By Benay Blend
Storytelling has long been a tactic in the toolbox of colonized people. For survivors of genocide, it validates their experience against those who deny that the horror ever happened.
When I taught in Northern Louisiana (1991-1998) there was a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, Rozette “Rose” Lopes-Dias Van Thyn (1912-2010), who spoke at area schools about what she had undergone.
After her death, Nico Van Thyn published her story to counter those “who deny the Holocaust who excuse what happened, who say it is fictional history” fabricated by Jewish people to gain sympathy.
Today there are Holocaust survivors who believe that “never again” means never again for everyone, so now they are speaking out against “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza. For example, Stephen Kapos, 86, a survivor of Nazi extermination in his native Hungary, claims that “there is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism.”
Kapos charges that “if you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges what’s happening.”
On July 9, Indigenous participants in the National Native American Boarding School Coalition spoke on National Public Radio’s (NPR’S) Native American Calling show about legislation to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate abuses at Native boarding schools in Canada and the United States.
As reports from Canada began to surface, there was a corresponding rise in people denying that atrocities at boarding schools ever happened. In response, Cree lawyer Eleanor Sunchild argued that residential boarding school denial equated to Holocaust denialism, and so should be added to the criminal code as hate speech.
What ties these stories together is denial on the part of the oppressors and their supporters who follow suit. Long before October 7th, what Vacy Vlazna calls “Palestine-denial” existed as a strategy “to wipe Palestinians off the face of their own ancestral land in order to lay a fictitious claim to the whole of historic Palestine.”
Along with ethnic cleansing, these tactics endure as such today. For example, at the beginning of “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza, President Biden denied the accuracy of the Health Ministry’s counting of the death toll, thereby “creat[ing] an opening for defenders of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign to dismiss the crisis.”
By denying the accuracy of the count, Biden joined deniers of another Holocaust who claimed that Germany did not murder 6 million Jews. That number is fictitious, they say, created by Jews in order to receive reparations and attention.
In response, the Ministry published a list of names of the 6,747 who had died as of October 26 since the bombing campaign began, including 2,664 children.
“Each name on the list is the story of a profound tragedy”—so went an investigation by the Intercept. Nevertheless, skeptics were not impressed. According to Biden’s National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby, the Ministry exists as “a front for Hamas,” meaning that “we can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health at face value.”
“Zionism doesn’t simply compromise people’s ethics,” Steven Salaita writes. “It prohibits their ability to comprehend simple ideas about the world.” A prime example of that mode of thinking, Biden’s denialism illustrates how Zionists view Palestine as a “nonentity or negation,” thus their stories, too, are not to be believed.
Given this logic, it is futile to attempt to convince the Zionists otherwise. To do so is to be labeled anti-Semitic. “No amount of talking, debating or defending oneself,” writes Ramzy Baroud, “can possibly convince the Zionists that demanding an end to the Israeli military occupation in Palestine or the dismantling of the Israeli apartheid regime, or any genuine criticism of the policies of Israel’s right-wing government are not, in fact, acts of anti-Semitism.”
Given this level of intransigence, how do activists change the Zionist mind? Perhaps the answer is they don’t. Instead, the focus should be on Palestine itself, concludes Baroud— its “geography, the intricacies of its politics, and, the richness of its culture.”
Shortly before October 7, journalist Mohammed El-Kurd reflected on the role of culture in Palestinian liberation. “It’s hard to imagine what a poem can do in the barrel of a gun,” he surmised but concluded that “the role of the artist in a liberation movement is the same as any member of that movement,” an obligation to build on achievements of the past in order to impact the present.
In other words, an obligation to accept the responsibility to “participate in the climb.” Reflecting on the past, El-Kurd paid tribute to the late Ghassan Kanafani, whose ability to transform the suffering of the Palestinian people into resistance literature proved a serious threat to the Zionist state. In 1972, while in exile living in Beirut, the Mossad placed a bomb in his car thus martyring him along with his niece.
Kanafani’s legacy lives on in the work of Palestinian poet, storyteller, and professor Refaat Alareer, who was murdered, too, by a bomb strike on his home on December 6, 2023. In a tribute to Alareer, Yousef AlJamal, recalled his teacher’s words: “For Palestinians to keep their memory and cause alive, they have to carry on telling their side of the story.”
“Currently, in Gaza,” writes Norman Saadi Nikro, “Israel is destroying the institutional basis for the reproduction and maintenance of social and cultural life, as well as administrative capacities to maintain records and documentation by which social and cultural life is organised.”
In destroying homes, he continues, they are erasing personal artifacts through which families hold their memories. In this setting, storytelling gains importance as it maintains the narrative that “Israel” seeks to destroy in order to replace it with their own.
“As a modality of social and cultural infrastructure,” Nikro concludes, “storytelling resuscitates memory into life, through practices of resisting the narratives of the hunters.” It connects the people to the land as it once was, as it is now, and what it will be in the future.
Not all stories are told with words. For example, Reem Anbar, a Palestinian oud player and music therapist from Gaza, “sings stories” of her land through her music. Now living in Manchester, Britain with her husband, writer and musician Dr. Louis Brehony, Anbar advocates for Palestine through Gazelleband, which she formed together with Brehony.
“I have two brothers in Gaza, including one with three young children, along with grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins and all of my friends and neighbours,” explains Anbar. “All of them have now lost their houses to the bombing.”
On July 13, 2024, Brehony posted on Facebook a photo of cassette tapes from the demolished home of Reem’s brother in Hayy al-Nasar, Gaza City. “Nothing else remains but memories and love for the place,” he writes. “And Rasheed Anbar, Ansam and the three little heroes, remaining in the neighborhood throughout everything.”
For Reem, it’s been hard not to be in Gaza with family and friends. “I have lost many friends and neighbors to Israeli bombings,” she makes clear. She adds that
“They killed them and destroyed their houses. I am a strong person but have felt a change in my life since October. I can’t relax. I’m constantly thinking about my people. The war has made me want to work more as a Palestinian musician because we express our message and our stories through music. I lived through three wars and have many memories to share. There are many emotions but I channel them into my oud playing and through musical performances.”
“Despite Israel’s hopes and best efforts, Palestinians have not yet forgotten who they are. And no amount of denial can change this,” Baroud concludes. Despite all of the destruction and displacement, none of “Israel’s” efforts have killed the story.
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
