Next Year in Jerusalem

Obsessions always interest me having hosted several of them with various results but I doubt that any of mine have shared the intensity with which Jews at the conclusion of Passover all over the world shout, “Next year in Jerusalem!” the dynamite that powers the unending war to erase Palestine.

I’m educating myself by reading Daniel Gordis’ Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn—not exactly concise at 598 pages with notes. The author hardly begins to question the rightness of the Zionists’ supernatural quest. As we as readers and listeners grow numb to the mounting numbers in Palestine—thirty-three thousand killed, seventeen thousand of them children-I’m reminded of the limitations of our human imaginations.

In Drew Gilpin Faust’s brilliant and haunting This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War, she teaches us that the unexpected numbers of the dead, many unknown and unburied—two hundred fifty thousand Confederate soldiers, three hundred plus Union men—prepared us for the carnage of future wars. At the same time, only a poetic imagination such as Walt Whitman possessed can see in these unimaginable numbers the individual: “The dead, the dead, the dead, OUR dead—or North or South, ours all (all, all, all finally dear to me).”

And again, as so often, in these accounts of war our voices as women are missing. In Faust’s account, the women helpless at home are desperately seeking news of fathers, husbands, brothers and sons they have not heard from in months. They are not actors in the tragedy except for a few, like Clara Barton, the heroic nurse on the battlefields and military hospitals. Gordis’ account is run by the voices of several well-known Zionist leaders; the only woman I found other than silent and often nameless wives and daughters was an Israeli spy named Sarah, “viciously tortured” and then released to return home and replace her bloody clothes, which seems unlikely. She used the opportunity to shoot herself in the mouth, lingering several days before dying a martyr. It seems there will always be room in the pantheon for women martyrs.

I am disturbed by many other hints—and they are only hints—in Gordis’ apparently accepted account of the current tragedy. One motive some Zionists seem and seemed to take as a worthy motive for killing springs from shame over a perception of masculine weakness; another worthy cause for genocide is that the land the Palestinians inhabit is worthless (I’m reminded of American invaders’ account of Native American lands they were stealing) and yet another is that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and in future hopes of far greater impact than the desires and prejudices of 700,00 Arabs.”

As always, our conclusions are colored by inevitably racist notions about masculinity, Muslims, tradition, and the role of women in all circumstances.

In Writing The Civil War Israel Drew Gilpin Faust