On the living – Allison Kaplan Sommer in Haaretz:
‘When Nadia Ibrahim Azizi told friends she would be traveling to Poland for the March of the Living ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on Holocaust Remembrance Day, she recalled that “you could see the puzzled looks on their faces.”
Nadia, 42, together with her 36-year-old sister Janet Soury, both Arabs from Jaffa, arrived in Poland on Monday as part of a group of 27 Arab Israelis who will hold a ceremony at Auschwitz after visiting the Jewish community in Krakow.
In preparation for the trip, the sisters visited the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Center. While both were educated at Christian schools and took part in coexistence programs, it was their first visit to the museum and memorial in Jerusalem.’
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‘The group they are traveling with comprises Muslims, Christians and Druze from across Israel. It’s the initiative of an NGO called Together – Vouch for Each Other, which was founded in 2018 with the stated goal of closing “gaps between Arabs and Jews in Israeli society.” The group’s CEO, Yoseph Haddad, who also travels the world defending Israeli government policies and opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, said in a statement: “It is important for us to make the memory of the Holocaust accessible to Israeli Arab society and the Arab world, because every human being must know about this shocking event in human history and learn about it and from it, thus fighting hatred today from Holocaust denial to any manifestation of racism.”’
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‘The March of the Living program was launched in 1988 and features thousands of people marching silently from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Historically, most of the participants have been Jewish, but Haddad’s group is one of several efforts this year promoting participation from the Arab world, both in Israel and internationally.
Another relatively new Arab-Israeli organization, Atidna, founded three years ago, is sending 120 Arab teenagers who are part of its youth movement, in a delegation that was set to depart on Tuesday.
“I believe this is a unique and extraordinary experience considering what’s going on in Israel now and all of the tensions,” said Atidna’s co-CEO, Dalia Fadila. “It’s a strong statement declaring: ‘We’re here, we care about our home, and we seek to understand the narrative of Israel and the Jewish people.’ It’s also an opportunity to examine our own narrative.’
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‘“We can disagree with a lot of things our country does, while considering ourselves Arab Israelis who love our country and its people,” Soury said.’
Read the complete article here.
I’m not a big fan of the march of the living, but I don’t want to tell other people how they should commemorate atrocities. All official commemoration is problematic; the alternative, no commemoration at all, would probably be worse.
I’m also curious what Jewish Israelis do to understand their fellow Arab citizens better, within the context of this NGO of course. Perhaps also that is besides the point.
And I remain skeptical about the possibilities of Arab Israelis to identify with their country. They cannot serve in the army, which is an important pillar of the country and its identity. On the other hand, the religious don’t serve in the army, quite a few them identify with Israel, even though officially they believe that the Messiah should have arrived first before the state could have established, if I’m not mistaken.
Among the slightly less religious Jews most girls don’t serve in the army either. My sister’s daughters didn’t go to the army.
It would be interesting to fantasize about what kind of country Israel is in one hundred years, whether the Holocaust is still a part of Israeli, and to a certain degree, also Jewish identity.
In any case, private Joker said already, ‘the dead know only thing, it’s better to be alive.’ Perhaps, that’s the main message of the march of the living. Now we can only hope that the participants know that nobody was chosen to live based on virtue, neither inside the camps nor outside.