Essentially, in moving to Ramallah, I did not make a choice. For Palestinians, the choice of life in Israel or the West Bank is a choice between two systems of Israeli aggression, different only in their manifestations. Both are just as deadly and soul crushing. Both attempt to negate us, to treat us with condescension and contempt, and to turn us into victims of state oppression in our own homeland. Both refuse to acknowledge our rights and dignity as a people, a people whose country and self-determination were stripped from them and who are losing all hope that there is a way out of this mess.
I need answers, as does every Palestinian, from anyone who says he or she loves Israel.
An Unsuitable Place for Clowns
Arnon Grunberg
1.
In 1982—I was eleven at the time—my older and only sister, Maniou-Louise, made aliyah. That is to say: she moved to Israel, her Zionist dream fulfilled. She gave up studying medicine at Amsterdam’s Free University and went to study psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.
Both of us belonged to the Zionist-religious youth group Bnei Akiva, the motto of which was Torah Ve’avoda (“Torah and Work”). I attended the meetings with a healthy degree of reluctance, not because I was opposed to Zionism, but because I thought the clubhouse (mo’adon) was dirty. There were mice in the building, and I was afraid of mice. The shared meals were lousy too, the other members seemed unfriendly to me, or I was afraid of them, sometimes a mixture of both, and I considered the propaganda for both the state of Israel and for God to be all too transparent. I still remember clearly, though, that one Saturday evening in winter, under the watchful eye of the madrich (club leader), we viewed a feature film. It was about the Israeli intervention to free passengers taken hostage at Entebbe airport in 1976. I liked the movie. Not that it made a Zionist out of me (to the extent that I wasn’t already a Zionist unawares), but this propaganda was at least entertaining; something that cannot be said for most of the other Bnei Akiva propaganda—or for propaganda in general.
I’d had a religious upbringing—my father was an agnostic, but my mother adhered to Jewish tradition—and was getting ready for my bar mitzvah. I went to the synagogue every Saturday and stuck to a more or less kosher diet, because all these things were expected of me. I underwent Judaism and Zionism in the same way that I would later undergo my high school Latin and Greek classes.
In the summer of 1982, my mother and I accompanied my sister to Israel. She began attending an ulpan, a language-immersion program, where she perfected her Hebrew, and I spent entire days walking with my mother around Jerusalem. We also took day trips to Bethlehem and Hebron, cities that were still accessible to tourists of all nationalities at the time. The occupied territories were not occupied, at least not according to my mother and sister.
Because I thought it was expected of me, I wore a yarmulke there, something I never did back in Holland. I even put on an arba kanfot, a ritual prayer garment worn under one’s clothes. The tzitzit, the tassels, hung out from under my T-shirt. I looked the way a dedicated member of Bnei Akiva is supposed to look.
One hot afternoon my mother and I visited Hebron, in the company of a group of other tourists, most of them Americans. The trip included a visit to a glassworks. As I was standing there watching one of the glassblowers, the man turned around slowly and gave me the once-over. His once-over lasted a few seconds. Then he spit on the ground beside my feet.
My mother hustled me away. I looked over my shoulder and saw that he was leaving the other tourists unmolested, at least as far as spitting went.
What had he seen in me? A staunch member of Bnei Akiva, which is to say: His and his people’s enemy?
“Did you see that Palestinian?” my mother said. “Did you see the hate in his eyes?”
It was the first time I had ever been conscious of seeing a Palestinian. I didn’t understand why he would hate me, when I didn’t hate him.
A few weeks later at Ben Gurion Airport, my mother and I took leave of my sister. She had found a room on campus at Bar-Ilan and was ready to get on with her new life. She had also changed her name to Ma’anit, and to me she said: “You already have an Israeli name. You won’t have to change a thing when you get here.” She was undoubtedly trying to say something nice, but I considered it a dubious honor. In the Netherlands I was always explaining that my name was neither Anton, Arnold, nor Aron.
Back in Amsterdam I took off my yarmulke and my arba kanfot. My parents thought that was a good idea too. “Not everyone needs to see that you’re Jewish,” my father said.
At the synagogue, an older gentleman asked me if I planned to move to Israel later, like my sister. “No,” I said. “I want to become a clown.”
Somehow I had understood that the Jewish state was not a suitable place for clowns.
2.
It is Sunday, June 5, 2016, and I am attending the Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) parade in Jerusalem. It’s the first time I’ve been to one of these parades, though by now I’ve visited Israel close to thirty times. On Yom Yerushalayim, people celebrate the “reunification” of Jerusalem, one of the side effects of the Six-Day War. There is, of course, another side of the story: where one party sees liberation, the other sees occupation, repression, and ethnic cleansing. And that is exactly why I’m here, to shed some light on that other account. The crew of a Dutch current-affairs program is tagging along after me. The program’s producers think that’s interesting, a Jewish writer visiting the occupied territories at the invitation of the NGO Breaking the Silence. A story with a special twist, because that writer also happens to have a sister who lives in a settlement (Dolev). But am I a Jewish writer? Much more preferably a European writer, in fact, one currently living in America. What I did at the age of eleven is actually what I am still doing, albeit more handily and perhaps more ironically: I am adapting. If they expect me to play the part of the Jewish writer, then that’s what I’ll do.
We cross the old center of Jerusalem, where many of the Palestinian shopkeepers on Al Wad street have been told to close their shops for the day. If they don’t, the police won’t be able to protect them from the crowds celebrating Yom Yerushalayim; the procession always crosses the Old City and ends at the Wailing Wall. With the help of an interpreter, one of the shopkeepers tells us that they are all closing up for the day, to keep their inventory from being wrecked and pillaged. In a country under the rule of law, one would expect the right of ownership to be protected against vandals and angry crowds, but everything is different around here; different at least from New York, Amsterdam, or Berlin. I am here to demonstrate that in this place everything is different. Or isn’t it?
In discussions, in articles, in books about what we’ll refer to for the moment simply as the Conflict, it is always the uniqueness that is emphasized, the uniqueness of Israel, the uniqueness of the conflict. Couldn’t it be that this perceived or perhaps even actual uniqueness has come to serve as a smoke screen? By appealing to one’s own unicity, after all, one gives oneself the right to step out of line.
The real parade still has to begin, but already the occasional group of singing and dancing young people passes by, carrying big Israeli flags. There is something intimidating about them, but then a flag-waving crowd has a tendency to become intimidating soon enough. The hysterical, nationalistic exuberance makes me think of soccer fans, something I will remark on later on Dutch television. After that broadcast a lady will pointedly remind me that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not a soccer match. She is implying that I don’t take the conflict seriously, that I am playing it down, that I refuse to see the consequences, that I make normal that which ought not to be made normal. She is partly right: the conflict is not a soccer match, there is more at stake here than a victory at the end of a soccer match.
But associations often serve to clarify. Nationalism in postwar Europe was, for a long time, mostly a by-product of soccer matches, something for which Europeans cannot be grateful enough, if only because it’s not at all
guaranteed that things will stay that way.
In any case, the lady touched on a sensitive point: marching through the streets with flags may be intimidating, but I also have a hard time taking it seriously. In order to truly understand this conflict, doesn’t one also need to take nationalism seriously? Wouldn’t it be arrogance to claim that nationalism is an atavistic custom? To accommodate the makers of the television program, I talk to a couple of girls I see walking down an alleyway, settlers from the look of them, or at least members of Bnei Akiva. It’s good to be wary of generalizations, but in Israel especially, ideology goes hand in hand with explicit and often also implicit dress regulations.
Even the simple question “Where do you girls come from?” turns out to elicit suspicion.
“We belong here,” one of the girls says rather aggressively. “We’re not coming from anywhere.”
She makes my innocent question sound as though the one posing it wants to drive the Israeli Jews into the sea or send them back to their countries of origin.
I make it clear to them that there was no ulterior motive lurking behind my question; only then are they prepared to tell me that they come from Hebron.
Settlers. A word that can sow confusion, as though there were only one sort of settler. Is my sister a settler? Absolutely. On top of that, ideologically, she is also convinced of being in the right. She is not there because the houses in Dolev are so inexpensive and the gardens so green. She is there to protect the country against the enemy. Because it is her country, because the Torah says it belongs to the Jews.
Her country, not my country. Does one need to have a country? Can you be a guest everywhere you go? Or has the past proved that a worldview like that is ultimately untenable?
A few years ago, a Dutch political commentator claimed that the Palestinians have the right to put up armed resistance against settlers, and that they also have the legal right—according to his interpretation of military law, at least—to kill settlers. I was able to follow his legal reasoning, but the person of my sister made this rather abstract train of thought awfully personal. Did anyone have the right to kill my sister? Of course not. I would actually venture to doubt whether it would be morally correct to sacrifice one’s sister, even if that sacrifice would bring peace. I have no real trouble advocating the principle of solely nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, but principles often tell us something about the privileges of the one who falls back on them.
When the girls from Hebron see the cameras, they tell me that they don’t trust the foreign media. Yet another principle: The foreign media are against us. All media are against us, except the media of which we approve. I do my best to summon up the bit of Hebrew I remember from my youth. My first name also works to my advantage. Maybe I’m not the enemy after all.
Yes, they are willing to talk for a few moments. Not long, they’re in a hurry, they have to celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem. There is so much to celebrate and to commemorate. The molding and maintenance of collective memory is an effective instrument used by all nationalistic propaganda machines.
Then the girls see Yehuda Shaul, cofounder of Breaking the Silence; they recognize him. If they were Christians, you might say that in Yehuda Shaul they see the Antichrist. That’s the way they look at him. That’s the way they recoil. That’s how horror stricken they are. But in Jewish mythology the devil plays a very minor role. Let’s say that in Shaul they see a serpent to whose forked tongue no one should be exposed. They shout a few terms of abuse and, as they move away, they warn other girls not to talk to me. I’m with Shaul, which makes me a serpent too.
A few hours later I find myself in the western part of the city, where at that moment the demonstration is reaching its apogee. The parade opens out before my eyes. My initial association had been with a soccer match, but now I’m reminded of the Soviet Union, China perhaps. As though the state offers the citizen an invitation to nationalistic enthusiasm and the citizen cannot refuse the offer. But the state here is Bnei Akiva, and probably those yeshivas associated with it.
I see a couple of families, but mostly young girls and boys between the ages of twelve and twenty, dressed in almost identical white shirts and blue trousers (the semiofficial Bnei Akiva uniform). They are marching around. Or rather, they are marching on the old city center.
You could also say that it’s like Carnival, only without the floats and the admixture of alcohol and eroticism. There is no eroticism around here, this ecstasy has nothing to do with lust.
I used to be a part of this. I was a member of this club; mostly, I have to admit, because my sister was such a confirmed and fanatical member herself, but still. Could I have become one of these singing and dancing nationalists? No, that’s impossible, and to reach that conclusion you don’t even have to be a fanatical believer in free will. I simply didn’t have what it takes to be a Jewish nationalist—I wanted to be a clown.
A young man who speaks fairly good English is willing to answer a few questions. He tells me that he runs a blog on which he publishes the truth about the Conflict, then he launches into a jeremiad against the media, all of which he says are against Israel. Against Jews. Anti-Semites. As a representative of the foreign media, I of course am an anti-Semite too, maybe without even knowing it, but that doesn’t matter. No nationalism without paranoia, but the religious-tinted nationalism in Israel seems almost impossible to distinguish from paranoia.
The hostess of the Dutch TV program butts into the conversation; she seems to feel that I am not doing enough to interrupt the flow of slurs and insinuations.
“He’s Jewish too,” she says, pointing at me.
I have been unmasked. The young man looks at me nonchalantly and says: “Then he’s a self-hating Jew.”
The conversation is bogging down. Anything I say is suspect by default; I, after all, am the self-hater. In the Netherlands too, by the way, non-Jewish Dutch people often level such accusations against me, especially when I claim in a newspaper or magazine that Islam is not identical to terrorism. Some Dutch people seem to think that Jews are obliged to hate Muslims; if they don’t, then they must be self-haters.
After a short coffee break—I’ve had my fill of this depressing parade—we take off to find the counterdemonstration.
Atop a little rise, cordoned off by police, stands left-wing Israel. A few hundred people. About one policeman to every ten demonstrators, I’d say.
An older lady, originally from South Africa, blames the meager turnout on indifference. “Lots of people share our views,” she says, “but they stay at home. I come out, and I will as long as I have the strength to do so.”
A young girl explains that the counterdemonstrators are also waving Israeli flags to show that the flag is not the exclusive property of Bnei Akiva and other religious right-wingers. “It’s our flag too,” she says. The paltriness of the counterdemonstration alone is enough to induce melancholy. On my way to the exit—crush barriers have been used to set up obvious entrances and exits—I see young men approaching in what are unmistakably animal costumes. They looked like they’re stoned, but I can’t be absolutely sure.
The counterdemonstrators in animal costumes start in on a sort of animal dance. Are these the clowns? Could I join up with them?
We walk toward the Old City. In the special set of grandstands set up for the press, to separate the journalists from the demonstrations and probably to give the journalists a clear view of any disturbances, a few photographers are still standing around. The parade is over. Few or no disturbances this year. “It’s the same thing every year,” says the lady from the TV program, who has been working as a correspondent in Israel for some time now. “It’s also a kind of performance. A play.” It sounds as though she’s trying to comfort me, but it doesn’t comfort me.
3.
Early Tuesday morning we find ourselves at the Qalandiya checkpoint. “We” being a handful of writers and a photographer. This is the checkpoint where thousands of Palestinians cross the bo
rder each day on their way to work in Israel. There are also thousands of other Palestinians who work illegally in Israel, under even worse conditions than those who do so legally. Almost everywhere that a state closes its borders, illegal aliens cross those borders to be exploited as workers in the land of their dreams, or at least in a place where they hope to be just a little less worse off than they are at home.
We’re here with Hannah Barag, an Israeli lady in her eighties who is a member of Machsom Watch, an organization composed of about 250 Israeli ladies of a certain age. The organization’s activities include going to checkpoints where Palestinians cross the border (which is not supposed to be called a border), in order to monitor what takes place there. Ladies of a certain age, because younger women, Barag tells us, have a job or a family and can’t spend hours standing at a checkpoint.
Barag says: “What you see here is the evil bureaucracy of the occupation. To keep a people under your thumb you don’t need a soldier on every street corner, all you need is the evil bureaucracy.”
I look at the men, all men, standing in line before the gates that open and close at the push of a button and allow them to approach the counter. As soon as the gates open the men start running, fearing that otherwise they will be late for work.
The fences, the gates, the silent yet desperate shoving in line, remind me of cattle in a pen, but I suppress that thought. Some metaphors obscure rather than clarify.
Barag explains that, with no prior notice, Palestinians can have their names put on a list that will result in them losing their permits to work in Israel. “There are different kinds of lists,” she says. “The first kind is put together by the internal security service, the Shabak; there are about 350,000 Palestinians on that one. The Shabak doesn’t check up on everyone individually, so often the service itself doesn’t even know who’s on the list. In other words, not everyone on the list is a terrorist; in fact, most of the people on the list have nothing to do with terrorism. You can get your name off the list, but that involves a complicated bureaucratic procedure. To appeal a scond time, you have to wait a full year. If you make your appeal one day too early, you have to wait another year on top of that. There are lawyers who make money off of that.”
Kingdom of Olives and Ash Page 39
