Requiem for a lost Israel and Palestine
Israel's war against Palestinians has been severing the bonds between Israeli Arabs and Jews and is producing a genocidal politics
I watched with horror the attack by Hamas on Jerusalem, brutal in its conception, and knowing also that the Israeli State would take revenge, virtually identifying each Palestinian as a potential “terrorist”. Israeli bombing, reinforced by American ammunition, has killed in Gaza many times the number of persons killed in Jerusalem and displaced lakhs of others.
As the violence rages, I think of how it has been prefigured again and again since 1967. Israel built up Hamas to counter the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Hamas’ attacks led to the rise of the Right-wing Likud Party in Israel. In 2010, I was in Tel Aviv-Jaffa when an Israeli attack took place on a Turkish aid flotilla comprising six ships bound for Gaza. A taxi driver offered to drive me to Gaza, which was then one big slum despite the influx of international aid. In 2014, I was to go to Haifa for a conference when rockets began raining on Tel Aviv despite its protective iron dome. A fierce counterattack followed.
My thoughts since the war began have been with students, friends and their families, both Jewish and Palestinian. Their lives intimate a geological understanding of the region below the surface with a palimpsest formed by rocks of multiple hues flowing into each other.
This account is about subjectivities that comprise a different order of experience contrasted with the geopolitical that is both calculative and inherently violent. These pen portraits highlight the human capacity to forge connections between Jews and Arabs, as well as between Israelis and Indians beyond the statist collaboration of militaries, arms suppliers and intelligence agencies.
Through my former students and other researchers, I came to learn of the rich Sufic and Islamic stratum of Israel (including the Bahai “heresy” now called a religion) and the close relation between Jewish and Arabic philosophy and poetry. Jewish contributions to the Sufic comprise a living tradition in Israel.
It is not a mere coincidence that in Akko, a multi-religious Sufi group has been working for peace and that the singer Shye Ben Azur composes qawwali and lives and performs in Ajmer, Delhi and Israel.
A month ago, Ronie Parciack, a Jewish scholar, and I had dinner at my home in Delhi. She had hosted me frequently in Israel, and taken me to old Arab neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem and Haifa. I learned much from her about facets of protest in Israeli Arab art and literature. We both share a love for the Sufic and for the Indo-Islamic city of Delhi. While I hope to write a book on Delhi as a sacred city, she has published Celestial Delhi: Anthropological Gazes at a Megapolis in Transition in Hebrew and co-authored an article with Rita Brara on the lesser-known dargahs of Delhi.
Peace has become more and more elusive in this troubled, beautiful land, which I first visited in the 1990s. Then it was possible to drive from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. After the Oslo Accords, however, East Jerusalem was handed over to Israel, an area of the ancient, sacred city that would have been the capital of a Palestinian State. The settlers had moved in as I witnessed in Hebron, the holy city of Abraham, the ancestor of a unified past of the three Abrahamic religions. In contemporary Hebron, Palestinians are excluded from major thoroughfares by the settlers who even throw garbage on the shops of its market.
Every other week, I have been carefully reading the posts of David Shulman, a Tamil and Sanskrit scholar from south Hebron. Israeli politics has forced him into working for the entitlements of the Bedouin. His Bitter Hope is a beautiful account of the work of his organisation Tayush (Arabic for Living Together). In his last post, he wrote heartbreakingly of Ein al-Rashash, “home to friends of many years, a village of infinite beauty”, that was in the throes of evacuation-expulsion. Wadi Siq with several encampments of tents and sheep pens huddled together on a hill overlooking Jericho and the Jordan Valley had already vanished after a savage attack by armed settlers and police. Palestinians are not supposed to build schools for their children, he commented with irony.
David Shulman had organised the Jerusalem lectures in which prominent Indian scholars were featured. Ashis Nandy presented his work deeply insightful into the making of genocide highlighting the authoritarian personality and the internalisation by victims of their victimisers that explains in large part the oppression of Palestinians by Jews.
As Israel’s authoritarian turn deepened a surge of protests had taken place against Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to clip the wings of the Supreme Court and its powers of judicial review. Many friends have spent weekends through the past year at protests, which led Netanyahu to pronounce that these Israelis were worse than the country’s enemies such as Iran!
Even as settler colonialism has intensified in Israel, there is a rich world of scholarship within. This account would be incomplete without two portraits, namely those of Sari Nusseibeh and Daniel Raveh. Nusseibeh is a public intellectual, a philosopher (author of The Story of Reason in Islam), president of the Al Quds University and was once the PLO’s representative at the UN. He sustained physical injury from an attack by Hamas affiliates. His family’s history goes back to the time when Saladin reconquered Jerusalem and bestowed the keys of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on his ancestor. Nusseibeh co-authored with Ayalon, a former member of Mossad, what many people in Israel told me had been one of the most workable peace plans for a two-State solution. The plan is hosted on the website of the United States Institute of Peace and is based on equity and justice.
Raveh is an ascetic-like figure in Israeli academia, a sadhu who has more images of Hindu gods and goddesses in his home than there are in mine. It was Raveh who first told me how the State had nationalised the roofs of homes in Jerusalem and Jaffa so that Arab owners lost claim to the terrace. He is something of a rockstar among students. Unlike in India where philosophy is a declining subject, his philosophy class in Tel Aviv draws several score students, some of whom have been exploring themes in contemporary Indian philosophy. His grandfather had been associated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and supported both a bi-national State as also giving Arabic the status of a national language.
Raveh first arrived in our Jaipur home after reading Daya Krishna in a Pune library. This was the beginning of a long guru-shishya relationship spiced with several debates between the two on Shankara and on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. He has since co-edited essays in a book called Contrary Thinking, brought out a seminal book on the philosophy of Daya Krishna, the very first book in a Bloomsbury series on World Philosophers and also has a new book on the remarkable Indian philosopher, K C Bhattacharya.
Raveh’s explorations have been in conversation with my own on Ramchandra Gandhi, Daya Krishna and Yashdeo Shalya. His grandfather had been associated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and supported both a bi-national state as also giving Arabic the status of a national language.
In Jerusalem, Raveh’s grandmother recalled when I met her having played with the Nusseibeh boys during her childhood. It is these bonds between Israeli Arabs and Jews that Israel continues to sever at its own cost. For what else can these politics produce but hydra-headed monsters and a requiem for a lost Israel?
Shail Mayaram is the author of Israel as the Gift of the Arabs: Letters from Tel Aviv. The views expressed are personal
