Chabon calls occupation ‘the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life’ and says he is ‘culpable’

A lot of people are passing this interview around today, and they should be. It will bring tears to your eyes: the US novelist Michael Chabon speaking sincerely and eloquently about the horrors of the occupation, which he has just toured with Breaking the Silence. Chabon is preparing a book of essays by novelists about the occupation. He was interviewed by Naomi Zeveloff of the Forward. Key excerpts:

Once you see for yourself it is pretty obvious I think to any human being with a heart and a mind, it is pretty clear what to feel about it. It is the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life. I have seen bad things in my own country in America. There is plenty of horrifying injustice in the U.S. prison system, the “second Jim Crow” it is often called. Our drug laws in the United States are grotesquely unjust. I know to some degree what I am talking about. This is the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice. If saying that is going to lose me readers, I don’t want those readers. They can go away and never come back.

What a beautiful statement, let’s honor Chabon for it. He is bearing witness, he is being in the moment. Yes we can criticize him for showing up late; this horror show was evident many many years ago, behind the wall, decades ago to Palestinians. But he went and he saw and he is surely going to take action.

Chabon makes the excellent point that it was Harriet Beecher Stowe who brought on the civil war with her observations of slavery that animated a nation. So storytellers have an important role to play. (And the occupation is as grievous as slavery, because it is ours, in our time, and involves over 4 million people without rights.)

Then he says this about his own culpability:

The first day we were here they took us to Silwan, in the shadow of City of David [a national archaeological park managed by the Elad organization, which helps settlers move into Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem]. I’m hearing and seeing [Jewish settlers] illegally taking over houses and these [Palestinian] people are fighting for their neighborhood. Who does it turn out is one of the major sources of [support] for this whole City of David enterprise? The little blue boxes I put my pocket change in at Hebrew school every week growing up, the Jewish National Fund. That was in 1973 and the pennies I was putting in the boxes weren’t literally going to support the takeover of Silwan. It’s just I have that in my own personal history, not the history of my people, but in my own life I have a connection to something that does make me culpable. Not just through omission, not just through a lack of having taken any action or spoken up or said anything but actually through support of things that I didn’t know were being used in that way. It has given me a whole different viewpoint on the entire enterprise going all the way back to 1967 at least.

Chabon has done the wonderful thing of not exculpating himself because of the Jewish role in the civil rights movement. This is the dodge employed by countless US Jewish progressives, including Jewish World Service. We are engaged in progressive causes; we already gave at the office. Yes, well this is in our own house. Again, maybe it took Chabon too long to show up at the scene of his/our crimes, but there he is and the man’s heart is full and I bet he will do something about it. That is the only course that can follow from his JNF epiphany; and it was always the problem with Peter Beinart. He also was horrified when he saw this video in 2010 of a Palestinian boy crying as his farmer father was brutally arrested for “stealing” water from settlers on lands that had been in his family for centuries. Well that was in 2010, and how much more do you need to see to take action? You don’t need anything more, my friends. I sense that Chabon will never be the same and he will take action and happily alienate Jewish readers and that he will even support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) because it is the only real movement for change that is fighting the occupation every day and every hour.

Now not to be cynical, but– is it possible that Chabon has an eye to the main chance and that he knows young Jews are changing and older ones are sickofitall and he will write a book against the occupation that gets a wide Jewish audience and he will declare that Zionism went badly wrong and its racist strain became the dominant strain and the New York Times will celebrate him for it and he will get a bestseller? I sure hope so.

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“And the occupation is as grievous as slavery”

That’s offensive and ridiculous. The occupation should be ended, and is an injustice to Palestinians, albeit an injustice Israel was forced into to and an injustice that pales in comparison to what is occurring elsewhere in the Middle East.

It is not as grievous as slavery. Slavery involved Americans buying Africans, shipping them here on boats in chains, a trip on which many of them died of disease and starvation, forcing their families apart by stealing and selling their children. Millions were killed. This was followed by forcing freed slaves to endure endless poverty that continues today through Jim Crow laws, redlining, and other forms of institutional discrimination.

This may well be the most grievous injustice Chabon has ever seen, but that’s more a function of the fact that he hasn’t been very many places than a judgment on Israel. He can see much graver injustices virtually everywhere else in the Middle East, Tibet, and many other places. He just hasn’t gone to these places, either because they’re unsafe, or because he doesn’t care.

Thanks Michael Chabon – you just got yourself a new fan. You’re words are heartfelt. Maybe you’ll write a book about it –

an excellent interview, hats off to zeveloff also. i loved his answer here:

What role do novelists have to play in changing the status quo in Israel and the Palestinian Territories?

What a creative writer, a fiction writer or a writer of creative non-fiction can bring is an overt point of view that doesn’t try to hide itself the way journalists are trained to be objective and conceal their biases and just “present the facts.” It is a strength to have a point of view, to implicitly or explicitly say to the reader: Here is where I am coming from and this is what I saw and this is what I thought of it and what I made of it and how it made me feel. It is all there on the page for the reader to accept or reject or connect to or not connect to, and it can be extremely powerful.

Glad to see MW using American historical parallels such as the references to Harriet Beecher Stowe and the American history of black chattel slavery to discuss Palestine and political Zionism here in the US. Intersectionality, indeed. The near constant use of Nazi parallels used in much of the criticism of Israel, while perhaps technically relevant with reference to Israeli military policies and actions, is alien, almost always off-putting and ultimately counterproductive in terms of Palestine solidarity.

Let’s keep the light on the parallels that Americans can relate to directly and with which they are likely to be most open to considering: those that refer to their own history. Let’s experiment with the idea of drafting our posts as curricular resources for the American classroom.

In reference to hophmi’s comment:

“… albeit an injustice Israel was forced into…”

Discussing Palestine and Zionism in the American Classroom – Lesson Plan Number One:

Topic:

Was Israel “forced into” its illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories?

American Historical Parallel: Antebellum claims that the South was “forced into” accepting and expanding slavery.

Overview

America’s slave plantation aristocracy, via its very own in-house propagandist, John C. Calhoun, writing for what is called the “positive-good” school of slavery apologetics claimed that slavery was not something the South should be isolated or penalized for. After all, it had been “forced into” embracing the “peculiar institution” by virtue of the American victory in the War of Independence: it was the British who had established and legitimated slavery and what was South Carolina to do…free the slaves?

Calhoun’s blame-the-British argument served the South well in that it allowed the slave plantation aristocracy – a very small, even tiny minority, however one with keenly focussed power in Congress – to continue its enslavement of black people unabated while simultaneously declaiming to the world that it was a virtuous moral agent trapped not by its own immoralities but rather by the unjust vagaries of history.

The excuse that it was the British who had initiated chattel slavery into the colonies, though self-serving, was true enough: however, having “inherited” slavery the slave plantation aristocracy did nothing to outlaw it and in fact, expanded and deepened it all the while celebrating freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and singing the praises of American “democracy”.

The slave plantation aristocracy never had any intention of limiting chattel slavery merely to the original colonies: its foundational strategy was never limited to the original thirteen American colonies. It had always had its eyes on the entire northern hemisphere including Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and the entire American west in much the same way that political Zionism never intended limit itself to only those parts of historic Palestine outline in the Partition Plan of 1947.

Questions for Classroom Discussion (Choose One)

In your responses please be specific and provide references and footnotes.

1) What was it that “forced” Israel to occupy the Palestinian Territories and what is it that forces Israel to remain there today?

2) What were Zionism’s original publicly stated plans vis-a-vis the indigenous Palestinians?

3) Were Calhoun’s arguments persuasive? If yes, how so? If not, why not?

4) How does Chabon’s epiphany vis-a-vis Zionism and his subsequent writing on the subject compare with the writings of the Grimke Sisters of South Carolina whose family held slaves?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimké_sisters

Reading assignment:

* Arguing about Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress
William Lee Miller (1995)
Chapter Three: An Indignant Rebuke to the Fanatics of the North
P: 27-41

* The Jewish State, by Theodor Herzl
Chapter Four: Society of Jews and Jewish State

* From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948 by Walid Al Khalidi (1987)
Part III: We Look to the United States – David Ben Gurion

* View historic Zionist-published posters related to labor, emigration, settlement, occupation, ethnic cleansing in historic Palestine:

http://www.palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/jewish-colonizationzionist-kibbutzimisraeli-settlements
http://www.palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/buy-hebrew-campaignhebrew-laborconquest-of-labor
http://www.palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/al-nakbathe-catastrophe
http://www.palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/jewish-colonizationzionist-kibbutzimisraeli-settlements
http://www.palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/israeli-occupationisraeli-occupied-territories

Note: I will address hophmi’s “offensive and ridiculous” avoidance of any mention of the MORAL comparison between political Zionism and chattel slavery that is at the heart of Chabon’s epiphany and Phil’s analysis in a subsequent post/lesson plan.

(And the occupation is as grievous as slavery, because it is ours, in our time, and involves over 4 million people…)
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I say, round it up to 6 million.
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It would be poetic justice.