BOOK: “The Long Path Out of Denial: Zionism, Heartache, and a New Vision of Israel and Palestine” by Kim Chernin Nov09 November 11, 2009
Bottom: Driven from their homes by Jewish attacks on Galilee, a group of Arab refugees carry their meager belongings from Jerusalem to Lebanon on November 9, 1948.
PHOTO CREDITS: TOP – AP PHOTO/FRANK NOEL, BOTTOM – AP PHOTO/PRINGLE
by Kim Chernin - Tikkun Magazine - 19 October 2009
The hardest work for me, the child-Zionist, has been the struggle to take in the Palestinian point of view. “Take in” has not meant agree with it, although it has involved questioning some cherished ideas about my people and our land.
I found this tough work—moral, ethical, intellectual, psychological, and spiritual, all at the same time. I passed through recurrent cycles of not caring to know what there was to know. I was always ready with Great Thoughts: the ancient roots of our exiled people, our suffering, the cherished dream that had held us together as a people in exile over thousands of years. These ideas still hold great power for me. But they are ideas I now regard as very dangerous; in their name one can justify just about anything.
No claim that came up from the Palestinian side could enter my consciousness until it forced its way through these barriers, over and again, and then again. When the Palestinian point of view finally arrived, exhausted and threadbare with this struggle to get in, it faced my own exhaustion and was held in suspension before I could take it up and use it for thinking. In this process I am still involved.
I am not implying that our Jewish ways of seeing things are wrong. Only that they made it hard for me to listen to the Palestinians.
I have come to no conclusions, as yet. How could I, with my Jewishness so long present in me and my listening-to-others so newly established?
One discovery I did make: it is not wise to confuse people and their leaders with the extremists among them, or with their representatives or the representations made by themselves or others.
Another discovery: the compassion and sympathy I had always felt for the Jewish people in dispersion, and by extension for exiles, refugees, and impoverished people living under difficult conditions, could now include the Palestinians. Everywhere a guest, nowhere at home: could I deny this description to them?
Six words that tell the story of two peoples.
A Naïve Zionist
When I first went to Israel in 1971 I was a naive but ardent Zionist, intending to spend my life on a kibbutz in the Galilee and to become an Israeli citizen.
A naive Zionist, such as I was, hears that there is a Jewish homeland. A place filled with Jews, a country that celebrates Jewish holidays, a homeland where all Jews from all over the world are welcome; a country with a kibbutz system that is a form of socialism and where you can work on the land. I had been wanting to live in that place since I was eight years old.
A naive Zionist off to spend her life in Israel. But once established on my kibbutz on the Lebanese border, I began to notice things that disrupted my complacency. We used to ride down to our orchards on kibbutz trucks with Arab workers from the neighborhood who occasionally invited us to visit them in their village. We liked sitting on a rug on a dirt floor, eating food cooked over an open fire, drinking water from the village well. Above all, we loved the kerosene lamps that were lit and set in a half circle around us as it grew dark. It was exotic and it was romantic, and walking home it occurred to me that our kibbutz had running water, electricity, modern stoves. Our neighbors were gracious, generous, and friendly, although I had learned by then that the land the kibbutz occupied had once been theirs or had been land they had worked, sometimes for generations, for absentee landlords. We Jews had been a people without a land, but the land we came to cultivate and develop had not been a land without a people.
The path from this troubled awakening to my later ability to be critical of Israel has been long and complex. Over the years I have spoken with other Jews who have traveled this same path, and to many more who haven’t. In each of us I have detected the same mental obstacles that made it hard, sometimes impossible, to see what was there before our eyes.
How We Come to Perceive Selectively
We keep a watchful eye out, we read the signs, we detect innuendo, we summon evidence, we become, as we imagine it, the ever-vigilant guardians of our people’s survival. Endangered as we imagine ourselves to be, endangered as we insist we are, any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on exaggerated dimensions—we come to perceive such criticism as a life-threatening attack.
Our proclivity for this perception is itself one of our unrecognized dangers. Bit by bit, as we gather evidence to establish our perilous position in the world, we are brought to a selective perception of that world. With our attention focused on ourselves as the endangered species, it seems to follow that we ourselves can do no harm. We are so busy warding off danger, we become unaware that we endanger others. As a people we fill up, we occupy, all the endangerment-space. When other people clamor for a portion, we believe they are trying to deny us our right to this ground. At its most vehement, our sense of ever-impending Jewish peril brings down on us an almost perfect blindness to the endangerment of others and to the role we might play in it.
When I lived in Israel I practiced selective perception. I was elated by our little kibbutz on the Lebanese border until I recognized that we were living on land that had been the home of other people.
The fixed certainty of impending Jewish destruction: wherever we look, we see nothing but its confirmation, the same old story, always about to happen. In the grip of this persuasion, any other possibilities of meaning are swept away; we are unable to imagine things, even for a split second, from another’s point of view. It took me years to overcome this blindness.
It seems that no victory on the Israeli side, no crushing of the perceived enemy, no destruction of their wells or dismantling of their infrastructure can change our fear that the enemy will rise up to defeat us. Nothing, no act or behavior by our now powerful homeland with the fourth-largest army in the world, can alter this perception of ever-present danger.
We will not let it happen again. But this claim, which seems to point exclusively into the future, is also yoked to our inability to accept the past. By keeping the past alive, by living it all over again, we attempt to alter it. Hidden within the militant “never again” is the anguished cry: “It did not happen. It will never have happened.”
A Disturbing Calculus by which We Measure Violence
We Jews are an old people. The past that comes along with us, thousands of years old, fills us with longing for our ancient homeland, for the idea of a homeland, for Jerusalem, for the Temple, and for what these places have meant to our people. We celebrate the fact that these shared memories, enacted in yearly rituals, have held us together in a long exile. We remember our bondage in Egypt and our expulsion from Spain and the forced flight of our people, hunted across continents. We are proud of our descent from King David—we recite his psalms. We read the prophets. We believe (many of us) that we were exiled from the Holy Land because of our sins. But there is a danger here: it is this past, and its suffering, and the scale of its suffering, which create a strange and troubling calculus that does its work just beyond our self-awareness as Jews. When we behave roughly to another people, we judge our behavior by what has been done to us. Is our behavior as bad as that? If not (and since very little is likely to match our two thousand years) we have granted ourselves a frighteningly large range of permissible violence. We have an enormous difficulty imagining Palestinian lives and the suffering involved in them. Are we whispering to ourselves: “But our suffering was much worse. We haven’t driven them into concentration camps, smothered them in gas, burned them to cinders. If they have had to leave their homes behind, to live uncomfortably in other parts of the Arab world, how bad is that when placed alongside our thousands of years of persecution and exile”?
If we learn that no Arab state (apart from Jordan) has granted Palestinians citizenship during the last fifty years, our ghettos and exclusions over the last two thousand years rise up to diminish theirs. If our violence is not as bad as what was done to us, do we need to take our violence seriously? Do we even have the ability to conceive of it as violence?
There is a widespread assumption among our people that the vanished victims of the Holocaust would approve of what we do to make sure their fate cannot again befall the Jewish people. Is it fair, however, to assume that their suffering and death would make them approve of our recourse to violence and vengeance? How can we assume that they would want their suffering to legitimize anything “not as bad as what happened to them”?
There is a poster that shows a single Palestinian woman facing a massive Israeli bulldozer. Looking at this image one immediately understands what Primo Levi (a survivor of Auschwitz) meant when he claimed that the Palestinians are the Jews’ Jews. He did not have to complete this equation. Silently, it points an accusing finger at the people who are turning the Palestinians into Jews. Can we face the fact that we make use of the Holocaust as a way of diminishing, in our own eyes, the magnitude of our violence against another people?
It is not easy to encounter the idea that we are using the six million, hiding behind them, importing our own meanings into their suffering and death. It took me a long time to face this charge, to recognize that some part of my ever-increasing concern with Holocaust victims, Holocaust books, and first-person Holocaust accounts was serving as a cover-up, distracting my gaze from a living, contemporary struggle in which another people was engaged.
When Ideology Matters More to Us than Other People’s Lives
The Israeli army that defends our homeland fires upon innocent civilians. What justifies the behavior of this army? When the Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a hotel full of Passover celebrants, we see clearly that this is an instance of unholy violence. When we attack a refugee camp of impoverished Palestinians in our search for terrorists, this, in our eyes, is a violence purified by our history and our destiny. We are puzzled that much of the world doesn’t see our situation in the same way.
That boy over there with the black face mask and a rock—that is a terrorist. This boy over here with a submachine gun, firing on the boy with the rock, he is a soldier.
A trick of language? I was once persuaded to show up for rifle training when I lived on my kibbutz, although as an American citizen I wasn’t required to attend. And whom did I imagine I would shoot? And kill? I, who cannot kill a moth? I never imagined it had to do with killing. Because of the language I used (I lift this rifle in fulfillment of my pledge to reclaim my homeland) the training became a pure act, necessary, not even in need of justification.
Shlomo Lavie, a well-known leader of the Israeli Labor Party, the Mapai, declared that the “transfer of Arabs out of the country in my eyes is one of the most just, moral, and correct things that can be done.”
Another Mapai leader, Avraham Katznelson, felt that nothing was “more moral, from the viewpoint of universal human ethics, than the emptying of the Jewish state of the Arabs and their transfer elsewhere…. This requires … force.”
It may indeed have required force. But moral, ethical, universally sanctioned force? David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, shared these sentiments: “We must expel Arabs and take their places … and if we have to use force … to guarantee our own right to settle these places — then we have force at our disposal.”
Another of our early founders was prepared to go further: “All moral enterprises are carried out through compulsion…. The transfer [of Palestinians] is a just, logical, moral, and humane program in all senses” (quoted, along with the three prior quotations, in Nur Masalha’s The Politics of Denial of 2003).
It is not good enough that some moral enterprises might require compulsion. Now it is all such enterprises, every imaginable moral enterprise, that require force. Nor is it sufficient that under certain conditions the use of force might be justified. Now the expulsion of the Palestinians is the most moral imaginable act “from the viewpoint of universal human ethics.” I suppose our early leaders may have been talking themselves into believing these words. But so much the worse if they believed them, and so much the worse for us if we do. We are excited by these grand thoughts; at their urging we fly up onto a higher plane where everything is certain, preordained, lawful, commanded. Suddenly, we are able to disregard the Jewish teachings that a single human life and the saving of it are more important than obeying the laws of the Sabbath. This is a bold and Jewish ethical idea and soundly rebukes our wish to believe in the sanctity of Jewish violence.
Taken together, the examination of these suppositions and convictions about perception, calculus, and ideology promises to make us uneasy. That is my hope.
Some American Jews will soon set out to join settlements on the West Bank or to volunteer for the Israeli army. Others have gone to Ramallah to help the Palestinians, hoping that their presence there will make it harder for the Israeli army to smash through the city with tanks. Still others have been talking about a peace brigade that will be established along the still undefined and ever-expanding Israeli border, a human buffer zone between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Here is our Jewish identity, stretched out between these extremes. It’s up to us; we are free to choose. Where shall we place ourselves?
When I Learned a New Word: Nakba
Some years later, back in Berkeley again, I was listening to two Palestinian women in conversation in a café. They were discussing the fact that both their mothers had been born in Palestine and had left after 1948. I heard the word “nakba.” The two women leaned toward each other across the table, their heads almost touching. Some of their conversation was lost to me. After a time, I heard the word again and in its new context figured out that it meant something terrible. Something terrible had happened to both their mothers, and here were the daughters in a Berkeley café discussing it. I left the café without giving their conversation much thought, but I took away a new word and with it an opening into a very different point of view than I had before encountered. The new point of view was in the word itself, in the way the two women had leaned toward each other to speak it, in the fact that we were at adjacent tables in my regular café, where I had seen them before, had thought of them admiringly as two good friends and seen them as women like myself and not as Palestinians.
Nakba. Nakba. Nakba.
At that time I had a friend, a professor of political science, who had critical thoughts about Israel. Some weeks later, when I was having coffee with him, I asked him about the word. He knew it; he’d known it for some time but had hesitated, with good reason, to mention it to me. Back then I wasn’t known for my calm and rational style of discourse; when facing disagreement, especially about Israel, I often flew into a rage, raised my voice, and interrupted my friend, trying as hard as I could to drown him out while trying as hard as I could not to. I had been known, on some occasions, to push back my chair and storm out of the café resolving to end the friendship or at least never to speak with that particular person about anything serious again. This time I listened.
Nakba meant “catastrophe.” It was the way Palestinians referred to what had happened to them in 1948.
It is easy enough to forget a foreign word, not so easy to quell the apprehension it stirs up. I certainly forgot the word many times, while the history it carried, the version of events it held, the implications it brought, the difficult challenges it presented, seemed to be drawn to me and gathered in, magnetically. The faceless enemy, the dark threat from the other side of the border, had acquired a face and therefore could no longer be considered simply an enemy. There was another people there, there were people who had mothers and stories and homes and villages and orchards and families, each with their own unique sense of disaster. Voluntarily or not, they were people who had lost a homeland as we had acquired ours. What if they had fled in fear expecting to come home again? What if they hadn’t fled voluntarily? What if they’d been driven out?
A struggle of this kind, set going within the self, will occasion sleepless nights. Once it starts up it will rage on for years. For every argument a counterargument, for every point of view another way to look at things, for every accusation a justification, for every assertion a counterclaim. Facts? Establish the facts? I was trying to place the Palestinian version of events against the Zionist account of them, the old Zionist account against the work of more recent historians. I was fighting within myself to figure out what really happened, what happened first, what happened next — or who did what to whom and for what reason.
At times the obsession with Israel would die down. Months, sometimes a year or two would pass before, inevitably, it showed up again.
Where Facts End
I had returned from Israel in 1972. I was still engaged in this debate during the 1980s and well into the 1990s. I remember a violent argument that broke out on New Year’s Eve, as my preoccupation with Israel crossed over into the twenty-first century.
The more I learned, the more uncertain I became about the present. Whom was I to believe? The Palestinians did not agree with one another. Some called for armed struggle and the liberation of Palestine; others encouraged the peace accords; and some saw the peace accords as a stalling effort on the part of Israel as it continued to build settlements in occupied territory.
Israelis did not agree with one another, either. We Jews were old-style Zionists who believed in the Zionist version of events, or we were revisionist historians who rewrote the history of 1948. We were members of religious movements that believed God had promised us the land and therefore justified our violence against anyone who questioned our possession of it. Or we were men and women who had seen at first hand and with horror what had happened to the Palestinian population. “We came, shot, burned, blew up, repelled, pushed, and exiled. What the hell are we doing here?” demands the Israeli novelist S. Yizhar (as cited in Amos Elon’s The Israelis, Founders and Sons).
Everyone agreed that a flight had taken place in 1948, but how many Palestinians had been involved, and why they had fled, remained contentious. Zionists claimed that the Palestinian refugees from 1948 represented a “population exchange” with the Jews who left the Arab world in the 1950s. Palestinian historians regarded this claim as “mendacious and misleading.” Was it fair to compare the flight of Palestinians in 1948 with the voluntary exodus of Jews from hostile Arab nations? And how voluntary were these mass departures? Readers must take up the issue and resolve it, or not, for themselves.
This is the place where facts end. Zionist claim: 850,000 Sephardic Jews left Arab states to come to Israel. Palestinian claim: It was 600,000 Sephardic Jews. Zionist claim: 600,000 Palestinians left Israel during the troubles of 1948. Palestinian claim: It was 850,000 Palestinians. There was, depending on your numbers, an equal exchange of populations from Arab states to Israel, from Israel to Arab states. Or, depending on your numbers and your interpretation of them, there was not.
In talking about hundreds of thousands of people, does it matter if there is a disproportion in how many on either side have been unsettled by war and hostility? Perhaps it does matter; but in what way?
Point: There were more Jews than Arabs in Palestine at the time of the partition. Counterpoint: The Arabs far outnumbered the Jews.
Assertion: The Arabs were not dispossessed of their land; the land they worked belonged to absentee landlords who had always exploited them. Denial: The Palestinians had worked the same land for generations, tended the same orchards, lived in the same villages; the land was theirs even if they did not own it.
Claim: The Jews descended from the ancient Hebrews and therefore had the prior claim to the land. Counterclaim: It was the Palestinians who descended from the indigenous Canaanites.
Appeal to memory: We Jews have always longed for Eretz Yisrael as our ancient homeland. Witness our liturgy. Refutation: The Jewish preoccupation with Palestine began with Zionism in the nineteenth century.
The Palestinians claimed the Jews were an occupying, colonial power, which could and would some day be driven out; we Jews, always part of this land, had nowhere else to go. We Jews knew we had behaved righteously in securing our homeland; the Palestinians knew they had been violently and illegally dispossessed of theirs. They knew they were the victims of our violent occupation; we knew at any moment we might be blown up and victimized by them.
The idea that I could find out what “really happened” became increasingly questionable, then doubtful, and finally absurd. My reading was an education in the infinite regress of reality from the facts assigned to represent it. A “fact” was nothing more than an assertion in an argument; it was used to establish rights, which presumably rested on principles upheld by international law, which might be suspended because of a people’s history of suffering, which on the other hand might be irrelevant given that same people’s subsequent exercise of violence. Inevitably, the question of rights disappeared into the realities of power, given that power and not rights would determine outcomes. Yet, both sides talked insistently about their rights.
If a people’s need was great enough and desperate enough, need began to confer a right. The Holocaust, as Hitler’s attempts to exterminate the Jews later became known, and the refusal of other nations to receive the Jewish refugees, gave us a claim to the land of Israel. The Palestinians derived their rights from the plain fact that they were already there.
Jewish Fear of Annihilation
I was troubled by how easily one author, referring to the work of another, can misrepresent another’s point of view. David Hirst, in The Gun and the Olive Branch, claimed that Benny Morris had “made clear that the Jewish community had never been in danger of annihilation on the eve of the 1948 war, and that the Arab armies, poorly trained and equipped … stood virtually no chance of defeating the new-born state.”
In my reading of this book by Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, I had come across very different words:
Throughout, when examining what happened, the reader must also recall … the intention of the Palestinian leadership and irregulars and, later, of most of the Arab states’ leaders and armies in launching the hostilities in … invading Palestine in May 1948, to destroy the Jewish state and, possibly, the Yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine] itself; the fears of the Yishuv that the Palestinians and the Arab states, if given the chance, intended to re-enact a Middle Eastern version of the Holocaust; and the extremely small dimensions, geographical and numerical, of the Yishuv (pop. 650,000) in comparison with the Palestinian Arabs (1.25 million).
Morris made clear that by July of 1948 the leaders of the Yishuv were aware that Israel had won its war for survival. But this statement in no way undermined his earlier assertion (in the same paragraph) that the Yishuv, its people and its leaders, were alarmed. Some pages later, Morris returned unequivocally to this earlier idea: “The war between Israel and the Arab states was protracted and bloody (about 4,000 of the Yishuv’s 6,000 dead were killed after 14 May) and the Yishuv’s leaders recognized that they faced a mortal threat.”
A Colonial Occupation … by Powerless, Threatened People?
I saw Jews as a persecuted people who had fled to Palestine from the impossibility of living in the Russian Pale. The first immigrants had arrived in 1881 after the assassination of Czar Alexander II and the pogroms that followed, in which hundreds of Jewish communities were attacked by mobs, hundreds of people were killed, and Jewish women were raped by their attackers. How could it be claimed (as it was, by Palestinian historians and by me arguing against myself) that these people represented a colonial occupation? They came in small groups, bought land, and founded settlements and colonies that often failed. They did not exploit the indigenous population in order to prosper; they too struggled for survival. According to historian Bernard Avishai in The Tragedy of Zionism: “Agricultural output of the Arab sector rose by 50 percent between 1922 and 1938. Citrus production in the Arab sector grew from 22,000 dunams in 1922 to 144,000 dunams in 1937, roughly the same expansion as in the Jewish sector.”
Why “occupation”? Why “colonialism”? Because the Balfour Declaration had been issued by a colonial power? Because the British took the side of the Jews? But wasn’t it clear that the English in Palestine during the Mandate period sometimes sided with the Jews, sometimes with the Arabs? The Jews had not been a nation or a state; they’d been a dispersed and scattered people. If you wanted to rise against them and kick them out, to what motherland would they return as citizens?
The debate is restless, evasive, unsettling. Palestinian historians argue that the type of settlements created by Israeli settlers corresponded in their basic structure to settlements created by colonial powers. There were “pure settlement colonies” and “ethnic plantation colonies,” and there were attempts to claim all jobs in the land for Jewish laborers, who as a result became ardent nationalists hoping to establish a purely Jewish society.
I am impressed, I shift sides—but only for a moment. A group of Girl Scouts who bought land in the Mojave Desert, built settlements, and worked the land themselves or hired people to work it for them, even when they restricted their colonies to other members of the Girl Scouts, would not for any of those reasons become colonialists. The similar forms could not by themselves reproduce the power relations of a colonial nation to the indigenous people it exploited. The making of an exclusivist colony does not of itself make a colonialist.
Members of the Jewish underground, fighting against the British before the State of Israel had been declared, knew the British as a colonial force intent on crushing Jewish resistance. In her memoir, Geula Cohen, a young member of the Stern Gang, rebuts the claim that the colonial British consistently took the side of the Jews:
Adam’s latest letter had been impatiently awaited, for one of the events that had taken place since his last communication was the Black Saturday of June 29, 1946. On that day the British had launched a general attack on the Jewish settlement in the hope of breaking the back of the Insurrectionary Front. A curfew was declared in all the major cities and house-to-house searches and confiscations of arms were carried out in dozens of rural co-operatives. The Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem was occupied by troops and the Agency’s officials were placed under arrest. Mass arrests took place throughout the country, many of them accompanied by bloodshed.
Is It Possible to Hold Two Opposing Narratives at the Same Time?
This is not an easy world to inhabit. I understand why many readers are inclined to stick to the narrative of their side, without struggling to line up the arguments or move flexibly when reasoning from side to side. I certainly was not capable of this grace. Whenever the fuss died down, the dispute about colonialism left me sympathetic to the Zionist narrative. I tried, I tried again; I could not break away from this loyalty to my own side. What was the point of borrowing for Jewish-Arab relations a name that defined the behavior of powerful nations toward an exploited, indigenous people? I hated this argument. I hated this debate. No matter how many times I hurled myself back to the Palestinian side, the Jew in me always had the last word. I was far too biased to have the right to an opinion.
Did I believe Edward Said’s assertion that since 1967 Palestinian leaders had been “jailed and deported by the Israeli occupation regime”? Yes, I did. That small businesses and farms had been “made unviable by confiscation and sheer destruction, students prevented from studying, universities closed”? I knew that. And I knew too what Said wrote in his book From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: “In the mid-1980s Palestinian universities on the West Bank were closed for four years”; no “Palestinian farmer or business [could] export to any Arab country directly”; and taxes were paid to Israel—collected by Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority but delivered to Israel.
But I could not, or I would not, stand for any association of the Jewish homeland with colonialism. Because it made us, an abused and persecuted people, far more powerful than we had been? Because it erased our struggle for survival? Because it was a war over words conducted by people who did not engage in the struggle on the ground, to make up for their failure to be engaged? This charge could not be brought against the PLO in its effort to emulate the Algerians in evicting French settlers. But it was, inevitably, a charge I could bring against myself, against Palestinian and Israeli historians and intellectuals, and against all readers of books and anyone who tried to reason and think. Now the two sides got going with equal force in an effort to shame each other, cast aspersions, pronounce suspicions, back and forth, each side attacked and attacking, as the argument retreated further from relevance.
And then suddenly it would become relevant again. I recalled Israeli historians who, after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, had used the word “colonialism” to describe their country’s relationship to the Palestinians. At first, this seemed a concession to the long-standing Palestinian charge, and I fought against it. But then this idea would edge its way toward a possibility even more disturbing. Colonialism, for all its evils, has had to hold its colonized people in sufficiently tolerable conditions to be able to exploit them. But was that what was happening in the territories? Did we even have a word to characterize the behavior of a conquering power that wants to rid itself of a conquered people without either transferring or openly destroying them—by making their lives so intolerable they will be driven out? Or be forced against their will to choose to leave?
A Chanukah Reflection
Nes Gadol Haya Sham. A Great Miracle Happened There. The words we repeat when we play dreidel on Chanukah. Each player spins the top; depending on how it falls, we get one nut or all the nuts or half of them, or we have to put some back into the pile. Whoever has collected the most nuts by the end of the game is free to squirrel them away or share them with the other players. Some say this game was invented to teach Jewish children the Hebrew alphabet when learning Hebrew was forbidden by the Romans. My learning of the Hebrew and Yiddish alphabet began with the dreidel.
Nes Gadol Haya Sham. Familiar and beloved words.
One day the words underwent a spontaneous, shocking transformation. Nakba Gadol Haya Sham. A Great Catastrophe Happened There. Could one say such a thing? Would grammar allow this intermixing of languages, this unexpected verbal miscegenation between Hebrew and Arabic? Here suddenly two incompatible ideas from two radically opposed people were yoked together, a ferocious wordplay, a gift from the unconscious.
What is the space between a catastrophe and a miracle? In this case it spans more than two thousand years between the revolt of the Maccabees and us. A revolt by an indigenous people, against the Greek-Seleucid dynasty that was depriving them of self-rule (in 175 bce). The space shrinks. Is it in similar terms that the Palestinians view their struggle against Israel? To the Seleucids the Jews must have seemed a stiff-necked, stubborn people from an inferior civilization who would not settle down and let themselves be governed. I’ve heard more than a few Israeli voices speak of the Palestinians in similar and far more derogatory terms.
An analogy presents itself through a slip of the tongue. How far can this analogy be taken? Judah and his brothers, avoiding direct encounters with the Seleucid army, became guerilla fighters. Did Antiochus IV, Epiphanes, the Seleucid ruler, think of them the way we think of armed Palestinian fighters?
I do not like these thoughts. I’d rather not think them; I am pushing them away almost as fast as they press in. Judah Maccabee, without question a great Jewish hero. In honor of him and his brothers we celebrate Chanukah with its miracle of light. He is ours, he fought in our name, he defeated a superior armed force that kept us from living according to our traditions. Is it such a stretch to imagine the Palestinian people might feel the same way about their struggle and their heroes?
Yes, it is a big stretch, an enormous stretch. It has been driving me to see things as another people might see them, and this is not comfortable. Perhaps the mistake I’d been making all these years was in the effort to determine a simple truth, a single truth, a set of facts that stayed settled as facts no matter who looked at them? A Palestinian village has been destroyed. Is it the same event if it happened as a hazard of war in protection of a young homeland? Or a vastly different event if it was done with the intention to eliminate an indigenous people from their native land? Is there a way to find some middle ground, to listen to both sides without coming to a conclusion about who was right? But here I encounter an ethical problem. The suffering of my own people is widely acknowledged; it has gained a worldwide recognition while the suffering of the Palestinians has been neglected for decades. In an effort to be fair I would have to raise up what has gone missing to give it adequate representation. What exactly has gone missing? A reviewer in the New York Review of Books, writing in 1974, twenty-five years after the state of Israel had been declared, twenty-five years after the Palestinian refugee problem had been created, described his visit to the Israeli Knesset. He was “amazed to hear the members of parliament discuss the question of whether or not the Palestinian problem existed.” When he challenged Shulamit Aloni, a government minister elected on a civil rights platform, about this, she told him what a great step forward it was for the Knesset simply to be debating the Palestinian problem. A debate of this kind had not been held since the time of Ben-Gurion. “It seemed to me ridiculous that it took Israelis twenty-five years and four wars to recognize the existence of a Palestinian problem,” wrote the reviewer, Sana Hassan. “But then it took twenty-five years and four wars for the Arabs to come around to recognizing the existence of the state of Israel. Were I an Israeli, Arab deliberations over recognizing Israel would no doubt have seemed equally absurd.”
Equally absurd but not exactly the same. The recognition of a state implies a recognition of its legitimacy. The recognition of a people simply acknowledges that you know it exists. If I were a Palestinian, I would not have been happy about a young woman going to live on a Kibbutz in 1971 with no awareness that there was a Palestinian people, or a problem.
Nes Gadol Haya Sham. Nakba Gadol Haya Sham.
At a Chanukah celebration I was spinning the dreidel with a group of kids, explaining to them the meaning of Chanukah and the Hebrew letters on the dreidel. I had to keep a close eye on myself. I didn’t want any slips of the tongue to interfere with my lesson. But on the other hand, why not? Was it too early to let these children know that another people was fighting for its liberation the way our people had fought? To tell them this other people saw their protest as a liberation struggle and that their struggle was against us?
Wasn’t Chanukah the perfect time to introduce this lesson? Plates of latkes were arriving from the kitchen, one of the younger kids wanted to light all the candles on the menorah, our hostess was telling about the miracle of lamps that had burned without oil for eight days and nights during the Maccabees’ struggle. This was a celebration, and I was still uneasy with my own thoughts. I had trouble staying present in our gathering. I was searching for a way to think and speak and write about these things without judgment, from a sense of compassion equally deserved by both peoples. When I achieved this, there would be time enough to share my thoughts. It was 1982; Israel had just invaded Lebanon in a war of choice. The kibbutz where I had lived so many years ago was on the Lebanese border. This effort to position myself fairly between the opposing sides was the most difficult conceptual task I had ever undertaken. Next morning I went home and started gathering up my books on Zionism, Palestine, Israel, the Middle East. They were numerous; they had spread out into different rooms. I put them in piles on the floor and sat down with them. This was the right approach.
Yosef Nahmani, director of the Jewish National Fund office in eastern Galilee between 1935 and 1965, recorded in his diary (November 6, 1948) this briefing from Israel’s Minority Affairs Ministry. Members of the ministry were discussing “the cruel acts of our soldiers” in 1948:
In Safat, after … the inhabitants had raised a white flag, the [soldiers] collected and separated the men and women, tied the hands of fifty-six fellahin [peasants] and shot and killed them and buried them in a pit. Also, they raped several women … in Saliha … they had killed about sixty-seven men and women. At Eilabun and Farradiya the soldiers had been greeted with white flags and rich food, and afterwards had ordered the villagers to leave, with their women and children. When the [villagers] had begun to argue … [the soldiers] had opened fire and after some thirty people were killed, had begun to lead the rest [toward Lebanon] … Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis? … Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than such methods?
An Israeli minority affairs minister has compared the soldiers of the IDF to Nazis. Can I answer him by talking about identification with the aggressor? The concept has always troubled me for the way it contains a measure of justification. Its explanation rests on the knowledge of prior victimization undergone by the current perpetrator. Behind his violence we are invited to remember the atrocities he has undergone. Surely the minister is not saying that the soldiers of the IDF were Nazis. No identity has been established; it is the cruelty of both groups that is being compared. Bad enough. The whole thing sets my teeth on edge. I am writing my thoughts as fast as I think them and they keep trying to get away. I’m not sure why the government official is called a minister of minority affairs; during the time he occupied his office it was the Jews, not the Arabs, who were in the minority. This is of course one of the number of disputes that erupt throughout the discussion. (How many villages, how many refugees, how many soldiers killed in the first months of the war? How many children beaten with sticks, how many Jews slain during the Arab Revolt?) In The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz speaks of the number of Jews and Arabs within the area the UN had assigned to Palestine. He eliminates from the population tally of Palestine the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza and “what is now Jordan.” Were there really more of them than there were of us? Not according to this way of doing the numbers.
Here we can see at work the way I use numbers to distract myself from what is really at stake. I am trying to entertain the idea of a comparison to the cruelty of Nazis. It is an effort of will to bring my mind back, to make myself ask the relevant questions. What accounts for this cruelty in a Jewish soldier? The government official who asks might have answered his own question.
Men come to acts of cruelty and brutality of this kind because they have learned to see their neighbors with contempt. It begins with a sense of superiority derived from birth and origins. The other is lesser, insignificant, uncivilized, not entitled to the rights we claim for ourselves. We despise these dark(er)-skinned neighbors not just in warfare, but daily, as we go about our lives. “It would have been better, perhaps, if there were no Arab students. If they remained hewers of wood it would perhaps be easier to rule over them.” This, from a Jewish man (see David Gilmour’s Disposessed).
A camp commander, quoted by Dov Yermiya in My War Diary, is speaking through a loudspeaker to his Palestinian captives: “You are a people of monkeys. You are terrorists and we will break you. You want a state? Build it on the moon. Whoever causes trouble here, will be shot.” These men have not been tried or condemned. It’s impossible to know if they are terrorists, but we know that they are not monkeys.
An Israeli officer of the military government in the West Bank drives up to a government building, blowing his horn and shouting at a guard. In Strangers in the House, Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer, writer, and human rights activist, describes the following scene:
“How often must I tell you that I don’t want anyone in the driveway? Let them stand on the side. It is not a parade here.”
The officer’s eye fell on a young well-built man leaning on a tree, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t like his open and bold expression. “What are you standing there for?” he asked.
“I’m waiting to collect my ID,” the man said without removing his cigarette.
“Take away your cigarette when you speak to me. What’s your name?”
“Mahdi Hammad.”
“I will remember your name and we’ll see if you get your card today. You must learn manners first.”
You must learn manners first? To whom does he think he’s speaking? An insubordinate, a prisoner, a child, an animal in training? Mahdi Hammad is standing in line to comply with Israeli military orders. Because he is smoking a cigarette he won’t be able to get his ID. Not today, perhaps not tomorrow? Without his ID he can’t get work; he can’t pass through the Israeli checkpoints. Is this roughness and brutality the inevitable fate of an occupying army? I wish I could say yes and leave it at that. But the problem goes further back.
Shortly after the founding of Israel, at a state meeting, an Israeli minister speaks about Arabs. The minister’s treatment of the Arab refugees is so shocking to a visiting British member of parliament that the discussion has been set down and can be found in the parliamentary record:
“Doctor Hacohen, I am profoundly shocked that you should speak of other human beings in terms similar to those in which Julius Streicher spoke of the Jews. Have you learned nothing?” I shall remember his reply to my dying day. He smote the table with both hands and said, “But they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs.” He was speaking of the Arab refugees.
It must weigh heavily on a Jewish reader to discover that this is not an isolated incident. In “The Jews’ Jews,” a 1993 article from the New York Review of Books, Amos Elon reports that “according to one of his biographers, David Ben-Gurion refused to accept his new Israeli ID card because it was printed also in Arabic—one of Israel’s two official languages … Golda Meir said … whenever she heard an Arab member of the Knesset swear allegiance to the state she felt ‘sick.’”
What is the unthinkable thought trying to make its way through? It slips and twists, it tries to get away, the usual tactics. This passage from Amos Elon’s book The Israelis: Founders and Sons snags and holds on tight: “The tragic irony is deepened by a fatal parallel. There is a symmetry between the Israelis’ traumatic memory of holocaust and the neurosis of shame and anger, humiliation and white rage, that has been generated among Arabs by Israel’s recurrent successes.”
I found this brave and daring when I came across it many years ago. Today, in pursuit of what I dare not think, I am invited (as Amos Elon has been in later writing) to take it further. The “fatal parallel” that makes of the Palestinians what we once were has not arisen from Israel’s successes. It is our brutality that has brought it about. Catch this thought: If we become like them, the people who wanted to exterminate us, to the degree that we become like them they have succeeded in destroying us.
Why is the Israeli soldier kicking his Arab prisoner in the face? His prisoner is sitting on the ground, his hands tied behind him. Over and over again in the face. “His nose and face are covered in blood while the soldier continues to strike him,” Dov Yermiya writes in My War Diary. OK, yes: perhaps the thousands of years during which our people has endured persecution can help account for the way we have become brutal toward another people. Or perhaps the soldier cannot manage to see his prisoner as a suffering human being because he has been taught since childhood to see him as an animal. Daily, since childhood, he has been encouraged to see the Palestinians as thieves, snakes, cockroaches, and grasshoppers. Colloquial Hebrew, filled “with expressions reflecting the prevailing prejudice” reflects this alienation, Amos Elon writes. “‘Arab’ is synonymous with meanness, bad workmanship, and bad taste, as in ‘Don’t be an Arab,’ ‘Arab work,’ and ‘Arab taste.’”
I don’t want to believe that Jewish people think or talk like this, but the evidence is right here. And here too are my notes, written by me but almost illegible. I seem determined to hide from anyone else, and perhaps also from myself, what I have learned. My books have been stacked up, taken down, reassembled—as if the right arrangement could segregate the worst of what I am forced to know. And now, grabbing a book at random, opening it to a marked page, I find this: the messages sent to IDF soldiers by children born and raised in the settlements. The book is Raja Shehadeh’s When the Birds Stopped Singing. One child asks the soldiers “to kill as many Arabs as possible.” Another says: “For me, kill at least ten.” One child goes further: “Ignore the laws and spray them.” Their teacher thinks these are examples of “healthy hatred.”
Can I imagine, under any circumstances, wanting my Jewish daughter to have written a letter like this?
Kim Chernin, Ph.D., a feminist writer and psychotherapist who practices in Berkeley, has won acclaim for her numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. This article is adapted from her new book, Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home: A New Vision of Israel and Palestine.
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