Now that I'm looking into the "Nakba," or Palestinian catastrophe of '48, I've come to understand that division of water rights, land swaps, settlement of refugee issues etc. are all subsidiary to a spiritual process of recognition. Last night I went to a panel at Columbia University that furthered this belief. Two women activists, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, spoke of their work on the situation.
Esti Tsal was the Israeli. She is a small woman with a strong narrow face and short hair and hip glasses, about 45. She described herself as an artist. She lives in Tel Aviv and does abstract art, minimalist art. She was somewhat disorganized, throwing her bags down as she came in late, and was utterly familiar to me: a privileged Jewish artist, a little self-absorbed, with quiet, listening eyes.
Five years ago a friend associated with Machsom Watch urged her to come to the West Bank, to the place Israelis could go: Zone A, to see the checkpoints. "'You don't believe what is going on there," the friend said. "I couldn't even imagine what she's talking about." Tsal said, OK, the next time you go, I will go.
Then Tsal couldn't stay away. "What you see usually is soldiers--young--and citizens. Soldiers and citizens." She felt as if her entire vision of the world had corrected itself, become clear, and then she felt called to document what she was seeing. Because Israelis go on with their lives with no recognition of what is happening 25 minutes away from them, and the media are weary of talking about it. "Leave us alone," they say. "It doesn't sell. Nobody wants to hear about it."
Documentary was the last thing anyone would ever say about Tsal's art. But she began taking photographs. "I was really obsessed by documentary. I went four or five times a week." Tsal was very clear about what she was doing: documenting crimes. "The
main reason our soldiers are there, the settlements. Why are they
there? To defend Israelis, to defend the Jewish people, whoever they
are."
Her photographs of interactions between soldiers and citizens at checkpoints were on easels, around the room in Lerner Hall. I wish they were online. I will describe them a little later.
The Palestinian woman was a lot younger than Tsal, and beautiful--a lawyer, named Lubna Hammad. Born in Jordan, as a girl she had visited her family's land in the West Bank every year so as to keep her papers up to date--and observed an ongoing process of what she called "ethnic cleansing" by Jewish colonists. By the time she got to college she vowed to undo the injustice with all her power. This led her to Columbia Law School. "I was so full of more than vengeance." Hammad aimed to sue every soldier, every politician. She studied international law, human rights law, war crimes law.
Then she took a course in something called Transitional Justice that brought her to study the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa. Hammad developed a new idea of justice that involved recognition, accountability. She told a story to explain it. In South Africa, a military officer testified in great detail about how he had arrested, tortured and then killed a young activist. The victim's mother sat watching in the courtroom. When the testimony was complete, the mother was asked what she wanted. "I want the red shirt he was wearing when he was killed." Hammad interpreted: "For her that was absolute justice. Another mother said, 'I want him to be prosecuted.'"
With this new understanding of justice, Hammad began pressing for acknowledgment and recognition of the Nakba of '47-48. "This is the root cause." She doesn't care whether there is one state, two states, or a million states, so long as this recognition of the ethnic cleansing in '48 occurs. This knowledge exists chiefly in Israel, she said: in the archives, and in the memories of the perpetrators.
Palestinians had little idea what was happening, she said. When a recent tour of activists on the right of return came to Brooklyn (the night after I saw it in Manhattan), Palestinian-Americans were stunned to hear Eitan Bronstein, an Israeli, describe the nascent movement inside Israel to come to terms with their history. She said that these efforts were encouraging Arab survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre in '48 to come forward with reports that "many" women were raped there. "It wasn't hard for them to say that women and children were killed." But the utmost symbol of humiliation, rape, had been hard to discuss. "Until today, you wouldn't find a single Palestinian to talk about this."
Tsal interjected that she had first heard the word Nakba a few years ago. "Now everyone's talking about Nakba, even our minister of education." Not in the U.S., Esti. I tried to get a magazine assignment to write about it. No dice.
Questions began, then an argument, led by a loud marketing executive seated in the front row, over how best to get images of the Occupation out to the world. There were 30 in the room. I raised my hand but wasn't called on. Then I had to go. My question was for Esti Tsal.
Her photographs are searing. They are pieces of minimalist art, alas I can't find them online (though here are a couple). In one, a soldier's disembodied arm sticks out of the narrow window of a concrete pillbox, gesturing for what he wants from a Palestinian. The caption said, "the ordering, pointing finger." In another a perfectly groomed old man held out his pita bread to the same window, to be inspected. Another man stood turning his empty plastic bag upside down. Two Palestinian youths carried an old man who could not walk through the concrete barriers of the checkpoint, to get him to a car.
The machinery of the checkpoint was all modern. Gleaming steel, turnstiles, sleek lines. The worst photo showed an Israeli soldier, looking like a cheder-student with his beard and wirerimmed glasses, holding a semiautomatic rifle and standing over a Palestinian taxi driver he had knocked to the ground as a group of dazed Palestinian young men stood around, unable to respond.
The photos were about power, humiliation, abasement, emasculation. They reminded me of the book my mother bought six new copies of when I was a
teenager as an act of racial memory, so as to give one to each of her six children (and my mother never bought new
books, ever): Roman Vishniac's photos of the Warsaw ghetto. Tsal seemed to be echoing the imagery many of us have of Jews oppressed in central and eastern Europe. I wanted to ask Tsal if these references were intentional.
