The anguish has grown acute.
My brother has lived in Israel for 30 years now. I have never completely understood his move from the intense apartheid of his youth, to the exhilaration of a left - leaning Zionism tinged with a medical duty to treat all, Israeli Jews and Arabs alike, and a liberal claim to professional Palestinian friendships.
Much as I understood the drive to establish the State of Israel, it has always struck me as closer to apartheid South Africa in its practices than conscience will allow to make comfortable. My sibling was on the first helicopter flown into Sabra in 1982, a member of Israel's medical corps, flown into the massacred camp to salvage whatever of Israel's tattered moral fiber remained in the wake of that horror. He came away literally catatonic for a week.
My mother moved to Israel almost four years ago, from a Cape Town liberated of its apartheid guilt, to spend her closing years in the promised land close to the comforts of a doctor son and grown granddaughters better able to care for her than I.
Living first on the beachfront of Netanya, Cape Town's Miami Beach, she moved north, and then in the past few months (as Sharon's megalomania made Israeli life increasingly fraught) to a protective community in Kfar Saba. She survives but a block away from bomb blasts in both towns claiming more lives than one can keep up count.
One of her granddaughters is at college in Haifa, another at work in Tel Aviv. I awaken every day to check whether a suicide bomber has touched my life more directly than the comfort of distant continents can protect.
Horrible as all this is, I am equally haunted by the image of that Star of David painted by soldiers on the walls of Ramallah homes, accompanied by the unit number of Israeli military battalions indicating the house had been searched.
Biblical references to the angel of death fade beneath more recent images of swastikas and death squads, tattooed numbers and demolished homes. Lives reduced to rubble. Worldly belongings reduced to longings. The stuff of suicidal motivations.
What on earth can the Israelis be thinking. Or not thinking.
A suicide is perhaps understandable, even as it may be unthinkable. Taking one's own life is an act of complete despair. Claiming others' lives alongside, less an act of defiance or resistance, than one of absolute and utter hopelessness.
All humanity, all hope cut out of one. Perhaps by taking others' lives with mine I might bring someone to their senses. Only to produce more senselessness. Suicide bombers show no real consideration for lives not their own, no respect for meanings beyond their lack of meaning, no prospect of peace.
Ariel Sharon
Those blind to history, the cliché has it, are destined to repeat it. Those blind to the history of their own experience, the aphorism might conclude, are destined to suicide bombers. No justification, just the cold hard calculus of predictability. Algiers circa 1960, South Africa circa 1976, Ireland circa 1985, Afghanistan 2001, all of a piece in the ratcheting up of Kondratieff cycles of violence.
Acute as the anguish is, we should hardly be surprised. I last visited Israel and the West Bank in 1999. The hint of what awaited was hardly discernible. Progressive critics remained quietly, uneasily critical of settlements, imposed order, continued occupation and extension.
At the same time contacts, social and political, intellectual and cultural, economic and entrepreneurial were more robust than I had remembered from earlier visits. There was a greater easiness in the streets and markets, across the dividing lines, controlled and policed as they remained.
Within the year, Sharon arrogantly stormed the Temple Mount, surrounded by thugs, declaring himself able to go wherever he chose in the democratic Land of Israel (which he has always taken to include the occupied territories). Playing on the lingering fears of Jewish Israelis, Sharon capitalized on Arafat's miscalculated if not completely incomprehensible retreat from the agreement with Barak to pursue peace. Israel after all continued to build beyond its own borders. Lopsided logic at work here.
In Sharon's self - pronounced ascension, he was after nothing less than absolute power. And the Israeli electorate obliged, Sharon's calculations helped along by a spiraling intifada and Arafat's misguided machinations. Have to say, the politician knew his clientele, playing them to a perfect pitch.
And why should we have been surprised at his bellicose belligerence? The man has been calling Arabs "dogs" and "mongrels" for more the thirty years now. He is nothing if not consistent.
But why wouldn't most Israelis, the likes of my brother, see all of this? After all, more Israelis have died violently since Sharon's ascending the throne of power less than two years ago than in all of the years between Rabin's handshake with Arafat at Camp David in 1993 and Sharon's spitting in the Palestinian face as he climbed the steps of the Dome of the Rock.
A Boston Globe reporter recently revealed that the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths had spiraled from 20 to 1 to 3 to 1 across the same period. In the name of establishing security, Israelis have lost all security. And Palestinians continue to lose their lives and loved ones and homes and hopes in ways they have lost their land since 1948.
How do most Israelis not see this? A Hobbesian fear of death? Security before all else blinding one to the material conditions of safety? The Palestinian Authority is dismantled, Arafat rendered effectively headless and legless and armless. But as he is disembodied he becomes far from harmless. The more disemboweled, the more cyborgian power he assumes.
Reduced to the rubble of Ramallah, Arafat becomes larger than life. The logic is classic. Cut off the head of the king and the king becomes Christ. Jews above all, you would think, might have figured this one out.
And yet it might be that this is exactly what Sharon has figured out. He needs Arafat to wage a war to the death. If it is death that is feared, paranoia needs death at any cost. As Etienne Balibar has wisely observed, it is not Hamas or Hezbollah headquarters that the Israeli armed forces have destroyed or even sought out. If Sharon is to have his way, if the holy land is to evacuate the philistines from polluting its soil, suicide bombers are a necessary sentence in the syllogism. Cold calculation is always frozen by the ice of idiotic ideals.
Speaking truth to Israel
The mania of the Middle East implicates all of us more completely than we might imagine. It is now without doubt the product of a US foreign policy at once frostbitten and pitiful, incapable of intervention in productive ways and dripping with the blood of thousands in the region. Every U.S. President must have his boy - war. Bush's war on terrorism has simply licensed the repressive impositions of every misdirected megalomaniac. My enemy is your terrorist. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.The vision of Ariel Sharon is one without vision. Blinded by its own lust, it leads only to destruction. The traumas underpinning the Shoah's "Never Forget" are transformed into the terror''s of occupation's "You will not forget" because we won't relent.
Sharon has never managed to articulate a view about what Israel could be, what the Middle East might amount to, what the region should aspire to. But then neither has Arafat. No doubt they deserve each other. And the people of the land of endless and endlessly broken promises deserve better from the rest of us.
I have long worried that Israel has claimed to speak for all Jews, that a state founded upon the necessarily racial makings and markings of modernity refuses any resistance from kin. Perhaps it is that a state claiming to be and speak above all for kin must founder on the violence of its own strictures and restrictions to maintain and sustain itself.
If Israel can claim to speak for all Jews, then critical Jewish voices are impelled to speak to Israel. Perhaps it is only in owning up to the relational possibility of a fair, just and equitable existence for all living in the cauldron of so heterogeneous a social setting that peace and safety for any would be more or less guaranteed.
That, after all, has always been the promise of Jerusalem. So perhaps too it is now, above all, in these most acutely anxious and anguished of moments that we - and perhaps above all we Jews - must embrace the history too of having been a Palestinian.
