As a Jew who is concerned with issues of identity construction, I went to the Arab Students Association event the other night at Columbia for selfish reasons, to see Idith Zertal, the Israeli co-author of Lords of the Land. I was not disappointed.
Zertal is a large woman with a fringe of black hair. Her warm, serious, expressive face reminded me of the faces of my own relatives. She was dressed in black, and when the time came for her to speak and both mikes on the table were pushed toward her, she reached out with both hands. "I want both! The Israeli way." Funny.
Zertal said that she had no words to say about Gaza–she was simply an "ashamed citizen." For we had just seen the most horrific film, presented by the UN representative Andrew Whitley. It told of the blinding of a little girl in her school in Gaza by a stray Israeli bullet. The lives of the girls in the school, and of the poor shattered girl, and of the hospital staff desperate to save her, were laid out with such precision and lack of emotionalizing that it was simply devastating. And then Whitley pointed out the terrible price that Palestinian children (and yes, too, children in Sderot) are paying for the hostilities. Since Feb. ’06, 141 Palestinians under 18 injured by Israeli actions, 41 killed. And 39 killed by Palestinian factional fighting…
Zertal talked about the Israeli psyche. She said that in 2003 a young Israeli officer was interviewed on British television and asked about the damage to Palestinian children. The ratio of Palestinians to Israeli injuries was so out of balance. Was this right? "The young officer, a third generation from the time of the Holocaust, said, ‘the only authority to what we are doing is the gas chambers.’"
Such is the function of the "organized memory of the Holocaust in the Israeli mind," Zertal said. "This ominous presence of a most horrific historical event, how it has shaped a whole society, shaped a collective psyche, and served as a warrant for such [abuses]….Traumas are bad advisers."
And meantime Palestinian children are drinking some of the worst water in the world in Gaza, and suffering high rates of kidney disease, Zertal said. This brought her to relationship of history and consciousness. Jews, she said, "feel at home in a very distant past and a very distant future." Our psychic lives take place 2000 years ago and 3000 years ahead. "The present is always creating a problem for us, for Israelis and Jews." (By which she included American Jews, too.) And the present is the time in which we must actually make our lives. The only way to peace for Jews is to "take responsibility for the present and the near future."
These are brilliant statements. They touch on the Jewish inability to see ourselves as principals in American society, and powers in the Middle East. They touch on Michael Walzer’s statement at Yivo a year back that Jews have been great at preserving a collective identity thru history, lousy at governing another people.
