Nationalism's Dream, Nationalism's Laundry

My Israeli cousin fits the image of "The New Jew" as I see it - you know, the guy who ain't gonna take no shmutz from no shmuck. Six-foot-one and barrel-chested, with one of the deepest voices I've ever heard, bald but bearded, he wears dark sunglasses and a plain white T-shirt emblazoned with the words, "Tougher than I look." He loves little kids, but many of his attempts at peek-a-boo are met with terrified widened eyes and a hasty retreat deep into the torso of the nearest parent.

To much of the Jewish community, my cousin is a symbol. He represents the change that took place among the Jewish people when we took control of our own security, seeking never to let ourselves be helplessly victimized by our persecutors, never to go again as sheep to the slaughter.

A noble aspiration, surely, but not without its flaws in practice. The problem – a problem – is that I often see the educational programs in the Jewish community exert tremendous effort in instilling an unbridled love for the embodiment of that goal without appropriately discussing Israel’s shortcomings.

My Man-with-a-capital-M cousin summarized my discomfort simply and eloquently, as only a “smahht Jewish boy” could: "They sell you the Zionist dream, not the Zionist reality."

Part of that reality stood exposed under the Jerusalem sun on a recent Monday afternoon. But while it could be seen less than five minutes from the Old City, it was invisible to all the city's tourists and most of its Jewish residents.

At around 12:45pm I met up with a rabbi from the organization Rabbis for Human Rights near the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City. “I’ve been on a wild goose chase all morning,” he told me. “They (the government) are going to demolish a house in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, and we’ve been trying to figure out where, to see if we can do anything about it.” You might think it would be easy to figure out where to go – I mean, how many housing units could really be up for demolition? According to this rabbi, 20-30,000. Are you kidding me?!?! I wish.

So why are all these places condemned to destruction? Technically, they were built without a permit. The problem is that it’s extremely difficult for Palestinians in East Jerusalem to get building permits, and the area closest to the Old City is completely frozen, says the rabbi. So what are growing families to do? Tough luck. Go somewhere else. Meanwhile, exclusively Jewish neighborhoods keep popping up and growing all over the city, and sometimes in the middle of previously Palestinian-only areas.

We drove into Silwan, altering our route as a local contact updated the rabbi by phone. Eventually, we reached a hillside opposite another hillside on which an orange bulldozer trudged slowly toward the main road, followed by what looked like a battalion of black-uniformed security forces and approximately one gagillion security vehicles. The grim procession stretched on for what seemed like over a kilometer. “We’re too late,” the rabbi sighed wearily, shaking his head. “Whatever they were gonna do, they’ve done it, and now they’re going home. There’s probably nothing we can do, but let’s go check it out anyway.”

We drove to the other side, where we met a pair of teenagers who guided us nonchalantly to the scene of the crime. Indeed, that lack of emotion characterized the whole thing: the crowd at the site milled around with an air of silent resignation, as if to say, “What can you do? This is how it is, and nothing can change it.” A few people came with videocameras, and a journalist or two sought interviews, but most of the action consisted of trying to get on with life. One man stood on the roof, banging away at the jagged remains of the structure (the unit destroyed was not a whole house, but an extension built on a house probably around one hundred years old – 40 meters squared out of 90 total. We heard, but were unable to confirm, that the small building houses a family of 17). A child who could not have been older than five tried to pitch in with the clean-up of his family’s gutted abode. At first, I wondered why they wouldn’t leave the debris untouched as a statement, but I soon saw that the mound of rubble blocked the entrance into the rest of the house. Another possible reason for the quick clean-up, according to the rabbi: since demolished homes are technically illegal, the residents are left to clean up the wreckage on their own and face municipal fines if they don’t remove it quickly.

What I found particularly troubling by the demolition was that even Israel's oft-professed and widely applied explanation of security concerns could justify nothing about this incident. And one of the most common justifications for Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem - that Jews need to control their holy city because previous stewards have impeded Jewish access to it - rings hollow when “Jerusalem for the Jews” becomes only for the Jews. I could find no legitimate rationalization for the demolition - this was simply a cynical implementation of a discriminatory policy aimed at "Judaizing" Jerusalem at the expense of non-Jews.

There's an expression in Brazil that says, "Roupa suja se lava em casa,” which roughly translates as, "dirty laundry should be washed inside your house." While I do hope the story above will provoke some reflection in other Jews, my intention in telling it is not to let the whole world know about the faults of the Jewish state; rather, I think we can learn a general lesson about the perils of nationalism. It seems to me that Jewish nationalism (Zionism) is different from many of the other nationalist movements I have studied. The man considered the "Father of the Zionism," Theodor Herzl, not only did NOT base his argument for a Jewish state in the self-aggrandizing "we rock, everyone else sucks" rhetoric of the so-called "Romantic nationalist" movements, but he actively sought to disassociate himself from any Jewish identity! It was not until he witnessed the pernicious anti-Jewish prejudice in "civilized" Western Europe that he decided that a Jewish state was necessary for the survival of Jews. Necessary - a last resort. One might call this ideology "desperation nationalism."

And yet if even this kind of nationalism can degenerate into an elected government condoning – or rather, encouraging - the repugnant display I witnessed in East Jerusalem, then one has to think that maybe nationalism cannot help but make its adherents into oppressors. Dirty laundry is part of the package.

In other words, everyone connected to a nation-state should check their nation's hamper – it probably overflowed a long, long time ago.

The nations of the world need to wake up from their dreams.
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Pictures: Local residents (at least that's who I assume they are) film the bulldozer and its accompanying forces as they leave the demolition site, with the Old City in the background


The demolition site, with the Temple Mount in the background

The father gives an interview holding the young child I mentioned


Resigned onlookers


Afterwards, the rabbi took me to an encampment of Bedouin in the West Bank who had been moved (some voluntarily, some by force) to a site near a garbage dump close to Jerusalem. We met with a schoolteacher and her father, with whom the rabbi is trying to plan a trip to the coast for the town's children


The Bedouin town, with an isolated Jewish settlement in the background

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So as not to end on too depressing a note, let's have a little more disturbing comic relief from the Balkans. A few days after I got back to the States, I met a waitress from Macedonia. I told her the topic of my research, and her response was swift and clear: "Akh, the Albanians," she said irritably. "They are like bugs - you can't get rid of them." And the Greeks? "Oh, they are just darker-skinned people who smoke and drink too much." I told her that while I basically sympathize with her country on the name dispute, antics like putting a map of all of ancient Macedonia on the statue of Alexander in Prilep (see May 27 pictures) make Greece legitimately nervous. "Ah, that map doesn't mean anything," she said, dismissing the thought with her hand. Gotta love that sense of perspective.

Ok, listen to this one:

A child of Ethiopian Jewish immigrants to Israel, a child of Russian Jewish immigrants to Israel, a white American Jew, an African-American Christian, and a Palestinian Muslim walk into a carpet shop – stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I know I hadn’t, but that’s basically what I witnessed the other day, and it wasn’t a joke.

To explain how I got into such a state of affairs, I need to go back to the beginning – of my interest in Jewish-Palestinian relations, that is. Four years ago, on my first trip to Israel, the group I was with participated in a seminar on the situation of Palestinians in Israel at the Givat Haviva Peace Center in Northern Israel. After speaking to a local resident about his experiences, we got in a bus for a mini-tour of the area. I was dumbfounded when I got off the bus onto a cracked sidewalk beneath an imposing mosque in the small, non-touristy Palestinian town of Barta’a (suffice it to say that until then my experience with Palestinians and their towns and their mosques was so limited that the combination of all three left me momentarily bewildered). I did not realize it at the time, but watching the interactions between the towns’ residents and our Jewish educator affected me so much that I spent much of the next year working to start a teen Jewish-Palestinian dialogue group in San Francisco. Thus began my foray into an arena that gives my life lots more meaning and my sanity lots more trouble.

It is fitting that Barta’a, rather than another town, provided my introduction into the world of interethnic relations. The physical and political layout is almost Dickensian, as the story of the town could easily be called, “A Tale of Two Mosques.” From a hill above Barta’a, the viewer can see a mosque with a dark green dome – the one that greeted me when I got off the bus – and another with a bright yellow dome. The former is in pre-1967 Israel, while the latter is in the West Bank. That is, the “Green Line” separating the widely recognized borders of Israel from the West Bank cuts between the two houses of worship, so that Bartans on the green mosque side are citizens of Israel, while those near the yellow mosque are citizens of nowhere. The barrier the Israeli government is building sweeps into the West Bank near Barta’a in order to enclose some Jewish settlements on the “Israeli” side, and in so doing it cuts behind Barta'a. As a result, the residents of Yellow Barta'a are pretty much literally stuck between a rock and a hard place – getting to the rest of the West Bank is obviously difficult because of the barrier right behind them; but it is technically illegal for them to cross the Green Line into pre-1967 Israel. Many do, and can feel reasonable safe while still in Barta’a, but if caught outside, they can be arrested. And oh yeah – almost all the residents are part of the same family.

(From the viewpoint above Barta’a one can also see the precarious circumstances that help to intensify Israeli Jews’ sense of existential threat. Just below the viewpoint is the invisible Green Line, and yet still within sight is the Mediterranean Sea – a testament to just how skinny Israel is at this point.)

And so there I was, back in Barta’a four years later, tagging along with a group of Israeli Jews of Russian and Ethiopian descent traveling Israel with a group of African-American high schoolers from Baltimore, as they learnt about the life of another minority, the Palestinians of Israel. One of the teachers at Givat Haviva told me he was concerned that attempting to deal with the diverse problems all these groups faced at the same time might be too much. The group seemed to be getting along fine, though I did notice one possible source of tension: the Americans spotted a KFC off the highway, and suddenly decided they had had more than enough falafel, thank you very much (ah, I love my country).

Come to think of it, Barta'a provides a good illustration of an important point made by a professor in Haifa who helped me out with my research. Remember our key word from last time ("$$$")? This prof distinguished between two ways in which money influences political behavior in Israel. Within the Jewish community in Israel, corruption works the way it's "supposed to." People get things they shouldn't by supporting the right people at the right times with the right promises. But with the Palestinian minority - like many minorities across the world - some voters cast ballots for Zionist parties in order to get what they should have gotten anyway, things like roads and electricity in their towns. And if a town populated by the minority doesn't vote for the right party from the ethnic majority, according to the academic, they don't get nuthin'. Maybe that explains the cracked sidewalk in Barta'a my tentative feet stepped on four years ago.

This insight helps explain the surprisingly large number of Palestinian votes for the Jewish national religious party called the "National Religious Party" (subtle name, I know) - a party whose hawkish views make even many (hopefully most) nationalist Jews uncomfortable. The NRP has often controlled the Interior Ministry - i.e. the ministry that controls budget allocations for building things like roads and electrical infrastructure.

One other interesting feature of interethnic relations in politics here is that not only do Jewish parties not invite Palestinian parties into coalitions (unlike the Macedonians with the Albanians), but many supporters and members of Palestinian parties I've talked to say they wouldn't want their party to be the coalitions, even if it was invited to join! The general consensus seems to be that of the major Palestinian parties, the one most likely to "sell out" and join a coalition with Zionist parties is the Islamic movement. "For religiosity you need money," said a professor in Jerusalem, his tone covering any cynicism like the yarmulke ironically covering his head.

So, a right-wing nationalist religious Jewish settler and a fundamentalist Islamic nationalist Palestinian walk into a government coalition - I know you haven't heard this one before...
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Pictures: One of the crazy things about a place with this much history is that just about anyone can be an archaeologist. In fact, it's hard to build anywhere because in many places, digging the foundations for a building will instead uncover an old cemetery or ancient house. At one kibbutz I stayed at, someone found a bunch of ancient mosaics that apparently no one knows what to do with yet:



The famous green mosque of Barta'a:



View from top of above-mentioned carpet shop, looking into West Bank (Yellow) Barta'a:



As I told you last time, Jerusalem drives me nuts. I thus find it more appropriate than annoying that I have a steady serenade of jackhammers outside the room where I'm staying. Instead of the usual pics, here's a nice Russian Orthodox church I don't remember noticing before:

Ah, how nice it feels to be back where I freak out

I’m in Israel. It’s my third time here. The first time, I fell in love with the place. The second time, I almost went crazy in Jerusalem. In anticipation of this third visit, I occasionally felt so bonkers that I considered not coming at all. And yet here I am, in the mixed Jewish-Palestinian city of Haifa. So in that timeless Jewish tradition of publicly discussing one’s own neuroses, I’d like to tell you a little bit about why this place so consistently escorts me to the brink of insanity, and what I’m doing back here, anyway.

Bay Area-laid back façade aside, I’m a pretty intense person – often more so than I would like, which explains why I love California and loathe New York. The intensity of Israel/Palestine strikes me as what New York would be like if you turned up the temperature and gave people a reason to hate each other.

Partly because of that ubiquitous intensity and partly because of my inability not to pay attention to the tense dynamics here, my time in Israel/Palestine has not exactly been “chill.” When I came for the first time, in 2005, I got stuck in a traffic jam on my way from the airport due to a suicide bombing that had just occurred close to where I was going to stay. A couple days before I left, an extremist AWOL Israeli soldier went to an Arab town and shot residents in a bus before an angry mob killed him. In between, I watched Israeli Jewish society engage in one of its most polarizing debates since the creation of modern Israel, over the upcoming pullout of soldiers and settlers from Gaza.

I planned to return the next summer, but the day I left for a stopover in Eastern Europe on my way to Israel, Hezbollah kidnapped and killed some Israeli soldiers and the 2006 Lebanon War began. As a result, just about everything I had planned for myself – mostly in the North and regarding Jewish-Palestinian coexistence work – was cancelled, and I didn’t go.

The next summer, I did return, intending to volunteer for any do-gooder organization I could find. I inadvertently found myself staying at a hostel/volunteer organization staffed and occupied by people with some of the most despicable beliefs I have ever encountered. I heard Arabs called “animals,” and Rabbi Meir Kahane – who advocated expelling all Arabs from the land Israel controls and whose political movement has been branded a terrorist organization by Israel – called “righteous.”

And what’s the situation like now? If you’ve opened a newspaper in the last two years, and especially the last 6 months, you’ll unfortunately have an idea.

For all of you who actually live here, I don’t know how you do it!

And then there’s the other conflict that has chained itself to my mind. When I was last in Jerusalem, I was going through the beginning of what I would call a spiritual…not a “crisis,” that sounds too dramatic – I’d call it more of a case of “acute spiritual questioning.” As I told people after I returned to the US, never had I felt so alienated as a Jew interested in the Jewish religion as I did when I was in Jerusalem. I suppose I’ve made some “progress” since then, but it’s gone about as slowly as the decentralization process in Macedonia – that is to say, slower than an aging turtle in lethargy-inducing hot weather.

Luckily, I’m not here to deal with either of those two issues! (yeah, right.) I’m here to research the Palestinian Arab population that too many people forget about – the one that makes up about 20% of Israeli citizenry. Their situation has some similarities to the Albanians, but also some important differences. One of those disparities is that while an Albanian party is always in the Macedonian government coalition, no Palestinian party ever receives an invitation to the Israeli coalition. Perhaps partly as a result of that reality, many Arabs in Israel – unlike Albanians in Macedonia – vote for the majority ethnic group’s parties. I want to try to understand how Palestinian citizens of Israel decide whether or not to vote, and if they do vote, whether to vote for a Palestinian party or a Zionist party, and how they choose which party within each category. Similarly, I want to know how the parties – especially the Zionist parties – try to recruit voters from the Palestinian community. So far, the key word seems to be “$$$.”

But while “$$$” can buy the Labor party votes, it can’t buy inter-ethnic love (at least, not in the context of everything else going on). Even in one of the few areas where Palestinians and Jews still co-mingle relatively amicably, a small incident can reveal the state of inter-ethnic relations:

The other day, I spent a few hours with an Israeli teacher-turned-good friend of mine, who is my go-to guy when I’m confused or conflicted about something Israel/Palestine-related (i.e. always). We decided to have lunch in a predominantly Palestinian area of town called “Wadi Nisnas” because he had heard the hummus there is supposed to be THE BEST. We asked a group of people at a café where the stairs to Wadi Nisnas are located. One man responded, in Hebrew and sarcastically, “If you want to see the Arabushim (derogatory term for Arabs), we are sitting right here!” “Well, actually we just wanted to get some good hummus,” my friend responded. “Oh, well, yeah, then you should go to Wadi Nisnas. Yeah. The stairs are right over there.”

We stumbled down the stairs and into a restaurant where an elderly woman sans teeth served us hummus that was, in fact, quite delicious (but the best…??). I told my friend that I didn’t think I had enough interview subjects yet, so he called over a young waiter (apparently with a better dentist, given the state of his teeth) and we began talking about “the situation,” as they call the inter-ethnic conflict here. In an unintentional move that demonstrated just how complex things are here, the man directly contradicted himself in less than a minute. First, he told us that the following should be done: a strong leader should say this (he grabs a saltshaker) is ours, this (now an ashtray) is yours, and this will be the border, he concluded, running a plastic cup in a straight line between the ancient table accessory adversaries. “And if any of you step on to our side, we’ll kill you.” But then, just seconds later, as if he hadn’t just said what he just said, as if he was arguing with something I had said rather than something he had said, he exclaimed, “How can you draw a border when I live here (in Saltistan), and my brother lives over here (in Beit Ashtrei)?”

My friend later pointed out that across the political spectrum, one always hears people speak of the need for “a strong leader.” It’s enlightening to dissect that phrase. The first and third words are singular. And why is the second word so often “strong,” rather than “courageous,” “visionary,” or “bold?” One strongman, gettin’ it done. Sounds vaguely dictatorial, no?

As I got up to leave the restaurant, feeling confused and a little depressed at hearing yet another pessimistic evaluation of the situation, a friend of the waiter’s offered one of the best political suggestions I’ve heard in a while: “Drink a lot of water. It helps.” Can’t argue with that.

Ugh, this place exhausts me (and dehydrates me). You know, another friend of mine recently pointed out that my updates from Macedonia read more like stories from The Onion than an account of actual experiences. If one accepts the idea that “everything is relative,” then I think Macedonia may be on to something, because on some level it is my most sincere realistic wish for Israel/Palestine that the news here would resemble The Onion instead of being what it is now.
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In other news, last week in Zagreb I randomly saw the Croatian Prime Minister walk out of a meeting. The next day, he shocked the country by suddenly resigning. Was it something I said?
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Pictures:

Bahai gardens with Shrine of the Bab in Haifa, world headquarters of the Bahai faith:


Haifa, older and newer:


House on top of the steep hill that is the entire city of Haifa:


I thought I'd left Macedonia, but Alexander keeps following me wherever I go, including to a Haifa archaeological museum: