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.
Related posts:
- Two Israeli Jews Speak of Palestinian Violence
- Avraham Burg Urges Jews to Get Past Hangup Over Intermarriage
- At the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Leading Scholar of ‘Arab Jews’ Denounces Islamophobia
- Somebody with a ’sense of victimization, siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization’ needs help
- Jews in recovery (or why liberal American Jews might help to imagine a binational future)
{ 24 comments }
So, what do you derive from the statement of "taking responsibility for the present"?
I just read "The Nazarene" by Sholem Asch. It was very controversial when it came out in the late 30's. It's about Jesus and why the Romans and jews didn't accept him, basically. It seems a very odd thing to be writing in the face of nazi oppression.
Wow do I disagree. This woman ain't the second coming of Tom Segev–in fact, her reductionist views on Holocaust consciousness do considerable violence to the very ideas she purports to be defending. See my breakdown of the event here: http://commentariat.specblogs.com/index.php/2008/02/16/gabbin-about-gaza/
"Jews have been great at preserving a collective identity thru history, lousy at governing another people."
Remember that these traits are related. The same huge sense of ethnic grievance which is so useful for maintaining a collective identity, also makes dispassionate political decision making virtually impossible.
Also, the "2,000 years in the past, 3,000 years in the future" statement was probably one of the dumbest of the night. I agree that Israelis and Jews in general need to take responsibility for the present situation rather than invoking some historical teleology or another–this isn't a controversial point, and was one of JTS chancellor Arnold Eisen's main contentions at a lecture he gave last year. However, Zertal gave the issue a purely theological frame–as students of Judaism should know, the Temple last stood 2,000 years ago, while those who look 3,000 years in the future are typically looking towards some messianic endtime.
But this is bullshit. No mainstream, secular Israelis actually view things in such narrow theological terms, and neither did the Zionist movement, which saw Zionism as replacing the accepted, orthodox eschatological narrative. Zertal's shallow attempt at charicaturing Israelis as religious fanatics was the whopper of the night, and while Shas or UTJ might actually be looking "3,000 years in the future," the majority of Israelis just want this over–and they don't want to restore the Temple in the process.
Neocons Search for 'Anti-Israel' Essays by Obama Advisers
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/954463.html
Armin: your barking up the wrong tree. Phil Weiss has a serious problem with self hatred going on. Lets examine his own writings. He married out, fine. He celebrates Christian holidays, not Jewish ones. And he stand in vehement opposition to the worlds one Jewish state. He has a following among neo-nazi's. And he is obsessed with the number of Jews in social situations, foundations. Well everywhere. He keeps count lest one of the little devils get by him. The guy also seems to subscribe to arcane publications like the cleveland Jewish news and the Yivo institute. Strange doings from a guy who believes that Jews should assimilate out of existence and that Israel should be destroyed. All in all classic psychosis.
"All in all classic psychosis," said Bill Pearlman as he stalked Phil Weiss around the Internet for year after year.
You call that psychosis?
What would you call this:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/761781.html
IDF commander: We fired more than a million cluster bombs in Lebanon
By Meron Rappaport
"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.
more psychosis–
Israel continues to ignore requests for data that would assist clearing the estimated one million unexploded bomblets. … "All these weapons systems are computerised and grid references are entered before the bombs drop. Not receiving the cluster bomb strike data from the Israelis remains our biggest obstacle to clearance,” said Dalya Farran, a spokeswoman for the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre for South Lebanon (MACSL)."
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=76358
Boys,
That's not psychosis, it's the dreaded pork sword of gideon!!!
You talking about the same UN that was complicit in the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers. The UN is a joke. And something else, Hezbollah has the right to kick off a war. They don't have the right to dictate to the other side how they fight it. Personally one of the biggest mistakes Israel made was not eradicating some of these towns off the face of the map.
"The UN is a joke."
It's worse than a joke. It's anti-Semitic!
The UN is anti-semitic joke which created the State of Israel.
I am sorry Ms Zertal doesn't think enough Jews are dying to keep a better balance with the Palestinian casualties. I am sure we can all empathize with her Jewish guilt complex ("pardon us for living").
Regarding the poor quality water in Gaza, I suggest that HAMAS take some of the money they are spending on high explosives, rocket technology and other weapons and use it for building water purification plants.
Acceptance of Jesus in Roman Times
The acceptance or rejection of Jesus among Judeans and Samarians of 3rd century Palestine is a matter of dispute among scholars.
There is widespread agreement that Jesus had wide following among the Palestinian peasantry.
19th philologists argued that Palestinian Christian Aramaic and Palestinian Christian Arabic developed out of Palestinian Judean Aramaic. I doubt that there were clear boundaries between Palestinian Christian Arabic and Palestinian Muslim Arabic in the 19th century although there were certainly regional dialects as well as differences between peasant and urban forms of colloquial Arabic.
Some scholars argue for that practically all Palestinian peasants became "Judean Christians" by the end of the fourth century. Judean Christians eventually migrated into Hijaz, and Islam, whose very name seems to be a reference to Jesus, looks a lot like an evolved version of Judean Christian religion. See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/04/linguistics-islam-and-beatitudes.html .
After Trajan crushed the revolt of 115-117 and put approximately 5,000 Alexandrian Judeans to the sword (Judean sources claim 50,000 deaths or more but consideration of all sources favors the smaller number), probably almost all Egyptian Judeans became followers of Jesus and eventually the core of Egyptian Christianity.
Sefer Hasidim on Intermarriage
The offspring of a Jew who marries a wife not of the Jewish race, but who is a woman of good heart, modesty and charity, must be preferred to the children of a Jewess by birth who is, however, destitute of the same qualities.
And before the peanut gallery start ranting that the book was referring to a non-Jewish woman that converted to Judaism, I have looked fairly carefully over relevant Geniza texts, and I can make a fairly good case that many Rabbanite Jewish communities were still using a patrilineal definition of Jewishness during the time period Sefer Hasidim was compiled.
I read Zertal's book Haummah veHamavet (Nation and Death — sorry as far as I know no translation has appeared in English). It was simultaneously ground-breaking and limited because the violence of Zionist Ashkenazim against Palestinians simply looks too much like the sort of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide that Soviet Ashkenazim planned and undertook in the Soviet Union long before the mass murder of Jews during WW2.
Zertal's book was just too exceptionalist with regard to Israeli history.
Of course, the justifications for the two types of ethnic Ashkenazi violence and here is where the Holocaust plays a major role and plugs into American Jewish Holocaust religion, which serves some very different purposes in the USA.
As I remember Zertal's Hebrew book made no mention of Stalags, which were fictional pornographic stories. They were the most common form of pornography common in Israel until the middle 60s and often had very graphic illustrations.
When I saw the sexual taunting of Palestinian adolescent girls in Hebron, I wondered if there might have been a connection to the Stalags.
Wow, I must say you aren't particularly good at making a point there, Armin.
"There was the title, for one thing, since you can’t really go to an event called “Gaza: The World’s Biggest Prison?” and expect any persuasive argument to the contrary. Never mind that the “world’s biggest” label suggets the kind of competitive victimhood that defenders of Palestinian rights have roundly condemned (since to some, Zionism is predicated on competitive victimhood), or that the term “prison” is abstract enough to include Turkmenistan, Eastern Chad, Belarus or a whole host of hellholes much larger than the tiny Gaza Strip."
The title was conducive to an 'ideological pep rally"? Seems to me that that little question mark thingy at the end would suggest that it is offered as debate.
That it attracted an "anti-Israel" crowd may be unfortunate from where you stand, but then again you were there – or did you forget that?
Do you guys ever stop and think how really dumb you sound when you rant about absolute nonsense? I know you're only concern is to obscure and confuse the issues when it comes to criticizing zionism – but you might want to consider making that a little less obvious. Particularly when Mr.Weiss is clearly making an honest attempt at understanding and analysis – very much unlike yourself…
The event was moderated by Nadia Abu al-Haj, a Palestinian-American academic famous for claiming that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are Zionist ideological fabrications. As I explained in my post, UNRWA is an aggressively anti-Israel organization masquerading as a UN Works and Relief agency; meanwhile Rashid Khalidi holds a chair named after Edward Said. This was in no way offered as a debate, and the panel was stacked with people who are notoriously hostile towards Israel.
And as I mentioned in my post, at Columbia student organizations and academic departments usually hold events to promote their particular views; real debate only occurs at events sponsored by the Political Union or other explicitly nonpartisan groups. Of course, all of this is explained in the second paragraph of my post. But from the looks of it, you didn't quite make it that far.
The event was moderated by Nadia Abu al-Haj, a Palestinian-American academic famous for claiming that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are Zionist ideological fabrications. As I explained in my post, UNRWA is an aggressively anti-Israel organization masquerading as a UN Works and Relief agency; meanwhile Rashid Khalidi holds a chair named after Edward Said. This was in no way offered as a debate, and the panel was stacked with people who are notoriously hostile towards Israel.
And as I mentioned in my post, at Columbia student organizations and academic departments usually hold events to promote their particular views; real debate only occurs at events sponsored by the Political Union or other explicitly nonpartisan groups. Of course, all of this is explained in the second paragraph of my post. But from the looks of it, you didn't quite make it that far.
Armin, perhaps if you could give us an example of how people could criticize Israeli behavior, without at the same time being "aggressively anti-Israel." Can you point to any recent events which have passed your test?
(BTW, what would you like to see debated about Israel's policy towards the inhabitants of Gaza? Too humane? Bad for public relations?)
Also, the charge that someone is occupying a seat named after Edward Said doesn't frighten large numbers of the world's population. (Remember, Jewish numbers are very small.) A better tactic would be to critique something the person himself has actually said or done. Similarly for UNRWA.
"The event was moderated by Nadia Abu al-Haj, a Palestinian-American academic famous for claiming that the ancient Israelite kingdoms are Zionist ideological fabrications."
Where did she make such a claim?
As I understand Abu el_Haj's position is pretty much in line with the well-respected Israeli archeologist, Israel Finkelstein from Tel-Aviv University.
Her only "sin" is interpreting the same facts from a Palestinian perspective. And, of course, being Palestinian in the first place.
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