There Was Room for Both

It was a Palestinian-American lawyer who asked, “Why are some people allowed to remember, but others are asked to forget?” Everyone who hears this, thinks it is about them.

I was initially relieved to see the piece from UC Santa Barbara’s Academics for Justice in Palestine in the Independent on October 19. I hoped, as academics, their assertions would be based entirely on verifiable fact and history.

As a very long ago alumna of the graduate programs at UCSB — and as a veteran of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 1960s — my memory was of chanting slogans in the streets, bearing witness (remembering now our late Congressmember Walter Capps, with whom I stood for peace in front of the library, on Wednesdays, at noon), and also of teach-ins, based on objectively verifiable facts. As part of a search for truth.

I don’t see that today, at the University, or anywhere else. All I see are slogans, which deny or pervert history.

I hoped to find a place from which we can talk, when the time is right, so this is not just the most brutal of the wars since 1948, but the last one. That we — or those who wish to return — finally find a way to share our common historic homeland. I am also more frightened than ever before, because Hamas’s brutality has been immediately, almost instinctively, justified and embraced by so many, and anti-Semitic violence worldwide has increased exponentially — a firebombed synagogue in Buenos Aires, one in Berlin, an Israeli worker stabbed in China, Australians chanting “gas the Jews,” all the while misappropriating words of white supremacy. Not even “good people on both sides.” A perversion of perversion.

The accusation of apartheid is not new. The accusation of genocide perpetrated by Jews is newer, and intended to destroy not only memory, but history itself.

The most extreme of each side’s “positions” continues to depend on the denial of the experience, memory, and history of the Other. It denies responsibility of other actors, throughout history. The specific reason I feel hopeless now is that the Other, in this case, consistently asserts that the conflict began, that history began, in 1948.

The UCSB academics wrote:

“In 1948, the Zionist movement established the state of Israel on the lands of the Palestinian people.”

Geography + Time + Space = History. This one assertion simply erases 2,000 years of history:

• It was the United Nations, not some shadowy “Zionist movement,” that “established” the State of Israel, by majority vote and according to a UN map which would have “partitioned” the land into then-viable Jewish and Arab states. The Arab States immediately declared war, which they lost, just as they began wars in 1967 and 1973, which they also lost.
• It conflates the notion of the “land” on which Arabs historically lived with a nation state of Palestine, which has never existed.
• It fails to acknowledge that both Jews and Arabs were and are indigenous to the area known through the millennia as “Palestine,” and that Jews have continuously lived in “Palestine” since biblical times. (See, Science: Archaeology and DNA.) The central prayer of Judaism, sung for thousands of years, begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One.
• The Prophet Mohammed lived in 700 C.E., and the Al Aqsa Mosque was established on top of the Second Temple of the Jews, which was destroyed by the Romans in the first century.
• It fails to acknowledge the complicity of the Arabs — before and during World War II — in the Final Solution. The well-researched and documented intention of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was to cooperate and implement murder of the Jews of Palestine when the extermination of the Jews in Europe was complete. (See https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/the-nazi-roots-of-islamist-hate.) It remains the objective of Hamas and their supporters to expel or exterminate every Jew in “Palestine.”
• It fails to acknowledge that the Israelis left their settlements in Gaza in 2006, or the role of the Arab states — Jordan, Egypt in particular — in keeping the Arab/Palestinian population in the “open air prison” now known as Gaza.
• It fails to acknowledge that the area known as the “West Bank” was controlled by Jordan until 1967. Jordan expelled the PLO, and hundreds of thousands of the Palestinian Arabs who now reside in Gaza, in about 1973.

That these historical truths are “passed over” by contemporary faculty at UCSB, academic home of our friend, Nobel Prize recipient Walter Kohn, who survived the Final Solution as a Kindertransport child, should be an embarrassment to the university.

We all have a duty to learn what happened before we were born. I know, now, where and when my own family was murdered: in 1944, mostly in Auschwitz, some in Maly Trostinec, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen. My mother didn’t find out until the 1970s where, exactly. And there are no graves or grave markers. So I think it is important to name each person, so they are remembered by the tribe, and by the world.

As for me, for days after October 7, I’ve posted images that I’ve received from an Israeli artist I know — mostly of dead Israeli civilians — young people killed at a music festival, babies and old people, Holocaust survivors kidnapped to Gaza, or murdered in their homes, and in the last days, young soldiers. I do this mostly because I believe have a duty to honor, or at least name, each Jew who is murdered just for being a Jew.

I do appreciate the expressions of grief I have heard, fleeting as they were, over the murder of 1,300 civilians in Israel, and I share in the sorrow over the thousands of innocents lost in Gaza. To the extent I can, I honor the dead of Gaza. I received an image from a Palestinian Art site that I belong to, and I posted that. It was the same image used by the UCSB academics in their piece, the work of a Palestinian artist, Heba Zagout, who was killed with her two children.

Now I am in despair. Many times I have used the symbol of the olive tree in my artwork, to advocate for peace, in a shared homeland. It is now shrouded in ignorance, darkness and fear.

Jana Zimmer has called Santa Barbara home since 1967. She received her MA and C-Phil/ABD in French Linguistics and Literature in 1974 from UCSB. She has been an environmental lawyer, writer, and artist. Her recent book, “Chocolates from Tangier:  A Child’s Memoir of Art and Transformation” (Doppelhouse Press, 2023), explains why she is who she is. Her views, and her history, are hers alone.