One mental shadow cast by my trip to Gaza is sympathy for the Israelis.
When you are in Gaza, as far as the eye can see there is incredible cruelty and scorched earth, all but unprovoked. Seeing a child burned by white phosphorus affected my delegation deeply (just look at Daniel Strum's vido). The denial of opportunity to any and all promising Palestinian students– the destruction of homes and businesses– the devastation brought to hospitals, schools and government services– the confiscation of land and the prison-wall borders– many in my delegation began to hate Israel. I felt that hatred myself.
I also wondered why Israel could be so cruel. The usual explanations are racism, colonialism, Jewish chosenness, the psychological brutalization of permanent war, the Holocaust, and the endless permission granted by the Israel lobby. All are true, but insufficient. When I was in Gaza, I wondered why Israelis were so afraid of Palestinians. You are in an incredibly poor place. Hamas has rockets but mostly they have ski masks.
Later it occurred to me that the Israelis are terrified of Hamas because of Hamas's words, that they deny Israel's existence. As John Mearsheimer has said to me, "Jews are people who believe that discourse really matters," and look, the Hamas discourse denies Israel's right to exist. That rhetoric creates a powerful sense of insecurity and wrath among Israelis.
The sympathy I felt for Israelis was the feeling that their sense of belonging anywhere is so fragile that they are easily disturbed by someone saying, We don't recognize you— so they go out and savage innocent children.
The fear was in Netanyahu's speech yesterday. He spoke of the "Jewish people"'s right to the land so many times it felt that he was protesting too much, he doesn't really believe that biblical crap, it is just a self-inflicted propaganda. Then there was his Holocaust story. A member of my delegation to Gaza liked to say that the Israelis manipulate the history of the Holocaust so as to rally American Jewry and the U.S. to Israel's side. At the time I thought he was going in for a kind of Holocaust denial, but Netanyahu's speech supported his view. Netanyahu said that if Israel had existed, the Holocaust would not have happened. He was imagining an unvictimized past so as to imagine a militarized future. And so "Never again" requires the existence of a ferocious Jewish state.
Meanwhile he denies that the Nakba even happened. He made no reference at all to Palestinian story. Palestinians just happened to show up in Netanyahu's Jewish biblical homeland. They are like the fellaheen and Arab beggars of Herzl's Palestinian tour–mere grubs on the landscape.
Putting all this together, I feel that both sides have powerful mythologies that allow them to deny the other's existence. The Holocaust story and the Nakba story. Both are over 60 years old. Both communities, in their vision of justice that excludes the other, are living in the distant past.
As I said the other day, it is essential that the Nakba narrative be acknowledged, in the west and in Israel. Because it is not, now; and we know how vital it was to Jewish liberation in America in my generation, to have the Holocaust recognized. Obama went some way toward acknowledging the Nakba in Cairo, with his talk of Palestinian dislocation, but we must go much further.
And in the end both sides must give up their victimized mythologies. I am not saying that the right of return must be liquidated. That's not for me to say. But the victimized stories must be abandoned if we are going to move forward together. There must be an acknowledgment by Palestinians of their own power to make Israelis miserable.
Even if you are for one democratic state in historical Palestine (and I am, as the goal; really the only goal), it is going to take a number of steps. There will have to be a political condominium. A halfway house for the battered parties to recuperate, called the two-state solution. Then slowly democracy can take root, in both societies, and in Iran and Egypt too.
But more than that some sort of spiritual reconciliation to the other is essential in this process. There are huge cultural differences in the Others; and denial of the other has meant denial of the Palestinian traditional way of life on the one hand and denial of Israeli civil achievement on the other. Looking back on it, my own path in America was eased by the recognition of the Holocaust. My mother's bitter refrain about "the 6 million" was extinguished by being corroborated by the Christians (as we called nonJews); and I stopped thinking about it. Now I'm a Nakba Jew. But I don't want to be one forever.
