Seven Oaks Magazine.

The history of major awards runs parallel to the history of embarrassing acceptance speeches; the two have, naturally, grown in tandem. But no matter how goofy the People magazine types may get behind the podium – the Sally Fieldses who feel really liked, the Helen Mirrens strangely hoisting their statuette and telling us that it’s the Queen – showbiz folk don’t tend to follow through into the realm of the embarrassing and obscene. Generally, that sort of thing is left to literary types, such as when Milan Kundera accepted the Jerusalem Prize in 1985:

In that opening paragraph of his acceptance speech, reproduced in his humbly-titled book The Art of the Novel, Kundera manages not only to repeat the noxious trope of Israel as the vanguard of European civility against Arab primitivism; he perpetuates the invisibility of Palestinian humanity while letting Europe (“not as territory but as culture,” a phrase that conjures images of symphonies and libraries rather than ovens) off lightly – so how’s that for unbearable lightness? If Kundera had really wanted to honour the legacy of revolutionary Jewish internationalism, or even just his own history of opposing totalitarianism, he might better have used his speech to comment on the Orwellian nature of an award “for the Freedom of the Individual in Society” taking its name from an occupied city.

Jacqueline Rose, regular contributor to the London Review of Books and author of the profound and profoundly ambitious collection of essays The Last Resistance, just released by Verso, does a far better job than Kundera of weaving literature into our understanding of political and psychological life today in Israel and Palestine. “These essays […] are published in the year that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza reaches its fortieth anniversary,” she writes in the preface of her new book, “an occupation that has now lasted longer in Israel’s history than the period between the Declaration of Independence of 1948 that founded the state and the 1967 war which was when it began.” More than twice as long, to be more precise – and, in the same spirit of precision, I’ll point out that that fortieth anniversary is actually this week.

No Palestinian in the Territories 40 years old and younger has ever known anything other than Israeli occupation; the same is true of the majority of Israeli Jews, who’ve experienced only the domination of another group of people, and a political culture held hostage to the demands of ‘security’. The enormity of those facts, and the attempt to understand them here on a continent where people get in fistfights over stolen parking spaces but think the Palestinians should be able to absorb themselves without complaint into Jordan or Lebanon, recalls an aphorism from the region about camels passing through the eyes of needles.

Understanding the human toll of the occupation calls for more than simply the ongoing and historical facts (despite claims that the history of the conflict is ‘complicated,’ the case has always been fairly straight-forward, if obscured by the media and racial/religious prejudice). Instead, Rose mobilizes the nuance of literature to make both Palestinian suffering and moral degradation in Israel more easily understandable.

Rose quotes Israeli author David Grossman: “ ‘When I write, for a moment I am not a victim.’ Writing is a cure for dispassion that makes him feel alive again: ‘an act of self-definition in a situation that literally threatens to obliterate me.’ Above all, literature forces you into other people’s minds [. . .] It forces you to connect.” In an absolutely fascinating study of the fiction of Vladimir Jabotinsky – the founder of the ultra-rightwing ‘Revisionist’ strand of Zionism that has dominated Israel since the “Earthquake Election” of Menachem Begin – Rose examines fiction as a space wherein even the most strident of ideologues can explore subtlety and self-doubt. In a later essay, she accesses the question of the suicide bomber through the prose of Tolstoy and the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. In our own country, Montréal novelist B. Glen Rotchin allowed the Orthodox Jewish protagonist of his outstanding novel The Rent Collector to consider the earthly motivations of the suicide bombers; he later told me in an interview that “We live in the age of the suicide bomber. This is our most stark political/social/religious context. I did not think it was possible to tell this story without touching upon that reality, just as I thought it was necessary to touch upon the legacy of the Holocaust.”

Rose’s book draws on – and, significantly, formally injects psychoanalysis into – work done by the late Edward Said, as well as Salma Khadra Jayyusi, the editor of the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, and the leading expert on, and translator of, Palestinian poetry and prose. Jayyusi’s Anthology clearly took its strength from the first intifada, a far more optimistic, less despairing uprising against the occupation (it’s significant that whereas the key image of the first intifada was the child throwing stones against a tank, today’s revolt is epitomized in the hopelessness of the kamikaze). There is a hopefulness to Jayyusi’s introduction, published the year before Oslo, when she writes that “the greatest struggle and the greatest triumph of Palestinian writers lies in their refusal to become humanity’s cringing victims [. . .] While never ceasing to be aware of the particular predicament of their people, they exhibit a resilience that transcends tragedy and overcomes necessity.” In other words, they’ve resisted not only Israel, but also the overwhelming temptation to produce one-dimensional agitprop.

Palestinian resilience appears in many of Jayyusi’s selections. “[E]rase with your edicts/our past/our literature/our metaphor,” writes Fawaz Turki in his poem The Seed Keepers: A Recital. “Do that and more,/I do not fear your tyranny./I guard one seed/of a tree/my forefathers have saved/that I shall plant again/in my homeland.” Yahya Yakhlif’s short story “That Rose of a Woman,” doesn’t once mention Israel, but returns again and again to phrases embodying the stubborn will to survive: “he reminded me of the fig tree and its determination to survive”; “looked like a fly that had landed on it back and now struggled to right itself”; “She wanted everyone to be joyous again”; “the dry fig tree was still clinging to life”.

Jayyusi includes, also, the giant of Palestinian poetry, Mahmod Darwish: “I name the soil I call it/an extension of my soul/I name my hands I call them/the pavement of wounds/I name the pebbles wings/I name the birds/almonds and figs/I name my ribs/trees/Gently I pull a branch/from the fig tree of my breast/I throw it like a stone/to blow up the conqueror’s tank.” In this single, staggering verse from Poem of the Land, Darwish renders undeniable the visceral Palestinian connection to the land on which Israel sees them as interlopers as well as expressing resistance as organic and overwhelmingly natural – very nearly a feature of the natural landscape which, as in the poetry of the Romantics, is internalized morally and politically.

Not surprisingly, the two towering novels of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict – Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock: A Confession and Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed: the ill-fated pessoptimist – trade in black humour, cutting irony, and absurdity. While the politics of Operation Shylock aren’t (always) my own, there’s no denying its importance as a meditation on the multiple personality disorder of the American Jew’s relationship to Israel: literally, the novel features a cat-and-mouse struggle between two men named Philip Roth. The author Philip Roth – always ambivalent, he plays at Hannah Arendt, in Israel watching the trial of an elderly WWII butcher; he watches Palestinians gather stones to throw at Israelis from his hotel window, waiting a while before calling the police – deals with a man who has stolen his name and notoreity, and uses them to call publicly for the Jews of Israel to return to the Diaspora for their own safety and for the authenticity of their Jewish experience (this led to the publication in the Nation, in 2004, to a tongue-in-cheek essay by Adam Shatz entitled “In Praise of Diasporism”; Shatz also edited the collection Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing About Zionism and Israel).

Like Operation Shylock, Emile Habiby’s The Secret Life of Saeed tackles an absurd situation with even greater absurdity: his protagonist is abducted by aliens, and his life is saved by a donkey, within the book’s first pages. Saeed explains his odd surname, ‘Pessoptimist,’ which “combines two qualities, pessimism and optimism [. . . I] am quite at a loss as to which of the two characterizes me. When I awake each morning I thank the Lord he did not take my soul during the night. If harm befalls me during the day, I thank Him that it was no worse. So which am I, a pessimist or an optimist?” For Palestinians, for whom ‘peace process’ means ‘war,’ and ‘homeland’ means ‘bantustan,’ Habiby’s irony seems appropriate.

So what about the rest of us – the Kunderas of the world, observing safely from afar, isolated from the reality of the occupation. In The Last Resistance, Rose twice mentions the play My Name is Rachel Corrie, a script adapted by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner from the writings of Rachel Corrie, the young International Solidarity Movement member from Olympia, Washington, who renounced her white, middle class privilege for a solidarity mission to the Occupied Territories which ended tragically in her being crushed by a Caterpillar tank driven by the Israeli military (Caterpillar has been the target of boycotts for selling specially equipped military models to armies like the Israel Defense Forces, making the company part of the military-industrial complex).

My Name is Rachel Corrie stands as potentially the most powerful literary statement on the role of the “observer” – the disinterested North American who is, in fact, an enabler of occupation through tax dollars and political support. Noam Chomsky called the relationship between Israel, Palestine and America as ‘the Fateful Triangle’; though they present themselves as mediators (Bill Clinton stood equidistant from both Rabin and Arafat when they shook hands), the Americans and, it has to be said, we Canadians who’ve allowed our government to starve the Palestinians for electing the wrong people, are fully engaged belligerents. Rickman and Viner’s framing of Corrie’s own extraordinary words makes clear the possibility of bucking that complicity, working one’s way out from under it by listening, by acting, and above all by attuning oneself to the universal value of human life; Corrie emphasizes dignity especially. To paraphrase Jacqueline Rose, Corrie’s is a story with which we should be forced to connect.