When the army accidentally killed two Jewish security personnel last week in a torrent of bullets, both the press and many of our friends began to wonder what that says about the behavior of the army in cases that we don’t hear about, when the people being pursued are Palestinian, not Jews. The people we talked to over Shabbat (religious, and by no means anywhere near “left,” if that will help dispel any stereotypes here) were deeply concerned. They were sad, perplexed.
But Jill, there’s an enormous difference between our friends who live here and the American Jewish left you represent. Here in Jerusalem, we have those conversations in full knowledge that the alternative to this IDF “full court press” in the hills just outside our neighborhoods isn’t obvious. For when the army lets up, our buses explode. When security measures are loosened just a bit, our children don’t make it home from school. So we struggle, and we agonize.
But I don’t feel any struggle in what you write. And your colleagues certainly don’t agonize. You just assume that we’re callous, that we’re comfortable with all the results of our actions. You write as if Israel has made a choice to be evil. No, you don’t say that, but that’s what you imply. You imply that we’re motivated by hate, by disregard for Arab life. Perhaps that’s true of a small percentage of radical-fringe Israelis, but it’s not the case for the overwhelming majority. Most of us are animated these days by something completely different.
This week is Purim. Today, the last school day before the Purim school vacation, thousands of kids went to school in costume. It’s an amazing scene when you think about it—an entire city filled with dressed-up kids in the middle of one war, and on the eve of another [in Iraq]. But it’s also a scene that infuriates me. Why? Because the police have told kids that they can’t wear their Purim costume masks out on the streets—the possibility that a terrorist will use Purim as a chance to wear a disguise and blend into the city is too great. And because as I was driving across town today, there were hundreds of police guarding the kids on their parades, and closer to home, I saw my daughter’s (high school) friends stationed with rifles along the street, also guarding their younger brothers’ and sisters’ class parades so that they’re not blown up for the simple crime of trying to enjoy Purim.
Do you have any idea what the awareness, day after day, that someone is trying to gun down your kids does to you? No, you don’t. Because if you did, you’d never have been able to write “I spent time sitting in cafés, having dinner with friends and former teachers, and wandering the streets of Jerusalem. Enjoying myself in West Jerusalem, I could easily forget about the difficult lives of Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, foreign workers and Jewish minorities.” West Jerusalem is Disneyland, and East Jerusalem is hell, right?
No, Jill, wrong. True, there is much too much suffering in East Jerusalem and other Palestinian communities, but West Jerusalem is not the picnic your tourist visa led you to see. Raise children here. Send them off to school every day fully cognizant that someone out there is gunning for them, hoping against hope that the security forces get the “bad guys” (for that’s exactly what they are, they’re evil—or do you believe they’re “freedom fighters”?) before they get our kids. Do that for a couple of years and then see if you can be in West Jerusalem and “easily forget about difficult lives.” It’s amazing what a few months of reality can do to Upper West Side idealism. Try to raise kids here for a few months, and then see how easy it is for you to write with such certainty that we’re so obviously wrong, or that we have any real alternatives here.
If your certainty is my first concern, your naïveté is second. There’s a small facet of this conflict that seems to have escaped your attention—this war isn’t about territories, or settlements, or the Green Line. It’s about Israel’s existence. That’s why the issue of refugees wasn’t resolved at Camp David or in Taba. Israel couldn’t compromise, because that would mean the end of a Jewish state. And the Palestinians wouldn’t compromise, because the end of the Jewish state was exactly what they wanted.
And that’s why I find myself bristling at your concern that your “visit [to Israel] would signal a tacit endorsement of the current Israeli government and of Israel’s ongoing human rights violations.” What’s wrong with saying that? What’s wrong is that it’s dangerous and myopic.
Yes, it’s dangerous. For the language of “ongoing human rights violations” is the language that the world used about South African apartheid, about Milosevic’s Serbia and its ethnic cleansing, and now uses about Saddam’s Iraq. And the world destroyed the first two, and is about to destroy the third. Is that what you want to happen to Israel? If it isn’t, then it’s time to recognize that the language you choose puts Israel into a category in which she doesn’t belong, but to which the world is all too anxious to add her. In this world climate, responsible Jewish leadership requires watching the words you choose very carefully. Does your rabbinical school spend any time talking about responsible leadership?
Whatever you intend, you will be quoted and cited as evidence. Are you aware that you’re featured and quoted on www.freepalestine.com? Do you really want to play into the hands of the French politically correct anti-Semites? Or the barbarian colonialist Belgians who have now decided to be the world’s conscience? Do you really want to give tacit justification to the Norwegians who boycott Israeli goods, the British who refuse to invite Israeli academics to conferences, or the Italians who will not have Israeli artists (even politically left-wing performers) on their stages? Is that the tacit message you want to convey?
But lest you respond that I’m advocating that you hide the truth because the truth is dangerous in this case, rest assured that I mean nothing of the sort. Because what you and your colleagues write is not only dangerous; it is also myopic.
What strikes you as the moral high ground, as righteousness born of Jewish learning, strikes me as a wholly dysfunctional read of the situation on the ground. Has Israel done a variety of things in the past two and a half years that are not pleasant? Yes. Have grave mistakes been made? Absolutely. The army itself issued a report last week in which it stated that 18 percent of Palestinians killed in the conflict have been civilians. That’s of deep concern to many people here.
But “Israel’s ongoing human rights violations”? Do you really mean to compare Israel to South Africa and to Serbia? Did the apartheid regime publish statistics about the performance of its security forces? Did Milosevic? Where is your sense of balance, of proportion?
Yes, you and your “Rabbinical Students for a Just Peace” colleagues regularly and perfunctorily decry Palestinian terrorism. We’ve all read those pro forma utterances. But are you not aware that you’ve been sucked into a shocking sort of moral equivalency? Remember, if you can, whom we’re fighting and what we haven’t done. Have we blown up their restaurants in order to kill as many unarmed civilians as possible? Targeted their public transportation? Celebrated on our campuses after we blew their pizza parlors to high heaven? Rewarded the families of homicide bombers, and turned murderers into religious icons? Have we lynched, to the glee of hundreds standing outside, Palestinians who have made their way into Israel? Have we destroyed their religious sites as they did to Joseph’s Tomb and Jericho’s Shalom Al Yisrael Synagogue?
No matter how grievous some of the mistakes that the IDF may have made, and yes, there have been too many, do you really want to make this comparison? Do you really believe that it is a policy from the “top” that civilians are to be systematically killed? And be careful before you answer. Even if the policy is to play very serious hardball with the terror organizations in the knowledge that civilians will inevitably be killed, that’s not the same thing as consciously and purposefully seeking to kill civilians. Don’t we have the right to assume that future Jewish leaders will have the ethical and intellectual nuance needed to make this distinction?
No, I guess not. I suppose that it’s of no interest to you that even the committed Israeli left has had to rethink its views in light
of this war. Take Benny Morris, for example. Morris, one of the key figures among the Israeli New Historians, has done more than almost anyone to document the roles of the Hagganah and the early IDF in the expulsions of Arabs from their villages (among many other phenomena) during the War of Independence. In doing so, he has aroused the ire of many centrist and right-wing Israelis. He, if anyone, would seem to be a committed leftist, devoted to settling this conflict and giving the Palestinians the home they deserve, right?
Right, except he looks around and realizes that there’s no chance for that now. He reads the situation and realizes that this isn’t about fairness, it’s about our destruction. So, he’s bagged that hope. Listen to him in his own words: “I have yet to see even a peace-minded Palestinian leader, as Sari Nusseibeh seems to be, stand up and say: ‘Zionism is a legitimate national liberation movement, like our own. And the Jews have a just claim to Palestine, like we do.’ . . . I don’t believe that Arafat and his colleagues mean or want peace—only a staggered chipping away at the Jewish state.” What would it take, Jill, to get the future leadership of the American Jewish community to understand what the Israeli left has had to learn?
The third quality of your D’var Torah that saddens me is the most subtle, but it may be the most important. I’ll be personal here. When I read Black Dog of Fate, Peter Balakian’s superb book about the Armenian genocide, I was sickened and appalled. There are scenes from that book that I still remember vividly, several years after having read it. The same with Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, about the horrific genocides of Rwanda. I couldn’t put either of those books down, and I think about them both, often.
But I’ll be honest. They disgusted me and appalled me, but they didn’t make me cry. Yet narratives from the Shoah do. Why? Was our suffering greater? I’m not a big believer in quantifying or comparing suffering. No, it’s not that. I don’t believe for a moment that our suffering matters more, or that our lives are more sacred. It’s just that stories about my people, my family, my narrative, and yes—my country—move me more powerfully and intimately than stories about others.
Does that make me a lesser human being? I hope not. I think that it’s simply a matter of—to use the phrase that Avishai Margalit uses so eloquently in his The Ethics of Memory—the difference between thick and thin relations. I have a much thicker set of relations with Jews—no matter where they are and who they are—than I do with Armenians or Rwandans. Most human beings are that way. It’s part of the way we love, and it’s part of the way we cope. We couldn’t bear life if every human tragedy cut to the core of our being.
To my sadness, though, I don’t feel that thickness of relationship when you write about your love for Israel. You say you love Israel, true, but in the very next sentence, you write that you could not “in good conscience, agree to preach unconditional support of a government that has long oppressed another people.” Is that how you think of what’s going on here? Of the myriad responsibilities the government has, and in the midst of everything the Jewish people is facing in this hour, that’s your read of what Israel is? Your basic, instinctive reaction is that this country is now in the business of oppressing another people? You have every right to believe that, I suppose, but I see it in the business of trying to stay alive. If you see it as simply about oppression, then I see little difference between you and the rest of the world that would do us in, with no regard for the history that created us, or for the dream—however insufficiently fulfilled—that this homeland represents for us.
If you can write that it’s time to “do teshuva [repentance] by reexamining the ways in which we speak and teach about Israel and by reconsidering our often unconditional support for the state,” then we’re not cut from the same national cloth. If that’s how you feel, especially in these days, then it’s a struggle for me to feel that we’re part of the same people. “The state”? How neutral can someone get, Jill?
Be honest, Jill, you and your colleagues say it, but you don’t mean that you love Israel. You might wish you loved Israel, or you might believe that you’re supposed to love Israel, or you might love the myth of Israel on which so many of us were raised. But that’s not what counts. You don’t love the real Israel. That’s where the American Jewish left has failed. It reminds me exactly of what Gershom Scholem wrote almost one-half century ago in response to Hannah Arendt on Eichmann. He accused her correctly, not of getting the facts wrong, but of lacking “ahavat Yisrael” (“the love of Israel”), that is, of the Jewish people as a whole and of its unique experience. Nothing’s changed, has it?
As for me, I don’t know how to think about the Jewish people today without Israel in some way at the core. That’s not to say that every Jew ought to live here, or that Israel’s perfect, or that criticism of Israel—by Jews or non-Jews—is always unacceptable. I don’t believe any of those things.
But most of us know when someone loves us. We know it not just because of what they say, but because of what they choose not to say, and when they choose not to say it. We know they love us because of how they say what they say. We know they love us because they feel our pain, first and foremost, before they see our faults. That’s what makes love real.
You’re just not there. Take off your masks. You really don’t love us. And because of that, you feel about us the way I feel about Rwandans. You’re saddened and appalled when we’re killed, but for too many of you, it’s an intellectual thing, not a visceral, emotional, immediate one. We’re other, removed, distant. So at a time when we need the partnership and support of all segments of American Jewish life more than ever, we have to admit that it’s just not there to be had.
For the future of the Jewish people, Jill, that is about as sad as anything I could imagine.
I hope that your Purim in New York is a joyous one. Here in Jerusalem, we’ll tell our kids that they can’t wear their costume masks outside, even as we dust off their gas masks and get our sealed rooms ready. And if the siren goes off in the next few days or weeks and we have to go into those rooms while Scuds from Iraq or Katyushas from Hezbollah enclaves rain down, and we have to hold our kids on our laps and comfort them, I hope you’ll forgive us if we don’t have them read your D’var Torah.
You see, Jill, concern for the people trying to kill them is a luxury I suspect even our uncorrupted children won’t have.
Purim Same’ach,
Daniel
PART ELEVEN
MUSLIMS
JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Behind Mubarak
THE MOHANDESSIN SECTION of Cairo is a fashionable district on the west bank of the Nile that contains a number of embassies, boutiques, and American fast-food restaurants. It also houses the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque, which is named after a physician and Islamic television personality who founded it, twenty years ago. On Friday, September 21, I arrived at the mosque just as the first worshippers were making their way there, and the egalitarianism that is one of the great virtues of the Muslim prayer service was evident: they were dark-skinned and light, rich and poor; one man drove up in a blue Jaguar; others, wearing grease-stained galabiyas and crude sandals, came on foot, or by donkey cart. (Women, as is customary, prayed apart, in another, smaller hall.) I had arranged to meet the mosque’s imam, Sheikh Nasser Abdelrazi. A slight, anxious man, he preemptively offered up the observation that “Muslims are gentle and Islam is peace.”
Many in Cairo are on the defensive in the wake of the terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Greater Cairo, a city of sixteen million people, is the intellectual capital of the Arab world—home to its moviemakers, many of its great writers, and some of its most respected interpreters of Islam. Muslim leaders here are sensitive to the image of their faith— especially now, because Egyptians are among those allegedly involved in the attacks. Muhammad Atta, who is believed to have flown one of the hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, is the son of a middle-class Cairo lawyer. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former
leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group that sought to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, is said to be second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile who is suspected of directing the attacks.
I did not dispute the Imam’s assertion, but the speaker at the service that Friday, Ahmed Youssef—an elderly, bespectacled professor at Cairo University, who joined us before the service got under way—did. “Look, what happened in New York is the work of a gangster mentality, but America must learn not to take the side of the aggressor,” he said. “I hope America learns from this mistake before it makes another mistake.”
In his view, the aggressor is Israel, which signed a peace agreement with Egypt almost twenty-three years ago. This historical fact is not immediately noticeable in Cairo, where the public obsession with Israel is overwhelming. Youssef said that the nineteen terrorists who on September 11 committed mass suicide in the course of committing mass murder engaged in an un-Islamic act. They killed civilians, which is haram, or forbidden, and they killed themselves, which is also haram. Only against Israel is it permissible to engage in a “martyrdom attack,” he said, and this is because it is “only the Jews who kill innocent people.” He added, “There are no Israeli civilians, only soldiers, so this is a legitimate tactic.”
At this, Sheikh Abdelrazi blanched. “He is not speaking for the mosque,” he whispered. The mosque, like all mosques in Egypt, ostensibly comes under the supervision of the government, whose position on suicide attacks against Israeli civilians is ambiguous. When I asked President Hosni Mubarak’s chief spokesman, Nabil Osman, if his government condemns such attacks, he would say only, “One cannot condemn these acts without condemning the acts of the occupier.”
I asked Sheikh Abdelrazi and Youssef if they believed that the Palestinian cause was the motivating factor in Muhammad Atta’s alleged act.
Those Who Forget the Past Page 54