Page - 60 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

60 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis History and background The politics of the Middle East and power relations have acted as a barrier between Jewish and Palestinian mutual awareness of and sensitivity to refugeedom, whether past or present. As Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg suggest, this need not necessarily be the case. They argue that the ‘Palestinian and Jewish refugees of the Nakba and the Holocaust not only serve as disruptive and alarming reminders of the exclusionary forces of identity politics in Israel/ Palestine’.1 More positively, they are “also... a challenge to the statist mainstream Palestinian and Israeli politics that view exclu- sive and separate ethnic nation-states as the ultimate and desired institutional frame within which the political rights of the respective peoples are realised and protected.” 2 From this inclusive perspective, they suggest that ‘Consequently, one could view the refugee as a herald of alternative and creative forms of politics, ones premised on partnership, coopera- tion, joint dwelling and integration rather than on segregation, balkanization, separation and ghettoization’.3 If making such linkages, however desirable, seem unlikely given the dismal poli- tics of the region, it is equally hard to envisage the the stories of Jewish ‘illegal’ immigration to Palestine from 1933 to 1948, most infamously in the case of Exodus 1947, being placed alongside more recent narratives of forced migration across the ‘merciless sea’. So far, the exclusive ten- dencies and partial amnesia associated with its journeying have largely precluded such com- parisons. But in the spirit of the challenge (and opportunity) offered by Bashir and Goldberg who note that ‘An empathetic view of the refugee disrupts the validity of the foundations of the political order that created her in the first place and now abandons her to her fate’, this article will explore the possibilities further in relation to historic and contemporary journeys of forced migration across the Mediterranean. In autumn 2015, cultural historian and literary biographer, Philip Hoare, used the ‘horrors of slavery’, the ‘coffin ships’ of the Irish famine and those transported to Australia by the British as ‘historical parallels’ when powerfully evoking the traumatic journeys of those attempting to cross ‘the Mediterranean in search of a better life’. To him, these extreme examples from the past ‘underline the desperation of the situation’ today. British amnesia of ‘illegal’ Jewish migration to Palestine curtail juxtaposition with contemporary tragedies associated with the ‘sea of despair’ – one which Hoare may well otherwise have added to his list of maritime human misery. Hoare concludes: ‘Slaves and transportees had no choice but to leave. The hungry and dispossessed have a choice, but it is hardly much of one.’ 4 It has been estimated that from 1933 to 1948 108,000 Jewish ‘illegal’ immigrants came to Palestine in 116 vessels.5 In 2014 alone, double that number of undocumented migrants came 1 Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, ‘Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: disruptive empathy and binationalism in Israel/Palestine’, Journal of Genocide Research 16 (1), (2014) 92. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Philip Hoare, ‘Sea of despair’, Guardian, 22 April 2015; and idem, 2013. The Sea Inside (London: Fourth Estate). 5 Mordechai Naor, Haapala: Clandestine Immigration 1931-1948 (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defence Publishing House, 1987), 105.