This is my grandad, or taid, as they say in Welsh. He was born and died in Wales (Footnote 1) and - apart from a short spell as a conscript in Ypres and the Somme, and a longer spell in a Liverpool hospital recuperating from being shot while on the Somme - he lived his whole life there. His first language was Welsh, and he grew up in a village that was monolingually Welsh in all aspects except one, which was public schooling.
Although it seems hard to believe, only two generations ago people like my granddad were not allowed to speak their native language in school. Welsh was officially regarded as a language of backwardness, English was the language of the future and, to ensure that the next generation grew up English-speaking, Welsh was not to be used in school, even on the playground. The policy was known informally as “Welsh – Not!”. In my grandad’s time, it was enforced by means of a knotted rope: a child heard speaking Welsh in school would wear the rope round his or her neck, until another child was reported to the teacher for speaking Welsh, and the rope would pass to him or her. At the end of the day, the child wearing the knotted rope got a beating with it. The rope was called the “Welsh Knot”. It was a play on words, see? A “Welsh Knot” to enforce the “Welsh - Not!”!!! Very funny.
So my grandad learned English at school. And he learned it in the wider community too, where road signs and town names were written in English, and only in English, even where the roadusers following the signs spoke Welsh. And if he had official business to attend to, he had no choice but to do it in English, as official forms were available only in English. And should he fall foul of the law, he’d better find an English-speaking lawyer, because a Welsh speaker in Welsh-speaking Wales would still be tried in English.
Of course it’s not like that any more. The grainy black and white TV pictures of civil rights protestors getting fire-hosed in Alabama created ripples in unexpected places, including the UK. Catholics in Northern Ireland, like John Hume, asked why couldn’t they have civil rights too, and took to the streets of Derry demanding “One Person, One Vote”. (And what a shock it was to many people in mainland Britain to be confronted with the uncomfortable fact that one of the peoples of the United Kingdom was systematically denied the right to One Person, One Vote. Wasn’t that something that only dark-skinned, colonized people had to worry about?). In Wales, organizations like Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg/The Welsh Language Society asked why Welsh speakers, living in Wales, shouldn’t be able to conduct their normal, everyday business in Welsh, and conducted a campaign of civil disobedience to make their point. Since the 1970’s, the policy of English-only has been abandoned, and the Welsh language has officially enjoyed equal status in Wales with the English language. It is now officially OK for people like my granddad to say that they come from “Cymru”, or “Wales”. They have a choice. One doesn’t negate the other, they both exist: nobody is confused by it, and nobody takes offence at what name you choose to use.
My grandad didn’t really get the benefit of the government U-turn that acknowledged – after denying it for centuries - that he and his language and his culture still existed, and had a right to exist equally alongside the language and culture of the anglo-Welsh. He lived almost all his life in "English-only" Wales, and died shortly after Welsh was officially rehabilitated. The funny thing is that no matter how determinedly Welsh was ignored in his lifetime, and no matter how officially anglicized Wales became, his Welshness persisted. He spoke in Welsh (and cursed impressively in it); he wrote in Welsh; when he went to shop in the nearest big town, he went to "Caergybi", even if the roadsigns directed him to "Holyhead"; and when he travelled to visit relatives in "Mold" or "Ruthin", he knew they were actually in "Yr Wyddgrug" or "Rhuthun", regardless of what the bus or train timetable told him. He didn’t stick to the Welsh words because he wanted to annoy English speakers. In fact, he wasn’t deliberately sending a message at all. It just never occurred to him that he should deny his native language, history and culture all because the Ministry of Transport put up road signs saying that his native "Ynys Mon" had only the English name "Anglesey".
So, what does my grandad have to do with anything?
Well, I thought of him as I read the comments of Reuven Erlich, director of Israel’s new "Museum of Terrorism". Mr Erlich described for Reuters why a traditional piece of Palestinian embroidery, showing a map of historic Palestine with the Arabic names of its towns and villages, is among the exhibits: The problem is that Jaffa is marked but not Tel Aviv. There are Arab cities but no Israeli cities. This is the message of delegitimising Israel.
Well, let’s leave aside the irony that a citizen of Israel - whose founding fathers displaced 750,000 Palestinians and systematically razed their towns and villages so that no trace of Palestinian history and culture should remain (2), and whose former leader warned that even the word “Palestinian” must never be uttered because that would be to admit that the land had a former population whose rights predate those of the Zionist movement (3) – should complain at the thought of any people’s nationhood and identity being delegitimised.
The fact is that unless he has personally heard it from the Palestinian (presumed) woman who created the piece, Mr Erlich doesn’t really know what message that embroidery was meant to communicate. He only knows the message that his own preconceptions attach to a map that dares show the towns and villages of Palestine. Maybe the person who made that map was the most rabid, unforgiving Palestinian nationalist who ever lived, and hoped with a passion that every last Israeli would be driven into the sea. And maybe she was just a Palestinian who, like my granddad, never thought for a second that the arrival of another culture in her land required her to pretend her own history never existed. I don’t know, and neither does Mr Erlich, because the embroidery alone doesn’t tell us enough about its maker.
The fact that a map of Palestine should be an exhibit in an Israeli “museum of terrorism” in fact tells us less about the person who made the map than it does about the people who put it in the museum. People who cannot bear to even hear the names of the towns upon whose ruins their own country is built, are people who are deeply ambiguous their own nation’s legitimacy; who would desperately like to believe they settled “a land without a people” (4), but suspect that this was never true, and do not know how to acknowledge that two peoples who share the same land have equal rights to that land. Only people who are uneasy about the legitimacy of Tel Aviv, would label the mere act of remembering Jaffa an example of Palestinian "terror".
Footnotes:
(1) For those who don’t know, Wales is a small principality in the west-central part of Great Britain, and is historically famous for coal- and slate-mining, organised labour, sheep-farming, music, poetry, rugby union, and having a national soccer team that, every four years, almost but not quite makes it to the finals of the European football championships.(2) "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages.You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population".
- Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan, from a speech to the Haifa Technion, reported in Ha’aretz, April 4, 1969.(3) "My friend, take care. When you recognize the concept of ‘Palestine’, you demolish your right to live in Ein Hahoresh. If this is Palestine and not the land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came."
- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, from a speech to the residents of kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, reported in Yediot Aharonot, October 17, 1969.(4) "A land without people, waiting for people without a land".
- Israel Zangwill’s description of Palestine, in The Return to Palestine, New Liberal Review II, Dec. 1901, p.627.
Further reading: The history of Zionism’s systematic denial of Palestinian existence and identity is examined at length in Muhammad Hallaj’s Palestine--The Suppression of an Idea, available online at Americans for Middle East Understanding
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