'The Hansel and Gretel fable, I’m told, is sometimes used by (abusive) parents to warn their children about the dangers of straying too far from home and getting lost (you might run into a witch who will throw you into an oven). The Holocaust and acts of terror against Jews/Israelis are used to warn Jews never to stray from the narrative of Israel as the last and only hope of the Jewish people to avoid the ovens again. Never try to look at things through the witch’s eyes and never try to see things through the Palestinian’s eyes. Yet Palestinians have suffered trauma and their stories also need to be told. The stench of burning Palestinian villages, the wreckage of Palestinian homes, the uprooting of centuries-old orchards, watching land that they’d tilled for decades or centuries being taken from them, becoming a people without a home, burying thousands of dead and caring for the tens of thousands of wounded… that stench can not be erased merely by time or by ignoring history.'
Read more: Hansel and Gretel and Israel/Palestine
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