No Place for Holocaust Denial
By Khalil el Halabi
When I worked as head of education at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) I supervised the creation of a holistic human rights curriculum. Once completed the new curriculum was distributed and taught to 260,000 students enrolled in UNRWA schools throughout the Palestinian areas.
I personally suggested that the Holocaust be included in the curriculum because of it is importance with the hope that the world would learn the lessons of history and ensure that it is never repeated. Since we were working on a holistic approach to human rights, I insisted that we must not only teach these issues, but we need to reject any effort to deny atrocities and human rights violations around the world.
I insisted that we make sure that our students understand the importance of working against all forms of discrimination including anti-Semitism. The issue of holocaust denial is back in the news these days and I wanted to add my condemnation to any person who does not have respect for the lives of human beings created in the image of G-d who were the victims of the horrible atrocities in Europe.
The issue of human rights was not only part of my day job, but it was also part of my life at home as well. I raised my children to respect human beings and to struggle for human rights at home and outside of the home. The only form of struggle that I have ever advocated for my children was the example of the Reverend Martin Luther King who demonstrated through nonviolent resistance that a person and a community can successfully struggle and succeed in obtaining justice and improving the lives of people. I still fondly keep a photo on my desk I had with former US President Jimmy Carter. President Carter a Georgia peanut farmer from the same state as MLK, visited us in Gaza and I spoke to him about this curriculum, and we had an important discussion of the importance of nonviolent struggle for justice and against all forms of discrimination.
My oldest son Mohammad grew up in this atmosphere and became a strong supporter of the issues that I believed in. Although he studied engineering, he wanted to be involved in humanitarian work and was excited to join one of the world’s most important humanitarian organizations, World Vision. World Vision is a Christian relief, development, and advocacy organization dedicated to working with children, families, and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. This American Christian charity is dedicated to working with people, especially children. Their public statement reads: “Our vision for every child, life in all its fullness; Our prayer for every heart, the will to make it so.”
Mohammad took his job as director of World Vision in Gaza seriously and worked tirelessly to help the people of Gaza, especially children. He also traveled around the world advocating for the goals and vision of this important organization. This took him to places as far away as Australia, where he addressed their parliament about the humanitarian needs of Palestinian children in Gaza. Australia has been one of the biggest donors to World Vision’s humanitarian work in Gaza. The UN was so enthusiastic about Mohammad’s work and ethos, that in 2012 the world’s most important international organization awarded Mohammad the UN Humanitarian Hero Award.
All this, however, did not show up on the radar of Israeli officials who were trying their hardest to crack down on the Islamic Hamas movement in Gaza. Long before working for World Vision my son, never agreed to this movement’s principles and when he was attending university, he was part of the Fatah youth movement and was sent to attend a youth event at the Arab League in Cairo.
Out of the blue and as part of the Israeli security agencies' efforts to put strong pressure on Hamas and the people of Gaza, my son was arrested in June 2016 on his way back from Jerusalem after meeting with the World Vision team. My innocent son has been in an Israeli jail ever since.
Benyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and the Israeli media machine quickly put out a fabricated claim that Israel had discovered that Mohammad the director of World Vision participated in diverging some $50 million worth of humanitarian aid to Hamas and other armed movements. This was a total setup with absolutely no proof.
Israeli military prosecutors hoped that under pressure my son would confess, and the issue would be resolved. Ninety-nine percent of all cases against Palestinians end up with a confession followed by a plea bargain. Fifty days of torture that led to Mohammad losing part of his hearing led them nowhere. Attempts to ‘encourage’ Mohammad to sign a plea deal failed. It has failed tens of times since then because Mohammad had never done what they accused him of. He refused to make any confession to any crime because he had done nothing. Offers to sign a plea agreement have gone on for seven long years. If he had agreed to any of them, he would be free now. But he was unwilling to trade his freedom for a lie and to besmirch the humanitarian organization he worked so hard for as well as the people that he and others had tried to help.
Israeli prosecutors are not used to taking a case like my son's and they worked tirelessly to trap him or to find a person to confess against him. All they could find was a claim by a cellmate a known criminal, that he had told him that. Even the original document of this so-called confession was strangely lost by the Israeli security who could not present the original document to court. Meanwhile, the Beersheba court bent over backward to help the prosecutor even agreeing to their demands that my son’s defense lawyer, Maher Hanna, was forced to type his closing remarks to the court on the laptop of the prosecutor. He was not allowed to keep a copy of it. My son’s lawyer was defending an innocent person without any tools and without even seeing any evidence against him. We are now waiting for the Israeli high court to investigate all these legal irregularities.
As the issue of the holocaust is being discussed these days, I hope that someone in Israel, or around the world, especially any person or descendant of the victims of this terrible crime against the Jewish people, will have the courage to make a simple call for the release of my innocent son. International organizations including Amnesty International, and the Secretary of the United Nations have studied his case and have called on Israel to release him. Will someone have the courage to stand up for an innocent Palestinian humanitarian worker who wanted to follow his father’s footsteps and practice as well as teach human rights and oppose any effort at Holocaust denial?