The wisdom of Edward Said says it well. we don't need a 'two state' agreement,
which will forever produce conflicts and border wars, but a ' one -state'
agreement in which both Israeli's AND Palestinians can share Jerusalem much in
the way Christians, Catholics and atheists can all share time in Washington,
D.C.
Want to promote peace in the middle east and an end to terrorism? Form a
country with a constitution based on freedom of religion with protection from
government intrusion on the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, allowing no infringement on the free expression of religion, the
freedom of the press or the rights of the people to redress the government, and
a government with no rights to enact any law restricting the practice of
religion.
In that country, the Palestinians are allowed to bury Arafat in an appropriate
place, they are not drinking from mud puddles while Israeli's are constructing
gated communities, there is no Infantada, Israel doesn't need three billion
dollars a year of American tax-[ayer money, and the Arab/Muslim world can go
about it's way without worrying whether or not they are going to be the next
victim of American foreign policy.
Promote unity and tolerance of diversity. If we truly want 'freedom to be on
the march in the Middle East' then we must truly allow the citizens of the
middle east to be free, to be free from intolerance, be free from a foreign
occupation, be free from a despotic tyrant, and be free to choose their own
religion, their own government, and their own constitution.
Barring that, we are in for a long, long struggle in which thousands of
Americans and hundreds of thousands of Muslims will die in the vain name of
theocracy.
Wesley Parish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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. Marcuse’s 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."
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