Exile and the prophetic: Nightmare in the mountains (awakening to my Jewish colonial self)

This post is part 41 of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

Nightmare in the mountains.  It happens.  I woke up crying out.  Anxiety about the future?

Now writing, a gentle rain outside my window. Day off today. I will be taking a cab into the city of Innsbruck.  Here in the outskirts of the city, you wouldn’t even know there was a city just miles away. Funny, can’t remember if I have ever been in the city center.  Probably haven’t been unless I lectured there years ago.  Have there been too many lectures in my life?

Vienna, yes, my (in)famous boycotting at the Jewish Studies Center.  Other lectures at the university and, if I remember correctly, one for a Pax Christi group at a church.  Large crowd.  Did I mention that just after I arrived here I had lunch with two program graduates, originally from India, one who works to spread nuclear energy in the world, the other a Catholic priest?  Quite a hoot as I told our nuclear proliferator that he was the real missionary and that the priest had lost his missionary badge.  We laughed away.  The other layer is that the nuclear missionary, a very personable fellow, heard me speak at the University of Vienna a few years ago.  It sent him on an Israel/Palestine quest and raised other questions in his life.

“The Great Book Robbery,” some students didn’t get the significance of the taking of books.  Of course, they didn’t think it was right.  Why emphasize it?  In my small group, we thought it through, the expropriation of a culture, the decimation of an educated elite, Palestine wasn’t a backwater, whatever “backwater” means.  Outside of the “meaning” centers of lifewhere the “important” people live?

An obvious dead-end, that kind of thinking.  Quite modern in its colonial dress.  Orientalist to the core, applied far beyond the Orient.  Yet what struck me was my still colonial self in relation to Palestine.  I know that Palestine was a thriving area with everything from intellectuals to people working the land, yet when I refer to Palestine it is usually as villages and towns, people being cleansed and living in refugee camps. All true enough.  Still, the emphasis is on a victimized people assaulted by the modern Western Jew.  Again, not wholly wrong.  Just needs a rebalancing in my still colonial mind.  Working on it.

Interesting, too, joint operations of state and knowledge centers.  All colonial forces combine the two.  I recalled Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscapes, where he recalls traveling through parts of Palestine with his cartographer father substituting Hebrew names for Palestinian named towns and villages.  After all, these areas cleansed of Palestinians or where few would remain had to have new names that represented the language of the state of Israel. 

As a child, Benvenisti was there at the creation of the state and the map, transforming the map/territory of Palestine into the map/territory of Israel.  Benvenisti never forgot this, couldn’t.  The sacred (Jewish) landscape, now, the sacred (Palestinian) landscape, then, all rolled into one, mixed, for Benvenisti now.  Revenge of the subconscious?

Palestinian books, too, stolen, different than the Jewish books being burned, a suggestion by one of the students in the large class.  Yes, as I remarked, the Nazis collected what became artifacts after the cleansing and death of their Jewish owners.  Collected for a Judaica museum, they, too, were being catalogued for display.  For knowledge of a world that had been.  So, the comparison if there has to be library/museum not collection/burning.  At any rate, the difference between ethnic cleansing and everything that goes with it and mass death and everything that goes with it can’t diminish the similarity of expropriation of everything that remains after the people have disappeared.

When 750,000 people, whoever they are, or 6 million, whoever they are, are removed from their lives, there is so much stuff – houses, furniture, bank accounts, jobs, land, businesses, orchards, farm land, houses of worship – that is now empty/available/up for grabs/collected/on the black market.  Boatloads of material life. So, individualized looting complements official looting.  The victors build their future on looting the disappeared.

In the process, no one cares about the disappeared as long as they don’t reappear.  Reappearance in any form is the worst nightmare for the victors.  This is why the looted books of Palestine are so important.  They are Palestine reappearing in book form. 

Our Jewish colonial self minimizes developed Palestine to minimize Palestinian return?

Jews reappearing in Austria.  They’re used to it now.  Still the discussion points remain about Jewish identity – we have never left that topic for long during my time here.  How disturbing it is especially for my European students and, at another level, for my Fiji student, who isn’t in my small group but who appears at meals regularly to talk.  Yesterday she arrived late to meals and didn’t sit with me. She told me that she was disturbed by my discussion about her colonial self. 

Disturbing Jew I am.  Because I – we – keep reappearing?

That’s “them” I suppose.  Interactions on the history front.  My lesson for the day is me, my colonial self.  A work in progress. Coming ever closer to an internal recognition of my own limitations.  Some I can transform and transcend.  Some I’ll probably just have to admit my limitations and listen to others who can move further along the Decolonizing Road.

Yet it is also true that our limits define us.  Is it our limits or the places we have gone in our life, that we are still going, that we weren’t/aren’t supposed to go?

In 1984, traveling though Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, not many Jews had been seen in those parts except Jewish settlers and soldiers.  Then finding my voice in a Jewish theology of liberation. Traveling the world during the first Palestinian uprising. The time after, refining my message in the face of Jewish power. Surviving barely, sometimes flourishing, now on the road again, traveling Jewish.

Nightmare in the mountains. History as a nightmare. Looting of the mind. Grateful for the early light ahead.

Light after nightmare. Mysterious approach to closeness?