I missed David Shulman’s blogpost in the New York Review of Books last week on the expulsions in Susya, a Palestinian village surrounded by illegal settlements in the Hebron Hills. Shulman’s reporting focuses on a large Israeli protest of the action, but it seems most significant for the commitment the NYRB is making to Shulman, a writer of real confidence who is not afraid to interrogate Jewish identity construction. When will the New Yorker get to this? I believe Shulman is echoing David Remnick’s fears about the occupation; Remnick should be running this stuff.
Two excerpts below. The second is a nice bit of reporting on the Palestinian resistance. But the first passage is from where Shulman begins, reading Israeli writer S. Yizhar’s 1949 story about the destruction of a Palestinian village during the Nakba, and Yizhar’s agony about what he had participated in.
The story embodies the conscience of Israel at the moment of the state’s formation. It also gives voice to a much older Jewish tradition of moral protest and the struggle for social justice. When I was growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s, I mistakenly thought that this tradition was at the core of what it meant to be Jewish.
Sixty-three years have passed since Yizhar wrote “Khirbet Khizeh.” I wish I could say that what he described was an ugly exception and that such actions don’t happen any more. It is not, and they do. This week I find myself in Susya, in the South Hebron hills, near the southern corner of the West Bank. Like their counterparts in many other Palestinian villages, Susya‘s approximately 300 inhabitants are impoverished, badly scarred, terrified, and defenseless. The week before last the officers of the Civil Administration, that is, the Israeli occupation authority, turned up with new demolition orders in their hands; these orders apply to nearly all the standing structures in the village—mostly tents, ramshackle huts, sheep-pens, latrines, and the wind-and-sun-powered turbine that Israeli activists put up some three years back to generate electricity on this stony, thirsty hilltop in the desert..
As in other Palestinian villages I’ve seen in this mode of non-violent protest, at Susya the women had a leading part, fearlessly engaging the soldiers, taunting them, dancing and singing before them, insouciant. Alongside these women was a troupe of five brightly costumed clowns, no less daring and inventive. Imagine a soldier, laden down with helmet and cartridges and grenades and boots and all the other foolish bits of metal and plastic, pouring sweat in the midday sun. What, exactly, is this soldier to do when a clown with a bright red nose, cackling and giggling, sticks a peacock’s feather down the muzzle of his sub-machine gun and then proceeds to tickle his nose?
Israel is engaged in the total annihilation, the obliteration of Palestine entirely, under the guise of “Occupation”.
To the minds of their younger citizenry, they’ve already achieved this through their indoctrination system – “Judea and Samaria”, thought of as integral parts of Israel, have been implanted in their minds instead of “Palestine” or “West Bank”, and for them, there is no “Green Line” – which is the purpose of their education.
The destruction of Susiya will be just one more step – or one more stomp – in front of a million others in the past 100 years of Zionism. Meanwhile, the narrative will be controlled, the MSM is totally tamed, as is the US govt, so nothing will interrupt or hold up the project of Eretz Israel.
Powerful writing
Shulman understands empires and how they collapse. He understands where Judaism came from and where it is headed .
“Susya is a microcosm of the Israeli occupation, a lucid embodiment of its norms and habits. Only the scale of the planned expulsion is a little unusual; normally the process, though relentless, proceeds in smaller steps. Note that the legal aspect of the situation, which I’ve only outlined, is little more than a superstructure, one might even say a distant theory; on the ground what one sees is a refined form of human malevolence, incapable of justification in rational terms. The Israeli army, the police, the bureaucrats of the Civil Administration, the government, the cabinet, the Knesset, the military and civilian courts, and large parts of the Israeli press—all are deeply implicated in an act, or a series of acts, of gratuitous violence inflicted on innocent human beings, in broad daylight. No one should pretend that any of this is anything but a crime”
It is a betrayal of a great religion.
Do you want Remnick fired by his publisher?
social justice is not at the core of jewish identity? perhaps not for jewish zionists, but for the rest of us jews (& there are many of us) social justice = judaism, that’s all there is, there ain’t no more, only fairy tales & ornamental rituals. the rapid growth of anti-zionist jewish organizations such as JVP is testimony to this & there’s much, much more yet to come. so take note, zionists of all religious/political persuasions, cause the days are numbered in which you’ll be in command of the narrative.