I remember myself remembering, striving to remember. It was always mid-May, when the sun beat down on Haifa already in the morning hours. The Herzl elementary school is located at the entrance to the neighborhood, on the mountain ridge, at the mouth of a green valley. The high wall that enclosed the schoolyard and the cypress trees above it cast a narrow strip of shade. We, the school children, stood in the exposed part of the courtyard, under the sun, ordered in rows, in front of the low stage, dressed in blue and white, intent, imbued with holiness.
The Memorial Day ceremony, on Mount Carmel in the early 1980s, was the culmination of a liturgical time. It is not a Jewish liturgy, but an Israeli, a national one. Its religion is not that of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, but another religion, that of the State. The Jewish Memory Day is Rosh ha-Shana, New Year’s Day, a day of judgment. The only memorial day I knew in my childhood was not New Year’s, nor was it the Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we called Shoah Day. In the Israeli liturgy, Memorial Day, always a week after Shoah Day, in mid-May, is the Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel’s Wars.
The central act in the national Passion story is the communion with the fallen soldiers, a ritual of death, which leads to the evening act of rebirth, the celebration of Independence Day. On this day, the Israeli religion draws its children close to war, close to battle. It is a liminal, ambiguous moment. Battle is engagement with the enemy. It is when the enemy enters our consciousness, our memory, our city. The memory of war is a crevice of peace.
For us at Herzl School, Memorial Day revealed a number of enemies. My grandparents fought against the British occupier, a war of independence. My parents fought against the Arab states: Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese. Those who did not appear to us on those Memorial Days, who were not remembered even as enemies, were the Palestinians, a word we did not know. The war we recalled was far from us, far from Haifa.
I remember myself remembering. The climax of the ceremony was the siren. It still sounds at 11 am throughout the country. For two long minutes, we stood in silence, our arms stretched along the sides of our bodies, our eyes downcast, sweating in the sun. I remember myself trying to remember, doing my best to touch the pain, concentrating on being sad. My boyish mind was devoid of memories, so I replaced memory with imagination, painting battlefields and scenes of war in my mind, creating soldiers and killing them, and then grieving for them.
In those moments, I disconnected from Haifa. The war I kept remembering, recreating, had no connection to the world around me, to the school, to the cypresses, to Mount Carmel. Every year I cleansed Haifa of enemies, of every trace of conflict. Memorial Day was a ritual of forgetting, hiding the battlefield on which I stood, erasing the ruins on which my city was built, eliminating the Palestinians. On those May mornings in the early 1980s, I became Israeli.
Memory of Forgetting
Carl Schmitt argued that political existence is based on extreme conflict. At the foundation of the state lies war. War splits reality so deeply that it tears apart our very consciousness of war. There is no external perspective on the conflict from which it could be grasped in its totality, from all sides. The essence of conflict is the absence of a unifying perspective. Therefore, Schmitt reasoned, knowledge of the political conflict can only be possessed by the parties involved. Only they, each from their own perspective, can identify each other as enemies.
Albert Memmi offered an existential description of the conflict underlying the French colony in North Africa. His Portrait of the Colonizer, Portrait of the Colonized describes how the two sides take various positions in relation to the colonial situation that pits them against each other. He emphasized that the patterns he outlined were based on personal experience. «For every line, for every word,» he wrote, «I could produce links to numerous and concrete facts.» Memmi believed that his minority position as a Jew in Tunisia, being neither French nor Muslim, familiarized him with both sides, colonized and colonizer. Did he find within himself the reconciling perspective of the colonial divide?