Last night we had an event about Gaza in Manhattan with the Culture Project. It was so great and affirming that I was up most of the night savoring the experience. It was in a grand hall in midtown Manhattan, it was sold out, people actually paid money to go in, and they were rewarded with wisdom about Gaza, Goldstone and the Arab spring. Of the five people on the stage that night, four were women. Many people commented on that, and god knows I’m proud to have had a hand in that staging. But what did they say?
The four experts were like four big characters in a David Hare play. They were all so distinct. Each time they spoke you wanted to hear that character come out then, in the life of the evening. No one dominated, until the end. The thaumaturge (I think I get to use that word, you know I am a helpless showoff) was the moderator Laura Flanders, host and founder of Grit-TV, who called the players out of the shadows with deft phrases.
Naomi Klein was the headliner, and she did what she always does, takes a conversation to a big plane. At the start she said, we did not need human rights reports and international law and the 450 pages of the Goldstone Report, we knew what we saw in the last days of 2008 in Gaza and it was wrong. That is why we are here tonight, because we all saw that– and when she went to Gaza in June 2009 she met people who felt abandoned by the world.
Then at the end she tied it into global warming, and Jewishness too. She is working on a book and a movie on the subject and she said we will face more intensified water wars (implying that they have already begun) and people will become countryless. They will lose their land. And how can I as a north American Jew, Klein said, justify having not one but two countries, one as a possible refuge, in these circumstances. There was huge applause. I was deeply grateful to her for the injection of the privilege/selfishness note, and the Jewish note.
Seated across from Klein was Colonel Desmond Travers of the Goldstone Mission. He has a clipped white military mustache and a military mien and a twinklin sense of humor. He said that he had wanted to go to Gaza because it was a perfect lab for studying the new theories of asymmetrical warfare and counterinsurgency. He spoke of shells and command posts and control towers and tanks and mortars and reminded me a little of the fabulous Uncle Toby of Tristram Shandy, the hobbyhorsical military man. But a moral thread ran through everything he said: he doesn’t know what this asymmetrical warfare means, it is a justification for killing civilians whenever anyone walks toward a post.
Many an army practices scorched earth, many of them poison (pysen he pronounced it) wells, but Travers has never witnessed the terrain-destruction he saw in Gaza. 140,000 olive trees destroyed, 130,000 citrus. Farms and factories bulldozed and sacked, the border turned into a no-man’s land. The intention, he felt, was to burn into the Palestinians’ minds that they must never resist, and in answer to Goldstone’s reconsideration in the Washington Post, Travers said that were he to write the Goldstone Report all over again today, it would only be more emphatic.
But Travers offered a ray of hope. He spoke about Northern Ireland. He said the British had actually learned: you cannot arrest and abuse boys for throwing stones, they will be resistance fighters. And yesterday the Queen came to Ireland and bowed before the monument to the Irish resisters. We never thought we would see that day. Oh, can the Israelis learn?
Lizzy Ratner is my co-editor on the Goldstone volume and she was the storyteller of the event. She laid out what Gaza was, that Guernica of 22 days, she laid out the meaning of the Goldstone Report as a utopian document about international law and accountability. I know this stuff, but afterward a couple friends told me it is a rare thing to have a speaker so vigorously and clearly lay out the matter of the evening. “She was incredible,” says my sister-in-law, a film producer. “She opens her mouth and you’re just comfortable being in her space because she’s so confident and clear and speaks directly to the problem, and she’s accessible.” Ratner has a beautiful voice and I liked it when she took apart the Obama speech of earlier yesterday. She had found it so inspiring when he talked about the democracy movement in the Arab world, and the suicide of the Tunisian peddler. Then as soon as Obama came to the Palestinian case, “it was tsk-tsk.” He began by warning them not to undertake the “symbolic” action of seeking statehood at the U.N. in September. But what was the Tunisian peddler’s electrifying act if not a “symbolic” gesture? All the ideals ended when it came to Israel and Palestine… And in the Goldstone Report, she said, the U.S. fears the enforcement of international law to our drones and disproportions, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Isn’t that what shock and awe was all about?
Finally there was Noura Erakat. She is a Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist and at the end of the night she stole the show. For she spoke almost entirely in political terms. To Travers’s fear that the imprisonment of stone-throwers would create resistance fighters, she said that she honored acts of resistance to occupation, on the part of Hamas and Hezbollah. There was applause, I was surprised how much; but it shows how much the left has now accepted the Palestinian cause. The way to express Palestinian solidarity is through supporting the boycott movement, with its nonviolent language of human rights.
The politics of the Arab spring… Erakat spoke of the effect of Oslo on the Palestinian movement. It splintered it into three or four parts: Israeli Palestinians, Palestinians under occupation, refugee populations in the Arab world, and the Palestinian Diaspora in the west. The Palestinian National Council was to represent the Diaspora but it has only met twice in the last 18 years, so it is “defunct.”
But the Arab spring has reunified the Palestinian national movement. It is coming to Palestine, liberating Palestine. People were thrilled; the affliction of the Palestinians was so much the matter of the evening that again, I say, the left is with her all the way.
But I also heard her selfishly. That was Laura Flanders’s specific effect on me: she said that solidarity must come from a selfish place, and I believe her all the way. I am in this movement selfishly, as an American Jew, two damaged communities. Noura Erakat and the refugees are the Jewish inheritance, they are ours. We rewrote the European Jewish experience on the backs of the Palestinians. We dispossessed them, we transferred them, we cleansed them, we subjugated them, we did to them much of what was done to us. And in the process we built what Europe created, a powerful Diaspora. However you feel about such power, such emotional displacement, the Jewish American achievement on my parents’ generation and mine was built out of such materials.
And now the Palestinian Diaspora is rising, and no one will be able to shut them out, and the world’s abandonment is coming to an end.
P.S. Please note that the event was part of the Culture Project’s Blueprint for Accountability series. It began with a very powerful reading by the actress Trudie Styler of the Khaled Abd Rabbo testimony to the Goldstone mission on the shootings of his three daughters and the panel spoke before a backdrop of photographs of Gaza by Kent Klich.
