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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hi all,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I thought this an interesting article.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Here are some excerpts, but it is worth reading the
whole essay.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Bryan</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>----------------------------------</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><A
href="http://www.ipsjps.org/jps/125/roy.html">http://www.ipsjps.org/jps/125/roy.html</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>From the Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol XXXII,
No. 1, Autumn 2002, Issue 125<BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child
of Holocaust Survivors</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Sara Roy</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Sara Roy, author of The Gaza Strip: The Political
Economy of De-Development, among other works, is a senior research scholar at
the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University. This essay was given
as the Second Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture at the Center for American
and Jewish Studies and the George W. Truett Seminary, Baylor University, on 8
April 2002.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Some months ago I was invited to reflect on my
journey as a child of Holocaust survivors. This journey continues and shall
continue until the day I die. Though I cannot possibly say everything, it seems
especially poignant that I should be addressing this topic at a time when the
conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is descending so tragically into a
moral abyss and when, for me at least, the very essence of Judaism, of what it
means to be a Jew, seems to be descending with it.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The Holocaust has been the defining feature of my
life. It could not have been otherwise. I lost over 100 members of my family and
extended family in the Nazi ghettos and death camps in Poland--grandparents,
aunts, uncles, cousins, a sibling not yet born--people about whom I have heard
so much throughout my life, people I never knew. They lived in Poland in Jewish
communities called shtetls...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>My father’s name was recognized in Holocaust
circles because he was one of two known survivors of the death camp at Chelmno,
in Poland, where 350,000 Jews were murdered, among them the majority of my
family on my father’s and mother’s sides. They were taken there and gassed to
death in January 1942. Through my father’s cousin I learned that there is now a
plaque at the entrance to what is left of the Chelmno death camp with my
father’s name on it--something I hope one day to see. My father also survived
the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and because of it was called
to testify at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961....</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>It was perhaps inevitable that I would follow a
path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue. I visited Israel many times
while growing up. As a child, I found it a beautiful, romantic, and peaceful
place. As a teenager and young adult I began to feel certain contradictions that
I could not fully explain but which centered on what seemed to be the almost
complete absence in Israeli life and discourse of Jewish life in Eastern Europe
before the Holocaust, and even of the Holocaust itself. I would ask my aunt why
these subjects were not discussed, and why Israelis didn't learn to speak
Yiddish. My questions were often met with grim silence.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Most painful to me was the denigration of the
Holocaust and pre-state Jewish life by many of my Israeli friends. For them,
those were times of shame, when Jews were weak and passive, inferior and
unworthy, deserving not of our respect but of our disdain. “We will never allow
ourselves to be slaughtered again or go so willingly to our slaughter,” they
would say. There was little need to understand those millions who perished or
the lives they lived. There was even less need to honor them. Yet at the same
time, the Holocaust was used by the state as a defense against others, as a
justification for political and military acts...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians is not the
moral equivalent of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. But it does not have to be.
No, this is not genocide, but it is repression, and it is brutal. And it has
become frighteningly natural. Occupation is about the domination and
dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their
property and the destruction of their soul. Occupation aims, at its core, to
deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their
existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. Occupation is humiliation.
It is despair and desperation. And just as there is no moral equivalence or
symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there is no moral
equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied, no matter how
much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> </DIV>
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