Those Who Forget the Past (49 page)

What do we make of Jews such as myself, who are emotionally invested in the state of Israel, critical of its current form, and call for a radical restructuring of its economic and juridical basis precisely because we are invested in it? It is always possible to say that such Jews have turned against their own Jewishness. But what if one criticizes Israel in the name of one's Jewishness, in the name of justice, precisely because such criticisms seem “best for the Jews”? Why wouldn't it always be “best for the Jews” to embrace forms of democracy that extend what is “best” to everyone, Jewish or not? I signed a petition framed in these terms, an “Open Letter from American Jews,” in which 3,700 American Jews opposed the Israeli occupation, though in my view it was not nearly strong enough: it did not call for the end of Zionism, or for the reallocation of arable land, for rethinking the Jewish right of return or for the fair distribution of water and medicine to Palestinians, and it did not call for the reorganization of the Israeli state on a more radically egalitarian basis. It was, nevertheless, an overt criticism of Israel.

Many of those who signed that petition will have felt what might reasonably be called heartache at taking a public stand against Israeli policy, at the thought that Israel, by subjecting 3.5 million Palestinians to military occupation, represents the Jews in a way that these petitioners find not only objectionable, but terrible to endure, as Jews; it is as Jews that they assert their disidentification with that policy, that they seek to widen the rift between the state of Israel and the Jewish people in order to produce an alternative vision of the future. The petitioners exercised a democratic right to voice criticism, and sought to get economic pressure put on Israel by the United States and other countries, to implement rights for Palestinians otherwise deprived of basic conditions of self-determination, to end the occupation, to secure an independent Palestinian state or to reestablish the basis of the Israeli state without regard to religion so that Jewishness would constitute only one cultural and religious reality, and be protected by the same laws that protect the rights of others.

Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theater Avraham Oz, and the poet Yitzhak Laor. Are we to say that Israelis who are critical of Israeli policy are self-hating Jews, or insensitive to the ways in which criticism may fan the flames of anti-Semitism? What of the new Brit Tzedek organization in the United States, numbering close to 20,000 members at the last count, which seeks to offer a critical alternative to the American Israel Political Action Committee, opposing the current occupation and working for a two-state solution? What of Jewish Voices for Peace, Jews against the Occupation, Jews for Peace in the Middle East, the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace,
Tikkun,
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Women in Black, or, indeed, Neve Shalom– Wahat al-Salam, the only village collectively governed by both Jews and Arabs in the state of Israel? What do we make of B'Tselem, the Israeli organization that monitors human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza, or Gush Shalom, an Israeli organization opposing the occupation, or Yesh Gvul, which represents the Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories? And what of Ta'ayush, a Jewish-Arab coalition against policies that lead to isolation, poor medical care, house arrest, the destruction of educational institutions, and lack of water and food for Palestinians?

It will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with Zionism. There were debates among Jews throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as to whether Zionism ought to become the basis of a state, whether the Jews had any right to lay claim to land inhabited by Palestinians for centuries, and as to the future for a Jewish political project based on a violent expropriation of land. There were those who sought to make Zionism compatible with peaceful co-existence with Arabs, and those who used it as an excuse for military aggression, and continue to do so. There were those who thought, and still think, that Zionism is not a legitimate basis for a democratic state in a situation where a diverse population must be assumed to practice different religions, and that no group ought to be excluded from any right accorded to citizens in general on the basis of their ethnic or religious views. And there are those who maintain that the violent appropriation of Palestinian land, and the dislocation of 700,000 Palestinians, was an unsuitable foundation on which to build a state. Yet Israel is now repeating its founding gesture in the containment and dehumanization of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Indeed, the wall now being built threatens to leave 95,000 Palestinians homeless. These are questions about Zionism that should and must be asked in a public domain, and universities are surely one place where we might expect critical reflections on Zionism to take place. Instead, we are being asked, by Summers and others, to treat any critical approach to Zionism as effective anti-Semitism and, hence, to rule it out as a topic for legitimate disagreement.

Many important distinctions are elided by the mainstream press when it assumes that there are only two possible positions on the Middle East, the “pro-Israel” and the “pro-Palestinian.” The assumption is that these are discrete views, internally homogeneous, non-overlapping, that if one is “pro-Israel” then anything Israel does is all right, or if “pro-Palestinian” then anything Palestinians do is all right. But few people's political views occupy such extremes. One can, for instance, be in favor of Palestinian self-determination, but condemn suicide bombings, and find others who share both those views but differ on the form self-determination ought to take. One can be in favor of Israel's right to exist, but still ask what is the most legitimate and democratic form that existence ought to take. If one questions the present form, is one anti-Israel? If one holds out for a truly democratic Israel-Palestine, is one anti-Israel? Or is one trying to find a better form for this polity, one that may well involve any number of possibilities: a revised version of Zionism, a post-Zionist Israel, a self-determining Palestine, or an amalgamation of Israel into a greater Israel-Palestine where all racially and religiously based qualifications on rights and entitlements would be eliminated?

What is ironic is that in equating Zionism with Jewishness, Summers is adopting the very tactic favored by anti-Semites. At the time of his speech, I found myself on a listserv on which a number of individuals opposed to the current policies of the state of Israel, and sometimes to Zionism, started to engage in this same slippage, sometimes opposing what they called “Zionism” and at other times what they called “Jewish” interests. Whenever this occurred, there were objections, and several people withdrew from the group. Mona Baker, the academic in Manchester who dismissed two Israeli colleagues from the board of her academic journal in an effort to boycott Israeli institutions, argued that there was no way to distinguish between individuals and institutions. In dismissing these individuals, she claimed, she was treating them as emblematic of the Israeli state, since they were citizens of that country. But citizens are not the same as states: the very possibility of significant dissent depends on recognizing the difference between them. Baker's response to subsequent criticism was to submit e-mails to the “academicsforjustice” listserv complaining about “Jewish” newspapers and labeling as “pressure” the opportunity that some of these newspapers offered to discuss the issue in print with the colleagues she had dismissed. She refused to do this and seemed now to be fighting against “Jews,” identified as a lobby that pressures people, a lobby that had put pressure on her. The criticism that I made of Summers's view thus applies to Baker as well: it is one thing to oppose Israel in its current form and practices or, indeed, to have critical questions about Zionism itself, but it is quite another to oppose “Jews” or assume that all “Jews” have the same view, that they are all in favor of Israel, identified with Israel, or represented by Israel. Oddly, and painfully, it has to be said that on this point Mona Baker and Lawrence Summers agree: Jews are the same as Israel. In the one instance, the premise works in the service of an argument against anti-Semitism; in the second, it works as the effect of anti-Semitism itself. One aspect of anti-Semitism or, indeed, of any form of racism is that an entire people is falsely and summarily equated with a particular position, view, or disposition. To say that all Jews hold a given view on Israel or are adequately represented by Israel or, conversely, that the acts of Israel, the state, adequately stand for the acts of all Jews, is to conflate Jews with Israel and, thereby, to commit an anti-Semitic reduction of Jewishness.

In holding out for a distinction to be made between Israel and Jews, I am calling for a space for dissent for Jews, and non-Jews, who have criticisms of Israel to articulate; but I am also opposing anti-Semitic reductions of Jewishness to Israeli interests. The “Jew” is no more defined by Israel than by antiSemitism. The “Jew” exceeds both determinations, and is to be found, substantively, as a historically and culturally changing identity that takes no single form and has no single telos. Once the distinction is made, discussion of both Zionism and antiSemitism can begin, since it will be as important to understand the legacy of Zionism and to debate its future as to oppose anti-Semitism wherever we find it.

What is needed is a public space in which such issues might be thoughtfully debated, and to prevent that space being defined by certain kinds of exclusion and censorship. If one can't voice an objection to violence done by Israel without attracting a charge of anti-Semitism, then that charge works to circumscribe the publicly acceptable domain of speech, and to immunize Israeli violence against criticism. One is threatened with the label “anti-Semitic” in the same way that one is threatened with being called a “traitor” if one opposes the most recent U.S. war. Such threats aim to define the limits of the public sphere by setting limits on the speakable. The world of public discourse would then be one from which critical perspectives would be excluded, and the public would come to understand itself as one that does not speak out in the face of obvious and illegitimate violence.

PART TEN

ISRAEL

DAVID MAMET

“If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem”: The Power of Blunt Nostalgia

I AM READING IN JERUSALEM. I read, in Azure, a scholarly Israeli publication, an article by historian Michael Oren that Israeli opinion is split on Orde Wingate. Wingate was a Brit philosemite (the exception that, et cetera), creator of the doctrine of desert guerrilla warfare and godfather of the Israeli military. I read that the jury was still out on him, as he ate raw onions, strained his tea through his socks, and greeted guests in the nude. Now, as to particulars one and three, I have been guilty myself (though never in conjunction). As to particular two, I must ask, did he, in the absence of a strainer, improvise brilliantly with a pair of clean socks, or, did he (disons le mot) utilize the very socks in which he trod that desert land he was to aid in Making Free? But, perhaps, there are some doors History was never meant to open.

My accommodations in the Mount Zion Hotel are superb —two large picture windows overlook the Old City. To its left, modern Jerusalem, to the right, the Mount of Olives, East Jerusalem, and the descent to the Dead Sea. Looking east, before actual dawn, and just before sunset, the light is extraordinary. The Old City is the height of land—it rises from the sea to the Temple Mount and falls away to the Dead Sea and the desert.

A tour guide, a committed amateur archaeologist, gives me a tour of the south and east walls.

“Look up,” he says, “what do you see?”

“The land rises and then falls away,” I say.

He nods. “The clouds come in from the sea and deposit the rain at the highest point: the Old City. To its west, the land is tillable. To its east is desert. This is the division,” he says. “This is the spot where . . .”

“Two cultures,” I suggest.

“Not two cultures,” he says, “but two
mentalities,
two
spiritualities
meet: the people in the land toward the sea, in biblical Canaan, were concerned with commerce, with trade, with agriculture. The people to the east, the people in the desert, were concerned with spirit, with visions. The two have always met in Jerusalem.”

We walk toward the cemetery at the Mount of Olives. Below he shows me the City of David, that is, Jerusalem, as it existed at the turn of the common era. In those days, he says, it had more than 100,000 inhabitants. The July heat is killing me. It is not hard to imagine the relief of the desert traveler, coming to the high, watered ground. The cleansing, insistent influence of the desert to the Westerner does not need to be imagined; one feels it.

The Old City is fairly empty. It is usually, of course, steeved, if I may, with tourists and pilgrims. The current intifada has discouraged them. We stop for lunch in a Palestinian falafel place my friends recommend as the best around. We eat under a large poster showing the growth of Medina from the desert crossroads into the modern shrine. “Excuse me,” I say, “but is it dangerous to be eating in a Palestinian restaurant?” I am assured that the proprietors, like most of their co-religionists in the Old City, are Israeli citizens and that they would not think of committing antisocial acts. I am puzzled to find this suggested suspension of human nature, and not gratified when, several weeks later, I find my friends' opinions proved too sanguine.

I am invited to Sabbath lunch in South Jerusalem, in a house one block from one of the latest bus bombings. My hosts are the Horensteins, close friends from Newton, Mass. I get out of the cab, and they greet me warmly. There is a group standing outside the front door, among them a nice-looking, obviously Christian gent, around my age. How like the Horensteins, I think, to extend their hospitality, to share their Jewish home with a non-Jewish friend.

The ringer is, of course, not him, but me. He is Michael Oren, the Horensteins' cousin, author of the piece on Wingate and, incidentally, of
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making
of the Modern Middle East.
He is a scholar and saw the eponymous war (1967), and several others, as a paratrooper in the IDF. With him is his son, Yoram, an eighteen-year-old on half-day leave from his unit, an ultra-elite helicopter rescue squad in the IDF. The young man leaves, and Michael says, “When he came home last night, he was short one of his uniform shirts, so I lent him one of mine.” This offhanded statement is the greatest expression of parental pride I have ever heard.

I am overcome by a sense of grief. We sit there, at the ritual meal, talking about Jerusalem, about the war—Michael's sister-in-law was killed in one of the recent bombings—about being Jewish.

To me, a Diaspora Jew, the question is constant, insistent, and poignant while in Israel. At this meal it is more than poignant, it is painful. How, I wonder, can I not be here; and how is it possible that I did not come here (as did Michael Oren) in my youth, and “grow up with the country,” instead of wasting my time in show business? I am full of grief, as at a middle-aged meeting with the girl I did not marry.

Now, this blunt trauma of nostalgia is a dead giveaway, signaling not an inability to relive the past, but to face the present. The present, to me, consists in this: that I am an aging Diaspora Jew on a junket, and that my cheap feelings of personal loss could better be expressed as respect and homage.

Israel is at war and has been at war since its inception. Much contemporary opinion in the West is anti-Semitic. Before my trip, I was strolling through Newton. There, before me, was a broken-down Volvo of old, the vehicle of my brethren, the congenitally liberal. It was festooned, as are its kind, with every sort of correct exhortation: “Save James Bay,” “Honor Diversity,” and so on. A most interesting bumper sticker read: “Israel Out of the Settlements.” Now this is a legitimate expression of free speech. Israel has been involved, as we know, in a rather protracted real estate dispute with several hundred million of its neighbors. This legitimate political expression, however, had all its S's transformed into dollar signs. Here we have, one would have supposed, a civilized person (one would assume that one could reason with the owner of a Volvo) sporting a slogan which could best be translated as “Hook-nosed Jews Die.” My very airplane book, my refuge on the endless flight to Israel, is Tom Clancy's
The Sum of All Fears,
in which I find the major plot point, the misplacement, by Israel, of an atom bomb. As per Mr. Clancy, in this otherwise ripping yarn, the world is going to end because these lazy or distracted Mockies have committed a blunder no civilized folk would make.

It is—I cannot say “refreshing”—a relief to trade a low-level umbrage at anti-Israeli tripe for the reality of a country at war. Israel, at war, looks very much like Israel at peace. Life, as the phrase has it, goes on. Six thousand people have bought tickets to the opening night of the Jerusalem Film Festival. Nine thousand show up and are seated. We are in The Sultan's Pool, a natural open-air amphitheater, just under the walls of the Old City. Lia van Leer, the festival's founder and complete enchilada, asks me to accompany her to the podium to open the ball officially. I do so, in English, and add
“Shalom, chaverim”
(“Hello, companions”), thus exhausting my conversational Hebrew. And we watch Pedro Almodóvar's
Talk to Her,
with 9,000 mainly young Israelis. They laugh at the film, cordially boo the mayor, and, during the speeches afterward, smoke cigarettes, sitting under the open sky. Such beautiful young people. Even the old people here look young to me. But, then, I am in love.

I tour the sites of bombings on the Jaffa Road, accompanying Mayor Ehud Olmert. The tour ends at the house of Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel School, the Jewish state's first school of art. Jimmy and Micah Lewensohn, his great-nephews, are my hosts. It is crammed with workbooks, plaques, sculptures, paintings, ceramics, weavings. Schatz, once court sculptor to the King of Bulgaria, had an unfortunate marital experience, around 1904, and it drove him back to his Judaism. Theodor Herzl enlisted him as the “First Artist of the Yishuv” (the pre-statehood settlement). Schatz came out to create a new Jewish art. Micah tells me that Schatz's wife, once a lover of Gorky, ended up screwing half the men in the Yishuv. It was, he said, like the Wild West. They went up to the Galilee on retreat, got whacked out on the native weeds, and it was one big orgy. These were disaffected youth, he said; they were, in effect, hippies, the early Zionists. Schatz dressed in a white djellaba, kept a pet peacock, and held court in the Galilee. Herzl comes up to see him, there he is: the peacock, half-naked girls,
Shabbos
dinner, and somebody's playing the flute. “And you
know,
” Micah says, “the flute is prohibited on
Shabbos
.”

So I am nostalgic for the days of '48, and Schatz's great-nephew is nostalgic for the 1910 Wild West, as he puts it, of the Galilee. “He was insane,” Micah lovingly says of his great-uncle. “Here is the burial plaque he designed for Ben Yehuda. You will see he dated it ‘In the Year Seven.' ” He shrugs. Ben Yehuda died in '24, and Schatz reinvented the calendar to reflect “seven years since the Balfour Declaration.”

In my study, in the United States, are two World War I posters. The images are identical, but the text of each is in a different language. They show a gallant squad of British soldiers in khaki, charging off. In the foreground, another soldier uses his bayonet to free a bound man. This man is a heavily bearded, tubercular, bowed endomorph in shirt sleeves. He has a hooked nose, essentially, a cartoon tailor of 1917. He gazes at the soldiers, whose ranks he will now join, and says, “You have cut my bonds and set me free. Now let me set others free.” The superscription says, in the one poster in English, and in the other in Yiddish: “Jews the World Over Love Liberty, Have Fought, And Will Fight for It.” And, below the pictured scene: “Britain Expects Every Son of Israel To Do His Duty—Enlist with the Infantry Reinforcements.” Well, it is a various world.

Assimilated Western Jews say, “I don't like this Sharon,” as if to refer to the prime minister simply as “Sharon” were to over-commit themselves. They are like the office assistant raised to executive status who immediately forgets how to use the fax machine. “This Sharon” indeed. Well, there are all sorts of Jews. One dichotomy is between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, and the movie stars in
Exodus
. These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at
Sophie's Choice
sniff at the State of Israel.

Here, in Israel, are
actual
Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world. This Western world is, I think, deeply confused between the real and the imaginary. All of us moviegoers, who awarded ourselves the mantle of humanity for our tears at
The Diary of
Anne Frank—we owe a debt to the Jews. We do not owe this debt out of any “Unwritten Ordinance of Humanitarianism” but from a personal accountability. Having eaten the dessert, cheap sentiment, it is time to eat the broccoli. If you love the Jews as victims, but detest our right to statehood, might you not ask yourself “why?” That is your debt to the Jews. Here is your debt to the Jewish state. Had Israel not in 1981 bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, some scant weeks away from production of nuclear bomb material, all New York (God forbid) might have been Ground Zero.

I had two Tom Clancy books to while away the eons on the plane. One, as I say, was
The Sum of All Fears,
which I discarded on the trip out. Alone, in my Jerusalem hotel room, I turn to my second Clancy novel,
The Bear and the Dragon
. A subplot deals with the Chinese custom (reported by Clancy) of female infanticide. An American operative falls in love with a Chinese young woman and is informed of this crime and is, rightfully, horrified, as is Clancy. How can these little children be murdered? He writes, “If it were the Jews, the world would be Up in Arms.” What can he mean? As the world was in 1941, when they rushed to the defense of six million innocents? Or as the world is today, in its staunch support of Israel's right to existence, and in opposition to the murder of its children? What
can
Clancy mean?
Is
there no beach novel to rest my overburdened sensibilities? Where do I belong? What will bring peace to the Middle East? Why has the Western press embraced antiSemitism as the new black? Well, Jerusalem has been notorious, since antiquity, for inculcating in the visitor a sense not only of the immediacy but of the solubility of the large questions. I recommend it.