Other Writings by Mark Chmiel

One of my partners in Gaza was a young American activist who told us newcomers one day,

“There are no women anywhere in the world stronger than the women of Rafah.”

Really?

What about all those Vietnamese women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies?

What about the Tibetan women living as exiles in India?

What about all those unsung elderly African American women in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi?

Over time, I came to this possible translation of my friend’s unverifiable assertion:

In her nine months of living in this city,

A frequent target of Israel’s U.S.-made bulldozers and F-16s,

She had come to love the women of Rafah

For all they had given her

A stranger to their community

But a stranger who earnestly sought to learn their language

And walk their streets

And savor their food

And weep amid the rubble

And undertake their fast

And duck the shrapnel

And mourn their dead

Those women of Rafah–

The late teen-aged girls

The grandmothers

The wives and mothers–

Were strong enough

Even to shower their love

On an American.

A Reflection on Peretz Kidron, Refusenik! Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience (London and New York: Zed Books, 2004)

1.

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle

It tramples the forest, it crushes a hundred men.

But it has one flaw:

It requires a driver.

General, your bomber is strong.

It flies faster than the storm, it loads more than an elephant.

But it has one flaw:

It requires a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.

He knows how to fly, he knows how to murder.

But he has one flaw:

He knows how to think.

–Bertolt Brecht, German poet and playwright who left Germany after Hitler came to power

2.

Refusenik = Israeli Army reservists who report for duty when summoned but refuse morally objectionable assignments (notably serving in the West Bank and Gaza)

In Refusenik!, Peretz Kidron has done a great service in collecting the testimonies of and giving the historical background for the Israeli refusenik movement. It is a slim volume, less than120 pages but it shines a powerful light on the Jewish humanism at work in Israeli society.

Born in Vienna in 1933, living in England during the Third Reich, and moving to Israel in the early 1950s, Kidron has been a refusenik himself. Although there were some instances of Israelis refusing military service in the 1970s, it was with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that galvanized Israelis to protest and say, Enough. In fact, these soldiers of conscience called their organization, Yesh Gvul, Hebrew which means “There is a limit.”

The refuseniks, it is important to know, are not pacifists. However, they would seem to agree in principle with a formulation of the twentieth-century’s best known pacifist, Mohandas Gandhi, who said, “Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.” Theirs is a selective conscientious objection, that is, they are committed to the defense of Israel but not to Israel’s occupation and domination of the Palestinians.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis would see such questioners of authority as traitorous. Likewise, in recent years, even though more Americans have indicated that they want the U.S. troops brought back from Iraq, I suspect those soldiers who refuse to go to Iraq and Afghanistan would be seen in comparably critical terms by their fellow American citizens.

Consider the view of Mike Levine, who was jailed for his refusing to serve in Israel’s Lebanon campaign in the early 1980s: “First time I was called up, I reported for duty. The second time I refused and joined Yesh Gvul. I should stress that my activity in the movement is in no way directed against the state of Israel, I do it out of concern and dread over what is happening here. I believe my refusal is an act of personal protest stemming from unwillingness to take part in the brutal acts committed by the Israeli army. Furthermore, I consider my refusal to be a patriotic act.” [p. 17]

Stephen Langfur was born in the U.S. and was a Conscientious Objector during the American war of destruction in Vietnam. When he moved to Israel, he began to serve in the Israel Defense Force but later refused to serve in the West Bank during the first Palestinian intifada. He faced three weeks of detention for his objection. The following is part of his reckoning for why he did what he did: “The basic moral law here is the Torah, as stated by the Jewish sage of antiquity, Hillel: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do unto others.’ Its principle: another person’s life is as important to him as mine is to me. Insofar as I owe my own being to other persons, that law is basic to being human. We are stuck with it. When we violate it, we feel guilt. There is, however, a way to oppress others and not feel guilt. The moral law applies to persons, so one can avoid feeling guilt by persuading oneself that the oppressed are subhuman. The doctrine of the sub-humanity of the Arabs is in full swing among us (‘grasshoppers’, ‘cockroaches’, ‘one thousandth of a Jew’, ‘animals’, ‘the dirtiest people on earth’). But then, instead of guilt, one feels dread of their ultimate revenge. And because one has pushed their humanity into the unconscious, the oppressed seem not only like animals, but like animals with demoniacal properties. So one feels threatened and beats them harder, and then there is more guilt to avoid, so one de-humanises them more, and on and on: it is the spiral of evil. One cannot sit upon another people without de-humanising them. This is my green line. I refuse to de-humanise the Arabs.” [p. 32]

There have been controversial reports circulating in Israel from soldiers speaking frankly about what they did in the recent Operation Molten Lead in late 2008 and early 2009 in Gaza. Supporters of Israeli policy attribute the problem to individual soldiers. This reaction is reminiscent of the reaction to U.S. soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the early years of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. A few of those soldiers, like Lynddie England, became scapegoats to obscure the chain of command ultimately responsible for the nefarious treatment of Iraqis.

Doron Vilner is a social worker and a co-founder of Yesh Gvul. While imprisoned for his resistance, he had some contact with fellow soldiers who were the cogs in the machine of the Israeli occupation that is authorized by the Israeli power elite. He writes, “The surprise is the discovery of what it is the occupation does to those who enforce it on the ground. Ostensibly, they’re ordinary youngsters like you’d meet anywhere in the world, who talk about the girl-friend they have or haven’t got, or how many days they have left to serve in prison. But over and again, conversations in the tents revert to experiences they’ve had in fighting the intifada. They talk about the Palestinian they beat to a pulp; about the child they caught after a chase, and how his mother came along and made such a fuss trying to get him released; about the Ratz (Liberal) party member who handed over the Arab he’d caught to the Border Guards, begging them not to beat ‘his’ Arab, and how they just waited for him to clear off before giving the prisoner a thrashing. Whenever I enter the tent, the talk ceases or they change the subject to more general matters. Those silences cry out. I have often heard stories of such silences. I heard about them in another land [German] when an entire generation kept silent, never telling their children about an entire period of their lives. And here in prison, detached from my usual circles of acquaintances, I meet those who do the daily work of the occupation. An entire generation for whom authorized establishment violence is part of their daily round. In corners, when there aren’t many listeners around and you can talk discreetly, someone finds a moment to slip up to me and say he didn’t behave that way, that he was different. And anyway, they too, the Arabs, are human beings.” [p. 40]

There are many other such compelling voices in this collection.

3.

Yigal Bronner is a professor of literature at Tel Aviv University and has worked with Ta’ayush, an Arab-Jewish solidarity group. In his letter of refusal to a general, he stated, “I have to turn down your summons to duty. I won’t come along to squeeze the trigger on your behalf. Of course, I have no illusions. To you I am a buzzing gnat that you will swat and try to crush before striding on. You’ll find yourself another gunner, more obedient and gifted than me. There’s no shortage. Your tank will rumble on. One single gnat can’t halt a tank, certainly not a column of tanks, certainly not the entire march of folly. But the gnat can buzz, irritate, infuriate, occasionally even sting. Ultimately, more and more gunners, drivers and commanders, who will see more and more aimless killing, will also start thinking and buzzing. There are already many hundreds of us. Ultimately our buzzing will ascend into a deafening outcry that will echo in your years and the ears of your children, and on the pages of history for many generations.” [p. 117]

For more information, see

Yesh Gvul: http://www.yeshgvul.org/index_e.asp

The Shministim are Israeli high school students who have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in an army that occupies the Palestinian Territories: http://december18th.org/

Courage to Refuse: http://www.seruv.org.il/english/combatants_letter.asp

Breaking the Silence: http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp

When we were reading Chan Khong’s book, Learning True Love, I compiled the following for my young students who do not know much about the American War in Vietnam.

American Heritage Dictionary

Napalm, incendiary material used in bombs and flame throwers. Developed during World War II, napalm is a mixture of gasoline (sometimes mixed with other petroleum fuels) and a thickening agent. The thickener turns the mixture into a dense jelly that flows under pressure, as when shot from a flame thrower, and sticks to a target as it burns. Earlier Soap thickeners were replaced by polystyrene and similar polymers.

Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam, Inc.

NAPALM. The most effective “anti-personnel” weapon, it is euphemistically described as “unfamiliar cooking fluid” by those apologists for American military methods. They automatically attribute all napalm cases to domestic accidents caused by the people using gasoline instead of kerosene in their cooking stoves. Kerosene is far too expensive for the peasants, who normally use charcoal for cooking. The only “cooking fluid” they know is very “unfamiliar” – it is delivered through their roofs by U.S. planes.

Some of its finer selling points were explained to me by a pilot in 1966: “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow [Chemical Company]. The original product wasn’t so hot – if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene – now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter (WP – white phosphorous) so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”

Philip Jones Griffiths, in the book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides by Christian Appy

There was a napalm ward in the provincial hospital of Quang Ngai where the people were so badly disfigured they could probably never go back into society. Many had been put in there to die. I was there once and saw this kid. He had his eyelids burned off, his nose burned off, and his lips burned off. He was halfway to becoming a skull, but he was still alive. I could hardly look at him—he was so ugly, so frightening, really, really frightening.

So I just glanced at him and turned around. I was photographing someone else and I felt somebody pulling at the back of my shirt. I turned around and it was the boy. He indicated with sign language that he wanted me to take his picture. As I took his picture, I remember thinking that it will never get published but it’s something we should have for the war crimes trial. Of course that never happened.

When I came out of that ward there was an American journalist. She said, “I can’t go in there, it’s too horrible. Can you take my camera and take some pictures for me?” I said, “No, you go in there. Those people were burned with your taxpayer’s money. Go and see what they did to those people with your money.”

Teachings from the Buddhist Order of Interbeing

Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sound. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.

Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to life. Select a vocation which helps realize your ideal compassion.

Do not kill. Do not let others kill. Find whatever means possible to protect life and to prevent war.

Respect the property of others but prevent others from enriching themselves from human suffering or the suffering of other beings.

There are many vital actions people are taking to respond to the intensifying crisis in Gaza. Inspired by the work and teachings of the Vietnamese Buddhists Thich Nhat Hanh and Chân Không, we offer the following simple practice for your consideration.

Pick a particular day (of the week or month) and decide to fast from breakfast to dinner.

By skipping lunch, one may feel some mild discomfort toward the later afternoon. Use that discomfort (1) to remember the people in Gaza who are struggling for life and (2) to resolve to find ways of responding to their suffering with efficacy.

The money one would have spent on lunch, say, $5.00, send to a project or an organization in or for Gaza that is trying to alleviate the suffering caused by the blockade since 2005 and Israel’s bombing and invasion since late December 2008.

Possibilities include: Red Crescent, UNRWA, and the Ahli Arab Hospital. People can post worthwhile projects and organizations on this Wall.

If this makes sense to you, please join us. If not, good luck in your own efforts.

Nima Sheth, Saint Louis University Medical School

Matt Miller, Washington University in Saint Louis

Mark Chmiel, Center for Theology and Social Analysis

Because of the extensive, though sanitized, U.S. news coverage of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza, many Americans are paying closer attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict (those with access to Arabic news programming and Youtube clips are not spared the gruesomeness and enormous destruction of Israel’s effort to deal Hamas a death-blow.)

Many people are shocked, if not disgusted, by the mounting death and injury tolls, the David and Goliath asymmetry, and the “collateral damage” and war crimes inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Given this latest escalating round of brutality, and events in recent years such as the publications of Jimmy Carter’s controversial book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid and Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby, more people may be ready to critically question the U.S.-Israel relationship. Further, those horrified by the mass death in what has been called the world’s largest prison may ask, “What can be done to stop this?”

Americans may pride ourselves on being problem-solvers and pragmatists. Yet, these dispositions can sometimes lead to knee-jerk quests for quick-fixes.

Over twenty years ago, MIT professor Noam Chomsky concluded his grim study of the U.S. support for bloodbaths in Central America with these sobering words: “There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change — and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.”

As far as the search for understanding and education, allow me to mention a few resources that provide alternatives perspectives to those often found in the mainstream media or voiced by the U.S. Congress. That search for understanding and education requires a willingness to question all kinds of authority, exposure to various viewpoints, thoughtful consideration of evidence, and on-going dialogue. I offer the following not as “the last word,” but for those wanting to begin to invest more attention to this part of the world.

One website: www.electronicintifada.net offers a stimulating range of news, analysis, and commentary, including diary entries from internationals working in the Palestinian territories.

One book: The Question of Palestine, by the late Edward Said, the foremost Palestinian voice in the U.S. for decades. Part of his work is to show what Zionism has looked like, not from the standpoint of Jews fleeing anti-Semitic Europe, but from the standpoint of Zionism’s victims, the Palestinians.

One documentary: Occupation 101: The Voices of the Silenced Majority deals the current and historical root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group If Americans Knew is distributing this documentary for free; contact them at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/freeocc101.html. The group’s hope is that people will take the initiative to screen the film in homes and gathering places for friends, family, neighbors, and community members.

For those who want to deepen their understanding by acting in concert with others, whether that means material aid, lobbying Congress, political protest, boycott campaigns, and/or travel to Palestine, one can begin by investigating the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation: http://endtheoccupation.org/index.php.

Chomsky’s “hope of a brighter future” is undoubtedly tested by the accumulated misery of the Gazans in the last few years up to this very hour. More of us need to reach out to others who have begun to question the predictable pieties of American political discourse. Further, as activist Kathy Kelly has said, we need to “catch courage from one another” as we seek ways to encourage moves toward justice and peace. Last, we ought to ponder these famous words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly….”

Saturday 1 December 2007

Here is the last paragraph of Dahr Jamail’s book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq:

If the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended. As a journalist, I continue to hold out hope that if people have knowledge of what is happening, they will act accordingly. If people in my country could hear the stories of life under occupation and put themselves into the Iraqis’ stories, they would understand. I hold that hope because the stories of Iraq are our story now. Whether we accept that or not, it is the truth. The water from the Euphrates runs through all our veins. [291]

An American horrified at the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to see the occupation from the point of view of the Iraqi people. Unlike the patriotic journalists embedded with U.S. troops, Jamail embedded himself amidst the Iraqi people.

With great bravery, what he attempted to do was to listen, transcribe, and relay these Iraqis’ stories and perceptions to us. In the United States, given the ubiquity of the slogan “support the troops,” people tend to focus overwhelmingly on our soldiers, their fate, their well-being, their PTSD, and their families. In his book, Jamail gives us an opportunity, in less than three hundred gut-wrenching pages, to listen to and take in the voices of Iraqis under U.S. military occupation.

To give you a small taste, I have culled a number of quotations from men and women Dahr Jamail spoke with in Iraq. Ask yourself, how often have you heard such voices and questions in the New York Times or Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, heard them on NPR, or seen them on ABC?

“Do you think all these people, these innocent people being killed by the Americans, don’t have families that are now joining the resistance?” [21]

“So what are the people to do? It [the attack] is not an action, what you have seen is a reaction. If the occupation power continues to hurt and humiliate the people here, every man will become a bomb.” [25]

[Another man approached me with the two children of his brother, killed by U.S. gunfire, by his side.] “This little boy and girl, their father was shot by the Americans. Who will take care of this family? Who will watch over these children? Who will feed them now? Who? Why did they kill my brother? What is the reason? Nobody told me. He was a truck driver. What is his crime? Why did they shoot him? They shot him with 150 bullets! Did they kill him just because they wanted to shoot a man? That’s it? This is the reason? Why didn’t anyone talk to me and tell me why they have killed my brother? Is killing people a normal thing now, happening every day? This is our future? This is the future that the United States promised Iraq?” [29]

“The largest tragedy of the invasion and occupation is the devastation of the people of Iraq. We were hoping for relief, but so far it has only been more suffering.” [39]

“The Americans are the ones who create the terrorists. They say they will kill all the terrorists in the world, but they are actually creating more terrorists.” [42]

“The Americans are creating the terrorists here by hurting people and causing their relatives to fight against them. Even this little boy will grow up hating the Americans because of their policy here.” [78]

“Why are we called terrorists? This is our country. These are foreign army tanks in our streets killing our people. We fight against this and we are called terrorists? They are the terrorists.” [116]

[The stream of patients slowed to a sporadic influx as night fell. Maki sat with me as she shared cigarettes in a small office in the rear of the clinic.] “For all my life, I believed in American democracy,” he told me with an exhausted voice. “For forty-seven years, I had accepted the illusion of Europe and the United States being good for the world, the carriers of democracy and freedom. Now I see that it took me forty-seven years to wake up to the horrible truth. They are not here to bring anything like democracy and freedom. Now I see it has been all lies. The Americans don’t give a damn about democracy or human rights. They are worse even than Saddam.” [I asked him if he minded if I quoted him with his name.] “What are they going to do to me that they haven’t already done here,” he said. [139]

“I was against Saddam. I was jailed by his regime in 1996 for making pastries because at the time sugar was being rationed due to the sanctions. But the U.S. policy now in Iraq will fail 100 percent. No people here support them now.” [147]

“Of course the Americans are bombing civilians, along with the revolutionaries. One year ago there was no revolution in Fallujah. But they began searching houses and humiliating people, and this upset people. The people became angry and demonstrated, then the Americans shot the demonstrators, and this started the revolution in Fallujah. It’s the same in Sadr City.” [150]

“The Americans don’t care what happens to Iraqis.” [151]

“Here, one would have to distinguish between terrorism and resistance. Terror was unseen here before the invasion. In Fallujah, it is not terrorism, it is resistance.” [152]

“The crimes against humanity in Palestine are shown daily on television. This does not indicate that the current U.S. administration is committed to democracy of human rights. How can the United States, a war criminal in Palestine, be accepted as a state-builder in Iraq?” [152]

“This is the way the Americans are freeing Iraq? America’s freedom is killing Iraqis. Fallujah is becoming another Palestine! How long will we have to live like this?” [161]

“When the Americans start patrolling on Monday, even more people will fight them this time because there are many who seek revenge now.” [164]

“When we tried to go to our mosque, the snipers shot at us.” [165]

[He asserted with justifiable pride that Fallujah was the first city in Iraq that the U.S. military had left because of the resistance rather than through negotiations.] “We hope all cities in Iraq become as liberated as Fallujah is.” [193]

“Abu Ghraib attacked the dignity of the Iraqi people. Did America not become barbarians from killing Indians, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Afganis, and bombing us and our young chidrlen. Who now have psychological scars? If these did not reveal the true barbarian nature of America, then Abu Ghraib certainly did. I never liked Saddam, nor did I support him, but at least under the dictator there was order and some basic services. Now there is no order, no electricity, no fundamental stability.” [195]

“The mujahadeen are fighting for their country against the Americans, who are the occupiers. We all accept this resistance.” [204]

“How can we live like this, we are trapped in our own country. You know, Daher, everyone is praying to God to take revenge on the Americans. Everyone.” [230]

“We need electricity to run our pumps to be able to irrigate our farms. At the moment we are having to carry water in buckets form the river instead and this is very difficult for us. They say they are going to make things better for us, but things are worse. Saddam was better than this, even though he executed three of my relatives.” [261]

“I watched American soldiers force naked Iraqi women into a cell. I heard the screams as the soldiers raped the women.” [261]

“We don’t want this freedom of the Americans. They are raiding our homes and terrorizing us all the time. We are living in terror. They shoot and bomb us everyday. We have sent our families to live elsewhere.” [261]

“The high commissioner for elections was appointed by Bremer, so how can we have a legitimate election under these circumstances? This election only serves the interests of the occupier, not Iraqis. This is only propaganda for Bush.” [267]

Dahr Jamail’s book should be widely read and meditated upon. It ought to be discussed at mosques and churches, in high schools and universities. And it ought to lead more of us to take deliberate and daring action to speak the truth about the occupation, interfere with its functioning, and highlight the immorality of the corporations benefiting from its lethal effect on the ordinary Iraqis with whom Dahr Jamail shared so many precious, exhausting, and frightful months.

DIALOGUE AND SOLIDARITY
Mark Chmiel
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006. xiv + 264 pages. Bibliography to p. 282. Notes to p. 348. Index to p. 362. $24.95 cloth.

Witness in Palestine: Journal of a Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories, by Anna Baltzer. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. xii + 212 pages. Appendices to p. 217. Glossary to p. 221. $62.00 cloth.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Palestine Studies

In July 1967 three young Palestinian men left the recently Israeli-occupied West Bank on a mission of visceral importance. Natives of al-Ramla, now in Israel, the men simply wished to see the home of their childhood. Bashir Khairi, one of the three, knocked on the front door of his family’s home and was met by a young Israeli woman, Dalia Eshkenazi, whose family came to occupy Bashir’s home after they fled Bulgaria after World War II. This encounter led to many more in the decades that followed, and it supplies [or these supply?] the narrative dynamic of Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree.

After the short first chapter sets up this dramatic face-to-face meeting, Tolan alternates succeeding chapters by devoting one to Bashir’s family and the next to Dalia’s, moving from the period before or during World War II up to 1967. One hundred and forty-three pages into the book, the meeting of Dalia and Bashir begins, leading them both on a journey of unexpected appreciation, grave disappointment, strong disagreement, and a willingness to keep talking and keep seeing the humanity of the other.

Like so many Israelis, Dalia saw Zionism and the State of Israel in glowing, heroic, and innocent terms. The encounter with Bashir begins to wear away at this uncritical understanding. As a child Dalia had been taught that in 1948 the previous owners of the Eshkenazi home simply ran away. Through Bashir’s stories and meeting his family, she begins to see how the Nakba affected one Palestinian family, with its members’ ardent longing to return to their home with the precious lemon tree in the back yard.

Nevertheless, in the ensuing decades, Dalia continues to challenge Bashir, who is adamant about the implementation of UN Resolution 194 and the Palestinian right to return: If the Palestinians were to exercise this right, what about the Israelis who are already there? His response to Dalia: “The Israelis created this problem, and they can’t place more burdens on us to solve it” (p. 261).

Tolan skillfully weaves significant historical and political events, from the first intifada to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, into the personal context of Dalia and Bashir’s families. This makes for compelling reading throughout.

As a personal gesture of acknowledgement of the intertwined histories of Jew and Arab, Dalia eventually turned her family’s home into Open House, a kindergarten for the Arab children in the town and a site of Arab-Jewish dialogue.

Eleven years ago, Edward Said made the following challenge:

The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be deflected by the common tactic of putting Israeli security on the same plane. On the other hand I do think it is a mistake simply to rule out the whole history of anti-Semitism (the Holocaust included) as irrelevant. As Palestinians and Arabs we have not even tried to study this enormous subject, nor in any serious way have we tried to see how it impinges on the Jewish, and indeed Western, conscience as something all too real. Thus we need a discourse that is intellectually honest and complex enough to deal both with the Palestinian as well as the Jewish experience, recognizing where the claims of one stop and where the other begin. (The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After [Pantheon Books, 2000], p. 123)

The Lemon Tree consciously attempts this kind of discourse and juxtaposition. Here is one exchange between the two protagonists/antagonists:

Dalia: “I know that my people were killed, slaughtered, put in gas ovens. Israel was the only safe place for us. It was the place where the Jews could finally feel that being a Jew is not a shame!”

Bashir: “But you are saying the whole world did this, Dalia. It is not true. The Nazis killed the Jews. And we hate them. But why should we pay for what they did? . . . Is it justice that we should be expelled from our cities, our villages, our streets. We have history here—Lydda, Haifa, Jaffa, al-Ramla. Many Jews who came here believed they were a people without a land going to a land without a people. That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land. Their civilization, their history, their heritage, their culture. And now we are strangers. Strangers in every place. Why did this happen, Dalia? The Zionism did this to you, not just to the Palestinians” (p. 160–61).

The Holocaust appears early in Witness in Palestine, the chronicle of a young Jewish American woman’s journey to the West Bank. The second sentence of Anna Baltzer’s introduction notes that her grandmother is a Holocaust survivor who deemed Israel crucial to Jewish safety. It was during Baltzer’s travels in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon that she began to hear a narrative, as the one so passionately articulated in Dalia’s exchanges with Bashir, that countered the Holocaust-Israel one.

Baltzer decided to see the Palestinian side for herself and committed to work on two different occasions for a period of five months with International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) in the West Bank. Like Rabbis for Human Rights and the International Solidarity Movement, Baltzer and her partners with IWPS were intent on practicing solidarity and nonviolent direct action with the Palestinians to protect their land, crops, property, as well as the people living under a brutal Israeli military occupation.

Scores of beautiful and heartbreaking color photographs accompany Baltzer’s lively and detailed journal entries, which take the reader through the hardship and horror of the occupation. She describes the mechanisms of that occupation, such as roadblocks and checkpoints, that belie their stated purpose of protecting Israeli citizens by simply making life hard on the Palestinians. She documents instances of intimidation, kidnappings, destruction of property, confiscation of land, among many other violations of Palestinian human rights.

Baltzer also writes with respect and admiration for the Palestinians who practice nonviolent direct action every day of their lives. Further, she candidly details several encounters she has with Israeli soldiers, at times remaining calm and at others becoming infuriated by their words and actions. Baltzer herself exhibits commendable courage in choosing to walk with Palestinians in difficult and even life-threatening situations, including nonviolent demonstrations against the separation wall. In addition to her reports on the day-to-day life of an activist in Palestine, Baltzer writes on broader issues such as nonviolence and Zionism.

Tolan’s book reveals how tense and fragile the path of dialogue can be. Baltzer’s account of her admittedly brief time in the West Bank also points to the limits of international attempts at sharing life with Palestinians and aiding them in their struggles for justice. Both books contain scenes of brilliant and courageous humanity and look unsparing at the power of violence, hatred, and vengeance. These books remind me of Albert Camus’s candid self-examination from World War II: “During these four dreadful years all Frenchmen were witnesses to a crime not foreseen by any law (and in saying this we are weighing our words carefully): the crime of not doing enough” (quoted in Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz [Random House, 2006], p. 261). Bashir Khairi, Dalia Eshkenazi, and Anna Baltzer may not be guilty of this crime; the reader of these books, of course, has to answer for himself.

Review of Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. New York: Random House, 2006. 303 p. $25.95. Forthcoming in Shofar.

In Fear, historian Jan Gross explores a seemingly baffling phenomenon. How is it that there was aggressive anti-Semitism in Poland, after the Holocaust?

How is that even thinkable? After all, did not ethnic Poles and Polish Jews both suffer horrifically during the Nazi years? Did not Poles see much more intimately than other Europeans what the Nazi system of mass murder was like, since Poland was the site of so many death camps?

In his investigations, Gross was intrigued to discover cases of Righteous Gentiles among the Poles who hid Jews during the Nazi slaughter, yet after World War II, they were reluctant to let their heroism be known to their fellow Polish citizens. Why be silent, when they exhibited an all too rare humanity on behalf of the Jews? They were afraid of the likely hostile reaction by their Polish neighbors.

Here is Gross’s summary view: “I see no other plausible explanation of the virulent postwar anti-Semitism in Poland but that it was embedded in the society’s opportunistic wartime behavior. Jews were perceived as a threat to the material status quo, security, and peaceful conscience of their Christian fellow citizens after the war because they had been plundered and because what remained of Jewish property, as well as Jews’ social roles, had been assumed by Polish neighbors in tacit and often directly opportunistic complicity with Nazi-instigated institutional mass murder” (247).

At the center of Gross’s study is an analysis of the murderous outbreak of anti-Semitism in Kielce in 1946 and the reactions to it. Gross estimates that up to a quarter of the population participated in some degree with the violence against the town’s Jews. Scores of Jews were murdered by both police and townspeople. Authorities themselves took pains to side with the locals involved in the melee, and not be seen as sympathetic to the Jews under attack. With one exception, the Catholic Church hierarchs basically blamed the Jews for what happened. There was no social stigma attached to those involved in the harassment, beatings, and murder. Gross quotes a witness to the stoning of a Jew at that time: “After several hours of these events, people were tired but in spite of everything they were lifting stones and throwing them calmly, as if the death of a human being, killing of a person, were not at stake here” (103).

One rare shining light Gross identifies in Fear is the outraged stands taken by Polish intellectuals vis-à-vis their fellow citizens blithely brutal behavior. Gross comments that these interventions “make all the difference for Poles today, and can be cherished as a measure of moral sensitivity which has not been dulled among the country’s spiritual elite. But at the time they went unheeded, and their calls for vigour combating anti-Semitism fell on deaf ears, very much like the warnings Jan Karski delivered to the Polish government-in-exile in 1940, when he reported that anti-Jewish measures of the Nazi occupiers resonated well with large segments of the Polish society” (133). This is a familiar, sad, and predictable story: Those who embrace the prophetic vocation of afflicting the comfortable experience a kind of marginality, or exile.

The “fear” of the title can be interpreted as belonging to various groups: Obviously, the surviving Polish Jews, who were subject to abuse, intimidation, and murder; the Righteous Poles who were afraid of the consequences if their neighbors knew they had hid Jew during the war (the neighbors might have murdered them in hopes of digging up the mythic Jewish wealth their neighbors must have appropriated); and the Poles who had benefited from the dispossession of the Jews and were, at some level, fearful of the survivors who reminded “them of the fragility of their own existence, of the propensity for violence residing in their own communities, and of their own helplessness vis-à-vis the [Communist] agents … who now invoked class criteria for elimination from public life” (emphasis Gross’s, 256).

But the word “hate” could have also joined “fear” in Gross’s title. He retrieves a pungent line from Tacitus: “It is indeed human nature to hate the man whom you have injured.” While some Poles had an acute conscience that led them to act compassionately toward the Jews, many others had a bad conscience that first led them to act complicitously with the Nazis, and then to treat the Jewish survivors with contempt and violence.

Gross’s tale has an eerie pertinence to our present time. His themes –ethnic cleansing, dispossession of a people, material gain following on persecution of the suspect group, the bureaucratic processes by which such theft is legitimated, perpetrators evading justice—are still all too familiar. Gross cites Albert Camus’s candid self-examination from World War II: “During these four dreadful years all Frenchmen were witnesses to a crime not foreseen by any law (and in saying this we are weighing our words carefully): the crime of not doing enough.” Gross’s lacerating study reveals how few Poles did enough. Surveying our own world today in the light of the themes of Gross’s troubling book, can we honestly say that we are doing enough?

Remembering al-Nakba

Mark Chmiel

Recently the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC sponsored an unusual exhibit, “Darfur: Who Will Survive Today?” Photographic images of the genocide in Darfur are flashed to incredible size at night outside on the wall of the Museum.

Even given the fast and furious pace of many who live in Washington, the exhibit may have raised some awareness, touched some hearts, and spurred willingness to get involved. A friend of mine who works on Darfur recently told me that “there are no easy answers” to the crisis there. She sees grave problems with advocacy of military intervention without resolute attention to a meaningful peace process.

It seems to me that Darfur represents, for the U.S. government at least, a “benign” genocide, to adapt an idea from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s books on contemporary bloodbaths, The Political Economy of Human Rights. Darfur doesn’t really affect primary elite U.S. interests and, thus, there appears to be no “Operation Darfur Freedom” in the works, reminiscent of President Bush’s drive to invade and “liberate” Iraq. Despite some occasional rhetoric from the president, the people are Darfur appear to be expendable.

Perhaps such practical indifference on the part of the U.S. government influenced the Holocaust Museum to offer the photo exhibit. Back in 1978, it was President Jimmy Carter who started a President’s Commission on Remembering the Holocaust that would eventually give birth to Holocaust museum. In 1979, Carter addressed why such a project was necessary for us as Americans: “because we are humane people, concerned with the human rights of all peoples, we feel compelled to study the systematic destruction of the Jews so that we may seek to learn how to prevent such enormities from occurring in the future.” So, it is understandable that the Holocaust Museum would have a mandate to be concerned with calling attention to contemporary genocides and ethnic cleansings.

Today is a good time to think about an ethnic cleansing that remains too little known in the United States. For November 29 is the anniversary of the 1947 UN partition plan of Palestine, after which began what Palestinians have called al-Nakba, the catastrophe. In a new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, describes the process under the Zionists and Israeli Jews by which Palestinian villages were occupied and then destroyed, and its people expelled. Of particular interest to Pappe is David Ben-Gurion’s Plan D, which in March 1948, gave the unequivocal green light for this cleansing (Pappe points out several Hebrew words used in various communications of the time that spoke clearly of “cleaning”). Looting, murder, and rape also accompanied these operations. Pappe writes of early spring 1948: “Between 30 March and 15 May, 200 villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled. This is a fact that must be repeated, as it undermines the Israeli myth that the ‘Arabs’ ran away once the ‘Arab invasion’ began. Almost half of the Arab villages had already been attacked by the time the Arab governments eventually, and, as we know, reluctantly decided to send in their troops. Another ninety villages would be wiped out between 15 May and 11 June 1948, when the first of two truces finally came into effect.”

Edward Said once recalled, “I’ve frequently said [to Israelis], ‘Look what happened to you: You as Jews are the victims of all time, really. The history of anti-Semitism is a millennial fact. And we are your victims now. How can you, having suffered victimization, in what seems to be with heedless consciences, inflict similar punishments on another people? People, who, in the great scale of things, have done you very little harm—except that they were there?’”

Given the political economy of memory of the Holocaust Museum, one ought neither to expect that the Museum will host an exhibit on al-Nakba nor think that the Museum will invite Jimmy Carter to discuss his new book in which he speaks of Israeli apartheid in the occupied territories. Photos of the suffering in Darfur are acceptable; photos of Palestinians who have suffered ethnic cleansing and apartheid will be unacceptable and arouse outrage. Books speaking of the need for Israel’s security are praised; books addressing Palestinian insecurity at the hands of Israelis are de facto anti-Semitic.

However, other institutions, civic groups, churches, and schools ought to sponsor such al-Nakba photo exhibits and invitations to Carter to speak a truth that many would just as soon forget or deny.

The Holocaust Museum and its leaders like Elie Wiesel have been tireless in urging remembrance of the Holocaust and working against Holocaust denial.

We ought also to be tireless in urging remembrance of the Palestinian Nakba and in working against Nakba denial as well.

Mark Chmiel teaches at Saint Louis University and is author of Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership .