Growing up in the West Bank, Mujahid Sarsur knew next to nothing about the Jewish Holocaust and saw little ground to sympathize with a people he saw as his occupier.
However, thanks to an Israeli roommate overseas, the 21-year-old Palestinian student learned about the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews during World War II and discovered a new understanding of his Israeli neighbors.
Now he wants other Arabs to do the same. Sarsur heads one of a handful of Palestinian grassroots groups seeking knowledge about the Holocaust.
On Wednesday, he led a delegation of 22 students to Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. The students, fasting for Ramadan, listened closely to their Arabic-speaking guide’s explanations and were left wide-eyed by the gruesome images of the death camps.
Girls in Muslim headscarves turned away in horror at the sight of Jewish corpses being shoveled into pits. They huddled together as they watched film from Auschwitz, where about 1 million Jews were put to death.
“The Holocaust is a huge part of Israeli society. We live so close to them and we need to understand them better if we are ever to live in peace,” said Sarsur, a junior at Bard College in New York. “If we change the way we think about the Holocaust, we can create bridges.”
Arab sentiment toward the Holocaust ranges from ignorance about its details to outright denial. Some hold a more complex belief system, acknowledging that the Holocaust did happen, but that they are paying the price by the loss of their land with the creation of the state of Israel after World War II.
Last year, in an incident that got international attention, a Palestinian youth orchestra performed a concert for Holocaust survivors in Israel and caused such uproar among Palestinians that it was shut down. Its conductor was banished and blocked from entering a West Bank refugee camp out of concern for her safety.
Two years ago, Yad Vashem launched an Arabic version of its Web site to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab world and provide credible historic material to those who seek it. A similar version in Farsi was aimed at Iran, whose president has called the Holocaust a “myth.”
Noor Amer, a 15-year-old Palestinian who attends high school in Jordan, said he compares Jewish suffering in the Holocaust with Palestinian suffering in the West Bank and Gaza. While he still rejects Zionism, he said the Yad Vashem visit helped him understand that “the Jews had nowhere else to go” after the Holocaust.
He said Palestinians have trouble seeing their enemies as victims to be sympathized with.
“The conflict is so complicated that people cannot forget it or put it aside,” he said. “If we say that the Holocaust happened, if we accept it, then we accept that Israelis are human just like us and I think that here is the twist — we do not want to consider Jews as humans because of all the suffering that we go through we cannot believe that human beings can do such a thing.”
Palestinians maintain that Israelis generally have failed to come to grips with their responsibility for the Palestinians’ six decades of dispossession and exile, though a new generation of Israeli historians has challenged their country’s widely held narrative of blamelessness.
Surveys show that Holocaust denial is common even among the 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are Arab and grew up under the Israeli educational curriculum.
Aumamah Sarsur, 22, an Israeli Arab and cousin of Mujahid Sarsur, said the Yad Vashem visit taught her that Jews were tortured and killed by the Nazis.
“I am not giving them legitimacy to come here and make their own country, but I get their point of view,” she said.
Dorit Novak, the director of Yad Vashem’s international school for Holocaust studies, called the visit a “blessed initiative” and hoped for continued dialogue to break down the stereotypes on both sides.
“I appreciate their principles, their courage, their curiosity and their willingness to come, listen and learn,” she said. “The Arab world is exposed to the Holocaust in a very distorted way. I know this is limited outreach, but I am willing to suffice with something limited in the reality in which we live.”
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was