“We’re at War! Are you doing all you can?” As I walked into my new office for the first time in 2005, there he was: a pointing, glowering, eerily focused Uncle Sam, asking me about my commitment to the “War!” It stopped me in my tracks. Not because I necessarily opposed it’s being there, but because of how out of place the sign seemed, the sentiment seemed. That is, in my daily experience in Washington, working within shouting distance of the White House, I realized this was about the only direct reminder I had in my field of vision that our country is indeed fighting a war.
I have now gone from Washington to Jerusalem. If you asked many people in the world what the two most vital conflicts are to determining whether our future is a stable or volatile one, they would likely say Iraq and Palestine. So here I have traveled between the two capitals arguably most directly involved in creating – and ultimately ending — these conflicts that may well determine the future of the world.
And walking around the streets of either one, you would have no clue.
Unless you really look and think about it, it’s hard to imagine as you stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue or Jaffa St. that either country’s young men and women are fighting a war. Or that, here in Israel, a town is being bombarded daily from Gaza. Never mind that, within mere miles of the incredible zoo my wife and I took our kids to over the weekend, Gaza is descending even further into chaos and the West Bank continues to suffer under an ever more constricting and stifling occupation.
I wish I had a pointed anecdote or moment to demonstrate this phenomenon. But that’s just it – there’s nothing. No comments in shops, no arguments, hard to even catch anyone reading the paper intently as you drink a kafeh hafuch in a café. Sayed Kashua captures the phenomenon pretty aptly in his column this week, describing a conversation of his own when entering a café the morning after Jerusalem Day last week.
“What’s eating you, so early in the morning?” he asked as he went about his work, snipping open sacks of milk, turning on a machine, refilling the containers of ground coffee.
“It’s nothing, I’m just a little stuck. And this whole thing in Gaza is killing me. Did you see Channel 10 yesterday?”
“What really bugged me yesterday wasn’t Gaza, but my own people, who stood in Sacher Park waving yellow flags and hailing Caesar,” he demonstrated by clenching his fist and holding his arm straight out. “How, how is it that they don’t get it …?” He shook his head in annoyance. The door opened and his expression instantly changed, as he said: “Hello, ma’am. How are you this morning?”
People may well be angry or bothered by what is happening in Gaza, or Iraq, or the insensitivity or outright hypocrisy of their own people in responding to these crises, but, well, then they have to get on with serving the next customer. Or getting their next cup of coffee themselves.
And, in no small way, I am a proto-typical example of this. In DC, I am too busy with work and family and activities to go out of my way to think about Iraq; most of the time, I barely listen to the news from Iraq on the radio or TV. Here, I’m a bit busier with kids than work, but still trying to do some of the latter, too, not to mention travel a bit and catch up with old friends. If we don’t have to know that war is happening, that people are suffering elsewhere, why should we? If we’re within the society that is not the locus of the fighting, what is the proper level of attention to pay, of concern to show, of distraction to feel?
In neither place is this notion of detachment new. I remember when in Israel and Palestine in 1997 and 1998 that I would often have to hear from friends and family back home that something of note had happened in Nablus or Gaza. The same has been true this time. Off I go each day on my rounds, and I wait to hear in emails from friends or on CNN that I should probably be experiencing something other than an enjoyable, comfortable spring day (although this weekend was a bit more like summer, and earlier in the week more like winter, with a torrential downpour).
And in DC, well, once you leave the airport, there is literally nothing that would force you to ever know there was a war or two that our soldiers had any part of (unless you come into my office building to see that Uncle Sam sign, of course). People in much of D.C. generally don’t know what’s going on two neighborhoods away in their own city, let alone half a world away.
Of course, in the U.S., and particularly in the American Jewish community, we like to believe that people in Israel live with this over-arching sense of terror every day, that they are more keenly aware of what is happening in their own country and in Palestine. And, no doubt they are, in some way, at least, as Andrew points out, those who serve in the Palestinian Territories. And there are certainly the reminders of those killed in various terrorist attacks that you pass on the street, or the special security guards sitting out front of many restaurants or shops to check your bags. But more than that?
How many times did we hear after 9/11 that “now we Americans know what Israelis go through every day”? I used to scoff when I heard that, for a lot of reasons, but perhaps, in a way different than I think this statement was intended, it really is true.
Perhaps what it means is that now we know what it was like to go about our daily business with a bit more vulnerability, even fear, in the back of our minds. But be sure that we still go about that business. Or maybe now we understand a bit more about what it means to have a government that acts more of its own calculation, taking actions counter to civil liberties and human rights under the rubric of security, a word that has been a trump card in Israel for decades. (I wrote about this subject last year for the Israeli civil rights group Adalah – you can see that article here.)
As I have written here before, I don’t think much changed for the average American’s daily life after 9/11. At this point, not much changes for an Israeli’s daily life when Gaza falls apart or an Israeli town gets shelled because it doesn’t have to. Maybe it should, maybe we expect it to, but as one friend and long-time social activist here has described it, the previously critical social fabric of Israel is coming apart quickly in the 21st century. Hence, no protests (as many predicted, the post-Winograd protest came and went, without seeming to stake a real hold), no introspection, no demands. (Shlomo Ben-Ami had an interesting article over the weekend that, oddly enough, seemed to blame investigative committees, a la Winograd, for a lack of real democratic action in Israel — perhaps more on that later in the summer). No level of concern that we may have come to expect from Israel and Israelis.
I guess now the question is have we become more like the Israelis post 9/11, or have they become more like us?
Used to be, at various times, that that question of Uncle Sam’s meant something to both Americans and Israelis – are we really doing all we can for our men and women soldiers? Now, seems we do all we can to forget. I am no different, of course, and am not sure I will be any time soon (although my perspective here will likely change in the coming days, when we move over to East Jerusalem). But I wonder what will – or could – change in our societies in 2007 to make it different?
Any ideas?
This is disengagement, right? There was a time in Israel when Jews and Arabs were much more interpenetrated- they were, in some sense, part of the same community, even if it was a community in conflict.
Israel has succeeded in pushing more and more Arabs outside its (temporary) borders. It has imposed more obstacles for those from the West Bank to access institutions in Jerusalem. Palestinian labor has been replaced to a large extent by migrants from low-income European, African and Asian countries. It is, literally, building a giant wall to keep the Arabs out.
At the same time, Israel has become more prosperous and more European in look and feel.
All of this makes the Palestinians nearly invisible to Israelis in their daily lives - unless, of course, one blows up a bus or a disco.
By the way, here is one of the many small ironies that stand next to the obvious large one.
Many Jews come to Israel to re-connect with their tradition, to see the Land of the Torah. But life in the small Arab towns on the West Bank is much closer to the way our ancestors lived in Biblical times, than anything a visitor will see in modern Israel.
This is just one of the things we have lost by separating ourselves, in the interest of security and of maintaining a Jewish majority, from the land and the people amidst which Israel is situated.
“Now, seems we do all we can to forget. “
I feel a bit of an intruder commenting on this blog as I am not Jewish. But still … those are questions that affect us all, I’m sure.
A while back I came upon the very interesting article by Yagil Levy, Materialist Militarism. It clearly shows the power that the military-industrial complex has over all of our lives. Thus, reading your post, it seems to me that, whether in Israel or in the Western countries engaged in the “war-on-terror”, it may not be that “we do all we can to forget”, but more likely that we are NOT encouraged to think about and to mull over the war(s). Perhaps there will come a time when the military-industrial complex will need more engagement on the part of the public (say, when a draft becomes absolutely necessary in the US), then I suspect that the images and the discourse will change in a way that will make it impossible for us to “forget”.
I know this will sound more controversial than I want it to, but years ago, I heard a presentation of a Master’s thesis by a social work student who had interviewed Germans who had grown up in Germany during World War II. Jews have decried the “good German” who was aware of Nazi atrocities and did nothing. But this student presented some very moving interviews, including one with a mother who lived on a farm near one of the concentration camps and saw from a distance the trains come in and unload their emaciated, barely-alive passengers. She talked about how helpless and frightened she was, and how her concerns were twofold: to protect her young son from these awful sights, and perhaps more crucial, to manage to survive by keeping the farm going to produce at least enough food for her family. Some other interviews had a similar tone: an emphasis on the need to function and survive, a feeling that if one knew too much, or spoke about what one knew, it would be terribly dangerous and/or painful.
Now none of this applies to the situation of the Israelis vis-a-vis the Palestinians. But it does speak to the ways in which human beings have to — or at least tend to — exercise massive denial regarding events or situations which are simply too overwhelming and threatening, emotionally, politically or otherwise, and over which they feel they have little control.
The separation wall works both ways: most Israelis are insulated from what life is like in the West Bank on a daily basis, and certainly have little or no direct knowledge of everyday life in Gaza. The exception to this is the soldiers who serve in the territories, and it appears that for at least some of them, their experiences as occupiers do lead them to become refuseniks or to work in some way or another for peace. It is also interesting to note that according to various sources, many young people (I’ve heard that the numbers are as high as 40%)are either avoiding army service by claiming physical, mental or some other problem such as drug use, or they are making sure they get into some elite unit that will do high level computer or similar “desk” work to avoid being sent to the occupied territories. It would be nice if all those young men and women refused to serve on moral grounds, but the point is, they’re finding some way to avoid confronting the human consequences of their government’s policy. I guess we are all “good Germans” at times.
Perhaps I am a bit unique in this denial business. I live 9/11 everyday as well as the Gulf War. I was there for 9/11. I saw friends gone or so damaged that they will never be the same. I worked in the rescue tents and listened to the emergency workers cry and sigh. I listened to my son and daughter-in-law who are both teachers in schools where many parents were lost. They were called to work in the middle of the night to learn how to talk to the children when school resumed. They were barely children themselves. My son-in-law will never be the same after his trips with the Air Force to who knows where. They call it PTSD and he gets a small disability pension each month. Even with that he will finish his 20 years in the military to get a pension to help his family. I do not know how he goes back one weekend a month and 2 months in the summer.
Perhaps our world leaders should wear a Tibetan Prayer Bell for one day. Each time the bell rings,they should think about what it is like to be living in Israel or Iraq today. It takes just a moment. Perhaps if we all did that, things might, and I say might, change.