semitism.net

It was supposed to be different here, wasn’t it? Different for the better, that is?

After several days of thinking about Steffi’s comment to my last post in which she references “good Germans;” reading Gideon Levy’s story in Haaretz about Ronnie Kasrils, South African Minister of Intelligence Services, and his views that the Occupation is worse in many respects than apartheid in South Africa; reading just the title to Ze’ev Schiff’s piece in Friday’s paper: “If that’s how they act in Gaza;” and topping it off with Roger Cohen’s piece in the Sunday Times, “Israel and the Price of Blindness,” I realized what has been bugging me for these past few weeks (despite my admitted enjoyment of ignorance and detachment, or as Andrew might rightly put it, my personal disengagement), really the past 10 years, since I first experienced life in the West Bank.

Of course, this point has been made innumerable times on this site and so many others, and by so many other people far more articulate and knowledgeable than me. And so I apologize in advance for repeating it, for ranting without much of a point or new thought or new idea. But the message still has not been heard by everyone, for some reason. In fact, it seems sometimes that it’s hardly been heard by anyone. Given how little I seem to do about it anymore, I guess you could say even me, much of the time.

So perhaps I just feel the need to say it again, if only to wake myself up from my first few weeks of personal disengagement. The point is simply this: it was supposed to be different here.

Here in Jerusalem in 2007, we weren’t supposed to be reading in the weekly magazine about why the Occupation is worse than apartheid. And even if we disagree, we weren’t supposed to have arguments honed as to why the Occupation is not worse than apartheid. Apartheid wasn’t supposed to be part of the vocabulary, the ability to fashion technical arguments to the contrary not part of the national identity.

In 2007, we weren’t supposed to be asking American Jews to go on a first date with a 60-year-old Israel, but then be afraid of what they might learn on that date (such as, for example, the country you’re on a date with is the parent of a 40-year-old Occupation). There were not supposed to be skeletons in the closet here, literally or figuratively. The terms “Israeli policies” and “Holocaust” were not supposed to be even conceivably uttered in the same breath. Of course, as Steffi says, what’s happening here does not compare to what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. But as I have said many times before, the mere notion that anyone has to even think for a second about whether there could be a comparison – that alone should be enough to change things here. And to cause pain to every Jew everywhere.

In 2007, we should not be reading articles that describe Palestinians as “they” in such dehumanizing terms as Schiff’s piece does, hearkening back to the pre-civil rights era U.S. But in fact, as we consider a 60-year-old Israel, we have to consider it in precisely those pre-civil rights terms. That is, the impact of disengagement and detachment are simply the equivalent of one of the most derided rulings in U.S. judicial history: Plessy v. Ferguson. I plan to write more on this in the future, but for now, I’ll ask everyone to consider simply that both inside Israel, and between Israelis and Palestinians, in 2007, Plessy’s notion of “separate but equal” would, in fact, be something of a dream, rather than a nightmare. As of now, all there is is “separate.” For all of the talk about the splendor of Israeli democracy, consider that, vis-à-vis “the other,” it has so long to go to even ascend to one of the worst moments in the history of American democracy.

The separation is so pervasive as to make even the tiniest moments when it’s absent seem like earth-shattering occasions. It should not have felt so odd on Shavuot to see observant Jews in talitot walking through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. But it did. Just as my wife and I should not have had to wonder aloud whether Palestinian families ever came to the Jerusalem Zoo (we encountered a handful of such families, I think, in a very crowded zoo – and all in one specific part of the zoo). But we did.

I should not feel like going into my son’s daycare at the Jerusalem Y is like entering some land of pre-apple Eden. But being in a place where Palestinian and Jewish children play, learn, eat, celebrate, and cry together feels like walking on to a movie set or a fairy tale. It feels that way because outside there are posters calling for “Chumat Magen 2” in Gaza. Chumat Magen being “Operation Defensive Shield” that caused so much devastation and destruction in Jenin and elsewhere in 2002 (in response, of course, to a wave of suicide bombings, including the horrific attack in Netanya during Pesach). Is this really what is needed to calm things in Gaza? More destruction? If only the people who put up those signs knew what was happening inside the Y.

No matter whose fault you think it is, no matter how right or wrong you think Israel is in this situation, no matter how little or much you think the Palestinians should have in a settlement — I don’t think anyone can possibly believe that this is how it’s supposed to be here. That if you had told Ben Gurion in 1947, just before the state would come into being, what Israel would be in 2007, he would have leaned back and said, “That’s exactly what I hope for.”

Perhaps it’s trite in a post like this to quote Buber. Just like it often seems trite to quote Martin Luther King Jr. when talking about race relations in the U.S. But in both cases, until their dreams are realized, we have few other choices. For his part, Buber more than most understood why it was supposed to be different here, that the goal of Zionism should have been the fulfillment of this land’s divine promise, not simply to be a nation like any other. Sadly, today, we have the latter.

Some thoughts from Buber:

We speak of a “national concept,” when a people makes its unity, spiritual coherence, historical character, traditions, origins and evolution, destiny and vocation the objects of its conscious life and the motive power behind its actions. In this sense, the Zion concept of the Jewish people can be called a national concept. But its essential quality lies precisely in that which differentiates it from all other national concepts.
…

This land was at no time in the history of Israel simply the property of the people; it was always at the same time a challenge to make of it what God intended to have made of it.
Thus, from the very beginning, the unique association between this people and this land was characterized by what was to be, by the intention that was to be realized.
…

The idea of Zion is rooted in deeper regions of the earth and rises into loftier regions of the air, and neither its deep roots nor its lofty heights, neither its memory of the past nor its ideal for the future, both of the selfsame texture, may be repudiated. If Israel renounces the mystery, it renounces the heart of reality itself. National forms without the eternal purpose from which they have arisen signify the end of Israel’s specific fruitfulness.

Renunciation of the mystery means renunciation of the reality of the land. As I got waved through an impromptu police checkpoint set up in East Jerusalem today, where only my and other cars with Hebrew written on the sides were allowed to pass without question, I realized the renunciation is near complete. Amid such a blatant exhibition of absolute power (albeit minor, in comparison to those unleashed in the West Bank), as Cohen so cogently called it last weekend, we must realize that Israel has repudiated its roots and renounced its mystery. And replaced it with pure power.

So what? Was this supposed to be a utopia, where Jew and Arab lived peacefully for eternity? Maybe not, but it was supposed to be different than this – the source of our redemption was not supposed to also be the source of others’ (and, ours too, in some ways) destruction. But, now, it is.

So what do we do? Is it Israel’s fault, anyway? Is Israel the one that has to change everything? Look around, after all – how could it be different here? Am I so naive as to think it could really be any other way?

Well, from here, you get to myriad other questions and debates, many of which leave you hungry for personal disengagement again because they are too hard, too frustrating, too demoralizing, too familiar. And, as I wrote a couple weeks ago, there is so much else here to grasp on to that makes you believe things really are okay.

But no matter what our answers to the above questions, no matter what we do or do not do each day to change things, no matter how long this tragedy continues to unfold, no matter how many good and positive things may come from this place, we have to always come back to a single notion, all of us, regardless of our politics: it should be different here.

Perhaps, as Buber says, this is a great challenge. But that is as it was intended. This land was supposed to be the realization, not only of a people’s dream and promise, but of God’s.

But, in Jerusalem in 2007, it isn’t.