Reference 1 being a short book, less than 200 pages, bought on the strength of a review or a reference in the NYRB. A nicely produced book from the University of Chicago Press. A book about protesting against the grabbing of Palestinian land by Jewish settlers in the South Hebron Hills, about providing much needed support to the Palestinians.
Shulman is a 73 year old Israeli academic who was born in Iowa. He is an expert in the religion and culture of southern India, a polyglot with lots of languages, including a number of Indian languages, ancient and modern. He has also spent years protesting this particular land grab.
I assume that the South Hebron Hills are the hill country to the south of Hebron, top centre in the map above. Jerusalem a little to the north and the Dead Sea to the east. I think the land in question is quite sparsely occupied by people who make their living from grazing sheep and goats and by growing some cereals. Hot and dry in the summer, cold in the winter. Access to water and to wells is important – and is all too easy to block off. Some of them live in caves, some in tents, some in small villages and some of them have deeds for their land going back to the days of the Ottomans.
I associate to the grabbing of much bigger tracts of sparsely occupied Indian land in the US; in particular to the grabbing of Oklahoma around a hundred years ago. Only fifty years in the past at the time that Israel came into being.
Reading of the crude hatred of some of the Jewish settlers for the Palestinians whose lands they are stealing, and of the behaviour of the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who facilitate this theft, one can understand why many in the world think that the west is not very even handed about such things. Putin bashing Ukrainians is awful and must be stopped. But Putin bashing Syrians is different, as is Bush bashing Iraqis. And Jewish settlers bashing Palestinians is different again. Matter of state about which we have to be sensible. There are also differences rooted in proximity, race and colour.
Shulman, in addition to bearing witness to this theft, to doing what he can to stop it and to providing aid and comfort to the Palestinians involved, is also interested in his own inner workings, in what is happening to him in the course of his protests. An interest which might seem a little self indulgent, a little Californian, but probably stems from his professional interest in Buddhism.
He is in love with these hills and with the people who have lived in them for centuries and he finds a strange exhilaration in bearing witness to the wrong that is being done to them. A bearing witness which carries considerable costs – in, for example, being pushed around by policemen and being held for hours, if not days, in hot and stuffy police stations. But, on the whole, as a Jew, he is not meted out the rather rougher treatment accorded to the Palestinians. And, unlike them, he can walk away.
Other matters
These Palestinians might spend a lot of time in jail. But some of them use the time to read a great deal. So they might be in prison, but they do have access to a respectable library. I associate to something of the same sort in the prisons we ran during the Mau-Mau emergency in Kenya. And to Trotsky being allowed to take his large personal library with him into exile. A form of basic decency which survived.
The word ‘fact’ is derived for the Latin for something which has been made. So facts are not just there, waiting to be found, they have to be made. A distinction on which I dare say philosophers spend a lot of time.
Conclusions
A rather shocking read.
One can only hope that Israel’s founding fathers, mostly highly educated and very civilised people from Central and Eastern Europe, would have been appalled by what is going on now. What the seed that they sowed has grown into.
PS: the snap is taken from my Historical Atlas of the Holy Land. A very handsomely produced book from the days when people in this country were prepared to throw a lot of time and money at such things. Noticed in passing at reference 3. Notice the use of the word 'wilderness' to describe some of the country.
References
Reference 1: Freedom and despair: Notes from the South Hebron hills – David Shulman – 2018.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dean_Shulman.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/books-from-honiton.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment