Brave author details awakening
We are transfixed these days by the suffering in Palestine. How is a westerner to take a position, except to beg for a ceasefire? But we owe it to the deep tragedy that continues to scar that region to learn the history of two peoples, before we speak.
And to take as our guide an Israeli-American, Linda Dittmar, who has moved from ardent Zionism to being an advocate for Palestinians. It is recorded in her beautiful recent book, “Tracing Homelands.”
When I saw the cold hatred in the eyes of the Hamas attackers on Oct. 7, I sensed this was deeper than other conflicts. It had been 75 painful years in its gestation. And even longer.
I knew about the Balfour Declaration of 1917, whereby the British Empire, then in charge of Palestine, issued an order that declared two things: the Jews had a right to a “natural home” and Palestinian Arab rights had to be “protected.”
One goal has been achieved; Israel is a nation state, but at the cost of displacing hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. The resulting deadly impasse is called by many “the world’s most intractable conflict.”
In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, there was massive worldwide sympathy for the Jewish people coming out of their unimaginable suffering in Europe — the Holocaust — inflicted by the Nazis. Thousands of survivors came to Israel. Most of the world applauded.
The Zionists among them, calling for such a homeland, have been passionate, and in many ways, justified. But what about the people already living there? For them, it was the horrific Nakba.
Into my quandary about justice and injustice has come Dittmar’s book, published in 2023, before the Hamas attack. Age 85 now, Dittmar grew up in Tel Aviv in a middle-class family in the 1940s and ’50s, and was a loyal Israeli girl, ignorant of the Nakba, in 1948, in which Israel forces depopulated 450 Palestinian villages and forced 750,000 men, women and children into exile.
She was never taught about it. There was a policy of ignoring this grievous displacement, a kind of conspiracy of silence. She was unknowing and uncritical of the ways by which her people had acquired their land, believing it had been willed by God to a special people.
Her years as a student in the U.S., starting when she was 21 in 1961, opened her eyes. She experienced turbulent times there: the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. And access to information about the unjust origin story of her young country.
Years later, Dittmar went on an awareness trip organized by an Israeli non-government organization called Zochrot (We Remember). It further opened her eyes to the catastrophe that had befallen the Palestinians.
Her unease grew. Her personal change, the conversion of her Zionist views, happened over a 12-year period. It makes a riveting read. Dittmar now lives in Boston. She has a doctoral degree from Stanford University.
Her book is a timely, dramatic first-person account of a Jewish woman who attended patriotic Jewish youth camps, and even spent two years in the IDF, who seeks to know, and, with anguish, to write about her awakening. She bravely publishes at a time of great polarization resulting from a raging and unequal war.
But rather than encountering hatred from Jews, she has been flooded with invitations to speak about her experience to all kinds of audiences.
There is an aura of deep sadness and nostalgia, as Dittmar recalls her childhood among Palestinians. But she is convinced that without the painful facing of its past among Israelis, the resentment and grievance among Palestinians will endure from generation to generation in the Middle East.
Linda Dittmar is a brave and righteous Jew. One hopes the words of Jesus, “the truth shall set you free” will prove true.