by David Palumbo-Liu*
Knowing how public I’ve been in support of the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against the state of Israel, a Jewish colleague came up to me on campus one day to talk. “I know why I’m obsessed with Jews,” he said, “But why are you?” I could hear both puzzlement and pain in his voice.
It was clear at that moment that there were two kinds of “obsession”
at work in his imagination. For him, a
Jew should properly - perhaps obsessively - care about their fellow Jews. But my friend couldn’t help but wonder why I,
as a non-Jew, would also “obsess so much” about his people, especially from a
critical perspective.
My reply was pretty automatic: “I’m not obsessed with Jews,”
I said, “I’m concerned about the Palestinians.”
I know and like this person a lot. In essence I don’t think
his political position is much different to mine, except in terms of tactics. I
think he trusts me too. But his
statement revealed an important and discouraging assumption: one is naturally drawn to care about one’s own
people, and it is unexpected - even odd - that someone from outside one’s group
should care as much.
Taken in its most negative form, this attitude would
conceive of an outsider’s interest as intrusive if it is not entirely positive.
And that’s one of the main problems one faces when speaking of Israel and
Palestine: not only does the line that’s drawn between groups seem hard and
fast in terms of communication and ideology, but empathy and caring also seem
to be contained within those lines as well.
Under such conditions, what are the possibilities that the
conflict could ever be transformed?
According to the philosopher Richard Rorty, the transformation
of human thought and feeling is not only possible, but natural: “We have come
to see that the only lesson of either history or anthropology is our
extraordinary malleability.” All people can change, Rorty is saying, especially
when they open themselves up to new stories about others: stories that lead
them to “tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people - people whose appearance
or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our
sense of the limits of permissible human variation.”
This is not a new idea.
Literature has long been considered the best vehicle for moral
instruction exactly because it can take people out of their narrow sense of
self and their self-centered habits of the mind. But what kind of stories would be most
effective in this way?
In one of the worst current violations of human rights and
international law - Israel’s bombing and land invasion of Gaza - the news is
full of stories in the form of photographs, reports, and news clips of the
tragedy. But it isn’t enough just to put
them out there for the world to see.
Although there are clear signs of a shift in attitudes toward the
conflict, we need to go further than simply registering immediate impressions
of who is good and who is not.
I believe that one of the main reasons why many people
remain unchanged in their sympathies is that they are still too deeply rooted
in the belief that certain people are worthy of their care, while others that
fall outside their group are not only not
worthy of the same care, but they are not even worthy of full recognition as
human beings like themselves. As a result, the stories of people most like
oneself are listened to with more openness and empathy than others. But in both cases, these stories are caricatures,
simplifications. The actual, complex, stories of real people are ignored.
In the case of the Palestinians and Israelis, the dominant
narratives describe the other entirely as ‘terrorists,’ or as the only
aggressors in the conflict who deserve the rocket fire that’s raining down on
them. To simply flip sides and say that
now it is Israel or Hamas that is in the wrong, or in the right, doesn’t help much
in the long run. We have to see a larger
picture. We have to look more clearly at the actual political contexts of what
is happening, and with that knowledge transform the ways in which we see people
as blind agents whose identities are immutable. We need to see the real workings of history,
culture, and politics in shaping human action. In the process, all those
involved can be humanized.
While to be ethically consistent one must urge that both
sides accept this imperative to resist stereotyping and its attendant racism,
there is no question that until very recently, one side of the conflict has had
its story largely obscured or erased from the historical record, and that is
the story of the Palestinians. Ironically,
it is precisely because of the Israeli invasion of Gaza that more and more
people around the world are coming to know that history, and world opinion is shifting as a consequence. That is not only a political transformation,
it is also a humanistic one.
The hope is that humanizing Palestine will allow others to
see Palestinians as full human beings, and that, in turn, will transform the
ways in which they are both perceived and treated. But again, such efforts at
transformation must fight against entrenched habits of the heart and mind that
confine people’s empathy to those who are most like themselves.
I admit that there’s a natural propensity to care for those
with whom we have the most intimate relationships. But it’s all too easy to let that inclination
confine our sense of responsibility within narrow limits. If we linger in that narrow circle, how is it
that we would ever change? And if others
remain locked in their own limited loyalties and commitments, how can they ever
change themselves?
Change - especially in times of crisis - requires that we
re-examine not only the stories we hear, but also why we care about them, and
crucially, how we act as a result. This
is not an abstract exercise. It’s critical in determining how we treat
others. Change requires openness, but it
also means unlearning our habits of caring.
We must leave ourselves open to transformation even if that means going
against our political biases. Without
the capacity to respond to the historical moment, we not only abrogate our
freedom to think and to act, we also make democracy into a hollow concept, an
empty routine.
It’s terrible to think that only a massive human catastrophe
and moral failing like Gaza could break through the habits of the mind and
heart. But the ways in which the world has
regarded the Palestinians - or rather has disdained and disregarded them – are
finally, slowly, changing.
During the last mass bombing of Gaza in 2012, I argued the need for another narrative about the founding of the state of
Israel. We have heard and deferred to the story of the Holocaust for so long
that that the tragic story of the Jewish people has been allowed to blunt
criticism of the means by which the Zionist state of Israel was created, and has
been expanded illegally through the persistent growth of settlements in the
Occupied Territories.
Today however, as the number of Palestinians killed in “Operation
Protective Edge” rises above 1700, the vast majority of them innocent civilians (and mostly
children), many people are responding to their plight in a different way. How was
this allowed to happen, they are asking, and what roles have the United States
and other powers played in bringing the catastrophe to pass?
A recent Gallup poll, for example, shows a slow but distinct generational change, at
least in the USA, where more and more Americans, mostly younger, are willing to
hear that other story. This is a point I
make in a recent article in Salon: “there is now a widening band
of light in between the heretofore seamless merger of the Holocaust and
Founding narratives, resulting in a weakening of the former in its capacity to
act as an alibi for the latter. This is
especially important with regard to the US, which has been the world’s most
generous supporter of Israel. Growing up
well past the postwar era, increasing numbers of young people in the US find
the Holocaust narrative to be less absolutely and unquestionably adequate as a
rationale for supporting the horrible
killings in Gaza. And as they learn
more, their support will wane further.”
This is significant because only greater knowledge of our
own responsibility for the catastrophe is likely to make us act in a different
way - to end the killing and compel others to act with us. In this shift, the first thing to set aside
is the habit of caring only for those who look, speak, act and think like
us. Our “obsession” with those who are similar
needs to be converted into a deep concern for those who are different, and who
are easily ignored.
To do this means listening to their stories, and respecting
them as rightful narrators of their own historical situation. While there are no guarantees, if we can
expand our circle of care we can begin a process of transformation that will
help us see a way out of the comfortable but narrow worlds in which we live.
_________________
* David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon
Professor at Stanford. His most recent book is The Deliverance of
Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age. His blogs for Truthout,
Salon, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, Boston Review, and The Los Angeles
Review of Books can be found at palumbo-liu.com. Follow him on Twitter @palumboliu.
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