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Etgar Keret in the ‘NY Times Magazine’ tries on orientalism with an iconic ‘Arab’ look

“If you have a respectable mustache and believable shoes, people will take you for an Arab even if your parents are from Poland,” writes Etgar Keret in “A Mustache for My Son” in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. The “even if” part of Keret’s sentence illustrates a thread running throughout the entire piece. The implication is that it is better to be from Poland than it is to be an Arab. This is just one example of how Keret’s essay follows the tradition of liberal Ashkenazic leftist Zionist writers: Keret speaks for a liberalism that ultimately perpetuates and reinforces the dominant Ashkenazic narrative as superior to others.

The piece is full of teachable moments, but only for the members of this dominant Ashkenazic narrative. Sadly, it is Keret who misses the biggest teachable moment; his essay upholds the status quo of colonization in those very moments when it claims to be progressive. This is the danger of white liberal discourse and it begs certain questions. Is this a cute piece about the writer’s son? Or is it a familial narrative that is politically irresponsible and objectifying to those under occupation?

The first teachable moment comes in Keret’s portrayal of the IDF as a patient army of soldiers who ask “for permission to open fire.” Re-telling a story told to him by his acupuncturist, an IDF soldier who was in an elite unit sporting fake mustaches to stay undercover as “Arabs,” Keret explains that when the acupuncturist was a soldier in Lebanon, he once mistook an Arab man wearing a kaffiyah and holding an umbrella for a man holding a Kalashnikov. “If they encountered someone with a Kalashnikov,” Keret writes, “it was a terrorist and they had to shoot immediately; if it was a hunting rifle, it was probably just a shepherd.” Not only is the mustache a means of exoticizing and othering Palestinians, the mustache in this story is a fake one. As often is the case in hierarchies of power, those in the dominant group can pass freely between worlds and those who are subordinate can’t.

In this story, the 20-year-old “boy with binoculars and a painted-on mustache, not knowing what to do,” didn’t shoot the man with the umbrella. Keret uses this story to present to his New York Times Magazine audience the teachable moment between soldiers: “first lieutenant whispered in his ear that if it really was a terrorist, they had to shoot before he spotted them.” A touching moment between a young, naïve soldier and an older soldier/mentor. A moment that almost cost an Arab man with an umbrella his life.

Keret re-tells this narrative as though it is normal behavior of the IDF. In 2008 when the IDF entered Gaza, they did not take the time to decide if men were “terrorists” or “shepherds,” or who were holding Kalashnikovs or hunting rifles. Palestinians–their daily lives centered around checkpoints and home invasions and evictions and occupation (and certainly not their acupuncturist’s sweet stories)–are never so lucky to be the object of a soldier’s teachable moment when he does the right thing.

That Keret never once in his essay mentions the word “Palestinian” is also noteworthy. Indeed, using the word Arab not only ignores the fact that the Palestinian people do in fact exist as a legitimate people with a legitimate narrative, it also reinforces the Orientalizing of all Arabs as the same. Keret allows himself to use the word “Poland” instead of “Europe” which is further indication of his privilege as part of the dominant narrative–he does to others naturally what is never done to him. Furthermore, the words “Arabs” or “terrorists” are associated with the cultural symbol of the mustache. The mustache is an exotic other that exists only to serve Keret’s anecdote–not as a legitimate cultural norm. This “othering,” indeed, this Orientalizing, serves white liberals by further perpetuating stereotypes of Palestinians as “exotics” and Ashkenazi Israelis as the norm.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Keret’s piece is the fact that by being published in the New York Times Magazine, it reaches about three million readers. What a missed opportunity for Keret to have his own teachable moment, like the soldiers get to have in the story he re-tells–to use his success as a writer to expose the institutionalization of stereotypes, rather than perpetuating and upholding the status quo. The discourse begins with a sweet father and son moment and ends with the Orientalizing of a people whose narrative is erased (and erased from this essay by the lack of the word “Palestinian”).

Keret’s “absurdist” writing, as it has been called–“part Kafka and part Vonnegut”–attempts at the end of the essay to reflect a kind of wry surrealism. Keret writes, “The story of a kid with a scribble that looked like a mustache, who almost killed a man with an umbrella that looked like a rifle, on a covert operation that looked like a war.” Keret ends the essay bringing it back to his son, and Keret’s decision to remove his mustache, “Maybe I’ll shave this mustache off after all. Reality here is confusing enough as it is.” By the end of the essay, the Arab in the acupuncturist’s story serves Keret’s point beautifully. Arabs exist only as objects in the dominant culture’s stories of teachable moments.

Like so many other liberal canonized Israeli writers before him (Amoz Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, for example), Keret is following in the tradition of the liberal Zionist paradigm. Perhaps the most absurd aspect of his piece, after all, is that “absurdist” and “quirky” seem to be the new mainstream. Yitzhak Laor’s book, The Myths of Liberal Zionism, provides an in-depth analysis of these writers and how their “liberalism” actually perpetuates and reinforces the discourse of the dominant narrative, and perpetuates the exoticization and fetishization of Arabs as other and lower. (I had my own teachable moment reading this book, since I grew up, as a young Zionist, loving these writers.)

Keret is right when he says that “[r]eality here is confusing enough as it is.” The teachable moment that Keret misses, however, is that there are different realities and some are more confusing than others. And some, ultimately, are not so confusing after all.

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His name is Etgar, not Edgar. Ironically, it’s Hebrew for ‘challenge.’

Now that the typo has been fixed…

It always puzzled me that my late Polish-born grandfather, who immigrated to Palestine in the early 1930s, would never utter the name “Poland.” To him it was always “Europe.” As if being Polish carried some sort of stigma among Ashkenazi Jews. But that’s kind of a “white man’s problem.”

just reading the nyt mag article now..i had to stop a minute

The mustache is a hairy and mysterious creature, far more enigmatic than its older sibling, the beard, which clearly connotes distress (mourning, finding religion, being marooned on a desert island). The associations aroused by a mustache are more along the lines of “Shaft,” Burt Reynolds, German porn stars, Omar Sharif and Bashar al-Assad — in short, the ’70s and Arabs.

weird. you learn something new everyday.

Thanks for a great article. Keret’s essay was outrageous, and I was glad to see a response like this.

Not to be pedantic or anything , but now that you’ve changed Edgar to Etgar, how about “trys” to “tries”?