I am sure that there are times that my tortured Jewish approach to events in the Middle East must aggravate readers. Anna Baltzer is clearer than I am about this, so is Jeff Blankfort. They get the Jewish part out of the way and don't try and speak to the Jewish community per se, they talk to America about how we're funding apartheid. While I try and do both. I don't fully understand why I am so engaged by the Jewishness of it, it is after all a form of tribal loyalty, exhibited for all to see; and then a Jewish friend gave me his answer tonight.
He'd sent me a link to a horrifying story in the greatest newspaper in the world about the eviction of an elderly Palestinian couple from their apartment in East Jerusalem to make way for settlers who have claimed the property. This story is so terrifying, and presages further evictions–it is really out of Kafka, out of Kafka's Jewish fears and authoritarian understanding, with the same stifling east European bureaucratic thuggish nausea of Kafka.
I told my friend that this is simply "ethnic cleansing," and "sometimes i just think, why do i even try and save that country from
its fate when it is behaving in this way. and by fate i mean: this is going to go on another generation. there will be more wars,
bombings, etc. not the big one, but 2000 here, 5000 there. lebanons. and in another generation they'll have to accept it…but I don't want to walk down the road reasoning with a crazy man any longer…"
He's responded with two emails. The first was more distinctly tribal:
"What if my grandparents had emigrated to palestine instead of here?
would i have known better, & become a jonathan pollack, or a pacifist? When i come across a brainwashed 17-year old with a
gun defending settlements who throws a palestinian's passbook in the
mud & laughs about it, i wonder if i would have done any better had i been raised in the zio-reich, with rahm emanuel's dad as my pediatrician, & an arab scrubbing my dad's floor.
"It's
not a matter of saving a country from its fate. it's the tribe. that's
why i feel inspired, tho not literally, by people like august bondi, the jew who fought alongside john brown."
His next email was more universalist in feeling:
i'm more concerned about
stopping the oppression, & that means the oppression of the
palestinians. suicide bombings are also oppressive, but mostly they're
blowback
from the treatment of palestinians.
having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should
not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up
in the centres of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in
our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They
spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our
appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are
hungry and humiliated. We could kill a thousand ringleaders a day and
nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below – from
the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice
and moral corruption.
"If all this were inevitable, divinely
ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be
different, and so crying out is a moral imperative"
