History

Songs of Jewish and Palestinian resistance, poems, slides, and more

Wednesday, May 2, 8PM

La Pena Cultural Center 105 Shattuck, Berkeley

$2 donation

text is superimposed over a photo of a woman wearing a keffiya, I believe it is Leila Khaled (ليلى خالد)

Summer, 1976 Tal al Zaatar Refugee Camp, Beirut, Lebanon: Courageously, the Palestinian and Lebanese people of Tal al Zaatar defended themselves against a brutal attack by the Lebanese fascist forces.

text is superimposed over a photo of Rachela Wyszogrodzka, a captured militant in the Warsaw Uprising source

April-May 1943 Warsaw Ghetto; Poland: Against overwhelming odds, Jewish resistance fighters held off Nazi stormtroopers.

Throughout the world people remember and are inspired by these acts of heroic resistance.

The parallels of what Jews suffered and what Palestinians were then enduring led us to create a dramatic program to “Commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943 & the Resistance at Tal al Zaatar 1976.” We dramatized the 1976 Palestinian resistance to the siege by Lebanese fascists (supported by Israel) of Tal al-Zaatar refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut and the 1943 uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazi extermination of the last Jews in the ghetto: “The dramatic presentation you are about to hear is a collective effort to try to convey more what it was like at the Warsaw Ghetto, at Tal al Zaatar.” Lincoln Bergman, drawing from his long experience doing radio productions, pulled together first-hand accounts, radio broadcasts, and other material in a narrative/testimony of both historic last stands, woven together with others in the group, and members of JAAZ took the stage to read the dramatic accounts alongside each other. Here are some excerpts:

Warsaw: “The young men and women of my group had been waiting for this moment for months, the moment when we would shoot back at the Germans. Suddenly, they entered near our post, thousands, armed, and we, some twenty young men and women, had a revolver, a grenade, some bombs, home-made ones that had to be lit by matches. It must have been strange to see us happily standing up against them; happy because we knew their end would come. We knew that ultimately they would conquer us, but we also knew that they would pay heavily for our lives. It was a joy for the fighters to see the Germans retreat. On the first day, we with our poor arms drove the Germans from the ghetto.”

“It is difficult to describe life in the Ghetto during that time. People were embracing and kissing each other during the first days. And although it was clear to each of us that we would be killed, we were satisfied to know that we had avenged the murders of our people. Fighting back made our lot easier.”

Tal al Zaatar: “We speak to you from our besieged camp of Tal al Zaatar, not to obtain sympathy, but from a position of heroic steadfastness which this camp has obtained for every moment of this long siege. The fascists have shelled our homes with unprecedented savagery. Thousands of shells and rockets have fallen on them, while 73 major attacks have been launched against us, all of which we have confronted and repelled.

“There are things we shall never talk about, because the inhuman horror of Nazism has found a place in this tragedy. The sadism was incredible. We had read about the Nazis but were unprepared for anything like this. We saw cars dragging bodies of Palestinians . . . A fascist militiaman killed a few-months old baby in his father’s arms, saying, ‘I want to taste this famous Palestinian blood.’”

And alongside this account, the diary of young girl in Warsaw: “The Germans march with this song on their lips: ‘When Jewish Blood Spurts from the Knife.’”

Tal al Zaatar: “I was there at Tal al Zaatar and I can say that not once did we contemplate the notion of surrendering. At the end 600 fighters were able to sneak out of the camp for the mountains, even though many were badly injured. Despite the hunger and thirst, despite the fact that we were dying of hunger, the reason we did not surrender was that the people themselves would not surrender . . . “

The role of women was dramatic in both battles. In Tal al Zaatar, “Many of the sisters were fighters themselves. Another major task was the transporting of arms, and some of those sisters stayed to help save other fighters.”

Warsaw: “The youngest member of our combat group in the Ghetto was a young woman, the only daughter of a wealthy family, but she had grown up in revolutionary student circles. Her firmness of character was revealed just before the uprising when her father obtained ‘good papers’ and a place for the family in the non-Jewish section. She refused to go, saying ‘I no longer belong to myself, my place is in the Ghetto with my comrades.’ In the fighting she was assigned to a group led by one of our most prominent warriors. Suddenly she saw an enemy gun pointing at her commander. She shielded her commander with her own body and was killed. ‘My life is less important,’ she said, dying. ‘She’s the commander, we need her more.’”

The parallels were eerie and tragic: “For us at Tal al Zaatar, we feel a strong bond with the Warsaw Ghetto. We have been reading books about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and the radio broadcasts coming from the besieged Jews there in the last days are the only things we have encountered which are like what we went through at Tal al Zaatar.”

Both the Ghetto and the refugee camp were defeated in the military sense, but they held obvious, enduring messages. The dramatization draws to a close with a passage by Martin Buber:

“The true history of humanity is not composed of sterile victories but of fruitful defeats. A hopeless minority fighting an anti-human oppressor does not experience what we are used to calling success. It ‘fails,’ but succumbing it may announce and prepare a great turn. Out of the seed decomposing in the soil the new stem invisibly sprouts.”

And the performance ends with a basic lesson: “We must fight against fascism. The only way to exist is to resist.”

We felt that we too were under siege, and we too would battle to the end. No doubt a romantic illusion, our heroic image of ourselves, but we knew our own resistance to Zionism was also going to be a failure, at least at first. How could we stop the machine that was the State of Israel backed to the hilt by the US? But it would be a good failure, one that planted those seeds, a failure to reclaim Jewish culture. To be sure, though, while we wanted to salvage or redeem Jewish culture, the struggle above all was for the liberation of the Palestinians and only secondarily of ourselves.

On May 2, 1979 (close to the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt), we performed the Warsaw Ghetto/Tal al-Zaatar dramatic reading at La Pena, the cultural center in Berkeley founded by Chilean exiles from the Pinochet dictatorship soon after the coup in the early 70s. But the program did not go unnoticed by the Zionists. Outside there were leaflets accusing us of the usual things, that we were self-hating Jews and anti-Semites. Appealing more to the left, one flyer also claimed that Zionism was not a settler, apartheid ideology but the national liberation movement of the Jews, and Israel was an anti-colonial state.

La Pena also received a bomb threat, the first ever for any of their programs. Lincoln went to meet with people from La Pena a week or so before the event. “They had received a call from the Jewish Federation of the East Bay who told them—look, it’s not us, but we’ve heard some things stemming from some more threatening elements of the Jewish community. We’ve heard rumors that they plan to bomb La Peña if you go ahead with this program by this group JAAZ. We just wanted to warn you, to caution you that if you go ahead with the program, these elements have made these threats.” So the Jewish Federation was doing a service by warning La Pena (actually conveying the threat). “But both JAAZ and La Peña wanted to go ahead,” Lincoln explains. “So in order to be as safe as possible, we had careful security and we searched the place and the people at the door. As it turned out, it was very well attended and the security only added to the general atmosphere and heightened the drama. The reading was successful and extremely powerful, and was not interrupted. It was professionally recorded and was later played on KPFA a number of times, not only that year but in later years, and is part of the collection at the Freedom Archives.”

Leslie Simon remembers the bomb threat, which she believes came from the JDL. “I brought my Palestinian boss to the program (I was working at the restaurant he owned called Cafe Strand at Noe and Market). He remarked on how all the Jews looked like Palestinians. I reminded him we were cousins.” Cindy Shamban felt that the play “was so clear about the connections between the Warsaw Ghetto and the struggle of the Palestinians,” she couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t understand that. The program was performed again in July 1982 with an addition of a new ending that incorporated the eyewitness accounts of the latest horror, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon – and this was even months before the Sabra and Shatila massacre shocked the world.

Full text: “To Fight Against Injustice is to be A Jew”: Jewish Alliance Against Zionism 1978-1982