Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 16:38:24 +0300
From: <aoz@univ.haifa.ac.il>

Dear friends,

The world has been watching these days on all major channels, the soap opera promoted by the Jewish settlers, the Israeli government and the mainstream mass media, simulating a saga of grief and desolation of refugees uprooted from their homes. We have been asked by many, including some liberal journalists and writers, to empathize with their sorrow and shock at being expelled (by their brethrens). The narrative underlying those scenes was utterly misleading, of course. It totally ignored Chapter 1 of this epic, in which those settlers, or their parents, left comfortable homes in Israel and aggressively trespassed Palestinian lands, appropriating, against any single clause of international law, land and water resources. It totally suppressed Chapter 3, in which all those grief-stricken families are getting substantial sums of money, out of the public coffers, to re-settle within Israel. And the affected tears of the so-called victims of the evacuation were once again this week drowned in the blood of Palestinians, murdered in cold blood by another member of the settlers crowd, for whom spilling the blood of innocent civilians is a rhetorical figure. For us, practitioners and theorists of the performing arts, it was another proof, in case we needed one, how, once the historicity of a given scene is dissimulated, the distance between fiction and reality is readily erased, resulting once again, as so often in history, with hegemonic narrative covering all traces of its ongoing repression and constant manipulation of public opinion.

The views from the (too) few evacuated settlements, on the Gaza strip, were supposed to divert our gaze from the prolonged suffering of the genuine refugees, who live in the most densely populated region in the world, trying to survive at an average salary of $2 a month; Or from the ongoing suffering of the West Bank Palestinians, spending hours at road blocks and cut daily from their fields or schools by the evil wall dividing their land. Who would build the wall preventing the settlers from murder, theft and hooliganism, blaspheming the name of the legacy of Judaism?

But when we are not carried away by the contrived sentimentality of this soap opera, we may look into the one genuine lesson to be extracted from it. In spite of what the leaders, the politicians, and the media would have us believe, it is so easy (as I have repeatedly reminded in these updates over the years) to do what it takes to recover injustice and bring about a just peace. After 18 years in Lebanon, the Israeli army has left it within a few hours. After 38 years in occupation of Gaza, all the settlements were evacuated in a few days. How much blood should be spilled in vain, in order for the West bank to be evacuated, for Israel to return to its recognized borders and recover its soul and integrity among the family of nations?

A great Israeli poet, and a much beloved personal friend, Dahlia Rabikowitch, has died today. She took her own life. Her admirable poetic sensitivity was often mobilized to express her political conscience. Beside all else, she was for me a living proof that the genuine tradition of Jewish culture, invested in humanist values, was not entirely betrayed to the vociferous messianic rhetoric of Israel today. I would like to pay my tribute to her sweet memory by citing one of her poems (translated into the English several years ago).

For better days,
A. Oz

—
Professor Avraham Oz
Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature
University of Haifa
Mount Carmel, 31905 Haifa, Israel
Office Tel. +972-4-8240672
Office Fax +972-4-8249713
Home Telefax +972-3-5609627
Mobile +972-50-7220783
Email: avitaloz@gmail.com

Dahlia Rabikowitch/”One Cannot Kill a Baby Twice”

Upon sewage puddles in Sabra and Shatila
Where you delivered masses of people
Considerable masses
From the world of living to the world of truth.

Night after night.
First they shot
Then they hung
At last they slaughtered with knives.
Terrified women appeared in urgence
Above a sand hillock:
“They slaughter us there,
In Shatila.”

A refined trail of a newborn moon was hung
Above the camps.
Our soldiers illuminated the place with lightening shells
Like daylight.
“Go back to the camp, march!” the soldier commanded
The yelling women from Sabra and Shatila.
He had orders to follow.
And the children were already laid in dung puddles
Their mouths wide open
Calm.

Nobody will hurt them anymore.
One cannot kill a baby twice.

And the moon’s trail became bigger and bigger
Until it turned into a complete coin of gold.

Our sweet soldiers
They asked nothing for themselves,
How strong was their desire
To return home in peace.