I don’t tend to comment on politics; it doesn’t really solve much, and in the current climate of debate you are either talking to an opponent who won’t see your side, or preaching to those with whom you already agree. Mostly, I am interested in political theory, from my philosophy background.
However, from Library Juice I got this report that Israeli troops targeted a Palestinian archive full of government records–passports, birth and death certificates, other identification documents–destroying the contents beyond recovery. Library Juice quotes the original article, and I am going to use the same quote because it illustrates the historical importance of the archive:
hundreds of thousands of file cases and documents — birth and death certificates, identification records, passports and other travel documents, ledgers of hand written information — a heritage of historical information about Nablus residents that covered more than 100 years of successive Palestinian occupations under the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the Jordanian kingdom, and the current Israeli regime.
What strikes me is that, according to the article, Palestinian officials offered the keys to the archive to the soldiers, who were reportedly “searching for ‘wanted men’ for the purpose of ‘national security.’” Okay, let’s give the Israelis the benefit of the doubt: maybe there were bad men in the archive, and maybe the army didn’t want to risk soldier’s lives, so just used bombs to be sure they got all the “wanted men.”
Then what about this:
“They destroyed the building completely, but that wasn’t enough for the Israelis. They then used their Caterpillar bulldozers to churn up everything and mix all the documents with the soil so that nothing is able to be preserved,” [director of the Ministry of the Interior in Nablus] Ateereh said.
The records of a government are what give it legitimacy (good reading is the beginning portion of Derrida’s Archive Fever). These archives, going back 100 years, document the current and previous residents of the area, including now absent Palestinian refuges. Documentation is the source of these people’s claims, without which they become homeless and voiceless. Regardless of what side one takes, such destruction is illegitimate, and harms not only the people of the area, but our entire collective memory.
Steve, you could have added the tag “war” to this post as well. I would imagine this is the essence of no-holds-barred warfare — the ugly side we don’t typically see as consumers of media that serve up video game/sporting event like coverage.
August 11th, 2006, at 5:57 pm #