Exile and the Prophetic: ‘Collecting’ (Palestinian) books

This post is part 40 of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

Imagine the Jewish prophetic accompanying the Palestinians.  We are there – now.  After a long time reviewing the situation.Our excuse for the delay?Probably kept in-house.  It couldn’t make sense to the ethnically cleansed, could it? 

Suffering does strange things to people.  Knowing the faults of the oppressors is sometimes a way of recognizing the faults – or potential faults – in your own oppressed people.  You realize that identity and empathy moves in mysterious ways.  So some Palestinians understand.  This means revolutionary forgiveness remains a possibility.  For the time being.

Time limit on the possibility of revolutionary forgiveness.  Things can go too far.  As in the Holocaust.  Then it will fall to the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas.  On the Jews and Palestinians of Conscience level this may become one.

Yes, a Jewish/Palestinian Diaspora is evolving.  Another identity is growing, one that retains each particularity.  Boomeranging back to Israel/Palestine?

Perhaps also a joint Diaspora within the land, since at some point any Jew or Palestinian associating with the Other will be exiled. 

Diaspora birth, growth, fusion, evolution.  It wouldn’t be the first time in history that this happened.  More than one “imagined” community came together out of need, crossing boundaries across “enemy” lines.  The Still/Former Jewish/Israelis may be the glue of this joint Diaspora.  Of course they will be joining a global New Diaspora made of exiles from every land and religion.  Jews and Palestinians will evolve their own particularity. They will be part of a larger identity as well.

Imagine that!  The creation of a new identity which is also not free-floating, so (un)European, which, of course, is free-floating only in their own imagined world.

Catching up on the news, I see the Mormon, Mitt Romney, has been at the Western Wall. Talk about an imagined religion.  But hush, hush, on the politically correct front.  We need to remember that every faith seems absurd from the outside, including the faith of modernity when experienced, say, in the Congo.  From the viewpoint of atrocity, the imagined modern community is one of (un)belief; they think their modern culture doesn’t exist.  Isn’t distinctive. Doesn’t carry a club.

Indeed, most of the Congolese who die don’t have the worldly experience to know what hit them.  Somewhat like the Jews of Europe who couldn’t imagine that it would come to that.  Hell on earth, in civilized Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century – no one could believe it until it was too late.  The death camps weren’t imagined.  They weren’t an imagined community either.

Helicopter gunships in the Ark of the Covenant, sure, that is imagined.  The imagined, here, is constructing a truth that raises the undepicted, the censored, the buried, the unspoken so that it becomes speakable.  In the visual, it becomes more than words.  It becomes the territory of Jewish life. It upends the map of Holocaust and Israel – as innocent.

Now imagine this, “The Great Book Robbery,” – a documentary on the confiscation of books from Palestinian homes during and after the 1948 war.  Presented today in the larger group under the rubric of the archaeology of knowledge.  What it was – theft.

Where are these thousands of Palestinian books now – Israel’s National Library. Catalogued under AP – Absentee Property.  As in, the Palestinians who owned the books have disappeared from Palestine.  Thus Israel claims the books as its national patrimony.  Strange, this organized looting brought the Jewish armed forces and the librarians of the fledgling Jewish state.

One Palestinians commentator remarks that the books are part of the “spoils of 1948.”  The tip of the iceberg, for sure.  Though one Israeli says that the “books were not looted, the owners were absent.”  Like Jewish property looted during and after the Holocaust, the owners being absent?  A library official notes during the time that with the Palestinian books “our research capacity will expand.”  In that comment I hear Edward Said’s Orientalist production of knowledge, Jewish-style.

Two types of looting are identified – individual theft when the Jewish soldiers went through Palestinian homes – organized looting when the library-trained went through the homes to collect the books for the National Library.  Which was worse?

Hebrew University in on everything.  The university that was supposed to bring Jewishness to the world, in its particular and universal Jewish way, where Judah Magnes had been Chancellor, in 1948, he in Washington, D.C. pressing the flesh with Secretary of State Marshall and President Harry Truman and asking them not to recognize the Jewish state and even to declare a US Trusteeship in Palestine which would have meant the sending of American troops to keep Palestine as one – Hebrew University where Martin Buber was teaching – who knew what, when?

Another point in time when the Jewish prophetic was delayed.  Absent.  Like God.  Palestinian books being collected.  Wholesale looting of land and treasure providing the starting point for the Jewish state.

Delaying the prophetic.  Even when the prophetic arrives it may be mixed.  It is always too late or losing. 

Jews as the great book collectors of history. Readers. Being read.

Israel collecting the books of the defeated.  Augmenting our knowledge – of who we have become.