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.
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