I missed an important lesson about Alan Dershowitz’s encounter with Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa at the Boston book fair on Saturday.
Step back for a moment, and what do you see. You see a young Palestinian writer, calm in her knowledge of her people’s endless dispossession and oppression, essentially stating that a “theocratic” Jewish state does not have a right to exist. And in response, Alan Dershowitz flips out. A 71 year old Harvard professor, world-famous, has a tantrum. He labels Abulhawa a Holocaust denier and a bigot, and compares the Israeli occupation to the occupation of defeated Nazi Germany (and of course in doing so he denies the Nakba and other plain truths of Palestinian history.)
I think it’s my place as a Jew not that distant agewise from Dershowitz to try and explain the behavior. Dershowitz was formed by an awareness of anti-Semitism. Call it anything you like, irrational or paranoid, but grant that this awareness formed him. It pervades his bestseller, Chutzpah, where he behaves like a boor in the company of then Harvard Law Dean Derek Bok because he thinks Bok doesn’t like Jews and says we shouldn’t read Mark Twain or Hemingway because they were anti-Semites. This anxiety informs his every political act. He thinks the Jews are about to be wiped out.
And this awareness informs many, many Jews of my parents’ generation and mine.
I don’t have this consciousness. I believe that lots of people have been oppressed in history and that Jews are doing great in the U.S. and Europe and that when my former editor asked me of my gentile wife’s family, Will they hide you? or when Jeffrey Goldberg asks the same suspicious question of critics of Israel, would they pass the Anne Frank Test? they are wrong in their estimation of non-Jews, they are being selfish and paranoid.
Still these are their genuine feelings, and I don’t think we’re going to work our way out of this mess until we deal with Jewish fears. I remember in Gaza a psychologist saying that Palestinians were freer mentally, even in that prison, than the Israelis. And again I quote Eyad el-Serraj from the Goldstone Report, explaining the slaughter, emphasis mine:
In my view we are seeing not only a state of war but also a state that is cultural and psychological and I hope, I wish that the Israelis would start, and there are many, many Jews in the world and in Israel that look into themselves, have an insight that would make them, alleviate the fear that they have, because there’s a state of fear in Israel, in spite of all the power, and that they would start to walk on the road of dealing with the consequences of their own victimization and to start dealing with the Palestinian as a human being, a full human being who’s equal in rights with the Israeli
Beautiful wise words. What we saw in Dershowitz is fear. The same fear that is in Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on Israel needing to bomb Iran that may soon wag the dog of American policy. And we/I need to help Jews step outside of that fear if we’re going to make a difference.
I think one component of this is an acknowledgement of the Jewish narrative, the Holocaust narrative that so moved my wife when she first set foot on Israeli soil and saw the pictures of the young Yitzhak Rabin. Isaac Deutscher wrote famously that Jews jumped out of a burning building and landed on the Palestinians who were walking by. There is a lot wrong with the metaphor, but there is an emotional/historical truth to the fact that Jews were persecuted in Europe and sought to heal that wound by colonizing Palestine. And yes, having gotten huge reparations from an apologetic Germany, they projected their Nazi enemies on to the Palestinians, as Dershowitz did on Saturday, and to this day they strip Palestinians of humanity because they had the temerity to oppose the colonization, as anybody would.
Still it is also true that Jews were second class citizens in Arab lands historically, secure but second-class, and that the rise of militant aggressive Israel has produced anti-Semitism in the Arab world and even some Holocaust denial. I saw Mein Kampf in an Amman newsstand. I have to read my Achcar book.
I am just saying: I know the Jewish narrative in my bones. I think that time is past, which is why I differ so strongly with it going forward; but I know it, and it is essential to get Jews past this understanding, and empathy is important. Otherwise we will continue to see violent outbursts by powerful people who have not a clue about their power.
