Thanks to Jill for letting me do this guest-post. My apologies if it’s a bit slapdash.
I went out to my friend’s house in the west of Amman last night, and stared at Israel glittering in front of me. Looking out over the Dead Sea at night, it’s hard to imagine violent death rampaging next door. In these last weeks, Amman has been simmering with anger – anger at Israel, at the United States, and, in some instances, even at Hamas, but there has been a lot of quiet too. No big celebrations (on New Year’s Eve, most people went to a protest or stayed at home), but a whole lot of volunteering.
Now that plans for a ceasefire have officially been announced, you’d think that everyone would just take a collective breath. But we all know that you don’t just hose the blood off the streets in Gaza and start over.
I’m not a Hamas sympathizer, but I think I understand why they took power in that densely populated, impoverished strip of land. I think it has more to do with class solidarity than anything else. In Jordan, those people who readily discuss the culpability of Hamas in this latest tragedy are often ones who come from upper to upper-middle class families. People from humbler backgrounds will usually first point out that “you have to understand, what choice did the Gazans have?” or else, “they were voted in fair and square, and the U.S. government can’t simply pretend that they don’t exist” – before beginning to address Hamas launching rockets into Israel.
Fundamentalist movements are brilliant when it comes to appealing to suffering. They let you take your bloody, beating heart and offer it up directly to God. No medicine for your sick child? Sister, be comforted. In heaven, you shall have no wants. When your child is finally dead, you know that his pain has come to an end. You will see him in time. Have faith, sister, it’s the only thing you have. When you scream over the little body, God will hear you when the rest of the world will not.
As a writer and editor in this region, I’ve been attempting to gather writing from within Israel and the Palestinian communities alike. I can’t pretend to be unbiased, though my thoughts are as much with friends and relatives living in Israel as they are with the people in Gaza.
I recently got into it with a friend who suggested that distant Jewish relations of mine were selfish in moving to Israel at this time, to live in relative comfort while the Palestinians suffered.
“But they were coming from Europe!” I sputtered. “Anti-Semitism in Europe? Hello?”
“So Palestinians must pay for the fact that you Europeans are so bloody anti-Semitic, do they?” He snapped.
I couldn’t quite answer him at the time.
Simply put, I think that Israel has the right to exist, but that the situation must evolve, it cannot remain static. Although I have stated before that I am anti-Zionist, I think I can recognize how Zionism in itself encompasses different viewpoints. I think that the way Israel was created was in line with such “noble” colonial traditions as we have seen practiced by other groups throughout the centuries. At this point, I don’t know what’s better: a one-state or two-state solution, but that a one-state solution is probably better down the line, if not now.
Meanwhile, acquaintances who have never been to a single Muslim country piously warn me that I have been “warped through living in a culture of hate and death.” When I tell them that people like Joe the Plumber, who say that Israeli journalists should be “ashamed of themselves” for giving a crap about the civilian death toll in Gaza – aren’t exactly promoting a culture of love and life, they announce that I just can’t handle Joe’s brand of shiny, complexity-free “truth” wherein all Arabs are recast as bloodthirsty, fanged chupacabra-type things that worship the Great Big Chupacabra in the sky.
And so spineless U.S. politicians offer blind support to almost every single thing the Israeli government says or does – and that’s perceived by many as alright. The idea that you can’t fix the situation by attempting to bring people down on their knees, and then expect them to act all rational and enlightened, having been “liberated” from their homes and/or limbs and/or loved ones – never gets off the ground. Because these aren’t people we are talking about to begin with, you see?
I think that one of the most terrible ironies here is how much this entire thing is reminiscent of hatred against Jews. Bloodthirsty? Check. Scheming? Check. Not-quite-human? Check. Powerful and scaaary? Check. One of the main differences is the perception of Jews as sly and under-handed. Whereas the Arabs are supposed to just lay it all out there, Jews, apparently, search long and hard for the perfect place to stick a knife in your back.
Cleaning out the moderation queues at the magazines I work for is like stepping into a portal to Asshole Universe:
“We must exterminate all Jews and the scheming Jewish plague,” writes some creature in North Carolina (right outside my old hometown of Charlotte, for bonus creep-factor).
“ArabComment? ha..,” writes another, this one in London. “Do you people ‘comment’ on anything besides bombs and goats?”
It might seem completely bizarre from you stand, but from where I stand, it seems reasonable that Arabs and Jews should have a lot to talk about vis a vis stereotypes and hatred. I wouldn’t use this point to argue that Israel and Palestine are on an even playing field – they are not. And I don’t want to throw out any platitudes about peace, hope, love and holding hands while running through wheat-fields either. But if there is a shred of meaning buried in there somewhere, well, maybe one day it can be unburied – even as the horrors of the last few weeks will continue to live on, undimmed, if no longer so immediate to the outside world.
This is a fabulous, thoughtful piece of writing. Thank you so much.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that Jews and Muslims continue to fight each other when both have the common experience of being over-run and attacked by the Christian orthodoxies over the years. Spain would be the center of the world had the Jews and the Moors not been attacked/expelled/forcibly converted by the Catholics back in the day.
Well said–brilliant. I would just like to add a couple of things. Fundamentalist movements are also adept at providing some kind of education, medical care and assistance to people who get nothing elsewhere. This is also true of fundamentalist Christians in the States. My only other point is that holding hands and running through the wheat fields looks to me like a better alternative than screaming at each other or deriding people (hopefully after the harvest so the wheat isn’t trampelled).
Good post. I thought this was also a good comment:
You’re absolutely right Lilian – a lot of fundamentalist movements have a very practical, hands-on approach to people’s most immediate problems. It’s like that in Ukraine – some of the bravest advocates for abused sex-workers, for example, are conservative Eastern Orthodox people. They build shelters and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, or risk their lives, if need be.
Yes. Thank you.
One of the things that hit home for me most, that caused me to change my viewpoint on the Israel-Palestine situation and listen to Palestinians, was seeing that anti-Arab racism and anti-Semitism were sometimes indistinguishable in content, even though their forms and contexts are different. As a mixed-race person, too, I find that my Semitic features plus my brown skin read constantly to other people as…yes…Arab. So as a Jew who’s generally mistaken for and treated as an Arab in many public contexts, I had to wise up and educate myself some. Even that didn’t do it, though it started me looking.
This all didn’t hit home for me until I had Arab loved ones, Palestinian friends. And listening to them–real people, not distant, speaking directly about their lives and their pain–I just couldn’t hold onto my old way of thinking any more.
There is so much Jews and Arabs have to talk about if we’re not busy dehumanizing each other. But you’re right about that other dynamic, too–when you’ve got nothing, and you’re bleeding, extremism has a very easy way in.
Anti-Semitism has been real in my life–my father is closeted about his Judaism in my hometown out of fear of losing business, having heard a number of clients express anti-Semitic views–but it also hasn’t structurally affected my life or done me harm the way sexism, racism, homophobia, and transmisogyny have hit me as a queer trans woman of color. While I had to be aware of the content of anti-Jewish bigotry my whole life, it rarely got in my way the same way–any more than knowing the content of anti-Catholic bigotry, directed at my mother’s religion, structurally got in my way. That thing that struck me was–especially post-9/11–watching people say the exact same things about Arabs, plus a bit extra, that I’d read or heard about my Jewish relatives and ancestors. But they were going past saying it, and acting on it–violently.
Nobody had ever attacked anyone in the last couple generations of my Jewish family for being Jewish. But suddenly, post 9/11, in a town where I and my brothers, Jews of color, were transported from anonymously brown to mistaken-for-Arab? That’s when they vandalized my parents’ house, destroyed my mother’s garden, and beat up my little brother while shouting “rockchucker” and “raghead” and “sand nigger.”
There’s a lot we have to talk about.
Agreeing with Mandolin on this. It’s pretty much the sentiments I (as a white single middle-class generic male, thus not really having a great inside perspective on the entire situation) have on these events.
I can’t really offer well-wishes, since I feel they’ll just ring hollow in this; still, I know I will try to do what I can to support a peaceful reconciliation there.
Thanks for this post, Natalia. All we wanted was a little nuance, y’know? This is good.
Also, thanks to little light for coming back. You should write a post too.
Everyone should go read the discussions at Natalia’s magazines too.
ol cranky,
Divide and conquer has always been one of the best tactics, no matter how it’s executed.
Thanks Natalia, awesome writing.
I love hearing a point of view from on the ground and your writing put me there. Thanks, Natalia. Thanks also for that great link to the volunteers for Gaza. It does a good deal to smash another horrible stereotype: that Arabs outside of Palestinian don’t care about the Palestinians.
Little Light wrote: “There is so much Jews and Arabs have to talk about if we’re not busy dehumanizing each other.” Absolutely. For hundreds of years we helped each other against some of the worst horrors of seriously fucked up Catholicism. This split is very recent and may be easier to overcome than we believe. If we really did know and care about our histories, we would see so many similarities.
A fabulous post. Thanks.
ol cranky: Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that Jews and Muslims continue to fight each other when both have the common experience of being over-run and attacked by the Christian orthodoxies over the years.
Not at all. In fact, though some extremists on both sides have sought to portray the history of Jews and Muslims as one of constant enmity and strife, reality is much more nuanced. It is not until after the establishment of Israel in 1948 that these monolithic images of Muslims as anti-Semitic and Jews as Islamophobic have emerged and dominated the discourse on Jewish-Muslim relations. European Jews were historically some of the greatest scholars of, and sympathizers with, Islam. They recognized that European/Christian racism against Jews and Muslims was deeply linked, and that to defend Muslims was to defend themselves as well. It’s sad that many lack this perspective today.
Really excellent, insightful post. Thank you. I keep coming across people who insist that all Palestinians are responsible for what’s happening to them right now, and I keep trying to explain that we need to understand why Hamas was elected – the fact that they provided social services and so forth – and that the election of Hamas does not mean Palestinians, as a group, are virulently anti-Semitic religious fundamentalists, or that those who voted for Hamas agree with Hamas on every aspect of their charter. I also completely agree with your statement that extreme deprivation, poverty and hopelessness are more likely than anything else to drive people toward fundamentalism.
I keep finding myself thinking simplistic, cliched stuff like ‘we’re all people!!! We’re all basically the same!! Why can’t we all just get along!!’. Then I roll my eyes at myself, but wish it’d happen anyway.
And presumably for daring to think that the Israeli public at large would give a crap about it too.
How is it that Joe the Plumber can feel himself qualified to lecture Israelis on what it means to be pro-Israel?
And come to think of it, the idea that the Israeli public don’t or shouldn’t care about civilian casualties among the Palestinians implies a rather dim view of the Israelis to me.
Good post…
For my part, I hate the contextualisation of the Middle East conflict in purely religious terms; lazy journalists (in the States for the large part, sadly) rarely fail to mention the “centuries old” nature of the problem, or “intractibility” of such old foes.
But anti-Semitism doesn’t really inform this problem – in fact, it may more of a symptom than a cause.
This is very much a recent, nationalist war over land: the Palestinians (the native inhabitants) don’t have much of it, the Israelis do, and the latter have been extraordinarily tenacious in not only keeping hold of it, but in 1948 and 1967 expanding their dominion over it.
Hamas are an ugly, often unsympathetic group, but their religion does little to inform their hatred of their colonisers, nor their continued attacks on them – after all, the much reviled PLO and PFLP that fought for decades for Palestinian rights were entirely secular. Hamas, relatively new to the scene, are simply the latest torch bearers for a group of people who have every right to seek the basics of human dignity that Israel (correctly) demands for its own citizens.
It would be entirely wrong to suggest that Palestinians would act any differently if Israel were a Hindu state.
Of course, terrorism and rockets and so on offer a poor argument for self-determination, but then the nascent Israel used much the same tactics in the 1930s and 1940s; the supposed elevated morality of their democracy only came later, and we should never forget that their nation was built on the foundations of some pretty extreme violence and ethnic brutality.
As Ben Gurion understood in 1948, statehood is rarely a reward for good behaviour.
Unfortunately, domination and not dialogue still seems to be Israel’s chosen method of achieving security, so it should be of little surprise that those under their boot should seek ever more extreme methods of achieving the most basic freedoms.
After all, diaglogue during the 1990s merely brought more settlements, more dispossession, more colonisaiton – and, ultimately, the unending hatred of the West for their refusal to put up with it.
[...] Jump to Comments If you don’t feel like reading this latest rant of mine – check out my Gaza-themed guest post on Feministe. I tried to be a little more thoughtful than [...]
I haven’t been able to bring myself to comment on most of the recent discussions here, or elsewhere in the progressive blogosphere, about Israel/Palestine/Gaza – because I still find the conversations exhausting, depressing, tedious, and painful.
But I wanted to say thank you, Natalia. This post was insightful, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and, I think, right on the mark.
I’d also like to second what you said, that “Arabs and Jews should have a lot to talk about vis a vis stereotypes and hatred,” and to say that I share, to a certain degree (though without the deplorable experiences of discrimination), Little Light’s experiences.
I’m a Jew, with both Sephardic and Ashkenazi roots. I wouldn’t identify as mixed-race based on my family’s background, but I have dark olive/light brown skin, and am often read as – yup – Arab, middle eastern, or Iranian (sometimes all of the above, as most people who’ve vocalized how they read me and their thoughts on that matter don’t seem to know there’s a difference). Throw into that mix the remarkable similarities in appearance between myself, my brothers, and my cousins (who are mixed-race, with a white WASP father, and an Indian Muslim mother from Tanzania), and well, it’s a really complicated mix of personal and familial politics, allegiances, perceptions, identities, and religions.
Being a Jew who’s so often read as Middle Eastern (and Muslim) has, again and again, caused me to think very critically about those whom I identify with, my relationship to Israel/Palestine, and my position within Israel (during the time I’ve spent there) as a Jew and a sometimes-perceived-as-somewhat-ambiguously-raced-and/or-Arab person with a US American accent. Seeing the degree to which racial profiling and racism in Israel impact Jews of Arab, Middle Eastern, or North African heritage really changes the justification that it is being done for the safety and security of “us,” the Jews. The overlap in history, narratives, and experiences between Jews of color (including Mizrahi Jews) and Muslim Arabs and Middle Easterners challenges both the explanation of Israel and Zionism as *only* white, European colonialism, and the justifications of Israel’s racist policies and practices on behalf of “the Jewish people.” (Which is not to say that either of those are entirely untrue either, but that both are far more complicated than such an explanation implies.)
We have so much to talk about. There is absolutely a huge part of me that wishes we could take pauses to talk about those things, have an aside to talk about how anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and racism pit us against one another and oppress us all, before resuming the ever-stalling and self-destructing conversation about “what to DO.” But the weight of the knowledge that for so many people invested, involved, and forced into this conflict, that pause or aside means more time trapped in a cycle of violence, more time without access to food, water, medical supplies, fuel, education, or the freedom to move, more time caught in a terrifying and destabilizing limbo – well, that knowledge weighs heavy.
I’m not sure if we can afford to have those conversations (because they come with the consideration of who is invited to the table, who has the means and ability to get to the table, whose voices are silenced or supported, what will be sacrificed or put on hold while those conversations are had, etc).
But I’m also not sure if we can afford not to.
Lovely and thoughtful, Natalia. The class difference in support for Hamas is particularly interesting and an element easy to forget when the ethnic/religious anger between communities is front and centre the way it is here.
As nuanced and thoughtful a piece on this conflict I’ve read yet. It is very refreshing to see somebody not carrying water for either side and sympathizing with innocent victims of this tragedy.
One thing I would say, however, is that the notion that Islamism or any other totalitarian mass movement for that matter is born from poverty is frequently asserted and rarely warranted. The suicide bombers across the region tend to be fairly well educated and come from middle class families. Revolutions are typically only successful with significant elite support or acquiescence and a large base in the bourgeoisie. I only say this because it is common for the apologists for such violent and oppressive regimes to justify their popularity in the name of the poor. I simply wanted to suggest yet another layer of nuance.
Nonetheless, brilliant. You are very gifted and have an honest and noble heart. You will be going places with your writing I’m sure!
Thanks for your comment, Andrew. I think I would generally agree with you (of course, there are notable exceptions – Zarqawi comes to mind, for example), but I would also say that you cannot divorce this situation from the rampant poverty in Gaza and from the blockade. You just can’t.