The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  Eventually he added, “Their intention is and always has been to see the end of a Jewish polity in the region and the expulsion of the vast majority of Jews. To the extent the Palestinians agree to have sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it is but a stepping-stone for an Arab-dominated polity over the entire territory. As the common refrain goes, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’”

  Brandon brow furrowed, considering.

  “Don’t the Israelis have expansionist wishes of their own?” he finally said. “Claiming the West Bank as their patrimony?”

  “Yes, and more,” agreed David. “In its most minimalist form, the Zionist aspiration has been about establishing a Jewish state reaching all the way to the Jordan River. And the dream is always there for us. Regardless, what counts is the ideology that holds sway where and when it matters.” He leaned forward, resting an arm on the small side table next to him. “In a context of a genuine prospect for peaceful coexistence, my people agreed to a two-state solution and came around to paying its price—the loss of a dream of a Jewish state extending over its Biblical heartland and the loss of existing Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In contrast, when it comes down to it, the domineering Palestinian position hasn’t.

  “As a group, the Palestinians have neither been inclined nor seemingly capable of seeing any point of view except theirs, justice except theirs, no aspiration or national narrative except theirs. Before disillusionment set in, the movement Peace Now, calling for two states for two people, was popular for decades among Israeli Jews. Nothing remotely equivalent has existed among the Palestinians. You cannot meet halfway those who do not wish to meet at all.”

  “What is your personal story, David?” Susan asked.

  The old man smiled obligingly. “I was born in Zagreb, Croatia,” he told them. “Life as I have known it was over in the summer of 1941, a few months after the Ustasha assumed power, shepherding dreams of a racially pure Croatia.” It happened decades ago, a lifetime ago. Time indeed healed. Now it was merely a story, albeit a sorrowful one.

  “A cattle train to Gospic,” he began. “From there, hungry and beaten, we were marched for miles up massif Velebit to Jadovno death camp. There were thousands of us, Serbs and Jews. Every few hours, a group was assembled, then escorted out, never to return. A few days in the camp and my turn came. They tied me with a wire to another boy. The wire was linked to a chain that connected about fifty of us, mostly children and women. They marched us for what must have been miles to the edge of a sinkhole. At that point, the Ustasha overwhelmed those in the front and bashed their heads with mallets. The corpses were pushed into the deep sinkhole dragging the rest of us in. Those still alive were screaming. A hand grenade was flung into the pit, killing off those that survived the fall.” David gave them a sad smile. “I had bodies below me and two above me. Perhaps that’s why I made it. I was the only who did on that day. From the pit of death, I worked my way out. About a year later, I reached Palestine.” He glanced up. They were all looking at him intently, engrossed in his account.

  He continued in a lighter tone, “The year was 1942 when I stood at the lowest point in the world, gazing upon the impossible: Beit HaArava. The story of this extraordinary settlement began a few years earlier with one lone night guard.” David suddenly chortled. “He had this crazy notion that the scorching, barren plains to the immediate west of the Dead Sea could sustain people. He refused to admit the obvious: with 17 percent salt content in the soil, nothing has ever grown there. Or could.

  “After months of futile attempts, he hit on the idea of washing the sand repeatedly and leaching off the salt. And one sunny morning, the first plant grew in one of his experimental garden beds. It was the first plant to grow in that region since time immemorial. A year or two later, a dozen young people joined him in creating the first settlement in the area. They piped water from the Jordan river.

  “I came on board during the third year. We constructed ponds to breed fish, and their fecal matter provided us with the needed fertilizer. We have worked hard, very hard. Let me tell you, when I heard the first chirp of a bird, I cried like a child.

  “A few years later, about one hundred Jewish families were living in Beit HaArava, which by then boasted eucalyptuses, cypresses, pines, and flowers. And soon, there were the sounds of playing and laughing children, where but less than a decade earlier there was nothing but the sigh of the wind over a barren land. This was the happiest period of my life.”

  Lee suddenly rose from her seat and waved through the glass panels for someone on the outside to come in. “Sorry for the interruption, David.” She peeked outside again. “Heather is here.” She looked back at them. “Please do continue, guys.”

  “Sounds like it came to an end at some point,” suggested Mr. Galecki.

  “I am afraid it did,” replied David. “As the UN trust territory that was Palestine collapsed, a power struggle ensued. We were among those who had to flee the oncoming Arab armies. Later we learned that the Jordanians destroyed the settlement.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Susan.

  “Well, yeah, it was a shame. In one decade, I became a refugee twice. But we just went elsewhere, where we could work and build things once again. Life goes on, you know.” David shrugged then looked up.

  A slender woman in a pixie cut was walking in. She appeared to be in her twenties. Lee went over and hugged her.

  “Hi, everyone,” said Heather. She had a firm, pleasant voice.

  “David,” said Lee, putting her arms around the newcomer, “this is Heather. Heather is doing a dissertation on women and Australian rules football. Did I get it right?”

  “Yep. ‘Empowerment through collective subjectification Aussie rules culture of women,’” affirmed Heather.

  “Nice to meet you.” It was apparent that the old man had no inkling what was just said.

  “David is an old friend of Aratta,” Lee was saying, and the old man inclined his head.

  Lee introduced her to Brandon and to Mr. Galecki, but skipped Puddeck, who resumed his snooze. Heather gave the hammock a wide berth but smiled at David in greeting and then at the handsome, dignified man in a linen summer suit. She had seen Aratta once before at another gathering. He looked to her like a fashion model out of GQ magazine—circa 1910. She was never quite sure how to behave around him. Lee claimed he was much older than he appeared. Heather nodded toward the elderly woman in cream pantsuit; she had run into Susan once or twice before in one of Lee’s get-togethers.

  “I thought Ashley was also coming,” Lee remarked.

  Heather helped herself to a can of Dr. Pepper and plopped on the sofa. “She is. In the evening.” There was a little popping sound as she opened the can. “What are you guys talking about?”

  “Israel and politics,” Susan said.

  “Oh neat,” said Heather.

  It was thirteen hours away before the clock was to strike midnight.

  Chapter 21

  “In truth,” said Brandon, “some people have a problem with Israel.”

  Heather bobbed her head in agreement.

  People seemed to have problems with Israel ever since David could remember. “What problem do you speak of?”

  “Well, I don’t think Israel can be a Jewish state any more than France can be a white republic,” said Brandon. “I will be honest; some think Zionism equates racism.”

  David raised an eyebrow at that last remark. “You find in my country blacks from Ethiopia, whites from Russia, and everyone in between. It is a state based on a common nationality and ethos, not on race.”

  Brandon made an impatient sound. “Either notion is a relic of the past. Can there really be a place for a country that defines itself as committed to any one ethnicity, that does not see all its citizens as equally central to its mission?”

  “Obviously, yes. Japan is just such an entity.�
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  “Are you saying non-Jews are unwelcomed in Israel as citizens?”

  “Insofar this would upset the overwhelming Jewish majority, I am.”

  “You really are a nationalist, aren’t you?”

  “I really am,” David agreed and smiled good-naturedly. “Like the Dalai Lama.” He winked. Susan grinned at that. Heather scowled. Her opinion of the Dalai Lama hit rock bottom after he had proclaimed that “Europe belongs to the Europeans” and “Refugees should eventually return to their own land and rebuild their own country.” As far as she could tell, he had turned out to be just another bigot and a fake.

  “Israel has a sense of community and bonds of solidarity that are simply not possible outside a nation-state,” the elderly professor said. “A country ought to be more than a place that enshrines civil rights; it needs to have a soul.”

  He added, “When one of our soldiers, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped by Hamas forces and held in captivity for five years, we did all we could to get him back. We ended up releasing over one thousand political prisoners in exchange and never looked back. He was the son of every father and mother in Israel. I doubt you Americans can truly comprehend how we felt about Shalit.”

  “All the same,” said Heather, “both our countries are alike in some ways. Our colonial roots. The fact we’re all descendants from immigrants.”

  “Rubbish,” countered Mr. Galecki, suddenly coming to life. “The Europeans who settled North America did not ‘immigrate.’ For one, this would have necessitated an existing country to immigrate to. Far from being immigrants, these northwestern Europeans were settlers and pioneers, regardless if they thought of themselves that way. In the 1600s and in the 1700s and in the early 1800s, their collective actions and choices gradually spawned what was to become the American nation.”

  He added as an afterthought, “The first big wave of immigrants proper happened toward the mid-nineteenth century.”

  Brandon gave him a cool glance. “Aren’t you overlooking the Native Americans?”

  Galecki disliked the term. As he saw it, being born in America made you a native, which meant all the Americans in the room were “native Americans.”

  “What about them?” he asked gruffly. “They largely died off due to diseases. To a limited extent, their mindset and sensibilities did enter the mixture that makes up the American ethos. However, their members had little to do with the building of this country.”

  Brandon shifted uneasily in his chair.

  Galecki’s mouth twitched with amusement. It seemed he had stumbled over one of the big American guilt buttons: the original sin of their nation’s birth.

  From an inside-pocket in his jacket, Aratta produced a pipe. He gestured with it. “As the northwestern European colonial-settler enterprise here expanded, its people engaged in brutish skirmishes with various Amerindian populations and more often than not ended up forcibly displacing the latter,” he told Brandon. “But it was fundamentally no different from the conduct and dynamics of other population groups in the region.”

  He put the pipe in his mouth but took it out again. “The Amerindian tribes in the Great Lakes area fell all over each other in their rush to supply the European traders with beaver fur—in their desire for and gradual dependency on brass cookware, muskets, and hatchets, which they themselves could not manufacture. By the 1630s, the Iroquois League, the Haudenosaunee, all but decimated the beavers in their territories in a prolonged hunting frenzy. What happened next was as deplorable as it was predictable.

  “In pursuit of unspoiled lands, Iroquois League war parties moved against the Hurons, Mahicans, and Eries. From there, it evolved into a series of expansionist wars that drove tribes out of the Ohio River Valley. The invading Seneca ate Miami children, and old Mascoutens had their eyes gouged and mouth girdled, leaving them to stumble blind and starving. The word that comes to mind is savagery.”

  Aratta continued, “From the Shawnee and the Fox to the Petuns and the Ottawas, vast streams of displaced people migrated southward and westward, in turn impacting others. And after three generations of up­rooting, killing, pillaging, and burning, the butcher bill came due. It dwarfed the combined number killed in the hands of the northwestern Europeans before or since.”

  There was a moment’s astonished silence. They have not heard of this before.

  But of course, thought Mr. Galecki to himself. These days, it seemed that the only time the general public studied—or cared to study—the misfortune of people of color was when the historical event could be used as a club to hit white people over the head with or as a ram to batter the Western world with. Indians slaughtering Indians was of no use.

  Aratta crossed one leg over the other. “In the 1710s, when the people of North Carolina were expanding their territory and dispossessing the Tuscarora, the Apache were expanding their territory south of the Red River, dispossessing, absorbing, and slaughtering the Jumanos.”

  “So the Apache stole the Jumanos’ land, huh?” said Lee. Her intense-green eyes gleamed mischievously.

  “Nations don’t ‘steal’ land; they ‘conquer’ or ‘take over,’” Aratta said immediately. “One cannot apply a civil code to the affairs among nations or countries,” he added. “At any rate, the Apache were more powerful, they wanted the territory, so they ejected others out and gained control. A few decades later, the Apache were on the receiving end. The Ute and Comanche brutally drove them out of the upper Arkansas basin, and their territory was absorbed into the Comanche empire, the Numunuu Sookobitu. That had been the way of the world until about the second half of the twentieth century.

  “In the long run, owing to the decimation of Amerindian populations from deadly pandemics of biblical proportions, coupled with sheer, overwhelming numbers and superior weaponry, the northwestern European expansion in North America proved wildly more successful than those of other groups. Just that.”

  “With all due respect,” said Heather, “we will have to agree to disagree on this one.” Her voice was carefully neutral.

  Aratta inclined his head. “Of course,” he said diplomatically, not interested in pursuing this topic with her.

  From somewhere outside, the doorbell chimed.

  “Expecting anyone else?” inquired Brandon.

  Lee got up. “It must be the pizza delivery guy.”

  “Now we are talking!” Brandon was grinning. He went with Lee to the door, and they returned moments later carrying two pizza boxes and paper plates.

  Aratta’s brows drew together in disapproval. “Don’t you have some real plates?”

  “That, my dear, would have been sacrilege,” explained Lee. “For pizza to acquire its full flavor, it needs to be eaten off paper plates.”

  Gentle laughter filled the room.

  In short order, they were all seated and content, looking at the breath­taking vista through the wide windows and tearing into the hot pizza.

  “Pizzeria Napoletana,” announced Lee, waving about one thick slice. “The best pizza in the county. Eat up, folks, while supplies last.”

  “Some of us are blessed to be born here,” reflected Brandon in between bites. “Why not grant this to those born in less fortunate places?”

  David shook his head, chewing.

  Brandon raised an eyebrow in question.

  The old man swallowed. “Fortune has precious little to do with it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Nigeria is fortunate and privileged to have abundant natural resources. South Korea is disadvantaged and unfortunate to have a dearth of natural resources,” David said. “Yet, it is in oil-rich Nigeria where a large segment of the country have no access to electricity, and it is in Nigeria where power plants are routinely vandalized, sometimes by the very people paid to guard them. Bribes and one’s ethnicity may determine who gets a job or police protection. Some country roads are riddled with
potholes, burst water pipes are commonplace, and many schools have leaking roofs. It appears that at the end of the day, communities make their own fortune. The dirt is about the same everywhere. The rest is excuses and bubbe-meise.”

  “I see what you’re saying,” said Brandon, “but it’s not all a product of moral values and ingenuity. America made much of its fortune on the back of cheap or unwilling labor force.”

  Mr. Galecki was not having any of it. “Noting the history of Norway and Switzerland and Iceland, you can see it is not the importation of cheap labor, or having colonies, or slaves that have made Western countries prosperous. As I see it, the key is free market dynamics, strong work ethic, competence-based hierarchy, a systematic trial-and-error, and a can-do spirit coupled with innovation mindset. We can thrive without importing unskilled labor.”

  “Maybe we can, but we don’t want to,” replied Heather without missing a beat. “Immigrants don’t steal our jobs; many of them do the shit jobs Americans won’t. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Sure makes you wonder how Mississippi manages,” Galecki rem­arked.

  “Mississippi?”

  “Yes. You see, the immigrants valiantly make up about 6 percent of their construction workers and 3 percent of their manufacturing and food service workforce. Put another way, in Mississippi, well over 90 percent of those jobs, in fact, any jobs—from marine oilers to crane operators to excavating operators to packers to farmers—are carried on by native-born Americans. I venture to say that if those relatively few foreign-born had not graced Mississippi with their presence, Americans would have filled their positions. All positions. I could have made the same case using any other low-immigrant state, such as Montana.”