Other Writings by Mark Chmiel

City Lights Open Media Series has done the U.S. public a service in publishing historian Howard Zinn’s The Bomb, a two-part pamphlet that is a contribution to critical thinking about war, and about one of its modern manifestations, that of high-altitude bombing.

Part 1 is Zinn’s essay on the atomic bombings of Japan and part 2 is about his own wartime participation in and later retrieval of the history of the Allied napalm-bombing   of a French town, Royan. Both essays could be read in less than a couple of hours but it will take a lifetime to integrate their implications in our personal and collective lives.

In his first essay, Zinn reminds fellow citizens of the enormity of unnecessary damage and destruction done by the two U.S. atomic bombings of Japanese civilians.  Statistics point to some 200,000 killed immediately by the two bombs. But Zinn stresses that “we need personal testimonies, not statistics to free us from our numbness: Only with those scenes in our minds can we judge the distressingly cold arguments that go on now, sixty-five years later, about whether it was right to send those planes out those two mornings in August of 1945. That this is arguable is a devastating commentary on our moral culture” (26).

For example, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, a Japanese man said to a filmmaker:  “I ordered the driver to stop, with the funeral pyres still burning in the city, and turned to the American soldiers: ‘Look there. That blue light is women burning. It is babies burning. Is it wonderful to see the babies burning?’”  (52).

Zinn’s second essay is based on research he did in the mid-1960s about the French town of Royan, which he had helped bomb in the spring of 1945. The official line was that it was a military necessity to bomb the German soldiers garrisoned in the vicinity of Royan, even though the end of the war was clearly in sight.  The task for Zinn and his fellow pilots:  “…to bomb pockets of German troops remaining in and around Royan, and that in our bomb bays were thirty 100-pound bombs containing “jellied gasoline,” a new substance (now known as napalm)” (66).

After the town was bombed for three days, the German soldiers surrendered.   Practically all the buildings of the town had been destroyed.  Zinn notes that “[t]he evidence seems overwhelming that factors of pride, military ambition, glory,  and honor were powerful motives in producing an unnecessary military operation” (80).

After his participation in the European theater of the war, Zinn had a leave for some weeks before he was to join the effort in the Pacific.  Reunited with his wife, he noted that one day in August they read the headlines about Hiroshima:  “I remember our reaction: we were happy.  We didn’t know what an atom bomb was, but clearly it was huge and important and it foretold an end to the war against Japan and if so I wouldn’t be going to the Pacific, and might soon be coming home for good” (19). Thus, he was like countless Americans who were jubilant or relieved that the bombs ended the war.

About the bombing of Royan, Zinn recalls, “From our great height, I remember distinctly seeing the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches struck in fog. I was completely unaware of the human chaos below” (67).  Earlier in the book, he writes more specifically that being such a pilot means “seeing no human beings, hearing no screams, seeing no blood, totally unaware that down below there might be children dying, rendered blind, with arms or legs severed”(18).

Over the decades, Zinn went from being this thoughtless and just-war bombardier to a critical citizen and historian:  By the period of U.S. B-52 carpet bombing in Indochina in the 1960s-1970s, Zinn had become experienced in questioning authority, refusing obedience to the war machine, and facing the victims of U.S. violence.

Able to break through the nationalist propaganda that conditions us to avert our gaze from or minimize U.S. belligerence, Zinn offers us a simple, though demanding, task: “We can reject the belief that the lives of others are worth less than the lives of Americans, that a Japanese child, or an Iraqi child, or an Afghani child is worth less than an American child” (63).

Saturday 1 December 2007

Here is the last paragraph of Dahr Jamail’s book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq:

If the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended. As a journalist, I continue to hold out hope that if people have knowledge of what is happening, they will act accordingly. If people in my country could hear the stories of life under occupation and put themselves into the Iraqis’ stories, they would understand. I hold that hope because the stories of Iraq are our story now. Whether we accept that or not, it is the truth. The water from the Euphrates runs through all our veins. [291]

An American horrified at the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to see the occupation from the point of view of the Iraqi people. Unlike the patriotic journalists embedded with U.S. troops, Jamail embedded himself amidst the Iraqi people.

With great bravery, what he attempted to do was to listen, transcribe, and relay these Iraqis’ stories and perceptions to us. In the United States, given the ubiquity of the slogan “support the troops,” people tend to focus overwhelmingly on our soldiers, their fate, their well-being, their PTSD, and their families. In his book, Jamail gives us an opportunity, in less than three hundred gut-wrenching pages, to listen to and take in the voices of Iraqis under U.S. military occupation.

To give you a small taste, I have culled a number of quotations from men and women Dahr Jamail spoke with in Iraq. Ask yourself, how often have you heard such voices and questions in the New York Times or Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, heard them on NPR, or seen them on ABC?

“Do you think all these people, these innocent people being killed by the Americans, don’t have families that are now joining the resistance?” [21]

“So what are the people to do? It [the attack] is not an action, what you have seen is a reaction. If the occupation power continues to hurt and humiliate the people here, every man will become a bomb.” [25]

[Another man approached me with the two children of his brother, killed by U.S. gunfire, by his side.] “This little boy and girl, their father was shot by the Americans. Who will take care of this family? Who will watch over these children? Who will feed them now? Who? Why did they kill my brother? What is the reason? Nobody told me. He was a truck driver. What is his crime? Why did they shoot him? They shot him with 150 bullets! Did they kill him just because they wanted to shoot a man? That’s it? This is the reason? Why didn’t anyone talk to me and tell me why they have killed my brother? Is killing people a normal thing now, happening every day? This is our future? This is the future that the United States promised Iraq?” [29]

“The largest tragedy of the invasion and occupation is the devastation of the people of Iraq. We were hoping for relief, but so far it has only been more suffering.” [39]

“The Americans are the ones who create the terrorists. They say they will kill all the terrorists in the world, but they are actually creating more terrorists.” [42]

“The Americans are creating the terrorists here by hurting people and causing their relatives to fight against them. Even this little boy will grow up hating the Americans because of their policy here.” [78]

“Why are we called terrorists? This is our country. These are foreign army tanks in our streets killing our people. We fight against this and we are called terrorists? They are the terrorists.” [116]

[The stream of patients slowed to a sporadic influx as night fell. Maki sat with me as she shared cigarettes in a small office in the rear of the clinic.] “For all my life, I believed in American democracy,” he told me with an exhausted voice. “For forty-seven years, I had accepted the illusion of Europe and the United States being good for the world, the carriers of democracy and freedom. Now I see that it took me forty-seven years to wake up to the horrible truth. They are not here to bring anything like democracy and freedom. Now I see it has been all lies. The Americans don’t give a damn about democracy or human rights. They are worse even than Saddam.” [I asked him if he minded if I quoted him with his name.] “What are they going to do to me that they haven’t already done here,” he said. [139]

“I was against Saddam. I was jailed by his regime in 1996 for making pastries because at the time sugar was being rationed due to the sanctions. But the U.S. policy now in Iraq will fail 100 percent. No people here support them now.” [147]

“Of course the Americans are bombing civilians, along with the revolutionaries. One year ago there was no revolution in Fallujah. But they began searching houses and humiliating people, and this upset people. The people became angry and demonstrated, then the Americans shot the demonstrators, and this started the revolution in Fallujah. It’s the same in Sadr City.” [150]

“The Americans don’t care what happens to Iraqis.” [151]

“Here, one would have to distinguish between terrorism and resistance. Terror was unseen here before the invasion. In Fallujah, it is not terrorism, it is resistance.” [152]

“The crimes against humanity in Palestine are shown daily on television. This does not indicate that the current U.S. administration is committed to democracy of human rights. How can the United States, a war criminal in Palestine, be accepted as a state-builder in Iraq?” [152]

“This is the way the Americans are freeing Iraq? America’s freedom is killing Iraqis. Fallujah is becoming another Palestine! How long will we have to live like this?” [161]

“When the Americans start patrolling on Monday, even more people will fight them this time because there are many who seek revenge now.” [164]

“When we tried to go to our mosque, the snipers shot at us.” [165]

[He asserted with justifiable pride that Fallujah was the first city in Iraq that the U.S. military had left because of the resistance rather than through negotiations.] “We hope all cities in Iraq become as liberated as Fallujah is.” [193]

“Abu Ghraib attacked the dignity of the Iraqi people. Did America not become barbarians from killing Indians, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Afganis, and bombing us and our young chidrlen. Who now have psychological scars? If these did not reveal the true barbarian nature of America, then Abu Ghraib certainly did. I never liked Saddam, nor did I support him, but at least under the dictator there was order and some basic services. Now there is no order, no electricity, no fundamental stability.” [195]

“The mujahadeen are fighting for their country against the Americans, who are the occupiers. We all accept this resistance.” [204]

“How can we live like this, we are trapped in our own country. You know, Daher, everyone is praying to God to take revenge on the Americans. Everyone.” [230]

“We need electricity to run our pumps to be able to irrigate our farms. At the moment we are having to carry water in buckets form the river instead and this is very difficult for us. They say they are going to make things better for us, but things are worse. Saddam was better than this, even though he executed three of my relatives.” [261]

“I watched American soldiers force naked Iraqi women into a cell. I heard the screams as the soldiers raped the women.” [261]

“We don’t want this freedom of the Americans. They are raiding our homes and terrorizing us all the time. We are living in terror. They shoot and bomb us everyday. We have sent our families to live elsewhere.” [261]

“The high commissioner for elections was appointed by Bremer, so how can we have a legitimate election under these circumstances? This election only serves the interests of the occupier, not Iraqis. This is only propaganda for Bush.” [267]

Dahr Jamail’s book should be widely read and meditated upon. It ought to be discussed at mosques and churches, in high schools and universities. And it ought to lead more of us to take deliberate and daring action to speak the truth about the occupation, interfere with its functioning, and highlight the immorality of the corporations benefiting from its lethal effect on the ordinary Iraqis with whom Dahr Jamail shared so many precious, exhausting, and frightful months.

DIALOGUE AND SOLIDARITY
Mark Chmiel
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006. xiv + 264 pages. Bibliography to p. 282. Notes to p. 348. Index to p. 362. $24.95 cloth.

Witness in Palestine: Journal of a Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories, by Anna Baltzer. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. xii + 212 pages. Appendices to p. 217. Glossary to p. 221. $62.00 cloth.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Palestine Studies

In July 1967 three young Palestinian men left the recently Israeli-occupied West Bank on a mission of visceral importance. Natives of al-Ramla, now in Israel, the men simply wished to see the home of their childhood. Bashir Khairi, one of the three, knocked on the front door of his family’s home and was met by a young Israeli woman, Dalia Eshkenazi, whose family came to occupy Bashir’s home after they fled Bulgaria after World War II. This encounter led to many more in the decades that followed, and it supplies [or these supply?] the narrative dynamic of Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree.

After the short first chapter sets up this dramatic face-to-face meeting, Tolan alternates succeeding chapters by devoting one to Bashir’s family and the next to Dalia’s, moving from the period before or during World War II up to 1967. One hundred and forty-three pages into the book, the meeting of Dalia and Bashir begins, leading them both on a journey of unexpected appreciation, grave disappointment, strong disagreement, and a willingness to keep talking and keep seeing the humanity of the other.

Like so many Israelis, Dalia saw Zionism and the State of Israel in glowing, heroic, and innocent terms. The encounter with Bashir begins to wear away at this uncritical understanding. As a child Dalia had been taught that in 1948 the previous owners of the Eshkenazi home simply ran away. Through Bashir’s stories and meeting his family, she begins to see how the Nakba affected one Palestinian family, with its members’ ardent longing to return to their home with the precious lemon tree in the back yard.

Nevertheless, in the ensuing decades, Dalia continues to challenge Bashir, who is adamant about the implementation of UN Resolution 194 and the Palestinian right to return: If the Palestinians were to exercise this right, what about the Israelis who are already there? His response to Dalia: “The Israelis created this problem, and they can’t place more burdens on us to solve it” (p. 261).

Tolan skillfully weaves significant historical and political events, from the first intifada to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, into the personal context of Dalia and Bashir’s families. This makes for compelling reading throughout.

As a personal gesture of acknowledgement of the intertwined histories of Jew and Arab, Dalia eventually turned her family’s home into Open House, a kindergarten for the Arab children in the town and a site of Arab-Jewish dialogue.

Eleven years ago, Edward Said made the following challenge:

The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be deflected by the common tactic of putting Israeli security on the same plane. On the other hand I do think it is a mistake simply to rule out the whole history of anti-Semitism (the Holocaust included) as irrelevant. As Palestinians and Arabs we have not even tried to study this enormous subject, nor in any serious way have we tried to see how it impinges on the Jewish, and indeed Western, conscience as something all too real. Thus we need a discourse that is intellectually honest and complex enough to deal both with the Palestinian as well as the Jewish experience, recognizing where the claims of one stop and where the other begin. (The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After [Pantheon Books, 2000], p. 123)

The Lemon Tree consciously attempts this kind of discourse and juxtaposition. Here is one exchange between the two protagonists/antagonists:

Dalia: “I know that my people were killed, slaughtered, put in gas ovens. Israel was the only safe place for us. It was the place where the Jews could finally feel that being a Jew is not a shame!”

Bashir: “But you are saying the whole world did this, Dalia. It is not true. The Nazis killed the Jews. And we hate them. But why should we pay for what they did? . . . Is it justice that we should be expelled from our cities, our villages, our streets. We have history here—Lydda, Haifa, Jaffa, al-Ramla. Many Jews who came here believed they were a people without a land going to a land without a people. That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land. Their civilization, their history, their heritage, their culture. And now we are strangers. Strangers in every place. Why did this happen, Dalia? The Zionism did this to you, not just to the Palestinians” (p. 160–61).

The Holocaust appears early in Witness in Palestine, the chronicle of a young Jewish American woman’s journey to the West Bank. The second sentence of Anna Baltzer’s introduction notes that her grandmother is a Holocaust survivor who deemed Israel crucial to Jewish safety. It was during Baltzer’s travels in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon that she began to hear a narrative, as the one so passionately articulated in Dalia’s exchanges with Bashir, that countered the Holocaust-Israel one.

Baltzer decided to see the Palestinian side for herself and committed to work on two different occasions for a period of five months with International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) in the West Bank. Like Rabbis for Human Rights and the International Solidarity Movement, Baltzer and her partners with IWPS were intent on practicing solidarity and nonviolent direct action with the Palestinians to protect their land, crops, property, as well as the people living under a brutal Israeli military occupation.

Scores of beautiful and heartbreaking color photographs accompany Baltzer’s lively and detailed journal entries, which take the reader through the hardship and horror of the occupation. She describes the mechanisms of that occupation, such as roadblocks and checkpoints, that belie their stated purpose of protecting Israeli citizens by simply making life hard on the Palestinians. She documents instances of intimidation, kidnappings, destruction of property, confiscation of land, among many other violations of Palestinian human rights.

Baltzer also writes with respect and admiration for the Palestinians who practice nonviolent direct action every day of their lives. Further, she candidly details several encounters she has with Israeli soldiers, at times remaining calm and at others becoming infuriated by their words and actions. Baltzer herself exhibits commendable courage in choosing to walk with Palestinians in difficult and even life-threatening situations, including nonviolent demonstrations against the separation wall. In addition to her reports on the day-to-day life of an activist in Palestine, Baltzer writes on broader issues such as nonviolence and Zionism.

Tolan’s book reveals how tense and fragile the path of dialogue can be. Baltzer’s account of her admittedly brief time in the West Bank also points to the limits of international attempts at sharing life with Palestinians and aiding them in their struggles for justice. Both books contain scenes of brilliant and courageous humanity and look unsparing at the power of violence, hatred, and vengeance. These books remind me of Albert Camus’s candid self-examination from World War II: “During these four dreadful years all Frenchmen were witnesses to a crime not foreseen by any law (and in saying this we are weighing our words carefully): the crime of not doing enough” (quoted in Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz [Random House, 2006], p. 261). Bashir Khairi, Dalia Eshkenazi, and Anna Baltzer may not be guilty of this crime; the reader of these books, of course, has to answer for himself.

Review of Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. New York: Random House, 2006. 303 p. $25.95. Forthcoming in Shofar.

In Fear, historian Jan Gross explores a seemingly baffling phenomenon. How is it that there was aggressive anti-Semitism in Poland, after the Holocaust?

How is that even thinkable? After all, did not ethnic Poles and Polish Jews both suffer horrifically during the Nazi years? Did not Poles see much more intimately than other Europeans what the Nazi system of mass murder was like, since Poland was the site of so many death camps?

In his investigations, Gross was intrigued to discover cases of Righteous Gentiles among the Poles who hid Jews during the Nazi slaughter, yet after World War II, they were reluctant to let their heroism be known to their fellow Polish citizens. Why be silent, when they exhibited an all too rare humanity on behalf of the Jews? They were afraid of the likely hostile reaction by their Polish neighbors.

Here is Gross’s summary view: “I see no other plausible explanation of the virulent postwar anti-Semitism in Poland but that it was embedded in the society’s opportunistic wartime behavior. Jews were perceived as a threat to the material status quo, security, and peaceful conscience of their Christian fellow citizens after the war because they had been plundered and because what remained of Jewish property, as well as Jews’ social roles, had been assumed by Polish neighbors in tacit and often directly opportunistic complicity with Nazi-instigated institutional mass murder” (247).

At the center of Gross’s study is an analysis of the murderous outbreak of anti-Semitism in Kielce in 1946 and the reactions to it. Gross estimates that up to a quarter of the population participated in some degree with the violence against the town’s Jews. Scores of Jews were murdered by both police and townspeople. Authorities themselves took pains to side with the locals involved in the melee, and not be seen as sympathetic to the Jews under attack. With one exception, the Catholic Church hierarchs basically blamed the Jews for what happened. There was no social stigma attached to those involved in the harassment, beatings, and murder. Gross quotes a witness to the stoning of a Jew at that time: “After several hours of these events, people were tired but in spite of everything they were lifting stones and throwing them calmly, as if the death of a human being, killing of a person, were not at stake here” (103).

One rare shining light Gross identifies in Fear is the outraged stands taken by Polish intellectuals vis-à-vis their fellow citizens blithely brutal behavior. Gross comments that these interventions “make all the difference for Poles today, and can be cherished as a measure of moral sensitivity which has not been dulled among the country’s spiritual elite. But at the time they went unheeded, and their calls for vigour combating anti-Semitism fell on deaf ears, very much like the warnings Jan Karski delivered to the Polish government-in-exile in 1940, when he reported that anti-Jewish measures of the Nazi occupiers resonated well with large segments of the Polish society” (133). This is a familiar, sad, and predictable story: Those who embrace the prophetic vocation of afflicting the comfortable experience a kind of marginality, or exile.

The “fear” of the title can be interpreted as belonging to various groups: Obviously, the surviving Polish Jews, who were subject to abuse, intimidation, and murder; the Righteous Poles who were afraid of the consequences if their neighbors knew they had hid Jew during the war (the neighbors might have murdered them in hopes of digging up the mythic Jewish wealth their neighbors must have appropriated); and the Poles who had benefited from the dispossession of the Jews and were, at some level, fearful of the survivors who reminded “them of the fragility of their own existence, of the propensity for violence residing in their own communities, and of their own helplessness vis-à-vis the [Communist] agents … who now invoked class criteria for elimination from public life” (emphasis Gross’s, 256).

But the word “hate” could have also joined “fear” in Gross’s title. He retrieves a pungent line from Tacitus: “It is indeed human nature to hate the man whom you have injured.” While some Poles had an acute conscience that led them to act compassionately toward the Jews, many others had a bad conscience that first led them to act complicitously with the Nazis, and then to treat the Jewish survivors with contempt and violence.

Gross’s tale has an eerie pertinence to our present time. His themes –ethnic cleansing, dispossession of a people, material gain following on persecution of the suspect group, the bureaucratic processes by which such theft is legitimated, perpetrators evading justice—are still all too familiar. Gross cites Albert Camus’s candid self-examination from World War II: “During these four dreadful years all Frenchmen were witnesses to a crime not foreseen by any law (and in saying this we are weighing our words carefully): the crime of not doing enough.” Gross’s lacerating study reveals how few Poles did enough. Surveying our own world today in the light of the themes of Gross’s troubling book, can we honestly say that we are doing enough?

Remembering al-Nakba

Mark Chmiel

Recently the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC sponsored an unusual exhibit, “Darfur: Who Will Survive Today?” Photographic images of the genocide in Darfur are flashed to incredible size at night outside on the wall of the Museum.

Even given the fast and furious pace of many who live in Washington, the exhibit may have raised some awareness, touched some hearts, and spurred willingness to get involved. A friend of mine who works on Darfur recently told me that “there are no easy answers” to the crisis there. She sees grave problems with advocacy of military intervention without resolute attention to a meaningful peace process.

It seems to me that Darfur represents, for the U.S. government at least, a “benign” genocide, to adapt an idea from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s books on contemporary bloodbaths, The Political Economy of Human Rights. Darfur doesn’t really affect primary elite U.S. interests and, thus, there appears to be no “Operation Darfur Freedom” in the works, reminiscent of President Bush’s drive to invade and “liberate” Iraq. Despite some occasional rhetoric from the president, the people are Darfur appear to be expendable.

Perhaps such practical indifference on the part of the U.S. government influenced the Holocaust Museum to offer the photo exhibit. Back in 1978, it was President Jimmy Carter who started a President’s Commission on Remembering the Holocaust that would eventually give birth to Holocaust museum. In 1979, Carter addressed why such a project was necessary for us as Americans: “because we are humane people, concerned with the human rights of all peoples, we feel compelled to study the systematic destruction of the Jews so that we may seek to learn how to prevent such enormities from occurring in the future.” So, it is understandable that the Holocaust Museum would have a mandate to be concerned with calling attention to contemporary genocides and ethnic cleansings.

Today is a good time to think about an ethnic cleansing that remains too little known in the United States. For November 29 is the anniversary of the 1947 UN partition plan of Palestine, after which began what Palestinians have called al-Nakba, the catastrophe. In a new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, describes the process under the Zionists and Israeli Jews by which Palestinian villages were occupied and then destroyed, and its people expelled. Of particular interest to Pappe is David Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, which in March 1948, gave the unequivocal green light for this cleansing (Pappe points out several Hebrew words used in various communications of the time that spoke clearly of “cleaning”). Looting, murder, and rape also accompanied these operations. Pappe writes of early spring 1948: “Between 30 March and 15 May, 200 villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled. This is a fact that must be repeated, as it undermines the Israeli myth that the ‘Arabs’ ran away once the ‘Arab invasion’ began. Almost half of the Arab villages had already been attacked by the time the Arab governments eventually, and, as we know, reluctantly decided to send in their troops. Another ninety villages would be wiped out between 15 May and 11 June 1948, when the first of two truces finally came into effect.”

Edward Said once recalled, “I’ve frequently said [to Israelis], ‘Look what happened to you: You as Jews are the victims of all time, really. The history of anti-Semitism is a millennial fact. And we are your victims now. How can you, having suffered victimization, in what seems to be with heedless consciences, inflict similar punishments on another people? People, who, in the great scale of things, have done you very little harm—except that they were there?’”

Given the political economy of memory of the Holocaust Museum, one ought neither to expect that the Museum will host an exhibit on al-Nakba nor think that the Museum will invite Jimmy Carter to discuss his new book in which he speaks of Israeli apartheid in the occupied territories. Photos of the suffering in Darfur are acceptable; photos of Palestinians who have suffered ethnic cleansing and apartheid will be unacceptable and arouse outrage. Books speaking of the need for Israel’s security are praised; books addressing Palestinian insecurity at the hands of Israelis are de facto anti-Semitic.

However, other institutions, civic groups, churches, and schools ought to sponsor such al-Nakba photo exhibits and invitations to Carter to speak a truth that many would just as soon forget or deny.

The Holocaust Museum and its leaders like Elie Wiesel have been tireless in urging remembrance of the Holocaust and working against Holocaust denial.

We ought also to be tireless in urging remembrance of the Palestinian Nakba and in working against Nakba denial as well.

Mark Chmiel teaches at Saint Louis University and is author of Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership .