Brad Burston has written yet another lucid, compelling and compassionate essay in Haaretz on the common threads in the Israeli and Palestinian collective psyche. If only both sides could retain in their minds their shared values and experiences, then solving this bone-crushing conflict might actually be possible. His piece was written for Passover, but its subject is relevant year-round:
Nobody likes to talk about it. In fact, there is nothing enemies hate more than to be told that they are alike.
…Since it’s Pesach on our side, it might be the right time to bring up the central obsession of both Jewish tradition and Palestinian culture: exile, and the hope for return.
…The experience of exile…forged…Jews and…Palestinians both. We are who we are, in no small part, for the hardships and longings and insecurities that displacement…confers.
The story we are commanded as Jews to tell on the seder night has everything to do with exile…the pain of the loss of freedom, the humiliation of the loss of humanity…the fear of loss of collective memory…[and the desire to] seek redemption through return.
…Certainly, for Palestinians, exile exerts no less commanding a power over the national personality. For many Palestinians, the issue of eventual return home of refugees is the one question before which all other Israeli-Palestinian disputes pale.
Palestinians the world over treasure the keys to former family homes in the Holy Land, many or most of which may no longer be standing.
On six continents, Palestinians and Jews, awash in the alienation of diaspora, dream of an ancestral home so idealized that it may well never have existed.
The insecurity of the refugee stalks all of us. It is in our blood. We all suffer from it, Jew and Palestinian, even as we deny the right of our enemy to suffer, even as we blame our enemy for his own suffering.
For the Jews, the insecurity manifests itself as fear, fear of being annihilated, fear of being cast out of here by force.
For the Palestinians, the insecurity finds expression in humiliation, a profound loss of honor that stretches over the decades that the State of Israel has existed.
There is profound psychological wisdom in Burston’s analysis of the commonalities shared by Israelis and Palestinians. Here he tells us why neither side will ever be able to vanquish the other no matter how many weapons are used, no matter how many dead bodies lie piled high:
…The refugee’s ultimate weapon…figures in the arsenals of both sides. It is the wily stubbornness that is the child of the union of memory and rage. In the Jewish refugee it is as old as Joseph in Egypt. It is called the trait of a stiff-necked people, a people who will even stand up and defy God if they so choose, and the trait has been ours since the Exodus.
In the Palestinians it is called sumud, or steadfastness. It is a trait that makes Palestinians defiant, rather than compliant, as we throw shell after shell at them.
It is this trait that makes victory impossible here. We will literally die to deny our enemy a victory, and our enemy is certainly prepared to return the favor.
If only Khaled Meshaal, the Islamic Jihad bombers, and Dan Halutz (IDF chief of staff) would recognize these traits. Then perhaps they might stop deluding themselves into thinking they can annihilate the other side.
In this section, Burston discusses the illusions shared by the ‘keepers of the flame,’ those extremists on both sides who hold out for a maximalist future in which they will control their destiny without the interference of the ‘enemy”‘
We are, all of us here, Jew and Arab, victims of our refugee mentality, the one we cannot shake, the one that makes us into villain and victim both.
We are, all of us, still dor hamidbar, the Generation of the Wilderness, still adrift in our dreams, still holding on, still holding out for dear life, unwilling to part with the refugee’s fervent illusions about how this eventual state of ours should look. Of how it must look, in order to somehow justify and give meaning to our decades and decades of suffering.
For many on the Palestinian side, it is preferable by far to hold out and hold on to the illusion that all will return to former homes, than to have an independent Palestine that confirms the compromise, and thus, the defeat.
For many on the Israeli side, it is preferable by far to hold out and hold on to the illusion that we can keep all of our biblically deeded land, Shilo and Nablus and Beit El and Hebron, than to live within the real, internationally recognized, final borders that define an independent state.
Burston argues that neither side can realize its dreams until the other side also realizes its own dreams. Until this happens, Palestinians and Israelis will continue in moral and territorial exile:
We will all of us here, Jew and Arab, be refugees until we can bring ourselves to accept that the other has rights, legitimate grievances, and valid claims.
…Sooner or later, there will be two states. Even the extremists know this. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have to work so hard to prevent it. It’s a matter of time. It could take another 20 years and terrible trauma, but it will happen.
Until then, we’ll all continue to be adrift. Mired with one another, and with ourselves. Refugees, right here at home
Wise words…Hat tip to Common Ground News Service.
