“A Quick Rant on Historical Suffering” by Yasmina Aboufirass

All opinions are that of the author and not necessarily those of the website that it is published under.

I was debating with a friend; a guy who seemed pretty angry about what I had said about Israel’s government and the horrors it was inflicting upon the Palestinian people. “You have no right to criticize Israel, we Jews have suffered, my great grandfather was deported and killed!” He got a little emotional…and of course the conversation had reached a dead end. I was not going to compare suffering, that would just be silly, and my argumentation was drowned in emotional whining . Of course I had already told him that I was not against Jews as a people or Judaism as a religion, but as usual I was silenced by his deliberately chosen moments of surdity. I left feeling… well feeling frustrated. I went back to my dorm, made myself a glass of Moroccan mint tea, sweet, very sweet (not caring about the diabetes I might get in 30 years time). And as I sipped on my tiny cup of burning hot tea, I asked myself “Why is this guy so emotional about the holocaust? He wasn’t in it?” I was ashamed of my question….It seemed too brutal and unsensitive. I reformulated it in my head, “no, let me put it differently; this guy didn’t live through the holocaust, maybe his ancestors did…but why should he feel the “pain” more than anyone else who’s not a Jew.”
When does history stop being personal? When does history become universal history. When we have reached a point where something has been recognized as “genocide” for instance, do I have to necessarily be part of THAT community to feel “bad”?
Let’s take the holocaust, that horrible period (just like the horrible times nowadays in Gaza). Do I have to be a “Jew” to see that it was terribly wrong and inhuman? Do you have to be Palestinian, or Muslim to recognize that Gaza is going through a holocaust of its own? History must never be forgotten, history must be respected and people and civilizations must be treated with respect; respect to their history and respect to what their ancestors have suffered. I think we all agree on that. One must live while remembering those who have lived but simultaneously keeping in mind the present and not letting history taking over our present. History has been called “history” for a reason. And let us not be hypocritical, a black today might share the same color as a person who used to be a slave, it is a mere superficial aspect of that persons identity, it does not mean that BECAUSE he is black he “feels” the suffering of the slave more than I do because I am “white” or “Asian”. The “mémoire historique” is a recollection of physical, geographical but most importantly psychological aspects of our lives and we live these memories as citizens of “the world”. The holocaust is no longer painful to Jews only, it is painful to everyone jew or not jew and it is hypocritical to say that a jew in todays world “feels” the pain of the holocaust more than I do. Why? Well because the geographical and physical aspects of this period of history have been “forgotten” (the Jew no longer has bruises and is no longer in concentration camps); what remains is the “psychological” aspect and that is a universal trait of our identity. Let’s take slavery for instance; yes it is a history that had “blacks” implicated, but today we are ALL implicated and we all recognize the bestiality and the terror blacks have endured, it is no longer a “black” history.
Today the only thing we carry with us is “memory”…not even memory, it is a sort of “virtual” memory that I am close to, as much as the black man or the Jewish man. That s why I believe that this political correctness has gotten out of hand, we can no longer express ideas because the other person is geographically or physically part of a distant history. Similarly, we cannot justify the barbaric acts of a country by bringing up its history. History is history. It must be used carefully, but most importantly it must be used RATIONALLY to make our present better, to learn from the mistakes of the past in order to implement a better future. It is very easy to get caught up in emotions. And just like in everyday life, we succumb to personal emotions when we have no arguments, in politics we succumb to historical “pseudo” personal emotions to justify the unjustifiable, hoping that a passionate plea will blind people from rationality.