Those Who Forget the Past Read Online Free PDF

charge?).
    But the laments about Hitler’s failure to be ruthless enough were not the most disturbing aspect of Goldberg’s piece. That honor goes to Mustafa Bakri’s dream. Bakri is the editor of another Cairo newspaper, and Goldberg says he had “wanted to meet him for some time, ever since I read a translation of a column in which he described a dream. The dream began with his appointment as one of Ariel Sharon’s bodyguards, assigned to protect the Israeli Prime Minister at Cairo’s airport [during a state visit], and in the column . . . he wrote:
    The pig landed; his face was diabolical, a murderer; his hands soiled with the blood of women and children. A criminal who should be executed in the town square. Should I remain silent as many others did? Should I guard this butcher on my homeland’s soil? All of a sudden, I forgot everything . . . and I decided to do it. I pulled my gun and aimed it at the cowardly pig’s head. I emptied all the bullets and screamed. . . . The murderer collapsed under my feet. I breathed a sigh of relief. I realized the meaning of virility, and of self-sacrifice. . . . I stepped on the pig’s head with my shoes and screamed from the bottom of my heart: Long live Egypt, long live Palestine, Jerusalem will never die and never will the honor of the nation be lost.”
    A columnist for an Islamist newspaper in a nation with which Israel is ostensibly at peace. A culture in which such a murderous excrescence is celebrated rather than despised. In which such a “dream” was—it was fairly clear—thinly disguised incitement to
real
Egyptian bodyguards to “realize the meaning of virility” and carry out the assassination Bakri “dreamed.”
    What made it more disturbing was its metaphoric import: the Jewish state was in effect being asked by the international community to put its trust in the good faith, put its very fate in the hands of “bodyguards” such as this. By “trading land for peace,” as they were incessantly being urged to do, they’d be trading defensible borders and, in effect, giving themselves over to “bodyguards” who had not given up dreams like that. Making themselves, making their children’s lives, hostage to the “bodyguard” of purported Islamist goodwill. 7
    Again, Egypt was a land officially “at peace” with Israel. That’s why the bodyguard murder-fantasy, that one paragraph in a six-thousand-word
New Yorker
report, touched such a nerve in those of us who had wanted to believe there was a simple, attainable, trustable,
reasonable
solution to the Middle East crisis. That’s why it gave one—gave me—such a sense of hopelessness, a profound historical pessimism about the possibility of peace.
    But as I said, something curious happened to Bakri’s dream, to that single paragraph in its transmission to the world.
    In preparing this volume I’d asked a researcher to fax me a copy of Goldberg’s
New Yorker
article she had downloaded from the LexisNexis database, the source that most commentators, journalists, and essayists consult, the one that— in practical effect—defines, describes the contours of the public debate on any given issue, internationally.
    As I read over the LexisNexis version of the Goldberg piece for the first time since it came out in
The New Yorker
of October 8, 2001, and came to the portion where Bakri’s ugly dream is recounted, I was stunned. It wasn’t there anymore. The text came to the place where Goldberg quoted from the dream— “in the column . . . he [Bakri] wrote:”—and after the colon, there was a space break and the text picked up: “Bakri offered me an orange soda. . . .” The existence of the murderous dream from beginning (“The pig landed”) to end (“I stepped on the pig’s head . . .”) was erased.
    I called both Goldberg and LexisNexis: