For as long as we have been alive, Jews have been known as the People of the Book, both admiringly and dismissively. Critical discourse — the parsing of texts and complex circumstances — has always been one of our sustaining values. In the literary heyday of the 60s, Jewishness — rejecting it, claiming it, or existing in a state of conflict about it — was a ubiquitous subject. American writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud, as well as Yiddish writers like I. B. Singer and Chaim Grade and Israeli writers such as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, opened up the larger global arena to the ethnic woes, joys and concerns of a persecuted and often despised minority.
It is all the more paradoxical then, and a sign of an intolerable wokeness, that Israelis have been singled out as representative of the sins perpetrated in the name of colonialism, apartheid and genocide. The literary world, never the most independent-minded of entities, has issued a boycott against Jewish and Israeli writers, Israeli publishers, book festivals and literary agencies that haven’t disavowed an allegiance to the Israeli cause. It’s as if Israelis are being placed outside the circle of informed discussants, unworthy of being included in issues that concern them as much as they do Palestinians.
Some of these thousands of pro-boycott writers include visible names like Sally Rooney, Arundhati Roy, Jonathan Lethem and Rachel Kushner — not to overlook tone-deaf literary theorist Judith Butler, who declared the hideous events of Oct. 7 a sign of “armed resistance.”
Among other questions, one might ask whom do these protestors think they are supporting? No one is arguing against the reality that the Palestinians have often been victimized, displaced and killed by Israelis, but they are also a people who support the fanatic, terrorist leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, and dance in the streets when Israelis are killed.
What began as a shocking, herd-like demonstration of animus and discrimination has become by now de rigeur, which makes the boycott all the more disturbing and impermeable. It is also a position completely ignorant of Middle Eastern history, when, within days of Israel declaring its independence in 1948 following the United Nations’ partition of Palestine, seven Arab countries — Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Syria — attacked the new nation. And let us not forget that to this day, the charter of Hamas includes the destruction of Israel as one of its unrepentant givens.
For sure, there were always those among the Israeli governing body who were unwilling to give the Arabs their due. But there were also those like Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin, who hoped to achieve an accommodation with snaky PLO leader Yasser Arafat when they shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993 to sign the (ultimately doomed) Oslo Accords. Even ultra-hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was willing to evacuate the Gaza Strip in 2005, which included expelling the nearly 9,000 Jews who lived there, in a unilateral effort to push for peace with the Palestinians. Gush Katif, as the area was called, was the agricultural pride of the country, with flourishing greenhouses that decades of labor had gone into creating, only for the Palestinians to destroy them within days after the Israeli retreat.
It’s possible to argue that the world, including many Jews themselves, has almost never been comfortable with Jews in a position of power. Jews have always been seen as weak, at the mercy of rulers and tyrants, compelled to pay a tax to live among ordinary mortals in European cities, and weak is what they are meant to be. To see Jews fight back, especially with the ferocity Israel has demonstrated in the last year, is to fly in the face of an unquestioned preconception.
The other, largely unspoken side of this conviction is that Israel is not supposed to be like other countries, committed to its own survival, even if such commitment takes a large toll on other people’s lives. We are meant to be the People of the Book, remember? Pacific, reflective, unvindictive, free of the rage that incites other minorities.
Perhaps to be the victim of as much historical animus is to seem to deserve it. Israelis — democratic and openly self-critical — have become the ultimate Other, while the Palestinians — autocratic and without dissension in their ranks — have become Ours to embrace. Back in 2001, the late French envoy Daniel Bernard — one of President Chirac’s closest confidantes — allegedly referred to Israel at a buffet party as “that shitty little country.” It is undoubtedly a view that many hold (including some Jews) but have sat on for decades after the bloodbath of Nazism.
But I have also been thinking of myself and my siblings, all of whom went to Jewish day schools, and would go on Friday to the shabby library on East 68th Street to take out a pile of books to read over the coming weekend, with the enforced inactivity of Sabbath. I loved reading about people utterly different from myself and about lands whose customs seemed strange but intriguing.
To intentionally exclude Israelis from literary representation seems shameful, a matter of cultural faddishness rather than acute political engagement. I suspect I know more about the history of the Irish Troubles than Sally Rooney (who didn’t allow her latest novel to be published in Israel) knows about the history of the Mideast. But this doesn’t seem to make much difference to the self-righteous, bien-pensees demonstrators and writers who want to bend Israel and their supporters to their will.
Still, the People of the Book are not as compliant as we would make them, studying Talmud in airless yeshivas with yarmulkes on their heads, left to a tiny share of the globe that was bequeathed them and now is begrudged them. They have some surprises up their sleeves, be it their military expertise or long-time peace activist writers like David Grossman, who continues to wrestle with beleaguering Middle Eastern issues in his work despite losing his own son to this intractable conflict back in 2006.
The nuances of what has been erroneously referred to as “the Occupation” have been altogether lost in the rubble of hatred on both sides — with the only real winners here the media game of propaganda and disinformation.
