Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
408
Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
408Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
This book is the culmination of 20 years of research, fieldwork and analysis on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the impact of Israeli occupation. Discussion of Israeli policy toward Palestinians is often regarded as a taboo subject, with the result that few people -- especially in the U.S. -- understand the origins and consequences of the conflict. Roy's book provides an indispensable context for understanding why the situation remains so intractable.
The focus of Roy's work is the Gaza Strip, an area that remains consistently neglected and misunderstood despite its political centrality. Drawing on more than two thousand interviews and extensive first-hand experience, Roy chronicles the impact of Israeli occupation in Palestine over nearly a generation. Exploring the devastating consequences of socio-economic and political decline, this is a unique and powerful account of the reality of life in the West Bank and Gaza. Written by one of the world's foremost scholars of the region, it offers an unrivalled breadth of scholarship and insight.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745322346 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 12/20/2006 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 408 |
| Sales rank: | 128,064 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.91(w) x 9.06(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Part I
The two pieces contained in Part I represent, in a certain sense, the culmination of my work, for they explore ideas and questions that for almost two decades I was unwilling to write about but which emanated from, and deeply shaped, who I was and the nature and purpose of my work. It could not have been otherwise. For me there was a natural connection and intersection between my personal history as a child of Holocaust survivors and my work on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a linkage that did not represent a departure from my Holocaust background as others have argued, but a logical and unbreakable extension of it.
I should say that my unwillingness to examine these ideas in writing stemmed from a strong belief that my work should not be about me but about the issues I was researching and the questions I was trying to raise. But the time did come to look inward and write about it, and it began with an invitation from Professor Marc Ellis to give the second annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture at Baylor University in Texas in 2002. It was this lecture that became the first essay in Part I, and at its heart lies a plea, a counsel of dissent, that looks at the distortion of the Jewish ethical tradition and the particularization of Jewish conscience and moral sensibility by Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
The second essay is a review of three books by Marc Ellis — one of the most courageous and powerful Jewish religious thinkers of our time — in which some of the themes I examine in my own essay are more deeply explored, and new ones raised. Marc asks some desperately needed questions: What does it means to be Jewish and free after the Holocaust and within a Jewish state that is empowered? What is the meaning of memorialization without justice, and (Jewish) celebration in the context of (Palestinian) oppression? How does one affirm and remain faithful to a tradition that grows increasingly misshapen and alien? What are we as a people seeking: empowerment or renewal?
Today — and here I borrow from my review of Marc's work — renewal and injustice are silently joined, and in their joining Jews also are denied a normal life, something they have not yet found in Israel. As the British scholar Jacqueline Rose has said, exultation does not dispel fear. How then do we as a people move forward and create meaning? For some Jews this meaning is now found in a personal narrative that is slowly shifting from identification with a strong, militarized state to one that embraces a history of displacement and loss. Perhaps this is one way of dealing with our oppression of the Palestinians — by seeking engagement over disengagement, inclusion over exclusion.
As both essays show, the ethic of dissent and its crucial importance in remaking a world gone wrong is a core tenet of Judaism and one by which my own family lived. For dissent is tied to justice and justice to dignity. Opposing harm — indeed, laying siege to it — was a profound part of who my mother and father were, how they defined themselves and how they reimagined the world. Yet, dissent is often considered a form of defection and betrayal, particularly in times of conflict when the impulse to silence and conformity is acute. This is no less true of the Jewish people than of any other people. Today, there is a war against dissent, a dangerous war that not only threatens what we think but how we construct our thoughts and who, in the end we become. Whether we are talking about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the war in Iraq or global terrorism, our right to oppose is being stigmatized and invalidated.
Dissent therefore becomes equated with a lack of belief or commitment, with disloyalty or treason. At a 2003 conference at the University of California at Berkeley on media coverage of the Iraq war, journalists explained that one reason for their lack of critical reporting prior to the invasion was a fear of appearing unpatriotic. President Bush's now-famous injunction less than ten days after the September 11 attacks —"either you are with us or with the terrorists" (which consciously or not takes from Jesus' call, "anyone who is not with me is against me") leaves us with no alternatives and perhaps more importantly delegitimizes those we may articulate. Under such a polarized scenario, where is the recourse to justice? This desire for "order at the cost of justice, [discipline at the cost of dignity, [a]nd ascendancy at any price" creates a context of fear in which speaking one's conscience becomes not only difficult but wrong. Yet, to insist on the legitimacy of criticism of unjust policies is at the core of dissent and of democracy; without such criticism, to quote Lear, lies madness.
The legitimacy of dissent — and of Jewish dissent in particular — is perhaps nowhere more challenged than in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. To be Jewish and opposed to Israel's occupation of Palestine is still untenable for many Jews and certainly for the American Jewish establishment. We are called self-haters and heretics and viewed as aberrations and deformities. Yet, the tradition of Jewish dissent, of speaking with another, unclaimed voice is an old and revered one, having arisen in large part as a response to Zionism. A wonderful example comes from Bernard Lazare who, writing to Theodore Herzl in 1899, reproached him for ignoring the impoverished condition of Eastern European Jewry in his vision of a new Zionist nation: "We die from hiding our shames, from burying them in deep caves, instead of bringing them out into the pure light of day where the sun can cauterize and purify them ... We must educate our nation by showing it what it is." In a similar plea, Ahad Haam, the founding father of cultural Zionism, asks, "How do you make a nation pause for thought?"
The answers of course are not simple or easy and certainly beyond the scope of this brief introduction but at their core rest some fundamental questions that both Marc and I feel compelled to ask: What have we as a people made from our suffering and perhaps more importantly, what are we to do with our fear? Are we locked into repeating our past while continuously denying it? As Jews in a post-Holocaust world empowered by a Jewish state, how do we as a people emerge from atrocity and abjection, strengthened and unafraid, something still unknown to us? How do we move beyond fear and omnipotence, beyond innocence and militarism, to envision something different, even if uncertain? How do we create a world where "affirmation is possible and ... dissent is mandatory," where our capacity to witness is restored and sanctioned, where we as a people refuse to be overcome by the darkness. It is here that I would like to share another story from my family, to describe a moment that has inspired all of my work and writing.
My mother, Taube, and her sister, Frania, had just been liberated from the concentration camp by the Russian army. After having captured all the Nazi officials and guards who ran the camp, the Russian soldiers told the Jewish survivors that they could do whatever they wanted to their German persecutors. Many survivors, themselves emaciated and barely alive, immediately fell on the Germans, ravaging them. My mother and my aunt, standing just yards from the terrible scene unfolding in front of them, fell into each other's arms weeping. My mother, who was the physically stronger of the two, embraced my aunt, holding her close and my aunt, who had difficulty standing, grabbed my mother as if she would never let go. She said to my mother, "We cannot do this. Our father and mother would say this is wrong. Even now, even after everything we have endured, we must seek justice, not revenge. There is no other way." My mother, still crying, kissed her sister and the two of them, still one, turned and walked away.
Marc Ellis asks, Can our identity as a people survive a life without barriers? Can we create a future beyond the past while holding onto remembrance? The following essays hopefully show why we cannot leave the world as it is.
CHAPTER 2
Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child of Holocaust Survivors
Some months ago I was invited to reflect on my journey as a child of Holocaust survivors. This journey continues and shall continue until the day I die. Though I cannot possibly say everything, it seems especially poignant that I should be addressing this topic at a time when the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is descending so tragically into a moral abyss and when, for me at least, the very essence of Judaism, of what it means to be a Jew, seems to be descending with it.
The Holocaust has been the defining feature of my life. It could not have been otherwise. I lost over a hundred members of my family and extended family in the Nazi ghettos and death camps in Poland — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, a sibling not yet born — people about whom I have heard so much throughout my life, people I never knew. They lived in Poland in Jewish communities called shtetls.
In thinking about what I wanted to say about this journey, I tried to remember my very first conscious encounter with the Holocaust. Although I cannot be certain, I think it was the first time I noticed the number the Nazis had imprinted on my father's arm. To his oppressors, my father Abraham had no name, no history and no identity other than that blue-inked number, which I never wrote down. As a very young child of four or five, I remember asking my father why he had that number on his arm. He answered by saying he once painted it on but then found it would not wash off, so he was left with it.
My father was one of six children, and he was the only one in his family to survive the Holocaust. I know very little about his family because he could not speak about them without breaking down. I know a little about my paternal grandmother, after whom I am named, and even less about my father's sisters and brother. I know only their names. It caused me such pain to see him suffer with his memories that I stopped asking him to share them.
My father's name was recognized in Holocaust circles because he was one of two known survivors of the death camp at Chelmno, in Poland, where 350,000 Jews were murdered, among them the majority of my family on my father's and mother's sides. They were taken there and gassed to death in January 1942. Through my father's cousin I learned that there is now a plaque at the entrance to what is left of the Chelmno death camp with my father's name on it — something I hope one day to see. My father also survived the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and because of it was called to testify at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.
My mother, Taube, was one of nine children — seven girls and two boys. Her father, Herschel, was a rabbi and shohet — a ritual slaughterer — and deeply loved and respected by all who knew him. Herschel was a learned man who had studied with some of the great rabbis of Poland. The stories both my mother and aunt have told me also indicate that he was a feminist of sorts, getting down on his hands and knees to help his wife or daughters scrub the floor, treating the women in his life with the same respect and reverence he gave the men. My grandmother, Miriam, whose name I also have, was a kind and gentle soul but the disciplinarian of the family since Herschel could never raise his voice to his children. My mother came from a deeply religious and loving family. My aunts and uncles were as devoted to their parents as they were to them. As a family they lived very modestly, but every Sabbath my grandfather would bring home a poor or homeless person who was seated at the head of the table to share the Sabbath meal.
My mother and her sister Frania were the only two in their family to have survived the war. Everyone else perished, except for one other sister, Shoshana, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1936. My mother and Frania had managed to stay together throughout the war — seven years in the Pabanice and Lodz ghettos, followed by the Auschwitz and Halbstadt concentration camps. The only time in seven years they were separated was at Auschwitz. They were in a selection line, where Jews were lined up and their fate sealed by the Nazi doctor, Joseph Mengele, who alone would determine who would live and who would die. When my aunt had approached him, Mengele sent her to the right, to labor (a temporary reprieve). When my mother approached him, he sent her to the left, to death, which meant she would be gassed. Miraculously, my mother managed to sneak back into the selection line, and when she approached Mengele again, he sent her to labor.
A defining moment in my life and journey as a child of survivors occurred even before I was born. It involved decisions taken by my mother and her sister, two very remarkable women, that would change their lives and mine.
After the war ended, my aunt Frania desperately and understandably wanted to go to Palestine/Israel to join their sister who had been there for ten years. The creation of a Jewish state was imminent and Frania felt it was the only safe place for Jews after the Holocaust. My mother disagreed and adamantly refused to go. She told me so many times during my life that her decision not to live in Israel was based on a belief, learned and reinforced by her experiences during the war, that tolerance, compassion and justice cannot be practiced nor extended when one lives only among one's own. "I could not live as a Jew among Jews alone," she said. "For me, it wasn't possible and it wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to live as a Jew in a pluralist society, where my group remained important to me but where others were important to me, too."
Frania emigrated to Israel and my parents went to America. It was extremely painful for my mother to leave her sister but she felt she had no alternative. (They have, however, remained very close and have seen each other many times both here and in Israel.) I have always found my mother's choice and the context from which it emanated remarkable.
I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined and practiced not as a religion but as a system of ethics and culture. God was present but not central. My first language was Yiddish, which I still speak with my family. My home was filled with joy and optimism although punctuated at times by grief and loss. Israel and the notion of a Jewish homeland were very important to my parents. After all the remnants of our family were there. But unlike many of their friends, my parents were not uncritical of Israel, insofar as they felt they could be. Obedience to a state was not an ultimate Jewish value, not for them, not after the Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for Jewish life, for values and beliefs that were not dependent upon national boundaries, but transcended them. For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing witness, raging against injustice and forgoing silence. It meant compassion, tolerance and rescue. It meant, as Ammiel Alcalay has written, ensuring to the extent possible that the memories of the past do not become the memories of the future. These were the ultimate Jewish values. My parents were not saints; they had their faults and they made mistakes. But they cared profoundly about issues of justice and fairness, and they cared profoundly about people — all people, not just their own.
The lessons of the Holocaust were always presented to me as both particular (that is, Jewish) and universal. Perhaps most importantly, they were presented as indivisible. To divide them would diminish the meaning of both.
Looking back over my life, I realize that through their actions and words, my mother and father never tried to save me from self-knowledge; instead, they insisted that I confront what I did not know or understand. Noam Chomsky speaks of the "parameters of thinkable thought." My mother and father constantly pushed those parameters as far as they could, which was not far enough for me, but they taught me how to push them and the importance of doing so.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue. I visited Israel many times while growing up. As a child, I found it a beautiful, romantic and peaceful place. As a teenager and young adult I began to feel certain contradictions that I could not fully explain but which centered on what seemed to be the almost complete absence in Israeli life and discourse of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, and even of the Holocaust itself. I would ask my aunt why these subjects were not discussed and why Israelis didn't learn to speak Yiddish. My questions were often met with grim silence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Failing Peace"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Sara Roy.
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