Thursday Oct 12
Fun fact: experiencing an air raid siren in the evening makes it really hard to sleep through a thunderstorm during the night.
(but the sunrise was brilliant)
So since I spent a lot of the night ruminating about a lot of things, a warning: this entry will be unduly long, and probably a bit too angry.
When I was growing up and becoming more aware of the world, I used to think that the reason that people didn't like Israel was that they had no personal reason to delve beyond the headlines that they saw and really understand the situation. I on the other hand had grown up with an education that gave me insights into all of the different aspects, the nuances, the complexities of the modern middle East and Israel's place in it. I had learned the history, albeit a version focused on the Jewish side of it. But because of my innate obsession with reading and diving deep down rabbit holes across entire landscapes of ideas, I had also learned other sides, read and evaluated the things I saw in the newspapers, and tried to understand and empathize with perspectives that were foreign to me. I was also acutely aware, both personally and culturally, that a lot of people just didn't like Jews, so on a basic level it made sense that Israel – an entire country full of them – would arouse antipathy simply for existing. But I reasoned that the people who didn't seem to mind Jews but still didn’t like Israel, simply didn't know enough. And the journalists whose responsibility it was to educate them, to present all of the sides that I knew existed, also presumably didn't know enough. Let's call my sense of things then an interesting mix of naivete and paternalism.
Then I went to grad school, and entered the world of academia. As an undergraduate, I had majored in the history of modern intellectual thought, and I knew that all the dead white men that I studied were raging antisemites, but I also knew the reason was that every intellectual in that time was a raging antisemite. What I learned though – and it took a long time, because my mind simply couldn’t grasp it – was that in the realm of academia in the late 20th century, not much had changed since the time of those dead white intellectuals. Only that as the western world was finally starting to recognize and come to terms with the horrific ways in which they have historically treated every other culture with which they have come into contact, and to grapple with the growing guilt of being white colonizers that came with such awareness, it began to assume a self-righteousness directed toward others whose “colonizing” activities were more historically recent in an attempt to deflect their own culpability. For example, when I lived in the US, bashing Britain for still being an empire and for its continued status with respect to the Commonwealth colonies, was part of academic culture. (To be fair, some were at least aware of the ironies inherent in celebrating Columbus Day and re-enacting the Mayflower narrative on Thanksgiving.) And Israel – well that was just too easy, especially if you ignore the history and focus on the Palestinians still piled into refugee camps so many decades after the founding of the state.
But how could they really ignore that history? That was, and continues to be, harder to rationalize.
A former student of mine (of whom I’m immensely proud), posted the following on Instagram last night, as part of a series of warnings and admonishments to those who follow her:
Be aware when North American movements such as Land Back are being applied to conversations about occupation in a completely different country on the other side of the world, where the question of living where your ancestors lived has concerned BOTH sides historically and doesn’t have the same “colonizer-colonized” narrative as our country’s history.
As an educator I am keenly aware that the way that we tend to absorb new information is to fit it into pre-existing frameworks. It’s really hard to digest what is completely unfamiliar, so in order to learn it, we make it familiar by analogizing with what we already know. So when students make false analogies, it’s part of their journey to learning, and it’s our job to point out the fallacies and the inconsistencies so that they can grow and develop their own critical and analytical skills. But I have seen academics of every race, religion, and discipline, time and again assert with full confidence that Israeli apartheid settler colonialism is to blame for the problems in this region. I have watched my own university stage panels of ‘experts’ and documentary screenings, and pay a lot of money to people with self-proclaimed expertise in the affairs of the Middle East to get up in front of students and the public and talk about the Israeli apartheid settler colonialism problem. When I see it in the TV newsrooms and internet newsfeeds, it’s disheartening and frustrating. When I see it among my colleagues and peers, it’s incomprehensible and gutting.
My student’s instagram post made me wonder out loud: if the indigenous people whose lands you stole while raping, pillaging, poisoning, and massacring as many of them as possible – lands on which you had no prior claim, having never possessed them historically nor having longed for a return to them for thousands of years – were to suddenly take up arms, storm into your houses, behead your babies, rape your women, and take your grandmothers back to their reserves to parade around as trophies, would you nod understandingly and tell the press that you got what you deserved? (To be clear: I’m not buying into the false analogy that Israel “stole” any lands from anyone, let alone that they did so with anything close to the means that Europeans used, nor with the underlying self-righteous justification that the people whose lands they were taking were heathen pagans with questionable claims on being anything higher than animals lacking souls. I’m just taking this ignorant and blatantly ridiculous comparison to its logical conclusion.)
I don’t understand this drive on the part of educated people to pander to a simplified and ignorant woke agenda, nor do I understand why one needs to be specifically an historian to be able to take a non-myopic perspective of this region and its problems. Again, let’s be clear: Israel’s history is not unblemished, and the suffering of Palestinians through the generations, and ongoing perpetuation of settlements on contested land is repugnant to me. Equally repugnant though is the narrow focus on holding “Israel” as a whole (or worse, "Jews") responsible for the ongoing and very real suffering of millions of Palestinians. (If you want to know why, I'll be posting on that soon but in the meantime read my "Some things you may not know about Hamas" post.) On the one hand, many nations are guilty of perpetuating this suffering and doing nothing to alleviate it; on the other, many Israelis have devoted their lives to doing something about it. It is too easy, and too mistaken, to hold “Israel” accountable, as though the world exists in an historical and political vacuum.
Too easy because it’s simple, and we all love simple explanations. And too easy because falling back on blaming the Jews has always offered a solution that everyone else is too happy to accept.
I understand if you think that my own emphasis on the role of antisemitism in all of this is overblown, because I assume that those of you who are reading this have no problem with Jews. So I want to ask you to consider something. Why is Israel – a country whose total square footage is roughly equivalent to the state of New Jersey and whose population is less than a quarter of California’s – always in the news? Let me put it differently. Open any news site (or newspaper if you still get those) and count the number of articles criticizing Israel’s policies toward Palestine (on an average day, before this week, obviously). Now count the number of articles about China, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Burundi, Egypt, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, and Chad. Go ahead and look up how each of these non-democratic, authoritarian states treat their own populations, let alone minorities that have the misfortune of living there. And now find me a better explanation for the media’s obsession with Israel, because I'd love one.
Actually I have another one to offer, but in the end it amounts to the same explanation I already gave. While the United Nations was key in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the ideal it represents as an intergovernmental entity empowered with ensuring and overseeing international peace, security, and collaboration throughout the world was a laudatory outcome of the 20th century’s catastrophic world wars, the UN has become Israel’s most powerful enemy. There are a lot of historical and geo-political reasons for this, but this blog entry is long enough. If I have the energy I’ll write about them another day. Suffice it to say that in the past 8 years, the UN General Assembly has passed the following Condemnatory Resolutions: 7 against Iran, 8 against N. Korea, 10 against Syria, 23 against Russia, and zero against China (do you know what they’re doing to the Uyghur Muslims there? Has it ever occurred to you to boycott the Dollar Store because the stuff you’re buying there probably comes from Chinese sweatshops that feature child labor?). There are also none against Libya, Turkey, Qatar, or Zimbabwe. There have been 143 passed against Israel during that same 8 year time span. See for yourself here. The authority that the UN's resolutions and policies have in the court of world opinion is more than regrettable, undeserved, but very real.
So in graduate school and over the past 20 years since, I have tried to come to grips with the fact that not much has changed since the days of the dead white raging antisemites I studied in my western intellectual history classes as an undergraduate. Most of the differences are subtle; now the rage is a quiet, latent, under the surface one; and while the 19th and 20th century versions included the concomitant denigration of a swath of other minorities in its wake, it is no longer in vogue to do so. Only Jews – sorry, sympathizers with Israel – are fair game anymore. But what remains most shocking to me, is that this targeting of Israel is as endemic among Jewish intellectuals as it is among non-Jewish ones. In other words, I can’t chalk it up like I used to, to the fact that those who speak out against the right of Israel to exist (i.e. against Zionism) just simply don't know the history, the complexity, or the nuances involved. Or to the idea that they had never been discriminated against themselves, or exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust just a few generations ago. Or to the fact that they were not acutely, fundamentally aware to their core of the central fact of our existence which had always been to me that whenever historically our home countries have turned against us, we've had nowhere to go that we could call home. No place that would accept us without question. No place where we could always feel supported, understood, and safe.
Last winter I was having dinner with some colleagues, including a guest whom I had arranged to bring in so that he could offer a public lecture on Islamophobia in Canada. I knew from his bio that he had spent some time at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, so when we were chatting, I offered that I planned to spend my upcoming sabbatical in Haifa. “Oh,” he said. “Haifa is nice.” Because he was on his way to Europe to promote his latest book, I asked if he was going to spend any time in Israel. “No,” he said. “I haven’t been there in many years. I don’t support the country. I support BDS.” (Note: upcoming post on BDS as soon as I can muster the mental energy but in the meantime if you're curious, take a glance at the hyperlinked article.) I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. In fact, I didn’t say much the rest of the evening. I tried for a long time to understand where he was coming from, and I read articles and websites by other Jewish supporters of BDS to help me wrap my mind around it. I have to confess, that while I fully understand and actively support criticisms of many of the Israeli government's policies, past and present, and while I fully understand the general public’s perspective on Israel due to its ceaseless fuelling by relentlessly one-sided media narratives, I still can’t get my head around the active anti-Zionism and active attempts to cripple or even topple the existence of a Jewish state by modern intellectuals, let alone by Jewish ones. As current events are making abundantly clear, Jews are still under serious threat of violence and the desire to exterminate them in many places in the free world (with the wonderful and laudatory exception of the world leaders who have made strong statements to the contrary). Where do these people think they would be welcome, other than Israel, if the people who hated them – despite their Jewish activism against Israel (which I would carefully distinguish from Jewish criticism of particular Israeli government policies and leaders, of which I am an active sympathizer), which no one who hates Jews would care about for a single moment – were to suddenly start burning down their businesses and homes, lynching their family members, or worse? It’s not like this hasn’t happened before, and in living memory.
I want to tell you a little about A., an Israeli man I have come to know very well and who I love and admire deeply. He is a farmer, born and raised on a kibbutz – I told you a little about him in previous posts. When I was younger and looked forward to afternoons at his house with his family, one of the things that I enjoyed the most (aside from watching him religiously switch out cassette tapes from the stereo during the 24-hour Elvis Presley marathon that the local radio station was running – he was so excited to be able to record the entire thing!) was hearing him talk; about his parents and their lives before coming to Israel, about growing up on the kibbutz, and about serving in the army (when he was somewhere between my son's and my daughter’s age right now) and being caught up in the Six Day War, on the front lines. I cannot begin to imagine how terrifying it would have been. He caught shrapnel in his eye and ear and through much of the rest of his body, but he was the lucky one because many in his platoon didn’t make it. He spent months recovering in the hospital, with R. at his side every minute of it. And then, the inconceivable: he and R. had four children together, and watched each of them grow up and go off to the army themselves. I will say plainly that I don’t know how I would have done that. But then, I didn’t grow up here, my mother wasn’t a refugee from Europe during the Holocaust who lost her entire family to murder by Nazis (and some in previous generations to pogroms), nor was my father a refugee from Afghanistan, persecuted for being Jewish and narrowly escaping to safety in Israel with his life. As dedicated as I am to the idea of a nation where Jews rule over themselves and will always be welcome, I didn’t help build that nation with my own blood, sweat, tears, parents, and children.
When I was here this past May with a couple of colleagues and 30 students (including my son and daughter), we had a tight schedule – only one week to see the whole country before we moved onto Greece and Rome. I wasn’t going to be able to visit the kibbutz, but I called A. and R. anyway just to say hello. They asked where we were staying, and got in the car, drove almost an hour to meet us only to sit in the lobby for an hour and catch up before they needed to head back to the kibbutz for their grandson’s birthday party. During that hour, we talked about the ongoing protests over judicial reform here, and A. told us that he had participated in those protests at least once a week, every week, since they began (a man in his 70s, he also, fyi, still works 4 days a week on the kibbutz farms). He explained, choking up as he talked, that this was the most important thing that he had ever done; the heart, the soul, and the very existence of the country that he and his family and community had built with their own hands was at stake as never before. Sure, the wars over the last 7 decades have constituted external existential threats, but they could put the whole country’s resources and their own physical bodies into fighting those. But now, he said, the very nature of the country’s democratic and socialist principles were under threat in a way that could only be fought with the strength of conviction of the hundreds of thousands with whom he stood in the streets, waving signs and demanding that the government listen to them. He told us that unlike the external wars against Israel’s existence, he and his friends and their communities felt like they were watching everything they had built, everything they had fought for, everything in the name of which they had sacrificed themselves and the lives of their children for, be written out of existence.
One thing you may not know is that members of non-religious kibbutzim (my experience is with secular kibbutz life, so I will limit my comments to those and not generalize about kibbutzim (pl.) organized around religious principles) have always tended to be even more left-leaning than their traditionally fairly left-leaning city-dwelling counterparts. They have been at the forefront of a variety of movements throughout Israel’s history to increase the rights of Palestinians and to trade land for peace toward a two-state solution. But the last 10 years have seen a definite shift to the right across the Israeli spectrum, including in the kibbutzim. The older generation that A. and R. represent deeply lament this shift and the abandonment of the uncompromisingly egalitarian principles upon which the kibbutz movement was founded by their parents; principles around which they in turn have built their lives and characters. But they also understand this shift in a way that is heart-breaking. While their parents – many refugees from the worst anti-semitism perpetuated on a mass scale since the Crusades almost a thousand years earlier – were optimistic that hard work, integrity, courage, and truth would all prevail to show the world what a model democratic state could look like, the reality of brutal wars and perpetual intifadas that their children grew up with have beaten them down. Their parents fought the Arabs who lived in the land for the right to co-exist here with them. Then they themselves fought for the right for those now-“Palestinians” to be granted a land of their own in a 2-state solution. And now their children (note: not necessarily A & R’s children, who share a variety of interesting perspectives of their own), raised with suicide bombings internally and unrelenting hatred and propaganda from western media and intellectuals externally, are simply over it. They just want to raise their own children in a safe space, and concern for the Palestinian cause is no longer on their radar.
One last note, on the subject of understanding one’s children. It has been insinuated to me by a few well-meaning people that it is one thing for me to choose to stay in Israel during this time, but quite another to keep my daughter here with me. So I just want to carefully and clearly state that while I completely get where you’re coming from, I need you to understand two things. First, as I told my son and my parents more than once, her safety is my top priority; if it were me here alone it would be different, but precisely because she is here with me, I am keeping a sharp eye on an exit strategy if things get to a point that I no longer feel that she is reasonably out of harm’s way. Anyone who knows me well knows that my children’s well-being is far and away more important than anything else, full stop. Second, and this is the part that I think some people have a hard time grasping: my daughter is just as hard-headed, stubborn, and wilful as I am (possibly more so) and although she can have a hard time deciding which dessert to order or which courses to take in university, when it comes to convictions of the heart there are no equivocations. Her commitment to staying here has not wavered from the time we heard the rockets falling on Saturday morning until this moment. Last night, in the panic room, I asked her if we should contact the embassy and request to be extracted. “No.” There was no hesitation. “I am not ready to leave yet.” I told her that I respected that, for now, and that I would continue to consult with her but that there may come a time when I needed to override her decision with my own. She understands.
While I am well aware that there is a fine line between bravery and wilful ignorance of danger, if you really want to know who my daughter is and what she stands for, have a look at the posts she’s been writing on social media. She has taken on what seems like the whole world’s hatred – not exactly with equanimity (but who can blame her) – but with tireless and ceaseless efforts to educate and to point people to resources to learn more, and to resources to donate to help others who are suffering. I couldn’t be more proud.
So the good news is that I finished this post relatively early in the day, which means I might actually be able to do some real work now that all of this is off my chest, and there is also the distinct possibility for a nap after lunch. Thanks for reading all the way to the end.
ADDENDUM: No nap. Need to spend some time figuring out if this latest demonstration of true colors is also reflected by my own union leadership, and if so, how to withdraw from my union.