Tikkun magazine, November/December 2008
REVIEW
Rebuilding Homes, Building Peace
By Ed Gaffney
An Israeli In Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, by Jeff Halper, Pluto Press, 2008
This volume is full of hope. Not naïve Panglossian optimism, that imagines that "things always get better and better in this best of all possible worlds" (any attentive visitor to the Palestinian Occupied Territories will have observed the very opposite). But courageous hope that remains steadfast in the face of enormous obstacles to a humane, just resolution to the longest-running conflict in the modern world. Hope that responds to a violent situation not with more violence, but with the bold willingness to interrupt a seemingly endless cycle of retaliation by a refusal to continue to act out the role of enemies of the other community.
An anthropologist by trade, Jeff Halper has written a book that is sometimes autobiographical but never self-important. The most telling of these personal accounts took place on July 9, 1998, when a very large contingent of the Israel Defense Forces came to destroy the home of his friends Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh. Halper just happened to be in the area when Arabiya called him on his cell phone to report the traumatic events. When Halper arrived on the scene with two busloads of Israeli peace activists, the soldiers fired shots in their direction warning them to back off. Halper managed to reach the front door and tried to persuade the commander to cease and desist. The commander took out a pile of maps and started explaining why demolishing homes was "just doing my job," as he put it (with no sense of irony in the invocation of Eichmann's defense in Jerusalem in 196l). As a Caterpillar bulldozer rumbled up the hill toward the Shawamreh home, the academic knew with certainty that the situation demanded much more of him than just doing his job: He could not simply observe this unjust situation; he had to resist this injustice with all his might. He threw himself in front of the bulldozer, an action he has taken many times since then. In that moment Halper moved from notional or theoretical opposition to the Occupation to active resistance. This shift forms the basis of the hope that un-dergirds his narrative and analysis.
The point of sharing his own experience is to encourage us as readers to make turns (sometimes U-turns) in our lives in ways similar to his shift from academic anthropologist to critical "Israeli in Palestine." Perhaps the most fundamental shift on the part of most Americans would be to simply become better informed about important things happening in our name, but rarely—if ever—mentioned in our mainstream media. Attention to data abounds in this book. Halper provides us with a great deal of information. He documents his sources at critical junctures in his argument. And he offers a more than ample bibliography for further reading.
But data do not "speak," any more than "facts on the ground" do. We must probe just what these data or facts really mean. Halper offers not just information, but alternative explanations—called "reframings"—that stretch our minds to make sense of the apparently nonsensical. In short, we must be intelligent, rigorously so, as we seek the real rationale for the policy of home demolition, which on its face and in its effects does not promote the one thing that Israelis crave more than anything else: security. Halper grounds the home demolition policy historically in the British policy of home demolition (by dynamite rather than by bulldozers) in the period of its Mandate over Palestine. In so doing he neglects to mention that the British also destroyed the homes of Irish dissidents (by torching thatch-roofed cottages rather than by dynamite) prior to Britain's rule over Palestine. And he omits centuries of dispossession of Jews by Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and—most devastatingly—by emperors, kings, and petty princes of city-states throughout the Christian centuries.
Whatever the precedents for the current Israeli policy of home demolition, Halper argues that this policy is only comprehensible as an act of neocolonial oppression of the indigenous people, and that this particular policy and related oppressive policies—checkpoints, settlements, bypass roads, and the Wall—are all aspects of a twofold plan to maximize Jewish control over the entire land and to minimize the presence of Palestinians by their overt or indirect transfer elsewhere (where precisely is a matter of indifference; it could be Jordan or Lebanon, Chicago or Detroit).
If this interpretation seems implausible to some of Halper's readers, he is the first to encourage them to find some better hypothesis to explain a policy so profoundly insensitive and inhumane, so inattentive to centuries of Jewish experience at the hands of Europeans who expressed contempt for Jews by subjecting them to homelessness, and who made them wanderers by expelling them from their homelands.
At several turns in his argument, Halper relies on history to shed light on conflicting interpretations. Fortunately, Halper knows Zionism much better than most admirers of its current excesses. To be sure, he is aware of the exclusivist strain that surfaced as early as Herzl and that came to dominate Zionism. Halper refers, for example, to the Hagana's Plan Dalet of 1947, and to the following 1965 statement by Joseph Weitz, the director of the Jewish National Fund: "There is no room for both peoples in this country...and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries. Except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe." But Halper emphatically denies the deterministic historicist claim of inevitability for this exclusivist vision of Zionism. He notes, for example, that as early as 1891, Ahad Ha'am, a significant voice in the movement of Cultural Zionism, wrote: "There is certainly one thing that we could have learned from our past and present history: how careful we must be not to arouse the anger of other people against ourselves by reprehensible conduct. How much more, then, should we be careful, in our conduct toward a foreign people among whom we live once again, to walk together in love and respect, and needless to say in justice and righteousness."
Halper has no crystal ball to predict the precise political futures of Jews, Palestinians, and their other Arab neighbors over the next decade or two. He points out the improbability of Palestinian acceptance of a two-state solution that does not include contiguous land or a viable state. But he offers no prediction about Israel as a single state with equal rights for all inhabitants, or as part of a confederation in a comprehensive regional solution.
Whatever form a new reality takes, Halper is not a deterministic pessimist who cannot see beyond the status quo. On the contrary, precisely because "Israel did not have to become a colonial state," it need not and should not remain colonialist much longer, even if this shift might now seem improbable or just too difficult to accomplish. He writes, "Israel, like all colonial regimes who managed to redeem themselves from their oppressive pasts, must traverse along and painful trail from decolonization through reconciliation to a new form of political life that is just and inclusive of all the country's inhabitants." That may not sound hopeful to those who are wedded to an endless preservation of the present lose-lose situation. To me, however, it reflects the only way out of the present mess and into a win-win solution for both communities.
One reason why Halper seems so hopeful to me is that he is an educator committed to the possibility of rational inquiry. The "essence of learning," he writes, is that "if people are provided with the rudimentary tools of understanding—facts, context, concepts and an ability to figure things out for themselves—they can and will change their opinions and behavior." Halper, moreover, is an anthropologist who studies the world from the ground up, not from the top down. He proclaims: "If we, the people, lead, our governments will follow. But we have to empower ourselves."
Halper empowers his readers when he informs us that Israel destroyed over 20,000 homes in the Golan Heights in 1967 to make way for settlements, and over 18,000 Palestinian homes since then; and that five agencies of the Israeli government currently have power to demolish homes for various "reasons," none of which has anything to do with security. His hope is that persons of good will understand the enormous scope of the Israeli home demolition project and its devastating impact on Palestinian families. The most moving account of human pain in this book is Halper's description of the deep trauma inflicted upon the Shawamreh family (and by extension on all Palestinian families like them). As Salim notes, "A home demolition is a family demolition." The message of the bulldozers, Halper states, is not just the shattering of physical walls, but also the wiping out of a family's life savings, the abrupt end of any semblance of healthy family life, the complete destruction of everything that any of us would hold dear when we use the word "home" in all of its primal significance.
Halper describes not just the narrative of his arrest after confronting the bulldozers at Salim's home. He also shares his self-critical reflection about his experience, which led him to conclude that the NGO he coordinates—the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions—should rebuild demolished homes as a nonviolent act of political resistance to a policy that epitomizes what is wrong with the Occupation.
Halper has written not just for his readers, but also about us. When he describes his own willingness to take decisive and creative action to change the things he can and should resist, he challenges us to become more responsible for things we do or leave undone. He wishes us to experience both the helplessness he felt on the ground with Salim and the empowerment that comes with the realization that resisting dispossession is the only way to redeem the Jewish hope of a homeland safe not only for them, but also for the Palestinians. Because the fulfillment of this promise is conditional on our response, this book is full of hope only if we are.
Ed Gaffney is a low professor at Valparaiso University, where he teaches international humanitarian law. He is producer-director of "Holy Land: Common Ground," a documentary film on Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to be enemies.
Source Citation
Gaffney, Ed. 2008. Rebuilding Homes, Building Peace [Review of the book An Israeli in Palestine: Resisiting Dispossession, redeeming Israel] Tikkun 23(6): 76.
