March
2001
Listening
to My Generation: A Personal Account of the Palestinian-Israeli
Conflict
By Jean Thaler
|
|
|
It’s election day and Palestinians are burning
an effigy of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the Israeli leader who went
farther than any other to meet their terms. Without a Jewish consensus,
Barak had agreed to return 90 percent of the West Bank and the Muslim
and Christian quarters of old Jerusalem to Palestinian sovereignty
and
to a partial return of Palestinian refugees. The compromise cost him
political defeat.
Today’s landslide victory of Ariel Sharon is the heartbroken response
of Israel to the unrelenting hatred of its neighbors. I don’t
approve of it, but I do understand it.
When I read Hanan Ashrawi’s article, “Anatomy
of Racism,” in Satya (November/December 2000), I reacted
opposite to what she probably intended, and opposite to how I would
have reacted 20 years ago. As a non-religious Jew, I was offended. How
dare she call us racist?
It is the Palestinians who have shown unrelenting racism. Over years
of continual breakdown in the peace process, I have sadly come to the
conclusion that many Palestinians seek the destruction of Israel, not
peace. And it is articles like Ashrawi’s that whip Palestinians
and many other Arabs into a frenzy against Jews, perhaps worse now than
ever before. The disgust I felt reading Ashrawi’s words is something
most Israelis must feel every day.
When I was younger, I advocated for peace and rallied for Palestinian
human rights. Now, however, my reaction to Ashrawi’s article and
her defense of the Palestinians against Israel made me wonder just
how
far to the right I have drifted, and whether other American Jews of
my generation, in their 30s and 40s, feel the same.
“We don’t know enough to say”
While many religious Jewish Americans of my generation always have
taken a hawkish line toward the Palestinians, others, like me, became
disillusioned over time.
When I asked around to find if I was alone in my feelings, what came
as a surprise was the non-stance of other Jews! The secular Jews I know
had no concrete opinion to offer. The peace process is on, off, then
on and off again. Who can keep on top of the latest proposals, or the
gory details of the latest bloodshed?
“We don’t know enough to say,” most people told me. “We
can’t do anything about it.”
Perhaps many non-observant American Jews of my age feel they do not
have a right to an opinion on Israel. I doubt this is because they
haven’t
closely followed the news—many religious Jews don’t either.
Maybe it’s Jewish guilt. We did not live during the Holocaust.
We hardly speak Hebrew. We don’t observe all the laws of Sabbath
and the kosher diet.
Then there is liberal guilt. To have an opinion during an intifada might
be to have an opinion less-than-liberal!
When I kept pressing, I found that everyone shared, at minimum, the
wish that Israel survive as a Jewish state in some form. And I noticed
a major change in the stance of all but the hardest-line of the right,
and that is a consensus for a Palestinian state.
Sadly, the reasons are negative: to separate Israeli Jews from people
who by-and-large hate them and to preserve the Jewish state.
“Racism we see”
I would guess that I and many of my friends are truly doves at
heart. But at present, we are hawkish to varying degrees as a matter
of self-defense.
Unfortunately, in the current climate it would be naïve to drop
our defenses.
For instance, three quarters of Palestinians surveyed favored a recent
bombing of an Israeli school bus. In a television broadcast, a clergyman
(who was appointed by the Palestinian Authority) issued a call to butcher
Jews—no matter where they are—and Americans who are like
them.
An article in the Palestinian Authority (PA) newspaper described the
Holocaust as “a deceitful myth which the Jews have exploited to
get sympathy.” A prominent politician dismissed Dachau and Auschwitz
as disinfection sites; Mein Kampf is on the Palestinian bestseller
list.
Palestinians have died. But Palestinian spokespeople don’t tell
us how boys and girls get in front of Israeli guns. After school, buses
bring children to the fighting. Their fathers, teachers and clergy exhort
them to martyrdom. Their schoolbooks call on them to destroy Israel.
The Mufti of Jerusalem has proclaimed: “The younger the martyr,
the more I respect him.” A Palestinian women’s group petitioned
the PA: instruct the police to stop driving our children in cars to
the conflict sites.
A cartoon in the PA newspaper labels an eggplant-nosed Jew, “Disease
of the century.” Yasser Arafat dismisses Jewish connections to
the Temple Mount. Hanan Ashrawi does the same for the Tomb of Joseph.
This, after Palestinians smashed and burned the structure and the Torahs
and Hebrew prayer books inside.
At a falafel restaurant recently, I saw a front-page cartoon in “Muslims
New York.” A bulbous-nosed Jew says: “I’m from Brooklyn,
and I’m retoyning [sic] to Israel;” a nearby Zionist-English
dictionary says: “Return, as in ‘law of return,’ for
Jews only—to come back somewhere you’ve never been before.”
It’s unfair to my generation. Unfair to the generation shaped
by a handshake between an Egyptian president and an Israeli prime minister.
Unfair to the only government that ever voluntarily accepted the principle
of partition. A slap in the face to a peace movement that kept going
after five Arab invasions, bombings against Jewish civilians and children,
and the rock throwing of the intifada. A slap in the face after years
and years of peace demonstrations, letters, donations.
In college, I was quite the sympathizer for the Palestinian cause.
My love for ancient Egypt and the Middle East since childhood propelled
me to major in Middle Eastern Studies as an undergraduate and to earn
a Masters degree in International Affairs. When Lebanese allies of
Israel
massacred Palestinians in refugee camps, I led a memorial during a
Sabbath service. In the late 1980s, I signed outraged letters to the
Israeli
government protesting the human rights abuses of suspected Palestinian
fighters who were detained for months without charge or trial. Whenever
I found the reaction, “Support Israel—right or wrong,” I
fought it.
When I was young, the stance of religious and older American Jews on
Palestinians had seemed knee-jerk. I no longer think so. In conversations
with modern Orthodox and Conservative friends my own age, I find that
they offer real, informed reasons to see Palestinians as the enemy:
bombings, intransigence in the peace process, siphoning of international
aid into the pockets of the Palestinian Authority, the intifada, a second
intifada. The sight of Palestinians dancing with the blood-dripping
entrails of two murdered Israeli soldiers.
All this said, racism is never the proper response to racism. Jews and
Palestinians must co-exist to survive. My generation will face an uphill
struggle to combat Palestinian racism, at the same time striving to
regain our ideals.
Jean Thaler holds a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Yale
and a M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University. She was
the founder of Big Apple Vegetarians.
