A Jewish Plea

> CounterPunch, Weekend Edition
> April 7 / 8, 2007
> http://www.counterpunch.org/roy04072007.html
>
> A Jewish Plea
>
> By SARA ROY
>
> We have nothing to lose except everything. - Albert Camus
>
>
> During the summer my husband and I had a conversion ceremony for our
> adopted daughter, Jess. We took her to the mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath
> where she was totally submerged in a pool of living water -- living
> because it is fed in part by heavenly rain -- and momentarily suspended
> as we are in the womb, emerging the same yet transformed. This ritual
> of purification, transformation and rebirth is central to Judaism and
> it signifies renewal and possibility.
>
> The day of Jess's conversion was also the day that Israel began its
> pitiless bombing of Lebanon and nearly three weeks into Israel's
> violent assault on Gaza, a place that has been my second home for the
> last two decades. This painful juxtaposition of rebirth and destruction
> remains with me, weighing heavily, without respite. Yet, the link
> deeply forged in our construction of self as Jews, between my
> daughter's acceptance into Judaism and Israel's actions-between Judaism
> and Zionism -- a link that I never accepted uncritically but understood
> as historically inevitable and understandable, is one that for me, at
> least, has now been broken.
>
> For unlike past conflicts involving Israel and the Palestinian and Arab
> peoples this one feels qualitatively different -- a turning point --
> not only with regard to the nature of Israel's horrific response -- its
> willingness to destroy and to do so utterly -- but also with regard to
> the virtually unqualified support of organized American Jewry for
> Israel's brutal actions, something that is not new but now no longer
> tolerable to me.
>
> I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined and practiced not so much
> as a religion but as a system of ethics and culture. God was present
> but not central. Israel and the notion of a Jewish homeland were very
> important to my parents, who survived Auschwitz, Chelmno and
> Buchenwald. But unlike many of their friends, my parents were not
> uncritical of Israel. Obedience to a state was not a primary Jewish
> value, especially after the Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for
> Jewish life, for values and beliefs that were not dependent upon
> national or territorial boundaries, but transcended them to include the
> other, always the other. For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing
> witness, raging against injustice and refusing silence. It meant
> compassion, tolerance, and rescue. In the absence of these imperatives,
> they taught me, we cease to be Jews.
>
> Many of the people, both Jewish and others, who write about
> Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the
> people they are writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and
> racism. Within the organized Jewish community especially, it has always
> been unacceptable to claim that Arabs, Palestinians especially, are
> like us, that they, too, possess an essential humanity and must be
> included within our moral boundaries, ceasing to be "a kind of
> solution," a useful, hostile "other" to borrow from Edward Said. That
> any attempt at separation is artificial, an abstraction.
>
> By refusing to seek proximity over distance, we calmly, even gratefully
> refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We are no longer
> compelled, if we ever were, to understand our behavior from positions
> outside our own, to enter, as Jacqueline Rose has written, into each
> other's predicaments and make what is one of the hardest journeys of
> the mind. Hence, there is no need to maintain a living connection with
> the people we are oppressing, to humanize them, taking into account the
> experience of subordination itself, as Said would say. We are not
> preoccupied by our cruelty nor are we haunted by it. The task,
> ultimately, is to tribalize pain, narrowing the scope of human
> suffering to ourselves alone. Such willful blindness leads to the
> destruction of principle and the destruction of people, eliminating all
> possibility of embrace, but it gives us solace.
>
> Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate Palestinians and
> other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history? Why is
> there so little perceived need to question our own narrative (for want
> of a better word) and the one we have given others, preferring instead
> to cherish beliefs and sentiments that remain impenetrable? Why is it
> virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism,
> repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable
> -- indeed, for some, an act of heresy -- to oppose it when Israel is
> the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure? For many among us
> history and memory adhere to preclude reflection and tolerance, where,
> in the words of Northrop Frye, "the enemy become, not people to be
> defeated, but embodiments of an idea to be exterminated."
>
> What happens to the other as we, a broken and weary people, continually
> abuse him, turning him into the enemy we now want and need, secure in a
> prophecy that is thankfully self-fulfilling?
>
> What happens to a people when renewal and injustice are rapturously
> joined?
>
> A new discourse of the unconscious
>
> We speak without mercy, numb to the pain of others, incapable of being
> reached-unconscious. Our words are these:
>
> * " . . . [W]e must not forget,' wrote Ze'ev Schiff, the senior
> political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "the
> most important aspect of this war: Hezbollah and what this terrorist
> organization symbolizes must be destroyed at any price. . . .What
> matters is not the future of the Shiite town of Bint Jbail or the
> Hezbollah positions in Maroun Ras, but the future and safety of the
> State of Israel." "If Israel doesn't improve its military cards in the
> fighting, we will feel the results in the political solution."
>
> * "We must reduce to dust the villages of the south . . ." stated
> Haim Ramon, long known as a political dove and Israel's Minister of
> Justice. "I don't understand why there is still electricity there."
> "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to
> Hizbollah. . . What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge
> firepower before a ground force goes in." Israel's largest selling
> newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth put it this way: "A village from which
> rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire. This
> decision should have been made and executed after the first Katyusha.
> But better late than never."
>
> * "[F]or every katyusha barrage on Haifa, 10 Dahiya buildings will
> be bombed," said the IDF Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz. Eli Yishai,
> Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, proposed turning south Lebanon into a
> "sandbox", while Knesset member Moshe Sharoni called for the
> obliteration of Gaza, and Yoav Limor, a Channel 1 military
> correspondent, suggested an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses followed by
> a parade of prisoners in their underwear in order "to strengthen the
> home front's morale."
>
> * "Remember: distorted philosophical sensitivity [sic] to human
> lives will make us pay the real price of the lives of many, and the
> blood of our sons," read an advertisement in Ha'aretz.
>
> * "[A]ccording to Jewish law," announced the Yesha Rabbinical
> Council, "during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as
> 'innocents of the enemy'."
>
> * "But speaking from our own Judaic faith and legal legacy," argued
> the Rabbinical Council of America, "we believe that Judaism would
> neither require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice himself in
> order to save deliberately endangered enemy civilians. This is
> especially true when confronting a barbaric enemy who would by such
> illicit, consistent, and systematic means seek to destroy not only the
> Jewish soldier, but defeat and destroy the Jewish homeland. New
> realities do indeed require new responses."
>
> * The Israeli author, Naomi Ragan, after learning that many of the
> war dead in Lebanon were children, wrote "Save your sympathy for the
> mothers and sisters and girlfriends of our young soldiers who would
> rather be sitting in study halls learning Torah, but have no choice but
> to risk their precious lives full of hope, goodness and endless
> potential, to wipe out the cancerous terrorist cells that threaten
> their people and all mankind. Make your choice, and save your tears."
>
> Many of us, perhaps most, have declared that all Palestinians and
> Lebanese are the enemy, threatening our -- Israel and the Jewish
> people's -- existence. Everyone we kill and every house we demolish is
> therefore a military target, legitimate and deserving. Terrorism is
> part of their culture and we must strengthen our ability to deter.
> Negotiation, to paraphrase the Israeli scholar, Yehoshua Porat, writing
> during the 1982 Lebanon war, is a "veritable catastrophe for Israel."
> The battlefield will preserve us.
>
> The French critic and historian, Hippolyte Taine, observed:
>
> "Imagine a man who sets out on a voyage equipped with a pair of
> spectacles that magnify things to an extraordinary degree. A hair on
> his hand, a spot on the tablecloth, the shifting fold of a coat, all
> will attract his attention; at this rate, he will not go far, he will
> spend his day taking six steps and will never get out of his room."
>
>
> We are content in our room and seek no exit.
>
> In our room, compassion and conscience are dismissed as weakness, where
> pinpoint surgical strikes constitute restraint and civility and
> momentary ceasefires, acts of humanity and kindness. "Leave your home,
> we are going to destroy it." Several minutes later another home in
> Gaza, another history, is taken, crushed. The warning, though, is not
> for them but for us-it makes us good and clean. What better
> illustration of our morality: when a call to leave one's home minutes
> before it is bombed is considered a humane gesture.
>
> Our warnings have another purpose: they make our actions legitimate and
> our desire for legitimacy is unbounded, voracious. This is perhaps the
> only thing Palestinians (and now the Lebanese) have withheld from us,
> this object of our desire. If legitimacy will not be bestowed then it
> must be created. This explains Israel's obsession with laws and
> legalities to insure in our own eyes that we do not transgress, making
> evil allowable by widening the parameters of license and transgression.
> In this way we insure our goodness and morality, through a piece of
> paper, which is enough for us.
>
> What are Jews now capable of resisting: tyranny? Oppression?
> Occupation? Injustice? We resist none of these things, no more. For too
> many among us they are no longer evil but necessary and good-we cannot
> live, survive without them. What does that make us? We look at
> ourselves and what do we see: a non-Jew, a child, whose pain we inflict
> effortlessly, whose death is demanded and unquestioned, bearing
> validity and purpose.
>
> What do we see: a people who now take pleasure in hating others. Hatred
> is familiar to us if nothing else. We understand it and it is safe. It
> is what we know. We do not fear our own distortion -- do we even see
> it? -- but the loss of our power to deter, and we shake with a violent
> palsy at a solution that shuns the suffering of others. Our pathology
> is this: it lies in our struggle to embrace a morality we no longer
> possess and in our need for persecution of a kind we can no longer
> claim but can only inflict.
>
> We are remote from the conscious world -- brilliantly ignorant, blindly
> visionary, unable to resist from within. We live in an unchanging
> place, absent of season and reflection, devoid of normality and growth,
> and most important of all, emptied-or so we aim -- of the other. A
> ghetto still but now, unlike before, a ghetto of our own making.
>
> What is our narrative of victory and defeat? What does it mean to win?
> Bombed cars with white civilian flags still attached to their windows?
> More dead and dismembered bodies of old people and children littered
> throughout villages that have been ravaged? An entire country disabled
> and broken? Non-ending war? This is our victory, our achievement,
> something we seek and applaud. And how do we measure defeat? Losing the
> will to continue the devastation? Admitting to our persecution of
> others, something we have never done?
>
> We can easily ignore their suffering, cut them from their food, water,
> electricity, and medicine, confiscate their land, demolish their crops
> and deny them egress -- suffocate them, our voices stilled. Racism does
> not allow us to see Arabs as we see ourselves; that is why we rage when
> they do not fail from weakness but instead we find ourselves failing
> from strength. Yet, in our view it is we who are the only victims,
> vulnerable and scarred. All we have is the unnaturalness of our
> condition.
>
> As an unconscious people, we have perhaps reached our nadir with many
> among us now calling for a redefinition of our ethics-the core of who
> we are -- to incorporate the need to kill women and children if Jewish
> security required it. "New realities do indeed require new responses,"
> says the Rabbinical Council of America. Now, for us, violence is
> creation and peace is destruction.
>
> Ending the process of creation and rebirth after the Holocaust
>
> Can we be ordinary, an essential part of our rebirth after the
> Holocaust? Is it possible to be normal when we seek refuge in the
> margin, and remedy in the dispossession and destruction of another
> people? How can we create when we acquiesce so willingly to the
> demolition of homes, construction of barriers, denial of sustenance,
> and ruin of innocents? How can we be merciful when, to use Rose's
> words, we seek "omnipotence as the answer to historical pain?" We
> refuse to hear their pleading, to see those chased from their homes,
> children incinerated in their mother's arms. Instead we tell our
> children to inscribe the bombs that will burn Arab babies.
>
> We argue that we must eliminate terrorism. What do we really know of
> their terrorism, and of ours? What do we care? Rather, with language
> that is denuded and infested-give them more time to bomb so that
> Israel's borders can be natural-we engage repeatedly in a war of
> desire, a war not thrust upon us but of our own choosing, ingratiating
> ourselves with the power to destroy others and insensate to the death
> of our own children. What happens to a nation, asks the Israeli writer
> David Grossman, that cannot save its own child, words written before
> his own son was killed in Lebanon?
>
> There are among Israelis real feelings of vulnerability and fear, never
> resolved but used, intensified. Seeing one's child injured or killed is
> the most horrible vision -- Israelis are vulnerable, far more than
> other Jews. Yet, we as a people have become a force of extremism, of
> chaos and disorder, trying to plow an unruly sea-addicted to death and
> cruelty, intoxicated, with one ambition: to mock the pauper.
>
> Judaism has always prided itself on reflection, critical examination,
> and philosophical inquiry. The Talmudic mind examines a sentence, a
> word, in a multitude of ways, seeking all possible interpretations and
> searching constantly for the one left unsaid. Through such scrutiny it
> is believed comes the awareness needed to protect the innocent, prevent
> injury or harm, and be closer to God.
>
> Now, these are abhorred, eviscerated from our ethical system. Rather
> the imperative is to see through eyes that are closed, unfettered by
> investigation. We conceal our guilt by remaining the abused, despite
> our power, creating situations where our victimization is assured and
> our innocence affirmed. We prefer this abyss to peace, which would hurl
> us unacceptably inward toward awareness and acknowledgement.
>
> Jews do not feel shame over what they have created: an inventory of
> inhumanity. Rather we remain oddly appeased, even calmed by the
> desolation. Our detachment allows us to bear such excess (and commit
> it), to sit in Jewish cafes while Palestinian mothers are murdered in
> front of their children in Gaza. I can now better understand how horror
> occurs-how people, not evil themselves, can allow evil to happen. We
> salve our wounds with our incapacity for remorse, which will be our
> undoing.
>
> Instead the Jewish community demands unity and conformity: "Stand with
> Israel" read the banners on synagogues throughout Boston last summer.
> Unity around what? There is enormous pressure -- indeed coercion --
> within organized American Jewry to present an image of "wall to wall
> unity" as a local Jewish leader put it. But this unity is an illusion
> -- at its edges a smoldering flame rapidly engulfing its core -- for
> mainstream Jewry does not speak for me or for many other Jews. And
> where such unity exists, it is hollow built around fear not humanity,
> on the need to understand reality as it has long been constructed for
> us -- with the Jew as the righteous victim, the innocent incapable of
> harm. It is as if our unbending support for Israel's militarism
> "requires putting our minds as it were into Auschwitz where being a Jew
> puts your existence on the line. To be Jewish means to be threatened,
> nothing more. Hence, the only morality we can acknowledge is saving
> Israel and by extension, ourselves." Within this paradigm, it is
> dissent not conformity that will diminish and destroy us. We hoard our
> victimization as we hoard our identity -- they are one -- incapable of
> change, a failing that will one day result in our own eviction. Is this
> what Zionism has done to Judaism?
>
> Israel's actions not only demonstrate the limits of Israeli power but
> our own limitations as a people: our inability to live a life without
> barriers, to free ourselves from an ethnic loyalty that binds and
> contorts, to emerge, finally, from our spectral chamber.
>
> Ending the (filial) link between Israel and the Holocaust
>
> How can the children of the Holocaust do such things, they ask? But are
> we really their rightful offspring?
>
> As the Holocaust survivor dies, the horror of that period and its
> attendant lessons withdraw further into abstraction and for some Jews,
> many of them in Israel, alienation. The Holocaust stands not as a
> lesson but as an internal act of purification where tribal attachment
> rather than ethical responsibility is demanded and used to define
> collective action. Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome of Jewish
> nationalism, of applying holiness to politics, but whatever its source,
> it has weakened us terribly and cost us greatly.
>
> Silvia Tennenbaum, a survivor and activist writes: "No matter what
> great accomplishments were ours in the diaspora, no matter that we
> produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and hundreds of
> others of mankind's benefactors -- not a warrior among them! -- we look
> at the world of our long exile always in the dark light of the Shoah.
> But this, in itself, is an obscene distortion: would the author . . .
> Primo Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand that we slaughter the
> innocents in a land far from the snow-clad forests of Poland? Is it a
> heroic act to murder a child, even the child of an enemy? Are my
> brethren glad and proud? . . . And, it goes without saying, loyal Jews
> must talk about the Holocaust. Ignore the images of today's dead and
> dying and focus on the grainy black and white pictures showing the
> death of Jews in the villages of Poland, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and
> Bergen-Belsen. We are the first, the only true victims, the champions
> of helplessness for all eternity."
>
> What did my family perish for in the ghettos and concentration camps of
> Poland? Is their role to be exploited and in the momentary absence of
> violence, to be forgotten and abandoned?
>
> Holocaust survivors stood between the past and the present, bearing
> witness, sometimes silently, and even in word, often unheard. Yet, they
> stood as a moral challenge among us and also as living embodiments of a
> history, way of life and culture that long predated the Holocaust and
> Zionism (and that Zionism has long denigrated), refusing, in their own
> way, to let us look past them. Yet, this generation is nearing its end
> and as they leave us, I wonder what is truly left to take their place,
> to fill the moral void created by their absence?
>
> Is it, in the words of a friend, himself a Jew, a "memory manufactory,
> with statues, museums and platoons of 'scholars' designed to preserve,
> indeed ratchet up Jewish feelings of persecution and victimhood, a
> Hitler behind every Katyusha or border skirmish, which must be met with
> some of the same crude slaughterhouse tools the Nazis employed against
> the Jews six decades ago: ghettos, mass arrests and the denigration of
> their enemy's humanity?" Do we now measure success in human bodies and
> in carnage, arguing that our dead bodies are worth more than theirs,
> our children more vulnerable and holy, more in need of protection and
> love, their corpses more deserving of shrouds and burial? Is meaning
> for us to be derived from martyrdom or from children born with a knife
> in their hearts? Is this how my grandmother and grandfather are to be
> remembered?
>
> Our tortured past and its images trespass upon our present not only in
> Israel but in Gaza and Lebanon as well. "They were temporarily buried
> in an empty lot with dozens of others," writes a New York Times
> reporter in Lebanon. "They were assigned numbers, his wife and
> daughter. Alia is No. 35 and Sally is No. 67. 'They are numbers now,'
> said the father. There are no names anymore."
>
> "They were shrunken figures, dehydrated and hungry," observes the
> Washington Post. "Some had lived on candy bars, others on pieces of dry
> bread. Some were shell-shocked, their faces blank . . . One never made
> it. He was carried out on a stretcher, flies landing on lifeless eyes
> that were still open."
>
> As the rightful claimants to our past we should ask, How much damage
> can be done to a soul? But we do not ask. We do not question the
> destruction but only our inability to complete it, to create more
> slaughter sites.
>
> Can we ever emerge from our torpor, able to mourn the devastation?
>
> Our ultimate eviction?
>
> Where do Jews belong? Where is our place? Is it in the ghetto of a
> Jewish state whose shrinking boundaries threaten, one day, to evict us?
> We are powerful but not strong. Our power is our weakness, not our
> strength, because it is used to instill fear rather than trust, and
> because of that, it will one day destroy us if we do not change. More
> and more we find ourselves detached from our past, suspended and
> abandoned, alone, without anchor, aching-if not now, eventually-for
> connection and succor. Grossman has written that as a dream fades it
> does not become a weaker force but a more potent one, desperately clung
> to, even as it ravages and devours.
>
> We consume the land and the water behind walls and steel gates forcing
> out all others. What kind of place are we creating? Are we fated to be
> an intruder in the dust to borrow from Faulkner, whose presence shall
> evaporate with the shifting sands? Are these the boundaries of our
> rebirth after the Holocaust?
>
> I have come to accept that Jewish power and sovereignty and Jewish
> ethics and spiritual integrity are, in the absence of reform,
> incompatible, unable to coexist or be reconciled. For if speaking out
> against the wanton murder of children is considered an act of
> disloyalty and betrayal rather than a legitimate act of dissent, and
> where dissent is so ineffective and reviled, a choice is ultimately
> forced upon us between Zionism and Judaism.
>
> Rabbi Hillel the Elder long ago emphasized ethics as the center of
> Jewish life. Ethical principles or their absence will contribute to the
> survival or destruction of our people. Yet, today what we face is
> something different and possibly more perverse: it is not the
> disappearance of our ethical system but its rewriting into something
> disfigured and execrable.
>
> As Jews in a post-Holocaust world empowered by a Jewish state, how do
> we as a people emerge from atrocity and abjection, empowered and also
> humane, something that still eludes us? How do we move beyond fear and
> omnipotence, beyond innocence and militarism, to envision something
> different, even if uncertain? "How," asks Ahad Haam, the founding
> father of cultural Zionism, "do you make a nation pause for thought?"
>
> For many Jews (and Christians), the answer lies in a strong and
> militarized Jewish state. For others, it is found in the very act of
> survival. For my parents-defeating Hitler meant living a moral life.
> They sought a world where "affirmation is possible and . . . dissent is
> mandatory," where our capacity to witness is restored and sanctioned,
> where we as a people refuse to be overcome by the darkness.
>
> Can we ever turn away from our power to destroy?
>
> It is here that I want to share a story from my family, to describe a
> moment that has inspired all of my work and writing.
>
> My mother and her sister had just been liberated from concentration
> camp by the Russian army. After having captured all the Nazi officials
> and guards who ran the camp, the Russian soldiers told the Jewish
> survivors that they could do whatever they wanted to their German
> persecutors. Many survivors, themselves emaciated and barely alive,
> immediately fell on the Germans, ravaging them. My mother and my aunt,
> standing just yards from the terrible scene unfolding in front of them,
> fell into each other's arms weeping. My mother, who was the physically
> stronger of the two, embraced my aunt, holding her close and my aunt,
> who had difficulty standing, grabbed my mother as if she would never
> let go. She said to my mother, "We cannot do this. Our father and
> mother would say this is wrong. Even now, even after everything we have
> endured, we must seek justice, not revenge. There is no other way." My
> mother, still crying, kissed her sister and the two of them, still one,
> turned and walked away.
>
> What then is the source of our redemption, our salvation? It lies
> ultimately in our willingness to acknowledge the other-the victims we
> have created-Palestinian, Lebanese and also Jewish-and the injustice we
> have perpetrated as a grieving people. Perhaps then we can pursue a
> more just solution in which we seek to be ordinary rather then
> absolute, where we finally come to understand that our only hope is not
> to die peacefully in our homes as one Zionist official put it long ago
> but to live peacefully in those homes.
>
> When my daughter Jess was submerged under the waters of the mikvah for
> the third and final time, she told me she saw rainbows under the water.
> I shall take this beautiful image as a sign of her rebirth and plead
> desperately for ours.
>
> ========================================================================
> ==============
>
> Sara Roy is Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studie,
> Harvard University. "A Jewish Plea" will be published in The War on
> Lebanon: A Reader . Nubar Hovsepian (ed), Interlink Publishing, Spring
> 2007.