Old City, New Fight
Leftist literary elite tries to ruin anniversary of Jerusalem unity
THE literary elite is using the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem to make Israel’s greatest victory synonymous with tragedy.
It’s the new “nakba,” that being the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that Palestinians and their allies give to Israel’s victory in its 1948 war of independence, after Arab governments rejected the partition plan and declared war on the infant Jewish state. Palestinians could have had their own state all those decades ago, but chose war instead — and lost.
There is something utterly nasty in trying to take a rare bright spot on the dark timeline of Jewish history and blot it out with black ink.
Yet this is exactly what Israel’s tireless critics are hoping to do with the reunification of Jerusalem, which took place on June 7, 1967, as Israel again fought another defensive war and managed to capture eastern Jerusalem, including the Western Wall — one of the holiest places in all of Judaism.
Jerusalem isn’t just a place; it’s a concept, with an importance to Jewish observance that’s hard to overstate. As is the symbolic significance of its reunification under Israeli stewardship.
Yossi Klein Halevi may have expressed this best in his book on Israel since the Six-Day War: “It was impossible, but here they were, sovereign again in Jerusalem, just as Jews had always prayed for and believed would happen. Strangers smiled at each other: We are the ones who made it to the end of the story.”
This feeling of cosmic Jewish joy is too much for some left-wing intellectuals. The power couple of American prose, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, chose to recruit a legion of writers whose fame was exceeded only by their ignorance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and take them to the Palestinian territories (in cooperation with a left-wing pressure group) in search of Palestinian stories to tell.
The result is “Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation,” a collection of narrative nonfiction. The point was to tell the story of the Palestinians since the Six-Day War, when Israel took over Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan.
It’s a book of pure, 100-proof propaganda, featuring such luminaries as Colm Tóibín, Mario Vargas Llosa, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, Jacqueline Woodson, Colum McCann as well as Chabon, Waldman and others. The only Israelis in these stories are caricatures, either peaceniks or coldhearted soldiers of oppression, but in any case rare.
It’s true that Palestinians are suffering. It’s also true that Israel isn’t blameless. But reading the book, you’d never understand the paramount role of the Palestinians, their leadership and the wider Arab world in this tragedy. Nor would you get a true sense of how badly Israelis want peace and the generous offers and painful sacrifices they’ve made to prove it.
Interestingly, the writer who comes closest to flirting with the truth is Waldman, who was born in Jerusalem but who for a long time wanting nothing to do with modern Israel.
Her chapter profiles a Palestinian activist who trains youth in nonviolent resistance. And she occasionally nods to Israeli decisionmaking stemming from something other than callous brutality.
At one point Waldman lets slip the need for intricate security measures to protect Israeli settlers, even while much of her critique (and the book) is aimed at those measures: “the relative safety” of the settlers, surrounded by millions of Palestinians, “represents a remarkable Israeli military achievement.” But that’s about as close to nuance as she’ll get — and it’s not very close.
The weakest chapter in the book is Chabon’s, not only in its writing but because it is strikingly cheap and dishonest. Chabon’s bread and butter is fiction, not nonfiction, and here he blurs the line between the two.
He accuses Israel of violating the Fourth Geneva Convention, which he calls “the finest flower of the Nazi defeat,” comparing Holocaust survivors and their descendants to the Nazis. And he repeats falsehoods like a gullible child — that the water used by Israeli towns is stolen, that Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount was responsible for the second intifada, that roadblocks are “pointless.”
What’s not pointless, of course, is the timing of this execrable book. Chabon & Co. don’t present the truth, and they don’t pave the way for justice. They are rhetorical rock-throwers.
Happily, as the liberation of Jerusalem reminds us, Israel has survived far worse.