Palestine, we all know, is a heartbreaker. The homes wrecked, the
lives spent, the hate fixed between neighbors, families and friends--and still
she devours a century on.
Through decades of bloodshed in her name, there have been a few---fools
mainly—who have wondered what the fuss is all about. Juxtapose her, they keep insisting,
against World War I and II and the hell they unleashed across continents, the
millions they killed, the wholesale population transfers they provoked. What
for, then, all this surely manufactured mayhem?
Others--fools, really—till this very day believe that if only
the Palestinians had been nice, Palestine would have been saved a paradise for all
her children, newcomers and millennium old alike. Here’s
Woody Allen’s eye-popping recent thoughts on the subject:
But I feel that the
Arabs were not very nice in the beginning, and that was a big problem. The Jews
had just come out of a terrible war where they were exterminated by the
millions and persecuted all over Europe, and they were given this tiny, tiny
piece of land in the desert. If the Arabs had just said, “Look, we know what
you guys have been through, take this little piece of land and we’ll all be
friends and help you,” and the Jews came in peace, but they didn’t. They were
not nice about it, and it led to problems…
And still Palestine confounds. Because she doesn’t just break
hearts, she cuts down heroes, infects dreams, turning them into nightmares
and—most consequential of all—she slays myths and mocks those who think they
can, as masters would their slaves, possess her.
For the longest time, as Israel looked contentedly on, it
seemed that only Arabs and Palestinians would fall at her altar. After all, we’re
the fantasists who, through innocence or idiocy, could not keep her. But, of
course, arrogance is its own kind of buffoonery. And would that it were just
the government of Netanyahu’s, then Israel’s supporters might be forgiven for
entertaining the faint possibility that her once magnificently woven script is
still salvageable. But it isn’t, and the implications for Israelis are nothing
short of earth shattering.
I refer here not to the clear breakdown in the European
consensus on Israel, although that matters. Nor do I have in my sight American
public opinion’s gradually less subtle questioning of Israel, although that
matters even more. Nor am I focused on the progressively louder soul searching within
the American Jewish community, although, eventually, that could well prove
vital. I am not even hinting at the thorny debate occupying
wider circles in the West—some earnest, others not--on how well Israel has done
in finally laying the Jewish
Question to rest.
I actually have in mind the disintegration of the extraordinary
dichotomies that Israel, at conception, had so painstakingly constructed in
order to impregnate herself against the damage wrought by her own actions. I
speak of the notion that Israel, Western bastion that she is supposed to be, belongs
in the Middle East but not to it;
that in system and culture she stands apart from—blatantly superior to--the
Arab Other; and with all the
exceptionalism these extend her, that she could proceed to lay absolute claim
to Palestine and crush the
Palestinians.
It is understandable for Israeli leaders to have thought that
they could get away with it, because they did up until 1967. It took such a
unique turn of events, a story so finely tuned, to make 1948 and the “resurrection of a nation” so impervious to the
catastrophe inflicted on another. Had a victorious Israel ceded the lands
conquered in the six-day war, the narrative is almost sure to have held. But
she didn’t, succumbing instead to her insatiable appetites--and, over 40 years,
the tearing
at, first and foremost, the very fabrics that knit
Israel into such perfect shape for all her lovers.
You want it in photos? Then put Avigdor Lieberman against the
legendary Abba Eban. You want it in the currency of hate? Try and argue the
difference between “death to the Arabs” and “death to Israel.” Bloodshed? Then
yours is the face of a dead child in Gaza right next to his twin in Aleppo. You
prefer zealous beards and their gibberish uttered in the name of God? By all
means, stop by the settled hilltops of the West Bank on your way to Zarqa in
Amman.
Of all the divides that Israel had erected to convey an acute
sense of her glorious, enlightened self, none stood grander than the one
between her and us barbarians pressing against her ever expanding borders. More
significantly, none, Israel believed, could be more effective in shielding her
on the inside from the fallout of her misdeeds on the outside. But ironically,
it is precisely this racist license that Israel had devised for herself (in the
European colonial tradition, as it were) that tricked her into thinking that
she could proceed, blessed and unshackled, to occupy, thieve and oppress
without so much as a trace on her body politic, her culture, her character, her
future.
Of this existential dilemma, the late Tony Judt wrote
in 2003:
The problem with Israel,
in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European ‘enclave’ in
the Arab world: but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a
characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that
has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international
law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish
religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever
excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an
anachronism.
You might be feeling the urge to widen the lens onto Syria, Yemen, Libya and
Iraq, for example, to provide kinder context for the Jewish state’s case. And I
would, in turn, thank you. The mere fact that you feel compelled to draw
attention to the bigotries of the neighborhood to dilute Israel’s makes exactly
my point.
In the end, only fairytales withstand the ravages of time. And
Israel is not one of them.
What now? Nothing--and everything. Beyond the immediate
spectacle of balloons deflating all around the Middle East, the coming years
are extremely hard to predict. Ours today is a wasteland of epic tales. There
is something cathartic about the experience, and something devastating as well.
