At Columbia U. the other night the Israeli scholar Idith Zertal sought to explain Palestinian violence.
Zertal was speaking on the heels of Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia who in faulting all parties to the Gaza crisis faulted Palestinians as well, and said that Palestinian attacks on the Israelis were "immoral, illegal and politically stupid."
Zertal said that Khalidi was being unrealistic. "You expect from the Palestinian side to be angelical… as if we were talking about a laboratory situation." At every step in the history of the occupation, Israel had acted to "thwart.. the growth of a democratic fabric in Palestinian society." The roadblocks and checkpoints were crucial to this thwarting project. There was no freedom of movement for Palestinians, no freedom to assemble. Israeli authority was violent toward the Palestinians in countless ways, she said.
"The asymmetry between the forces is so blatant, so enormous, that …for Palestinians not to be violent I think is–"
That’s where my notes end. I remember the room exploded with applause–from the many Arab students. Not from the pro-Israel students. They had taken up a few rows near the back of the room, on the right side. At least two asked pro-Israel questions. In American accents, they said that the speakers were excusing Hamas, or that they were ignoring the Palestinian acts that had resulted in the shutdown of Gaza. They cited specific incidents of violence, and invoked that maxim of Israeli life: the need for security.
I had an inkling of something that I have heard about in other settings: That western Jews are standing up to excuse anything Israel does while the actual Israelis in attendance are far more weary and dismal and despairing about what violence has done to their society, their identities and their history. This is another problem with dual loyalty. We westerners don’t have to live in Israeli society. No, we get to exercise our freedoms in great security here. And still we feel called on to support Israel–to be an army for Israel here, as Ruth Wisse has put it. So young American Jews go to war on the Israeli Jews’ behalf here, and meantime the Israelis are the ones who are suffering.
After the conference, an Israeli came up to me. I realized I had met him a year before: Elik Elhanan, an IDF veteran who toured the U.S. with Combatants for Peace. Elhanan is a brave, thoughtful man, now a grad student here. As I chatted with him, a thought kept going through my mind, He lost his sister, he lost his sister, how would I feel to lose my sister? For as Elhanan had described in temples in N.Y. a year ago, his sister was killed in Jerusalem by a suicide bomber. He spent years trying to understand how he should answer his sister’s murder and honor her. Spent years struggling with his commanding officer’s advice that he "revenge" his sister’s murder in his military service.
And here is the epiphany that Elhanan had, which brought me to tears a year ago:
"My sister didn’t die for the security of Israel. She didn’t die
because the Arabs are a lower breed, or because Islam is a fanatic
religion or because of a clash of civilizations. She died very simply
because there is an occupation. Over a disputed piece of land…I
should struggle against the occupation, is what I should do."
It almost goes without saying: Elhanan and Zertal have had to deal with Palestinian violence in a way that few of us here have.
