29 January 2010By
Jonathan Cook
An Arab member of the
Israeli parliament has sparked controversy among Jews
and Arabs in Israel over his decision to join an
official Israeli delegation commemorating
International Holocaust Day today at a Nazi death camp
in
Poland.
Mohammed Barakeh will be
the only Arab in a contingent of Israeli
parliamentarians and government ministers, including
Benjamin Netanyahu,
the prime minister, at
Auschwitz to
commemorate the 65th anniversary of the camp’s
liberation.
Mr Barakeh has reported
receiving a spate of hate mail, including a death
threat, since he was invited to the remembrance
service by the speaker of the parliament, or
Knesset, over
the opposition of many right-wing politicians.
Among Israel’s Arab
population, meanwhile, commentators and public figures
have argued that his involvement in a delegation
dominated by rightwing politicians sends the wrong
message, especially after Israel’s assault on the
Gaza Strip
a year ago, in which hundreds of Palestinian women and
children were killed.
“I have every sympathy with
the Jewish people for their horrific suffering in the
Holocaust,” said Awad Abdel Fattah, the secretary
general of the National Democratic Assembly party.
“But Mohammed Barakeh is
participating in a delegation that wants to use the
Holocaust as a way to win sympathy not for the Jewish
victims but for an Israeli occupation and Zionist
settler project that come at the expense of the
Palestinian people.”
Mr Barakeh, the leader of
the
Communist Party,
the only joint Jewish-Arab faction in the Knesset, has
defended his decision, even while admitting that his
involvement can be exploited by Israeli officials.
This month he walked out of
a lecture at
Yad Vashem,
the main
Holocaust museum
in
Jerusalem,
after accusing the speaker of blaming modern
anti-Semitism on Arabs and left-wingers who opposed
Israeli policies.
On Monday Mr Netanyahu
struck a similar note in an address at Yad Vashem:
“There is an evil that can spread and threaten the
security of Jews. We know that this just begins with
Jews, and then continues on to the rest of the world.
There are today new people who hate Jews, with new
reasons for [wanting] the destruction of the Jewish
state.”
Over the past few weeks a
group of right-wing legislators, led by
Danny Danon,
a member of Mr Netanyahu’s
Likud Party,
have lobbied unsuccessfully to have Mr Barakeh barred
from the commemoration. Mr Danon told a Knesset
committee: “Do we want this man representing us at
such an important and sensitive ceremony?”
Mr Barakeh, one of 10 Arabs
in non-Zionist parties in the 120-member parliament,
is reviled by many Israeli Jews because of his
opposition to what he calls “racist” government
policies, both towards Palestinians under occupation
and towards the fifth of Israel’s citizens who are
Arab.
A death threat sent to his
office this month referred to Arabs as “trash” and
contained his photograph with a swastika drawn on his
forehead.
A senior member of the
Communist Party said in an interview that several of
Mr Barakeh’s colleagues questioned him in private over
his decision, accusing him of attending with “war
criminals”.
Abir Kopty, a Nazareth city
councillor in Mr Barakeh’s party, admitted she had
doubts. “But after seeing how his participation has
shaken up the right wing, I can see there is a
positive side … It is important that his attendance at
the ceremony challenges the preconceptions and racist
attitudes of many Israeli Jews.”
She added that his visit
would have a special effect given his image among
Israeli Jews as an “extremist”. In December he was
charged with using threats and violence against police
at four demonstrations since 2005, an indictment he
has called “political persecution”.
Mr Barakeh said: “It is my
duty to be anywhere I can to demonstrate my very clear
position against all forms of racism and genocide. The
lesson of the Holocaust, a great tragedy for humanity
and the Jews especially, must be that there can be no
room for such crimes.”
He added that, although he
would join a candlelight march through Auschwitz, he
would not take part in symposiums to avoid any danger
of colluding with Israeli attempts to manipulate the
occasion.
Mr Barakeh’s attendance was
backed last week by Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator
with a rival party.
Other Arab public figures
in Israel have been critical. In a commentary, Zuheir
Androus, editor of a newspaper in Galilee, reminded Mr
Barakeh that his family came from Saffuriya, a
Palestinian village close to
Nazareth that
was ethnically cleansed during the Nakba, the
Palestinian name for the 1948 war that founded Israel.
He wrote: “We should be
asking Barakeh why he needs to take part in an
official Israeli Knesset delegation to the death camp,
while other [legislators] in the delegation prevent
us, Arab Palestinians, from mentioning the 1948 Nakba.”
Israeli legislators have
been seeking to outlaw commemorations of the Nakba.
Mr Abdel Fattah said that,
while it was compulsory for Arab children to learn
about the Holocaust, the Nakba was excluded from the
curriculum in both Arab and Jewish schools.
“The demand from Israel
that we recognise Jewish suffering in the Holocaust
while we are required to deny our own people’s
suffering in the Nakba is just another form of loyalty
test,” he said. Far-right parties in the government
have proposed that Arab citizens be required to take a
loyalty oath
or perform national service.
“Barakeh should remember
that Israel wants to reshape our political and
national identity and is using the Holocaust to do
that.”
But Nazir Majali, a
journalist who helped to organise a trip of 260 Arabs
and Jews to Auschwitz in 2003, at the height of the
second intifada,
called Mr Barakeh “courageous”. He said the barriers
of mutual suspicion between Arabs and Jews needed to
be breached.
A poll conducted by Haifa
University in the wake of Israel’s attack on
Gaza showed
that 40 per cent of Israel’s Arab citizens believed
that the Holocaust had not happened, up from 28 per
cent three years earlier.
Mr Majali said of his own
visit to Auschwitz: “I did it for myself, my people
and my children, not for the Jews. I don’t expect
something back from them because I participated. If it
helps them to look at me a bit differently afterwards,
that’s great too but it’s now why it was important I
went.”
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel.
His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran
and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East”
(Pluto
Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website
iswww.jkcook.net.
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