Israel and the Wall

...Israelis have often worried about losing their children...

...Now, peace, that would be something...

...I figured I was there to provide, or at least suggest, that world perspective...

...I felt that, perhaps unconsciously, he was telling me some very old primal Jewish joke...

...Of the ability they have developed to enter into the fabric of others' lives...

...True, there's an ideology of clear identity, a recurrent demand for clear identity...

...I think that's dangerous...

...But isolation is a disaster for peaceniks, because there is no way peace can happen without the world's help...

...I thought I would lead with Baudelaire, one of the heroes of my book, and see where he led me...

...It may be that Yehoshua the human being, living as all Israelis do in an endlessly desperate situation, has grown more pessimistic and demoralized than Yehoshua the novelist...

...When I point to their clothes and the way they present themselves, I am suggesting that this is another political action, an action they may not yet recognize but that has meaning and power...

...For the sake of a Jewish "clear identity," he was giving the wall an ontological kosher seal...

...He sounds a little like "The Little Black Boy" in the poem by William Blake: "And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair/And be like him, and he will then love me...

...In 1920, while Kafka was writing for Martin Buber's magazine Der Jude, he composed a series of existential parables...

...It's hard to know how serious Yehoshua is in his demands for hardening...

...In the classic Zionist vein, this skirts the edge of blaming the victims...

...I asked what he thought of Sharon's Wall...

...Alas, he couldn't live long enough to go...

...In the way they configure their bodies and themselves, they are voting against the wall...

...It's also a disaster for intellectuals, whose only reason for being in the world is to talk with everybody, everywhere, without borders or boundaries...

...I think he is saying that their identities are clear, but ours are not, and that's why they hate us, but their hate might abate if we could only be more like them...

...they are wearing and embodying the same modern mass culture, full of negative capabilities, uncertain potentialities, dynamic contradictions...

...Both the creator and the reader of modern poetry know how to "be both himself and another," to "adopt every profession, every joy and every misery as his own...

...State and church propaganda offices round the world transmit images of "clear identity"— the all-male "Arab street," the all-male, black-hat mob, both dynamite visuals for our mass media...

...To live without borders...

...they've NOTEBOOK positively thrived on them...

...It's like El-Al Airlines: Everyone knows everyone has been electronically scanned and swept...

...These sermons are often hypocritical, but sometimes legitimate—and sometimes, as often happens in politics, both hypocritical and legitimate...

...In verse 12 it is Jerusalem, the first world city, whose breasts "all you who love her" will be welcome to suck...

...Yehoshua seemed skeptical about the Wall as security policy, but drawn to it as a foundation for a hard identity politics...

...lectual boycott of Israel that has been going on since the second Intifada began...

...In the next few seconds, Z's whole life passed before her...

...MARSHALL BERMAN is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at CCNY/CUNY...

...Hearing Israelis laugh, you can feel the country's human strength...

...But what deranges the anti-Semite is the way we are...

...Yehoshua.* As it turned out, he gave me something to talk about...

...The demand that Jews should cease to be the people they are, a people with "negative capability," and strive to become some entirely other people, a people with "clear identity," has roots in classical Zionism...

...Where "all that is solid melts into air," Jews find themselves at home...

...Instead of the tortured writer he was, he told his writer friends, he would be a happy waiter in a café in Tel Aviv...

...No security system is foolproof, but this one is pretty good, and public spaces look alive...

...When people in the 2000s are free to look the way they want, the great majority wear pretty much the same outfits all over the world: cheap and easily replaceable, Americanesque, lots of sneakers, T-shirts, and tank tops, denim and down...

...They wove a fabric of identity that could experiment and play with and change its shape, yet retain and even increase its inner strength...

...I hope they're wrong...

...And to maintain some sort of elusive existence...

...wHEN I'M ASKED to talk far from home, it usually means that somebody has read my book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, a meditation on what it means to be modern...

...The one says Either/Or...

...In the twentieth century, a Jewish mass-production garment industry opened it up DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 8 5 NOTEBOOK to the world...

...but he couldn't stop reflecting or writing as long as he lived...

...His worry seems to be that our openness and fluidity freak out the goyim...

...But the demand is never satisfied, because the people themselves repeatedly choose impurity, elusiveness, fluidity...

...Unlike Tolstoy, he was always a liberal: he didn't want to deprive everybody, just himself...

...Then I found S, a shopkeeper whose big belly, long hair, and friendly smile made him look like a soulmate from Broadway...

...There were plenty of tourist tchachke shops around, but they displayed icons and ephemera of American pop culture, mostly made in China...

...If we try to break off the process of dialogue, we convict ourselves as nothing but a bunch of learned hacks...

...If peace comes, the whole world will want icons from Israel...

...They now "know what a bomb sounds like," not only because bombs are blowing them up, but because in the Israeli Defense Forces, the world's most democratic army (where nearly everybody serves), they have learned how to blow other people up...

...When I got back to New York, I told it to my kids' Hebrew teacher, Jerry Raik, and he said that indeed, the joke went a long way back, to the Book of Exodus (14:12), where the Jews ask Moses, "Are there no graves in Egypt...

...I wanted to get them stuff that was both nice and distinctively Israeli...

...Today's Israelis are surely more "normal...

...In fact, this is one of the great archetypal forms of Jewish identity...

...but they are erecting walls just like it in their own neighborhoods, and turning world culture into what American real-estate agents call a "gated community...

...in a Jewish state with "a fixed address," citizens would feel "found" and they would be happy...

...I told him what I always tell people: "It's a classic look, never goes out of style...

...Then the girl said, "I'm wearing too many clothes...

...Kafka was alive to the Wall's allure, but also to its human costs...

...Is there more reason to worry now...

...They have been poster children for what John Keats called "negative capability," the power to live with their inner contradictions...

...I couldn't get physically close to it, but it loomed, and Jerusalem is full of spectacular views...

...After half a century of state power, they are still victims, only now they have become sophisticated perpetrators as well...

...But here he was speaking as if he had just discovered modern culture, and recoiled in horror, "shocked, shocked," like the police chief in Casablanca...

...Without a clear identity...

...Classical Zionism of the Herzl period disparaged Jewish humor as a symptom of diaspora slavery...

...If young Israelis can learn to read themselves, they will see they have chosen a form of self-identity that is meaningful only if it is shared...

...if it turned out to hurt more than it helped—for example, if it raised Palestinian rage to a frenzy that made peace even more remote—it would have to go...

...Mightn't this mean that they yearn to be more like us, and that we are not alone—or at least, a lot less alone than we used to be...

...You could even say it's a tradition...

...the unclarity of our identity led individuals and collectivities who were possessed with identity chaos to make us the target of terrifying projections...

...The cafés of Tel Aviv have always been full of writers...

...the people have created another tradition...

...It is the Middle East's newest "fact on the ground...

...They adapt to everywhere they go...

...or as if he had received a personal invitation to epouser la foule, and rushed into the chapel to shout that this wedding must not take place—or if it does, LEAVE THE JEWS OUT OF IT...

...He rubbed my PEACE NOW button, which I've worn since about 1987...

...84 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 source, but really what did I know...

...I worry about all the people today, both here and there, who long for walls but don't get the joke...

...If you read our Bible, you can see there isn't much clear identity there...

...People asked, what did I think about the wall...

...I told him they did very well where I teach...

...Modern Jews, it was said, "had no address" and felt "lost" and miserable...

...As the world has grown more modern, Jewish fluidity has turned out to have impressive evolutionary value...

...Yehoshua even says it himself: he notices "the ability the Jews have developed to enter into the fabric of other's lives . . . to be both here and there...

...Americans have never taken it seriously, but it seems to have had more resonance in Europe, where Israelis have been expelled from editorial boards of serious magazines, banned from attending or speaking at conferences (including conferences on the Middle East), blacklisted from contributing to periodicals or symposia, eliminated as peers from every activity whose ongoing life depends on "peer review...

...Life in the crowd is at once dirty and holy: "universal communion," but also "an orgy," a "sacred prostitution of the soul that gives itself totally . . . to the unexpected and the unknown...

...Everywhere it has been a problem, but also "a bargain...

...He replied, "Why should I go to Jerusalem...

...In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, every café is required to have a security guard with a scanner...

...I can get bombed on the Dizengoff, right in my own neighborhood...

...On my last morning in Israel, I found myself rushing in and out of shops near the beach in Tel Aviv (and near my hotel), trying frantically to buy some nice tchachkes, souvenirs for my wife and kids, not only to make them happy, but to atone for the guilt I felt for not being able to bring them with me...

...This poem seemed like a good way into the contradictions of modern city life, contradictions as thrilling and troubling for us as they were for Baudelaire...

...I found a couple of things I could buy, and we schmoozed for awhile...

...I have a fear of the partial identity of the Jews...

...I have called on Yehoshua to "read himself...

...But in 13, Jerusalem turns out to be a metaphor for God: "As a mother comforts, I will comfort you...

...And his books, clearly in the mainstream of world modernism, have dramatized this talent for forty years: they are filled with Israeli and other Jewish men and women who are full of life, who keep reaching out for endlessly new forms of partial, unclear, elusive existence, "both here and there," and who aren't monsters, and who sometimes manage to be happy...

...but in both biblical and in modern times there has been a strong Jewish counter-tradition that says, Yes we can...

...I focused on his op-ed-length 1860 prose poem "Crowds...

...In the first few shops, when I said "Israeli," people looked blank and said "What...

...So people talk, and laugh through tears...

...When anti-Semites don't kill them, Jews know how to be fully alive...

...A few days later, A, an architect in Tel Aviv, mentioned Jerusalem, and I asked him if he got up there much...

...And if he had gone...

...I would be shocked, shocked, if I weren't long accustomed to seeing the same pattern in America...

...Maybe, to overcome his inner need for a wall, he needs to learn to read himself...

...After a little while, I could see what this was really about: it was about the Wall...

...I disliked the idea and distrusted its '"The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," actually a conversation between Yehoshua and critic Ari Shavit, Haaretz Magazine, March 19, 2004...

...the other says Both/And...

...On my first day, I sat in a Jerusalem café with Z, a comparative literature student, who told me that just a couple of weeks before, in this same café, a girl had walked in who reminded her of herself, except that she was very bundled up, in a down jacket, on an unseasonably hot day...

...A. Understanding that there is no Israeli left today...

...Why should Jews have evolved this way...

...My point is that they share the same romance of improvisation and do-it-yourself-construction...

...Franz Kafka became a kind of Socialist Zionist in his last years...

...I don't know, but they have...

...It isn't that the Jewish people have failed to observe "the tradition...

...Notice, since 1989, how many of the goyim have been tearing their old walls down...

...He talks about Hitler's "identity derangement" as the key to his anti-Semitism...

...I don't know if Yehoshua believes this, or if he cares...

...To narrow your circle more and more, and to make sure you have not hidden yourself somewhere outside it...

...It has made them vulnerable to many goyim who are afraid of people different from themselves...

...The girl was breathing heavily, and Z asked her if there was anything wrong...

...She stood up and said, quite loudly, "Yes, something's wrong...

...Most of the guards are freshly discharged soldiers...

...they want "to be both here and there...

...He dreamed of "making aliyah," a new life in Zion, and he might have become one of the Kibbutzniks of what we now call "the third aliyah" if tuberculosis hadn't killed him first...

...They don't kvetch about it, because men who grow up in the IDF learn not to cry...

...What was eating him...

...86 n DISSENT / Summer 2004...

...Yehoshua has been writing powerful modern fiction addressed to modern audiences for over thirty years...

...But I wasn't sure what I should say...

...There are thousands of vibrant cafés where you can sit with Israeli leftists, who will ask you riddles: Q. You know the main requirement for being on the Israeli left today...

...Pragmatically, right now, it might help...

...Should there be a chance of peace, it could be torn down fast—the IDF is very good at fast demolition...

...The scholars who boycott Israel say they deplore Sharon's Wall...

...I know what a bomb sounds like...

...as if Israel were another country...

...Why did you bring us here to die in the wilderness...

...They don't want kosher laws to go away, but they don't want their whole lives to be kosher...

...At least since Tolstoy's late pamphlet What Is Art?, beloved by many early Zionists, the desire to end culture has had a fascinating relationship to the Zionist project...

...HAS THIS "clear identity" ever existed, except in nostalgic dreams...

...Maybe Israel should try to enjoy this convergence and exploit its human possibilities instead of hardening when the world may be softening...

...One parable says this: "Two tasks on the threshold of life...

...But there may be limits...

...and why the prophets imagine a city where the whole world crowds in, a city that never sleeps, where the gates are open all through the night so the wealth of nations can come in, and where all the children of Israel can suck the breasts of God...

...Jews, locked for so long behind ghetto walls, were the first to imagine the self without walls, to cut and press the patterns of modern cosmopolitan identity...

...besides, although Sharon was embarrassed to admit it, it was part of a project of giving territory back...

...Look at the people in virtually any room or on any street around you...

...BUT I DON'T THINK very many of today's real people fit into those pictures...

...This is why one of our Bible's stars is Solomon in all his glory, with all his foreign wives, each with her own gods and their temple in Jerusalem...

...There is a feeling that nobody in the world really cares if they live or die...

...Then I'll get rich...

...In March 2004 I was in Tel Aviv to speak at a conference on "Concepts of the Israeli City in World Perspective...

...It promised to liberate Jews from their ancestral ironies and to embed them in a "normal" life that would be direct, straightforward, and humorless—or else would allow only "normal" laughter...

...One deep source of bitterness is the intelNOTEBOOK Photo by Jamal Juma...

...he said, "I sell bikinis to make people forget...

...You know," he said, quoting a song he knew I'd know, "We teach our children well...

...He looked thoughtful...

...Now why would anyone want souvenirs to remember us...

...I was feeling increasingly anxious because I couldn't find anything with Hebrew graphics or symbols for my kids...

...He thought it would give people's kids more reasons to get out and less reason to stay...

...To be both here and there, neither here nor there...

...For God's breasts, Isaiah 66:12 - 13...

...In Israel in the 2000s, there is much survey data suggesting that people under thirty support Sharon and his politics of walls far more than their parents do...

...Some people I respected, who had spent their adult lives fighting Sharon, said that in a finger-inthedyke kind of way, it might impede certain kinds of terrorist attacks...

...This means to "marry the crowd," or alternately, in slang, to "fuck the crowd," in the sense of merge or fuse yourself with it...

...It isn't just that, over thousands of years, Jews have lived with fluid and elusive and contradictory identities...

...But he said he wasn't holding his breath, and I shouldn't hold mine...

...I did not think it had undone so many...

...Does the author of A Late Divorce, Open Heart, and The Liberated Bride, really want to wall off world culture...

...In Kafka's Zionist dreams, he could throw off his grueling vocation as a writer and start going to bed when other people did...

...He said he wanted to combat what he calls "identity chaos" and "identity derangement" in the name of "clear identity...

...They are betraying the honor of intellectuals, an honor that consists, first of all, in a demand for dialogue without end...

...She shed layer after layer of clothes, then sat down to read the paper and eat a normal meal—oblivious to everyone else in the café, who spent the next hour unable to stop laughing...

...But when I heard that a man I'd met had been not only cut out of a world public health symposium that he had helped to create, but cut out by people he thought were his lifelong friends—"nothing personal," they said, "there's just no room"—I saw where the dark cloud above his head was blowing from...

...The Mosaic tradition says, No, you can't have both...

...Ironically, many modern writers have been nihilistic toward modern culture...

...A century later, the 82 n DISSENT / Summer 2004 promise to end Jewish jokes sounds like one of the biggest Jewish jokes, staggering in its chutzpah...

...He said it would probably work in the short run, "just like the Berlin Wall," but like that wall, it would "rot the country from within...

...The way to enjoy the greatest delights in our world, he says, is to "epouser la DISSENT / Summer 2004 n 83 NOTEBOOK foule...

...This sense of isolation often creates an angry recoil: The hell with them...

...The night before my talk, I read a long interview in Haaretz with a writer I've admired for years, the brilliant, eminent, widely translated and traveled Israeli novelist A.B...

...Sharonians, of course, are glad to have reasons to spit in the world's face...

...Hmmm, looks worn out...

...Many Israelis think so...

...Jewish inner conflict goes back at least to the days of the Canaanite peasants who worshipped Yahweh, yet kept figurines of the Goddess in their houses...

...maybe it even drops over the edge: * See Isaiah 60 for the city that never sleeps...

...He smiled sadly: that old Jewish smile...

...Today' means in the age of Sharon and Sharon's bombs and Sharon's Wall...

...Them" means the Palestinians and other Arabs who surround Israel, but it also means the Europeans and Americans who urge Israel to obey international law and Recognize The Other...