(en) France, Organisation Communiste Libertarie (OCL) - Between oblivion and obsession: European memory view from Gaza (fr)

 [machine translation]

In 1940, shortly before to end his own life, feeling hunted by the Nazis he fled, Walter 
Benjamin tries to cross the Pyrenees with a suitcase full of documents. He carried with 
him the text that later became famous under the title of Theses on the Philosophy of 
History. In this extraordinary text, he wrote a kind of political testament for future 
generations in the warning over the political meaning that memory - history and collective 
construction - could take. He felt that, on the ruins of the past, he would accumulate 
new, that time is not a continuum homogeneous and empty, but an explosives magazine. His 
thoughts come to mind in these days of violence and killings in the Gaza Strip. They come 
to mind because the bombs of Israel in the Gaza Strip were also massacres perpetrated 
memory. Massacres committed by the State of Israel with its memorial turned into political 
ideology of terror. Massacres with a Europe which, struck by a double amnesia, supported 
with an irresponsible attitude and criminal violence of Israel.

Just a word about it, even at the cost of repeating the obvious. The same Benjamin, 
preparatory to his notes PhD , stressed the importance of returning permanently to memory 
as the exegete with the sacred text. Unabated, with the awareness between the past and the 
present, there is a political link that should not stop fighting.

In different European state, the development of the memory of the extermination of 
European Jews followed different paths, largely because of the role played by various 
countries during World War II. To date, however, memorials discourse have largely 
standardized under the sign of the paradox: the institutionalization and ritualized memory 
of the Holocaust has been accompanied, indeed, deletion (when it is not camouflage 
revisionist) historical conditions under which a religious anti-Semitism rooted could turn 
into mass extermination of a people. This stems from the disjunction of anti-Semitism and 
fascism, and with it, the separation of the order of remembrance duty and the necessity of 
anti-fascism. If, in fact, it is true that antisemitism preceded European fascist 
ideologies and does not coincide with them, it is equally true that it is fascism (Nazism 
is fascism included here knowing the issue is complex and controversial) that turned 
antisemitism in a political machine of persecution and extermination. From this point of 
view, the dissolution of the historical relationship between the two phenomena - the 
extermination of European Jews and Fascism - meaningless injunction to remember and paves 
the way for the exploitation of the past as well as 'the real phenomena of mass hysteria.

So these days, for example, in France the specter of anti-Semitism was stirred by 
attributing anti-Semitic sentiments in the French population of Muslim faith or Arab 
origin (or, less crudely, from countries whose official language written is Arabic) to ban 
public demonstrations in support of Palestine. Event that takes an even more confusing 
character when you know that we are only two months of the electoral success of the 
National Front, whose ideological roots, despite the circus staged by Marine Le Pen, are 
directly rooted in history fascism and European anti-Semitism.
It's like an obsession and oblivion asserted simultaneously, one and the other, as 
political acts. But while the obsession reproduced at European level the memorial outline 
drafted by the State of Israel, which is a real ideology of memory with criminal purposes, 
forgetting is rather a European affair, certainly related to the alleged postideological 
exceeded past and affirmation of neo-liberal discourse as the new framework of 
institutional policy. But not only.
Obsession and forgetting - at least observed of France where, right now, the waters seem 
particularly disturbing about this - a second cross-political memorial plan for the 
colonial past. The so-called Arab anti-Semitism, in fact, looks like a kind of experience 
of "invention of tradition" which, on the one hand promotes erasing the actual historical 
development of relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in the country Arab and 
the impact that colonialism has had on them and on the other hand, provides a tool of 
preventive delegitimize criticism of Israeli policies and criminalization of aprioristic 
sense of solidarity with Palestine.
Obviously, tabooing of critical toward Israel is not new. However, the intensification of 
its use for specific political purposes and located as in the French case, requires a 
conscious mobilization not only the present but also the past. Or, more precisely, of 
their relationship. In the manipulation of memory and selective memories, it is not useful 
to oppose a presentist attitude, but, if necessary, against a checklist that tries to stop 
the accumulation of ruins. The latter, however, does not coincide with the juxtaposition 
of "human memory" and sclerotic separated within a "paradigm of victimhood" but rather in 
the contextualization in the political explanation of the conditions and responsibilities.
The memory of the extermination of European Jewry and the massacre of Palestinians are not 
in conflict with each other. They are, if applicable, operation of an oversight in favor 
of the other.

Simona De Simoni (infoaut), July 29, 2014

Translation from Italian Francesco / OCLibertair