freya
30-09-05, 20:43
The Other Side of Israel - The Middle East - October, 2005 - Pamela Ann Smith
Susan Nathan's pioneering work, The Other Side of Israel, published this summer in the US and in Europe, is above all a heartfelt story of love…love for Israel's "Arabs" as well as love for her Jewish forefathers and compatriots. But it is also a story of one woman's journey across the divide, from the cozy smugness of the privileged Israeli community she found in Tel Aviv to the real-life daily discrimination and oppression she witnessed, living as a lone Jewish woman in her 50s, in a Palestinian town in the Galilee.
Her story, which begins in the late 1990s when she left Britain to make the aliya-- is a wake-up call not only to Israelis and Zionists in the diaspora (including their Christian fundamentalist supporters) but also to all those who equate sympathy for the Palestinian cause with a knee-jerk condemnation of all things Israeli (or Jewish, for that matter), or with an uncritical acceptance of the inhumanity that some Palestinians can, and have, demonstrated during their long struggle.
Speaking to me on a summery day in London, shortly after her book appeared, she summed up part of her own huge transformation from a lifelong Zionist to a harsh critic of the Israeli state. "Zionism", she remarked, is about the "love of the country. What I am against is political Zionism, which is driving the country now. It is an outmoded ideology, and has no place in the modern world."
"The Israeli government," she added, "rules by fear"…and it is clear that she sees many Israelis, as well as the Palestinian "Arabs," as the victims of this fear. "It gets away with it because the rest of the world doesn't have the moral courage to stand up to them. It's shameful."
On her first visit to the town of Tamra, she was profoundly shaken. "A disturbing thought occurred to me," she writes, "one that refused to shift even after I had driven back to Tel Aviv. Tamra looked far too familiar… Where had I seen this before? I recognised the pattern of discrimination from my experience of apartheid South Africa, which I had visited regularly in my childhood. I could detect the same smell of oppression in Tamra that I had found in the black townships."
This realisation is reinforced continuously after her move to the town and her experience teaching English to Palestinian businessmen in Haifa. And it forms the basis for her conviction that "at some point in the future, Israeli society will collapse, under international pressure, in the same way as happened in South Africa."
Two questions she asks are particularly pertinent to the current debates raging within the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas about the way ahead. The first is a personal one, "Why was I able to break away from the Jewish collective when other Israelis and Jews feel so bound to it, prisoners of a belief that they must stand with the state and their people, right or wrong?" The second concerns the role of left-wing, or liberal, Israelis and Jews, who may oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its control of Gaza, yet, as she reminds us, may remain unmoved by the suffering of Palestinians within Israel itself.
To the first question, she responds with an analysis of Jewish national ideology as reflected in contemporary Zionism. "The sense among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora that they are uniquely victims, both as individuals and as an ethnic group, cannot be overstated." Hence the sincere belief of many Israelis and Jews that, despite its massive army and nuclear arsenal, Israel "is in imminent danger of annihilation" from its Arab neighbours or from the Palestinians.
This is a theme that has also only recently been taken up by another Jewish woman writer, the British literary critic, Jacqueline Rose. In a book dedicated to Edward Said, "The Question of Zion," she maintains that "when suffering becomes an identity, it has to turn cruel in order to be able to bear, or live with, itself. How," she asks, "did one of the most persecuted peoples of the world come to embody some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state?"
The irony, as Nathan notes, is that the latest weapon of the oppressed--suicide bombers--only serves to reinforce the sense of Jewish victimhood and becomes an excuse to avoid confronting the reality of what the Israeli state is doing. Her move to Tamra provoked "revulsion," both from her Israeli friends as well as from the "well-heeled party crowd in London."
As for the attitudes of left-wing and liberal Israelis and Jews, Nathan says that many attempted to reassure her that they had "Arab friends". Who were they? she asks. "Where did they live? What did they talk about together?" The response seemed, invariably, to be that they were on good terms with a restauranteur who made excellent felafel, or a garage owner whose prices were low. "When did they meet outside these formal relationships," she wonders. "What intimacies did they exchange? The Tel Aviv crowd," she writes," looked at me aghast, as if I were crazy. They did not have those sorts of relationships with Arabs."
"In fact, it was clear they had no Arab friends at all… The revelation that I had stumbled across the same kind of master-servant relationship as exists in South Africa was something I was little prepared for. For a week," she says, "I was racked by pains in my stomach and head. It was as if I was purging myself of all the lies I had been raised on."
The beauty of Nathan's work, however, is that it does not stop at being simply a personal record of an extraordinary emotional, intellectual and physical journey. It also looks at possible solutions, including the debates about one state or two. Drawing her inspiration from Nelson Mandela and Gandhi, she concludes:
"My journey was not really about crossing a divide, but about a far harder journey: one in which I have learned that the divide is really an illusion. It is an artefact we have created in our imaginations, just as we have built a concrete wall in the West Bank, to protect us from the truth….
"It is not about where we live, but about how we live… It is about learning to look honestly at the places we inhabit and want to call ours, to understand the past, and to face up to the crimes committed in our names. Then we Jews will be ready to apologise and to reach out a welcoming hand across that divide. To embrace the Other, who is really ourselves."
Ook in het Nederland verkrijgbaar
Susan Nathan
De andere kant van Israël
Isbn: 90 6305 206 5
Prijs: 18.95 euro
Verschijningsdatum: 29 september 2005
Susan Nathan's pioneering work, The Other Side of Israel, published this summer in the US and in Europe, is above all a heartfelt story of love…love for Israel's "Arabs" as well as love for her Jewish forefathers and compatriots. But it is also a story of one woman's journey across the divide, from the cozy smugness of the privileged Israeli community she found in Tel Aviv to the real-life daily discrimination and oppression she witnessed, living as a lone Jewish woman in her 50s, in a Palestinian town in the Galilee.
Her story, which begins in the late 1990s when she left Britain to make the aliya-- is a wake-up call not only to Israelis and Zionists in the diaspora (including their Christian fundamentalist supporters) but also to all those who equate sympathy for the Palestinian cause with a knee-jerk condemnation of all things Israeli (or Jewish, for that matter), or with an uncritical acceptance of the inhumanity that some Palestinians can, and have, demonstrated during their long struggle.
Speaking to me on a summery day in London, shortly after her book appeared, she summed up part of her own huge transformation from a lifelong Zionist to a harsh critic of the Israeli state. "Zionism", she remarked, is about the "love of the country. What I am against is political Zionism, which is driving the country now. It is an outmoded ideology, and has no place in the modern world."
"The Israeli government," she added, "rules by fear"…and it is clear that she sees many Israelis, as well as the Palestinian "Arabs," as the victims of this fear. "It gets away with it because the rest of the world doesn't have the moral courage to stand up to them. It's shameful."
On her first visit to the town of Tamra, she was profoundly shaken. "A disturbing thought occurred to me," she writes, "one that refused to shift even after I had driven back to Tel Aviv. Tamra looked far too familiar… Where had I seen this before? I recognised the pattern of discrimination from my experience of apartheid South Africa, which I had visited regularly in my childhood. I could detect the same smell of oppression in Tamra that I had found in the black townships."
This realisation is reinforced continuously after her move to the town and her experience teaching English to Palestinian businessmen in Haifa. And it forms the basis for her conviction that "at some point in the future, Israeli society will collapse, under international pressure, in the same way as happened in South Africa."
Two questions she asks are particularly pertinent to the current debates raging within the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas about the way ahead. The first is a personal one, "Why was I able to break away from the Jewish collective when other Israelis and Jews feel so bound to it, prisoners of a belief that they must stand with the state and their people, right or wrong?" The second concerns the role of left-wing, or liberal, Israelis and Jews, who may oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its control of Gaza, yet, as she reminds us, may remain unmoved by the suffering of Palestinians within Israel itself.
To the first question, she responds with an analysis of Jewish national ideology as reflected in contemporary Zionism. "The sense among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora that they are uniquely victims, both as individuals and as an ethnic group, cannot be overstated." Hence the sincere belief of many Israelis and Jews that, despite its massive army and nuclear arsenal, Israel "is in imminent danger of annihilation" from its Arab neighbours or from the Palestinians.
This is a theme that has also only recently been taken up by another Jewish woman writer, the British literary critic, Jacqueline Rose. In a book dedicated to Edward Said, "The Question of Zion," she maintains that "when suffering becomes an identity, it has to turn cruel in order to be able to bear, or live with, itself. How," she asks, "did one of the most persecuted peoples of the world come to embody some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state?"
The irony, as Nathan notes, is that the latest weapon of the oppressed--suicide bombers--only serves to reinforce the sense of Jewish victimhood and becomes an excuse to avoid confronting the reality of what the Israeli state is doing. Her move to Tamra provoked "revulsion," both from her Israeli friends as well as from the "well-heeled party crowd in London."
As for the attitudes of left-wing and liberal Israelis and Jews, Nathan says that many attempted to reassure her that they had "Arab friends". Who were they? she asks. "Where did they live? What did they talk about together?" The response seemed, invariably, to be that they were on good terms with a restauranteur who made excellent felafel, or a garage owner whose prices were low. "When did they meet outside these formal relationships," she wonders. "What intimacies did they exchange? The Tel Aviv crowd," she writes," looked at me aghast, as if I were crazy. They did not have those sorts of relationships with Arabs."
"In fact, it was clear they had no Arab friends at all… The revelation that I had stumbled across the same kind of master-servant relationship as exists in South Africa was something I was little prepared for. For a week," she says, "I was racked by pains in my stomach and head. It was as if I was purging myself of all the lies I had been raised on."
The beauty of Nathan's work, however, is that it does not stop at being simply a personal record of an extraordinary emotional, intellectual and physical journey. It also looks at possible solutions, including the debates about one state or two. Drawing her inspiration from Nelson Mandela and Gandhi, she concludes:
"My journey was not really about crossing a divide, but about a far harder journey: one in which I have learned that the divide is really an illusion. It is an artefact we have created in our imaginations, just as we have built a concrete wall in the West Bank, to protect us from the truth….
"It is not about where we live, but about how we live… It is about learning to look honestly at the places we inhabit and want to call ours, to understand the past, and to face up to the crimes committed in our names. Then we Jews will be ready to apologise and to reach out a welcoming hand across that divide. To embrace the Other, who is really ourselves."
Ook in het Nederland verkrijgbaar
Susan Nathan
De andere kant van Israël
Isbn: 90 6305 206 5
Prijs: 18.95 euro
Verschijningsdatum: 29 september 2005