Letters from Palestine (2 page)

The work of Ta’ayush and other peace groups
is in effect to interpose themselves between the settlers and the
Palestinians in an effort to fend off the former from attacking the
latter. And because the peace groups are committed to nonviolence,
their members are often injured and suffer many other hardships in
the course of their efforts to deter or deflect the settlers from
their predations. Shulman himself has been beaten up more than
once.

Although Shulman often writes in a
restrained, unassuming, and, at times, almost contemplative mode
about the travails he and his comrades must endure to do this work,
he is forthright when it comes to his depiction of the settlers he
encounters who are known to be among the most vicious in the
country. At one point, after returning home from a typical day in
the fields, he finds himself suddenly filled with fury and
writes:

What we are fighting in the South Hebron
Hills is pure, rarefied, unadulterated, unreasoning, uncontainable
human evil. Nothing but malice drives this campaign to uproot the
few thousand cave dwellers with their babies and lambs. They have
hurt nobody. They were never a security threat. They led peaceful,
if somewhat impoverished lives, until the settlers came. Since
then, there has been no peace. They are tormented, terrified,
incredulous. As am I. What black greed, what unwitting hatred, has
turned Israeli Jews into the torturers of the innocent? . . . I
rage in my well-appointed kitchen; I am inflamed, crushed, mad with
pain.

I was shaken by Shulman’s book, which was a
revelation to me. Although I certainly could not claim to possess
anything like his exquisite sensibility, his reports did enable me
to see, and to see clearly through his eyes for the first time,
just what life was like for the Palestinians living in such
conditions. Even a person with only the most rudimentary sense of
empathy could easily identify with Shulman’s anguish, while
admiring his bravery and commitment, and feel something of the same
explosive grief and anger that he could no longer contain.

Shulman’s book opened a door for me, and
once I looked inside, I had to enter.

I decided I needed to read more, to inform
myself further, so I quickly found some other books that could tell
me more about the life and situation of the Palestinians living
under occupation—that is, living under the military control of
Israel either in the West Bank or Gaza. One of those books,
Witness in Palestine
, was written by a Jewish American woman
named Anna Baltzer, and it helped to flesh out and provide a
historical context for much of what Shulman had described in his
book. Through reading Baltzer’s illuminating book, which allowed me
to glimpse what daily life was like for many Palestinians, I was
beginning to form a more definite impression not only of their
suffering but the reasons for it.

By this time, I had begun to share what I
had been learning with my beloved partner, Anna, and I remember one
day when I showed her a map in Baltzer’s book that depicted the
number and extent of the Israeli settlements (they now number about
one hundred and twenty) in the West Bank, Anna was shocked and
appalled. And I remember her exact words: “I had no idea. We have
to do something about this!”

By this time in my life, I was seventy-two
years old and had long been retired after spending nearly
thirty-five years as a university professor and author. Although I
had a passing interest in politics and world affairs, I had never
been an activist, and I had no real desire to disrupt my pleasant
life in Marin County, near San Francisco, where I was now living
happily enough with Anna.

At this point, I should probably say a bit
about myself, mainly to show just why it was that by the time I
read books like Shulman’s and Baltzer’s, I could scarcely do
otherwise than walk through the door they had opened to me and
enter the world that their writings had unveiled.

I was born in San Francisco, grew up in the
Bay Area, went to Cal-Berkeley with a major in psychology, got a
PhD from the University of Minnesota, became a professor, and
taught for many years at the University of Connecticut. My main
area of research dealt with near-death experiences on which subject
I wrote five books and probably almost a hundred articles. During
those years, 1977–2000, I traveled widely and lectured on
near-death experiences and similar subjects all over the world.
After I retired from teaching, I still continued to work in this
field, but I also explored and wrote about other topics, such as
classical music composers, and wrote some memoirs, too, but mostly
about other people in my life, not myself.

As to what led to my strong response to
Shulman’s and Baltzer’s book, it is necessary to go into my Jewish
past in order to explain my Palestinian present.

My ancestors—both on my mother’s and my
father’s side—came from Lithuania. But I mostly only know about my
mother’s side of the family. Her father, who was a cantor, came to
America in the early 1900s. He and his wife had five children, my
mother being the last of them. However, all of these kids rejected
the Jewish faith and almost all of its rituals, and I myself was
raised in a completely nonreligious, even antireligious,
environment. Unlike most Jews, we didn’t even live in a Jewish
community. In fact, I don’t think I even knew that I was Jewish
until I was about six or seven. I scarcely even knew any Jews
outside my own family until I got to graduate school—there they all
were!

Still, in those days, even though I had no
use for Judaism itself (and still don’t), I was nevertheless proud
to be a Jew because so many outstanding people in the modern world
were of Jewish descent—Freud, Marx, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and
Mahler, to name just a few. Obviously, a lot of Jews were smart
cookies, and even though we were a very small percentage of the
world’s population (about 0.02%), our achievements as a people were
vastly greater than our numbers alone could account for. And a lot
of us were professionals, despite coming from humble backgrounds.
For example, in my family, no one before me had ever gone to
college. But in my cousinly cohort (four of my mother’s sibship had
one kid each), I became a professor and author; my closest cousin,
a cardiologist; another cousin a professor and outstanding jazz
pianist; and a fourth cousin, a podiatrist, though he’s now
internationally famous for some oddball research he does. In this
respect, we are just typical Jews, though none of us cares a whit
about being Jewish, and we virtually never talk about it.

But another reason I was glad to be a Jew
was that American Jews had played a major role in the Civil Rights
movement and were often found, again in disproportionate numbers,
engaged in liberal causes on behalf of the underdogs in our
society. My own family was not at all involved in activism of any
sort, but we were liberal, and I had a Communist uncle who was very
important to me when I was young, so I learned about the values
Jews of this sort stood for at an early age.

In any case, I had my life and career, and
though in the course of it I had met many Jews, that’s about as far
as it went until one day a few years ago I happened to read a book
by an author I admired very much—W. G. Sebald, a marvelous, highly
original writer. He wasn’t Jewish, and he only wrote about the
Holocaust rather elliptically, but his books got me wondering about
my own Jewishness and Jewish history.

So all of sudden, I found myself delving
into my Jewish past, individually and collectively. Over the course
of a year or so, I must have read easily at least three dozen books
on the subject, including several on Lithuanian Jewry, which I
found fascinating. And through this immersion in Jewish history, I
learned a great deal about what had formed the Jewish people as
well as what shaped the contours of my own psyche that I had never
known or had only dimly appreciated.

Necessarily, I read a lot about what the
Jews had suffered. The history of Jews, after all, with some
notable exceptions, such as in medieval Spain, is pretty much a
history of suffering, humiliation, horror, and, of course exile,
not only in the Holocaust but at earlier times, too.

But then I found myself wanting to read
about other people who had suffered similar fates, so after a while
I turned my attention to the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks
(who deny it to this day). I read four books alone on that topic.
And then I started digging into the literature of other peoples who
had endured similar terrible tragedies and genocides—the
extermination of the Australian aborigines, for example, or that of
the American Indians (of course I had read about that much
earlier); the treatment of the Chinese by the Japanese in the
twentieth century; the recent genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda; and
then other books on ethnic cleansing, on World War I and II, the
history and treatment of homosexuals, et cetera—reading about the
most vile, heinous, unspeakable cruelties, all in an effort to
understand how people could do such things to other people, how
they could act like beasts, not humans, worse than any animal, by
engaging in collective acts of such barbarity and savagery that you
could barely keep from vomiting when reading about it. In reading
these books, I wound up taking a long trip through human-induced
hell, always asking “Why?” How could people do such things to one
another?

It was at this point in my life that I came
across David Shulman’s book.

I had long detested Israel’s actions toward
the Palestinians, but I’d never had an inclination to go to Israel
(in fact, I had an aversion to doing so), so I had never taken an
active interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, as I have
said, it was this book that first opened my eyes and shocked me
into a realization.

In a nutshell, this is what I saw
immediately. First, all the terrible crimes against various peoples
I had read about had already taken place; they were matters of
history. This crime—that the Israelis were guilty of toward the
Palestinians—was happening now and was on-going. Second, it was
being committed by Jews—of all people! How could they adopt
policies against non-Jews that were so unmistakably suggestive of
those used
against
Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s? (Of
course, as a psychologist, I could understand this, but as a human
being, I could not countenance it.) Third, it was already clear to
me that it was principally the support of the United States that
was making all of this possible. Americans, and especially many
American Jews, were Israel’s best friend and its bank.

I felt ashamed to be a Jew, if this is what
Jews had become. Furthermore, this was an injustice I could do
something about now. I had to do something. I couldn’t stand the
thought that some of the people of whom I had once been proud to be
member had sunk to this level of depravity. I thought it was up to
American Jews especially to speak out against this and to do more
than speak out—to stop it. (Subsequently I realized that it was not
up to American or other Jews to “stop it,” but to support
Palestinians in doing so, but here I am only speaking of what I
felt
then
.)

At that point, I became a Palestinian in my
heart.

So when Anna said, “We have to do something
about this,” I was ready. Shulman’s book was the trigger, Baltzer’s
made me pull it, but clearly the gun had been loaded for some
time.

“Let’s go,” I said.

The first thing Anna and I did that March
was to attend a meeting of the first group we came across that
seemed as if it might help us get involved. It was called Jewish
Voice for Peace, and it was having its monthly meeting across the
bay in Berkeley. At that meeting, there was a guest speaker, an
American-born Israeli peace activist named Dorothy Naor. Anna and I
were galvanized by her firsthand account of her activities in the
West Bank and the information she shared about the current
situation in Israel. Afterward, I went up to thank her and asked if
I could perhaps arrange to see her (she was going to be spending
some time in the Bay Area, where she still had family, before
returning to Israel), and she was kind enough to give me her email
address. At that point, I was very interested in establishing
contact with some Palestinian people, and when I first wrote
Dorothy, it was to ask her help in locating some. She suggested
that I get in touch with one of her good friends in Ramallah, a man
named Ghassan.

The next day, I woke up with an idea, and
the following morning I wrote Dorothy about it. I still have the
email I sent to her that morning, which read in part:

An idea just came to me—for a book called
Letters from Palestine
. It would be made up of
communications like the one from Ghassan about his wife—testimonies
from Palestinians from all walks of life, describing what it is
like to live there these days. It would be oriented toward American
audiences, especially American Jews, in order to give “a human
face” to Palestinians to counteract the stereotypic image that they
are mostly rock-throwing “terrorists,” but on the contrary people
like any other who only wish to live in peace and freedom and to
have all the elementary rights and privileges that any people
deserve as their birthright—and that we here take for granted as we
do the air we breathe.

Thus it was that scarcely a month after
reading Shulman’s book, I was already thinking of writing one of my
own—even before I barely knew anything and had no firsthand
knowledge of the subject myself! I may have been only a nominal
Jew, but clearly I had no lack of chutzpah!

Of course, I was aware that I had no
qualifications to write such a book. I didn’t even know any
Palestinians at that point! And obviously I would need to educate
myself first, begin to make contact and communicate with
Palestinians, and eventually go to Palestine and Israel to see
things for myself. And equally clearly, I would need to collaborate
with someone who lived there on such a book because I lacked any
credentials on my own for such an undertaking.