Category Archives: Israel/Palestine

The Erasure of Gaza

I have been writing for five months about the siege and assault on Gaza, but most of that writing feels too immediate to post here. I’m making an exception for this piece, which has deeper personal resonance and relates to earlier posts:

The Washington Post today has personal reminiscences from 14 Gazan refugees about places that have been destroyed in the last five months: the region’s only university; the oldest Christian church; a mosque; the zoo; a cultural center; an orphanage; a park ā€” the trees bulldozed ā€” and smaller places: a bakery, a pizzeria…

I think about my mother’s family being forced to flee Vienna in 1938, and her enduring love for the places where she grew up… and the fact that decades later, when my sister and I were old enough, she could take us back there, and show us those places.

The Israeli destruction of Gaza goes way beyond the immediate human cost ā€” the 30,000 people killed, the two million homeless and starving under constant assault and bombardment. It is a concerted, intentional effort to wipe out memories, to destroy not only the past but the future; to convince Palestinians who have yet again been driven from their homes that this time there will be no homes to which they might hope to return.

There is nothing “defensive” about the razing of every significant structure in northern Gaza. Some of the buildings were destroyed while people were sheltering in them; some were destroyed when they were empty. Some are being destroyed after serving as temporary bases for Israeli soldiers, who eat the food left in the kitchens, take family possessions as souvenirs, then set the rest on fire when they leave. (That is not a slander; it is from videos the soldiers themselves are posting, proudly.)

The Post story refers to this as “urbicide,” the destruction of a city, but it is more than that, and does not require an academic term. It is an attempt to destroy memory; to destroy culture; to destroy hope.

None of this is accidental; the Israeli government has repeated for decades that Palestinians do not exist, that they are simply “Arabs,” with no particular connection to the homes or land from which they are expelled. When people were driven from their homes in Haifa, they took their door keys with them, and those keys remain a symbol ā€” the image is everywhere in the occupied territories and refugee camps ā€” for their hope of someday returning.

What is happening in Gaza is an attempt at complete erasure. Some of the two million people may survive; some may even remain within borders policed by Israel; but the Israeli state is trying to ensure there will be no place to which they can return ā€” that the only “return” is of the Jews to their ancient homeland, in which some “Arabs” can remain as guest workers, but without a history.

A founding myth of Israel is that the Jews were a people without land who came to a land without people. That was always a lie, always an invention to mask an ongoing policy of appropriation, expulsion, denial, and erasure. In Gaza, as we watch, that policy is being carried to its logical conclusion: utter destruction, wiping out not only the people but the evidence of their prior existence.

The Washington Post piece has the power of personal connection: ordinary people recalling places that they loved, that made their homes a home. The introductory paragraph refers to the common description of Gaza in the past two decades as an ā€œopen air prison,ā€ and counters with an insistence that, true as that was in some respects, it was also a place where people lived and loved.

Vienna was not a paradise for Jews; it had a deep history of antisemitism, and my mother had direct memories of the Nazis marching, the books being burnt, the Jews being forced to scrub the streets; but when she took us back there, it was to share the Prater, the Riesenrad, the Stephansplatz, the Brueghels in the national museum, the restaurants where you could order a schnitzel and hear the cook hammering in the kitchen.

That is an authentic Jewish past: not the poisonous Wagnerian myth of a past when our ancestors were warrior kings, but the real past of personal connections and memories. It is a past that Zionist propagandists have often sought to destroy and replace with a myth that we were never happy in Europe, that we could never truly belong anywhere but Israel. What is happening now in Gaza is inseparable from that effort; it requires erasing my true past in favor of a myth, and erasing the past of the people who were living in Palestine before my relatives settled there in the twentieth century.

A Jewish Perspective on the Bombing of Gaza

I normally write as a white American, but in the weeks following October 7 I have been writing specifically as a Jew, because I cannot help reacting as a Jew to what is happening in Israel/Palestine. I have friends and relatives there, and that affects my reaction; I also see and hear people all around me talking about what has happened and could happen to “the Jews,” meaning people like me, not only in Israel, but elsewhere.

My mother grew up in Vienna. She was 14 years old when the German army marched in and was greeted with parades. She spent the next weeks running errands for her parents because it was dangerous for them to be out in the streets. They were not only Jewish, but longtime leftists, and they realized immediately that they would have to leave. It was easier in those first months, and they got out and got to the United States. My grandfather helped other relatives to get out. He tried to help his favorite brother and my mother’s favorite cousin, but for various reasons they did not want to leave until it was too late. They were shipped east in the cattle cars, and murdered.

My mother lived with that experience until she died in her nineties. She always thought of herself as a refugee. She found safety in the United States, but never felt at home there. She also found that in the United States she was treated as a white person, and other white people talked to her about Black people the way the German Austrians talked about the Jews. Even many Jewish Americans talked about Black people the way German Austrians talked about Jews.

She had experienced the Nazis first-hand, and she saw that many white Americans were acting like Nazis. So she did not raise me and my sister to be afraid of Nazis, or to ask who would hide us from the Nazis — she raised us not to be Nazis. She taught us to despise militarism and racism, and to stand up for people who were excluded or oppressed, for immigrants, for refugees, for people treated as ā€œdifferent.ā€ To her, those people were the Jews, the people like her, whoever they might be.

No moral compass is perfect. Sometimes it is hard to figure out who the ā€œgood guysā€ are. Sometimes there are no good guys. But there always is the option of choosing not to be the Nazis ā€“ of saying that no matter how far one is pushed, how desperate or angry one may feel, or how frightened, there are things one will not do.

Our mother taught us that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unforgivable atrocities, like the Holocaust ā€“ that we must do whatever we could to prevent anything like that happening again. When I read ā€œSlaughterhouse Fiveā€ and asked her about the firebombing of Dresden, she said it was the sameā€”an atrocity, targeting a civilian population. The fact that they were Germans, many of them presumably Nazis, didnā€™t excuse the choice to wipe them out, men, women, and children. Blindly murdering tens or hundreds of thousands of people because of who or where they were was behaving like the Nazis.

My mother was not particularly unusual. Many refugees and survivors from the Nazi Holocaust had similar reactions. It became almost a clichĆ© of Israeli writing about the formation of the Jewish state and the expulsion of Palestinians: the moment when a Jewish soldier looked around him and realized he was now behaving like the Nazis and the Palestinians were the Jews. Some writers took that meditation to its (to me) logical conclusion, and turned against the Zionist state projectā€”some left; some continued to live in Israel/Palestine, but worked to shape a multiethnic, multireligious future, whether in one or two states. Other writers took a (to me) more dubious lesson, concluding that they were doing something dreadful but had no choice: the frequent analogy was that the Jews jumped out of a burning building and unfortunately landed on someone elseā€™s head; they hurt a bystander and were sorry for that, but the essential fact was that they had to jump.

I continue to hear many people echoing that claim: that the Israelis are doing something terrible, but have no choice. But, more and more, Iā€™m hearing a different claim: that the Palestiniansā€”or more specifically Hamasā€”are the Nazis. I donā€™t have to celebrate or excuse Hamas to reject that analogy. If the Nazis had been a bunch of desperate fanatics carrying out occasional horrific attacks on civilians, they would barely be remembered, because there have been hundreds of groups like that, all over the world. What distinguished the Nazis was not that they hated Jews ā€“ it is a commonplace of Jewish history that we have always had enemies ā€“ but that they harnessed the power of a modern nation-state and modern technology to kill not hundreds or thousands, but millions.

I am not going to jump from one Nazi analogy to another. The fact that many people, in many wars, have had moments when they realized they were behaving like Nazis does not mean what they did was comparable. The Nazis committed a methodical genocide that had never been attempted on that scale and has never been equaledā€”they were by no means the only nation to commit or attempt genocide, but managed it with a cool efficiency that was unique, and in that sense uniquely horrific.

But, as my motherā€™s son, I do think about that history and turn to it for guidance. My mother opposed the death penalty, unconditionally: she did not believe the state should ever kill people, calmly and efficiently, no matter what they had doneā€”much less kill their entire families, their children. She had a particular horror of ā€œcivilizedā€ states killing with modern efficiency: if a nation was dropping bombs on people who had no airplanes, she always imagined herself under the bombs, not in the airplanes. She could imagine herself in Dresden or Hiroshima; she could have imagined herself in a kibbutz on October 7, hiding in a safe room, but would have found it far easier to imagine herself in Gaza, under the bombs. I find it far easier to imagine myself in Gaza, under the bombs. It is a much more common fate, in our modern world; few of the people who die in modern wars see the people who are killing them, nor do the killers see them.

A few years ago, I went to Poland, to Przemysl, to see where my grandmother came from, and also my fatherā€™s father. Some Jewish friends were puzzled that I would feel that desire, or feel any closeness to that place. They said, ā€œthe Poles were even worse than the Germans.ā€ That comment seemed bizarre to me, so they sent me storiesā€”pornographically violent stories, about peasants disemboweling Jewish women with scythes, or herding Jews into a synagogue with clubs and setting it on fire. Those stories were horrible, but the implication was worse: that peasants who were used to slaughtering animals with butcher knives and slaughtered Jews the same way were worse than civilized Germans who bought their meat in stores and sent Jews off to be efficiently gassed by the millions. To me, that is what defines being ā€œlike the Nazisā€ā€” methodical, state-sanctioned killing, using the latest technology and wiping out entire families without even having to see the people you are killing.

That is not about one state or another. It is about having the power to kill with efficiency, with clean hands, and is the way the vast majority of people have been killed in most of the wars in my lifetime. And yes, I think it is even more horrible than the old-fashioned kind of killing, because it is easier to pretend that you are not doing it, or would rather not be doing itā€”and when you can pretend you are not doing it, you can do much more of it, and turn off the images, or dismiss them as propaganda, or lament the deaths, but as numbers, not as people. I see the pictures of the Israelis killed on October 7, with their names and their biographies. The pictures from Gaza are of entire neighborhoods destroyed, masses of wounded and dead peopleā€”I hear numbers rather than names: five thousand killed, ten thousand killed. It is the language of statistics, the language of the slaughterhouse, of how many hamburgers McDonalds has sold. Most of us feel a more visceral horror at the death of one person we know by name and face than the deaths of an abstract thousand or ten thousand people. But I also find it easier to imagine myself under the bombs than in the airplanes. And all I want is for the bombing to stop.

That is not the answer to any longterm problems, or to trauma and enmities that go back decades and generations. But it is the first, vital, immediate answer to what must be done now, today. Stop the Killing. Then, do whatever it takes to reduce the hatred, the trauma; do the long, hard work of building, which is always harder and more time-consuming than destroying. But first, stop. Stop the bombing. Get food, water, fuel, and medical supplies to the people who are trapped and dying. That is not an answer to all the deep and painful history, or the infinite questions of what to do next — but it is the only answer that matters right now.

Traveling in Poland, Reading about Israel, Thinking about Nationalism

I wish the news didn’t feel so familiar…

I’ve recently been traveling through Poland, visiting the region two of my grandparents came from, and it is a complicated experience, because of the ways in which those places are and are not where my grandparents lived. Przemysl is still there, many of the houses are still there, the churches are still there, two of the five synagogues are even still there… but the synagogues are abandoned and boarded up, because the Jews who used to be almost a third of the population are not there anymore, nor are their descendants… and same in Lesko, where 70% of the town used to be Jewish, and now the only remaining synagogue is an art gallery, and much of the art is Christs and Madonnas and saints… and I recently posted a funny story about a recreater acting the part of a “Jew” in a historical park.

So I’m thinking a lot about nationalism and erasure, and the way I keep seeing monuments to Polish victories and Polish historical figures and Polish deaths and Polish resistance to the Nazis and the Soviets… and then separate monuments to Jewish figures and Jewish deaths and Jewish resistance, as if those Jews weren’t Polish… and I know identity is complicated and plenty of Jews didn’t identify as Polish, or as fully Polish, though plenty of others did identify as Polish, and some even identified more as Polish than as Jewish, and some even converted and considered themselves Polish Christians until the Nazis showed up. And it wasn’t not just the Nazis, of course — in the Warsaw Jewish museum I saw an exhibit on 1968, when the Polish government purged Jews, including very thoroughly Polish Jews, as covert or incipient Zionists…

…and then, right in the middle of my exploration of that history, the Israeli knesset passed the Nation-State Bill, which says “the right to national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people” — which is another way of saying if you are an Arab Israeli, you may live there but it is not your country.

I was in Israel/Palestine a few months ago and nice people were still telling me it was a multicultural democracy, though not perfect and with plenty of problems, and that everyone had equal rights, and Arabic was even an official language, alongside Hebrew. Well, with that bill Arabic ceased to be an official language, though it still has something called “special status.”

The original version of the bill would have explicitly encouraged segregated communities in which only Jews could live — as opposed to the status quo, which is communities that refuse to sell or rent to Arabs, complete with protest marches to keep Arabs out — and that section didn’t pass in full, but a clause remains saying “the state sees the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” And it’s hard to read “consolidation” as meaning anything except encouraging Jewish-only areas, and “settlement” as anything except encouraging Jews to keep expanding those areas.

Am I trying to make a parallel, an analogy, a comparison? As I’ve written before, the simple answer is no. I’m not trying to make any comparison. I’ve been traveling through Poland, immersing myself in the history of nationalism, exclusion, and segregation directed at my family and people like them, and when I read about laws being passed that tell some citizens they can stay if they behave but they have to remember they don’t belong, and maybe they can’t stay in this particular village, even if their grandparents planted those trees… it feels miserably familiar. Familiar, as in this happened to my family. They lived in Galicia for centuries, it was where they belonged, where they farmed, where they built homes and formed their culture, the place they still in exile referred to as “the old country.”

Przemysl is a lovely city on a river, surrounded by forests and rolling hills, and my ancestors were in that region for generations, and it seems to me it was their country as much as anybody’s. Their country, in the sense of the place where they lived — not of the glories of the ancient Polish nation, the ancient Hebrew nation, the ancient German nation, or any of those mythical military fantasies that quicken the blood of adolescent boys of all ages.

Those myths are what killed my cousins and left me with nothing to visit but graveyards.