"You can fool some of the Arabs all of the time, and all of the Arabs some of the time, but you can not fool all of the Arabs all of the time." - Ibrahim Lincoln
Brad, it is a hopeless task to try to convince the Palestinians that their Nakba and the events of Tisha b`Av carry the same weight TODAY. History keeps rolling, and what happened 2000 years ago does not entitle anybody to anything TODAY.
Our more recent Holocaust can be more understandable as implying some entitlement, except that the Arabs know that they were not involved in it and believe they should not be asked to pay the price. Unfortunately, the Jews did not manage to wed the events of Tisha b`Av and the Holocaust. Instead of placing Holocaust Memorial Day on Tisha b`Av, the Holocaust received its own day of commemoration. It is a big mistake, both for the Jewish and Arab psyches.
Most Jews no longer bother to observe Tisha b`Av, and why should they? The Temples would have been gone anyhow by now. And the very religious Jews object to the date of Holocaust Day. It falls on the 27 of Nissan (an arbitrary day, more or less), while one is forbidden to mourn in Nissan since it is supposedly the "month of redemption." The ideal solution would be to place Holocaust Day on Tisha b`Av. The religious will fast and compose some new Holocaust poems to add to the old liturgy, and the secular Jews will come to understand that the Exile and its catastrophes is what is being commemorated. The Arabs will get the same message. Then Bradley`s piece will have a chance to make sense.
P.S. The present date of Holocaust Memorial Day was chosen to be in between the eve of Passover (the beginning of the final evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the beginning of the Ghetto Revolt in 1943), and Independence Day, so the Holocaust can be associated with heroism too, and be seen as historically related to Independence. It would have been better to place it on Tisha b`Av, the real beginning of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. There was little heroism in the Revolt, when the alternative was certain death. |
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