Not all of one mind
Judy Kirby reviews a book with new insights into the complexities of the Middle East
Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche by Arthur Neslen, Pluto Press. ISBN 0 7453 2365 0. £16.99. Who are the Israelis? We may think we know – proud, motivated Jews defending their right to a homeland. But is it true? Some of the people Arthur Neslen spoke to in his psychic journey conform to this expected profile. Most do not. It isn’t long before the reader is confronted with the stark reality of a country facing the impossibility of moulding a modern state from a diaspora.
Neslen isn’t an impartial observer. He is a journalist who grew up in Britain in the 1970s and 80s whose parents were of the Bund generation of secular, anti-zionist Jewish socialists. He is a Jew who worked for the Arab news channel Al-Jazeera. So already we have an enigmatic commentator. On his second trip to Israel in 2004 he was expecting ‘a racist and nihilistic picture’. Anticipating his story – as reporters do – he thought he would be writing of how Israel betrayed the Jewish people. Instead he found a more complex and sad situation.
‘The Zionist “counter-identity” is something I still find ugly’, says Neslen, ‘but Israelis themselves are rarely monsters – and never two-dimensional. As human beings they are frail and contradictory, however they try to mask the fact, and there are many sincere Israeli humanists, operating in a context more fraught and dangerous than that facing those who would instinctively condemn them for their nationality.’
Although the ‘status quo’ agreement between religious Judaism and political Zionism in 1947 removed much of the religious opposition to the state of Israel not every Jew is convinced of the state’s legitimacy and here and there it peeps out from Neslen’s interviews. Jews in the Neteurei Karta movement, for example, consider themselves still to be in exile. They dress in the apparel of seventeenth century Polish aristocracy so that they may not be taken for non-Jews. Moshe Hirsch, the group’s ‘foreign minister’ is a New Yorker who went to Israel in 1956 and says he doesn’t identify with the state, it just happens to be where he chose to live. ‘I haven’t even been to the Wailing Wall,’ he says. ‘We’re in exile and return will not be practised until we have a divine approach.’ Hirsch told Neslen that the state has no ties to the Jewish nation. ‘They’re basically goyim who speak Hebrew.’
Hirsch sat in Yasser Arafat’s cabinet as minister for Jewish affairs and says Arafat was ‘a national leader, an honest man with faith concerned for his people.’ Sitting in his cabinet was ‘the same as sitting with non-Jewish people anywhere, except they were fighting for their independence’.
There are strident voices here, like Yonatan, a fundamentalist, asked if he thought he was living in a Messianic age: ‘Yeah, definitely. We have to continue living as if it wasn’t happening for now but it began with secular Zionism and the First Zionist Congress. That was the bang on the door; we need to be back in Eretz Yisroel. The seculars would have gone for Uganda but the religious Zionists I belong to said: ‘No, it needs to be Israel!’
But his is only a voice among many and Neslen teases out numerous strains of thought and behaviour with as wide a variation as in countries not at war. Racism exists between Jews as well as between Jews and Arabs and it is surprising to learn that Mizrahi Jews, from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, have had a hard time in Israel. When a number arrived as immigrants from Baghdad – some of whom had been in the forefront of Iraq’s cultural revival – they were doused with DDT and housed in tin shacks.
What is happening to the Palestinians is against all our principles of justice and compassion. We can continue to shout loudly about this, as we do, but our protests will come to nothing if we do not hear as well as shout.
Comments
>> When a number arrived as immigrants from Baghdad – some of whom had been in the forefront of Iraq’s cultural revival – they were doused with DDT and housed in tin shacks. We know now that DDT is toxic, but at the time - I assume this was in the 1950s or ‘60s - it was used with gay abandon: good, all-American housewives would, with their children, go to DDT parties for similar treatment. Silent Spring wasn’t published until 1962. The fear of malaria or typhus did strange things (and it’s making a *controlled* comeback for that reason). The tin shacks is also a misnomer… these were constructed for the refugees and other arrivals. Anyone without self-sourced accommodation generally ended-up (still do) in such temporary accommodation. I know a European Jew who found himself in a room with rats the size of cats (and without a production crew from I’m a Celebrity in sight). Most importantly, those Iraqi Jews no longer live in temporary accommodation or under refugee” status. Nor does the image of Yasser Arafat as “an honest man with faith concerned for his people” sound familiar. One of the darkest pieces of humour - more so than piping, which could be used to reduce the sewage backlog in Gaza, being stolen to make qassams - is of what happened to cut-price concrete supplied to the Authority by Saudi: a goodly part of it was sold by members of his clan, at market prices, to Israeli companies. No properly formed moral creature could fail to feel sorrow for the suffering of individual Palestinian Arabs; and their political leaders, who have appropriated sums the per capita equivalent of four Marshall Plans, are a significant cause.”
By woundwort on 8th December 2009 - 10:21
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