In an attempt to put my head on hold in the last few days, I decided to watch movies. And trying to stay good to my brains, I thought; let’s have some useful entertainment. As I was preparing an article on the Earth Day, I stumped into Kafr Kassem, a movie that, and in accordance with its title pictured Kafr Kassem Massacre that tool place in October 1956, where Israeli police killed 49 Palestinians from the village. I decided that the movie would be too much for my struggling head so I left it and binged my head with some of Mahmoud Darwish’s recited poems for some days, until I felt too musical and found on my way the Pianist. Forgetting of course why I never watched such a huge making of a movie, I thought I would watch.
The brutality of what happened to the Jews in Poland brought into my head the scenes of the movie I haven’t watched. But as in every committed massacre against the Palestinians, there is something that is engraved in my head and apparently my head doesn’t struggle to understand why.
It is true that each day I grow into a more tolerant person, and I admit that I wouldn’t have been able to watch the pianist some years ago, believing that it was a Hollywood polishing to Israel through Jewish massacres during the Nazi.
I couldn’t but pause my head and leave it on that period of three years (around) until the Nazis were finally brought into a defeat, and what took place inside every Jewish soul. Whether exaggerated or fabricated into better cinematic form wasn’t an issue. There was a real human tragedy that keep going on and on to those people that make it in many ways miraculous that they survived.
Was Israel a real reward after their suffering or not, also remains in between what lies inside me that I also don’t want to discuss.
I was trying to take myself completely from being a Palestinian who lives today, and remain with that moment of what took place in Warsaw back then. But there was some childish behavior inside me that insisted like a little child to point excitedly with each scene to how we Palestinians live today.
I was asking myself, could there be some genetic aspects that drive the Jews into revenge, until this moment after seventy years, exactly like those memories I have about the nakba and the massacres that continued to be executed against my people?
I was in a certain shock watching what took place in Poland, the Auschwitz, and the organized systematic extermination of a race maybe. But more shockingly was the resemblance of how the Jews made us suffer here since then. I could understand their rage and hatred to the whole world that tried to exterminate them, but why should the revenge be on us. I was reviewing in my lousy head all those theories of oppression ad revenge. And I couldn’t find a justification to why we had to pay. The wall that was built, the marking of the Jews, the brutality that was practiced against them, the pleasure of torturing them in any possible and given way. Remains exactly what they have been binging and purging on us for the last almost seven decades.
My memory brought me back to the need to watch Kafr Kassem the movie. I didn’t want to maintain that feeling of sympathy I had for them. I didn’t need to watch a movie of course. I simply had to go to Ramallah and pass through the checkpoint and have another renewed way of observation towards the wall. They have gone way too sophisticated than the Germans in building walls. The sense of dehumanization that they master each moment against Palestinians is way too aggressive and psychotic, as if their inability to shoot in the head directly is fulfilled through all else they practice on us, until of course they find another way to purge it all in a massacre. Kafr Kassem was one among the series of massacres that accompanied the occupation of Palestine, but their style hasn’t changed much since then except with the modernity that accompanied the upcoming decades until Gaza again and again. As if they found in Gaza the graveyard of all the need of their purging desires.
As in Bulimia, Jews continue to Binge and Purge punishing the wrong people and taking their revenge in continuing to persecute anything, of course in the form of Palestinians, while continuing to blackmail the original culpable and guilty.
Somehow, it seems like an organized and systemic plan of pathetic wounded vengeful psychopaths, who need to continue their serial crimes in order to fulfill their sick needs.
Seven decades later, and the thrive of revenge didn’t stop, and it continues to deploy on innocents, whereas it may only prevail, that there is something wrong in their own psyche….
Except for those Israelis and Jews, who seem to be normal enough to understand the difference, and ended up to be self-hating and anti Zionist, the core making of the state of Israel is a pathetic recipe to heal a severe wound of a decayed injury.
You raised a question that brought this thought to me – you asked was there something genetic in the Israelis that made them be so cruel to Palestinians to inflict the same and worse violence that was brought on them. Well, I’m sure you’re aware of the concept of ingrained suffering, that is used to explain the addictions and poverty continuing among many Native Americans and black people. (I can’t remember the correct name for it now.) And it may be true that some Israelis do carry that, but here’s another thought. The reason Hitler was able to do what he did to the Jewish people was because throughout Europe, the US, and Russia, Jewish people were isolated, were considered less than Christians, were looked down upon. They were like the poor whites in the south during slavery. So after slavery, what did those poor whites do? they killed, and lynched, and segregated black people. Because there had to be some group below them. And in many ways the racism and violence exhibited by the followers of Netanyahu against Palestinians reminds me very much of the behavior of southern whites after the civil war. Racism is a terrible beast but it is a disease that has roots in dislike and hatred that go deeper than skin color.