A stark contrast

Two stories — one Palestinian and the other Israeli reveal a great deal about their respective societies.

The Israelis murdered Palestinian educator and poet Refaat Alareer on December 6, 2023. Refaat taught English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. He was one of the leading lights of the literary scene in Gaza and was well-known outside of the tiny enclave for his writings as well as preparing his students in the craft of storytelling.

In an obituary published a day after Refaat’s murder along with several relatives, his friend Max Blumenthal wrote in The Grayzone:

“Refaat also assigned his students The Merchant of Venice. He encouraged the class to view Shylock, Shakespeare’s Orientalized, avaricious Jewish character, as a sympathetic figure who was struggling to retain a modicum of dignity under an apartheid-like regime.

“When his students completed the play, Refaat asked them which Shakespearean character they sympathized with more: Othello, the Venetian general of Arab origin, or Shylock, the Jew. He described their response as the most emotional moment of his six-year teaching career: One by one, his students declared an almost visceral identification with Shylock.

“In her final paper, one of the Refaat’s students reworked Shylock’s famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:

Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

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David Sheen is an Israeli author and journalist, who, like Refaat did, also contributes articles to The Electronic Intifada. While researching for a project, I came across a video in which David is giving a talk at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, on March 12, 2015. In the video titled Inside Israel’s Race Wars, David recounts a story from Tel Aviv:

“On Holocaust Remembrance Day just a couple of years ago, you have students being brought into Tel Aviv to the Cameri, which is like the national theatre, to see a play. And they came to see a play of ghetto — appropriately enough — a play about the Holocaust on Holocaust Remembrance Day and, while you have actors portraying Nazis, beating up or pretending to beat up the actors in the play who were portraying the Jews, you actually had students in the audience cheering on the Nazis: ‘Yay! Get ‘em! Beat ‘em!’”

“And this wasn’t again just one or two or three or four people and it wasn’t just once or twice, it was throughout the play. It got to the point where the entire cast broke down crying. And at the end of the play one of the actors came out on stage and he said, ‘it was disgraceful behaviour … you [the Nazi-cheering students] also embarrassed the Jewish people and the Holocaust.”

David asks rhetorically, “How is this possible? How could Jewish Israeli youth treat this with such disrespect? It’s about how the Holocaust is taught. Everyone knows the stories, we are taught them from the earliest stages. They just decided this year that elementary school isn’t early enough. Starting next year, kindergarten is when Israeli students are going to learn about the Holocaust. Kindergarten.”

David diagnoses the reasons for the Israeli students identifying with the Nazis: “But it’s not just what, it’s how. So, when asked, 92 percent of Israeli students said, ‘yeah, I have encountered racism towards foreigners.’

“They aren’t stupid, they see what’s going on. It’s all around them.

“But after studying about the Holocaust, and then they were surveyed, only 2 percent [of the students] said that they identify with the suffering of the persecuted nations. Only 2 percent reported that they feel a commitment to preserve democracy.”

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To break it down: a Palestinian teacher in the blockaded ghetto of Gaza, which is overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of the Palestinians kicked out of their homes in 1948 (and 1967), where people have for generations lived under the yoke and at the mercy of their Jewish supremacist occupiers, unwilling to give them a life of dignity, still taught his students values that they identified with the suffering of the predecessors of their Jewish oppressors.

These sympathetic and empathetic Palestinian children — who cannot get out of their open-air prison, who cannot take a flight out of their city to see the Pyramids in the country right next to their enclave, who cannot know the delight of going off to some faraway place during their summer breaks, who cannot experience the simple pleasure of strolling along the beach that abuts their enclave without the fear of gunfire, who cannot spend a day without hearing the buzzing of a drone above their heads — are being taught (and are imbibing) the values of justice and morality by their Palestinian teachers who endure the exact same conditions as their students. Neither the teachers nor the students have lost their humanity.

These children haven’t lost their sense of right and wrong, their moral compass despite their deprivations, despite their horrific living conditions, despite their near-hopeless future.

Meanwhile, the occupying Israeli Jews — who displaced nearly 800,000 Palestinians off their lands, killing thousands in the process, took all of their possessions for themselves, all because someone in a foreign country oppressed their co-religionists — still identified with their oppressors, not with the suffering of their own ancestors, their own relatives.

It’s hard to wrap one’s head around such a stark contrast.

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