A Brief Reply to Marshall Berman: Responds
Berman, Marshall
MY ARTICLE in the Summer 2004 Dissent was called "Israel: No Souvenirs." But I was wrong: early one Saturday morning, early in the fall, I got a phone call from the great Israeli novelist A.B....
...They often said their parents had implored them to send pictures of their children but, please, not to come back...
...Luckily for us, Tolstoy couldn't stop himself from writing, even after he had convinced himself literature was a form of degeneracy...
...kids learn to read and write and get jobs beyond day labor...
...It is a condition that Yehoshua the master novelist is profoundly at home with...
...104 n DISSENT / Winter 2005...
...Nothing can happen until post-Arafat Palestinians step up: until parents appear like the "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo" in 1980s Buenos Aires, willing to say in public that they don't want their children blown up...
...It is fascinating that many Arabs have been able to develop an image of Israel far more accurate than the image shown in most European newspapers...
...It has to be there before different people, or peoples, can live together in peace...
...It shows that people whose countries are Israel's enDISSENT / Winter 2005 n 1 0 3 ARGUMENTS emies have the capacity to see through their countries' propaganda and learn what's real...
...a great variety of people get to lead pretty good lives...
...Yehoshua describes the Israeli left's longtime hope as "open borders and free flow in both directions...
...I've heard Arab students say stuff like that for thirty years...
...Many described themselves and their families as victims of horrible actions by the IDF...
...Most of my Arab students have been Palestinians, and they have come in waves, first as refugees from the 1967 war, then from the 1973 war, then from the early-1980s war in Lebanon...
...For more than thirty years, I have been teaching political theory and urbanism at the City University of New York...
...They were often embarrassed, and I was at first amazed: I asked, isn't Israel your sworn enemy...
...But as they learn and grow, it is bound to cloud up the xenophobic and anti-Semitic "clear identity" that they learned as kids...
...But Israelis and their friends need to step up, too...
...there's freedom to complain and argue, and every party has its own paper...
...People who have spent the last thirty years fighting for peace have got to keep imagining how peace can flow like a river, rather then imagining modes of identity politics that can dam the river up...
...he needs it, we need it, like a hole in the head...
...I encouraged him to tell it to Dissent, and I promised him some dialogue...
...I have taught many Israeli students, and plenty of Arab students as well...
...What a thrill, that "No Souvenirs" should get me such an impressive souvenir: for once a happy irony...
...They didn't deny it...
...oppressed Arabs can vote...
...It shows how real people in the modern world can "overcome," and think and live outside the boxes and beyond the borders they grew up with...
...there's plenty of poverty, but the poverty isn't crushing...
...As a longtime fan of Yehoshua's fiction, I have to hope he will fail to achieve that "clear identity" he seems to crave...
...It shows how Arabs can empathize with Israel and appreciate it for complex and good reasons, not absurd and fantastic ones (like that Israel secretly controls the world...
...I am telling this story for a number of reasons...
...Hasn't hope for openness and free flow driven his whole career...
...Over a thirty-year span, the overwhelming majority have voted for Israel...
...they laughed, ironically or uproariously, and then they said remarkably similar things...
...until the peace activists who recently inscribed Jerusalem for All on the Palestinian side of Sharon's Wall, flanked by a Cross and a Crescent, have the guts to place the Star of David on the Wall along with them, as part of "all...
...It demonstrates Israel's tremendous success as a nation—something that stressed-out Israelis and their friends easily forget...
...When I was able to speak to Arab students privately, I would ask them this question: Within the Middle East, which country would you most like to be a citizen of...
...The condition I call clouded identity is a tremendous human achievement...
...This sounds right to me, but why is he so scornful...
...we can go out with whoever we like, if they like us (this meant a lot...
...Look, they said, Israel isn't a theocracy where heretics get killed...
...So why, now, is he not only wishing "clear identity" on the Jews, but even prescribing it as a moral duty...
...Students from Argentina in the 1970s, from Croatia in the 1990s, from Nigeria and Bangladesh, told the same story...
...God gave us big brains so we could tell tomorrow's possibilities from today's, and so we could recognize all the Arabs out there who have the capacity to live in peace someday...
...I think these hopes can be realized, even if, "owing to repeated traumatic incidents," they can't be realized yet...
...if you get arrested, you can get a lawyer, and he can get you out of jail...
...It has been one of the great chimeras of the twentieth century...
...conflict is endless, but the losers don't get shot on the street or disappear at night...
...Some were Egyptian citizens, some Jordanian, some Lebanese...
...MARSHALL BERMAN is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at CCNY/CUNY...
...Yehoshua, who wanted to let me know how wrong I was about him, about Israel, about modernity and identity, and much more...
...It seems like a selfinflicted wound comparable to Tolstoy's in his late pamphlet, What Is Art...
Vol. 52 • January 2005 • No. 1
