In my exploration of the BDS movement a week ago here, I talked about Margaret Atwood, who had chosen to not boycott the Dan David prize of which she was co-winner. She’s written a piece for Haaretz about her experience of Israel, that is a profound and eloquent exegesis of her Israeli experience. She admits that going into the issue she had “strayed into the Middle-eastern neighbourhood with a mind as open as it could be without being totally vacant”, and says, not unfairly, “The whole experience was like learning about cooking by being thrown into the soup pot.”

So what does she conclude about Israel?

The Israelis I met could not have been more welcoming. I saw many impressive accomplishments and creative projects, and talked with many different people. The sun was shining, the waves waving, the flowers were in bloom. Tourists jogged along the beach at Tel Aviv as if everything was normal. But… there was the Shadow. Why was everything trembling a little, like a mirage? Was it like that moment before a tsunami when the birds fly to the treetops and the animals head for the hills because they can feel it coming?

I’d been told ahead of time that Israelis would try to cover up the Shadow, but instead they talked about it non-stop. Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear. It’s not called the Shadow, it’s called “the situation.” It haunts everything.

The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears. The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.

Two things are worth noting about this. The first is how closely it parallels LeGuin’s discussion of Carl Jung (in “The Language of the Night”) in which she says “Unadmitted to consciousness, the shadow is projected outward, onto others. There’s nothing wrong with me – it’s them. I’m not a monster, other people are monsters. All foreigners are evil. All communists are evil. All capitalists are evil. It was the cat that made me kick him, Mummy.” Denial and projection walk hand in hand, or perhaps they are conjoined twins, with a shared brain that can never be separated.

And the other parallel is with David Grossman’s stunning fiction on the Holocaust, “See under: Love” For those who haven’t yet had the extraordinary pleasure of reading it, the first section is about Momik, a young boy born in Israel in the 1950′s to parents who survived the Holocaust. The fears they carry infect him, and he becomes obsessed by “the Nazi Beast” that he believes lives in the dark of the basement and must be given placating sacrifices or it will do something terrible. The sacrifices that Israel’s denial is forcing are beyond what it can afford, internationally or psychologically.

I read Atwood’s thoughts, written after the first flotilla was stopped, and Grossman’s (which Abby Caplin cites four posts below this one) and Amos Oz, who writes in the New York Times that….

Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.

I’m struck how these three great writers see deeper than most of the political responses I’ve seen, including the ones I agree with. This isn’t about who’s on which side, it’s about how, as Atwood commented in the Dan David Prize piece, literature creates “a space that allows the remembrance of what has been forgotten, the digging up of what has been buried.” The burial of the truth of Israel’s actions, both in “Operation Cast Lead” and in the flotilla action (“Operation Mini Cast Lead” as Gideon Levy calls it) is both poisonous to Israel, and the cause of the vituperation directed towards the Goldstone Report. As Bradley Burston writes eloquently, tragically, in Haaretz,

A war tells a people terrible truths about itself. That is why it is so difficult to listen….

We explain, time and again, that we are not at war with the people of Gaza. We say it time and again because we ourselves need to believe it, and because, deep down, we do not.There was a time, when it could be said that we knew ourselves only in wartime. No longer. Now we know nothing. Yet another problem with refraining from talks with Hamas and Iran: They know us so much better than we know ourselves.

Coyote walks out over the edge of the cliff, and when he suspects there’s nothing below him, he starts trying to run, faster and faster, more and more desperately. That situation does not end well. It’s time to look at the shadow, to acknowledge and name the fears. For Israel, there’s simply no other way back to any place of security.


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