A new documentary called »The Inner Tour,« by the Israeli filmmaker Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, played this March at New York's Museum of Modern Art as part of the annual New Directors/New Films festival. Alexandrowicz followed a group of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank on a bus tour of Israel. The audience is told that an organized excursion is the only way for Palestinians to legally and safely visit any parts of the country besides the occupied territories. The twisted irony of a group of citizens having to pay to visit the same country in which they reside is excruciating, and we watch and listen as each Palestinian, wide-eyed and a bit overwhelmed, reminisces about his or her family's earlier freedom. These stories provide yet another example of the multilayered discourse of blood and belonging that continues to unfold in the Middle East, one that views nationalism not as divisive and xenophobic, but rather as the means of organizing privileges and security for those who pledge allegiance to the communal ideals of a particular locality.

But this assertion depends on the distinction - made by Michael Ignatieff, director of The Carr Center of Human Rights Policy at Harvard University - between a civic and an ethnic nation. The recent quarrels in the Middle East circulate in and around a contested parcel of land that perfectly presents the difficulties of making such distinctions. Israel is host to three major religions, and remains, amid all the profound antagonism, the tablet on which the history of Arabs, Christians, and Jews has been written. It is uncontested that Jerusalem (the heart of the discord) was a Jewish city from 1006 B.C. to 586 B.C., and an Islamic one from 636 A.D. However, today the conflict resides on many more registers than the single issue of the Right to return.

A recent conversation with two prominent American archaeologists from Duke University yielded a unique perspective on the situation, one that resisted typically problematic forms of nationalism in favour of the ecumenicity of empirical science. The simple fact that arose out of the discussion concerned the cessation of many important archaeological excavations in the West Bank, a fact that should be obvious but is nevertheless not taken for granted. Both Israelis and Palestinians should have a profound interest in the outcome of these studies, given that their mutual antagonism is based upon claims of historical affiliation and residency in these areas.

To take but one example, the modern city of Jenin, or Tell-Jenin, is an extremely important archaeological site, mainly due to its association with the biblical city of En Gannim (mentioned in Joshua 19:21). The city was first discovered in 1926 by a British archaeologist with the (now) bizarrely ironic name of P. L. O. (Philip Langstaffe Ord) Guy, working for the Palestinian Department of Antiquities under the British Mandate. After the influx of refugees in 1948, the site was built over with the necessities of a modern community, such as a gas station, a bus depot, and a Latin convent.

The recovery of the site began in 1977 with a coalition of researchers under the aegis of the Albright Archaeological Institute in Jerusalem and the University of Birzeit, a school near Jenin, and continued until the mid-1990s. But now, for obvious reasons, the research has ceased. This may all seem besides the point as regards the current conflict, but in fact it illustrates the region's significance on a number of different levels, the ignorance (wilful or involuntary) that surrounds these multiple areas of meaning, as well as the more disturbing complacency that both illuminates and enlarges that ignorance.

[b]»Mirroring Evil«[/b]

Another example, physically removed from the area of conflict but intimately related to its underlying themes, appeared last month in the form of an exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum called »Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art.« America is the only country in the world where a show such as this could or would be shown, as American Jews have long been accredited with a certain impunity as regards the way in which the last century's most horrific event is to be processed intellectually. While the show itself has been rightly reviewed as rather idiotic in both concept and form, the contribution by the artist Tom Sachs is significant. Sachs, using his estimable gifts of whimsy and his considerable design prowess, contributes a model concentration camp made entirely out of a Prada shoebox, a piece - he confesses in a pedagogic video elsewhere in the show - that his (Jewish) grandmother said had made her want to vomit. The work is hardly powerful enough to induce convulsions, but as the only American representative of the show, it evidences something salient about the American way of dealing with trauma, namely to process it in terms that make sense to the American mind: in this case, commerce and capitalism.

Sachs fatuously claims to be equating the Nazi insistence on conformity with the societal pressure to succumb to brand-name fashion, as if European Jews could have escaped persecution had they dyed their hair blond and worn knee-high black combat boots. The point here is that Sachs clearly lacks the ability to deal with the Holocaust in anything but the most familiar terms, reducing its vast depravity to a wry joke. In contrast, in the case of the Lego Concentration Camp by Polish artist Zbigniew Libera, which uses another internationally recognized brand name, the ludic, easily assimilated resonance of Lego construction strives towards a heuristic role in aiding people of all ages to contemplate the rigorous internal logic of the Final Solution. Libera seeks to make the Holocaust a symbol of universal suffering through the invocation of a popular toy, while Sachs exploits a much more exclusive product for a much narrower goal; his sort of abbreviation is endemic in the American mind, which tends towards the lowest common denominator in any and all fields of debate. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the tendentious American role in the Middle East crisis.

Many articles have been written criticizing the Bush administration's glibly self-important view of the Arab-Israeli situation, a problem compounded by the sheer lack of intellectual engagement within his cabinet. Bush's victory over Gore was more than a victory of conservatism over liberals: it was a victory of passive disengagement with the world (on any number of registers) over a commitment to sophisticated socio-political action. This election result mirrors a major problem of the collective American psyche, namely the constitutional inability to process information on more than one level at a time. This pathology is no better illustrated than by Bush's statement shortly after the attack of September 11, when he declared on behalf of the United States that the rest of the world's nations were »either with us, or against us.«

This strict dialectical approach is emblematic of the typical American's lack of desire to understand, or even discuss, issues that may not have an easy or immediate resolution. Coupled with the American government's use of market research techniques to help form the most crucial decisions, the result is a foreign policy largely directed by a populace that is ill-informed, yet strongly opinionated. They offer their opinions because they have been asked, and their opinions only exist for the same reason. Presumably, the logic of this is that if one's position on an issue is solicited, it must be because that position has value. Given that Bush has hired Charlotte Beers, a media consultant formerly with J. Walter Thompson, to help make the war on Afghanistan (and soon, on Iraq) more consumer-friendly, it is easy to understand why Americans don't feel as if they need to actively pursue additional knowledge about the Middle East. They can rest assured that whatever important information exists has been generated largely to conform to a general consensus, repackaged for easy and rapid consumption, and fed to them through the passive conduit of broadcast television.

[b]Triumph of the outsiders[/b]

Yet a surprising schizophrenia regarding the Middle East crisis is explicit in the latest poll figures from ABC News. Only 41% of Americans support Israel's recent actions, yet merely 9% support the Palestinian Authority. One might read this as a collective exhaustion with the failed peace negotiations, but in the light of all that has been written above, another inescapable conclusion presents itself. The American populace has no idea what to make of the Middle East crisis, and this is for two reasons.

Firstly, the American media has not made a fair-minded attempt to present the situation in its totality. The mainstream news organizations numb the mind with a relentless barrage of up-to-the-minute reportage and banal speculation, while what we might call the intellectual media (both Right and Left) weaken their own cause through the cold comfort of dogmatic, close-minded editorializing. Secondly, and equally as tragically, there is the related realization that the typical American mind seems constitutionally incapable of grasping the subtle nuances of Arab-Israeli relations. As suggested earlier, a dialectic approach such as that propounded by the Bush administration cannot begin to address the multiplicity of historical shifts - the alliances and antagonisms - that underscore the present-day conflict. And most American intellectuals have not sought a high-profile public vessel through which to sponsor and support an open dialogue on the issues, leaving the majority of Americans to rest complacently with the diluted populism of network news.

The first major exception is Edward Said, whose obviously committed interest stems from his Palestinian heritage. Said is considered a dangerous man in the U.S., and accordingly his editorial voice is scarcely heard, except in the relatively obscure confines of the Egyptian weekly, Al-Ahram. It was there that he made the following astonishing accusation, all the more powerful because of his usual belligerent tone: »Moreover, neither have we understood the power of trying to address Israelis directly, the way the ANC addressed the white South Africans, as part of a politics of inclusion and mutual respect. Coexistence is our answer to Israeli exclusivism and belligerence. This is not conceding: it is creating solidarity, and therefore isolating the exclusivists, the racists, the fundamentalists.« From his professor's office on the Columbia University campus, Said is arguably as guilty of insularity as are the residents of the Middle East, but his impotence can be attributed to the seeming impossibility of any dialogue either within the academy or the greater intellectual sphere at large.

The second major exception is Noam Chomsky, also no stranger to controversy. But unlike Said, Chomsky's position has an affiliation with an intellectual morality that very nearly does not exist within the context of the American intelligentsia. Chomsky, along with Said, harbors a fierce pro-Palestinian prejudice, but his conviction is based entirely on his long history of human rights battles and trenchant critiques of U.S. foreign policy. His is the bias of a skeptic and a moralist, while Said's is a nationalist's. Still, they have found a common ground, such that Said has recently provided a foreword to a revised edition of Chomsky's classic book on the Middle East, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (1983). This unusual alliance is symbolic of the radical shift that has taken place since the first appearance of Chomsky's book with regard to the landscape of American intelligentsia.

In 1983, Chomsky criticized American intellectuals for a blind fascination with the Israeli cause, much like an earlier generation's flirtation with Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. Israel's ability to marshal military strength against its oppressors while effectively retaining, to outsiders' eyes, the status of victimhood, appealed to a specific sense of insignificance on the part of the American Left. The triumphalism of the underdog is a exemplary American trope, especially within the intelligentsia, which (rightly) sees itself as perpetually positioned outside of mainstream discourse. But many intellectuals have since, famously, renounced their Leftist convictions to embrace a particularly repellent and virulent conservatism.

Examples such as Norman Podhoretz (of Commentary Magazine) and William Kristol (son of prominent neoconservative Irving Kristol and editor of the influential Weekly Standard) are the best known examples, and they remain two of the most prominent voices on the Right. If these two had earlier championed Israel from an enlightened, human rights point of view, they can now be said to be doing so in defense of American isolationism and self-protection. Chomsky's argument is thus turned on its head, as the resurgence of pro-Israel sentiments on the Right usurps the position previously claimed by the Left.

In turn, a group of liberal intellectuals have now initiated a movement that is trying to advance a dialogue surrounding potential Israeli injustices against Palestinians. Michael Lerner, a rabbi and editor of Tikkun Magazine, along with Cornel West, have created what they call the Tikkun Community, a humanist-driven initiative that seeks to provide a pro-Palestinian voice, and to argue, in West's maxim, that to be pro-Palestinian does not equal being anti-Semitic. But such logic generally falls upon deaf ears in the U.S., where challenging and constructive thought has long since ceased to exist. So soon after the events of September 11, Americans have largely returned to their earlier complacency, confident that whatever is happening, it is happening »over there,« not in their own back yard. Meanwhile, the backyards of Palestinians and Israelis alike, with their layers of secret history, lie covered with debris, rather than uncovered by the labors of profound inquiry.

The mainstream American media is missing its chance to initiate its own dialogue on the subject of globalization and nationalism, an opportunity that in some surprising quarters has been seized with enthusiasm. News from France arrived, announcing that Le Monde has begun enclosing an insert in each day's newspaper comprising a summary of the same day's New York Times, printed in English. An accompanying editorial on the first day announced that the experiment was a local effort to combat xenophobia, and that today's world would remain riven by conflict as long as existing allegiances continued to insist on untransgressable borders between nations and cultures. Notwithstanding the watered-down Deleuzian, nomadic overtones of this declaration, it is shocking to hear such a call of openness from the European country that historically has been the most covetous and protective of its native tongue. The editorial concluded with the following: »To better know the Other in his own language and his own imagination is not to renounce oneself. It is, on the contrary, to accept the plurality of worlds, the diversity of visions, and above all, a respect for differences.« Can one even imagine that this generous gesture might be reciprocated? What would be the consequences?

 

 

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