Tag: Memoricide

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Ending memoricide– the Nakba Museum project by Alice Rothchild

A decade ago I was on a speaking tour in Washington DC with Husam el Nounou, administrative director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program. I will never forget while exploring the National Museum of the American Indian, he suddenly left in tears. As we stood in front of the large stone edifice he explained this is what he fears for Palestinians, that we will mostly know their culture and history through static dioramas reflecting a reality that exists only in the past, while the remaining population is left to eke out a desperate existence living on reservations…

This deliberate state-sponsored erasure of Palestinian voices and the evidence of their centuries old existence thus constitutes a form of historical genocide, of attempting to destroy the memory of a people’s history and thus the people themselves. I suggest that refusing to forget is thus a deeply political act.

Continue reading at http://mondoweiss.net/2015/06/memoricide-museum-project

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.
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Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli genocide of Palestine by Haifa Rashed, Dr. Damien Short, and Professor John Docker

In our view, taken together, the collections and books on genocide in Genocide Studies represent an archive of Nakba denial. Our concern is not so much that Israel is not classed as a case of genocide, but that it is never substantively discussed, even though there are good clear reasons for doing so… In Genocide Studies, international Zionism has achieved one of its most successful scholarly ideological victories. In its silent refusal to entertain substantive studies of the Nakba, without any self-reflexive discussion, Genocide Studies is on ethically dangerous ground. Because the field fears Zionist intimidation and ad hominem attack, it judges that a determined disinclination to pursue critical scrutiny of the Nakba as genocide serves its self-interest as a growing discipline. Genocide Studies is now on the edge of an ethical precipice, a crisis of intellectual bad faith, claiming to be making scholarly choices only, when those choices are subtended by political considerations. This essay calls for further research and discussion on this particular case study, which has thus far been sorely neglected in Genocide Studies.

 

Continue reading at http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/17/israels-decimation-of-gaza/

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.
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Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/israeli Genocide Of Palestine and other articles by Haifa Rashed, Dr. Damien Short, and Professor John Docker

In our view, taken together, the collections and books on genocide in Genocide Studies represent an archive of Nakba denial. Our concern is not so much that Israel is not classed as a case of genocide, but that it is never substantively discussed, even though there are good clear reasons for doing so… In Genocide Studies, international Zionism has achieved one of its most successful scholarly ideological victories. In its silent refusal to entertain substantive studies of the Nakba, without any self-reflexive discussion, Genocide Studies is on ethically dangerous ground. Because the field fears Zionist intimidation and ad hominem attack, it judges that a determined disinclination to pursue critical scrutiny of the Nakba as genocide serves its self-interest as a growing discipline. Genocide Studies is now on the edge of an ethical precipice, a crisis of intellectual bad faith, claiming to be making scholarly choices only, when those choices are subtended by political considerations. This essay calls for further research and discussion on this particular case study, which has thus far been sorely neglected in Genocide Studies.

Continue reading at https://independent.academia.edu/HaifaRashed/Papers#coauthor_wizard

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.
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Urbicide in Palestine: Spaces of Oppression and Resilience by Nurhan Abujidi

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

These discourses of cultural cleansing and cultural genocide suffer from their focus upon the symbolic cultural heritage, which solely refers to one layer of urban destruction, the deliberate destruction of cultural artefacts. In other words, it focuses only upon the buildings whose loss is judged to be a cultural loss. However, the urban environment normally experiences more widespread destruction than these symbolic buildings. From the Bosnian history of cultural destruction it is evident that hundreds of other types of buildings were subject to destruction–for example, houses in Mostar Old Town and in many of the villages in Bosnia. The same can be noted in the Palestinian history of urban destruction–for example, Nablus old town (more details on Nablus are analyzed in Chapter 6). Indeed, urban destruction encompasses buildings that have no distinctive cultural value, or are of distinct cultural provenance. Thus the interpretation of urban destruction as an attack o cultural heritage provides only a partial (though striking) account of the destruction of the urban environment in Bosnia among other cases; it does not account for the scare of destruction or targeting of buildings that are not recognizable as such symbols of culture. Thus, cultural cleansing and cultural genocide are only partially reflecting the process of urban destruction; they reflect the destruction of cultural artefacts, but this destruction does not take place in a pure form or apart from the destruction of other types of urban environment.

Continue reading at https://books.google.ps/books?id=KLDpAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA21