semitism.net

In general, I am not a fan of Ari Shavit. My opinion of him, for what it’s worth, is that he is one of the classic examples of those who claim to support peace, write headlines about how much they support peace, but when you read between the lines, it’s a lot less clear. He often likes to sound strident and urgent about the big picture, but then just can’t go all the way when it comes to the details. I suppose, though, that not everyone can be Gideon Levy or Amira Hass. Regardless, his piece in Thursday’s Haaretz, “Israel Must Sit Shiva,” is extremely powerful and worth a careful read because, well, it hurts. It hurt me, anyway, because it says so clearly what I have been trying to say in my last few posts…

Shavit’s piece begins with a description of disengagement that evokes the feeling of war that the settlers were, in some way, hoping to bring out with their actions.

The settlers have been defeated. Their greenhouses are withering. Their synagogues are empty. Their rooms are wide open. Their villages are ghost towns.

Shavit then does not, as he sometimes does, backtrack and attempt to evoke sympathy for the settlers because of the “withering greenhouses.” He does not wonder whether there may have been another way, whether disengagement was the wrong way to go:

Should they have been here? No. Was it necessary to remove them? Yes. The 30 years of pointless settlement on the Gaza coast had to come to an end. The great injustice done to the Palestinians had to be ended. Israel’s great historic mistake had to be corrected.

For many on the left, this is the beginning, middle and end of the story. And for most of my years of working against the occupation, this was all I focused on. Settlements are wrong, and by extension, the settlers were all wrong for being there. The only solution was to eradicate settlements and move the settlers. Nothing else needed to be said or considered.

And this is how so many on the left approached disengagement: it needed to be done. After all, not only was the settlement project wrong, but many of the settlers are extremists, Jewish fundamentalists, who have acted inhumanely not only toward Palestinians, but to many Israelis and other Jews as well.

So with the settlers so opprobrious, why should any of us who have opposed them bother to care about how they are evacuated? We’re right, they’re wrong. And when they were “winning” and living a life of virtual impunity behind settlement walls, did they care about the humanity of those who were “losing?” Of course not. When the government that they helped elect made the decision to remove them, did they respond with understanding and acceptance? Perhaps they did not respond with mass violence, but the Holocaust imagery they invoked, the accusations hurled at young soldiers that they were akin to Gestapo, will not soon be forgotten by anyone. Their playing of the Holocaust made everyone a loser.

But that’s precisely the point. The left is not supposed to be different from the right only in ideology or preferred media outlets, but in practice. In humanity. And the shock to the system disengagement caused to the settlers, and will cause to Israel and the entire Jewish community for some time to come, required that level of humanity.

But that humanity did not materialize in any real way, and although the focus of the world’s attention and media has been on the settlers, on the soldiers and the logistics of disengagement, Shavit gets it exactly right by focusing things back on the absence of those who have been far away from the process:

Dovish intellectuals were not here this week. Perhaps they are busy. Perhaps they have more important things to do. But the fact that the chief rabbis of Israeli secular morality did not see fit to make a genuine human gesture toward 8,000 fellow citizens who were forcibly uprooted from their homes is a fact laden with significance. It reorganizes Israel’s normative framework. Soon they will discover that those who do not stand emotionally with their fellow citizens when their lives are being destroyed have lost the right to preach morality to them regarding the destruction of the lives of others.

This is where Shavit hits closest to home, at least for me. When I first read this, I wondered why, as I said above, these standards and expectations should only apply to the left? Did any of the settlers, extremist or not, “stand emotionally with their fellow citizens” who lost their family and friends in military units sent to protect the settlements? With the families of their fellow citizens whose relatives were killed by Eden Natan Zada? With their fellow citizens who opposed the separation wall, or any number of incursions into Gaza? In the end, there are many Israelis whose lives have been destroyed, in one way or another, by the occupation, so why is it only the left who should show up to “stand emotionally with,” and ease the pain of, those on the other side?

Because that is what the left is about. The left seeks an end to the destruction of lives, as Shavit rightly captures it. What is often so distasteful to the left about the occupation, and those on the right who support it, is that it divides and separates people. Literally and figuratively.

There is a criticism often hurled at Israel, by me on occasion, that by being an occupier, we are repeating, in some way, sins of the past. Only the sins now are committed by us, rather than upon us. Although simplistic, it bears some truth. But the same logic is true for those fighting occupation as well. By not responding differently than those we oppose, we respond the same. We repeat their sins. We divide between them and us. And there is no peace or justice in that.

The Israeli human rights group “B’tselem” takes its name from the passage in Genesis in which we are told that God created all human beings “B’tselem Elohim,” in God’s own image. We who have asked that this commandment be respected by our opponents vis-à-vis the Palestinians must now adjust our thinking to include those same opponents as well. I will admit that I am not even sure what this means, but it is up to all of us, working together, as the left always seeks to do, to figure it out.

Part of the reason, of course, that many on the left, including me, did not respond to or embrace disengagement is skepticism about Ariel Sharon and whether this process is really “Gaza first, Gaza last.” We must continue to fight to make sure that this is not what happens. But along the way, we must remember to fight in a different way, in a way that will bring the completeness to the “day after occupation” that the Jewish mourning process of shiva, which Ari Shavit asked us to observe, is meant to bring.