A Few Thoughts about Palestine
Today is a good day to call on your representative to call for a cease-fire. Jewish Voice for Peace has a tool that makes it easy. I started writing this a while ago, before the ‘pause’ and then during and now after. This need has remained the same.
I’ve been a JVP member for a while, I can’t remember how long. I was especially involved around 2014, a couple of assaults on Gaza ago, and feel a lot of regret I haven’t stayed as active in the years between then and now. If you’ve watched JVP actions, at Grand Central or the Statue of Liberty or the Space Needle or in Chicago or elsewhere, and been inspired to get involved, please feel free to reach out. You don’t have to be Jewish, or agree with everything JVP has ever done, you just have to want this horror to stop. Or find a different organization to plug into. In times like these having the 100% correct analysis is less important than overcoming fear and cynicism to act. It feels perverse in a time of such horror to recommend protesting on the grounds that it will “make you feel better,” but if you are doom scrolling, or feeling helpless, I cannot strongly enough recommend gathering together with people who feel the same. Is it enough? Of course not. But we have to do it all the same. A friend who is close to many people in Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank, said that people there are watching our protests and taking some solace in them. I’m not giving up on believing our actions can change things, but that on its own would be enough of a reason to do it. A while ago I posted about getting arrested at Grand Central. I got the usual insults in response, which mostly don’t bother me, but the only one that did was the one that accused me of “easy virtue signaling” In a way they are correct: we all want validation when we post. But I also want people to know it’s possible, so I’m willing to risk seeming self-serving if it can serve that purpose.
“I’m not an expert on Palestine.” This is a familiar sentence, one I’ve said many times myself. Maybe you’ve said it too, especially if you’re an academic, and therefore, in the weird narcissism of our profession, find one’s state of non-expertise to be notable enough to be stated. I do actually believe in slow careful research by journalists and scholars, and I've been collecting some of what I’ve found the most useful writing by experts, however one defines that. But I think one of the most powerful things I’ve read and watched in the last month is this interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about coming “late” to the issue of Palestine after visiting the West Bank and recognizing, intuitively, the architecture of apartheid familiar to him from the United States: checkpoints, Jews-only roads, the denial of all the apparatus of citizenship to one part of the population, in particular the franchise. In his great book, The Return to the Spring, Ben Ehrenreich called the occupation “a machine for humiliation.”
People makes lots of analogies in discussing Palestine - Ireland, South Africa, Algeria - some of whose implications are more “hopeful" than others (whatever that means). But it’s interesting to think with Coates about the parallels to the U.S. When we were talking about this recently, Josh mentioned that in pre-Civil War America, it was common wisdom that a multiracial future was impossible. Slavery would last forever, or the former slaves would have to be repatriated, or there would be a race war to the death. No one would call what happened instead a utopian triumph, but we are never better off when we let defenders of the indefensible tell us what is realistic.
Many years ago I read a bunch of the flood of novels that were then coming out about the Weather Underground, the antiwar group that resorted to bombings to try to end the Vietnam war after, from their perspective, the traditional modes of protesting, pleading, petitioning and so forth had failed. Most of these novels, most famously Roth’s American Pastoral rely on psychological tropes to “explain” radicalism - all the familiar stuff about the discomforts of abundance, the need to rebel, religion, nihilism and so forth. So far as I could tell, the only novel that rang true to me in terms of trying to see these folks as they might have seen themselves: the relatively obscure Vida, by Marge Piercy, a writer who combines a workman like ethos to her extremely prolific career as a novelist and poet with serious politics. Not coincidently, her novel is much more formally ‘traditional’ than the others, and it takes the moral questions of activism much more serious.
In an interview about the book, she talks about how she wanted to get at the guilt that people in the antiwar movement felt, the sense of deep complicity and shame. The sense, as she put it, that if you weren’t doing something to end the war, you didn’t deserve to be alive. That quotation always stuck with me, but I never fully felt what it meant in my bones until now. I thought then that there were so many novels about the Weather Underground because it was comforting to focus on the most out there results of antiwar activism, to think the radicals had ‘gone crazy’ than to reckon with what everyone else did not do.
One of the best books I read last year was Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, a perfectly crafted short novel about a contemporary Palestinian woman’s investigation into the historical event of the murder of a Bedouin woman by Israeli soldiers shortly after founding of the state. When I read it I was struck by the title, in part because it was, for a time, sitting on top the much thicker history of everything tome Josh was reading at the time. In the mist of massive injustices, and cataclysms, what does it mean to try to recreate the truth of one event, one life?
Apparently it means enough to some that it was imperative a German literary association cancel the prize it was slated to give the book. The book was written before the war, or, maybe one should say, this phase of the war, but no matter. The questions I used to write about in graduate school - “historiographic metafiction” or “the problem of historical memory” - in the parlance of those end of history days feel quite different now. There are moments in which it doesn’t seem to matter with what subtlety one crafts frames around historical traumas; history is a nightmare we’re trying to wake up from or else it’s just a boot in the face. I love this piece by Hala Alyan not only for what it says about the obscenity of saying that this or that text “humanizes” people, but for the anguish at being a person of words at a time when all words feel obscene:
I’m a poet, a writer, a psychologist. I’m deeply familiar with the importance of language. I’ve agonized over an em dash. I’ve spent afternoons muttering about the aptness of a verb. I pay attention to language, my own and others. Being Palestinian in this country — in many countries — is a numbing exercise in gauging where pockets of safety are, sussing out which friends, co-workers or acquaintances will be allies, which will stay silent. Who will speak.
Trying to be in solidarity with the people of Palestine, trying to have that phrase - the one I use daily in emails dealing with union business - be anything but an obscenity - demands words and actions and some kind of integrity, that I don’t think I or any of us can achieve, that I’m pretty sure I/we cannot but fail at, but all I know is that we need to try.