by Joshua Cohen
8/10
Florentin: The neighborhood reminds me of Williamsburg ca. 2000, which is not a compliment. Of course, by “Williamsburg” I mean “north of the Williamsburg Bridge.” Because south of the bridge are the Hasidim—more Hasidim than in all of Tel Aviv. I miss them something terrible.
My daily routine, now that I’m finally over the jet lag: wake up at 6:00 A.M., write for four hours, get to Hummus Beit Lechem just when it opens. Order a hummus with egg, which is served with pita, pickled veg, and half a raw onion. Eat while reading Haaretz. Buy cigarettes and smoke my way back to writing by noon. I can choose between two routes; rather, between two sides of Herzl Street, neither of which gives any shade from the sun. One side has a store that sells birdcages. The other side has a store that sells birds. Both are run by Ethiopians and both are called “Song of Sheba.”
I quit by 7:00 P.M., and head out again for a shwarma or a falafel or a sabich, then wind down the day at a bar, reading the books I bought at Ha’Nasich Ha’Katan and Robinson, and drinking beer and arak until I’m sleepy (by 11:00 P.M.). The books, in Hebrew: Dolly City (Dolly City) by Orly Castel-Bloom, Hitganvut Yechidim (Infiltration) by Yehoshua Kenaz, and last but not least, Ha’Yored Lemala (The Acrophile) by Yoram Kaniuk, a great writer who was once very generous and kind to me, and whom I can’t avoid, or can’t avoid missing, not just because Tel Aviv was very much “his city,” but also because it’s been two summers now since he died.
In English, translated from the Arabic: The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist by Emile Habiby.
8/12
I’m not going to Jerusalem. That’s my decision, and I’m enjoying its perversity.
It’s insane to visit Israel but skip Jerusalem—to resist its gates, to refuse its walls—to fail in my duties to God, family, and the Israel Ministry of Tourism.
I remember how back when I dated H, I took her to Katz’s Deli and she ordered a salad. Another time when I took her, she ordered nothing.
Denying herself and/or provoking me was the thrill.
I wonder whom I’m denying and/or provoking now.
A guy at a café who talks about his life exclusively in terms of “terror”: Instead of saying, “I was born,” he says, “I was kidnapped.” Instead of saying, “My parents took me for a year to Ann Arbor, Michigan,” he says, “My parents took me hostage.”
8/13
A conversation about Israelis who don’t serve in the IDF, and so: a conversation about the religious and the mentally and physically disabled.
My interlocutor, a fancy journalist, says, “Religious and disabled—there’s a difference?”
I would’ve laughed at that in New York.
Not here.
8/14
Whenever army service comes up in café conversations, or just in café conversations with me, everyone says, “I was the worst soldier in my unit.”
A mysterious line by Avot Yeshurun (Ukrainian-born Israeli poet, 1904–92): Should it be translated, “The isolationist life of a roof”? “The separatist life of a roof”? “The secessionist life of a roof”?
No, no, the translation by Harold Schimmel (Israeli poet, born in Paterson, N.J., 1935) is still the best: “The dissident life of a roof.”
8/15
Didn’t even try to go to the beach. (Or Gaza.)
8/18
I go about breaking, or half-breaking, my vow as I ride in the crowded nosepicker’s sherut to Jerusalem.
But all I do in Jerusalem is get a cab—still, because I’m going east, to the West Bank, it takes me a while. No one’s keen to drive me.
Y, a Palestinian, drives me out to a checkpoint, where I’m asked what I do and why I’m here. Intimidated by the uniform, intimidated by the gun, I mumble something in English about tourism, and it’s only after I put the barrier wall behind me and get out of the cab, it’s only after I get out of the next Kia Picanto converted into a cab—after the settlements, after the ruined fields, after the blockaded roads, and all the plastic and aluminum garbage glowing in the sun along the only open road to Jericho—that I come up with a more honest answer: I’m an uncle.
LINES OF OCCUPATION
ON YITZHAK LAOR
HOW GREAT IS THE GOD Who allows a poet to be born at the same moment as his nation! Let us praise Him! Let us praise Him with flute and timbrel! Let us praise Him by criticizing Israel!
Yitzhak Laor—Israel’s most celebrated dissident, and perhaps its greatest living poet—was born in 1948 a month before the founding of the Jewish state. The town he grew up in, Pardes Hannah—Hannah’s Orchard, named not after the biblical Hannah, mother to the Prophet Samuel, but after Hannah Rothschild, scion of the orchard’s funding family—is today a scruffy backwater redeemed only by its bright groves of citrus trees. Forsaken halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, Pardes Hannah in 1948 was a Jewish oasis surrounded by Arab villages soon to be destroyed. By the time Laor could have been conscious of his neighbors, they’d vanished, through intimidation and by force. Gone were their orchards. Gone were their citrus trees.
Laor was first recognized for his resistance—the most modern of mediums. As students at Tel Aviv University in 1972, Laor and fellow reservist Yossi Kotten became the first two Israel Defense Forces soldiers to invoke “selective refusal” (in Hebrew, sarvanut selektivit) with regard to their compulsory military service. The line they drew in the sand was the Green Line, the border that separated Israel from the lands it took during the Six-Day War: Laor and Kotten refused to serve in any mission perpetrated in what are now called “the Occupied Territories.” This act of becoming a “Refusenik”*—retrospectively marking a generational shift from the happy heroes of 1948, 1967, and 1973 to the grunts mired in Lebanon in 1982—proved a national sensation, prompting popular condemnation and earning Laor a short term in a military prison. But it also proved his seriousness as a political voice and gained readers for his poetry—politician-readers, soldier-readers, even lay readers.
For more than three decades, Laor has ignited controversy, and the success of his verse, novels, stories, and the play Ephraim Goes Back to the Army has given rise at times to outright paradox: When he won the 1990 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry, Israel’s highest such award, Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister, refused to sign the official declaration. Laor should not be read as the bane of officialdom, however, but rather as the stern comfort of the Israeli soldier who can no longer pretend to be the courageous warrior; his poetry is both the balm of those who serve only the orders of their own conscience and the prophetic exhortation of those he describes in his poem “Balance”:
The gunner who wiped out a hospital the pilot
who torched a refugee camp the journalist
who courted hearts & minds for murder the actor
who played it as just another war the teacher
who sanctioned the bloodshed in class the rabbi
who sanctified the killing the government minister
who sweatily voted the paratrooper
who shot the three-time refugee the poet
who lauded the finest hour of the nation
who scented blood and blessed the MiG. The moderates
who said let’s wait & see the party hack
who fell over himself in praising the army the sales clerk
who sniffed out traitors the policeman
who beat an Arab in the anxious street the lecturer
who tapped on the officer’s back with envy of the officer
who was afraid of refusing the prime minister
who eagerly drank down the blood. They
shall not be cleansed.
The translation is mine, because no English translations of Laor’s poetry have yet appeared in a book of his own, and where they have appeared, online and in left-leaning poetry anthologies, they have been poor if not incorrect.
The decision of who gets translated into English is often less a matter of quality than of politics—the lack of a market for translated literature requiring its subsidy by a writer’s home state—and one can imagine Israel’s unwillingness to promote a writer like Laor abroad.
It comes as both a disappointment and an inevitability, then, that Laor’s first book to make it into our language is nonfiction. The Myths of Liberal Zionism is a work of political critique as literary criticism, a treatment of statecraft as an adjunct to poetic craft, and it is also an attack on the famous writers of Laor’s generation, whom he reads as providing humanitarian cover for Israeli abuses. Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, even David Grossman, who lost a son in the 2006 Lebanon war—Laor accuses these and others of sanctioning, through impotent dissent and empty rhetoric, the tragic status quo. Novelists who pen pietistic eulogies but have never resisted their governance; public intellectuals who absolve liberal guilt but have never directly opposed the moral compasses of their readership—“They shall not be cleansed.”
According to Laor, the singular Myth of Liberal Zionism is Liberal Zionism itself. Like the beasts Behemoth and Leviathan, a Zionis liberalis is inconceivable to Laor, because whereas his Liberal believes in openness and the policies of empathy, his Zionist—more than a century after Theodor Herzl recalled Palestine as the Judenstaat—believes that millions can be denied their patrimony, dispossessed, abused, and even murdered in the name of Jewish statehood.
As Laor writes in the preface to his essay collection, composed in Hebrew, then translated into French (published by La Fabrique éditions as Le nouveau philosémitisme européen et le “camp de la paix” en Israël), then from French into the following, with the rage intact:
History is always written by the mighty, by the victors. Even if we do not talk openly of bloodshed, of the price of our blood compared to “theirs” in the ongoing equation between sufferings, every discussion about Israel must bear in mind that over ten million people live in this nation-state and the territories occupied by it. Half of them are Arabs, but almost four million of them live under military occupation, with virtually no law protecting them. Fifty percent of all the prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centers—in other words, ten thousand people—are “security prisoners,” as Israel calls them, in other words Arabs from the occupied territories who are sitting in prison after being convicted by military courts, or detained without any trial at all. Close to four million people are currently living under the longest military occupation in modern times, stripped of the right to vote on the laws that have governed their lives for more than four decades.
Laor’s version of history is to be incensed that history should even have versions. His disdain for the very concept of myriad concepts is informed by a vicious integrity—by his credentials not only as a conscientious objector but also as the son of refugees from the Shoah—and reinforced by his poetic practice. For him, the essential truth underlying historical ambiguity can be found only in and through common language, and one wonders, reading him, whether the ultimate synoptic history of Israel and Palestine would not be a poet’s history, a linguistic history—a version that can be all versions, once the vocabulary has been agreed upon: vocabulary having to do with, for example, the sanctity of “life,” or chayyim, a word that in Hebrew is uniquely plural, and so, as Laor reminds us, cannot be lived by one person, or one nation, alone. Any philological account of this conflict must begin with the name of the younger aggrieved party: “Palestinian” is the word for a people created by the fall of the Ottomans, an empire destroyed in WWI along with two other vaunted houses of the nineteenth century—the Habsburg and the Romanov. Ottoman decline left the Muslim and Christian Arabs living in Palestine to seek for themselves nationhood and a cultural identity distinct from Turkish suzerainty. Meanwhile, the rise of pogroms in Russia, and pervasive anti-Semitism within a host of newly nationalistic countries liberated from the multiethnic inclusivity of empire, turned disparate Jewish populations—from Hasidim in rural Poland and Ukraine to worldly businessmen in Berlin and Paris—into “the Jewish People,” dedicated to reestablishing a country that no Jew had ruled in more than two millennia.
Palestine was then a British “mandate”—that term denoting an indefinite interregnum between colonial rule and colonized self-governance. In 1917, with the war entering its gory senescence, the Balfour Declaration—an open letter from British Foreign Minister Lord Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, Hannah’s grandnephew and the premier Jewish philanthropist of his day—took pains to assert that the newly proposed Jewish homeland shall not “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” and so defined the rightful Palestinian inhabitants of Palestine apophatically, or by negation, as what they were not.
That declaration and the subsequent White Papers of 1922 and 1939 were effectively nullified in the wake of the Shoah (much of the Arab world was aligned with the Axis), and by Jewish paramilitaries such as Lehi, Haganah, and the Irgun, which led raids on Arab settlements and British military depots. Israel’s founding, coming six months after the United Nations passed Resolution 181, which advocated Palestine’s partition into Jewish and Arab states, immediately triggered a war when the provisions of that resolution were violated, by Arab aggression and by Israel’s very existence. Israelis call this the War of Independence; Palestinians refer to it as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” Here is another Catastrophe: At the time of this writing, that term, Nakba, previously allowed in Arabic schools and textbooks, has been removed from all curricula in the State of Israel by order of the Education Ministry.
* * *
—
THE MANIPULATION OF LANGUAGE is no metaphor for political manipulation; it is political manipulation, and every government that has ever sought to convert its citizenry has turned to words—the medium of the media that is also the domain of the poet, who is a veritable president of words. (In Israel the presidency is a powerless office, yet possessed of symbolic significance.) According to Victor Klemperer, by 1933 the German language had swollen with an array of new compounds involving the word Volk: Volksfest (“a festival of the people,” later the Führer’s birthday), Volksgenosse (“comrade of the people”), Volksgemeinschaft (“community of the people”), volksnah (“one of the people”), volksfremd (“alien to the people”), volksentstammt (“descended from the people”). Klemperer, a Jew and leading lexicologist of the Reich, along with Karl Kraus, of decayed, feuilletonistic Vienna, are perhaps Laor’s foremost political precursors—Nestbeschmutzern, or “people who dirty their own nests” (leave it to German to have a word for this)—and the best popular theorists of how a change in public language can manifest a change in public consciousness.
Indeed, this reification of language is a tenet of all Abrahamic faiths. Allah, through the angel Gabriel, dictated the Koran to Mohammed; in the Torah the world itself is made by Word: “Let there be light,” and there was, and we’re told “it was good,” and so it is good still. Vitriolic critic of a country that proudly defines its citizenry in the terms of a Volk—Das Jüdische Volk—Laor makes the following tally. Since Israel’s inception, more than four hundred Arab settlements have been dismantled, and not a few have had their ancient toponyms Hebraicized—Rami to Ramat Naftali, Majd al-Krum to Beit Ha-Kerem, Ja’una to Rosh Pina. The first summer of the Netanyahu government, just as Nakba was deleted from the schoolbooks, the Transportation Ministry proposed to redo Israeli street signs so that even the names written in Arabic would be Hebrew transliterations (e.g., the city of Jaffa would be written as the Hebrew Yafo on Arabic signs, not as the Arabic Yaffa).
These official measures, Laor insists, just legislate the bias with which the conflict is reported in Israel and in those countries, like the United States, influenced by Israeli hasbara, or “explanation”—the Hebrew term for wartime lobbying. According to the Nakdi Report, a set of guidelines drafted by the Israeli Broadcast
ing Authority, the epithet “East Jerusalem” is strictly verboten. During the First Intifada, Israel fought, according to the American press, not an organization like the PLO but “the Palestinians.” Israeli soldiers are regularly “kidnapped,” whereas Hamas “fighters” can only be “arrested.” A Palestinian action is normally “terrorism”; an Israeli action is routinely a “response.” To be fair, the official Palestinian Authority newspaper did, at millennium’s end, call “the Jew” “the disease of the century,” but Laor insists on criticizing only his own.
* * *
—
IT ISN’T EVERY DAY that poetry sheds a metaphor, but that is exactly what happened on May 14, 1948, the date of Israel’s founding. By the time of David Ben Gurion’s proclamation, “Zion” ceased to be a proleptic ideal or symbol and began to be an archaeological site with borders to defend. The imagery of the daily prayers, and of Diaspora poets like Judah Ha-Levi (“O Zion, won’t you ask after your captives—the exiles who seek your welfare, the remnants of your flocks?”), would be reread as versified prophecy, while new writers—“Sabras,” native Israelis nicknamed after the prickly cactus (Israel’s national plant, which isn’t indigenous)—would need to find new metaphors to exploit in a revivified language. Previously a historical tongue wherein each letter controlled a bodily organ and represented an attribute of the Godhead, Hebrew was now put to more mundane uses: finding verbiage for landed things; for flowers, trees, and animals; for politics; for warfare.