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Abstract
This article considers analogies between the Holocaust and the Nakba in Israeli narratives, analogies that became increasingly dominant in political discourse in Israel through journalism, historiography, art, and literature. I focus on two recent works: the memoir My Holocaust Thief by Noam Chayut (2009) and the film Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman (2008). Both juxtapose Palestinian refugees and Holocaust victims (and less explicitly, Israeli soldiers and Nazi officers) as a way of rehabilitating a moral self. I ask what kind of political meaning is constructed by this mirroring, by placing the narrative of the other-the Palestinian catastrophe-within a Holocaust-based representation of the Nakba. In a certain sense, thinking through the conceptual framework of the Holocaust focuses attention on the catastrophe of the Jews and relegates the Palestinian catastrophe, once again, to secondary importance, driving it out first as a physical reality and then as a narrative.
Key words: Holocaust, Nakba, catastrophe, Noam Chayut, Ari Folman
Toward the end of S. Yizhar's novella "Hirbet Hiz'ah," which traces the expulsion of the residents of an Arab village by Israeli soldiers, the narrator ventures a provocative analogy:
Something struck me like lightning. All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like. I couldn't stay where I was. The place itself couldn't bear me. . . .
I felt that I was on the verge of slipping. I managed to pull myself together. My guts cried out. Colonizers, they shouted. Lies, my guts shouted. Khirbet Khizeh is not ours. The Spandau gun never gave us any rights. Oh, my guts screamed. What hadn't they told us about refugees, their welfare, their rescue . . . our refugees, naturally. Those we were driving out-that was a totally different matter. Wait. Two thousand years of exile. The whole story. Jews being killed. Europe. We were the masters now.1
Another story by Yizhar, "The Captive," implicitly engages the conceptual framework of the Holocaust, as shown by Gil Anidjar.2 But the connection in "Hirbet Hiz'ah" is much clearer. Initially hinted at by the use of the word "coaches," describing the trucks carrying the exiles beyond the frontier, and by the German "Spandau...