Culture

Palestine's Holocaust Museum, Hassan Musa Quietly Makes a Point

by Tina Kells | May 3, 2009 at 10:41 am

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Hassan Musa is curator at a little known makeshift Holocaust Museum in the occupied West Bank. A Palestinian academic, in the Holocaust Museum displays Musa draws clear parallels between the Jewish Holocaust and the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

Hassan Musa's approach is controversial, a quiet protest against how the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust led to the present day horrors against his people. His presentations are hard to dismiss and his point is clear: Two wrongs can never set things right.

Whether you agree with Hassan Musa or not his display of the facts of both the Jewish Nazi Holocaust and the situation in the West Bank and Occupied Territories is thought provoking.

In addition to the pictures depicting the Nazi brutality against Jews in Europe, there are also images of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the violence in Palestine since.

On one wall, there is a picture of a scared Jewish boy holding up his hands as Nazi soldiers look on; the caption reads: "Make your final account with Hitler and the Nazi Germans, not with the Palestinians."

On an adjacent wall there are photos of dead children, demolished homes and women screaming during the Israeli war on Gaza in January.

Musa, who is also a member of Ni'lin's Popular Committee Against the Wall, says pictures of the atrocities committed against both peoples were strategically placed side-by-side to not only reflect the suffering of both and help Israelis and Palestinians better understand each other, but also to demonstrate how victims of one conflict can become the harbinger of another.