I read David Hare's "monologue" on the Wall on the train just now, and I can't say enough good things about it. First of all, it's great that the New York Review of Books is publishing a forceful piece from Israel/Palestine and making the Wall iconic. Especially after the publication went AWOL for Gaza. Second, the tone and manner of the piece are odd/lovely/original. Sort of an oral performance piece as journalism. Ragged but very real-feeling, you are there.
The best thing about the piece, though, is the way it contrasts high-minded discussions that journalists always have with authors and intellectuals in cafes and backyards in Israel, with very vivid experiences of the occupied territories. Hare is truly interested here not in ideas but in experience, of knowing for a little while what occupation is like. What a great thing this journalism is, what potential it has to actually wake people up. Hare:
the next one, and then the one beyond that, and there aren't even
houses, just trailers, the trailers arriving to plant a new community,
and then no sooner planted than they move on to plant another. They're
called settlements, but in fact they're plantations.
And that's what I feel in Jerusalem as well. Jerusalem used to be
the spiritual capital—after all, that's what the argument was about.
You could feel it, on every street corner, you could feel the history,
but now with the hideous wall and the overbuilding and desecration of
the landscape—I mean, what is going on? Aren't they destroying the very
quality for which the city was meant to be precious? Aren't they
killing the thing they love? …
So—look again, look to the hills, and you can see why the
Palestinians consider the settlements not a religious phenomenon but a
network of control. Because that's what they look like. Watching over
us….
Nablus, the town of Joseph's tomb and Jacob's well;
a city with 180,000 residents, surrounded by six Israeli checkpoints,
fourteen Jewish settlements, and twenty-six settlement outposts which
are illegal even under Israeli law. Nablus, the city that everyone says
will be the crucial testing ground for the future of the Palestinian
Authority on the West Bank: once a home to the Fatah-based al-Aqsa
Martyrs Brigade, but now with a mayor, Adly Yaish, a graduate of
Liverpool University, who, though not a member of Hamas, nevertheless
ran on their ticket and got 73 percent of the vote in 2005. Since then
he has spent fifteen months of his term as mayor in Israeli jails,
without ever being charged with anything. Nine times Israeli judges
have ordered his release.
Nablus, a trading center which is no longer allowed to trade
because—problem for a trading center—nobody's allowed to go there. …Up to 80 percent of the citizens of this town are
unemployed. So there are few customers, and the prices are half what
they are in Jerusalem. In the corner, a biblical hammam, up a short
alley, nothing but steam and stones.
happy. You can lose yourself. Now we've come upon what seems to be the
most famous café, at the center of the market, looking like one of the
greenhouses at Kew. Before renovation, of course. Flat-planed walls of
cracked glass and rotting timber, giving out onto a sunny courtyard.
The Sheikh Qasim Café used to be the fashionable place, the hub, where
everyone went. Now with just five of its four hundred wooden chairs
occupied, it looks like a film set, a stage play, maybe at the Glasgow
Citizens, peeling paint, the wild romanticism of abandonment and decay.
Unless something happens soon, unless the Israelis relax their grip,
unless peace comes to the Middle East, the soil will reclaim this
place.
Antony Loewensterin's blog has some incisive comments re David Grossman referring to Jewish suffering.Hardship and repression is ubiquitous and all races, classes and clans have experienced it.
As human beings we have obligations not only to our family members, friends, community memmbers but to the stranger as well.
Jeff Halper, in addressing a group of people for peace in Australia, said that there are many political groups in Israel with Likud philosophies including Labor and Kadima.
These parties are bereft on policies that include or care for the stranger especially their Semitic neighbours the Palestinians.
David Hare says that " the Israeli State was founded in 1948 with the principal ambition of being normal, of being a normal place like any other."
David Hare has great talent as a playwight but in this case shows a real ignorance of History.
How can a State ever be "normal" if it is built on the degradation of another people? Hare tries to come to some resolution of contradictions and ambiguities in his essay but he needs a refresher course in Middle Eastern history from the days of Theodore Herzl, the Ottoman Empire, Lord Rothschild and early Jewish colonizers.
Reading Gabriel Pieterberg woul be a good start for him.
off-topic post: don't let yourself be bamboozled by blatant lies in MSM about nuclear technology issues
Uranium Enrichment and Gas Centrifuge Technology
off-topic post: email from FAS for those who want to learn more about nuclear weapons issues, important to understanding Israeli and American neocon fears and motivations
FROM THE FEDERATION OF AMERICAN
SCIENTISTS:
New Report Recommends Nuclear Policy on the
Path Toward Nuclear Disarmament –
FAS and NRDC Chart Minimal
Deterrent Nuclear Mission
In Prague, President Barack Obama
called for a world without nuclear weapons. Today, the Federation of
American Scientists (FAS) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
released a report calling for fundamental changes to U.S. nuclear war
planning, a vital prerequisite if smaller nuclear arsenals are to be
achieved.
The study From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence: A New Nuclear
Policy on the Path Toward Eliminating Nuclear Weapons recommends
abandoning the decades-old “counterforce” doctrine and replacing it
with a new and much less ambitious targeting policy the authors call
Minimal Deterrence.
Global Security Newswire reported last week that Department of Defense
officials have concluded that significant reductions to the nuclear
arsenal cannot be made unless President Barak Obama scales back the
nation’s strategic war plan. The FAS/NRDC report presents a plan for how
to do that.
The last time outdated nuclear guidance stood in the way of nuclear
cuts was in 1997, when then President Clinton had to change President
Reagan’s 17-year old guidance to enable U.S. Strategic Command
(STRATCOM) to go to the START-III force level that the Bush administration
subsequently adopted as the Moscow Treaty force level. The series of
STRATCOM force structure studies examining lower
force levels is described in The Matrix of Deterrence.
Resources: Full Report | US Nuclear Forces 2009 | United States Reaches Moscow Treaty Warhead
Limit Early to get the full report
Phil,
I assume you did get the conflict between David Hare's meditations on the oddness of a divided Jerusalem, and your earlier comments on the contempt for those that consider any discussion of undivided Jerusalem.
Phil, there is a huge factual error in this piece that cannot be ignored:
"Ramallah houses the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank—as opposed to Hamas, which was elected to govern Gaza in 2006."
RE: "Aren't they destroying the very quality for which the city was meant to be precious?"
MY COMMENT: I recall reading an article many years ago by architectural critic Paul Goldberger in the NYT about the 'plaza' Israel created at the Western Wall after the '67 war. He wrote about how before 1967 a person would wind their way through a maze of Arab residential streets before the 'Wall' would suddenly loom up above them. He considered that drama a very important part of the experience of visiting the 'Wall'. After the '67 war, Israel bulldozed all of the Arab residential area to make the large empty space called the 'plaza'. Needless to say, Goldberger did not approve!
PS. The Paul Goldberger article referred to above appeared in the "New York Times" in the mid-70s.
From Wikipedia – The Western Wall (Hebrew: הכותל המערבי, translit.: HaKotel HaMa'aravi) (Arabic: حائط البراق, translit.: Ḥā'iṭ Al-Burāq), sometimes referred to as the Wailing Wall or simply the Kotel (lit. Wall; Ashkenazic pronunciation: Kosel), and as al-Buraaq Wall by Muslims [1], is an important Jewish religious site located in the Old City of Jerusalem. Just over half the wall, including its 17 courses located below street level, dates from the end of the Second Temple period, being constructed around 19 BCE by Herod the Great. The remaining layers were added from the 7th century onwards…
After reading Hare's piece yesterday, I got to thinking about the whole theme of walls and so went back to an old piece of 2002, "The Wall: how despair is transforming Israel," by Yossi Klein Halevi, New Republic (7/8/2002, Vol. 227, Issue 2/3), which captures all the self-pity which still has many Israelis in its grip:
QUOTE While international concern is focusing on the physical wall, along the length of the West Bank, that Israel is now building to ward off suicide bombers, Israelis have been increasingly concerned about the invisible wall of isolation that is rising between the Jewish state and much of the world. Israelis haven't felt so alone since the mid-'70s, when the United Nations declared that Zionism equaled racism and when more nations maintained diplomatic relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) than with the Jewish state. The eagerness with which most of the world adopted the Palestinian account of the Camp David talks and dismissed Israel's previously unimaginable concessions as irrelevant; the U.N.'s obsessive search for a nonexistent massacre in Jenin even as it ignores the massacres of Israelis; Europe's growing sympathy for suicide killers and its simplistic reduction of the conflict to occupation; anti-Zionism's emergence, since the Durban anti-racism conference, as a defining feature of the anti-globalization movement; the application of traditional Christian anti-Jewish imagery to the Palestinian conflict (like the new mural in a Scottish church depicting a crucified Jesus surrounded by Israeli soldiers)–all have convinced many Israelis that collective Jewish existence is again on probation. Last year, after the collapse of the Camp David talks and the renewal of anti-Jewish frenzy in the Arab world, Israelis began to suspect that the Middle East might never accept a Jewish state, no matter what its borders. After all, denial of the most basic elements of the Jewish story–from the biblical connection to the land of Israel to the existence of the gas chambers–has become routine in much of the Arab world. But in the last few months Israeli despair has broadened. Israelis now fear not only that they will never be accepted in the Middle East, but also that they will never be accepted in the world at large. UNQUOTE
This is what we're still up against.
Well, delia, look at this way, G-D created the original wall between jews and non-jews, so everything's according to plan, no?
I've just heard David Hare say his bit on BBC radio 4 – an essay called the Wall. Excellent. Anyone know where I can download a transcript?