Last night I went to a party in New York for Emma Williams’s new book, It’s Easier to Reach Heaven Than the End of the Street, a chronicle of what it was like to live in Jerusalem during the second intifada.
Williams, an English doctor and wife to a U.N. diplomat, was introduced to the large crowd by Sir Brian Urquhart, the former under secretary of the U.N., and I reflected that I had once ridiculed Urquhart in the pages of the New Republic at the instance of Marty Peretz, because Peretz hated the U.N. I did that many years ago, as a young journalist trying to get ahead; still I feel ashamed. I certainly owe Urquhart an apology, and I would point out that this is the way that the Israel lobby works: support for Israel is woven into the fibers of Establishment life, Peretz’s New Republic was the Jaffa Gate for a young magazine journalist trying to enter the city. If you want to get in, well, you support Israel.
I saw a number of people who are planning to go to Gaza for the freedom march, and I saw Cindy and Craig Corrie, who are planning to go to Israel in March, the 7th anniversary of their daughter Rachel’s killing in Rafah, to pursue a lawsuit that they have launched over the circumstances of her death. Craig told me that by law, an American consular official was supposed to be in attendance at Rachel’s autopsy, which was conducted by Israeli doctors. The autopsy proceeded without such an official present.
The Corries and I talked about their brave congressman, Brian Baird, whom Cindy first sought out in the days before Rachel’s killing, when she learned about attacks on international volunteers and wanted the State Department to act. Baird visited Gaza for the first time after the onslaught this year, and the Corries directed me to the statement he made in February, which reveals his moral understanding of the issue:
“The personal stories of children being killed in their homes or schools, entire families wiped out, and relief workers prevented from evacuating the wounded are heart wrenching – what went on here, and what is continuing to go on, is shocking and troubling beyond words…. It’s hard for anyone in our country to imagine how it must feel to have a sick child who needs urgent care or is receiving chemotherapy or dialysis, then be forced to take a needlessly lengthy route, walk rather than drive, and wait in lines as long as two hours simply to get to the hospital. As a health care professional myself, I found this profoundly troubling, no, actually it’s beyond that, it is outrageous…"
I read a lot of Williams’s book on my train ride home, and it contains a similar moral understanding. It is filled with the fear of suicide bombings, and also deep dismay at the brutality of the Israeli response to the Palestinian uprising. Williams chooses to have her fourth child in a Bethlehem hospital, even as the Israelis are doing missile strikes in the occupied territories (because she prefers the British medical model, practiced by Palestinians, to the American one, which the Israelis practice). The chief theme of the book seems to be the impression I got in Gaza: the Palestinians have been dispossessed again and again by Jews who are themselves traumatized. Williams is regularly exposed to the Israeli narrative, and she finds it disfigured. She smiles and walks away at parties, she runs when a woman in the street calls her a murderer because she has U.N. plates.
"We weep to see the suffering of other people," said Uri, "but what can we do?" What Israel was doing was self-defense.
"Other countries have experienced terrorist campaigns–the Ira campaigns on the British mainland, for example–without giving in to extremism," I said to Uri.
"Very few of you were affected by that," he replied. I remarked that [my husband] Andrew’s cousin was killed in an IRA attack on a troop of cavalry in Hyde Park, my brothers’ school friend was killed in a bombing by the IRA and my uncle was lightly wounded in the Harrods bombing, and did what he could to help the injured. This cut no ice. "It’s not the same. These terrorists are out to kill us because of who we are."
Because of who you are, or because of what you’re doing in the Occupied Territories? I wondered…
"It’s because we’re Jews," he said. "They hate us and they want to destroy us…"
The good news of the party I attended is the news I’ve been pushing all year: post-Gaza, a leftwing/international political coalition is gelling that regards Israel’s behavior as extremist. And American Jews are participating, without Uri’s psychic baggage, without needing to distinguish themselves from other participants on a religious/ethnic basis.
