"And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off."
Isaiah 56:5
This verse contains the inspiration for the title of the Jewish memorial and museum commemorating the Holocaust in Jerusalem. Yad Vashem describes an eternal memorial that God gives to those who have no earthly offspring. Yad Vashem is one of the places that MESP visits every semester, and it's been a memorable experience each time I've been. It tells the story of the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective; the museum is very informative but, perhaps surprisingly, not manipulative.
Aside from learning information about the Holocaust and the ghettoization that preceded the Final Solution, I pick up a couple important things from the visit. The first is the chronological proximity of the Declaration of the State of Israel to the end of WWII - the state was declared just three years afterward, in 1948. These two events are intimately connected; I can imagine survivors of the Holocaust and other Jews seeing the formation of the State of Israel as the beginning of a hopeful new chapter after the closing of such a devastating one in the nation's story. The visit also brings out the connection between the Holocaust in Europe and subsequent events and conflicts in the Middle East. Zionism, or the Jewish political movement that led to the establishment of the State of Israel, began before the time of the Holocaust, but the campaign of ethnic cleansing against Jews under the Nazi Reich definitely gave the movement urgency, encouraging Jews to leave Europe in great numbers and settle in the land of Palestine. This is important because, as Israeli historian and diplomat Michael B. Oren acknowledges, without Zionism, there would have been no influx of Jewish immigration, no State of Israel, and therefore no conflicts between it and neighboring states or the local Palestinian Arab population (Six Days of War). The modern Middle East has definitely been shaped by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would not have occurred without this specific development that gained a lot of urgency and support after the Holocaust.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not some eternal conflict between Arabs and Jews that has been brewing for centuries; its roots can be traced to specific historical events.
Palestinians do not look at the Declaration of the State of Israel, the subsequent war, and the attendant loss for their communities of many lives and much land, as the start of a hopeful new chapter in their story, but rather as the start of their own time of devastation: they call this "al Nakba" or "the Catastrophe." Israelis aren’t perpetrating another ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians, as some would claim, but since 1967 the Israeli government has been in control of the lives of over 2 million people who have no citizenship in the state.
I listened to a speaker today, a Palestinian Christian who had visited death camps such as Auschwitz. He suggested that Israelis today are driven by fear that an event like the Holocaust could happen again, and this fear translates into some of their policies toward Palestinians. Whether or not his assertion correctly describes the mindset of Israelis today, I think it was significant that he, as a Palestinian, made an effort to understand this chapter of the Jewish people's story; I've appreciated the opportunity that the memorial at Yad Vashem provides to learn more about that chapter and its impact on the following chapters of both Jews' and Arabs' stories in this region.
