At 10am this Sunday (April 7), at the Dewan Tun Dr Ismail in the Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur, there will be a special commemoration of the massacre that took place in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in 1948. Just what this event has to do with this column, shall be explained below.

Readers of this column would know by now that one of our preoccupations all along has been to salvage the traces of Malaysian history that have been marginalised and erased for a host of political reasons.

Malaysian history, like the history of all nation-states, has always been a heavily contested discursive terrain where competing political and ideological interests are at work, forever trying to challenge and undermine other interpretations and readings of the past.

But Malaysia at least has a past to fight over  pity those whose past have been lost or suppressed altogether.

Observers of Malaysian politics will tell you that many changes have taken place in the terrain of Malaysian political discourse over the past two decades. Two decades of Islamisation has also brought about a number of significant discursive shifts in the arena of Malaysian politics.

Our worldview has been altered, the boundaries and co-ordinates of our political universe have changed as well. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the countrys political map was spread from West to East, covering the global reach of Cold War politics.

But from the 1980s onwards, the casual onlooker would have noticed that the orbit of Malaysian (and Malay-Muslim politics in particular) had shifted somewhat.

One of the major issues that entered the space of Malaysian politics was the question of Palestine. Events such as the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the rise of Islamist movements like Hamas, Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad, the attacks on United States troops in the Middle-east and the radicalisation of Islamist political discourse in general began to register in Malaysias own domestic political scene.

Significant changes

Two significant changes took place: Firstly, this discursive shift was accompanied by the move towards the Arabisation of Malay-Muslim political discourse. If in the past the countrys Islamist movements were moved by the plight of Muslims in Mindanao, Aceh, Patani and other potential hot-spots closer to Malaysias shores, the 1980s witnessed the slow but steady intervention of Arab-Muslim concerns. Palestine became an increasingly important issue by then.

Secondly, following the footsteps of the uprooted Palestinian came the universal Jew. Stories of Jewish plots against Islam and Muslim concerns slowly entered the space of Malaysian political discourse as well.

But with the entry of these new ideas, symbols and tropes came an internal logic of its own as well. By the 1980s, Arab-Israeli relations had degenerated to such a low point thanks to Israels belligerent stand on the Palestinian issue and its part in the wars against and between the Arab states.

What began as a political conflict had moved to a different, cultural and religious register by then and was seen as a war not between two nation-states, but between two cultures and religions. The complex inter-relationship between the two nations and their respective histories had been effaced altogether.

One of the main reasons for this erasure of the complex inter-relationship between the Arab and Jewish peoples was the policy of the state of Israel itself. As Judaism became politicised and Israel inched closer and closer towards a religious state, both Israeli and Jewish history was deliberately re-written in such a way as to erase the presence of the other.

One of the most damaging and disastrous erasures of Israels past was the effacement of the massacre of innocent Palestinians at Deir Yassin in 1948.

Every nation has a dark side to its past. The history of the United States of America, for instance, remains largely silent about the calculated destruction of the 500 nations of native inhabitants of the country that now calls itself the land of the free.

Our own history here in Malaysia is one with so many closed closets, rattling with the bones of the dead who refuse to remain silent.

The massacre

But the skeletons in Israel are not metaphorical ones: they remain as very real reminders of the fact that the erasure of the countrys past had a human cost to it, but a cost that was borne largely by the Palestinians whose land they now occupy.

Some of these skeletons are found near the village of Deir Yassin, which was one of the first Arab villages to be attacked by Israeli forces during the traumatic and violent process of the creation of Israel itself.

In 1948 Deir Yassin was a peaceful little village of about 750 souls. Most of the Arabs there were stone cutters, and the village was surrounded by other Jewish and Christian villages.

The inhabitants of Deir Yassin, perhaps aware of the strategic position that their village occupied, had formed alliances with the neighbouring villages in the area, to ensure that whatever happened none of the Arabs in the village would attack their neighbours, and vice-versa.

The British mandate was not over yet at the time, and Deir Yassin was not even within the UN-established borders of the new state of Israel.

Yet despite their efforts, the villagers of Deir Yassin could not protect themselves from the attack that came on the morning of April 9, 1948.

On that fateful morning, the village was attacked by Irgun militia troops and members of the notorious Stern gang. Although the commanders of the Israeli army, the Haganah, claimed that they were not involved in the killings that followed, they later admitted that members of their elite Palmach troops were asked to support the attack on the village.

Deir Yassin was attacked despite the fact that the inhabitants had almost no weapons to defend themselves. After storming the village, the Irgun and Stern gang members took more than a hundred Arabs captive. They were put in trucks, paraded in the streets of Jerusalem, then taken to a quarry and shot down to the last man.

The village itself was looted, the Arabs driven out, and it was later occupied by Jews emigrating from Eastern Europe.

The leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, (who would later become Israels prime minister) sent a message to the Irgun troops who took part in the massacre at Deir Yassin that read: Accept (my) congratulations for this splendid act of conquest. Tell your soldiers that they have made history for Israel.

History was indeed being made that day, but one which was based on the erasure of the past of others.

DR FARISH A NOOR is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist. The Other Malaysia' tries to unearth aspects of Malaysias history and culture that have been erased or relegated to the margins in order to remind us that there remains another Malaysia that is often forgotten.

The commemoration of the Deir Yassin massacre will be held at 10.00am on Sunday April 7 at the Dewan Tun Dr Ismail at the Putra World Trade Centre. Attendance is free. Those interested can contact the organisers at (03) 4252 8699.