Blind faith

[Amit Elkayam/The New York Times/Redux: Israeli settlers in the illegal outpost of Evyatar, near the Palestinian village of Beita, West Bank, June 2021]

This prompted by the article in the NYRB at reference 1, written around the book at reference 2. The author of the first is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of the second was a French Zionist who lasted something more than ten years in Israel before returning to France.

My parents, in common with many other lefty intellectuals of the 1950's and 1960's of my childhood, had been appalled by what had happened to the Jews of Europe in the Second World War and were very sympathetic towards Israel. They knew all about the Kibbutz movement. Maybe they thought that one of their children would give it a try for a while. But they were oddly blind to the Palestinians. I don't recall either of them ever mentioning them or their predicament. Or the messy birth of the state of Israel. Indeed, the only relevant memory from that period is a comrade from Trinity College regretting that the Communist Party of Israel had split into two, into a Jewish Party and a Palestinian Party - while noting that the Party was one of the last such organisations so to split.

I don't know what my parents would have made of the present article, never mind the book, but I imagine it would have made them rather sad. That a people who had been oppressed for so long had, in their turn, become the oppressors. With the behaviour of some of them not so far removed from that of the Cossacks of the Russian pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century. And, not least because they were atheists, they would probably have deplored the conflation of state, race and religion. That is not where they wanted to be. While Shulman is further saddened that, while many Jewish Israeli's deplore what is going on, very few of them are prepared to speak out or to try to do something about it.

But I shall find out what more Shulman has to say in his book, reference 3, shortly.

PS: gmaps turns up a Beita el-Foka, a little to the south of Nablus, rather further to the east of Tel Aviv. Possibly the same place as in the snap above, but only possibly as I suspect 'Beit' figures in lots of place names. Only limited availability of Street View, but what can be seen looks to be a harsh country in which to be a small farmer: thin, rocky soil and not much rain. In fact, just like the snap.

References

Reference 1: Lost Illusions: Sylvain Cypel’s transformation from liberal Zionist to ferocious critic of Israel - David Shulman, NYRB - 2022. February 10, 2022 issue.

Reference 2: The State of Israel vs. the Jews - Sylvain Cypel, translated from the French by William Rodarmor - 2021.

Reference 3: Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills - David Shulman - 2018. Bought at a very reasonable price from Abebooks.