Tell Magazine - March 2018 / Sivan 5778

{HALF-TELLING HISTORY}
Donna Jacobs-Sife
When I was a little girl growing up in Sydney, I thought ANZAC was the celebration
of a great victory. I was taught that the White Australia Policy was essentially a
good idea. I was not taught that Aborigines had been displaced by the British
colony. In fact, I got the impression that it was an empty land, ‘terra nulius’. I did
not know of massacres, nor of a stolen generation of indigenous people.
citizen of this country with compassion
and commitment. It does not make
me less valuable as an Australian, on
the contrary, the pain I feel for the
indigenous population is a symptom
of how much I care for Australia.
When I was a young Jewish girl growing
up, I thought that before 1948 there
were very few people living in Israel at
all. I thought that the Arab nations had
told the few Palestinians living in Israel
to get to Jordan whilst they finished
off the Jews. I remember Golda Meir
saying “there are no Palestinians”.
Recently in Sydney, a Palestinian woman
told her story of being forced out of
Jerusalem with her family in 1948, as
a result of an invasion by alien people
who were taking over her home. She
spoke of the death of an entire way
of life, and the agony of facing the
prospect of never returning to their
beloved home in Jerusalem. She spoke
of the displacement of the indigenous
people of that land. She asked the
question ‘what did the treatment of
Jews by Europeans in the second world
war have to do with the Palestinian?
And if the answer is nothing, then why
were they expected to pay for it?”
These myths and half truths were not
perpetrated out of malicious intent to
mislead its citizens. I believe they were
seen as a history of necessity, to establish
and give credence to a new colony. But
we have grown up in Australia, and
20
we are more sure of our identity, and
therefore we can afford to broaden
our history to contain other stories
- stories of dispossession and racism,
defeat and regret. Now that I hold a
more realistic history, I can proceed as a
A lot happened to me whilst I was
listening to her. My heart began to
pound. I felt fear. Part of me wanted to
shout that it was not true. Certainly, one
person’s account does not speak for an
entire history, but I could not possibly
deny that this was her experience. She
was simply telling her story. I asked
myself, what happens to me when I deny