The Message, page 11
Begin’s delineation—separating Jewish redeemers from the uncivilized natives—was reinforced by the West. In 1946, a British and American alliance dispatched an “Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry” to decide upon the fate of Mandatory Palestine, as well as its six hundred thousand Jews and 1.1 million non-Jews. In Jaffa, the delegates wrote of an “overgrown Arab village” filled with “squalor and a population diseased and beaten by life.” But in Jewish Tel Aviv they marveled at the “thoroughly civilized community” with its “tree-shaded boulevards, with opera and theaters, with playgrounds and modern schools, with busses and apartment houses.” Zionism would free the Arab race from “the veil, the fez, the sickness, the filth, the lack of education.”
This narrative of a barbaric Palestine plagued by filth and chaos, as contrasted with an ostensibly pristine and orderly West, has never faded. In 2013, Israeli journalist Ari Shavit published My Promised Land, a bestselling apologia for Zionism in which he tracks his great-grandfather’s 1897 voyage into Mandatory Palestine. In Shavit’s telling, his ancestor arrives into “the chaos of Arab Jaffa.” This is a city of squalor—of “hanging animal carcasses, the smelly fish, the rotting vegetables” and “the infected eyes of the village women,” one where Shavit’s ancestor is forced to contend with “the hustling, the noise, the filth.” Jaffa is not unique. In Jerusalem, this ancestor is faced with “the misery of the Orient: dark, crooked alleyways, filthy markets, hungry masses.”
This is an amazing account, if only because Shavit’s ancestor was coming from London—a city so notoriously filthy that it was nicknamed “The Great Smoke.”
In his book Dirty Old London, Lee Jackson sketches the city:
Thoroughfares were swamped with black mud, composed principally of horse dung, forming a tenacious, glutinous paste; the air was peppered with soot, flakes of filth tumbling to the ground “in black Plutonian show’rs.” The distinctive smell of the city was equally unappealing. Winter fogs brought mephitic sulphurous stinks. The summer months, on the other hand, created their own obnoxious cocktail, “that combined odour of stale fruit and vegetables, rotten eggs, foul tobacco, spilt beer, rank cart-grease, dried soot, smoke, triturated road-dust and damp straw.” London was the heart of the greatest empire ever known; a financial and mercantile hub for the world; but it was also infamously filthy.
Jackson understands London’s sanitation problems structurally—from 1801 to 1901, the city’s population grew from one million to six million. But Shavit’s narrative of Jaffa’s sanitation problems is about the people themselves.
The Anglo-American Committee delegates understood Zionism to be the “inevitable giving way of a backward people before a more modern and practical one.” But more, they saw in it a formative episode in their own history—the “conquest of Indians.” Zionists and their allies agreed. Jabotinsky believed the Arab race possessed “the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.” Inveighing against British rule of Mandatory Palestine, Progressive Henry Wallace wrote that the British were “stirring up the Arabs,” just as they had “stirred up the Iroquois to fight the [American] colonists.”
The notion that a colonialist Zionism exists merely in the hallucinations of leftist professors and the chants of their wayward students ignores a crucial source—the very words of Zionists themselves. But Herzl, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Yehuda were of a time when it was still possible for the West to propagate an untrammeled image of a noble colonialism. That is no longer the case. We say “colonialism” and an American colonel replies, “I have come to kill Indians…. Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” We say “colonialism” and Cecil Rhodes strides across an entire continent. We say “colonialism” and a French interrogator attaches electrodes to the private parts of an Algerian man. We say “colonialism” and the settlers of Kiryat Arba materialize before us, giving thanks and praises for mass murder.
And there was so little shame in any of this. Some years ago, I went on a tour of Civil War sites in Tennessee. I visited Fort Pillow, where Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, massacred a unit of Black soldiers. I watched Confederate reenactors in all their regalia. I listened to the lectures of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It was all propaganda, and I knew it. But I had not yet learned the lesson I brought with me to Palestine. I did not yet understand my own faculties, that I had the right to set my brackets as I would in Palestine and shove bullshit—no matter how politely articulated, no matter how elegantly crafted—out of the frame. And then one evening, after a long day, I showed up to dinner and saw a group brandishing the Confederate battle flag. I don’t know what got ahold of me. I don’t know why it was right then. But I understood that this was a matter not of public history but of deep belief. I quietly excused myself and went to my room. Even then I remember not wanting to make a scene or in any way disturb my hosts. But the next morning, they apologized profusely. They knew.
When I think back to that trip, what I see now is varying degrees of shame—conscious and unconscious. At Fort Pillow there was an interpretive film that, all at once, sought to celebrate Forrest and the Black soldiers he massacred. The Sons of Confederate Veterans kept talking about an old graveyard for the enslaved that they were restoring. The reenactors spoke vaguely about the cause for which they fought. And after that display of the Confederate flag, what my hosts seemed to fear the most had less to do with the flag of slavery and more to do with some sense that they, as white Southerners, had appeared in the exact manner that “Yankees” expected—as ignorant, uncouth, or ill-bred.
They didn’t have to worry. I’ve known too many “Yankee” racists and well-bred fools. And it was good for me to see them as they would be without me—the comfort they showed with a flag that only a few years later would be claimed by Dylann Roof. Sometimes, you are blessed with a moment where all the dissembling, all the shame, all the politesse are stripped, and evil speaks with clarity. Sometimes it’s in a park named for a nineteenth-century slave trader. And sometimes it’s in a settlement that honors a twentieth-century advocate of that same system. In either case, the clarity is a gift and we should listen close. In this memorial to Meir Kahane and his disciple, the gift spoke of Israel’s deeper designs.
Settlements like Kiryat Arba are not the work of rogue pioneers; much like our own redlined suburbs, they are state projects. In the settlements, first-time homebuyers are eligible for subsidized mortgages at low interest rates to build houses on land they lease at discounted rates—a discount made possible on account of the land being stolen. Factories and farms are propped by a similar array of discounts and subsidies. All infrastructure—roads, water, power, public synagogues, and mikvahs—is heavily subsidized by the state. In this web of subsidies is an incentive to further colonize the land of Palestinians, because further colonization advances a primary interest of the Israeli state—the erosion of any grounds for a future Palestinian state.
Standing there looking at Goldstein’s grave, having visited Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi only a few days earlier, I felt the horror of Goldstein’s spectacular violence intimately. But what I was beginning to see was that settlement, itself, was violent. When Israel constructs settlements in the West Bank, it extends its borders past the settlements—sometimes onto Palestinian farmland. Palestinian access to this land is almost always contested, and generally granted based on a maze of permits or the mood of the security forces who guard the settlements. In any clash between Palestinians and settlers, the soldiers can be expected to take the side of the settlers. And the settlers are, themselves, often armed perpetrators of violence. “The settlements play a political and a strategic role in taking over land,” Avner explained. “Imagine a pond. You throw a rock in a pond and it creates a ripple, right? The settlements create a ripple effect of violence everywhere they are. That’s the way they’re built.”
What I could now see was something more than bad actors or individual zealots but a system at work. I asked Avner and Guy how they could reconcile living under that system with the Zionism responsible for their very existence. There was quiet in the car for a moment. Avner answered first. He said he believed in self-determination for the Jewish people and that questions of where that self-determination should play out were now theoretical. “We’re here,” he said. “The question is, can there be a way to have the right to self-determination for Israelis and to Palestinians? I think the answer is yes, there has to be. I mean, there’s no other way. But I do think that there are very dangerous things that have grown out of this concept of Jewish nationality, which has transformed into Jewish superiority or Jewish supremacy, which goes beyond Kahane or Goldstein. I mean, this is deeply rooted within Israeli society, within Zionist ideology. There is a wish and a want for self-determination. I don’t think that’s inherently wrong. I think what’s inherently wrong is one nationality coming at the expense of the other. That’s sort of my attempt…”
Avner trailed off. Guy did not speak of such pragmatics. “For myself, I understand that I see the establishment of Israel as a sin. I don’t think it should have happened,” he said. He spoke of Israel as “a center of Jewish supremacy,” which he did not see changing. “So, it’s something that I can’t live with. And I think that in order to have some kind of sustainable, reasonable life here, there should be a real change.”
When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.
* * *
—
It was late morning. We were now approaching the town of Susya, in the South Hebron Hills, toward the edge of the West Bank. This “town” was a makeshift collection of perhaps twenty shacks and outbuildings across a strip of land. Susya native and activist Nasser Nawaj’ah welcomed us into the living room of his modest home. We sat down on the couch, and he served us tea.
Susya is in that broad swath of land deemed to be Area C, where Israelis have total control. The vast majority of settlements are in Area C, and it was here that the ripples of violence Avner spoke of were the most intense. But open, direct violence is just one of the tools of land theft on the West Bank. What I was beginning to see was an arsenal of weaponry—highway construction, water restriction, gated villages, forbidden streets, checkpoints, soldiers, settlers—all employed to part the dowry from the bride. I would catch myself marveling at the elegance of it all, the way one marvels at an ingenious bank robbery. But then I would meet people like Nasser—people whose life savings were the land—and I would be reminded of the sin of abstraction, which was, after all, the very sin I’d perpetrated in my work.
I was told that the people of Susya and the broader region of Masafer Yatta have historically dwelled in caves. But “cave,” with its Neanderthal implications, does not quite describe what I saw in Masafer Yatta. Imagine homes made of stone and earth, improved with electricity and plumbing and sectioned into rooms. These “cave” homes have the great utility of being durable against the volatile weather that marks the region. Nasser’s ancestors had lived in such homes since the eighteenth century. Nasser himself had been born into one, but the scheme of dowry divided from bride had placed him in the small slight housing where we were now received.
In 1985, when Nasser was just a baby, a group of Israeli visitors came to visit the original village. The villagers greeted the people warmly—there was tea, just as I was being served now. But later it became clear that the “visitors” were running reconnaissance. Having discovered an ancient synagogue on the land, Israel declared the village of Susya an archaeological site. The state placed the management of the site in the hands of local settlers, who immediately moved to push the Palestinian residents out of their homes and off the land. Nasser’s people were dispersed across the West Bank. Nasser’s family moved to their farmland to the south, hoping to find solace there. But they were now hemmed in between the settler-controlled archaeological site and an actual settlement. And then there was the law.
Land in Israel and the areas where it has direct control—Jerusalem and most of the West Bank—are tightly managed by the state. In much of the country, land cannot be outright purchased but must be leased from the state. And in Area C, communities must submit an application, with an attendant array of documents, aerial photos, and legal briefs, to receive a building permit. The adjudicators of the process, like the managers of the Susya archaeological site and the judges who handle appeals, are often themselves settlers who are living in the colonies of the West Bank. Nonetheless, Nasser’s people submitted a plan, including an application, to have their new community recognized by the planning commission in Area C. This went nowhere, and at that point Nasser’s people abandoned working through the system. “Why submit? The whole committees are against us,” he told me. “These are settler-led communities. There’s no Palestinian representatives.”
The camp where Nasser now lives is illegal, meaning that, at any moment, Israeli bulldozers could appear and demolish everything. But the bureaucracy that rules over Susya still has its own opaque internal rules. For now, instead of taking down the entire camp, they have settled for demolishing one structure at a time. The result is a kind of limbo—Nasser goes to bed every night not knowing whether his roof will be collapsed in upon him and his family. A few years ago, a massive blizzard hit the South Hebron Hills, destroying many of the village’s shelters. Families spent the night shoveling snow out of their housing. “One of our residents has a heart condition, and this was during this blizzard, and we called the police to help,” he said. “It’s so rare that we as Palestinians would call the forces of the occupation to help us. But we called them because he had a heart condition. They didn’t come.”
Fortunately, the man lived. But after the blizzard passed and Nasser’s people went back to rebuilding their camp, settlers took pictures of the rebuilding and submitted them for approval to a judge—who was himself a settler. But what bothered Nasser the most was that his people had originally moved into the caves precisely because of their durability against harsh weather. “There’s no justice for Palestinians,” Nasser said in reference to the courts. “It’s the opposite. Lack of justice. The courts are a tool of the oppressor, a tool of the occupation.”
Susya is only still standing because Nasser and his community have been able to attract international attention. The need to keep up appearances, to pose as a modern Western state, leaves Israel somewhat vulnerable to international pressure. But the international context that most occupied Nasser at that moment was a very particular one. “I see this as apartheid,” he said.
* * *
—
The evening after my trip to Susya, I caught a ride up to Tel Aviv with a friend. The tension of Jerusalem gave way to teeming cafés, wide boulevards, and glass towers. There was an air of the future that I would associate with a certain kind of liberal city back home, flush with mass transit and interesting restaurants and cocktail bars. The men were carefree in their tees and shades. The women were happy in their cut-off shorts. I took a seat at an outdoor café just off of Habima Square, watching as crowds of protesters, frustrated by Netanyahu’s attempt to subjugate the country’s courts, walked past waving Israeli flags. One of the flags subbed in pink and white for the traditional Israeli silhouette.
I ordered a ginger ale and then promptly began stewing. I was watching the ranks of protesters file past. But I was also thinking of all I’d seen the past few days—of Hebron, Susya, and the Old City—and how distant it felt from these protests. Back in America these protests enjoyed positive coverage and were taken as evidence of the vitality and mettle of “the only democracy in the Middle East.” But by then I knew that “the only democracy in the Middle East” was essentially a tagline which, like “the Breakfast of Champions” or “Just do it,” depended less on logic or observed reality than a form of word association. The “Middle East” is the insanity of suicide bombings, the backwardness of a woman peeking out from her niqab. “Democracy” is a flag over Iwo Jima, Washington crossing the Delaware, a working man rising in a town meeting. Overlay the two phrases and a collage emerges—a visual representation of Herzl’s dream of “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” And this collage is a technology, as functional as any other: Who can judge democratic Israel, which must exist in “that part of the world” where child brides, chemical weapons, and bin Laden reign?
