Another short vid we made for VJMovement in Holland. Uri Avnery is the brightest light on the Israeli left, and he speaks from a lot of experience. He came to Israel in 1933, a 10-yr old fleeing Nazi Germany. He has endured not only endless criticism, but beatings and assassination attempts, to get his message out that peace with the Palestinians is the only way. Read Avnery’s weekly column (in English) here.

Once in awhile we’ll post videos we have made about other peace activists. Rabbi Menachem Froman does not avoid paradoxes – he lives in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, but he has spent many hours meeting with influential Palestinians, including Yassar Arafat and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (the spiritual head of Hamas, assassinated by an Israeli missile in 2004).

When I asked Rabbi Froman if he were willing to live under a Palestinian government after a 2-state solution is reached, he smiled and said, “I am a citizen of the state of God”. Full of humor and hope, he said, with another big grin, that “Allahu Akbar” – “God is great” in Arabic – is translated into English as “Yes, we can.”

We made this video for the VJMovement in Holland. Please consider subscribing to this great site – we will be making more videos for them in the future. For more info and writings by Rabbi Froman, see here.

Almost all of Khaled’s work is controversial to someone. When I first tell Jewish friends about “the Arab man who opened a Holocaust museum,” they say something like “amazing”, and basically think he’s a saint.

Yes, part of what Khaled is doing is courageously confronting Arab/Moslem denial about the Holocaust (he was after all, on the way to the December, 2006, Holocaust Conference in Tehran, when the Iranians denied his visa at the last moment.)

But then later, when they (again the Jewish friends) learn that he sometimes puts photos of the Nakba next to Holocaust photos in his tiny museum, or worse, confronts Israelis (even Israeli soldiers) with Holocaust photos, my Jewish friends change their tune.

I’m re-posting the video clip above (won’t do this often, promise) that some of you may not have seen. One acquantance emailed me when I first put it up, saying Khaled is “simply using the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust to make a case for himself. There is no connection or even slight similarity between the atrocities carried out by the Nazis and the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

She asked what I thought, so I answered her – yes, the Separation Fence (which cuts through the village in the video, separating them from many dunams of olive trees and thus income) has cut down drastically on suicide bombings. But why is the Fence not built on the Green Line? And why not even near the settlements in the West Bank, but many hundreds of meters east of them, apparently to allow future growth for the settlements?

The woman never wrote back. So yes — Khaled is indeed not a total saint, he wants to help his fellow Palestinians achieve (what he thinks is) justice. I tell friends (the ones still listening) about one of Khaled’s operating principals, Gandhi’s satyagraha, “to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.” 

Displaying Holocaust photos is definitely less harmful than throwing stones (as some young Palestinians do at the weekly demos against the Fence). Would the photos shame an Israeli into trying to change its government’s policies? Or would they just offend?

What do you think?

[And by the way, a young Palestinian was killed several weeks ago at the exact spot where we shot this video, when he was hit in the chest with a tear gas cannister, and bled to death.]

Yesterday, the same Israeli paper ran TWO articles on Niilin, the village where Khaled and I have been shooting for the past several months (and where some of its citizens decided to open their own holocaust museum, see posts below…) On the one hand, two Palestinians were injured there yesterday in the demonstrations.

And on the other hand, the Israeli army states that in Niilin and Biilin (a neighboring village, where we have also shot, and where a villager was killed soldiers a month ago), “Gaza was easier.” The saga, and the bloodshed goes on. Of course, the “Gaza was easier” article didn’t mention once WHY the villagers in both places demonstrate weekly (because the Separation Fence cuts them off from a large percent of their olive trees and thus their income).

So how to sum up this mess? That the villagers AND the soldiers (not to mention all the citizens in Palestine and Israel) are victims of government policies that avoid peacemaking?

At the site of his ancestral home in Ellajon

I’m Khaled Kasab Mahameed born in Um El Fahem in 9^th of May 1962 from a family who was deported from the destroyed Palestinian village “Ellajon” – which is Armageddon – mentioned in the holy Bible:  Revelation Chapter 16.

My father Mahmood was expelled with his family and all the inhabitants of that village in 1948 from Ellajon – accompanying other  541 Palestinian villages by the Israelis when he was 17 year old where he carried in his memory, and which he told me and my other 12 brothers and sisters later, when he was returning from the Israeli jail -  there he spent a few periods of prisonment because he was claiming for the right of his fellow Palestinians.

I was six years old when I heard about the Holocaust  first time in my life. My father said, “We Palestinians Pay the price for the Atrocities the Nazis caused the Jews in the Holocaust”. From that time my mind wanted to know – what is was Holocaust?

It took for me 4 decades to decide to establish what is now called “The first Holocaust Museum in the Arab world,” after studying Sociology and Political Science in Hebrew University, business administration in Stockholm’s University and in Haifa University, and Law in East London University.

I practice Law for my living but Holocaust research and education for Palestinians in my “free time” for my “prophecy” and by my own expenditure.

In 2004 my wife Izdihar and I, with the support of our two children – Jawdat, who is now 14,  and Asil who is now 12 -  put on the internet the first website in Arabic  about the Jewish Holocaust  - which is aimed to inform Arabs about this unique crime in human History. We established “the Arab Institute for Holocaust Research and Education” in October 2004. Then in January, 2009, we inaugurated the second Holocaust museum in the world, in the Palestinian village of Ni’lin in the West Bank.

Next step is to inaugurate 5 Holocaust Museums in different 5 Palestinian towns.

Khaled and Hassan (Nilin resident) at the museum in Nilin

After an initial exhibit in the West Bank Palestinian village of Niilin in January, the official inauguration of the museum is next Tuesday, April 21 – Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel).
Come see for yourself how the Khaled’s work is inspiring debate and yes, starting controversy (I invited one Israeli journalist to this event, and he said “No, thanks,” saying it was undoubtedly a case of “holocaust abuse.”)
Read an article here about Niilin’s exhibit.

If you live in Israel, drive or take the bus to Modiin, getting out on Highway 443 just before entering Modiin. Then turn onto the road towards Modiin Ilit, and wait 30 meters down that road at the bus stop (and get there by 9:15 a.m.). We will drive the 10 minutes into the West Bank to Nilin. Israeli citizens, don’t worry – coming back to Israel afterwards there is a checkpoint, but IDs are never checked there. Cars are also leaving from Jerusalem. For information, please call or email Harvey: 052-801-6017,  jerusalemnewyork@gmail.com

The venerable “The Forward”, which was first published as a daily Yiddish newspaper, in 1897, published an article quoting Khaled last week – in their English edition. Definitely an evil publication, they came out early in favor of trade unions and democratic socialism – so it figures they would feature Khaled’s work at some point. 

The November 1, 1936 cover is at the top.

Here’s our new trailer – anyway, how can you sum up in a few minutes a complex story coming from a completely conflicted complex part of the world anyway?? Comments always welcome…

Fast forward to the Israeli/Palestinian mess. I’m a card carrying Jew (circumcised, Bar Mitzvahed, even a kabbalistic tattoo on my arm). I’m proud of my ancient heritage – especially when it talks about “justice, justice, shall you pursue” and “a stranger shall you not oppress, since you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.”

I immigrated to Israel in 2006 (as any Jew worldwide can do, according to Israeli law – something any Palestinian refugee worldwide, whose grandparents actually lived somewhere in the current state of Israel, can only dream of). I immediately realized this is a frustratingly polarized place. A lot of “leftists” are just as aggressive and angry as the worst of the ultra-Zionists, pan-Arabists, and other fundamentalists. And I soon discovered this very unusual Palestinian activist, lawyer, and poet. Not only a terrific subject for a doc, but a great excuse for some wild adventures.

How do you teach people compassion? Especially when they don’t necessarily WANT to identify with “the other”?

Mahameed sometimes hangs a Palestinian flag in his tiny museum. He often spends the first hour with a Palestinian audience developing rapport, speaking their language – yes, he wants every one of them to be able to return to their villages WITHIN Israel. Then finally, near the end of his talk, when they’re itching to see the photos he’s mentioned several times, he takes them out.

It’s almost like he has to trick people into feeling something they don’t want to feel. And likewise, when he shows the photos to Israeli soldiers, he says he wants to “shock them” into treating Palestinians more humanely.

A guy who has sat down with sheikhs and rabbis, Hamas and Fatah members, holocaust survivors and the father of Gilad Shalit – is not afraid to test his ideas wherever he can. One thing for sure: he has an almost obsessive faith in the power of examining the Holocaust – “looking into the pain” – to change peoples’ thinking on BOTH sides.

I’ve quickly found that not only Khaled’s work, but my film will provoke people – including potential funders. One Jewish guy was totally high when I first talked w. him (I guess he assumed Khaled was some kind of simplistic saint), but the more I showed him, the more suspicious he got, until he was quoting me warnings like, “If we are kind to the cruel, then we will be cruel to the kind.”

So I ask you – Arab or Jew, Zionist or anti-Zionist, religious, secular, none of the above – to look at this project with open eyes – don’t immediately evaluate it one way or another. We welcome interaction and feedback. Stay with us for the ride, support us in any way you can – and in a year or so, we’ll have finished a cool film about an amazing man, set in a beautiful, peaceful corner of the world.