You shall not hate your brother in your heart,
you shall surely reprove your fellow and not bear guilt because of him.
Leviticus 19:17
“This last winter was another lost in fog. As usual he did nothing.” In this way A.B. Yehoshua introduces readers to the anonymous, plodding, intellectually undistinguished Israeli protagonist of his story “Facing the Forests,” which appeared in 1968. The character betrays clumsiness even with his own perceptions, which often strike him as blurry, out of focus. A haze encircles him. At first he seems merely lazy, but slowly, slowly, at the glacial pace of a narrative that unfolds in a universe staggering beneath its own drowsiness, the reader realizes that this man is bound by an incapacitating awareness that something terrible has gone wrong. He has been sewn into an inheritance, bequeathed to him at birth, which he is powerless to set right. This awareness thickens and befuddles him, affecting him more than it seems to affect anyone else in the story. The other characters are utterly immune to whatever dark reality shackles him in place.
Solitude, his friends decree, will cure him. They propose a plan: he must become a forest ranger — ads in the newspaper assure them that such a position exists. All alone for months on end surveilling the trees in case of fire, this isolation will invigorate him, they insist, and shake loose the clutches of inertia. They do not know what the reader freshly suspects: that inertia is the mechanism by which he ignores an unbearable truth. It is his cure, and there is no cure for it.
Since protestation requires energy, which his crushing passivity saps, he finds himself some days later at the Forestry Service where “in a sort of dangerous drowsiness” he cannot stop himself from expressing his disbelief that there are any forests at all in a country as arid as Israel. The manager of the department, visibly insulted, assigns our gloomy hero to one of the larger forests. He will not be alone there; there is also an Arab laborer, about whom “they feel certain he has no prejudices.” Before his departure, a friend suggests that he make use of his leisurely job as a scout to finally distinguish himself academically. Why not sink his teeth into a subject — the Crusades, for example? Together they pack a suitcase full of history books.
A truck from the Forestry Service carries him from Jerusalem — “fading like a dream” — into a forest populated with pines so alien to that topography he is surprised they could take root in the rocky soil. The dream that he leaves behind is a world in which everyone but himself goes about ignoring a past which they are powerless to alter, though it hangs heavily over their present and their future. In this land, the Holy Land, more perhaps than any other track of earth, the living live alongside ghosts, and the ghosts preside.
At long last he alights at a small house, a two-story lookout post, in which an Arab man and his daughter also live. The man is mute — his tongue was cut out long ago. (“Did we cut it out or did they?” our hero wonders.) The Fire Scout’s solitude remains virtually undisturbed until, soon after his arrival, his timid father comes to visit. In this confrontation between father and son, Yehoshua forces the generations to face one another. The story presumably occurs in the year it was published, which means that the Fire Scout was ten years old when his country was established. His father’s generation oversaw that creation, and so this father bequeathed to this son not only a great victory but also a painful past. In the Fire Scout’s case, this father is the one responsible — though no single individual bears the blame for the ruthlessness of history.
Father and son sit in silence, broken occasionally by the old man’s awkward mutterings as he tries to strike up discussion. Why, he asks, doesn’t his son treat the Jewish dimension of the Crusades? The mass Jewish suicides in the Rhineland, for example, rather than the Muslim blood spilled by Christian hands in the Holy Land? This is the only time in Yehoshua’s tale that the two histories which are the ultimate subject of the story, winding around one another like twisted arteries, are overtly juxtaposed: the Muslim presence on the land from which the Jews were evicted a thousand years before the First Crusade, and the Jewish longing for return, punctuated and deepened by slaughters in exile. But the Fire Scout does not know this history, and he cannot answer his father. The son smiles and the two slip back into silence. Their silence is symptomatic of an overwhelming historical ignorance, which is often the condition of citizens who live in the grip of history. This ignorance, and the complacence that it fosters, is the ultimate villain of the story. A day or so before the father leaves, he mumbles warnings about the Arab who might any day set fire to the forest. Why not? he asks. His son offers no answer.
The Fire Scout returns to his books, but after a week heaving himself from line to line, he finds that he has read only three pages. Discouraged and distracted, he ventures out into the forest for the first time since his arrival. On the stones at his feet, he notices brass plaques glittering in the dappled sunlight. The plaques have names stamped on them: “Louis Schwartz of Chicago” and “the King of Burundi and his People.” These are the names of donors who have contributed to the national project of afforestation, to plant trees in a land so lacking in them. He stoops and reads plaque after plaque, repeating the names to himself, and is suddenly overcome by a great sadness.
Hikers begin to flow into the forest for the summer. From afar they look to him rather like Crusaders. At night they set small, harmless fires. At first he worries that a stray spark will set the forest ablaze, but after some time he discovers in himself a vague longing to see the trees go up in flames. A group of hikers seeks out the Fire Scout to ask a question: Where exactly is the Arab village marked on the map? It should be here, right in the forest where they are standing. Has he seen it? He assures them that there is no such village. The map must be mistaken. But that night he cannot sleep. The names on the plaques resurface in his memory, taunting him. He climbs out of bed, plods downstairs, and brusquely wakes the Arab on the floor below. When he tries to pronounce the name of the missing village, the mute Arab is overcome with astonishment and excitement. He jumps out of bed and points excitedly outside the window. The Fire Scout smiles and retreats back upstairs. So there was an Arab village there, long ago, or not so long ago, before the war for independence in 1948.
A brief historical excursus: Since the first Aliyah (or wave of Jewish immigration to the land of Israel) beginning in 1882, Jews had journeyed across Europe and Russia to their ancient homeland, the promised land, which was then under Ottoman control. Most of the land that these beleaguered, penurious Jews could afford to buy were plots of mosquito-infested swampland owned by absentee Arab landowners who were glad to sell. The pioneers’ momentous task was to make that land habitable. It was grueling, maddening work. Some went back to Europe, many died from malaria, others committed suicide. The few that survived managed to drain and convert the swamps into farmland. It was not long before these extraordinary pioneers had established a sufficiently large and thriving society and accumulated enough property — legally, according to the Ottoman legal code which the British, who governed the land after 1922, largely adopted — that the British proposed a partition plan: in 1936, as a solution to the growing conflict between the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine, the British suggested that the Jews would maintain control of all those regions which were already under Jewish control and the Palestinian Arabs (as they were newly called) would get the rest. The Jewish leadership accepted this proposal; the Palestinian and Arab leadership rejected it. A similar plan was proposed by the British, accepted by the Zionist leadership, and rejected by the Arab and Palestinian leadership again in 1947. On the night of November 29, 1947, when the United Nations voted to adopt the partition plan and authorized the establishment of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, Jews danced in the streets. Eight of them were murdered by Palestinians. The British withdrew on May 15, 1948, the State of Israel was declared, and the War of Independence (as the Jews call it) immediately ensued, between the Jews of the new, internationally ratified state and the attacking armies of Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt. Israel won an unlikely victory, and territories within the Mandate of Palestine that had been controlled by Arabs before the war came under Israeli control. For Palestinians, the war became known as al Naqba, the Destruction, in which many Palestinians were expelled by Israeli forces and many fled. The Palestinians were rebuffed or forced into refugee camps by all of the Arab countries into which they fled. Those who remained within the borders of the newly founded Jewish state became its citizens, guaranteed fundamental rights by its Declaration of Independence which the Jewish rulers of the state sometimes honored in the breach.
In the decades after 1948, wealthy Zionists from other countries, and many thousands of Jewish families and schoolchildren, donated trees to create forests like the one that the protagonist in Yehoshua’s story oversees. These trees grew over evidence of the forest’s former life. Nature often obfuscates the past, though frequently it requires the cooperation of politics and people. Landscapes bear the fingerprints of human history. They are historical documents. The Fire Scout begins to perceive this, to notice the revisions in the arboreal palimpsest over which he keeps watch, though Yehoshua does not communicate this realization outright. He gestures towards it. His Israeli readers know what it means; they understand the implicit condemnation. As Yehoshua — a patriarch of Israeli literature, who died in Tel Aviv last June — said in a speech to Israeli college students a few years ago, “We cannot behave as if the war did not happen. We cannot behave as if the Naqba did not happen. Yes, it was a just war. But even in a just war, terrible things are done.” His story is a critique of the cognitive consequences of victory. Reading it now, one wonders whether the Israelis have ever adequately faced the forests.
Back in the forest, the procession of hikers gives way to a procession of ceremonies. Donors teem in, the old manager from the Forestry Service returns each day to give speeches and cut ribbons while photographers flash their cameras. New plaques are fastened to rocks, and new trees take root. The Fire Scout confronts his old acquaintance, the manager, who says triumphantly, “You see? There are forests after all!” Before leaving, the manager asks what the Fire Scout’s opinion is of the Arab worker at the station, whom a department official suspects of harboring a stock of kerosene. The manager thinks there is no need to worry: the Arab seems a placid fellow. “He’s a local isn’t he?” the manager asks. “A local?” “Because our forest is growing over, well, over a ruined village… a small village… But that is a thing of the past.” Is it?
The Fire Scout’s mistress comes to visit him, and insists that he return with her. He refuses, and when she leaves she takes all connection to his former life with her. All hope for return to an untroubled, uncomplicated existence, to a past in which he was ignorant of the forest and all it hides, is extinguished. On the way back to his cabin on a cold evening, he meets the mute Arab. Gripped by a strong desire to warm his hands, the Fire Scout strikes match after match, each of which are blown out by “damp, traitorous air.” The Arab stares with wild eyes as the scout walks over to the hideout where the kerosene is hidden, and pours a flask of clear liquid onto the ground. He throws down a lit match and flames shoot up. The two men stand, bodies pressed close to the bonfire, which slowly dies. The Arab watches in despair as the scout stamps out the lingering sparks. “It was only a lesson,” the Fire Scout thinks to himself.
The Fire Scout’s alienation has thickened after being forced to reckon with the forest’s tainted past. He wants his guilt to be exorcized — specifically, he wants the accursed place burned to the ground — but he cannot bring himself to set the fire. He wants the Arab to do it for him. The mute man tries to communicate with the Fire Scout. He gesticulates wildly and thrashes the stump of his tongue inside his mouth so that his whole head shakes. He wants to tell the Fire Scout about his wives who were murdered right here on this land, but the Fire Scout smiles and pretends not to comprehend. “Did there used to be a village here? He sees nothing but trees.”
Finally, at midnight on the eve of the Fire Scout’s last day on the job, the Arab sets fire to the forest. The scout watches happily at first as the flames lick at his small two-story house. Eventually the Scout grabs the Arab’s daughter and carries her for miles, until the pines thin out and give way to parched, struggling shoots. The Arab appears from out of the wreckage, takes his daughter, and vanishes. The police arrive and after a few hours of uncomfortable interrogation the Fire Scout implicates the Arab, as the police had hoped and expected he would. The conclusion is nauseating.
Like the rest of us, Yehoshua’s protagonist finds himself in a national community with many of whose inhabitants he would never willingly form a moral community. (There are no morally homogenous communities, no perfectly evil or perfectly good societies.) Disquiet, malaise, suspicion, alienation, a vague but increasingly vivid awareness that he is building on something that is, at least in part, unstable or unjust — all this rises within him. There develops a peculiar heartsickness. It is the special agony of incomplete alienation, the torment of a wounded loyalty.
There are many ways to respond to the immorality of one’s own people. The most common response is no response at all, a numb complacency. Of course one can also righteously defect and relinquish one’s membership in the group. This is usually the response of fools who insist on an impossible purity in human affairs. Do its immoral actions morally vitiate an entire polity? Is the United States nothing but slavery and racism? Is Ukraine nothing but its corruption? Is Israel nothing but occupation? (It may be necessary, alas, to remind the present-day reader that Israel’s very existence is also an expression of right and justice.) The task is to honor what deserves to be honored and to renounce what deserves to be renounced. Too many Zionists find this too difficult to attempt. They have trouble making such distinctions, as if loyalty is incompatible with honesty. They protest that since Israel is constantly under attack (and its enemies, they argue, never are), only traitorous Zionists would publicly accuse Israel. Such an orientation conditions — insists upon — dishonesty.
What is instead required is heartsickness. Not of the passive sort, to be sure; but heartsickness that provokes debate and dissent and political action. Heartsickness is a healthy expression of patriotism, and it is also an expression of loyalty. A Jewish prooftext, if one is required: the exacting duality of heartsickness is broached by the verse in the Torah from which the rabbis deduce that we are commanded to hold our people to account and that we not hate them: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, you shall surely reprove your fellow and not bear guilt because of him.” Such heartsickness is a regular feature of responsible commitment to any state, including the Jewish one.
The Fire Scout’s heartsickness is commendable, but his befuddlement and confusion are failings. His heartsickness, like everything else about him, is passive. He cannot bring himself to read the history with which he must reckon. But the realities of power demand, among other things, introspection and unflagging alertness. Moral membership must overpower inertia, platitude, and bleary-eyed habituation. The vague sense that we have inherited guilt must precipitate education and then action, as opposed to brutish outrage or lazy complacence.
Yehoshua’s extraordinary story, which was a sensation when it was originally published, is a useful lens through which to interpret the evolution of Israeli politics. In 1968, when the story appeared, the mute and powerless Arab seemed to Yehoshua representative of the Arab Israeli experience. Much has since changed. The Arabs of Israel still suffer considerable discrimination, but, for now, they have a strong political voice. Mansour Abbas, the heroic member of Knesset who in 2021 secured his party’s place as the first Arab party to sit in a governing coalition in Israel, is a repudiation of Yehoshua’s wounded, tongueless Arab whose only recourse was to burn the forest down. Abbas joined Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid to form the coalition that finally ousted Benjamin Netanyahu from power, but Bennet and Lapid would never have been able to invite Abbas into their coalition if Netanyahu had not legitimized Abbas by trying to secure his partnership first. Netanyahu’s cynical courtship of the leader of the community that he had previously slandered had a sanguine consequence: it made Abbas halal for Israeli politics. This is what Israeli politics are like: there are myriad rules and biases which dictate what will be construed as too Arab-friendly. Even actors who are impartial to the Arab question (and a growing majority would rather ignore the question altogether than address it in any way) must obey these etiquettes or suffer political obscurity.
Abbas has gentle eyes and a sweet, soft voice. He is often described as a teddy-bear, which is surprising, because he has spent his political career nimbly and courageously walking a hair-thin tightrope in order to accrue and maintain the legitimacy necessary to advocate for his constituents in a political order in which Arab Israelis have enjoyed, before him, practically no influential representation. According to the 2020 national census, there are 1,956,000 Arab residents in Israel, out of a total population of 9,291,000; they comprise twenty percent of the Israeli population. Most of them live in all-Arab villages in the north and the middle of the country, though about ten percent of Arab Israelis live in integrated villages and cities alongside Jews. Thirty-six percent of Arab Israelis suffer from poverty, which is double the national average. In the last six years, crime waves have ravaged Arab cities in Israel, and criminal gangs have come to dominate the community. Abbas, who often acts as peacemaker in the bloody disputes between gangs, has pledged that he will serve as an effective advocate to address these and a complicated web of related maladies. His efforts have yielded results: he has secured billions of dollars’ worth of support for Arab communities.
Abbas has sacrificed much in order to demonstrate that it is possible to improve conditions for Arab Israelis while still respecting the Jewish majority: “I’m trying to show Jews and Arabs a new way to live together in which each side will realize itself as a collective and as individuals. It is [my party’s] role always to emphasize the rights of the minority, but the majority has rights too, and we have to preserve them as well.” For his trouble, he has become reviled both by the Israeli right and by segments of the Arab Israeli population who consider him a quisling and a sell-out. This is because Arab Israelis, who increasingly call themselves Palestinian Israelis to signal solidarity with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, know very well that Abbas has had to steer clear of the Palestinian issue entirely. He does not mention the occupation, or the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, because if he did the Jewish majority in Knesset would not do business with him. Out of fear for his own safety, he has had to stop praying at Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. Abbas is confident, however, that a significant majority of Arab Israelis are heartened by the progress that he has made in the government over the course of the past year.
In his lack of revolutionary sentiments Abbas is a revolutionary figure, rather like what Salam Fayyad once was in Ramallah. In an environment inflamed on all sides by ideology and bigotry, he is a practical man. In his person and in his program, he demonstrates that it is possible for an Arab Israeli to assume a position of leadership in Israel. Indeed, his objective should be the objective of every Zionist and every Israeli: to transform his constituency’s conception of citizenship in Israel. He has said with pride that “it has been my great pleasure to gain support among the Arab sector. In most public opinion polls, no less than 60 percent support what we are doing. Even among people who have not voted for UAL [United Arab List] and voted for the other [Arab] party, the Joint List, almost 45 percent of their voters support what we are doing. Many are waiting and seeing what we can do, what we can accomplish. Of course, this depends on the other side, on the Zionist parties, and whether they will give us the opportunity to succeed. If we succeed, then I have no doubt that more than 85 percent of the public in Israel will support us.” He is right: whatever progress he is permitted to make will be determined by the fate of the Israeli right in Israeli politics, and a particularly ferocious segment of the Israeli right is committed to his failure.
In 1968, the same year that A. B. Yehoshua published “Facing the Forests,” a man named Meir Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn. It began as a Jewish vigilante group patrolling high-crime neighborhoods in which Jews lived and were endangered, and then it got into the struggle on behalf of Soviet Jewry, distinguishing itself from more influential groups in that cause with its use of violence; but eventually it became perhaps the most influential, and certainly the most extreme, of the extremist groups in the Israeli right. Kahane emigrated to Israel in 1971, just three years before the official launch of Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, the movement dedicated to the (illegal) Jewish settlement in the territories that they call Judea and Samaria; its purposes were strategic — to foreclose any possibility of territorial concessions in any negotiation about the disposition of the territories — and spiritual — to fulfill a religious vision of Zionism with the Bible as its justification. (The settlement saga also began in the year that “Facing the Forests” appeared, when a group of militant religious Zionists posing as Swiss tourists checked in to the Park Hotel in Hebron for Passover in March, 1968 and then refused to leave.)
In Israel Kahane started promoting what he called T.N.T. — or teror neged terror, terror against terror — which in practice meant countering Arab violence with Jewish violence. (A decade later his anti-Palestinian bloodthirst would be fulfilled by a terrorist network of settlers that became known as Mahteret or “the underground.”) He preached the rankest hatred of Arabs and promulgated a worldview that was the mirror-image of the worldview that nearly destroyed the entirety of European Jewry. He lamented, for example, “the growing number of Jewish girls who date and sleep with and marry Arabs. Who easily bed the foreign laborers and foreign soldiers. The incredible pollution of the Jewish seed.” His blatant, disgraceful racism also matched inch for inch the ugliest expressions of Arab anti-Semitism. It is darkly ironic that, for Kahane’s twisted followers, Arab anti-Semitism implicitly legitimated Kahanism. The logic is as simple as it is barbaric: fight hate with hate, ugliness with ugliness, dehumanization with dehumanization.
Forty years ago Kahane developed a strain of Jewish anti-Arab racism which was so morally vile that his party — Kach, or Thus!, with a fist for its logo — was eventually banned from the Knesset, in 1985, under the Racism Law, which banned parties guilty of inciting racism. In 1990 Kahane was assassinated in Manhattan by an Islamist Arab gunman who had ties to the terrorist network that would perpetrate the first bombing of the World Trade Center three years later. But his movement, his party, did not die with him. For a while its standard-bearer was a madman named Baruch Marzel, Kahane’s right-hand man, who personally assaulted a Palestinian, an Israeli police officer, and a left-wing Israeli activist, but serially failed to make it into the Knesset. The legacy of Kahanism is now represented in Israeli politics, and prominently, by the foul Itamar Ben Gvir, who was a member of Kahane’s Kach party just as his father was before him.
Ben Gvir has given wild speeches at commemorations of Kahane, celebrating his ideology of hatred. For several years he has participated in and led “the flag march,” an annual provocation in which xenophobic Jewish extremists carry Israeli flags through the Muslim Quarter of the old city of Jerusalem, reminiscent of the march that Kahane led along that same route the day after his party was elected to the Knesset. Both marches were and are intended to elicit violence. Ben Gvir appears regularly with members of Lehava, a far-right Jewish terror group which, among other things, targets Arab-Jewish couples and community projects. Ben-Gvir calls himself an anti-assimilationist, which is his euphemism for a racist obsession with biological purity. Polls have predicted that his party, Otzma Yehudit, may achieve a significant number of seats in the Knesset after the next election in November. It is not speculation to suggest that Netanyahu will invite him into the governing coalition if it means securing the premiership: Netanyahu flirted with inviting Otzma Yehudit into the government in 2021. Ben Gvir detests Mansour Abbas, of course; he refers to him as a supporter of terrorism, and in a tweet he complained that “after they raised prices and taxes to enrich the terrorist supporter Mansour Abbas, even the prices on bread have risen by tens of percent and Yair Lapid does not care. A disconnected group that does not care if children go to bed hungry. With God’s help in the next election we will correct the injustices of the part of ‘healing and change.’ We deserve better.”
This despicable individual became an avatar of the extremist underbelly of the Israeli right in 1995, a few weeks before Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, when Ben Gvir wrenched the Cadillac logo off of Rabin’s car and boasted to the television cameras that “if we can get to his car, we will get to Rabin too.” In the intervening years he became a lawyer, and, like Kahane before him, offers legal services to Jewish terrorists. Ben Gvir told a disciple, a woman named Roni who became a member of his gang when she was fourteen years old, that whereas Kahane was defanged because he broke Israeli law, he, Ben Gvir, will cunningly stay within the boundaries of the law while promulgating his doctrine: “They placed Kahane outside of the law. But I will play by their laws. They will not manage to place me outside of the law.” And he has succeeded.
The Israeli channel MAKO conducted an interview with Roni about her time under Ben Gvir’s influence, and it is among the only windows into his netherworld. Roni recalled that one weekend, when she was fourteen years old, Ben-Gvir invited her and others to his house outside of Hebron (where, incidentally, a monument to Kahane stands in the nearby settlement of Qiryat Arba), and advised the children to go into the Arab casbah, approach an Arab man, and quietly mutter the words “Mohammed is a pig.” His plan was to ignite a conflagration. Her interviewer asked, “What went through your mind when you whispered that?” Roni replied: “I would provoke him to start a commotion and then I could say that he started it, not me.” She also described another instance when she and a group of Ben Gvirists were together on Shabbat and saw an Arab boy walking alone. They ganged up on him and then ran together into the closest Arab house and trashed it while the family watched. “When you’re in such a group,” she explained, “you feel like you are in a Jewish supremacy, you feel like you are better than them and… you end up doing things that are not so far from what was done to the Jews.” The interviewer asked, “Because you did some things that were not so different from a pogrom?” Roni answered: “Correct.” Eventually Roni dropped out of school and went to live on a hillside with other teenagers who would organize attacks on nearby Arab villages and on Israeli army bases.
Ben Gvir has said that he would never represent rapists or those guilty of indecent acts, but he is willing to represent Israeli terrorists such as the ones who used arson to kill the Dawabsheh family in their house in the village of Dum in the West Bank in 2015. “That was an entirely different matter,” he explained. “It was not murder for the sake of murder. It was ideologically motivated.” At a wedding of right-wing settlers later that same year, videos circulated of the guests stabbing a photograph of Ali Dawabsheh, the baby who had been killed in the fire. Ben Gvir was at the wedding; he said that it took him a little while to realize that the baby in the photo was Ali Dawabsheh, and that when he realized it was, he was surprised and ashamed. Apparently he thought the guests were stabbing photos of a different baby.
Itamar Ben Gvir and his contemptible comrades are useful to extremists on both sides. For those who hate Israel, their ascendance confirms everything that they already believe. For those who hate Arabs, their ascendance whets an appetite for intolerance and cruelty and even blood. Kahane’s ideological grandchildren are fittingly responsible for the new mainstreaming of a repulsive Jewish racism. Otzma Yehudit is a minority party, but it is not the smallest minority party in Israel, and it is large enough to figure in Israel’s endless and byzantine parliamentary politics. The harsh truth is that the party’s extremism has been steadily normalized, and this has had the effect of shifting the entire spectrum rightward.
Otzma Yehudit’s undemocratic tendencies are mirrored by more moderate right-wing colleagues in the Knesset who recently passed a law criminalizing the flying of Palestinian flags in publicly funded places, such as universities. The bill was introduced by Eli Cohen, a member of the center-right Likud Party, in response to a particularly large demonstration commemorating the Naqba at Ben Gurion University. At the debate preceding the vote on the bill, he shouted at those in opposition to “go to Gaza or Jordan.” He also snarled at the Arab members of parliament that “Naqba Day is your day of jealousy against Israel… your eyes pop out when you see how we turned the state of Israel into a powerful country.” Israel Katz, another member of Likud, declared: “I warned the Arab students who are flying Palestine flags at universities: Remember ‘48. Remember our war of independence and your Naqba. Don’t stretch the rope too thin.… If you don’t calm down, we’ll teach you a lesson that won’t be forgotten.”
It is true that a number of the people participating in the protests commemorating the Naqba are agitating for the destruction of the Jewish state. They fly the Palestinian flag, in many cases, because they want the state of Israel to be destroyed and for Palestine to include all the territory “from the river to the sea.” Zionists, on any point of the political spectrum, must oppose those aspirations, on moral and historical grounds; allegations of illegitimacy and fantasies of elimination are not criticisms, they are threats. But these same self-respecting Zionists must also allow the demonstrations to take place, because they live in what they love to call “the only democracy in the Middle East,” and democracies must tolerate non-violent protest no matter how unpleasant.
On March 10 of this year, members of Knesset also renewed the Citizenship Law, which bans Palestinians who marry Israelis from obtaining permanent residency in Israel. Whereas the country generally grants residency to most non-citizens who are married to Israelis under a policy called Family Unification, this law was designed to exempt Palestinians married to Israelis from reaping that benefit. About 12,700 such Palestinians live in Israel. Many are not permitted to drive or to open bank accounts. If their marriage ends — through death or divorce — the Palestinian partner may be separated from their children and deported to the West Bank. In early 2022, Ayelet Shaked, the Interior Minister, gave instructions to continue enforcing the law even though it had not yet been renewed. Ben Gvirism is only a few steps away from the spirit of this effort.
It is important to note — to insist — that the Palestinian question and the Arab Israeli question are distinct. The former concerns an occupied population in need of a political settlement, the latter concerns citizens of the state. Those who insist that the Palestinian problem will be solved as soon as Israel halts the occupation ignore the role that the Palestinians themselves play in the perpetuation of violence. Israelis are right to be mindful of the history of Palestinian behavior in the West Bank and Gaza. Though Israel cannot survive as both a democratic and Jewish state unless the occupation ends, the occupation cannot be unilaterally dismantled, at least not responsibly. When Israel tried to do so in the past in part of Gaza, Palestinian extremists responded with violence because they did not want a two-state solution, they wanted a one state solution, which is to say, they wanted the elimination of the Jewish state. This conflict will not be resolved by people who refuse to acknowledge the dangers to Israel.
Still, as the Citizenship Law makes plain, the Arab Israeli issue and the Palestinian issue often overlap. Arab citizens of Israel are rightly reminded often that in their country they enjoy rights which would be denied them in any Arab country — but they are not in an Arab country, and it is abundantly clear to them, and to honest observers of Israeli society, that they enjoy fewer of the fruits of life in a democracy than their Jewish cohabitants do. It is morally wrong and politically imprudent to strip a minority, especially a large minority, of their rights. These existential disparities only increase resentment — and Palestinian nationalism — among Arab Israelis, many of whom are related to Palestinians who live nearby in the West Bank.
The controversial Nation-State Law of 2018 was another awful reminder that Israel serves it Jewish citizens before its Arab citizens. The law was designed to protect the Jewish character of Israel (as if it is under threat by anything except the prospect of the annexation of the territories), and it states that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” It also stripped Arabic of its status as one of the national languages, and demoted it to a language with “special status.” This was a slap in the face of Arab Israelis. The symbolism was clear: Arab citizens are second-class citizens. The legislation underscored the already manifest reality that Arab citizens of Israel are considered by a majority of the Israeli government to be a subaltern group and a threat to the country. It also repudiates the remarkably inclusive and egalitarian spirit of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which somehow found a way to combine a universal guarantee of rights with a powerful statement of Jewish self-determination.
These are just some of the laws that overtly affect Arab Israelis. But then there are the unspoken rules that dictate their quality of life. The crime waves in Arab communities that Mansour Abbas has dedicated enormous effort to quelling should be dealt with by the government, but so little of the national budget (and national interest) is dedicated to the maintenance of Arab cities and villages. The spending package that Netanyahu passed for Arab communities (shockingly, the biggest to date) was largely wasted because the infrastructure was not prepared for the proper allocation of funds. It is incredibly difficult for Arab Israelis to get permits to build homes legally. Many sit on waiting lists for years. Owing to this, most of the buildings in Arab cities and villages in Israel are illegal, which means, among other things, that their homes cannot be hooked up to the electricity grids in the country. Black market electricity circuits are set up in these places, and they explode regularly. In addition, the demolition of illegally built Arab buildings accelerated during the pandemic and left almost a thousand Arabs homeless. If the Bennett-Lapid government had been permitted to last longer than one year, perhaps Abbas would have been able to attend to these and other conditions. But that is a senseless hypothetical: there is a reason the government was forced to collapse. There were just too many opponents of decency.
And all of this leaves aside the other forest: the question of peace with Palestinians. About this the majority of Israelis, like Yehoshua’s forest ranger, would rather not think at all. Mansour Abbas was able to achieve as much as he did in a coalition with Naftali Bennet because the two agreed to leave the issue alone. Abbas has made it clear that he considers it his responsibility to do what he can for his constituents, and that he can only ameliorate conditions for them if he steers clear of the Palestinian conundrum. But I find myself returning to the following questions. There is a politically significant abundance of right-wing Zionists who insist that the only solution to the Palestinian question is the annexation of all territories into a single Jewish state and who remind the Arab Israelis at every opportunity that they will never be treated as equal citizens of a Jewish state. As the ancient rabbis used to say when they were incredulous, do their ears hear what their mouths have just said? What do these Jewish patriots think will happen if a one-state solution is declared? Do they imagine that the Arab citizens of their newly established utopia will go merrily into that good democracy, or is democracy not a part of their plan? Do they believe that 3.2 million Palestinians can be smoothly and justly absorbed? Have they forgotten that a permanent demographic majority of Jews in the state is the very essence of Zionism’s revolutionary promise of security for the Jewish people?
The right-wing integrationists, in other words, are the ones who need to believe in Arab and Israeli comity from the river to the sea. (They deny this, of course, because for them integration has nothing to do with emancipation and everything to do with domination.) Their single state will be a multi-ethnic state. One would think, therefore, that if they want their single multi-ethnic state to function and to sustain itself, these Zionists’ top priority should be the amelioration of the quality of life for Arab Israelis. Why aren’t they protesting Ben Gvir? Why aren’t they protesting the Nation State Law? Why are they regularly insulting the people with whom they propose to share a polity, and already do share a polity?
Why, indeed, aren’t they voting for Mansour Abbas? As it happens, some Jewish Israelis are. Polls indicate that in the next election Jewish votes will account for fully half a seat of Mansour Abbas’ party. The handful of Jews who vote for Mansour Abbas represent an enlightened minority. They are taking the future seriously. But most Israelis, like the characters in Yehoshua’s story who live in Jerusalem and have never been to the forest, prefer to ignore the problem. Their willful ignorance is one of the villains of our story. Since 1968, Israelis have developed more elaborate methods for ignoring the problem than simply planting trees over it. Highways are designed, for example, in such a way that Israelis never have to look at the long wall that they have constructed between the Israeli and Palestinian populations. (As a security measure, the wall is a success and a necessity. But it has the added “benefit” of shielding Israeli citizens from ever having to face the realities of life on the other side of it.) Except for Haaretz and some smaller publications, the reporting on most of these issues is highly selective. There exists an infrastructure for ignorance and indifference.
As should be obvious by now, the kind of Zionists who do not care about the fate of the Palestinians are also the kind who do not care about Arab Israelis. For this and many other reasons, a one-state solution is no solution at all. But is there really any point, at this late date in the history of this conflict, in pretending that neither Israel nor the Palestinians have committed crimes and abuses? Is there really any point in pretending that these crimes and abuses vitiate the right of each people to part of the land? These two peoples are not going anywhere. They have nowhere to go. They both deserve safety and dignity. Their fates are forever intertwined.
Heartsickness is not the same as heartbrokenness. Heartsickness is a finer kind of pain. The unalloyed emotions are more common: usually one is either enraptured or envenomed. But heartsickness is nothing so unitary. Through it one is both steadfast and wounded. It is the only politically responsible kind of loyalty, because it makes room for criticism, even withering criticism, within loyalty, within ahavat yisrael, or love of the Jewish people. Zionists, like the decent citizens of all actual states, must learn to be cognitive contortionists, condemning Israel for what it does wrong, praising it for what it does right, and defending it when it is wrongly accused. One must be careful not to commit the Fire Scout’s mistake: one must not allow the admixture of diffidence and ignorance to congeal into hatred and incite one to burn the whole thing down. The existence of Israel, and its security, is completely justified. But the duties of a Zionist do not stop at support. One must also not permit a marrow-deep loyalty to compel one to defend the indefensible, or to silence criticism for fear of abetting ideological enemies.
This is difficult work, especially regarding a conflict upon which so many people opine but which so few understand. The conflict itself must be disentangled from the discourse about it, that one which rages on social media and college campuses every time influencers are reminded about that tempestuous plot of Earth to which they have not given a thought since the last related virality. The ferocity of that discourse is sustained by an obnoxious disdain for the full history. Virtually all involved developed their view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the political and cultural environment that they inhabit, without bothering to learn about the mind-boggling intricacies that characterize it. Everyone’s position is a priori.
On the left, the loudest and most common criticism of Israel begins and ends with the assumption that Israel is an illegitimate state, that it is a colonialist enterprise, that the Jews materialized in the Levant after the Holocaust as devastated interlopers and that that tragedy blinded the international community long enough to grant that traumatized mass statehood. Jewish history and Middle Eastern history are ignored. Millions of people blithely pass judgment about the existential legitimacy of a country about which they know only what they have gleaned from headlines and infographics. For this reason, they often criticize it for the wrong thing and with the wrong intensity. (I leave aside the considerable segment of Israel’s critics, here and abroad, that is animated by anti-Semitism.) Why bother learning about a country that shouldn’t exist in the first place? And the loudest and most visible responses from the Zionist right are often also fueled by selective ignorance. They know enough to defend Israel when it is wrongly accused, but not enough to criticize it for its transgressions; or they do not wish to know the latter, because their Zionist pride is too coarse to practice such self-scrutiny. Why bother criticizing a country that everyone else is already lambasting?
Consider the terrible killing of Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11 during an Israeli military raid on the city of Jenin in the West Bank. The raid was precipitated by Arab terrorist attacks that resulted in the death of nineteen civilians within Israel in the preceding weeks. Is nineteen a negligible number? During the raid, the renowned Al Jazeera reporter was shot in the head. Though the circumstances of her death remained murky for months, Al Jazeera insisted immediately, with perfect certainty, before any investigation was even possible, that she had been “assassinated in cold blood” by the Israeli army. There was no evidence that this was true, or that it was false; but news outlets across the globe repeated the “analysis.” Most consumers of mainstream media therefore continue to believe that Israel ordered the assassination of a journalist.
For months the Palestinian Authority held onto the bullet that had killed Abu Akleh, preventing a third-party investigation. Meanwhile CNN published a “report” thirteen days after the tragedy which stated that “new evidence suggests Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.” But the report itself contained no new evidence. Thirteen days is not enough time to conduct a responsible inquiry. The New York Times released a report on June 3 in which two experts analyzed the sound of the gunfire from a video recorded close to the site when Abu Akleh was shot. One expert deduced that it was likely fired by Israeli forces from “at least 181 yards… and up to 211 yards away;” the other deduced that it was fired “from a distance of 170 to 196 yards.” That means it was fired from about one tenth of a mile away — and Israeli soldiers were about that distance from Abu Akleh at the time. When the bullet was finally handed over to American investigators, the Department of State reported that, though the bullet was severely damaged, it is likely that it was fired by an Israeli soldier. The United States Security Coordinator “found no reason to believe that this was intentional, but rather the result of tragic circumstances.” But the a priori crowd — the priorists, we might call them — hardly noticed. In their minds the verdict was obvious, and was delivered on the day Abu Akleh was shot. (According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of journalists killed while covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1992 (25) is significantly smaller than the number killed covering Afghanistan (65), Russia (82), Syria (141) and Iraq (248) during the same period. Moreover, mainstream media outlets do not accuse American soldiers of “assassinating” journalists when they are killed in battle, but of killing them — a distinction with a good deal of difference.)
Then another terrible thing happened. At the funeral procession held on May 13 in East Jerusalem, Israeli riot police officers attacked the mourners carrying Abu Akleh’s coffin. In the videos of the event, a dozen or so armed and helmeted officers can be seen beating the unarmed mourners with batons. The coffin was barely saved from smashing to the ground. The Israeli police later said that they had attacked the pallbearers because the coffin had been carried rather than driven in a hearse, as had been agreed beforehand. The defiling of the funeral, the conduct of Israeli policemen at the event, was a disgrace. But most consumers of mainstream media had stopped paying attention to the Abu Akleh affair before the time of the funeral two days later, and so did not blame Israel for attacking the mourning procession. If the subject comes up, they blame Israel for deliberately assassinating a journalist, which is precisely what Israel did not do. In this way Israel is both wrongly accused and yet not held to account. And so it goes with many events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And there are blinding and corrupting ways of defending Israel. Zionists repeat catechismic assurances of Israel’s perfect innocence, which is priorism of the other kind. While Itamar Ben Gvir defends Israeli terrorists, many Zionists reflexively point out that there are more Palestinian terrorists, which is true but a way of changing the subject. While Ben Gvir’s political strength grows, many of Israel’s defenders protest — truthfully — that the Palestinian government rewards the families of Palestinian terrorists, and that Palestinians give their children candy in the streets when a terrorist murders a Jew. That, too, is a way of changing the subject. While Israeli Arabs are targeted directly and blatantly by Kahanists, many Zionists point out — truthfully — that the quality of life for Arab Israelis is better than the quality of life they enjoy in any Arab country. Again, a different subject.
Let us stop changing the subject. Is it really so difficult to condemn racist and violent Palestinians and racist and violent Israelis? What kind of a democracy justifies itself by comparing itself to non-democracies? These comparisons are sophistical and pathetic. Enslaved to a merely tribal loyalty, such Zionists are derelict in their duties and may preside over the corruption of their own country. After all, Ben Gvir and his supporters, and the radical Israeli right more generally, do not represent the majority, even if the undercurrent of racist hatred in the country is metastasizing beyond tolerable proportions. They depend for their political success on the passivity of the tribal loyalists, of the forest scouts, who are content to put no pressure on their own patriotism and never admit that Israel has moral failings.
It is not the duty of a citizen, or an ally, or a supporter of any cause, to lie, to evade and digress, to refuse knowledge, to suffice with slogans, to ignore or excuse the ugliest permutations of their own community. Right-wing Zionist extremism is growing in Israel. I am not a bad Jew or a bad Zionist for saying so, and you are not a good Jew and a good Zionist for changing the subject. Too many Zionists who live far from Yehoshua’s forest teach their children to fear the truth, as if Zionism or Israeli identity cannot withstand it. But fear of the truth is a dereliction of civic duty. The forests must be faced.
