Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel by Omri Boehm

Author:Omri Boehm [Boehm, Omri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, World, Middle Eastern, Peace, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781681373935
Google: P6U5EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2021-08-17T23:34:49.042928+00:00

One could choose many types of stories to commemorate the Holocaust’s horrors: stories of those who did not survive the death camps or the death marches; stories like Wiesel’s, about the sad-eyed angel. Tibi’s choice of this one is telling. He celebrates the triumph of those who were saved and reunited, established a home in Israel, and thus bore children. This, you could say, is a Zionist story par excellence, and yet when an Arab Israeli chooses to tell it, it is freed of mythical messianism to become a human story. Tibi, who is a gynecologist, invited Ovadia to join him at the Knesset, to attend the speech as his guest, but Ovadia was hospitalized that day, and could not. What a thought: a Jewish Holocaust survivor coming to Israel’s Knesset as the guest of an Arab Israeli representative, on Holocaust Memorial Day. There will be no future for Israel without remembering the Holocaust; but there will be no future for memory without an act of forgetting necessary to denationalize memory and make it a civil affair. Tibi’s speech showed that this was not only necessary, but also possible.

“On this day,” Tibi continued, one must shed all political identities and “wear one robe only: the robe of humanity.” In fact, the humanist power of his speech shines through because he did not speak as a mere human, but as an Arab Israeli representative, by all means aware of his identity. Tibi was fully conscious of years of bloody struggle between Palestinians and Jews, fully aware of the ways in which the Holocaust’s memory has been used and abused as a weapon against the people that he represents in the Knesset. But he put his own perspective aside in order to remember with Jews, in solidarity with the people who live with him, as he said “on the same land, in the same country.” By remembering to forget, Tibi spoke not merely as a human, but as a neighbor; or better: he spoke as a patriot, but if a patriot then one of a Haifa Republic that still awaits to be created, where Jews and Palestinians speak as equal citizens.

Tibi chose to remain silent on another issue, and this silence may be his most powerful challenge to his Jewish audience. He did not mention the Nakba. This silence contained an invitation. If the establishment of a Jewish state is part of the Holocaust’s history—this is a fact that no Israeli would deny—then the history of the Nakba is inseparable from the Holocaust’s history, too. Israelis cannot in good faith remember their history of victimhood and redemption—cannot follow the logic of mi’shoa le’tkuma—without remembering their role as perpetrators. Since just the opposite is being done, however, Holocaust commemoration has never been truly respected in the Jewish state.

Tibi refrained from mentioning any of this. He took a leap, and remembered to forget the Nakba when speaking of the Holocaust, despite the fact that the Nakba’s memory cannot be taken for granted. In this

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