So here’s where all you sophisticated cynics get to tell me I’m being naïve, and yesterday’s UN recognition of Palestine as a non-voting member state is merely symbolic, and it makes no difference to what’s actually happening etc etc.

To which my reply is:  Never underestimate the power of symbolism.  Or the sense of an alternate historical inevitability strengthened by this move.

Historical inevitability is exactly what Israel has been trying to create since 1967 with “facts on the ground,” aka “settlements” — a totally misleading term since it calls up images of small outposts, while the bulk of the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank is by now huge swathes of urban and suburban housing.  As if to underline this, today’s Israeli reaction to the UN move was to formally announce yet another urban expansion, this one intended to cut off Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem.

The New York Times seems to imagine that this is in retaliation for the UN vote, but they’re wrong.  It’s part of Israel’s long-term plan, which has been, since the late 1960s, to create an “irreversible” pattern of Israeli settlement in Palestine — I reported on this way back in the 1970s — and to make daily existence so burdensome for Palestinians in so many ways that they will up and leave “of their own accord” (a kind of ethnic cleansing lite.)

But history is nothing if not a long pattern of reversals.  And it now looks very much like both Israel and the United States (along with Palau, Panama, Micronesia, Canada, and the Czech Republic — the less-than-impressive array of countries voting against acceptance of heightened status for Palestine) are on the wrong side of history.

I have absolutely no idea how this might work out in the long run.  In fact when I try to imagine it, I find myself in despair.  The hard truth is that a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is in all probability economically, geographically, and politically non-viable — a “two-state solution” that solves nothing at all.  And while the “one-state solution” thus seems the only logical outcome, logic has nothing to do with the politics of identity.  One state would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, since it would then have a non-Jewish majority;  whether you support the idea of a Jewish state or not, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that Israel will never agree to dissolve its foundational raison d’être. 

Which leaves us where?

Without a vision of a positive outcome, the all-or-nothing hardliners are in the ascendance, promising nothing but more violence.  So could the rest of us be suffering from a dismaying lack of imagination?  Is there a third way?  Or a fourth or a fifth?  I have no answers, just the stubborn faith that there has to be.  For the first time in over a decade, the UN decision gives me a sense of forward movement.  If that’s illusory, I’ll take it for now.

This past weekend, I spoke to a Hadassah meeting – the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.  The subject, of my choosing, was “What’s a ‘nice Jewish girl’ doing writing so much about Islam?”

The easy answer to the question I’d self-imposed was “Why not?”  A perfectly reasonable answer, perhaps, but not with bigots like Peter King about to begin his witch hunt this week in the form of congressional hearings on the alleged “radicalization” of American Muslims.

The real answer is that it’s precisely because I’m Jewish that I find myself writing so much about Islam these days.  Because as a Jew, I know the dangers of prejudice.  And I can smell it a mile off.  When I hear someone talk about “the Jewish mentality,” I know I’m listening to an anti-Semite.  How else stereotype millions of people that way?   Just as when I read someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking about “the Muslim mentality,” I know — no matter how pretty she is, how soft-spoken, and how compelling her life story – that I am listening to an Islamophobe.

And I recognize that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the exact same coin:  the stereotyping of millions of people by the actions of a few.  That is, prejudice.

So it’s particularly painful, let alone absurd and self-defeating and dumb, to see that some Islamophobes are Jewish.  And equally painful – and absurd and self-defeating and dumb – to see that some Muslims are anti-Semitic.

I have no statistics to say what proportion of Jews are Islamophobic or what proportion of Muslims are anti-Semitic (though I could doubtless make some up and throw them out there with such an air of authority that they’d be repeated ad infinitum until they achieve the status of “fact”).   But the Muslim Brotherhood, for all the changes it has undergone, still distributes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  And while anti-Zionism does not necessarily mean anti-Semitism, there is a clear overlap, with a venemous hatred finding its outlet in what is now the more acceptable form of anti-Zionism.

So we need to be clear.  We badly need it.

“Islam” did not attack the US on 9/11;  eighteen people with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Islam did.  “The Jews” do not shoot Palestinian farmers in the West Bank;   Bible-spouting settlers with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Judaism do.

The Quran is no more violent or misogynistic than the Bible.  In fact it’s less so.  If you insist, as Islamophobes do, on highlighting certain phrases, then you should turn around and do the same with the Bible, which you will find ten times worse, with repeated calls for the destruction of whole peoples. Only the dumbest, most literal, hate-filled fundamentalist, Jewish or Muslim, takes the rules of ancient warfare as a guide to 21^st-century life.

We have to stop this stereotyping.  Now.  All of us.

We have to recognize prejudice not only in others, but in ourselves, Jewish or Muslim.

We have to be able to see that the anti-Semitic trope of “the Jews” trying to take over the world is exactly the same as the Islamophobic one of “the Muslims” trying to take over the world.

We have to acknowledge that an Islamophobic Jew is thinking exactly like an anti-Semite.  And that an anti-Semitic Muslim is thinking exactly like an Islamophobe.

We have to realize that American Jews need to stand up with Muslims against Islamophobia just as American Muslims need to stand up with Jews against anti-Semitism.

Because Islamophobia is, in essence, another form of anti-Semitism, and vice versa.  And it’s in the direct interest of both Jews and Muslims — of all of us — to stand up and confront both forms of prejudice.

In the famous words of an anti-Nazi Protestant pastor during World War II:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

“I can’t believe you don’t believe in anything!” someone wrote on this blog a while back, commenting on my agnosticism (actually, she used capital letters and lots of exclamation marks, but I’ll refrain).   And I was a bit shocked by that.  What kind of human being can I claim to be if I don’t believe in anything?  A nihilist?  A god-forsaken creature left to the whims and mercies of fate?    A craven whimpering coward afraid to commit herself?

So in between keeping up with what’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Bahrain and Yemen and Jordan and Iraq and Iran and oh-my-god Libya, I’ve been haunted by what she said — and have realized that she placed the stress on the wrong word.  It doesn’t belong on the word ‘anything,’ but on the word before it:  ‘in.’

Of course there are things I believe.  I just don’t generally feel the need to believe in them.  I may well believe that such-and-such a thing is true, though in fact this is much the same thing as saying “I think that…” or the more amorphous “I feel that…”  and I’m trying not to be amorphous here.  And in fact there are some things I do believe in, prime among them the possibility of some seemingly impossible form of peace between Israel and Palestine.

If I look at Israel/Palestine rationally right now, I see no way to a peaceful resolution.   So in the lack of empirical evidence, I have no choice but to fall back on belief – that is, on the conviction that peace is possible, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I’m not being over-idealistic here.   The first step in any thinking about peace is to get rid of all those images of doves fluttering around all over the place and everyone falling on each others’ shoulders in universal brother/sisterhood.  Peace is far more mundane than that.  It’s the absence of war.  It’s people not being killed.  It’s the willingness to live and let live.  And that will do just fine.

There’s no love lost between England and Germany, for instance, but they’re at peace after two utterly devastating wars in the first half of the 20^th century.  There’s less than no love lost between Egypt and Israel – in fact it’s safe to say that for the most part, they detest each other —  but that peace treaty, signed by an Egyptian dictator and an Israeli former terrorist, has lasted three decades.  It’s nobody’s ideal of peace, but however uneasily, it’s held, and will likely hold whatever the changes in Egypt – a frigid kind of peace, but peace nonetheless.

But even thinking in terms of pragmatic, undramatic, boring peace, which once seemed as impossible for England and Germany, and for Egypt and Israel, as for Israel and Palestine, I still can’t see it.  Of course this may simply mean that I have a very limited imagination, and so can’t see the forest for the trees.   But to think that something is impossible because I can’t see it is not only an absurd assumption, but also a dangerous one.

What we believe affects how we act.   If we stop believing that Israel/Palestine peace is possible, or even desirable, as the Israeli government seems to have done, then that affects how we act:  we really do make it impossible.  That is, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of unending conflict.   We act in our own worst interests.

I’d rather be naïve than nihilistic.  So in face of the despair that often overtakes me at the latest news from Gaza or from the West Bank, I have to fall back on belief in the possibility of peace, no matter how seemingly irrational.  After all, if it was rational, it wouldn’t require belief.

One definition of despair is in the inability to imagine oneself into the future.  It is, in a very real sense, a failure of the imagination.  So perhaps this is what belief really is:  an act of imagination.   The astonishing human ability to imagine something into existence, and to act in accordance with that imagination.

That’s what we’ve seen these past few weeks in Tunisia and Egypt and Bahrain (and maybe even in Libya), and that’s what’s been so inspiring about it:  belief transformed into possibility.   Belief not as faith in the divine, but as faith in the human ability to act and to change the future.   Belief, that is, in ourselves.

In the Middle East, it’s sometimes the small moments that stay with you longest.  Not the bombs, the injuries, the deaths – the things that make the headlines – but almost inconsequential moments, so small that they slip past the mind’s defenses and haunt you.

I’ve written here (and here) about such moments.  This is another.

It happened one evening in the fall of 2005, at the Qalandia crossing between Ramallah and East Jerusalem.  I’d spent the day traveling in the West Bank with two Palestinian archeologists and a German NGO worker, whose car we used.  We drove on ‘Arab’ roads (as distinct from ‘Jewish’ ones, which are reserved solely for Israeli settlers – in this part of the world, even roads have ethnicity) and went through so many military checkpoints I lost count.  Since the car had a large German flag painted on the hood, we were waved to the front of the line to wait a mere ten or twenty minutes at each checkpoint instead of three or four hours like everyone else.   As we eased with bad consciences past the long lines of ‘Arab’ cars and trucks, companiable talk gave way to a tight-lipped, eyes-straight-ahead silence.

The language of guns is a language all its own.  Israeli soldiers with mirrored sunglasses hardly speak.  They just gesture this way or that with their guns.  You don’t look at their eyes;  you look at the guns.  The guns do all the speaking.

Since I was in the front passenger seat, it fell to me to hand our passports and papers through the open window.   When he saw my American passport, one soldier broke his silence.   “Why you go with them?” he asked me in English, pointing his gun at my companions.  He dragged his finger across his throat: “They do this to you.”    When another asked where we were heading and I said Nablus, he leaned in to me with a loud stage whisper:  “Nablus? You want to die?”

I swallowed hard and kept my mouth shut, knowing that if I opened it, it wasn’t me who would pay, but the Palestinians I was with.   It struck me how hard it must be to keep your mouth shut under this kind of provocation every day, and yet the two archeologists seemed more embarrassed than anything – for me, and for the soldiers.

Now, as the sun was setting, I approached Qalandia, the largest checkpoint of all, on foot.  My companions had dropped me off from Ramallah, but could not cross.  I’d pick up a shared taxi to Jerusalem on the other side.

Two tunnels formed of wire-mesh and barbed-wire ran the length of the crossing, with well-guarded turnstiles either end.   I was halfway through when I heard a gun being cocked just a few yards away.  I looked over in alarm and through the wire saw two soldiers, a boy and a girl.  She was holding the gun, and he was pressed up against her from behind, his arms around her and his hands over hers on the gun.  They were both flushed and laughing.

She looked directly at me, and I could see the arousal in her eyes.  And then scorn as she registered my existence as what she doubtless called “an Arab-lover.”   She didn’t look away;  still in the embrace of the boy behind her, still cradling the gun, she held my eyes as though defying me to say a word.  “Look all you like,” she seemed to be saying.  “There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

I felt demeaned, dehumanized, even as I realized I was over-reacting.  It was such a little thing, after all.  Nothing really, not compared with everything else that was happening.   Just horny kids horsing around.  In public.  With loaded guns.  In a position of absolute power.

I wanted to break the moment, to shout something in protest, but I felt a gentle hand in the small of my back — a head-scarved Palestinian woman behind me gesturing me onward.  “Quietly,” her eyes indicated.  “Don’t start an incident that’ll only make trouble for us all.”  And I walked on with my mouth shut, full of the bitter taste, for just a moment, of the sheer, god-awful insult of life under occupation.

This is my olive tree, and yes, that’s a boat in the background:

It doesn’t ‘fit’ with anything else on my floating garden here in Seattle (pines, maples, bamboo, herbs), but I don’t care.  It reminds me of the Middle East (so what if it’s a European olive instead of a Middle Eastern one) — of sitting on an ancient terraced hillside sheltering from the noon sun under the silvery-green canopy of a mature olive, my back against its gnarled trunk, the gentle clatter of its leaves shaking in the breeze mixing with the bleating of goats and sheep wafting up from the valley below.  It was as though time itself were reaching out and enfolding me, cradling me in centuries of life.

Mine is just a newborn as olive trees go:  six years old, a blink of an eye for an olive.   These trees live 800 years, at least as far as we can be scientifically sure.  There are plenty of legends of 2000-year-old olive trees.  But 800 seems a sufficiently ripe old age for veneration.

Unless, of course, you happen to be a right-wing Israeli settler.

Then what you do is poison olive trees.

By the dozen.

Whole groves of them.

TURMUS AYA, West Bank — Palestinians from villages like this one in the West Bank governorate of Ramallah still remember when the olive harvest was a joyous occasion, with whole families out for days in the fall sunshine, gathering the year’s crop and picnicking under the trees.

“We considered it like a wedding,” said Hussein Said Hussein Abu Aliya, 68.

But when Mr. Abu Aliya and his family from the neighboring village of Al-Mughayer — 36 of them in all, including grandchildren — drove out to their land this week in a snaking convoy of cars and pickup trucks with others from Turmus Aya, they found scores of their trees on the rocky slopes in various stages of decay, recently poisoned, they said, by Jewish settlers from an illegal Israeli outpost on top of the hill.

Branches drooped.  The once lush, silver-green leaves were turning brown and the few olives still clinging on, which should have been plump and green or purple by harvest time, were shriveled and black. Dozens of trees nearby that Mr. Abu Aliya contended were similarly poisoned with chemicals last year stood like spindly skeletons, gray and completely bare.

I’m glad NYT reporter Isabel Kershner finally got a piece about this in the paper, even if it was edited mealy-mouthed Times-style to include phrases like “they said” and “they contended.”

But what Kershner didn’t write is that this has been going on for years.   Decades, in fact.

At first the settlers tried burning the trees.  But olives are phoenix-like:  you can burn one down, but within a few  months, new shoots will spring up around the burned-out core.  Then they tried bulldozing them, only to find that unless you use a deep backhoe, those shoots will still spring up again.   Then they took to shooting at Palestinians who came to tend and harvest the trees, which is why they can now do so only under Israeli army protection and for just a few days each year.   So now the settlers have turned to poison.

My revulsion at this is incalculable.  Of course there are so many greater causes for revulsion at the Israeli occupation and land grab in the West Bank — the continual harassment, checkpoints, beatings, arbitrary jailings, maimings, murders.   But olive trees?

When you poison so potent a symbol, you poison something deep and integral to the spirit.   You poison the very idea of the olive branch of peace.  Of the dove with the live branch in its beak that arrived at Noah’s ark as a sign of renewal.   Of the olive oil that kept miraculously burning in the temple at Hannukah, one of the holidays these religious settlers claim to honor.  Of the olive tree as the source of light, of shelter, of nutrition, of life itself.

The State of Israel once practically fetishised trees.   Remember all that stuff about making the desert bloom?  As a child, I happily contributed pennies from my allowance to the Jewish National Fund, thinking that I was planting trees in Israel.   They’d send a paper outline of a tree and I’d buy little stick-on leaves which I’d paste onto the branches, each in its proper place.  Then every time a tree was fully leafed, I’d proudly send it off, imagining each tree with a little plaque in front of it with my name inscribed as the donor.  I don’t remember what age I was when I realized that there were no trees with little plaques on them, but I count that as one of those moments when the disillusion of adulthood pierces a child’s view of the world.   A Jewish there-is-no-Santa-Claus moment, perhaps.

For all those American and Israeli Jews inured to the violence and thuggery of occupation, perhaps the poisoning of olive trees will slip through their defenses and rationalizations (“but what can we do?”  “but they hate us!”  “but we need security,” “but we don’t have any choice”) and wake up what tiny remnant of conscience and decency may or may not still exist.

Because these dead olives are literally the poisoned fruit of occupation.

These settlers don’t just use poison.  They are poison.

And they have all but killed Israel’s soul.