The Humanism of Israel and Palestine

Getting Away from a Punitive View of Campuses

During my office hours last month, the voices of my own students were drowned out by shouts through megaphones, slogans pouring in through the windows. I wondered how many of those screaming at each other across the quads have encountered one literary work from the nationality of the Other? One meager yet infinite glimpse into the substance of the Other’s humanity? 

What is it about literature that enables my students to learn together, even as a toxic environment awaits them outside the classroom? Great art can never be used as a punitive or corrective instrument. So a class on Palestinian poetry allows students access to the full range of bonds, betrayals, and empathies that suffuse the Palestinian national reality. And because true art cannot police the boundaries of subjectivity, a session on Israeli fiction opens students up to the defining contradictions and vulnerabilities of real life, refracted through that country’s existing conditions. My class steers right into the most vexing and painful parts of conflict: wars, mass displacements, threats of annihilation. But even this year, we’ve been able to learn together without having the tensions that plague many campuses shut down our intellectual exchange.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict puts human contradictions under a magnifying glass so intense, it is too much for many people to bear. It demands an almost virtuosic flexibility of one’s moral imagination. It is much easier to insist on political clarity. But in yielding to the questionable comforts of such clarity, we efface our own humanity. 

The materials I teach, literature and film, do not ask students to affirm an abstract set of political propositions. These works ask them to be open to the range of experiences that come with living in these two national communities. And my students this term – some of whom have been physically assaulted amidst violence between Palestine and Israel – exhibit moral bravery when they open themselves up to the interiority of the Other.

My students' engagement with the humanist texture of each nation’s cultural heritage is also instructive for navigating the vexing space between necessary forms of pro-Palestinian protest and fears of harassment by Jewish students. The unresolved tension between these poles reflects a failure to see one another’s culture as more than merely an extension of militarized rhetoric: one more supposed justification for unjustifiable violence.  

The hostilities imposed on campuses are animated by a false dichotomy, one that can only imagine two types of Jewish students: those who “support Israel,” and those who are “against Jewish supremacy.” If the distinction is that clean, then we are left debating whether it’s legitimate to socially ostracize a large majority of Jewish students because “they are Zionists” – or whether their souls can be saved by ideological conversion. This binary posits that unless a Jewish student explicitly meets some anti-Zionist criterion (such as demanded by Students for Justice in Palestine), then that young person is decidedly identifiable with Jewish supremacism and Israeli state terror. The institutional Jewish world (Hillel, ADL, etc.) largely accepts this binary; it simply punishes, rather than celebrates, the anti-Zionist minority.

No less harmful, mainstream Jewish institutions also demand that Palestinians define themselves to fit within Jewish vocabularies of fear and control. They demand, in effect, a type of Palestinian who seldom exists in the real world. One who will foreground an abstract set of affirmations (support “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state”; condemn violent militarism) without offering any reciprocation for Palestinian national rights to sovereignty, security, or self-determination. The Jewish establishment insists on a conception of Palestinians shorn of historical memory and family ties – and the cultural representations that grow out of each. 

In all cases, one is forbidden from feeling or grieving with one's community. When essentialism reigns, shared culture becomes a problematic excess. When these issues are litigated as propositions of speech (freedom or censure), the tyrannies of rhetoric take over. One thesis demands the negation of its antithesis. One then fails to see the potential for inhabiting a creative space where a rich web of affiliations need not resolve into purified political abstractions. 

We have much to learn from the figuration of Israel and Palestine afforded by the arts. The “Israel” of Israeli literature is not merely a set of policies or even their dreadful consequences, though it is informed by both. It is a national space within which the largest number of Jews on earth, alongside Palestinians living on their historical homeland, express their culture. In Israeli novels, for instance, one finds the long shadow of the Holocaust; the traumatic immigration of the Mizrahim; the subjective intricacies of Judaic belief; the dizzying temptations of socialist utopianism and techno-capitalism. If we can feel the gravity of these realities, surely we can grasp why Jews (of any background) might locate themselves within a spectrum of affiliation with the society where these storylines take human form. Perhaps polling that labels three-quarters of American Jewish students as “supporters” of Israel does not have adequate language for the affective spectrum of affiliations with the entity that we label “Israel,” as it has existed historically and up to the present. 

Widespread diasporic concern for the fate and welfare of the world’s largest Jewish population has persisted whether that population was located in authoritarian Czarist Russia, tolerant medieval al-Andalus, or the fraught modern state of Israel. And that concern has been mediated, in each instance, through the world of letters. The fact that students feel connected to lived realities in Israel (or their aesthetic representations) doesn’t mean these students support this Israeli government, the prosecution of this war, or continued Jewish supremacy. After all, in 76 years, the state of Israel has yet to definitively establish what it means to be a “Jewish” state, nor has it set finalized boundaries with its Palestinian neighbors. Students should not be on the hook to provide a conclusive answer for policy problems that have been left unresolved by the government of another state, even if they identify with many people living in that state. Similarly, after decades of wrong answers for the conflict (failures to which both sides have contributed), it would be foolish to demand “correct” responses from those whose primary function, after all, is to learn to ask the right questions. 

Palestine, like Israel, is linked by intergenerational bonds to a diaspora. It should come as no surprise that many in these diasporas have been imprinted by the historical traumas of their homeland, while maintaining a large amount of fellow feeling with the experiences of the populations still living in the homeland. As an instructor, I cannot teach Palestinian film without the vocabulary of the Nakba that represents 1948 as an ethnic cleansing. Nor can I assign “Israeli-Arab” satire without reflecting that population’s status as second-class citizens. I can’t even show the Israeli Oscar-nominated Waltz with Bashir without confronting the moral catastrophe of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the fall of the PLO in Beirut. Because these are all unavoidably real Palestinian experiences, one cannot demand their exclusion from Palestinian consciousness. And yet internalizing the impact of Palestinian art and culture does not require one renounce the intersecting histories of Jewish power and powerlessness, which have impacted Jews both before and within the Israeli state.

These bonds weigh heavily on the hearts of my students and their families. Why do we presume that they can extricate these parts of themselves? Why don’t we fling open the gates of empathy that lie within Palestinian and Israeli letters? All wars dehumanize their victims, and culture is often the first casualty of a violent reality. But today’s campus conflicts seem particularly devoid of the perspectives available in the cultural record. Why is our imagination so impoverished? Why have we trained ourselves to view one another as such flat, stock characters: eternal victim or untouchable war criminal? Pure victim or merciless terrorist?

I feel sincere concern for pro-Palestinian students who have faced beatings, along with criminal or professional consequences, for their views. And I am pained for Jewish or Israeli students who can’t cross a campus without hearing the murder or abduction of their family members celebrated by classmates. But these outrages are merely symptoms of a framing that cannibalizes the core function of the university. It's a framing imposed by cynics like Elise Stefanik, but quickly reinforced by some of own colleagues: that of the campus as a zero-sum battlefield between the forces of light and darkness. I am fearful that the vocation to which I’ve dedicated my life – as an educator and scholar – will be abandoned to the thrills of cosplaying liberation and take-no-prisoners crusading. And the ultimate victim of such vicarious “thrills” will not be found on campus, but in the continued bloodshed whose logic mirrors our own myopia. To put it simply: if we can’t appreciate the expressions of our humanity, what form of humanity, exactly, are we fighting for?

The poet Mahmoud Darwish arguably enjoys the most esteemed legacy among Palestinians from the past century. He wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, and he is the only Palestinian besides Yasser Arafat to have received a state funeral. Darwish, who lost his home in 1948 and went into permanent exile from Israel in 1972, said that he learned to write about the land from S. Yizhar, the first great Israeli novelist. From H. N. Bialik (a Hebrew poet whose work was read far more than Herzl by the early Zionist immigrants), Darwish learned how national degradation can be transformed into a poetics of moral outrage and vision. From the IDF siege of Beirut in 1982 to its siege of Ramallah two decades later, Darwish never stopped insisting that his consciousness remained open to Israeli subjectivity. Similarly, legendary Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, who was assassinated by Israel for his role in the PFLP, wrote an entire book on Israeli Jewish literature, which surely influenced his own empathetic fiction. How many pro-Israel demonstrators have even heard of Darwish or Kanafani, let alone their beautiful texts? And would their public consumption of Israeli culture be accepted in today’s pro-Palestinian encampments?

For half a century, Israeli literature was dominated by a trio of authors – the late Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, along with David Grossman. They ceaselessly pointed to the erasure of Palestinians and the untenability of its denial. They prepared the Israeli imagination for the necessity of an independent Palestinian nation, from Yehoshua’s iconic “Facing the Forests” (1963) to his embrace of a binational solution before his death. The testimonies that Oz collected from soldiers in the Seventh Day (1967) laid the foundations for the work of Breaking the Silence. Shortly before the first rock was thrown in the First Intifada, David Grossman published Yellow Wind (1987), bringing occupied Palestinian voices into Israeli living rooms. In fiction and essays, these writers carved a groove into the public discourse that allowed a negotiated peace with the Palestinians to became not only thinkable, but (all too briefly) electable.  

When teaching texts from Palestine and Israel, the self-reflexive habits of literature break open the silos into which our other media constrain us. The humanist record reflects the inextricable layering of personal experience, expression, and representation – in ways that exceed the neatness of unassailable ideological purification.