A few days ago, I left Gaza with Medea Benjamin (above, as we came through the Sinai) and four other members of her Code Pink delegations. I wasn’t really able to write about Gaza while I was there. We had so many wrenching meetings and encounters over nine days that it was all I could do to drag myself back into my room at 1 in the morning and then rise at 6 or 7 the next day to begin the cycle again.
When I said that I was witnessing bondage out of the Bible, a friend I made in Gaza, Mond Mishal, (right), a would-be graduate student, shook his head.
“Don’t talk about the bible, or an old story. You must find a new metaphor. We are being experimented on. This is a human experiment,” he said.
The other friend I made there, Reem Abu Jaber, echoed the point: “This is beyond books and fairytales. Sometimes I think that words are not made for what we are going through.”
Over the next few days I’ll be offering individual stories from Gaza in an effort to persuade Americans that this is persecution. In the meantime, I wanted to give my overall impressions.
Our days were full for a simple reason: Gaza is lonely. Shunned by the world community and closed off from interaction, the people feel an utter loss of respect, and so almost anyone who knew that the Code Pink delegation was there, from the UN relief agency to Hamas leaders to the International Solidarity Movement and even the New York Times correspondent, wanted to meet with us to try to explain the Gaza experience. These meetings always went over time with exhausting emotional exchanges. Gazans have been written out of the human family, notwithstanding the fact that they are “civilized to their core” (as John Ging of UNWRA says), and the hunger to regain respect in the eyes of the world pervaded every encounter we had, along with rage and helplessness at the global picture of Gaza as a place filled with crazy extremists.
“They think there is one man in Gaza with a long beard and he is saying these things,” Abu Jaber said, referring to Sheikh Yassin—“He is not me. But you must see the context, why he was doing this and saying this.”
She touched on the pervasive atmosphere of the trip, of hatred, communicated between two separated peoples. I’m more interested in the Israeli hatred, because Israel is the powerful party, and I’m Jewish and feel responsibility when I witness the intense racism I observed in Gaza. “What are we, cows and donkeys?” wailed Aisha Abed Rabbo, (left) who had been rendered homeless, living in a tent, through what Human Rights Watch has determined was the “wanton” destruction of housing in the easterly village of Izbet Abed Rabbo.
The answer to Aisha is: Yes; to them you are not much more than cows or donkeys. I know some of this prejudice. I grew up with a sense of Jews as a superior people. As readers of this site know, I am proud of Jewish achievement, I’m a reader and writer because I am Jewish, my culture granted me intellectual confidence. But there is a downside to the exceptionalism, a disdain for people who live off the land, and I saw it at every hand in Gaza. The vicious graffiti on the walls, the use of white phosphorus in civilian neighborhoods (which I’ll document in days to come), the rampant trashing of property—these arise from the cultural and racial differences between Jews and Palestinians that have been inflamed by colonization, war, and maybe worst of all, segregation. When you see this stuff at first hand, all Michael Walzer’s just-war arguments about how Israelis really ought to treat Palestinian civilians in the same way that they would Israel civilians during a battle in a neighborhood come off as overly detached. He knows Jewish exceptionalism as well as I do and knows the contempt that goes along with it. A few hours in Gaza reveals that the Israelis would never treat Palestinian civilians as they would Jewish ones, and inasmuch as Walzer removes this conduct from its real cultural life, he does us no real service.
Just look at this ambulance that the Israelis crushed under a building in a kind of sport, after they stripped the driver of his uniform, which is mutilated here.
That’s Norman Finkelstein walking away (photo right). Finkelstein and I had a running joke. Whenever we visited schools or cultural centers, where children were singing songs and women were learning English, he would walk out and pronounce, “It’s just like Jeffrey Goldberg said! That was a slamdunk! This is [the evil kingdom of] Amalek!” Making fun of Goldberg’s view of the Palestinians as hatefilled extremists, when we had seen ordinary kids singing songs, playing games.
Here it is important for me to add that Goldberg’s view of Gaza draws on truths; and from the moment I arrived in Gaza the Goldberg in me was engaged. Islamic society is different from mine; and in Gaza the difference goes beyond religious difference to racial, cultural and class difference (Gazans are so much poorer than Israelis). I don’t like fundamentalism of any kind; but the strict roles for women in Gaza seem especially illiberal to me. I did not see one woman driving a car there. Here we are in a classroom (left) with a teacher clad head to toe in religious robe, wearing gloves, too, and just a slit for her eyes. I wondered at the model she was making for 10 and 11 year olds. And just as I urge the lesson of American minority rights for Israel’s racist treatment of Palestinians, so I urge a little Title IX on the Muslims.
Something else Goldberg is right about is the hatred toward Israelis and Jews. I heard this expressed often. “Before I hated them. Now I hate them even more,” said our translator, who had lost her home to the latest slaughter. Several Palestinians told me that the only solution is to push the Jews out of historical Palestine. Here, this woman who works for UNRWA is pointing at a map of Palestine and explaining that it is our land and they should just put their things on their backs and go back to the country from which they came, or go into the sea. “It is our land,” I heard that three or four times.
Many of the Gazan trash bins in the street are decorated as this one at left is, with the Star of David.
People routinely spoke of the Israelis as the Jews. The yehud, they would say. The failure to distinguish upset one of the Jews in our delegation, Joyce Ravitz (right), a lifetime Hadassah member and now a one-stater, who made a point of saying that many Jews had come out here to help Palestinians. Finkelstein told me that his parents, concentration camp survivors, always referred to the Nazis as Germans, and that this was a natural confusion, as Nazis were the only Germans they knew.
Given the horrifying onslaught Gazans have experienced at the hands of the Jewish state, which controls and reduces their lives, hatred of Jews is comprehensible to me; and besides, I think that definitions of Jewish identity are a real issue in this conflict. For most Jews, a Palestinian life is simply not worth as much as a Jewish life (Just read Israel Shahak on this question; or consider the fact that Dershowitz says that it is the “sacred mission” of Jews to protect Jewish life –as opposed to others’ lives).
The ethnocentrism and contempt were brought home by the meeting we had with the families of men held in Israeli jails. About 60 or 70 of these people were gathered in the room, for us, as the minister of detainees brought up one after another to the microphone. A boy who had not seen his father in 21 years. This 82-year-old man, Jalal Sagr, who reminded me of my own father, and who has not seen his son in many years and wants to see him before he dies. This little girl with a picture of her father.
I have no idea what the jailed men did or didn’t do. That’s an argument for another day. The simple point is that These people haven’t seen their kin in years. They’re not allowed to visit. And their men are less than 100 miles away in a foreign country. The inhumanity of this is crushing when you consider the point that several family members made, that Gilad Shalit has been held by Hamas for 3 years and his name is known worldwide. Every ambitious politician in Washington knows his name, and meantime there are 11,000 Palestinian prisoners and we never learn a thing about them!
Thus the racist double standard of Arab life being worth so much less than Israeli life is exported from Israel and Palestine to America, and these poor people know it.
Over two weeks in the Middle East, I came to the idea that Israel/Palestine has become an epicenter of hatred; and hatred flows out to the outside world from both sides. The insistence that all of Palestine is Palestinian and Israel/Jewish settlement doesn’t exist has resounded in Arab countries for decades; I have heard it in Egypt and Syria. And the insistence that Palestine is Jewish is meanwhile carried by neoconservatives and Zionists into high levels of American establishment, feeding the settler movement. I’ve fought the Jewish hatred of Arabs for years on this site; and I regret nothing I have done to elevate the Palestinian narrative. It is unheard in the United States, where the Zionist narrative is embraced by politicians who parrot a racist mantra again and again at AIPAC–Israel made the desert bloom–as if Palestinians weren’t growing in the desert for millennia.
Yet I recognize from my trip that there are dangers in the Palestinian narrative. It is backward looking, and it is too large in Palestinian consciousness. Many Palestinians are having lives in other places; and yet, because of the ongoing oppression, this narrative of dispossession and massacre and humiliation crowds the consciousness, just like the Holocaust narrative that I was nursed on as a young man (and that led Jeffrey Goldberg to emigrate to Israel out of the belief that the U.S. was not safe for Jews). I sense that the Nakba narrative is a liability in forming identity. It is its own form of mythology, and while mythologies are rooted in truth, it is not a help in actually imagining a Palestinian future. “We are living 10 percent in the present and 90 percent in the past,” Mond Mishal said to me. The ratio needs to be reversed in order to imagine a future.
I don’t know how Palestinians get past this. Americans could play an important role. They must force the acknowledgment and recognition of the Nakba in world culture, because the failure to acknowledge it is a form of holocaust denial. Barack Obama demonstrated this power the other day when he acknowledged Palestinian humiliations in his Cairo speech, and instantly won the hearts of many Arab youths whom I talked to.
Much as I dislike Islamist fundamentalism, it too must be understood as a form of cultural resistance the Palestinians have been reduced to by their extreme conditions. Sensing Israel’s contempt and returning the hatred, Gazans have fallen back on the thing that sets them apart from us, their religion, and made it scary and alien to us. Mond told me there used to be a liberal culture in Gaza, now it is absent. And with staggering unemployment figures (you hear numbers like 80 percent) there is no middle class, on which democratic life depends. The siege of Gaza is breeding ignorance and idleness and a smuggling culture that undermines civil society.
I believe that we have enormous power to shape the Arab spirit. Code Pink’s outreach to Hamas leaders had an effect in softening the group’s politics; and myself I feel an urgency about working with one foot in the Jewish community and the other in non-Jewish communities, to try and build connections between Arab intellectuals and American intellectuals, connections that could make my country safer and also transform Jewish life.
I’ve said nothing about the larger politics here because I’m boggled now. The occupation and siege are aimed at destroying the Palestinian spirit, that is the only obvious conclusion to me. “Whatever we do now, we are not going to a good place,” Reem Abu Jaber said, breaking down in front of a room full of visitors at the Qattan Center for the Child, which she heads. “You will talk, I know you will. Tell people to come and see my real face, not a media face.” [she is shown here holding a child’s painting of the onslaught]
Myself I almost don’t care how the savage siege and occupation end, with one state, two states, or multiple cantons. What matters most of all is that there is Palestinian freedom of movement and the walls of hatred and suspicion start to come down. On our last night, I was sitting with Mishal, Norm Finkelstein and Roane Carey of the Nation, when Mishal said that Arafat should have accepted the deal in 2000–just as the Arab states should have accepted partition in '47. “They made the same mistake, twice.”
It was a shocking thing for us to hear (Carey has edited an important book criticizing the deal offered at Camp David), but who were we three American lefties to argue with a young man whose dream of becoming an intellectual of the world has been smashed through an unending siege by a great power that is not going away– a young man who accepts that reality?
Ging urged the Code Pink delegation to go to Israel, and try to work with Israelis. I know he's right. A couple of people said to me that the jail that the Israelis have built for the Gazans is the jail in their own minds. “Israeli politicians need their close friends to help them to understand what they are doing,” Hasan Zeyada, a psychologist at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, said, appealing to us. “They have a very tragic experience in the second world war, and … they are psychologically displacing and projecting their suffering on the Palestinians. They need mature politicians to help them pass that experience and integrate it. Only when the Israelis feel guilty about what they have done to the Palestinians will we come to a place of peace.
"And this is your responsibility now, to help them understand.”
