Memory, in Jerusalem and in Gaza

I just wrote a play about memory, focusing especially on my memories of Nov. 4 1995, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. I stole Ami’s memory of the same night, inserting it into the mouth of a Sephardi woman in her 70s. In case this play ever goes anywhere, and it won’t, I want to make it clear this is where his resemblance to the character stops and starts.

Finishing the play, though, led to my usual ADD peregrinations, this time about political memory. I covered postwar Bosnia for a bit, and read a pack of books to make myself smarter going in. Many of these were superb, but one thing that perpetually irked me was the dismissal of propagandizing by Slobodan Milosevic as meaningless — but lethal — grandstanding.

Three things bug me:

A): These journalists say Western governments were too easily duped by the propaganda, in which Milosevic would invoke bloody battles ancient and modern to make his case for vengeance. While its true that the Western lawmakers who blathered on about irreconciliable "ancient tribal rivalries" were fools, for the Serbians listening, these wounds were real; otherwise —

B): Why did the propaganda work? I mean, if Serbians had no memory of Croatian collaboration with the Nazis during World War II, it would not have resonated, would it? If Milosevic had railed instead about his memories of probes by alien races, he would have been institutionalized; these memories, he knew, had potency;

C) Finally, it’s not as if the cultures the journalists represent — or the journalists themselves — are immune to political memory. Britons still get teary eyed about standing up to the blitz. The French are still furious about the betrayal of resistance fighters. And you should have seen my 10 year old last year transfixed by the tale of the battle of Yorktown, how it ended the Revolutionary War — related by a gentle-spoken guide, leaning on a cane in front of a field that was little more than swaying grass.

Which is not to say that Milosevic, or any other tyrant, is justified in using collective wounds to spur forward atrocities. It is only to say we ignore the phenomenon at our peril: How stupid was Helmut Kohl’s eager embrace of Croatian independence, given Franjo Tudjman’s apologetics for the Ustasha, the Nazi puppet regime? And how stupid was it of the Clinton administration to heavy the U.S. Holocaust Museum into an exculpatory tour for Tudjman?

These insensitivities only feed the hurt that bloodthirsty men are only too willing to exploit.

Cultures isolated by grief and violence nurture memories that for the rest of us slip by as news stories. This is not necessarily unhealthy: A political memory can spur meaningful checks.

We know, for instance, that the Second Intifada — its bloody emphasis on civilian dead — is what feeds Israeli skepticism of Palestinian intentions.

But I think Israelis also particularly remember the Aug. 19, 2003 suicide bombing that killed 20 people — many of them children — aboard a bus in northern Jerusalem. The bomb was timed for after-school commuting; the Palestinian leadership — the moderate Palestinian leadership notoriously did nothing to pursue the perpetrators. And this was when Mahmoud Abbas — now, supposedly, peace’s best hope as Palestinian Authority president — was prime minister.

So it makes sense to hold the current Palestinian leadership to account, to demand and demand again that it show its bona fides. I think Mort Klein and the Zionist Organization of America do a real service in harping on this.

But it goes the other way, too.

Which is why Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza is so valuable.

Little official is known about the Khan Yunis and Rafah massacres in 1956, when Israel briefly occupied the Gaza Strip; according to Sacco’s research, 386 people were killed. His account of men lined up and shot raises, for me, recollections of the horrifying mass killings I reported after the fact in Bosnia.

There may be an Israeli refutation of this; I don’t know of it. It looks like Israel stonewalled Sacco’s attempt to get an account.

And guess what: Sacco compiles evidence showing how the memories helped spur Gazans toward their current radicalization.

I can’t begin to say how stupid this is. And it’s happening again. Yes, the Goldstone Report was a travesty, yes it was biased, inherently flawed, but you know what? I’ve also read the official Israeli version of what happened in Gaza a year ago — and it’s even crappier, in terms of unsourced material and declarations of belief presented as fact. Civilians, children died, and we’re still not sure why. What we have instead is constructions designed to refute criticism that is tendentious, true, but precious little fact. Yes, Israeli soldiers were generally fighting in closed quarters, and Hamas generally uses civilians as shields — but what are the particulars? The cases are under investigation. Still. It’s been a year.

As long as Gazans don’t have an accounting — and by accounting, I don’t mean a trial in the Hague, I mean a simple explanation — these memories will fester, even fifty-odd years later.

I don’t have a lot of love lost for the folks at Mondoweiss, but kudos to them for getting 11 pages of Sacco up on their site.