Yesterday I attended a touring presentation, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, of an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian speaking on the Nakba and the Right of Return. About 30 people came to an Arab group’s space near Wall Street. First Eitan Bronstein spoke. Then Muhammad Jaradat.
I took great pleasure in the fact that generally at such joint American presentations, the Jewish speaker is a person of bigger presence, the Arab plays second fiddle; but these two guys were equal partners, equal as performers. Their presentations were like night and day. But they had the same point: Zionism must end for the people of Palestine to be healed and live together.
Bronstein was slightly merry and indirect. "Shalom," he said with a twinkle at the start. He and other leftwing Jewish activists became dedicated 5 or 6 years ago to the cause of changing Israeli consciousness to include the understanding that the Nakba is part of Jewish history, it is not some separate Arab narrative, and that their towns lie on the ruins of expelled Arabs’ towns. There is simply no acknowledgment of this in Israeli society…
In one project, Bronstein’s groups got lifesized photographs of
Arabs living in a refugee camp in Lebanon and brought these photos back
to the village they were forced out of in the Galilee. They did so
because the Arabs said they would like this to happen; and they then
"populated" the Israeli village with the images. I found this
tremendously moving. Especially the image of an old Palestinian set up
on a demolished grave in the village; for the old Palestinian died not
long after the shot was taken, and he wanted to be buried back in his
village. It showed how important art is to change consciousness. That image simply broke your heart. No explanations necessary.
Another project Bronstein’s group undertook was to make up signs memorializing
Arab features of Israeli cities and put them up in the city. He showed
a film of his group putting up a street sign, right under the Israeli
street signs, in Ashkelon, to describe the Arab village that had been
there and how the residents were forcibly removed at night, in 1950.
Something remarkable happened. When they put up the sign, an Israeli
man came down the street and ripped it down. An Arab woman who lives in
Lod, outside Tel Aviv, and who visits Ashkelon every year because it is
her ancestral home, rushed at the Israeli. "I was born here. My
father’s house was here." They began cursing one another and
threatening to kill one another. The Israeli tossed the sign in the
garbage. They almost came to blows. Then after a stormy exchange, the Israeli allowed her to put the
sign back up, "to please her." And then he brought her a bottle of
water, to cool off. She accepted.
Again, there is nothing to say about such a thing. But Bronstein drew a great storyteller’s lesson.
"The Jewish Israeli said, ‘I don’t like the sign
because I also live here.’ Well what’s the problem? No one touches your
sign. Don’t worry, no one will move it. So what is the problem with
that word ‘also’? The problem is the Zionist identity… We cannot
really live with them. We cannot be ‘also’ here with them in equality.
Because when we are ‘also,’ it is threatening our existence. This is
exactly what we… are trying to challenge."
Now it was Jaradat’s turn. He spoke softly and with a smile, but
there was no merriness or symbolism. He said simply that the right of
return was inalienable.
"The Zionist movement has not come to an empty land…. It is not
true that they came to the desert to bloom it. They have not bloomed
it. They have taken our flowers and our homes, destroyed the nature and
the beauty of that country."
535 Palestinian villages were simply erased, including, Jaradat noted, a great deal of beautiful architecture that as anyone who has visited the Old City knows melds with the land in an indescribable way. Why?
"Because they want
to erase the Palestinian people from existence. We were not supposed to
exist as a people. Because if we exist then the Zionists will be
brought one day to a tribunal because they have acted a crime against
humanity, eviction, ethnic cleansing, genocide."
Jaradat said that despite the fragmentation and dispersal of the
Palestinians, his people had made great progress. They have achieved
unity, "and from unity we also got our identity." Their leadership is
both united and defunct, the PLO. And over the next 20-40 years he believes
the challenge to the Palestinian people is to "get our rights implemented. We
will be criminals if we don’t pave the ground for that–a secular
democratic state in the future."
Will the Jews have to jump into the sea? No. There is plenty of room
for both Jews and Palestinians. Then Jaradat also issued a challenge to
Zionist identity. "[They say] ‘We are Jews and we need to be alone,
give us the land.’ Those who are saying this… are not Jews, but
Zionists." For Judaism is itself a Palestinian tradition. The
Palestinian people are the unique heirs to three great religious
traditions in their midst. "No one can divorce the Palestinians from
this diversity of culture." Jaradat looks forward to the day when he, a
nonreligious person, can go through the Damascus Gate and have his cup
of coffee at a coffee shop even as Muslims walk past him to the Al-Aqsa
Mosque with no fear that their right to worship will be circumscribed.
The crowd in the room was small, quiet, slightly adulatory. An older Jewish woman stood up to say that the message in the room that day would be met with "extreme hysteria" in the U.S. For we have a "sickness" here that prevents serious discussion. We believe that if Israel ceases to be a Jewish state, there will be no Jewish life, no synagogues. "The Jews will be killed there and then sooner or later our time [in the U.S.] will come."
Bronstein’s answer was that Americans must help us to imagine that new state. Herzl was a visionary. He dreamed up something that did not exist 112 years ago and people said he was crazy. The new state "is not imagined. By artists, by writers, by architects, by movies." It can be imagined.
A few comments:
–The idea that the Nakba and Exodus are not separate narratives but must be integrated is revolutionary, liberating…
–Yes, I’m in an anti-Zionist mood today. But I’m not planting a flag, I’m listening and nodding my head. Richard, I consider myself post-Zionist but am still learning and often find myself opposed to Zionism. For those who are scared by this stuff, you should know that it wasn’t a big crowd, and there were, I’d say, mostly Arabs and Arab-Americans in the audience.
–The anti-Zionist space in the U.S. is unquestionably widening. The charming Adam Horowitz of AFSC was there yesterday. I’d note that Tony Karon, Brian Klug and Joel Kovel (who has said "Is Zionism racism? Is the Pope Catholic?") gave a Zionism Reconsidered presentation in Chicago that the touring group observed; and Bronstein said that one of those K writers said that such a presentation couldn’t happen in America a few years ago. True. It doesn’t seem fringe any more. (Are you guys coming to New York? Lemme know.)
–Jaradat’s description of Palestinian-Jewish heritage and having his secular coffee in the Old City was beautiful and confusing and reminded me of Saif Ammous telling Anita Shapira a year ago at Columbia that he also has Jewish heritage, but he can’t live in the Jewish state.
—Doug Suisman is a Jewish-American urban designer who at the behest of Rand has imagined the Palestinian state, including the "flexible infrastructure corridor" joining Gaza and the West Bank, which he calls The Arc. His design is gorgeous and forwardlooking but I have always found it a little chilling. It’s one thing to be for a two-state solution, as I am right now, and another to be dreaming up the beauty of a gerrymandered and fragmented geographical entity. I can’t make my imagination go there– to a kidney-shaped state with Gaza on the side, as Ammous says, or in the Arc’s case, a trout fly with a hook swinging down. A two-state solution feels like a provisional way station for me. I feel that the segregationists in the south in the 60s might have called on such imaginations, too, and paid good money for them, and every Jew I know would have said No no no. The imaginative challenge Bronstein offered is a higher one. Imshallah…
–Zionist identity remains entwined with Holocaust consciousness. That old lady put it best. American Jewry maintains that first they will come for the Israelis, then for us…. And other words: hysteria, sickness…
