Hank, donnella, Scott, Ed, G., etc This is what I have been arguing for quite a while. I am honoured to be a recipient.
Shalom l'kol uvrakha Wesley Parish ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Columbia Conference on Jerusalem Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 04:40 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Conference Review: Israel Forum Event at Columbia University, November 10, 2004 What is Jerusalem? A telling statement on this question was made by Rashid Khalidi, the chairman of the Middle Eastern Studies department at Columbia University, who related that Jerusalem is a place that is seen out of the lenses of each person who has developed a relationship with it. There is not ONE Jerusalem, but many different Jerusalems. In the presentation of the Israeli scholar and public intellectual Meron Benvenisti, a man who has graced the pages of the SHU many times, we saw a Jerusalem - the place of Meron's birth as a member of a Sephardic family living in the city for many generations - as is also the case for Khalidi's family as well - that had been stripped of both its dignity as well as its coherence. Meron Benvenisti is a man who in the question and answer portion of the evening provided a striking mea culpa for his own sins in the destruction of Jerusalem. As Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem in the post-1967 era, Benvenisti admitted that he too was another voice that justified the increasing polarization of the city; a government official who, as he said, provided a justification for the zealots and bigots. So what is the purpose of trying to understand Jerusalem? At the very start of his talk, Benvenisti decried any attempts to "resolve" the Jerusalem question. There were no solutions, he said, and in the course of his brilliant presentation he laid out what he saw as the disfiguring of the city that has taken place in the past decades; a disfiguring that has seen demographic and political shifts in the place that belie the very concrete realities of the place. And here we were shocked to see a speaker actually trying to look at Jerusalem as an earthly place, a place that was removed from the mythology and symbolism of Jerusalem that fires much of the religious and nationalist imagination of Jews, Muslims and Christians. We were told by Benvenisti that Jerusalem, a place that he loves as a native born inhabitant, has now been held hostage to competing and conflicting interests that have remade and reconfigured the city. The Israelis have sought to remake the demography of the city by gerrymandering and expanding its topology. The "original" Jerusalem - at bequeathed to us from the Ottomans - was 1 square kilometer. The present size of the city is over 124 square kilometers. This change in size has come about through the machinations of the Israelis to create a new set of realities for the city, thereby, in Benvenisti's opinion, serving to turn the city into a divided and polarized place; a place where there is no organic continuity with the actual contours of the city. These actual contours are to be found in a rational and scientific analysis of the demography and topography of the place. Where people live, how they live, how they are counted as citizens, what rights they have - in essence, the manner in which Jews and Arabs have been set at odds with one another, has become emblematic of the Frankenstinian patchwork that has now become the public face of Jerusalem. And in fact, Benvenisti sees Jerusalem as a Frankenstein. The place in his estimation has become a hostage of sectarian interests rather than as the home of its citizens. In essence, though he did not say it in these words, Benvenisti's approach - as we have seen in The Olga Document - is one of bi-nationalism for all members of Israel and Palestine. In his acute and deeply troubling assessment of the current situation he sees no way out but to re-unite the city and give it back to the people who live in it. Perhaps the most disheartening thing that he spoke about in his presentation was the fact that Jerusalem has now become a provincial town in Israel; the Benvenisti children have all left the ancestral home of their family to go to Tel Aviv and elsewhere - to get out of the hell that has become Jerusalem. Rashid Khalidi presented a Jerusalem that provided the historical and cultural background that was the backdrop for Benvenisti. Working off the model, as we mentioned earlier, of the "Jerusalem in the eye of its beholder," Khalidi, like Benvenisti, tried to find the actual city in history rather than in myth and memory. In his masterful presentation Khalidi pointed to the archaeological strata of the Holy City and the various layers that inhere to each and every rock of the place. In Khalidi's view, each of the sides sees the Jerusalem that it wants to see: The Arabs, contrary to the explicit texts of the Qur'an, have severed the Jewish links to the city, while the Jews have simply erased the Arab presence from Jerusalem's history. The most striking images Khalidi presented in his talk were the Qur'an text of Sura 17 - Surat Banu Isra'eel - where the Prophet Muhammad recounts the history of Jews in Jerusalem through a discussion of Moses, Adam and Noah, as well as the incredible story that involves an Israeli tour through the tunnel leading to the Plaza of the Western Wall where through the miracle of modern technology, a mechanized display of the Temple Mount replaces the Al Aqsa mosque with a replica of the Second Temple! Khalidi was scathing in his antagonistic assessment of the religious chauvinisms and polarities of the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city. By eliding and rhetorically eliminating the PLURALISM that is a salient and obvious feature of the city, the present inhabitants have constructed SIMULACRA of Jerusalem that bear little if any resemblance to the actual historical realities of the place. In his assessment, those Jews and Muslims who deign to speak in the name of their respective religions are merely charlatans - imposters who in reality know very little about their own religious traditions - in fact, Khalidi went so far as to say - something that I have been saying for quite a long time - that the GRANDFATHERS of these religious extremists would scarcely have been able to recognize the version of religion that is currently being practiced. When we think about the Israeli refusal to permit Arafat's burial in Jerusalem, alluded to by Benvenisti and Khalidi both, we see - beyond religion, nationalism and politics - the manner in which Jerusalem's history has been completely leveled - as has been the various strata of its rich and illustrious history - as we read in the Psalms (122:3ff.): Jerusalem - built as a city that is bound firmly together. To it the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, as was decreed for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the Lord. For there the thrones were set up, the thrones of the house of David. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, "May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers." For the sake of my relatives and friends I will say, "Peace be within you." For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good This love song - a valentine - to the Holy City is one that in the analysis of Khalidi has been transformed into ethno-nationalist hatreds and violent irrational primitivisms. We now have polarized ethnicities that refuse to recognize the Divine hand in the creation and sanctification of the city; a sense of God that has now been debased by the violence and hatred. The final presentation of the evening was a limp and lifeless talk by Peter Marcuse, a professor of Urban Planning and Development at Columbia University, who insisted - in blatant opposition to Benvenisti who has made the most eloquent case for the UNIFICATION of the city - that the city can be easily divided along the lines of Oslo and Camp David. Marcuseâs talk appeared not merely naive in this context, but was presented with a complete lack of enthusiasm - a matter that has infected the toxic morass of the peace movement in the region. In Marcuse's talk we could truly see that the erection of walls and barriers is not going to make anyone safer or more at ease. The hard truths articulated by Benvenisti and Khalidi would have it that the only way to restore the dignity of Jerusalem in both historical and actual terms is to have the inhabitants come to terms with each others' existential and socio-cultural realities. In point of fact, I was struck by the complete absence of any discussion of terrorism in the talks. While Khalidi and Benvenisti presented a constructive model of engagement, Marcuse's discussion papered over the very real difficulties that now animate the conflict. And this was to be expected: Khalidi and Benvenisti, as members of families who have lived in the region for centuries, understood the histories of the city in a more nuanced and intimate manner. Rather than seeking to split apart Arabs and Jews, the two Jerusalemites sought to articulate the barely-understood position of mutual co-existence - something that was once a part of the city's history and could well be a part of its future. The conference as a whole seemed to lack a certain energy even as the brilliant ideas of Khalidi and Benvenisti were clearly groundbreaking in their boldness. The manner in which the audience was clearly stymied by the creation of a new set of conceptual categories and a vastly radical way of reading the history of the region led to a very lethargic Q&A where the participants understood that the polarities they had been discussing in their talks were the very polarities that animated the members of the audience. It is instructive that in the setting of a university that the only thing the audience could think of was the clash of religions that now seems to have engulfed any and all discussion of the conflict. We have been schooled in the orthodoxies - Left and Right - that tell us that Jews and Arabs are different races and any possible mention of commonalities is rejected as illusory and romantic. But the voices of Meron Benvenisti and Rashid Khalidi, two spokesmen for a conceptual reality that does not at present exist on the ground, shone through loud and clear for those whose minds and hearts were open enough to hear them. These voices spoke of the realities of history, morality, demography and religion. Speaking within the walls of a Western university they did what the university at its best was created to do: They presented facts and critical assessments of a situation that has lost its rational bearings. Upon leaving the hall I began to think that Meron Benvenisti, one of my personal heroes, had become the Borges of Jerusalem; a man who understood the Labyrinths of Reality and was desperately trying to communicate that multiple sense of existence that has now been reduced to platitudes and slogans. On this evening we were treated to the complexity and richness of Jerusalem's past and were disheartened to see how that richness has evaporated into the mists of irrational hatred and inter-cultural violence. David Shasha ------------------------------------------------------- -- Wesley Parish * * * Clinersterton beademung - in all of love. RIP James Blish * * * Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?" You ask, "What is the most important thing?" Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata." I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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