Haviv Rettig Gur
A classic text. If you want to see academic cowardice masquerading as courage and a shrinking of historical discourse masquerading as an expansion of it, this thread is about as perfect as it gets. Here is Zionism conceived as a narrow and elite set of ideological constructs primed for dismantling by the courageous few who would dare undertake the task against the menacing edifice of the, um, vice chancellors. (Cue Darth Vader's imperial march.) A professor who cannot actually tell you the lived experience of the millions of desperate people whose basic experience was that Zionism saved them from destruction; who cannot show you the deep fear that gripped Zionist thinkers because they could see what others could not, the "catastrophe," as they put it, awaiting European Jewry around the corner; who neither knows nor cares about Zionism's profound sociological analysis of modernization that accurately predicted that even the most advanced and liberal societies would be unable to contain the murderous impulses thrown up by the social upheavals of industrialization and the new mass societies -- is now courageously going to teach us that, actually, Palestinians have a story too. The saddest part is that this is not even a serious or humanizing representation of the Palestinian story. Edward Said no more represents lived Palestinian experience and discourse on the ground than Woody Allen represents the Israelis. It's all just Western intellectuals talking to themselves about themselves. We Israelis and Palestinians aren't real people in these discourses, but merely a vocabulary they use to suss out just how wonderfully clever they are. (Forgive me, but this is incredibly annoying.) I'll be blunt. Palestinians have a powerful and old and sophisticated and complex (and sometimes, as in the restorationism of Hamas, bloodthirsty) story of their own experience. Many stories, actually. You need to know Rashid Rida and Haj Amin and the inner torment of Darwish -- and also the fellahin asking curious questions of the early Zionist land-purchasers in 1900 and the shopkeepers of Bethlehem who weren't consulted when the ideological elites chose to launch the Second Intifada in 2000 -- to seriously get at any of it. Said's Palestinians are an empty shell, a literary antihero, a hapless, passive object, rather than the smart and three-dimensional community of humans who debate themselves as much as they debate the Jews, who understand their world and hold multiple and contradictory views about what is happening to them. As I said, what bothers me about this thread, about this pretense to nuance and courage, is that it is neither nuanced nor courageous. It is the monoculture of academia, it is what everyone this person knows in her professional world, nearly everyone who belongs to the Western "sense-making elites," is required to believe to be respectable. That it does not describe how any of the real people being talked about actually understand themselves doesn't bother these people in the slightest. You want to understand Zionism? Stop reading Pinsker or Ahad Ha'am (or Rashid Khalidi's warped versions of the same) and start learning about the lived experience of the millions of Jews who only turned to Zionism as a last resort, about the last living Jews of the eastern hemisphere. Then you'll finally see something of the world that Israelis see. You want to understand Palestinians? Stop thinking of them as victims and start reading Hamas' religious writings, and discover why even those who despise Hamas for its authoritarianism and its destruction of their world and their lives can still cleave to their narrative, which positions the Palestinian experience as a fulcrum of the great Islamic redemption. Even these stories do not encapsulate us, but at least they reflect something real about the real us, and not the solipsistic mind-games of Western intellectuals to whom we are mere instruments of self-validation and moral preening.