July 8, 2016, פֿאָרווערטס Forward http://www.forward.com (US)
In the classic
American film noir “Out of the Past,” the wayward mob mistress and the private
eye hired to drag her back home are, inevitably, flirting in a casino in
Mexico. “Is there a way to win,” she asks, sultry and musical, pretending that
she’s talking about the gambling tables. “No,” the doomed chump answers, “but
there is a way to lose more slowly.” It’s hard not to read “The Way to the
Spring,” journalist Ben Ehrenreich’s deeply reported new chronicle of
Palestinian life and resistance in the West Bank and Hebron, with those dark
words in mind. The men and women he grows close to lose almost every battle
they fight — beaten down by Israel’s infinitely superior military force and the
expansion of Jewish settlers operating with apparent government approval. And
despite or, he might argue, because of his Jewish heritage, Ehrenreich makes no
bones about siding with the losers.
Courtesy of Ben
Ehrenreich
Simple
Pleasures: The daughter
of artist
Eid Suleiman al-Hathalin playing ball on her birthday.
The book has
already been both lauded for its impassioned writing and criticized for the
author’s explicit sympathy for his subjects (sometimes within the same review).
Sheerly Avni spoke with Ehrenreich by phone from his home in Los Angeles, just
as he was packing for a trip to the Palestinian Festival of Literature.
Sheerly Avni:
You lived in the West Bank and spent some time there on and off, for about
three years. How much did the amount of time you spent there impact your
understanding of events?
Ben
Ehrenreich: I know a lot
of Americans and Europeans who visit the West Bank either as reporters or with
delegations and return home filled with optimism and hope because they’ve met
all these great and inspiring people who are engaged in inspiring acts of
resistance. But actually living in the West Bank gives you a very different
sense of the duration of things, and specifically of these awful cycles of hope
and despair — usually heavy on the despair.
You mention in
the book a particularly surreal moment, seeing graffiti on a wall in Hebron.
That was the
first time I went to Hebron, in 2011. It was something I couldn’t forget. I was
given a very quick and impromptu tour — a local kid grabbed me in the market
and insisted on taking me around and showing me the sights. As we were walking
on a path I’d later come to know very well — it was across the street from the
Israeli settlement of Beit Hadassah — I saw the words “Gas the Arabs”
spray-painted in English on a wall. I don’t think I need to explain why that
was so upsetting.
Because you
are Jewish? Or rather, do you consider yourself Jewish?
My father is
Jewish, my mother is not. To an anti-Semite I am a Jew, to the Orthodox I’m
not. I’m not particularly interested in settling that question for them, except
to say that I did grow up with a deep sense of what it meant to be Jewish, and
of the responsibilities that heritage carries with it. My father’s family was
entirely secular — his parents were communists — but they had a strong and
painful sense of themselves as part of a people who had been hunted and
persecuted for centuries. What that gave us, I was taught, was not any special
rights or entitlements but an obligation that extended to all persecuted
peoples and to all human beings, and a powerful sense of the importance of
pursuing justice, not only on behalf of Jews but on behalf of all people
everywhere. The State of Israel increasingly claims to be acting in the name of
all Jews all over the world. This allows people to argue that any criticism of
Israel counts as anti-Semitism, which I find both cynical and extremely
dangerous.
Not all the
men and women you describe here are 100% nonviolent. In fact, the men and women
you spend your time with in Nabi Saleh throw stones at Israeli soldiers regularly.
The question
of whether stone throwing counts as violence becomes much less impressive if
you spend any time at these protests. The difference between 16-year-old boys
throwing stones and soldiers in body armor shooting tear gas canisters, shooting
rubber-coated steel bullets, shooting live ammunition is so radical that the
question really just disappears when you’re there on the ground.
Nonetheless,
it is a stumbling block, especially for Americans.
I do know, and
it’s certainly been pointed out to me, that people have been killed by
stonethrowing and people have been injured by stones. Of course stones hurt if
you’re hit by them. But I did contact the [Israel Defense Forces], and they
were able to confirm they have no records at all of any soldiers ever being
killed in a stone-throwing incident. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say
that there have been millions of stones thrown at Israeli soldiers since the
first intifada. Yet not a single Israeli soldier has been killed by one. Many
hundreds of Palestinians have been killed at demonstrations by Israeli bullets,
but it never occurs to us to ask if the Israeli cause wouldn’t be better served
if Israel disowned all forms of violence.
You also point
to groups — like Youth Against Settlements, in Hebron, which forbids
stone-throwing.
They have a
strict policy of not throwing stones. And it’s not on moral grounds. Their
belief is that it just doesn’t work. In Hebron, people have been throwing
stones for decades and it hasn’t made the slightest bit of difference. So Youth
Against Settlements resists in a different way, with actions like trying to
restore abandoned houses so that Palestinians can live in them without settlers
taking over. Yet even simple acts like this are met with military violence, and
people are dragged out, beaten and arrested, simply for attempting to rebuild
their own homes.
So even
clearly nonviolent resistance meets with violent oppression?
Yes,
consistently. The last time I was in Nabi Saleh, soldiers began firing
high-velocity tear gas canisters at villagers who were simply sitting on a
hillside. No one was surprised. This wasn’t strange or exceptional. It was
completely routine. There is a point in the book where I ask, “Is there no form
of Palestinian resistance so innocuous that it wouldn’t be condemned?”
You analyze
the strategies and structures of the occupation, from several different angles,
including financing of construction projects, the relationship between the
government and the military and, finally, an often irrational hatred of
Palestinians both in Israel and in the territories. But you also speak of a
deep hatred of Palestinians among Israelis, one that is harder to pin down.
I spent a lot
of time while I was there and afterwards trying to understand the mechanics of
the occupation. I began to think of it more and more as what in the book I call
the “humiliation machine,” a giant mechanism with a dizzying array of different
gears which all work together for a single purpose. It isn’t just about taking
land, and certainly not about anything that it would make sense to call
“security,” but about inducing despair in an entire population in order to
render them docile.
And the
hatred?
What I saw in
that summer of 2014 wasn’t rational. I don’t just mean the bombing of Gaza.
There were mobs of Israeli youth walking through Jerusalem night after night,
shouting “Death to Arabs” and looking for Palestinians to beat up. It rarely
made the news, but they often found them. I don’t think human beings are
ultimately rational creatures, and the things that push us hardest are not the
things that we’re conscious of. It was very painful to see that, to see all of
the hatred spilling out in the streets that summer, and to understand
retroactively that it had been there all along.
In the book,
you often refer to writers and thinkers who have nothing to do with the
conflict: Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, many science fiction writers.
I was shocked
by how accurately writers like Cesaire and Fanon, working within entirely
different contexts, diagnosed mass psychology in ways that apply to the State
of Israel. They may have been writing from the Caribbean or North Africa, but
they understood colonialism and understood the ways in which oppression
distorts and deforms the soul and the conscience of the oppressor as well as
the oppressed. And I think it was that deformation that was on display in such
an ugly fashion in the summer of 2014. And it’s still on display quite
regularly as Israel moves farther and farther to the right. You can’t exert
oppressive violence against another population for decades without it coming
back at you.
Where do we, as
U.S. Jews, fit into this schema?
As Americans,
both Jewish and non-Jewish, we tend to shake our heads and say, “Oh, what can
we do? They’re just going to keep killing each other there.” But the killing
mainly occurs in one direction, and it’s mainly sponsored by the United States.
The U.S. gives more than $3 billion a year in military aid to Israel, which is
more than we give to any other country. In total we have given more in military
aid to Israel than to any other nation in our history. So there is a very
direct sense in which Americans are not at all powerless to affect what happens
there.
Imagine for a
minute that you were given power to actually change things. What kinds of
policies would you suggest?
I don’t see my
role in the world as being to formulate policy or even suggest solutions. What
I can do is describe the realities I observe and try to do so accurately and
with empathy. I think one of the biggest problems of American political
psychology, and perhaps American psychology in general, is that we always want
to immediately fix stuff. We don’t want to take the trouble to listen. One of
the reasons I wrote this book is that very few Americans have had an
opportunity to understand or even hear any Palestinian perspectives on the
situation, which means we understand less than half of it. Until that changes,
it’s certainly premature for us to try to solve anything. That said, we don’t
need to do something new. We simply need to stop doing what we’re already
doing. In other words, we don’t need new initiatives, but we do need to stop
funding this occupation, and the massive amounts of violence and oppression
that go with it.
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