Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza caused much controversy last month when it ran at the Royal Court Theater in London. [snip] Whereas, at the start, Jews are portrayed as victims of the Nazis, by the end they've evolved into the oppressors who righteously take pride in killing Arab children.Being as it is a TNR blog, the author pushes back against these notions, which strikes me as fair. But the play as it is described (unsurprisingly I haven't seen it) doesn't seem to suggest that Jews are enthusiastic proponents of Arab pedicide. From what I read, the purpose of the play seems quite obvious: it is agitprop designed to get people like Oren Safdie to think about prevailing political attitudes in Israel and their logical endpoint. I'm not defending the play--I really cannot, as I haven't seen it and therefore don't know the nuance or the slant of the production--but it seems far from an open-and-shut case of anti-Semitism. For what it's worth, Safdie unsurprisingly misses the point:
The participants and presenters of this play can hide behind their lofty principles of freedom of expression and the need for further dialogue, but their support of this project says more about their own relationship to Israel than anything Churchill's play has to offer.It never occurs to Safdie that there might be a point to all this aside from anti-Semitism. And, indeed, there is anti-Semitism in the world, as there always has been and probably always will be. Where adherents of the pro-Israel ideology (and it is an ideology) go wrong is that they assume that criticism of Israel--anything said that undermines the Jewish State, basically--is something that philo-Semites can't do because Israel can't withstand criticism. What the Safdies and Peretzes and Kirchicks of the world don't seem to get is that Israel has survived endless wars and conflicts during its brief existence, and that policing the culture for anything that might be perceived as not completely complimentary doesn't help Israel so much as weaken the discussion about Israel, and therefore hurt Israel much, much more. Peretz and his acolytes might fancy themselves friends to Israel, but their model of friendship is an odd one: what kind of friend lets another friend put their keys in the ignition when they're completely plastered? Terrible analogy, perhaps, but for all their "liberalism" these folks seem to have deeply internalized Rovian concepts of loyalty and the value of dissent.
Indeed, the notion that Israel is fallible seems to be gaining more and more currency even among center-right folks like Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan, who are longtime staunch defenders of Israel, and famously so in Hitch's case. Hitchens' recent note of caution (to put it mildly) is a frightening one: that a movement is underway among the Israeli Army to refuse to evacuate the West Bank settlements, should it ever be decided to do so, one that will be enforced by blood if necessary. Couple this with the fact that Israel's new government will be led by a man who rejects a two-state solution and is rumored to be interested in expanding settlements, and its second most senior officer will be a man who supports loyalty oaths for Israeli Arabs--even ones not suspected of any wrongdoing. This would be disturbing were it not for the fact that such oaths seem to be within the mainstream of Israeli public opinion these days, in which 41% of Israelis support segregation in public places. To be fair, a majority of Israelis oppose this particular action. Couple this with the recent Gaza "war" in which Israel wildly overreacted to minor provocation and, in a campaign that produced hundreds of civilian casualties, tried to take down Hamas and wound up making them even stronger, only to lose support among its few relative allies in the region, notably Turkey. More to the point, stories like this about soldiers choosing to be safe rather than sorry in shooting civilians, coupled with effusive praise from nominally center-left, dovish Israeli politicians like Shimon Peres about how this was a wonderful little war--something almost inconceivable in America, even on such Bush ego trips like the Iraq misadventure. All of this doesn't quite add up to delight at killing Arab children, and that was probably an exaggeration on the part of this playwright, but "dovish" politicians glowing about urban bombing and civilian killing isn't exactly out of the ballpark, and the very real possibility over war with Palestinians over the West Bank seems even more real as a possibility than it used to.
I direct everyone to this post by Dr. Larison on the danger of ideology:
If a person approaches the world with an ideological frame of mind, whatever events dominate the historical memory of his fellow ideologues are perceived as constantly recurring again and again as part of a progressive narrative of successive triumphs, each one more important than the last. The simple framing, the certainty of victory and the quick and easy interchangeability of extremely different groups as different faces of the same enemy are all very useful for purposes of propaganda and the acquisition and exercise of power.I think this fits the pro-Israel ideology of the Peretz gang quite nicely. For them, it's always 1948. Israel is always on the brink, Arabs cannot be trusted, and Israeli history since then has been spent defending against successive dangerous foes with the capability to destroy Israel. It doesn't matter that, in the real world, Israel is at peace with its neighbors to the West (Egypt), to the East (Jordan), and was in negotiations (probably doomed now) for peace with one of its neighbors to the North (Syria). In the real world, Hamas is a nasty but not particularly potent terror organization whose offensive capabilities, as the Gaza War showed, were not really much greater than firing off rockets into unpopulated parts of Israel. Not only that but, aside from thawing relations with its allies, the Gaza War's unpopularity among Arab nations nevertheless led none of them to declare war on Israel. Why, it's almost as if they're nations who pursue their own interests, which don't necessarily include unprovoked attacks on Israel! Imagine that!
Anyway, I feel like I've addressed the crux of this. I am definitely pro-Israel and I want it to continue to exist, but I feel that their present course makes that either (a) unlikely or (b) likely only as a pale shadow of the people they are attacking. The impending Netanyahu Nightmare is almost punk rock in its nihilism. They have literally no plan for dealing with Palestine, none. On one hand, they don't want an independent Palestinian state. On the other, they want more of the West Bank to be under Israel's control and they want Israeli Arabs to leave. They just want them to leave? This isn't a solution, and it represents either a delusional detachment from reality or a deliberate one. The reason Palestinians haven't just moved on is because they feel that Palestine is their rightful home, not to mention a holy place, and for these reasons they are willing to spend generations as refugees or second-class citizens. The Netanyahu-Lieberman plan seems to be to push Arabs out of Greater Israel, but since they won't want to go I sense a disaster in the making. Of course, it would be smart for Palestinians to react to this news by adopting nonviolent resistance and trying to get equal civil rights as Israelis, hoping for a binational state. In the absence of true, strong leadership this is unlikely to happen and, of course, that would destroy Israel's unique character as a Jewish State, which I believe is worth keeping. This means that the resistance will be violent, and perhaps this is what Netanyahu and Lieberman are hoping for, so that they can use the military to force the Arabs out. Such a spectacle will be bloody, ugly, and no doubt fully supported by Marty Peretz and Oren Safdie as a necessary step for Israeli security. American politicians will not want to expend the massive amount of political capital necessary to point out the butchery--with millions of vocal fundamentalist Christians on the right hand and very vocal media types on the left, anyone who opposes Israeli policy is immediately doomed to become a pariah, and any attempt to explain the fragile politics of the region are going to be drowned out by these folks with cries of anti-Semitism, just as surely as they were with the killed nomination of Charles Freeman as National Intelligence Director. America will have the unique distinction of validating both Israel's Jim Crow experiment and its Trail of Tears redux, our two darkest chapters of national history. And it will all only serve to alienate Israel and America from the rest of the world diplomatically, which will not be helped when Israel bombs Iran's nuclear enrichment sites.
I suppose I could be wrong about what's going to happen to Israel. In fact, I'm sure I won't get all the details right. But I don't think I'm wrong about the big things. At best, Israel is intending to ignore the Palestine problem. In the grand scheme of things this might just be a speed bump in the road to progress that will be left behind and forgotten later, like I hope happens to the Bush years in America. Or maybe not. I wonder if the folks over at The New Republic have anything to say about all this.
