Memory

“Forgotten your password?” This is probably the most frequently asked and annoying question of the cyber age. Unless you’re blessed with a prodigious memory or have all your many passwords conveniently stored a mouse -click away, you have no option but to request a reminder, or an opportunity to compose a new password.

It’s on these “click for a reminder” occasions that I remember our collective memory. Every national entity, ethnic group and tribe is endowed with a collective memory. It seems there is no effective deleting mechanism that enables us to expunge it. Even conscious and determined efforts to bring about intentional ethnic amnesia fail to wipe the memory slate clean.

Perhaps second and third generation descendents of émigrés determined to assimilate and adopt the host nation’s identity and collective memory manage to blot out the past.

We the people of the book; the “good book” and all the interpretative tomes written after its compilation, that ongoing library often referred to as the “Jewish Bookcase,” we its beneficiaries are endowed with an especially prodigious and long collective memory.

“Remember what Amalek did to you …” commands Deuteronomy and then commands us to, “blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget." Deut. 25:17. Notwithstanding the problem that scholars disagree about the exact identity of Amalek and if indeed we did blot out the Amalekites, we are mindful of the injunction not to forget.

At various times we have faced existential threats, the most recent, the Holocaust blotted out many Jewish communities but not our ability to remember them and commemorate that tragic event. Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not content with trying to blot out the memory of that genocide threatens to physically wipe us off the map. Many Arabs and especially many Palestinians deny a large part of our early history, would happily blot us out if they could and have deliberately tried to destroy archeological evidence of our historical presence here.

Memory is a narrative that differs according to the way we recount an event. We commemorate our fight for independence and celebrate it annually as fitting the occasion with festivities repeating battle narratives, acts of heroism and the great victory..

The Palestinians remember the same event as their great national tragedy – the Naqba.

At present Israelis and Palestinians are trying without much enthusiasm to resolve the two narratives.

The conflict involves both people and territory. Recently, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested his own private solution when he spoke from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly. He is Israel’s most unwelcome foreign minister. Often the prime minister and the minister of defence act on his behalf in places where he is persona non grata. Lieberman says the guiding principle in peace talks with Palestinians should be exchanges of land and population not land for peace. The current plan is a refinement of a plan he suggested in May 2004. He proposes that Israel gets rid of as many of its Arabs as possible. Not by transferring them, but by transferring the territory they live in.

The Wadi Ara region is one of the places Lieberman has earmarked for transfer. Ironically this area, a narrow pass between the hills that affords a connection between the coastal road and the Jezreel Valley was not in Israeli hands at the end of the War of Independence. Israel wanted the pass and the road but had to take the Arabs living in the 15 villages along the route as part of the exchange of territories agreed to by the Jordanians in the 1949 armistice agreement

Recently we commemorated the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Intifada.

The July 11–25, 2000Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David was held between United States President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat . As we know the talks ultimately failed with both sides blaming the other. There were four principal obstacles to agreement: territory, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount , refugees and the 'right of return' and Israeli security concerns.

The disappointing outcome of the Camp David Summit led to a potentially explosive atmosphere in the West Bank and Gaza. On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon conducted a provocative visit to the Temple Mount.

Recently disclosed information indicates that the purpose of his visit was to boost his political standing. He underestimated the Palestinian reaction to the visit. Some observers have attributed the riots that broke out the following day and later on to the provocation caused by Sharon’s visit.

It’s reasonable to suppose that the disturbances would have occurred with or without the provocation. One of the main clashes that occurred between Israeli Arabs actively supporting the Palestinians took place in and around Umm el Fahm in the Wadi Ara region. The main road artery north was blocked for hours before police were able to reopen it. In the ensuing clashes 13 Arabs were killed, others were injured. The police also suffered a number of casualties.

Ten years later the trauma of the Wadi Ara clash is still felt. Perhaps this explains why Lieberman’s plan to exchange Wadi Ara for an equal area of the West Bank occupied by Israeli settlements was relatively well received when respondents to a public opinion poll conducted were asked to accept or reject it.

I doubt if the Arab residents of the15 villages in the Wadi Ara area are willing to change their nationality.

Lieberman knows that his plan tends to make him and his party more popular, however he probably knows it has few merits and many flaws

Journalist and TV anchorman Yaron London commented as follows:

“Let’s do Lieberman justice: He does not propose the expulsion of people from their homes and land. The term ‘transfer’ is incommensurate with his initiative. He proposes to mark the border in such a way that many Arabs will find themselves east of it.

Arab spokespeople are outraged by this, yet are having trouble explaining what’s so wrong with it. They do not wish to renounce their status as Israelis, yet at the same time they claim that this identity had been forced upon them. Their excuses are irrelevant here. Only one thing is important: Some 1.3 million Israeli citizens, who constitute roughly one-fifth of the country’s population, will strongly object to Lieberman’s proposal, and we cannot implement it without their agreement.

Yet let’s assume that everyone does agree. When will the border pass in a way that pushes as many Arabs as possible out of Israel without uprooting Jews, without ripping up the map of Israel, and without jeopardizing Israel’s security?”

Aluf Benn a journalist who writes op eds for Haaretz had this to say about the plan five years ago, soon after Lieberman aired it for the first time:

“Lieberman advocates a ‘populated land swap,’ which is sometimes called a ‘soft transfer’: Israel would give Umm el-Fahm and the adjacent Arab-populated area west of the Green Line to a future Palestinian state, in return for the major Jewish settlement "blocks" that lie east of the Green Line on the West Bank. You don't have to be from the extreme right to find the notion appealing; academics and politicians from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to his predecessor, Ehud Barak, have toyed with the idea. “

Benn asked Arik Sharon about the plan anticipating an affirmative reply.

He said Sharon told him: "It can be discussed. But I don't see any possibility to impose such a move by force."

“The residents of Umm el-Fahm firmly reject the idea, and the mayor, Sheikh Hashem Abdel Rahman Mahajne, calls it ‘racist and unacceptable.’ They are, and want to remain, Israeli citizens, he told me. The Israeli left opposes the Wadi Ara swap as both immoral and impractical. A state cannot simply divorce its citizens for convenience.” Said Benn.His impressions are still relevant today,

Like other nations we remember our wars and the soldiers who died in battle. This week Egypt and Syria celebrated the victory of the Yom Kippur War. In Israel the occasion was marked earlier according to the Hebrew calendar.

Viewed in historical perspective, that war was a victory for Israel. After the initial setback we were able to turn the tables and force our enemies to sue for a cease fire. Anwar Sadat was astute enough to realise that Israel was unbeatable at that particular time, so he sought a peace accord.

While Mubarak and Assad extol their great victory we find the laurel wreaths too uncomfortable to rest on. Instead we engage in another round of self-flagellation. After thirty seven years the Pandora’s box we call government archives were opened a little to allow a peek into the cabinet minutes of meetings held during the early part of the war.

Memoires, biographies and exhaustive research have revealed most of the details we would prefer to wish away. It seems we still need another cathartic

draught to rid ourselves of the humiliation and the guilt that came in the aftermath of the war. Till now the minutes published this week were classified as "top secret." They reveal a morbid, defeatist Moshe Dayan.

“October 7, 1973. 2:50 pm. A little more than a day after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, then-prime minister Golda Meir and her cabinet hold a dramatic meeting. Then-defence minister Moshe Dayan discusses the fall of IDF positions, one after the other, in the Sinai Peninsula. "The canal line is lost," he says, and suggests a withdrawal to the Isthmus line, some 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) from the canal, while leaving behind the injured soldiers who cannot be evacuated. "Where we can evacuate – we will evacuate. In places we can't evacuate – we will leave the wounded. Those who make it – make it. If they decide to surrender, they'll surrender. We have to tell them, 'We can't reach you. Try to bust through or surrender.'"

Their publication came at a time when efforts are being made to renew the negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas in Gaza. A formidable army of supporters have been lobbying the government to pay the price and bring him home. The Shalit family and their supporters remind the government that the IDF doesn’t desert its soldiers. The old cabinet minutes prove that at least one member of the war cabinet suggested we leave them behind.

I don’t know if Moshe Dayan remembered a precedent created by another famous general.

At the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign a secondary military expedition was conducted in Palestine. It was concluded with victories and a few setbacks. On the return march to Egypt when the French reached Jaffa Napoleon was faced with a dilemma. He had already discarded his canons to lighten his load and was forced to decide what to do with his wounded and sick soldiers. One biographer mentions it briefly: “The tale that has circulated for two centuries alleged that Napoleon had his medics administer over-doses of opium to some of his plague-ridden troops. The story explained that he did not want to have them fall into the hands of the Turks, who would torture them.” Many historians have discredited the story , nevertheless it won’t go away.

Of course Dayan’s plan was rejected, the Egyptians were repulsed but the IDF chief of staff David Elazar, one of the few cool headed people at the cabinet meeting who believed the IDF could win the war was blamed for the imbroglio.

Memory can be uncomfortable; nevertheless we can’t ignore the injunction to remember.

Beni 9^th of October, 2010.