Up, down, across sky, earth, and mortals — I ripped up my pair of favorite torn jeans, stressed out out my right knee, and twisted my ankle. A cry of pain shot down the mountain. An incomplete fourfould, without gods, and no Greek temples. I imagine Heidegger’s walks at middle age through the Black Forest were more leisurely and less ridiculous. Scroll down to see how on this blogsite “the Adirondacks” surround and absorb the creation of “Israel” and the Palestinian “Nakba.”
May 15 was Nakba Day, and I’m noting how, with each passing year, more and more Nakba discourse slips into liberal and leftwing Jewish thought in Israel and the United States, even as some on the Israeli rightwing begin to consider the possibility of forging a single bi-national state in Israel and the occupied territories.
Whatever your politics, truth and candor about complex political and moral phenomena can only be a good thing. Always caught in the middle, I wonder if one can affirm the mainline of competing narratives, to talk honestly about the Nakba, the disaster and dispossession that overtook the Palestinian Arab community around the period of the 1948 Israel War of Independence.
Alas, Nakba discourse would seem to be caught between the panic and denial it elicits on the part of the Jewish Israeli and American Jewish public and the moral self-posturing on the part of activists on the anti-Israel left and in Palestine activism circles. In contrast, I’d like to aim for a higher cynicism. In thinking back about 1948, what seems very much as stake are both the machinations of the victors in tandem with the rolling disasters that the leaderships of the losing side brought down upon their own communities.
Regarding the problem that so much of the Nakba discourse dovetails into maximalist versions of the Palestinian Right of Return to what is today sovereign Green Line Israel, I don’t have much to say except that is all too original. I don’t see the “logic” to the “rhetoric” because I’m not sure how far these claims get one. For the vast majority of Israelis and those who support Israel in the United States and across the international community it’s an absolute non-starter. Obviously.
But even still, it should be possible to talk about the events surrounding 1948 and the disaster that the creation of the State of Israel wrought upon the Arabs of Palestine, as they were then called, and to do so with as much sympathy and candor one would give to any other complex human story in which one’s own is intricately involved, politically and/or emotionally.
I might be wrong, but I would like to think that candor about 1948 undermines only the cant that attends the narratives and claims that shape both sides to the conflict, but not the core narratives or claims themselves, which remain coherent and reasonable. The more polemical approach would be to insist that it is impossible to differentiate cant from some putative core, at least as they appear in the camp against which one finds oneself opposite. But that would be to assume that only one side to a conflict has rights while the other side represents evil incarnate. I don’t think it is either cynical nor naïve to assume instead that nations and revolutions are not born in sin, that they do not live without some sin or another, and to recognize that no sin is ever “original.”
I would like to be dispassionate, to observe and to understand both sides of the narrative coin, not any one side in isolation; and to look at the coin as a whole across larger historical contexts. I’d be interested in comparative work, to understand the Nakba in relation to the much larger discourse and practice of population transfer in the first half of the 20th century. This would include the Armenian genocide, the expulsion of Greek Turks from Anatolia in the 1920s and of Czech Germans from the Sudetenland, and the hyper catastrophe in India and Pakistan after partition. What would the comparative approach yield? Nothing original or unique to Israel and Palestine; just different demographic and geographic scales between the relatively small and the enormous, different intersections of histories and life histories, different regimes of symbolic representation and orders of brute and sad human misery, different imperatives of memory and burdens of responsibility, memory and forgetfulness.
Setting aside the rhetorics of recrimination and apologetics, about 1948 it should be possible to recognize as “right” the logic of an encompassing and unfolding historical conflict. With hindsight, this includes each and every action of all the involved actors: [1] why in the face of European anti-Semitism, Jewish political and cultural nationalists sought to advance Jewish “auto-emancipation” before and after the turn of the twentieth century, and why they ultimately settled on Palestine, [2] why the British first supported the Zionist cause in 1917 and then sought to undercut it in the late 1930s, [3] why Jews mobilized and moved en masse out of Europe for Palestine in the 1920s, 1930s, and then after the Holocaust, [4] why this naturally provoked resistance on the part of the Arab Palestinian population, anxious to preserve its hold to the land, caught up in the formation of its own national identity, from the riots of 1921 and 1929 to the open rebellion between 1936 and 1939 and in 1947 [5] why the Arab armies invaded the nascent State of Israel in 1948, and [6] why the Zionist movement and nascent State of Israel took the steps it took, sometimes to expel and never to repatriate, in order to create and to consolidate its claim to and hold on the Land between the 1880s and 1949.
In this complex narrative, there is a logic to every act, and every act makes sense. From this late historical juncture, it’s hard to understand how things could have possibly transpired other than the ways in which they did.
The logics are cold and without mercy, while the rhetorics tend to be hot and committed. And this too makes sense. But I would still rather see a discourse about Israel and Palestine, about Palestine and Israel that combines broad moral sympathy alongside coldblooded assessments of demographic-political dynamics, without confusing solidarity with politics. And then to understand or to contest how and at what point the logics and sympathies that motivate both principal parties to the Israel-Palestine conflict stop making sense.
Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity, Khalidi’s Iron Cage, and Benny Morris’ 1948 (minus the epilogue) are still among the best, most candid books written on these subjects.
Ultimately, new historical, demographic, political, and moral dynamics demand new kinds of logic and new kinds of sympathy, perhaps or perhaps not based on co-existence and mutual recognition. It’s never clear when new logics begin to take hold, and what kinds of new political formations they might one day shape. As for the logics, no doubt the new one, just like the old ones, will be asymmetrical in regards to the lines of driving force, and this too requires candor no matter the position one ultimately takes, and possibly a little rhetorical cant as well.
What a relief. Nobody cares anything about what I do up here. Some places are more conducive than others to certain kinds of thoughts.
It’s embarrassing to read Gregory Nagy in the recent New Yorker article by Nathan Heller. The article is one of the best bits on MOOCs that I’ve come across. What’s new here is not the news about attempts to strip down the university system as much as what it says about the motives of the elite University professors such as Nagy or Michael Sandel brought into this educational scheme. Kudos to our colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere who will have nothing to do with it.
Nagy is a distinguished and charming a classicist famous at Harvard for the popular course “Concepts of the Hero,” soon to be relaunced as “CB22x: The Ancient Greek Hero.” It would seem that the MOOC appears to the professor’s inner Achilles. Is this at bottom the appeal of Massive Open Online Courses, to the professoriate at elite Ivy League institutions, this quest for immortal glory in the form of an online lecture, inscribed into the ethernet for all time?
In the Web lecture, Nagy talks about the scene from the Iliad in which Achilles is told of his forked destiny: “You have two choices, Achilles. Either you stay at Troy and fight, and then die young, and then get a glory that is imperishable. Or you go home. And then you don’t die young. You live to a ripe old age, presumably, and you could even be happy. But you’re not going to get the glory. And this glory—I use the word ‘glory’ to translate kleos—is not just glory. It’s the glory that comes from being featured in the medium of Homeric poetry.
I suppose if I have a problem with the soon to be launched NYC bike share program, it’s not the intrusion of contemporary design elements into pristine downtown neighborhoods. I’m sure they will blend in over time, as most things tend to do in New York. What I don’t like at all is the blatant corporate branding of a public interest. But I guess, we’ve gotten used to that too.
This cannot be the first time I’ve ever been to synagogue for the first day of Shavuot, but there is no other way to explain my surprise at finding that the first chapter of Ezekiel, perhaps the enigmatic and esoteric of biblical texts, the one that, according to the rabbis, almost didn’t make it into the canon of Hebrew Scripture, a text which the rabbis in Mishnah Haggigah expressly warn us about, is read aloud in the synagogue as the day’s haftarah reading. Apart from cheesecake and an all-night study session for the most intrepid, the holiday that commemorates the giving of Torah at Sinai, has almost nothing to distinguish it. The actual day of the holiday is one of the dullest, with no special ritual curiosities, except for this little bit, tucked discretely into the special order of scriptural readings designated for the holiday.
The main reading for the day is Exodus 19. The familiar and hackneyed scene in Exodus 19, where God gives the Torah to Moses to Israel at Sinai, it pales in comparison to Ezekiel’s vision of the wraithlike chariot figures, those four head creatures, the wheels within wheels, the din, electric dazzle, amber colors, and their rider, the burning power of the enthroned divine anthropos, “the appearance of a semblance of the glory of YHWH.” Are you supposed to see such spectacle? or even hear about it in the synagogue?
The public reading of this mystical text scrambles what I thought I understood about the esoteric and exoteric in Judaism. Viewed historically, perhaps the rabbis, or at least those rabbis who were uncomfortable with the revelations in Ezekiel, were not the people who assembled the order of additional scriptural readings in the synagogue. Once again, we see how little influence the early rabbis had on ancient synagogue practice? Or perhaps this particular text, the one that was always thought to be the most enigmatic of esoteric texts, is not an esoteric text, or was not always considered to be so. More philosophically, perhaps the firewall between esotericism and exotericism is not always a hot one. The line between esoteric and exoteric is contingent and labile, meaning that it is configured in different ways by different textual communities at different historical times and in different geographical places. Or more to the point, perhaps the esoteric and the exoteric always collapse into each other, are always on the verge of doing so; a meta-commentary to the relationship between the revealed and the concealed tout court.
In the text itself, there is no direct vision. The sense of God’s presence has been mediated by “appearance,” “semblance,” and “glory.” In the synagogue, perhaps “textual space,” “liturgical space” and “synagogue space” provide additional frame-sets with which to mediate the event of revelation, to bring one close to it at a distance. Every year, I teach this strange text in my Introduction to Judaism. So I guess this book, for all its strangeness, is kind of familiar. But this was the first time I ever encountered it liturgically in the synagogue, and that made it strange. You see and hear the words at the same time, while the plastic frame of ritual space lends the text an additional level of illumination.
I like this modest, translucent cross with the blue neon border at Iglesia Cristiana, a small Pentecostal joint at E. 104 at Park Avenue in East Harlem. It’s hangs out off the built structure and over the street, right under the commuter rail tracks. Catching the eye is the simple, cheap construction and the very sophisticated see-through effect. Instead of blocking the natural view, it absorbs the surrounding and framing treescape into its own frame-configuration. An interesting way to think about “religion,” the natural environment, and urban space. I walked past it on the way to a doctor’s appointment after lunch with a friend down in the Village. Posting multiple shots vertically here at the blogsite creates the impression of descent. The translucent cross comes down to earth. I don’t think the pictures would have come out as nearly as well in the winter. These shots required spring foliage, while the grey sky gives a nice, matted effect to its subject.
