Post by Helen Pearson [This is the first part of an article 1 2]

In April of this year GSN member Helen Pearson, went on a trip to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank) and Israel for a week.  It was an immensely powerful experience.  In an attempt to talk about what she witnessed there she has planned a series of articles comparing her experience in Palestine with that of Guatemala 10 years earlier.

When I lived in Guatemala in the mid 1990s I was told a story about Palestine.  During the time of the worst military repression in Guatemala, in the early 1980s, when hundreds of villages were wiped off the map, the teller of the story, José, had lived in an area of the country where many settlements had been founded by religious people.  The radio was one of the few ways by which people could find out what was going on.  One day José was listening to the news and to his horror he heard that there were bombs being dropped on the nearby village of Palestina.  He thought that meant that his village would be next so he rushed around warning everyone to get out, that the soldiers were coming.  The villagers, thinking they were about to be killed, fled into the surrounding countryside.  Only some hours later did they realise that it was a false alarm and that the radio report had actually been about the situation in the Middle East.

José was still chuckling when he told this story more than a decade later, humour being a crucial survival technique for Guatemalans affected by the civil war which lasted from 1960 to 1996.  I remembered José’s story one day during my recent trip to the West Bank as Samir, our Palestinian guide for the day, let us in on some of the jokes Palestinians tell each other, admitting that dark humour is something which keeps their spirits up.  For example he took great delight in telling us about being held up for hours at a European airport for questioning.  In the end the only accusation that could be made against him was that he was travelling on a false passport, to which he responded, “if I were a terrorist and wanted to travel around the world on a false passport do you think I would choose a Palestinian one?”

One of the places Samir took us to was the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem.  This camp has been in existence since 1948, when Palestinians who had lived in what is now Israel fled to Arab controlled areas leaving everything associated with their former homes behind as what Israelis call the ‘War of Independence’ erupted.  Many of the villages the Palestinians abandoned were destroyed and then built over by the Israelis.  In the process, massacres of Palestinian civilians occurred, one of the most notorious and well documented being at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem.  In an uncanny parallel with the Guatemalan experience, the disappearance of some 400 Palestinian villages has been documented (1).  During the worst years of the Guatemalan dictatorships, in the early 1980s, an equal number of villages were wiped off the map according to a project dedicated to the recovery of historical memory which published a report in 1998 (2) .  The physical destruction of villages went along with the massacre and enforced flight of their inhabitants. 

I know from the Guatemalan experience that this kind of violent dispossession and the uprooting of communities leads to profound trauma and cultural dislocation, not just in the generation that have suffered directly, but in new generations born into an exile culture.  The Palestinians call what happened to them in 1948 the Nakba (Catastrophe).  In Deheishe Mahmoud, a young man of about 20, showed us the huge iron key to his family’s house which was in a village which is now part of Israel. This rusty piece of iron represented Mahmoud’s longing for a home he had never seen and which no longer existed; this key was all he had to tie him to his family’s past.  With the physical obliteration of communities where people have lived for generations and the lack of acknowledgement of this history, or recompense for their loss, it is a struggle for the people affected to bring hope and renewal into the future.

Hearing Palestinians talk about being forgotten by the world and about their story not being acknowledged I was reminded again of the Guatemalan situation.  Thousands of indigenous Mayan Guatemalans were massacred in the early 1980s in the Army’s campaign to wipe out the social base of the guerrilla movement and many more thousands fled for their lives into neighbouring Mexico.  They left everything they possessed behind them; they ran in the dark, under the cover of the jungle, with the eyes of the world elsewhere.  Later, the Guatemalan military denied that the massacres had taken place, that people had been tortured, women raped, property destroyed.  That is why now, initiatives such as the Catholic Church’s Recovery of Historical Memory Project, are hugely important to the recovery process, not just for the individuals affected but for the Mayan community as a whole and for the peaceful existence of the entire country.

In Palestine there are similar initiatives to recover the historical memory of the Nakba, forming part of the Palestinian struggle to have their narrative acknowledged and to be compensated for what they lost.  I believe that telling the Palestinian story is vital to all the people who share the land of historical Palestine.  Just as Jewish suffering and the annihilation committed during the Holocaust is a valid backdrop to the right for a Jewish collective life, so the Nakba must be recognised by Israelis and Diaspora Jews as a justified reason for the recognition of Palestinian rights.  I find it unbearable that the dispossession and ethnic cleansing which we Jews have survived be translated into violence, rather than humanity, towards others.

Series: 1 2 . You can also download this article in full here.