Independence (November 1988). According to paragraph 1 of the National Code of 1968 "Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Nation and is an integral part of the great Arab homeland. The Palestinian stock is part of the Arab nation". Paragraph 3 says that "The Arab Palestinian nation has a lawful right on his homeland" and in paragraph 4 the Palestinian identity is articulated in relation to the land: " The Palestinian identity is an essential rooted character, which does not disappear. The sons from their fathers inherit it. The Zionist occupation and the disintegration of the Arab {Palestinian nation, as a result of the Holocausts that it suffered, do not harm the personality of the Arab Palestinian people and its Palestinian belonging of the nation and do not negate them". In the Palestinian Declaration of Independence this attitude of the relation between the land and the Palestinian identity is quite explicit. It says there: "On the land of God's usher to humanity, on the land of Palestine was born the Palestinian people, there it grow, developed and created its human and national existence which is an organic, inseparable relation between the nation, the land and history". It is important to note, however, that both official texts were written by the Palestinian exile in the Diaspora. The view of the exile is very present here in special centrality when it speaks of the Palestinian identity as a reflection of the identity of the land and as an essential dimension, not a historical, contingent construct. In the unofficial texts, in stories, poems, theater plays and essays the experience of the Nakbah, the exile and the daily experience of loss of the homeland and enrichment of remembrance is explicitly presented as the constitutive element in the formation of the Palestinian collective identity. Edward Said who denotes this constitutive element (24)  emphasizes also the constitutive function of the collective suffering and violence that was inflicted on the Palestinians.(25)  Paralleling the Zionist narrative of the Jews as the paradigmatic victim in human history also in this respect. The formative power of the loss of homeland is explicitly paralleled with the Jewish one but within an ideological framework, which presents the Zionists as mere colonizers.(26)  Many scholars, writers and poets emphasize this theme.(27)  The loss of the homeland did not make it unreal or remote for the Palestinians, as for the Jews who prayed for it daily and committed themselves "next year in Jerusalem" wherever they were and in all central events of Jewish life. For the Palestinians this is attitude toward homeland might be represented by Mahmoud Darkish when he writes, "We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone. We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel".(28)  The Palestinian existence as an experience of uprooted people from the land that is daily raped by its victimizer.(29)  The Palestinian experience of exile, according to Said manifests the "unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home".(30)  Exile, victimhood (or the presence of the Nakbah) and suffering or Palestinian identity and Israeli victimization, become inseparable. A central role plays in this Palestinian narrative the resistance to the Israeli instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory as part of their effort to justify, hide or marginalize the Palestinian tragedy as a terrible price they had to pay for the realization of the Jewish colonialist project.

     The Palestinians did not only reject any Jewish claim for being the legitimate owners or sons of Israel. They rejected and until this day present a general rejection of any true relation between the Jews and Israel as their homeland, not solely those Zionist and Jewish non-Zionist claims to be the sole legitimate owners or sons of Israel. The suffering of Jews in the Diaspora in itself was never a central Zionist argument for the justification of their right on the country as a Jewish homeland yet suffering and victimhood were undeniably central to the Jewish political theology. As a mirror picture of the Zionist narrative the Palestinian national movement traditionally bound together its refusal to acknowledge and offer empathy to the historical victimization of the Jews with its refusal to acknowledge the special relation of the Jews to Israel. This attitude is manifested even these days in the negotiations of the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israel's offer of giving up its sovereignty over the site of the Jewish temple (HAR HABAIT) which is also a Moslem mosque and an important religious sit (AL AKSA) in exchange of a Palestinian official recognition of the Jewish relation to the site is unconditionally rejected. The struggle over the power to represent the space as Israel or Palestine, the fight over the political control over collective sovereignty between the two parties, the strife who is the victim and who is the victimizer and the power to construct and represent the identity of the Israel/Palestine became inseparable. The philosophical and the political relations between the Holocaust and the Nakbah and who owns Israel/Palestine and who's homeland it is became a unified element for Israeli and Palestinian internal and external violence which at the same time is also a fruitful constitutive element of reproducing ethnocentric collectivism of each of the warring sides. Within the framework of each collective the Other is a threat for the very existence of the collective and is perverting the homeland by its very existence, so that the land itself is victimized, not only it's authentic owners. The Zionist changed the Palestinian names of the sites, renaming them according to their "authentic" Hebrew names or inventing new names, inseparable from uprooting the Palestinian dwellers or of changing the topography, the architecture or the demographic and political arche if spaces and sites in Palestine - from a Palestinian perspective. This is why when Palestinians counter this violence traditionally they do not center their counter-violence on Israeli army or policeman but on civilian population, on the one hand, and target factories, traffic lights or post offices and even woods, on the other.

     Setting the woods on fire is a repeated even in Israeli-Palestinian coexistence which normally does not receive much attention when the Israeli/Palestinian violence is analyses in light of the cost of these exchanges in terms of human life, property and additional political barriers for dialogue. It is, however, an event, which is worthy of much more attention then it usually receives.

     The returning to Israel and the constitution of the New Jew was for the hegemonic Zionist narrative connected with the ideal of reentering into an intimate relation with the land, farming it as a way of life and hard labor as an ideal for the reconstitution of the individual and the nation. A. D. Gordon acknowledged already in the beginning of the century the presence of Arabs - not of Palestinians - and he writes in 1909: "The country is ours as long as the Jewish people is alive and did not forget its homeland. On the other hand, it is wrong to decide that the Arabs have no share in it". Who then has more rights? "One thing is for certain", said Gordon, "The country will belong to that side which will be willing and able to suffer more and work harder for the land… that is the imperative of reason, this is also the conclusion of justice - and this goes along also with the nature of things".(31)  The "redemption" of the country was conceived and actualized by buying the land and farming it. Those who position the Zionist movement as a colonialist movement fail to face not only the uniqueness of this colonization process which involved buying the land at all cost from its owners, increasing the value of the Palestinian property and creating not only Palestinian farmers who had to leave their homes and the land they toiled, some times for centuries. Simultaneously it also created a huge immigration movement from the neighboring countries, which will constitute most of today's Palestinian population and the competition of the Jewish immigrants on the labor market with the Palestinians. They fail to see the idealistic dimension of this process, which was a vital element in the construction of new Israeli collective. They fail also to see the meaning the conception of entering a desolated and neglected country, planting tries in its bare mounting, drying its swamps and farming its valleys. The drying of the swamps of Herder, as an example by the Jewish immigrants of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth became an important myth within the Zionist normalizing education at schools, literacy, theater and other apparatuses and the trees are central figures here. In the play "The gathering of the boxes" written by Andre Finkerfeld-Amir the desolateness of the country is symbolized by the mosquitoes (who carried the diseases around the areas of the swamps). The drying of the swamps and the farming of the fertile land, which was recovered by high cost in human life, the eucalyptus trees take part as central heroes. They are called "the heroes of Hadera" and together with trees from other redeemed lands are driving away the desolation.(32)  The plantation of the country became not only a national holiday and a compulsive element of schooling; it became internalized in the collective psyche, assembled with the traditional Jewish relation to the holiness of the country and the religious-mystic essence of trees and of planting trees.

     The planting of trees in the bared and neglected country as the Jewish Halutz found it became a symbol of the redemption of the country from its desolation, a focal point of the exiled who returns home and home-land which returns to him. In school rituals it was celebrated often in the form of marriage. At the same time it had a political dimension of controlling the space, manifesting the presence and the power of the Zionist project, preventing Palestinian settlement and empowering the violent colonization of the Jewish Diaspora mentality and replacing it with Israeli mentality, if not in reality at list as an ideal.

     The Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project had and has many forms one of which is put ablaze the forests. Since there are almost no natural forest in Israel/Palestine and most of the forests were planted as part of the Israeli settlement which is conceived by the Palestinian intellectuals and politicians as a successful colonialist aggression and the blooming or forested land is accepted as a daily rape of the homeland - setting the forests on fire has a special meaning. The total negation of the Zionist project, its hegemonic narrative, its instrumentalization of Jewish victimization and suffering in Diaspora and its claim for Israel/Palestine as its homeland is united in this action. Its point of reference can be referred to in other, more articulated positions and actions, such as the refusal to acknowledge to Holocaust or the minimization of its extent and moral implications, or the current official rejection of any Jewish relation to Jerusalem and the Mount of the Temple. And yet, in such sporadic, individual, and yet consistent acts of setting fire the "forests of the Jewish National Fund" which as if pervert so successfully and pleasurably the view of the Palestinian homeland, there is special manifestation of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. The forests are set on fire, like the beloved daughter who, according to the Palestinian tradition, has to be blood liable if she "offended the honor of the family". The land and the family honor are called in Arabic Ard, although they are written differently. Poets, writers, educators and politicians are playing with these two meanings in this respect of the land which gave itself, devoted itself to a degree of total surrender and even a love affair with Israelihood and with the actualization of the ideal of forcing/rediscovering the Jewish identity of the land of Israel. An exiled relation to the homeland, then, refers also to those who hold on and did not leave, against all the odds and difficulties inflicted by the Israeli presence. Hisham Sharabi 's words are paradigmatic on this issue: "Man", he says, "does not really embrace his homeland unless he loses it. Immigration is essentially different. Facing the rape of my land and losing my homeland, my grandfather's house and the vies of my childhood is a kind of assassination".(33)  This, while uprooting its Palestinian identity. Accepting this process means for the Palestinian intellectuals an acceptance and even siding with the rape of Palestine as homeland, offending a sacred a marriage - and as such this deed has to be purified, and what is more purifying then blood and fire?

     The Palestinian commitment to liberate Palestine is unconditional and uncompromising, as manifested by its intellectuals; even when politically there is a will for a pragmatic settlement. However, even the politicians such as Yaser Arafat, when they deep into the foundations of the conflict and are faced with the principles of rival concepts of homeland refuse to accept the Jewish right, even as a partial or a moderate right or even relation, to Israel/Palestine. Traditionally this was the hegemonic attitude of the Zionist movement, yet from its very beginning it was accompanied by an active opposition which claimed the rights of the Palestinians, resisted the injustice that was inflicted upon them and protested against it within the Zionist movement and as opposition to it. Both sides have changed their positions, to various degrees. Influences such as the empowerment of the Palestinian national movement in the shadow of the victory of the Zionist project by establishing a strong state in economic, technological, military and cultural respect, as well as the presence of ever stronger influence on the Israeli society of instrumental rationality, global capitalism and multi-cultural realities all had their influence. In the Israeli society one important influence was the demolition of the Zionist ideology and its idealistic-collectivist concept of homeland, of which the exile was the locus of relating to and struggling for, at list for the secular part of the Israeli society. These processes have deep and various affects such as establishing strong individualism and McDonaldization of this advanced techno-scientific consumption-oriented society. In face of these developments the traditional Zionist propagated concept of homeland has lost its vitality and much of its relevance. As part of this development growing parts of the Israeli society acknowledged not only the presence of the Palestinians as a nation but also their narrative and their legitimate rights, aspirations as well as their Nakbah. This process was paralleled by an ever stronger Palestinian negation of any justification of the Jewish claim not only for equally-justified claim for legitimate narrative in which Israel is an homeland of the Jews, but even of partial or lesser justified claim for its homeland. Today there is no Palestinian intellectual who will question Zionism as a mere violent Western colonizing movement, which uprooted and destroyed the Palestinian homeland and its peaceful normal life.

     This a-symmetry is remarkable especially when post-modern Palestinian intellectuals treat the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its roots and future. While conceiving the Palestinian identity as historically developed and contingent (and therefore not a "right" or a "wrong", "authentic" or "inauthentic" intellectuals such as Edward Said will reject the Israeli narrative as a "violent" or "manipulative" and refuse to acknowledge any claim for legitimate Jewish conception of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. The most advance move in this respect is the attempt to appropriate the Jewish narrative and introduce the Palestinians as the true Jews of today.

Edward Said joins Azmy Bishara and some other Arab intellectuals who call today for a halt to the traditional Arab denials of the Holocaust or even of the Arab attempts to minimize its scales and moral implications. At the same time, However, while favoring a Jewish-Palestinian dialogue and not an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue Said sets a pre-condition for the dialogue: the one side – the Jew – will accept that it is the victimizer and the other side is its victim. "There is no symmetry in this conflict. I must say it and I deeply believe in it. Here there is one side who is guilty and another side, which is the victim. The Palestinians are victims".(34)  Said insists so much on acknowledging the Holocaust and Jewish suffering not solely for his empathy with Jewish suffering and life in exile of its homeland. He does so within a dialectical argumentation within which the ultimate victims of Hitlerism in the Holocaust are not the Jews in the Holocaust but the Palestinians in the Nakbah. This is since the victims of the victims are the ultra victims. The struggle about who's homeland is Israel/Palestine or does, in its essence, the space worthy the name Israel, Palestine, both or neither becomes inseparable from the question not of who suffered more but who is the ultimate victim in human history? It is a death and life struggle on who's narrative is the right one and who is its perpetrator? Or, in other words, what control apparatus on the representation of the narrative is stronger in destroying the rival narrative and hiding the violences which enable a simplistic justification of the "authentic" the "right" or the "justified" claim, interests, suffering and "counter-violence" against its Other. But Edward said, as some other Palestinian intellectuals want more than that. He is not satisfied with negating the Jewish claim for Israel as its homeland and with convicting them as victimizers. At the same token he, like other Palestinian intellectuals wants also to hair their Jewishness and proclaims himself as the authentic Jew of today: Jewishness as an existence in a permanent exile, Jewishness as homelessness. "Theodor Adorno said that in the twentieth century the idea of home is pushed away. I guess that part of my critique of Zionism is based on its overestimation of a home. It claims that we need an home, that we will do anything to appropriate an home, even if it means to make others into homeless…I never understood the claim that this place is mine and you get out. I dislike also the drive to ones roots, to the pure origin. I belive that the grate intellectual and political disasters of the twentieth century were actualized by condencing  movements which attempted to simplify and purify. They said that we havre to build here the tenants or the Kibbutzim or our army and start all over again. I would not like it even for myself, I do not believe in it. Even if I had been a Jew I would struggle against it. And it will not last for long…believe me…I am the last Jewish intellectual. You do not know anyone else like that.  All the other Jewish intellectuals are masters from the suburbs. From Amos Oz to those who live here in America, so that I am the last one, the authentic follower of Adorno. I will articulate it like this: I am a Jewish Palestinian"(35).

     This trend is part of a wider trend, which represents the Zionist and very often any Jew as a Nazi. It is a wide spread phenomenon in the Arab world of which Saria, Bishara and Said explicitly distance themselves. However, it is fair to ask is Said really presenting an alternative to this trend? Or does he actually offering a more sophisticated project? In it in the first stage the Israelis are presented as today's Nazis and at the second stage the Palestinian inherit not only the victimhood of the Jew but also the historical moral mission of Judaism along with the establishment of the hegemony of the Palestinian narrative and sovereign homeland. The reply should be that while Said insists on a difference between the evil of the national socialist regime and the Israeli injustice inflicted on the Palestinians he is  more violent against the essence of Judaism, its moral historical mission, its Messianism and its claim for Israel as a Jewish sacred place and homeland. This attempt of his integrates into a wider Palestinian trend the equalize the Nakbah and the daily life conditions under Israeli role to Auschwitz and to the moral implications of the Holocaust. This, even when explicitly rejecting this part of the Palestinian normalizing education. While accepting the Holocaust had a tragic influence on present day moral behavior of the Israelis (36)  we disagree with the conclusions of Said, his aim and with the projects of his followers.

      Said contributes, in his special way, to the equation of the Holocaust and the Nakbah or at list to the representation of the Nakbah as an outcome of the communization to the Jewish victimization - on the expanse of victimizing the Palestinians. This trend does not challenge the general Palestinian trend of presenting the Israelis as the present day Nazis as is reflected in a relative modest way in the poem of Ha al Matukhal: "Many years ago you plunged under the deeds of the butchers in Dachao/ Your father was slaughtered in the Warshao Ghetto/ You cried in the face of your sisters rape in the hell of Auschwitz/ Have you forgotten? How did you dare to reestablish Auschwitz in the midst of the dessert?/ How did you dare to uproot a nation from its homeland? How did you dare to burn the children/ Have you forgotten?"(37)  Facing the Palestinian move into the next stage of declaring themselves as "the real Jews" like in the case of the Palestinian poet Kamal Bulta who declared "I feel that I am a Jew" Mahmud Darwish presents a fearful reaction: "[it is a must] to worn the too-easy writers among the Arabs of the danger of these tempting metaphorical images, when all of the sudden the oppressed Arab Man sees himself as 'the new Jew'' in a moment of a difficult loneliness".(38)  For Darwish it is but a manifestation of the violence of the Israeli oppression, which transforms the victimizer into the victim and the Arab into 'the new Jew'. According to Darwish the Israeli cannot be satisfied in empowering his memory with the inclusion of the armed ferry tale and the uniform of the victim - he has also to destroy the Palestinian memory and empty the Palestinian from his relation to the place, the history and the Arab space. It will not take long, says Darwish, and the Israeli will claim to be the real Palestinian.(39)

         This position of Said is a rich, deep and challenging position. A central element of it, however, is that it is committed to justify one violence against its opposing violence on the ground that one narrative and one claim for an homeland is more valid than the other. More specifically, in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over the representation of rights, victimhood and autenticity Said sides with the Palestinian side, while denouncing the Jewish symbolic and non-symbolic violence – neglecting the essential lesson of Adorno which he claims to follow, that any collectivism, any use of violence, any normalizing apparatus is a challenge to overcome. Palestine which swallowed Israel and Palestinian identity which swallowed Judaism is Said's colonialist project. Deconstruction is here recruited for Palestinian ethnocentricity, which becomes a universal transcendental project. By conquering the Jewish claim for justice, swallowing its narrative and its sites of origin, legends and pretensions, the Palestinian people becomes not "simply" a collective which is less then hundred years old, only recently formed but much more than that, an historical power and an ancient rich universally valid moral voice and unmatched cultural project. Within it Said, as a Jew can find not in any place his home, but in every place his homelessness. Here the loss of the homeland is inseparable from the actual violent struggle for its recapturing. On this matter Said is uncompromising, as one can see in his rejection of the present "peace process" and appeasement attempt between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Said's favoring actual continuation of the war until the final defeat of the Israelis, their surrendering of the land/hegemony and their acceptance of their historic role as victimizers represents a devotion to ethnocentrism. At the same time it also shows he too refuses to face the implications and challenges of normalizing education – and avoids the struggle of overcoming its violences of which his project is one of the most advanced apparatuses. The struggle on the issue of who is the ultimate victim of history, who's homeland is Israel/Palestine and who is the real Jew is a unique manifestation of the ongoing-general function of normalizing education which must produce collectives, their quest for territorial homeland and their realms of self evidence which simultaneously produces also their Other as a danger/threat/colonizer.

     While both the Israel and the Palestinian sides are committed to control the space, they are also committed to control its "true" representation or effectively destroy the rival narrative within a framework in which homeland is an metaphysical entity. Here the Palestinian patriots and the Israeli join forces, or, in other words, here it is seen in special clarity how normalizing education creates both rivals as essential agents for its own self-reproduction. Refusing to dwell in the narrative of each of the sides, or overcoming not only both narratives – but also the play within which they are actualized, destroyed and replaced by other, more effective and violent, is the aim of counter education. As such it has no "homeland" and homelessness is its home. Jewish negative theology, Headgear's concept of facing the Ge-stell and Benjamin and Adorno's concept of Messianism without a messiah, or negative utopianism, are some of the places a counter-education committed person will visit in order to empower the struggle against normalizing education. The Holocaust and the Nakbah, as well as the struggle over the uncontested status of being the ultimate victim and the owner of the authentic claim for homeland are inseparable. They represent the tragic essence of every education. Education is inseparable from reality in the sense of being which necessarily produces war over existence, over representation and over space. Within this process and as part of its manifestation it produces struggles for national liberation and ideology critiques, which are, aimed at defeating and conquering the others representation apparatuses, claims for homeland and even its homelessness.
 

Notes

(1) Max Horkheimer, "Ueber den Zweifel", Gesammelte Schriften, 7, Frankfurt a.Main 1985, p. 218.

(2)  Wilhelm Brepohl, "Heimat und  Heimatgesinnung als soziologische Begriffe und Wirlichkeiten" in Das Recht auf die
Heimat. Vortraege, Thesen, Kritik, ed. Kurt Rabl, Munich 1965, p. 43.

(3) Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials - The German Idea of Heimat, Berkley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1990, p. 5.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid., p. 7.

(6) Rolf Petri, "Deutsche Heimat 1850-1950", p. 3.

(7) Ibid., p. 5.

(8) Ibid., p. 35.

(9) Ibid.

(10) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "Introduction" in Ilan Gur-Ze'ev (ed.) Conflicting Philosophies of Education in Israel/Palestine, pp.

(11) Moshe Lilenblum, "On the revival of Israel on the land of our ancestors", in M. L. Lilenblum; A selection of His Essays,
Tel Aviv (No date), p. 76.

(12) A. D. Gordon, The Nation and The Work, 1916, p. 366.

(13)  Ibid. p. 244.

(14) Ze'ev Ya'avetz, "The unity", in Y. Obsey, Hilel Bavly, M. Fiershtein and others, (eds.), Becoming a Nation, I.,  New York, ?????, p. 122.

(15) Anita Shapira, Land and Power, Tel Aviv 1993, pp. 26-27.

(16) Glen Bowman, "'Acountry of words': conceiving the Palestinian nation from the position of exile", in Eenesto Laclau (ed.),
The Making of Political Identities, London and New York 1994, p. 139.

(17) Edward Said, After the Last Sky, London 1986, p. 5.

(18) Mahmoud Darwish, Dewan Mahmoud Darwish, Beirut 1989, p. 342.

(19) Mahmoud Darwish, "There is no holyness to the execusioner", El Carmel 52 (Summer 1997), pp. 221.

(20)  Hisham Sharabi, Jafa, an Aroma of a City, Beirut: Dar el Fatah, 1991, p. 15.

(21) Ibid.

(22) Ibid., p. 15-16.

(23) Edward Said, "Keynote essay", in Ghada Karmi (ed.), Jerusalem Today; What Future for the Peace Process?, Berkshaire 1996, p. 16.

(24) Edward Said, After the Last Sky, p. 5.

(25) Ibid.

(26) Ibid., p. 120.

(27) Glen Bowman, "'A country of words'", p. 145.

(28)  Mahmoud Darwish, "We travel like other people", Victims of a Map, translated by Abdullah al-Udhri, London: Al Saqui
Books 1984, p. 31.

(29) Hisham Sharabi, Ibid., p. 15-16.

(30)  in Janet L. Abu Lughod, "Palestinians: exiles at home and abroad", Current Sociology, 36: 2 (Summer 1988), p. 61.

(31) Gordon, Ibid., p. 96.

(32) Yoram Bar-Gal, An Agent of Zionist Propaganda; The Jewish National Fund 1924-1947, Haifa 1999, p. 240.

(33) Hisham Sharabi, Ibid.

(34) Edward Said, "My right of return" – an interview, A'aretz 18,8.2000, p. 22.

(35) Edward Said "My right of return", Ibid.

(36) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, "Was Hitler really defeated?", in Philosophy, Politics and Education in Israel, Haifa 1999, pp. 57-98.

(37) Taha al Matukal, A Song from Ansar 3, Ramalla 1989, p. 63 (in Arabic).

(38) Mahmud Darwish, The identity of absence", Mifgashim 7-8 (Autumn 1987), p. 27.

(39) Ibid.