In the spring of 2018 I visited the occupied city of Hebron in the West Bank with Yehuda Shaul, from the Israeli anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.
This was my second trip to Hebron within a few days. As an international visitor, you can either go with a Palestinian guide and see the Palestinian city, which ends in the middle of downtown with tall steel gates and concrete blast walls—I had already done that with my excellent guide, Qasim. Or you can travel with an Israeli guide through the large settlement of Kiryat Arba to the tiny sliver of downtown Hebron colonized by Jewish settlers and protected by the Israeli army, on the other side of the same steel gates and blast walls.
Yehuda walked me through the settlement zone: rubble-strewn streets and cobbled-together apartment blocks with signs and murals in Hebrew and English put up by the radical settler groups, many of them funded by American donors, whose presence in the city, while technically illegal, is protected by the full firepower of the Israeli Army. He took me to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Hebron’s most celebrated site, the supposed burial site of Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Originally a mosque, the Tomb is now half-mosque, half-synagogue, with separate, heavily guarded entrances, always under the watchful eye of the IDF.
On the way out of town, he pulled over to show me what he said was the most important site of all: a large stone tablet set horizontally on a gravel-and-sand lot, somewhat incongruously behind a convenience store and mini-mart on the main road leading out of Kiryat Arba. It was the grave of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli American settler who committed one of the worst massacres of the post-Oslo era in 1994 when he entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs with an automatic rifle, killing 29 Palestinian Muslims before he was beaten to death by bystanders. Goldstein’s grave has been a place of pilgrimage for members of the settler movement and other right-wing Jews ever since the massacre took place. Originally it was part of a landscaped park, but the park was dismantled in 1996 by the Labor government in power in Israel at the time, to discourage crowds of visitors. Now it’s a simple, flat stone, lined with pebbles and small stones placed there by visitors: the traditional Jewish practice for people visiting a respected grave. A plaque next to the grave reads, in Hebrew: “To the holy Baruch Goldstein, who gave his life for the Jewish people, the Torah, and the nation of Israel.”
Since the Hamas attack on the Gaza border on October 7th, I haven’t been able to write a single coherent sentence about Palestine. I’ve tried: I worked for months on an essay, “The End of the Metaphor,” that tried to pick up on a section of The New Earth, “Palestine and the Poverty of Metaphor.” But it never came together.
The New Earth was the product of ten years of intense thinking, reading, and research; it exhausted me in every way. A novel has to speak for itself, and especially this novel, which speaks in so many different voices and registers and attitudes. You can write a sequel to a novel (in theory) but not an appendix. (Tolstoy attached a long, unbearable essay on the Napoleonic Wars to the end of War and Peace, which does nothing but infuriate completists who want to say they read the whole thing.) In any case, there are thousands of novels about Palestine and Israel, and innumerable other past texts, and the world’s attention has been urgently focused on the needs and words of the present.
The New Earth is a work of fiction written by a white American, and it’s not hard to guess why it’s been insulated from the firestorm of “controversy” around pro-Palestinian speech over the last four months. Maybe if it had become a bestseller or won a major award it would have attracted negative attention, but so far, nothing. American literary culture, which is overwhelmingly (sometimes suffocatingly) polite, tends to avoid sensitive subjects unless there’s no alternative, no possible distraction. When Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Here I Am was published in 2015, virtually all the public discussion focused on the book’s autobiographical portrait of a divorcing couple, rather than the nightmarish (and scandalous) speculative fantasy at the heart of the novel, where Israel experiences a catastrophic earthquake and is attacked by Arab nations and Iran. When Israel issues a call for diaspora Jews to return to fight its enemies, only a tiny number actually go. I was unimpressed by the domestic drama of the novel (even if it carried implications for the future romantic life of Natalie Portman) but in awe of Foer’s bitter, scabrous, utterly believable portrait of American Jews’ disaffiliation from Israel; I kept thinking he would be condemned by Jewish conservatives and Zionists, but no one wanted to touch it.
A simpler way to put it would be that Here I Am and The New Earth are novels written and published within the empire, not outside it. By “empire” I mean exactly this: Israel’s status as a Western-backed state in the Middle East, under the protection of American and European military and economic power, where Israel is (incorrectly) understood to offer a kind of umbrella protection and identity for all the world’s Jews.
Jonathan Safran Foer and I, by virtue of our white American status and affiliation with Judaism (I’m not Jewish but am part of a Jewish family; The New Earth is mostly narrated from within the bonds of a Jewish family) are allowed to operate by a loose and forgiving set of rules; whereas Adania Shibli, the author of Minor Detail, is not. Minor Detail follows a young and neurodivergent Palestinian woman, living in present-day Ramallah, who becomes obsessed with the decades-old rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman in the Negev desert by an Israeli army platoon during the Arab-Israeli War. Determined to visit the site of the woman’s death, and somewhat oblivious to the danger involved, she rents a car in Ramallah and drives through Israel to the Negev, where, after several misadventures, she stumbles into a military installation and is shot dead. Anyone familiar with contemporary Palestinian life would find Minor Detail beautifully written but not surprising or shocking. Nevertheless, the book was denied a major European literary prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair shortly after October 7th, inaugurating a season in which public events about Palestine were abruptly shut down by all manner of Western institutions: museums, cultural centers, literary centers, even my own high school in Baltimore, where I once took a semester-long class on “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.”
Pro-Israel lobbying groups and their allies in American and European politics, not to mention Israel’s own sophisticated propaganda machine, are sending a very clear message that any discussion of Palestine or Palestinians, even the mere presence of a Palestinian person, is tantamount to support for Hamas and the October 7th massacre. They are weaponizing the politics of grievance to erase Palestinian grief. Not surprisingly, many writers, culture workers, religious leaders, and others find this situation unacceptable and are taking a stand against it, in some cases losing their jobs or being threatened with violence. The schism between those who accept the “Palestinian exception”—free speech is allowed, as long as you don’t mention Palestine—and those who refuse it is getting wider by the day. None of this is new. What’s new is the intensity and malevolence of the pro-Israel side, and its willingness to flaunt every protection for the First Amendment, for academic freedom on college campuses, for the rights of employees, students, Muslims. Nothing will be the same in the aftermath of this crisis. A fundamental line of trust has been crossed everywhere you look.
The two weeks I spent in Palestine and Israel in May of 2018 were an intensely fraught moment. There was the opening of the new US embassy in Jerusalem, an inflammatory move calculated by Trump and his far-right-wing ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and a major protest in Gaza in response, the March to the Sea, which turned into an outright massacre in which IDF snipers killed scores of nonviolent marchers, along with reporters and medics. These events coincided with Jerusalem Day, a yearly event where tens of thousands of young settlers (mostly teenagers) are bused to the Old City and let loose, running through the narrow streets with flags and shouting anti-Arab slurs, trying to provoke Palestinian residents into fighting with them for the cameras.
On the morning of Jerusalem Day, a friend of mine from a Jewish anti-occupation group invited me to a counter-protest by Jewish peace activists ahead of the settler march. We assembled at Damascus Gate and walked through the Arab Quarter, distributing yellow flowers and cards printed in English, Hebrew and Arabic:
Dear neighbors, residents of the Old City.
We have come here to reach out to you on this complicated day,
to distribute flowers and purchase from your stores.
We are sorry that the day is causing harm to your business and your livelihood.
“You shall love truth and peace” Tag Meir.
It was all over in a few minutes, because the thousands of settler-marchers were pulling up in their buses right behind us. A few flowers fell on the ground, and I picked them and stuffed them, with one of the cards, in my pocket; later I stuck them in an envelope, and now they sit on my bookshelf in my office, in an olive jar. (That last poetic note didn’t occur to me until just now.)
When reports came in early November that the body of an elderly Israeli woman, Vivian Silver, assumed to be among the hostages, had been in fact been found in Kibbutz Be’eri, burned almost beyond identification, I immediately recognized her face. She was a noted peace activist and leader of interfaith groups for women, and she was, I’m almost positive, at that rally in the Old City. If not her, an older woman exactly like her.
The fact that a number of the victims of the October 7th massacre were peace activists opposed to the occupation, who in some cases had committed their lives to aiding residents of Gaza, was immediately seized on by the Israeli media to show that, as one Instagram commenter put it, “If you are merciful to the cruel, you will eventually become cruel to the merciful.” This is a bit of circular logic along the lines of Golda Meir’s famous statement, “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
No one wants to admit the obvious: Israeli and Palestinian peace activists and supporters of nonviolent resistance, who are now demonized and called supporters of terrorism everywhere they go, were the only ones working desperately to keep October 7th from happening. They put their bodies on the line, and sometimes lost their lives (like Rachel Corrie, the inspiration for The New Earth) trying to prevent the world from devolving into the situation we see today. They were the only ones.
They are still the only ones.
What do I do with these memories of stones and flowers?
Like a lot of observers, I didn’t believe Israel could descend so fully and quickly into what Jean Daniel, in The Jewish Prison, calls “negative theologization”: the willingness of secular people, in a modern, theoretically secular state, to engage in a religious war. The statements collected by South Africa’s lawyers in the International Court of Justice case show Israel’s government as a whole—and Israeli society, in large part—embracing Baruch Goldstein’s call for a holy war against all Palestinians. Netanyahu himself, a resolutely secular nationalist, transformed the Gaza War and the country fighting it with his October 28th speech invoking Amalek, an ancient enemy of the Israelites. In the Book of Isaiah, God commands Saul to destroy the Amalekites “man, woman, infant and suckling.”
In an interview in late December, the legendary Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy said that he no longer recognizes his own country: “This is the first war where there are no critics, no resistance, no moral doubts, or any other question marks,” he said, “and if there are, they are, ‘Why are we so soft? Why don’t we let it go?’ A famous commentator in a mainstream channel the other day suggested that Israel should have started with 100,000 people in Gaza killed, and from there, it would maybe be more smooth, if we started with 100,000.”
It isn’t literally true that there are no critics and no resistance; I know some of the resisters personally. My friend Guy Hirschfield, from the radical anti-occupation group Ta’yush, still posts pictures from the West Bank on Facebook nearly every day, where he aids rural villagers in their daily struggles against encroaching Jewish settlements. There are anti-Zionist Israeli groups like Shoresh in New York and around the world. But they have no power in Israeli politics and are regularly shunned and attacked for their work.
I don’t want to follow this paragraph by saying, “on the other hand.” There is no other hand. But there is a profound seriousness and determination in the global movement for justice in Palestine, knowing that Israel—aided by the US and European states—is on its way to accomplishing the unthinkable: a second Nakba. It’s a generational and spiritual breaking point. The people of Gaza are quite literally in the moment described by Mahmoud Darwish in one of his most famous poems, “Earth is Closing In Around Us” (translated here by Abdullah al-Udhari):
The Earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and
we tear off our limbs to pass through.
The Earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die
and live again. I wish the Earth was our mother
So she'd be kind to us…
Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly
after the last sky?
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?
We will write our names with scarlet steam.
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.
We will die here, here in the last passage.
“If Palestinians do not have a viable homeland,” Arundhati Roy put it in a speech in Munich on November 16, “then the moral architecture of western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.” In case this sounds like a rhetorical flourish, consider that last week, when the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre was asked what President Biden would say to the tens of thousands of Arab voters in Michigan who demand a ceasefire—voters who could easily cost him the election in November—Jean-Pierre answered, without missing a beat, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” That’s the sound of a political leader—a whole political order—willing to go down to defeat rather than accept he was wrong. Many observers have concluded (and probably most Americans recognize intuitively) that if Trump is elected a second time, he’ll never leave office willingly; he’ll do his best to install himself as president for life. So the year Gaza is finally reduced to flat, pebbly ground, a year where it becomes only possible to estimate, not count, the dead (as has happened in Syria, Rwanda, Myanmar) may also be the year of the last American election.
Where will we fly then?
Poster by Freda Guttman, 2008, from the Palestine Poster Project Archives.