May Their Names (and Memories) Be Erased

 

The CBS News show 60 Minutes had a segment Sunday about the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred 100 years ago in the predominantly black Greenwood section of that Oklahoma city, once known as “Black Wall Street” due to the many prosperous black professional families who lived there. After armed black men tried to stop a lynching, white mobs retaliated by destroying the entire community, leaving between 100 and 300 dead and 8000 homeless. No one knows the exact figures because there was no investigation of the crimes afterward and no indictments.

The tale is harrowing enough, but the point of the 60 Minutes report was to explore how the worst incident of racist violence in American history was then completely erased from memory to the point where local people just two generations removed swore it could never have happened. “I went to school here all my life,” said one black resident on camera. “We never heard anything about that, so I was sure it wasn’t true.”

Repairing the damage from terrible events starts with establishing the facts. Even in “merely” criminal acts, we place great emphasis on the ability of the legal system to set out what exactly took place in the eyes of the public, often in the context of determining the guilt of individual perpetrators. How much more important is it when the crimes are massive and/or social in nature like race-inspired murder, systematic oppression such as Jim Crow or apartheid, secret torture regimes, or genocide?

These are highly political matters, and reactionary nationalists hate things like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee that forced people to look at unpleasant facts, including their own complicity or willful ignorance of what took place and how they reaped benefits from it. To this day, for example, Turkish nationalist politicians threaten anyone who dares to suggest that the well-documented genocide of perhaps 1 million ethnic Armenians by the Ottomans—which was observed by German officers and inspired some aspects of the Holocaust—ever occurred. The events are over 100 years old (1915–1916), but you can still get yourself killed in Turkey for publicly stating that they ever happened. One who dared to do so was journalist HrantDink, [below] assassinated in 2007. Photos of the assassin later surfaced “flanked by smiling Turkish police and gendarmerie, posing with the killer side by side in front of the Turkish flag.” 

Since 2018 it is illegal in Poland to suggest that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” You cannot even use the term “Polish death camps” to describe Auschwitz or Treblinka under threat of a 3-year prison term. (However, it’s okay to blame Ukrainians for it.) Anyone who has seen the devastating Claude Lanzmann film Shoah in which he carefully asks local Poles what happened in front of their eyes and what they thought of it might have a slightly different take on the role of the “Polish Nation” in those events.

Last year, George Floyd's murder caused us to face yet again our own historical revisionism and silence, including a new look at statues of Confederate war leaders and the ongoing use of treasonous generals’ names on a slew of U.S. military bases (Benning, Beauregard, Bragg, Hill, Gordon, Hood, Lee, Pickett, Rucker, Pendleton). The “Lost Cause” rewrite of the Civil War convinced generations of Americans that that conflict wasn’t really about slavery and white supremacy after all but rather a more palatable and vaguer concept, that of “states’ rights,” elegantly interpreted by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Erasure was a key part of sustaining white supremacy up through World War II.

What then shall we make of yimakh shemo (“May their names be erased!”), the rallying cry of Jewish supremacists who chanted it in East Jerusalem while helping their cops displace residents of the territory they covet? I gather it has historical meaning applied to enemies of the Jewish people, of which there certainly is no shortage. But the implications are chilling when applied by a state engaged in a decades-long process of pushing people out of their coveted homes and turning them into an underclass. It suggests that not only will the ethnic cleansing continue, but that once it’s over, we will pretend nothing ever happened—and who will challenge us?   

The foundational fact of Jewish racial supremacy over non-Jews in Israel has long been obscured by the fantasy that two states could eventually come into being as wary neighbors and allowed to work out their differences over time. But recent events have shown that the erasure impulse is much too strong and has grown steadily since the establishment of the ethno-religious state in 1948. Erasing Palestine from the map was only the first step, and it is now clear in retrospect that the Zionist project could never tolerate allowing it back even under the one-sided terms of Oslo. Since erasure is the point, refusing to be erased is the counterpoint, and the George Floyd-inspired movement has clarified the terms on either side: you will bow your head (no we won't), or we will kill you (just try).

The debate about Israel-Palestine, as Norman Finkelstein explains in this interview, is no longer about the occupied territories, the construction of a two-state solution, the acceptance of the Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one, of two permanently estranged communities acquiescing in some sort of separate-but-equal fantasy that was tried here in the U.S. and finally demolished as the disingenuous wishful thinking of the privileged class. That was the narrative for decades since the so-called Six-Day War. But we are no longer examining the problem of 1967 but that of 1948, the impulse to declare a land the colonial preserve of a religious group to the exclusion of all others. Occupation, expulsion, and settlement used to be criticized for the 1967 lands while the exact same behaviors of 1948 were accepted as irredeemable facts—even by the Palestinian leadership.

That’s over now. While Israelis have been busy trying to erase Palestine and its inhabitants, they simultaneously have erased the boundaries between the events of those two landmark years. By raising the legality or legitimacy of importing settlers into the West Bank and expelling ancient families from their East Jerusalem homes, we now must examine the same questions about the 1948 expulsions of hundreds of thousands to Lebanon and Jordan and the permanent ghettoization of Gaza. “Let Their Names Be Erased” is Israel’s doomed call to achieve the impossible—short of repeating the historic crime that led to the present impasse.

Here in the U.S., we continue to grapple with segregation and racism, their historical underpinnings, their effects, and their ongoing appeal. One way to challenge the hoarders of the nifty advantages of racial supremacy is through the boycott as was demonstrated by the Baton Rouge bus boycott (1953), the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-56), the Savannah boycott (1960-61), the Natchez (Mississippi) commerce boycott (1965-66), and dozens of others throughout the civil rights movement.

No wonder that BDS, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to halt the movement for Jewish supremacy, has the Israelis’ and their allies’ knickers in such a knot that they have engineered a bunch of state laws to punish advocacy of it. Unfortunately for them, the First Amendment remains part of the U.S. Constitution (for now), and this week another court outlined in clear language that actions to ban speech are not kosher. Forcing someone to sign an anti-BDS pledge, said the judge, is equivalent to “requiring a person to espouse certain political beliefs.” 

Legal action to undermine boycotts has a long, shameful history in the U.S. Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written while he was imprisoned for promoting a boycott and encouraging picket lines to enforce it. It’s no wonder that white supremacist forces should have done everything to stop boycotts and that people would face prison for promoting them. It’s a powerful tool.

BDS is a nonviolent, moral movement to pressure the oppressor into changing course. It makes some people very uncomfortable. I get it. Plenty of my Ohio neighbors in the 1960s hated Martin Luther King and thought he was a troublemaker. Very few Israelis are interested in hearing any criticism because they’ve been enabled in every crime and abuse that occurs to them to commit by the impunity provided by the U.S. umbrella. White Alabamans were furious about Rosa Parks’ seating arrangement, and white Arkansans hated the girls who integrated Little Rock High. Racist privilege dies hard. BDS is the civil rights issue of our age, and we have a clear choice. Qui tacet consentit: “Silence [erasure] gives consent.”

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