Israel is Godzilla
To a Jewish American Friend While Israel Bombs Beirut
Hi Judith,
Hope Amy is doing better at camp. Thanks for the clarinet-buying tips; we found a used one for Banah at Sigler Music, as you suggested. I'm glad we can talk to each other, even though we each have things to say that are difficult for the other to hear. You're a creative, hilarious, vibrant woman-hey, we marvelous women have a lot in common!-and I enjoy your company-and yet I confess that in the past I have hesitated to 'grow' our friendship, because I knew that if we were to grow it further, you and I would have to start talking about Israel and Palestine, about our differences as well as the common ground. So far, in our relationship up to a few weeks ago I mean, we've only edged carefully around these issues.
So here goes. Right now, I sit waiting to hear if my graduate student Nadine has escaped Beirut from under massive Israeli terrorism, writing letters to my senator pleading for her evacuation (she is not a U.S. citizen, so they refuse). I'm anxious for word from other friends also caught under the Israeli aggression. My well-meaning Christian neighbor shakes her heads and says, "It's a shame people can't get along over there." I am stunned that she does not seem to realize America's role as Israel's arms supplier and giant one-sided supporter. I am dismayed at the lack of recognition that Israel has the power to do things to the Palestinians that the Palestinians can no where near do back to it, because Palestinians live under Israeli domination and are very nearly helpless under it, and that therefore it is completely inadequate to lament "both sides" even-handedly. I open newspapers to find them referring to the Israeli terror campaign on Lebanese civilians in vague language that does not assign responsibility to Israel for the killing done by Israel, that refers to the Israeli attack on Lebanon as a "conflict erupting," as if it wasn't a choice of Israel to launch massive firepower over the heads of an entire population on the whiff of a pretext.
From where I sit, Judith: Israel is Godzilla.
Israel is Godzilla on a rampage. Israel has been Godzilla from Day One, has never been "tiny Israel surrounded by powerful enemies," that whole spiel. You know how wrong that myth is, right? I don't have to stop here to dispel it, to tell you how pathetically outgunned were the Arab irregulars who tried to stem the first rampage of Godzilla in the terrible year of 1948.
From where I sit: Israel has been Godzilla backed by super-Godzilla as of eleven seconds after coming into existence. With a malignant, manifest destiny imperialism complex born of the European roots of its brand of Zionism, a totally immoral manifestation of Zionism that has nothing, despite our mutual friend Jacob trying to convince me otherwise, to do with spirituality, with Zionism as a spiritual concept (with which I think I can sympathize, divorced from its modern Israeli context). You've mentioned that you disagree with Jacob's advocacy of Zionism, and have described yourself as anti-Zionist-but you may not agree with my views on what that means; we haven't explored there.
Toward exploring, I would like to ask again if you acknowledge that Israel commits atrocities against Arabs. Commits them in trucetime, in wartime. Daily, unapologetically, not incidentally, not mistakenly; deliberately, as part of national policy.
I have struggled over the years to come to a place where I recognize and publicly abhor the logic of Arab rationalizations for the killing and suicide-bombing of Israeli civilians. The rationale includes statements that "no Israeli is really a civilian, because they all must serve in the army" (something which the early Zionists themselves unfortunately affirmed, with their dangerous and provocative slogan "The Whole Nation, a Front! The Whole People, an Army!") and "they leave us no other means, we are a people stripped of an army, an infrastructure, rights to speak, to travel, to assemble, to change things politically, to defend our homes against bulldozing; how else do you expect us to resist but by disrupting their daily life?" This is not acceptable. Being unbearably oppressed does not justify targeting civilians. Being oppressed does not justify immorality. I and my husband are critics of Arab dictatorships, as you know. I speak out against Muslim intolerance of Jews and Christians when it occurs. I am no zealot for Arab injustice or justifier of Arab atrocities. Such a recognition-when you hear the pain of the other side and are willing to listen to the names and stories of the innocents your side has killed-is spiritually transformative.
I am still waiting to hear a parallel acknowledgement on your side abhoring Israeli atrocities and seeking to learn the stories of the Palestinians it destroys, to look in their eyes and recognize their faces. Even though you are not a zealot and I know you advocate greater Israeli tolerance and fairness toward Arabs, and get grief for that from some of your Israeli relatives, what I heard from you the other night are rationalizations similar to the ones I am familiar with on the Arab side. The Zionist version of justifying atrocities includes such things as: "The guerrillas hide among civilians so what can we do," "Israel has turned the other cheek so many times, and is so humane that it even warns the civilians by leaflets that it is about to bomb them" (as if everyone can leave an area-think of who got left behind in Katrina! and as if the residents have any reason to trust information dropped on them by the Israeli army), and "Armies kill people, that's what they do, it's sad but inevitable, it's collateral damage." Judith, can you see that these rationalizations are immoral? Can you not see that Israel is behaving like Godzilla?
Does Godzilla have a right to exist? Yes, because it's life, and life does have a right to exist (and do not take this lightly; please understand how many Arab arguments I have crossed to get to a place of recognizing Israel's right to exist when Israel has not recognized the Palestinians' right to exist). But as Godzilla? as Godzilla on a rampage? How do you even answer that question when Godzilla is tearing through your world? This is why I get it when the Iranian prez says Israel must go. I know this statement upset you, but I have to tell you, it's very, very understandable, from where I sit. I do not agree with the destruction that implies (although Israel could conceivably be dismantled peacefully, like the Soviet Union), but I understand the frustration the statement comes from. And it is ludicrous to think this sentiment is anti-Semitism.
You cannot, when you have been since Day One crashing through the land smashing homes and civilians, you cannot claim anti-Semitism is the reason for the screams of hatred you hear from those you are destroying. Of course they want to wipe you out: You're Godzilla! Your ten-ton foot is descending on them again and again! Godzilla does not get to claim that the screaming people under Godzilla's ten-ton clawed foot are prejudiced against the lizard race.
You cannot go into a place with guns blazing, killing and massacring, turning populations into refugees for life, and then claim to be the aggrieved innocent. To quote James Baldwin: "It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent."
And no one will stop it, this rampaging monster. No one who can, will, and no one who has stood up to it has the power to stop it. My God, will no one put a stop to Israel's transgression in the land? Or, as the children of Israel cried out under Pharoah (according to the Quran), whence cometh the succor of the Lord?
What if Israel stopped itself? If Israel stopped being Godzilla and began making reparations, there are Arabs who would spearhead Arab change of attitude toward it, I firmly believe. Because we are already here. I, and many other Arabs, can conceive of an Arab world one day living in peace with a peaceful Jewish people in the land (and given the intransigence of Israel, please appreciate the immense imaginative leap of faith it requires even to be able to envision this, and the cost in ridicule to those of us who promote it). I think of it with joy: of the visiting that will be possible, and of neighboring, and the playing music together, and making a new Levantine culture. (And, contrary to what many seem to think, there is no inherent Muslim anti-Semitism. It's not in the religion, no matter how some Muslims and some anti-Islam bigots-try to twist it to sound as if it is. It's not in the Arab culture, pre-Godzilla. It is not a thousands-of-years-old conflict. It is not an inevitable conflict that must continue forever due to the "nature" of "those people" or their religious beliefs. It is a conflict that began sixty years ago, and I can conceive of it ending in the next sixty years). Pre-1948, my Syrian Arab grandmother speaks glowingly of having a Jewish high school teacher, for example, whom she and her Muslim and Christian Arab friends loved and respected and visited when sick. And that's not to say everything was perfect, that there weren't injustices. But the possibility of a loving relationship is there.
Why should anyone listen to the advocates of dialogue and peaceful coexistence, given Israel's continued Godzilla rampaging? What does it mean to "normalize" relations with an attacking Godzilla? It would take time, and a lot more humility on Israel's part than it has ever been willing to have one-hundredth part of. It would take a lot of meaningful healing steps, on both parts but with more, many more of them having to come from Israel than coming from Palestinians, and other Arabs it has done unbelievable damage to, and after the sovereignty needs of the Palestinians have been met, and their return to the land has been secured. Israel has the power = Israel bears the brunt of the responsibility for making things right. It would take a transformation into another Israel, and would it even be Israel anymore? is a valid question. Can Israel stop being Godzilla?
Today Israel demands that America put a rush on a shipment of more bombs for it to unleash, and the U.S. rushes to comply-the New York Times reports. In response to Israel's disproportionately massive assault, we are sending them more American bombs to hurl on Nadine's crushed city. And my innocent neighbor, who is truly a good neighbor to me and whom I truly love, says, "If only people there would learn to get along." I don't know a gentle way to tell her how despairing her innocence, her very special and very American (and very dangerous) sort of innocence, makes me feel.
My only hope is that I know there are people of conscience in Israel, and increasingly in America. (In the 1980s you could not say things like this in the U.S. Mention the PLO as the legitimate government of the Palestinian people and you were pariah. Just like today, accepting Hamas as a duly elected government makes you suspect, and saying the truth about Hezbollah, that it is a legitimate, mature part of Lebanon's democratic pluralism, makes you suspect of violating all sorts of new laws restricting our speech. Our speech which calls it "kidnapping" when Hezbollah violates borders by taking into custody Israeli soldiers of an illegal occupation (the alleged "provocation" for the current Israeli attack), but calls it "detaining" when Israel violates borders by taking into custody Palestinian civilians "suspected" of being members of a duly elected Hamas party (which it did several days before the Hezboallah "kidnapping" in violation of the same exact international laws, but that was not considered "provocation").
There are voices of Israeli conscience, thank God. I know it's not a monolith country (and I speak out against those in my communities who would paint all Israelis with the same brush). It's just that--after all the debating and disagreeing on the inside-Israel nevertheless continues to act like a monster, from where I sit. And America, for all its democratic disagreeing on the inside, still backs it unconditionally. One day maybe, Israel will listen to its conscience. One day maybe America will listen to its conscience. I don't expect it in my lifetime, but hey. Who knows. Right now, I'm just praying for the safety of those on whom Godzilla's terrible weight crashes down by day and by night.
Anyway. I can come tonight (if you still want me to, after this rant!) if I could bring my young babysitter, Serena, as well as the tyke himself, because the babysitter's only twelve, and I promised her mother I wasn't going to leave her alone with Kinan (Keeno) while she babysits him. Her being with us might allow us to actually have a moment of conversation between Keeno's pee runs. :)
Salam, shalom (how badly we need it!),
Mohja
