Palestinian peace activist visits SA

Former Fatah radical Mohammed Dajani is visiting South Africa during “Israel Apartheid Week” as a guest of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies.

Johannesburg – Two good experiences of Jewish doctors helping his dying parents without discrimination turned Palestinian Mohammed Dajani from a fiercely anti-Israeli Fatah radical to a courageous advocate of moderation and reconciliation between the two sides in the bitter Middle East conflict.

Dajani is visiting South Africa this week as part of his mission of moderation – during “Israel Apartheid Week” when feelings against Israel are running high – as a guest of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies.

He is best known for taking 27 Palestinian university students to the infamous Nazi death camp Auschwitz in Poland two years ago.

The uproar that the trip caused – Dajani was accused of brainwashing the students – led him to resign his job as a professor at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and to devote himself to Wasatia, the moderate movement he had founded before.

Dajani explained to South African journalists this week his mission was to overcome the “empathy deficit” on both sides of the Israeli-Palestine divide.

So at the same time as the Auschwitz trip, he sent 30 Jewish Israeli students to visit the Dheisheh refugee camp near the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

The idea was for both sides to better understand the suffering of the other because he said Israelis and Palestinians know very little about each other. He wanted to show the Palestinian students what anti-Semitism could lead to.

The visit sparked such a huge outcry because it contradicted the dominant narrative among Palestinians and Muslims more generally that the Holocaust has been exaggerated, or even that it didn’t happen and was merely a ruse to justify the Jews seizing Palestine land to create Israel, Dajani recalled.

The students were shocked by what they saw. But one of the students identified with what she saw at Auschwitz only because she had been imprisoned in an Israeli jail.

Dajani said he told her Jews see Auschwitz differently from that. “They see the big picture, the attempt to annihilate their people. We want you to see it from the Jewish perspective,” he told the student.

He wanted the students to see it as they themselves see Nakba “as the worst catastrophe in history”, referring to the Palestinian name for the loss of their homeland when Israel was created on it in 1948.

Another of the students asked why he should learn about the Holocaust when Israelis did not allow Palestinian students to learn about the Nakba. Dajani said he agreed that the ruling Likud party was trying to outlaw teaching about the Nakba, which he deplored.

But he told the Palestinian students to focus on empathy, on seeing the Holocaust through Jewish eyes.

Likewise, Daani asked Jewish students to see the plight of the Palestinians through Palestinian eyes.

Asked if he was not thereby trying to equate the lot of the two sides – when in reality Israel is much more powerful and is calling all the shots – Dajani said he totally agreed there was asymmetry in the conflict. But that was a political perspective. He said his task was to instil a human perspective.

Greater empathy by each side for the other, Dajani hoped, would diminish mutual tensions and fears and mistrust and so promote the faltering peace process.

“Part of our message is to seek an end to the occupation (by Israel of the West Bank), but in a different way … not boycotting … but first looking at ourselves to create a moderate culture.”

Dajani said if Israeli could be reassured that Palestine did not present a threat, “we hope that will empower the peace camp in Israel, which has been weakened by the fact of extremism in Palestine. That would pull the rug under the extremists of both sides.”

In this light, Dajani criticised the South African BDS (boycott, divest and sanction) movement in South Africa for campaigning for the isolation of Israel. That was just building walls – like the wall Israel had built between itself and Palestine – when the two sides should be building bridges to each other.

He deplored Israel’s expenditure of US$3-4 billion on the wall and only US$25 million on promoting people-to-people contacts between Israelis and Palestinians.

To the major vexed issues of the return of the Palestinian refugees and of the occupation of the West Bank, Dajani proposed that those refugees should be allowed to return – but to the state of Palestine.

“If someone is to return to Israel, they would have to have Israeli citizenship, which they don’t want,” said Dajani.

“Similarly those in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank could be offered a choice between leaving, with compensation, or staying, but with Palestine citizenship.”

Dajani expressed apparent pride that his father could have been such a refugee, but chose not to be. His parents lost the house he himself was born in West Jerusalem when the Israelis seized the city in the 1948 war.

The family fled to Egypt, but then returned the next year to live in the Old City of Jerusalem, then under Jordanian rule. His father created the city’s best hotel.

Dajani himself was later forced to flee Israel when he joined Fatah, then very much a banned movement trying to overthrow Israel by force.

He lived in Lebanon and Jordan but then left politics in 1975 to study in the US.

Dajani remained totally against dialogue or negotiations with Israel and wanted nothing to do with Israelis or Jews socially either.

But then he was allowed to return to Israel in 1993 because his father was dying of cancer. Dajani said seeing how Jewish Israeli doctors treated his father – and then, quite soon, his dying mother – without discrimination “opened my eyes to the humanity of others”.

African News Agency

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