Exile and the prophetic: Listening to Sara Roy

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

I just listened to Sara Roy deliver the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the Palestine Center.  I have known Sara for years.  Sara is a Jew of Conscience, and though she rarely talks about it, she is also a child of Holocaust survivors.   As one of the world’s foremost experts on Gaza, her background may be irrelevant.  Then, again, it might be quite relevant.

You see the Holocaust was real.  It wasn’t conducted by Jews or Zionists.  It wasn’t a conspiracy of one sort or the other.  You can break the Holocaust down any way you want to but it remains horrific to the core.

Sara doesn’t wear her Jewishness on her sleeve.  Like the Holocaust, she rarely talks about it.  In this way, Sara is a lot like Noam Chomsky.  He doesn’t wear his Jewishness on his sleeve either.  However, without factoring in his Jewishness, you don’t understand Chomsky.  It’s the same way with Sara. 

Rather than speak about her Jewishness, Sara exudes it. In light of the Free Gaza flap of the past days, Sara connects the dots of Jewishness as a particularity with its universal thrust.  Both exemplify the prophetic in its Jewish incarnation.  This prophetic is homegrown, indigenous to Jewish life.  The prophetic has stood the test time. 

Sara embodies the Jewish prophetic.  How interesting as well that she would be called to speak at Edward Said’s type of altar, the lectern, to honor him.   In flights of rhetorical fancy, Said imagined himself a cosmopolitan Jew much like Sara.   They were friends in life.  No matter how cosmopolitan, both drawn to and embodied the Jewish prophetic.

Sara’s lecture was close to the bone.  The only rhetorical lines were encapsulated in the title and in her closing.  Her title is dramatic and, unfortunately, quite apt:  “A Deliberate Cruelty:  Rendering Gaza Unlivable.” 

With a highly organized narrative, Sara’s lecture unpacks her title.   Sara is methodical, outlining what the Israeli and Egyptian closures mean to the people of Gaza.  Isolated, Gaza has developed a “Tunnel” economy were goods are smuggled in from Egypt.  Though in many ways heroic, such an economy is outside a normal setting; it isn’t good for Gaza in the long run.  For Sara, such an economy discourages a more productive and regulated business class.   Likewise, it encourages smuggling and the rise of a Black market mercantile class. 

Obviously the isolation of Gaza takes its toll in other areas as well.  Like the economy, isolation distorts the political situation in Gaza and among Palestinians in general.  The natural basis for political collective action between Gaza and the West Bank has been interrupted, if not destroyed. 

Israel is a main player here and everywhere in Sara’s lecture.  She especially focuses on the “buffer” zone between Gaza and Israel which comprises nearly 14% of Gaza’s land mass and contains 48% of its arable land.  Israel’s bulldozing and compacting of the land there has an especially onerous effect on Gaza’s ability to feed itself and export produce.  This and Israel’s restrictions on the maritime industry render Gaza dependent and further isolate it from its neighbors.

It’s a devastating picture that Sara draws.  She does so without hyperbole or a raised voice.  Sara doesn’t use mythic videos of Jewish power or Jewish conspiracy. She doesn’t use any “ism” language, even of International Law.  She simply analyzes what’s going on.  She assumes the conclusions are obvious.  They are.

It is only at the end of her lecture that Sara fills in the blanks of the thought behind her analysis. She first quotes from Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of Hebrew University who believes that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are entrapped in “a zone of non-existence.” 

In this zone, she argues, one finds “new spaces of obscenity in the politics of day-to-day lives” where engaging in normal, everyday acts of living and working—going to school, visiting neighbors, traveling abroad, planting a tree, growing vegetables and selling products in a nearby market—are treated as criminal activities, punishable, in some instances, by death.  In these obscene spaces, innocent human beings—most of them, children—are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink, all with the knowledge and acquiescence of the world community.

Then, unexpectedly, Sara speaks of her Jewishness.  Her Jewishness is unadorned.  It seems a natural conclusion to her analysis.  Nonetheless, you can feel an emotional resonance.  With her family background and her grounding in Jewish life, you feel that the words are heart-felt.  They come at a cost: 

This disfigurement of everyday life is, for me, as a Jew, painfully symbolized in the Star of David that was gouged into Gaza’s soil during Israel’s 2008 war on the territory. Yet the desecration of the land in this way not only points to the destruction of a way of life and means of survival for Palestinians, it embodies the limitations of Israeli power and the failings of Jewish life as well.  No doubt those who wrested the Star of David from Gaza’s land meant to convey the presence and the power of the Jewish state over the destiny of others. Yet this power is one of deprivation and ruin, and it speaks profoundly to our own inability to live a life without the walls we are constantly asked to build. 

Sara concludes:  

As I have hopefully shown, the people of Gaza are being deliberately targeted and a crime against them is being committed.  More than anything, this crime is found in the daily and unrelenting assault on their economy and society for which the United States, the European Union and various Arab states bear enormous responsibility together with Israel. Whether you deliberately shoot a human being through the heart with a bullet or deprive him of a home, livelihood, and the means to care for his children, you are saying to that human being that he has no right to exist. In this way, among others, Gaza speaks to the unnaturalness of our own condition as Jews.  For in Gaza, we seek remedy and consolation in the ruin of another people, “[o]bserving the windows of [their] houses through the sites of rifles,” to borrow from the Israeli poet, Almog Behar. It is ironic then that our own salvation now lies in Gaza’s. And no degree of distance or separation can ever change that.

How powerful Sara’s images are: 

The Star of David gouged into Gaza’s soil.

Desecration of Palestinian landas embodying the limitations of Israeli power and the failings of Jewish life.

Israeli power as testimony to our own inability as Jews to live without walls of our own construction. 

What Israel is doing to Gaza speaks to the unnaturalness of our own condition as Jews.  

Sara’s video and text should be added to all those Jewish organizations collecting materials on the end of Jewish history as we have known and inherited it.  I include here the Israel National Archives, B’Tselem and Haaretz.  It also should be forwarded to the archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  After all, listening to Sara, I hear her announcing the end of Holocaust consciousness as a blunt instrument against the Palestinian people.  

Shall the video of Sara’s lecture be forwarded to the leaders of the Free Gaza movement with the proviso that her family Holocaust-laden biography be included as the introduction to her lecture?  They can then tweet it to the larger or smaller audience that received the earlier video on Zionism and the Holocaust. 

Listening to Sara I feel the flowering of Jewish life at the end of Jewish history. 

Paradoxical I know, but anyone who has practiced the asceticism of the prophetic knows that documenting the end is a sign of fidelity.  It is also a sign of hope.