Aharon Appelfeld (Translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter),
The Story of a Life. Hamish Hamilton, 2005.
The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld is a writer who journalists approach with deference and admiration. “He is someone you immediately want to tell things to; beneath the jaunty peak of his sailor's cap, his sea-blue eyes gleam with inquiry,” gushed Hephzibah Anderson, writing about
The Story of a Life and her meeting with its author (
Observer, 21 August 2005), adding breathlessly: “When he speaks of writing, he gestures like a magician pulling a rope of silk scarves from deep within himself.”
Reviewing the book in the
Guardian (Saturday September 24, 2005), Lisa Appignanesi was similarly paralysed by admiration for the man and his memoir:
Like a series of luminous paintings discovered in the darkness of a vaulted church after the bombs have fallen, this memoir evokes a wonder which is on the other side of language. Its scenes need to be contemplated, tasted, savoured. In the
Independent (23 September 2005), Carole Angier concurred, asserting: “Primo Levi read him ‘with awe and admiration’. So will you.”
Well, speak for yourself Carole. I think myself that Appelfeld is at best an interesting minor novelist. When I read
Badenheim 1939 I found it a crushing disappointment – thin, one dimensional and heavy handed in its use of irony and metaphor. Designating it a ‘Modern Classic’ as Penguin Books do strikes me as more a marketing ploy than an informed literary judgement. I don’t think Appelfeld has ever truly freed himself from two of his dominant literary influences (Kafka and Camus) and the range of his interests and sympathies strikes me as being far too narrow to make him a great writer. However, evaluating a living writer is always a subjective exercise. For more enthusiastic responses than my own see
Spurious and
Waggish. Waggish supplies links to some very interesting interviews, which I shall cite in the course of this essay. My purpose here is not to rate Appelfeld’s fiction but to focus on his memoir. The deference accorded to Appelfeld seems to me quite illuminating when contrasted with, say, attitudes to Peter Handke and his politics.
The critical reception of
The Story of a Life is itself very revealing of the Orientalist impulse in Western intellectual life. In Britain, the only remotely critical note sounded anywhere came at the end of Theo Richmond’s review in the
Sunday Times (11 September 2005):
Is this slim book of 198 pages the story of a life? In essence, yes, but there are some curious gaps. The boy escaped from “an accursed camp”. Which camp? How did he escape? Appelfeld’s mother was murdered, but what became of his father, last seen on a forced march? On one page, he refers to himself as an orphan, so it was baffling to read in a Jewish paper that his father survived the Holocaust and was reunited with his son in Israel. Of the writer’s marriage, wife and family, not a word. This is a humane and moving memoir, but has the author taken reticence too far? But if Appelfeld is indeed reticent about large areas of his life, so, too, are those who write about him. The first thing that struck me, even before I’d started reading the book, is the lie in the first sentence of the author blurb: “Aharon Appelfeld has lived in Israel since 1946”.
No he hasn’t.
Israel didn’t exist in 1946.
Aharon Appelfeld arrived in Palestine in 1946. Apart from a perfunctory reference to Palestine (p. vii), it’s a fiction reiterated by Appelfeld himself (“1946, the year I came to Israel”, p. 107, repeated p. 109 and p. 127, together with “the moment I arrived in Israel”, p. 111).
Palestine was, of course, wiped off the map in 1948 by armed Jews. The difference between 1946 and the violent annihilation of Palestine and its majority Arab society by Jews in 1948 is a crucial one, but is not registered by two of the reviewers I’ve quoted. Theo Richmond carelessly loses three years when he says of Appelfeld that “In 1949, the mentally scarred loner sailed for Haifa to start a new life”. For Carole Angier, Appelfeld’s postwar existence is telescoped into “A brief rebirth in Italy; then new life in Israel”.
What is written out of history in Carole Angier’s lazy formulation is, of course, the 1948 Naqba –
the catastrophe – the erasure of Palestine and the forcible eviction of its population. It’s a very common erasure by those who are either ignorant of the twentieth century history of the Middle East or who have a vested interest in promoting the Jewish supremacist state. Thus the website of The Holocaust Teacher Resource Center states that “[Aharon Appelfeld] immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1946.”
Any formulation will do to avoid the word “Palestine” – a rhetorical strategy designed to muffle the historical reality of Jews as ethnic cleansers and bellicose aggressors. And of course it is almost never remembered that one-third of the Zionist army in 1948 comprised Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust survivor as a racist thug, a murderer or a rapist, is not a figure you will ever encounter in Western constructions of the Jewish identity or historical experience.
In Chapter 16 of
The Story of A Life, Appelfeld dramatises a scene on the ship in which he sailed to Haifa in 1946. It’s a poignant account of a five year old Jewish girl, an orphan. One leg has been amputated. The child smiles. Asked about her past she says all she remembers is the rain. Repeatedly she mentions the rain – nothing else. It’s a short, poetically charged chapter which eloquently adumbrates many of Appelfeld’s central themes, both as a novelist and autobiographer - the suffering of a child, the way in which the human mind negotiates the residue of unspeakable horror, the struggle to articulate such horrors in words, and the friction existing between Jews who are survivors and all, literally, in the same boat. And little Helga is also clearly a kind of surrogate of Appelfeld himself, then fourteen years old, his mother murdered, his father lost. But it’s an artful, polished chapter. It may be based on a real incident but it’s surely a novelisation of it rather than a literal rendering. It’s improbable Appelfeld could exactly remember dialogue overheard in 1946. The girl’s eloquently dramatised refusal or inability to tell a larger story is clearly a kind of metaphor for Appelfeld’s own memoir.
If it wasn’t for the large woman who pesters the child, demanding to know her story, the chapter would risk the charge of sentimentality in its portrayal of a brave, angelic child amputee. It ends:
Helga sat on the lap of the man who had adopted her. The light returned to her face. She moved her lips, muttering softly. The man took her small hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. “Soon we’ll reach Palestine,” he said. “There we’ll have a house and garden.” (p. 97)
It’s a perfect emblem of Appelfeld’s profound moral complacency that he clearly neither intends nor is capable of perceiving even the smallest possibility of
irony in those last two sentences. When the ship docked, he arrived at the Arab port of Haifa in 1946 – or as he blandly puts it, “Israel” (p. 109). And then?
Between the years 1946 and 1948, I was in the Aliyat Hano’ar Youth Movement, and between 1948 and 1950, I was an apprentice at the agricultural school founded by Rachel Yana’it at Ein Kerem (sic), on the outskirts of Jerusalem. (p. 118)
The name Ein Karem probably means nothing at all to European and American readers of Appelfeld’s acclaimed memoir. Palestinians have a different perspective. “Before 1948, Ein Karem was known as the most beautiful of all the Jerusalem villages.” That year, during the Naqba, its 3,000 Arab inhabitants were forcibly evicted by Jewish thugs. The village was then repopulated “in its entirety” by Jews, none of Middle Eastern origin. The Church of John the Baptist was closed down. The two mosques were closed down. None of the Arab inhabitants of Ein Karem was ever permitted to return. Today Ein Karem is a home for “wealthy Israeli professionals seeking a relaxing life in a beautiful village.” (Mariam Shain,
Palestine: A Guide [2005], p. 342)
If we want to learn what happened in the Arab city of Haifa – Appelfeld’s “Israel” – we need only turn to Ghassan Kanafani’s long story “Returning to Haifa”, with its account of how its Arab population was driven out in 1948 by Jewish terrorists. It is a reasonable speculation that Appelfeld has never read it. He has never shown the slightest interest in any other perspective about his homeland other than that of Judaism. And where exactly was Appelfeld during the height of the Naqba? He doesn’t say. Palestinian suffering has no existence for Appelfeld: his gaze is inward. “The years 1946 to 1950 were years of verbiage; when life is full of ideology, words and clichés abound. Everyone talked.” (p. 123)
But those were years of something more than just talk:
In early 1947, Jews owned 7 per cent of the land in Palestine; three years later, they had seized 92 per cent of land within the new state, including Arab homes and buildings of every kind. …this constituted a colonial occupation on a scale, and with a speed, without precedence in colonial history.
(John Rose,
The Myths of Zionism [2004], p. 149)
When the first great phase of ethnic cleansing ended in January 1949, 90% of the Palestinian population of what became Israel was living in refugee camps in the Jordanian occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Gaza.
Joel Gordon,
reviewing Lawrence Davidson’s America’s Palestine, comments that Davidson… writes of the disregard for the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine as “a form of ethnic cleansing on the conceptual level”.
Gordon thinks this idea is “provocative” but it seems to me that Appelfeld’s memoir is a perfect example of that proposition. Appelfeld says, “We had come to Israel, as the saying went, ‘to build and to be rebuilt.’ (p. 116) That the building of the Jewish state was done on stolen property is a matter of complete indifference to Appelfeld: he completely erases Palestine and its indigenous population from his self-serving memoir. He continues with a reference to “the ideological complacency that sought to make me into a man of narrow horizons, which I refused to be.” (ibid) In the context of his Orientalism the smug tone of self-congratulation is remarkable.
No one in the West would use the word “holocaust” without an awareness that that word now carries a specific historical resonance. But Appelfeld uses the word “catastrophe” (e.g. pp. 185, 187, 189) as if it had no resonance at all in the land in which he has spent most of his life.
The Story of a Life is, at a foundational level, a work of Naqba denial.
The parallels between the lives and writing of Aharon Appelfeld (born in 1932) and Ghassan Kanafani (born in 1936) are loose but striking. When they were children, their societies were shattered by brutal, racist occupying forces; forced into exile they had to reconstruct their lives and became novelists and intellectuals. Their creative impulses are drawn from a lost childhood world and societies on the brink of being extinguished forever. But Kanafani was exiled and then murdered by the Jewish state with which Appelfeld unequivocally identifies.
Heidegger has commonly and quite reasonably been charged with being blind to his own blindness, but it’s a charge which should also be levelled against Appelfeld. Indeed, Aharon Appelfeld supplies a perfect example of the moral corruption of modern Judaism in its Zionist incarnation and of the reluctance in Western intellectual life to confront that corruption. The (un)critical reception of
The Story of a Life testifies to an enduring Orientalism which is blind to Appelfeld’s own pernicious and extreme brand of Orientalism.
Appelfeld is completely silent about the
Naqba. It seems unlikely he played any active role in it but it seems equally unlikely he can have been aware that his new existence in Israel was predicated on the expulsion of the majority Arab population. With a characteristic lack of irony (shared by his admiring reviewers) Appelfeld describes how in the 1950s he was a member of the New Life Club, which among other things “arranged memorial services for small towns and remote villages that had been wiped out during the war”. (p. 184) But the society which piously remembered the lost villages of Europe was itself responsible for destroying 531 Arab villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods, as well as seizing entire cities like Haifa.
Bypassing this crucial period, which saw half of Palestine’s population turned into refugees, Appelfeld writes only of himself. He describes how little formal education engaged him during his years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1952-1956:
I wanted to return to the orchard. The quiet orchard that changed with each season now seemed to me like a spring of blessing. I loved the hours I spent there alone, plowing and harrowing the soil, spraying the insects, watching for the fruit to ripen in the spring and for the leaves to fall in the autumn, and then pruning the trees in winter. (pp. 146-7)
This is the lyrical expression of a memory; it is at the same time classic Zionist propaganda. It erases from history the question: whose land, whose orchard? Such questions do not trouble Appelfeld.
In setting out the Zionist blueprint in
The Jewish State, the slippery Theodor Herzl never once mentions Arabs, in John Roses’s words “as though they did not exist” (op. cit., p. 95) But Herzl was well aware of their existence, and was also well aware that their deportation was an essential requirement of the establishment of a Jewish supremacist state.
Like Herzl, Aharon Appelfeld self-servingly blanks out the existence of Palestine and its Arab population. He mentions a friend, a fellow Holocaust survivor, who now owns a factory and “has a house in Herzliyya and an apartment in Jerusalem” (p. 178); what’s more there is “a large library in his home. He is interested in philosophy, literature, the arts, and medicine” (p. 179). Like Amos Oz, Appelfeld gives us an image of cultured and sensitive Israelis; all that is missing is the material conditions of that culture – property and land theft, institutionalised sectarianism, state violence, massive injustice. Appelfeld is completely blind to his own position as the privileged beneficiary of sectarianism and discrimination; his conscience is unstirred by pitiless repression taking place just a short distance from his agreeable existence.
When Appelfeld does mention Palestinians at all, it is from the viewpoint of Zionism. Interviewed by the
Boston Review (December 1982), Appelfeld asserted that “The Zionist movement began around a hundred years ago. Then Palestine was a waste – rocks and hills and sand. Very under-populated by Arabs.”
Those last two sentences are just as much odious self-serving rubbish as the notion that the world is run behind the scenes by a secret conspiracy of Jews or that the number of Jews who died in the Shoah has been exaggerated, or that they weren’t gassed but died of illness. But such is the power of Orientalism within Western culture that, while Peter Handke is demonised for his pro-Serbian sympathies, Appelfeld’s extremist views attract no attention, let alone even the faintest whisper of criticism.
Appelfeld’s suggestion that late nineteenth century Palestine was a “waste” containing a handful of Arabs scratching a living in the dirt is ludicrous. By 1880, for example, more than 30 million oranges were being exported to Europe from Palestine every year. John Rose cites the case of the Jewish writer, Ahad Ha-Am, who visited Palestine in 1891 and who wrote that it was “difficult to find fields that were not sown” by Arab peasants. The racist fiction that Palestine was ‘a waste’ is comprehensively debunked in Chapter Five of Rose’s book.
Appelfeld’s assertion, prompted by the sympathies of his interviewer, that Zionism’s involvement in land struggles and territorial rights “was not and… is not” part of the original plan is chutzpah on a truly gargantuan scale. It is as indifferent to historical truth as it is to the central role played by sectarian land law in establishing and sustaining a Jewish state. In Israel 94.5 per cent of all land is now administered either directly by the state or by Zionist institutions, on behalf of Jewish citizens only. Appelfeld’s hardline Zionist beliefs register the moral blankness at the heart of his concept of Jewish identity, or what he has blandly called ‘the complex of Jewish existence’.
Appelfeld transmits the aura of the Holocaust survivor, so he is always treated very deferentially by European and American journalists. And of course in a central way his story is a remarkable one: a child surviving off his own wits after the murder of his mother and separation from his father. His reinvention of himself as an intellectual and a leading Israeli novelist who spurned the German language and learned Hebrew is a striking achievement. But it is an achievement with a dark side, which is that of his complicity in the sectarian project known as the Jewish state. Appelfeld’s complicity is present in his role as a soldier involved in its wars, as an academic and intellectual, and as a prominent novelist happy to promote his views on the politics of the Middle East through the medium of newspaper and magazine interviews. He is also, in a very small way,
a state asset.
Appelfeld’s opinions play less well to a Palestinian intelligentsia. He once remarked, ‘What is happening here in Israel has to wait fifty years before becoming literature.’ This drew a retort from Mourid Barghouti, the Palestinian poet excluded by the Israeli state from his homeland because of his race and his religion:
The Holocaust has been written as a novel, as poetry, as music, as theatre – as everything – in the Fifties and Sixties. It didn’t have to wait fifty years to be written. Israel has been established for fifty-six years and the West Bank has been occupied for thirty-seven years. They have been occupiers for thirty-seven years and that’s not long enough to look at themselves and see what they have become? Where exactly is their human gaze directed? (Both quotations from Ahdaf Soueif,
Mezzaterra [Bloomsbury, London, 2004], p. 332.)
In the case of Aharon Appelfeld the only reply to Barghouti’s question is surely: inwards and backwards. Appelfeld has no interest in or sympathy for Palestinians. He is pitilessly ignorant of the Other and pitilessly indifferent to their experience or their writing. Palestinians have no existence for him, other than as a threat to his beloved version of Judaism. Appelfeld, like Zionists generally, is incapable of constructing Israel as anything other than a victim, or criticism of Israel as stemming from anything other than the same kind of virulent anti-Semitism which he witnessed as a child. Everything, for Appelfeld, is simplistically framed by the Holocaust.
In 2004, pressed by an interviewer from the Israeli paper
Ha’aretz, Appelfeld complained:
there are not yet trains from Jenin to concentration camps in the Negev. There are no smokestacks. Yet, the Guardian
and Le Monde
feel the need to draw that comparison every day. To say of the Jews that they are a little like the Nazis. Not exactly Nazis, just a bit. When I see that, I say that there is something very deep in European civilization: the need to demonize us runs very deep.But his claim that every day the
Guardian compares Israel to Nazi Germany is preposterous. His ridiculous and paranoid notion that contemporary Europeans have an innate need to demonise Jews simply recycles the traditional Zionist line that all critics of Israeli sectarianism and human rights abuses are secret anti-Semites. Generalising about Europeans is as fatuous (and in its own way as Orientalising) as generalising about any other large, diverse body of people (Americans, say – or even Israelis). For Appelfeld, Israel is the only true representative of Judaism: in
The Story of a Life he speaks of “a Jewish world that had renewed itself in the Land of Israel” (p. 155) (the upper case used in “Land” signifies, I think, Appelfeld’s sense of Israel as sacred Jewish territory – another device which extinguishes the vulgar reality of stolen property).
Chapter 27 of
The Story of a Life describes Appelfeld’s IDF service in the Yom Kippur war, when, as he blandly puts it, “I found myself stationed alongside the Suez Canal”. The chapter describes the relationship between Holocaust survivors and the younger generation. It ends:
The three days that I spent with that unit not only brought me close to the young soldiers, but also gave me a deeper insight into my own life. As in every war, there hovered above us a sense of fate hanging in the balance. Who knew what awaited us? The voices of the soldiers became more lighthearted and jovial toward the end of my stay. The cease-fire appeared to be holding. I found it hard to part from this unit of young people on whose shoulders rested the fate of a people welcome neither in Europe nor in this part of the world. As different as the struggle was here, it was, nevertheless, the same ancient curse pursuing us. It’s amazing that Appelfeld gets away with this tosh. The origins of the Yom Kippur war lay in Israel’s refusal to withdraw from land it had occupied in 1967. On the Arab side it was a war of liberation against a bellicose Zionist state which, not for the first time, had invaded and occupied land outside its own borders. Egypt and Syria hoped to “force the superpowers to intervene and put pressure on Israel to withdraw” (Avi Shlaim,
The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World [Penguin Books, 2000], p. 319)
Appelfeld’s reduction of the war to the “ancient curse” of anti-Semitism is characteristic of his attitude to all modern Middle Eastern history. As far as he is concerned the clock stopped in the early 1940s. Europe is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. The Middle East is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Israel represents world Jewry. Israel is hated because it is a Jewish state.
As an alibi for Zionism it’s so threadbare it’s barely worth engaging with.
Let’s also consider his cited example of Jenin. In mentioning this refugee camp of 15,000 residents, Appelfeld was clearly alluding to events there two years earlier. In the words of a fellow Israeli academic with a far more humane grasp of these events than Appelfeld:
What did clearly happen in Jenin [in 2002] was that the Israeli forces simply ignored the fact that there were an unknown number of civilians in the areas that they attacked day and night with missiles from Cobra helicopters and demolished with bulldozers, in order to clear the way for the invading tanks. No one came to execute these people individually; they were crushed and buried under their bombed or bulldozed homes. Others died of their wounds in alleys, or cried for days under the ruins, until their voices faded away. (Tanya Reinhart,
Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2002)
Reinhart cites the case of the A Sha’abi family, crushed alive in their house by a giant Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer; their nine bodies were recovered six days later when the Israeli army withdrew.
Not as bad as the Holocaust? True, obviously. But as a response, surely a coarse and inhumane one.
The crimes of the Israeli state against Palestinians, though enormous, are self-evidently not on the same scale as those of the Third Reich’s crimes against European Jews. And it’s perfectly true, as Appelfeld suggests, that Zionism is not a genocidal project. Exterminating the world’s Arabs has never been its dream. In that the distinction with Nazi Germany is crystal clear.
It is however true that Zionism has always, from its origins, been quite consciously about seizing land and expelling an indigenous population to make way for a sectarian Jewish state. Its leading thinkers and activists have all been racists, with an ingrained loathing and contempt for Arabs. A genocidal impulse has always been inherent in Zionism and Israel may yet carry out an atrocity on a scale which dwarfs past massacres of Arabs by Zionist Jews. These are truths about which Appelfeld, as a man who all his adult life has benefited from his privileged existence as a member of the master religion in an ethnically-cleansed land, is completely in denial.
The entire history of Israel can only be understood in the context of the Zionist desire for land, the expulsion of non-Jews, and the creation of a sectarian state where citizenship would be defined not by birth but by religion. It is this last factor which makes Israel unique.
David Hirsh of the anti-boycott group Engage says:
Zionism is not racism. Zionism is Jewish nationalism and it is not fundamentally different from other forms of nationalism. But this is quite untrue. Zionism is fundamentally different to nationalism. To be Jewish is to belong to a religious group, not a national group. All nations except Israel define citizenship by birth, not religious identity. Travellers who land at an Italian airport are not divided into two queues – Catholics and Other Religions. If you are born in Italy to a non-Catholic family, the state does not discriminate against you and make you a second-class citizen who is forbidden to buy land. Therein lies a central difference with the sectarian Jewish state. Zionism is a Jewish supremacist ideology and Israel, like its founding ideology, is inherently chauvinist. Israel is institutionally sectarian and substantially, though not exclusively, racist (it imports black Jews from Africa to maintain its demographic superiority over its Arab population). Israel defines citizenship by religion with the same rigour that the Third Reich defined citizenship by race. Israel is a corrupt and sectarian democracy, born out of sectarian violence and terror, democratic only by virtue of expelling the majority Arab population and then maintaining an artificial Jewish demographic superiority.
*
No one could possibly blame Appelfeld for the way in which he ended up in Palestine as a bewildered and damaged teenager. Appelfeld’s focus on the Holocaust is understandable but it completely disables his understanding of events in the land of his exile. He is a man who emigrated to the Middle East from Europe and, sixty years later, finds no discomfort at all in remarking, "I am not familiar with the Arabs. For me they are an abstraction.” The complacency in that remark is stupefying. Appelfeld cannot rely on the Holocaust to shield him forever from the implications of his subsequent role as a soldier in the IDF, as an academic, and as a novelist and intellectual.
But Appelfeld’s complacency is protected by other intellectuals of an Orientalist cast of mind. In his Introduction to the Penguin edition of
Badenheim 1939, Gabriel Josipovici says, “Today [Appelfeld] lives in Israel, devoting his time to writing, after spending thirty years teaching at the University of the Negev.” Let’s give that educational institution its full name: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. David Ben-Gurion was a leading Zionist and Israel’s first prime minister. His history is well documented. Let’s leave aside Ben-Gurion’s complicity in attempting to cover up the Qibya massacre in 1953 (69 innocent Arabs, two thirds of them women and children, murdered by an Israeli army unit led by a young major called Ariel Sharon) or his central role in creating Israel’s nuclear arsenal or the fact that
Ben-Gurion had surprisingly little knowledge of Arab culture and Arab history and no empathy whatever for Arabs…Ben-Gurion could not conceive of a multi-ethnic society, embracing Jews and Arabs. (Avi Shlaim, op cit p. 96)
In a civilised society all of these factors might be thought something of an impediment when considering a suitable candidate after whom to name a university. Yet in one sense what could indeed be more apt than “Ben-Gurion University of the Negev” because, as Ben-Gurion wrote in 1937, “Negev land is reserved for Jewish citizens whenever and wherever they want. We must expel the Arabs and take their place.”
The Negev is a highland region which comprised slightly more than one third of historical Palestine. Ben-Gurion’s ethnic cleansing fantasy was a kneejerk response to the Peel Commission Partition Plan of 1937, which recommended that the Negev remain under Palestinian rule since it was an exclusively Arab region. Prior to 1948 the Negev was inhabited almost entirely by semi-Nomadic Palestinian Bedouin tribes; the major urban centre of population was the town of Birsheba.
In 1948 Ben-Gurion’s racist dream came true: the entire Arab population of Birsheba was driven out by the Zionist army (one-third Holocaust survivors, let’s again remember) and the Negev was almost completely emptied of its indigenous population, leaving behind just 11,000 Bedouin.
It’s important to note that the ethnic cleansing continued long after the war of 1948. In the 1950s the Israeli army forcibly moved the remaining Bedouin into a restricted area outside Birsheba. This was done to steal the good agricultural land they owned and push them on to inferior land. The Bedouin were “Confined to a space less than 10 per cent of the area of the land they had formerly possessed” (Hussein Abu Hussein and Fiona McKay,
Access Denied: Palestinian Land Rights in Israel [Zed Books, 2003], p. 114).
As a Professor of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Appelfeld enjoyed an academic career spanning three decades amid the ruins of
the comprehensively annihilated Palestinian society which
once existed
there.
When Appelfeld says there are no concentration camps in the Negev he is wrong. There are no death camps but there are detention centres which are essentially no different to Dachau in its early years. These are political prisons where Arab prisoners are brutalised by racist Jewish guards and where children are forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand. Appelfeld’s blindness to their existence is reminiscent in its own modest way of Heidegger’s indifference to the death camps.
Historically, the blatant sectarian discrimination against the Bedouin in the Negev did not cease in the 1950s. The expropriation of Bedouin land in the Negev and the eviction of Bedouin homes as part of a forced relocation policy continued throughout the period of Appelfeld’s tenure as an academic at Ben-Gurion University and continues to this day. And while the Bedouin were forced bit by bit into as small an area of land as possible, the land they formerly owned was seized for more and more Jews-only agricultural villages, settlements and farms.
Palestinians who have resisted moving to “development towns” for Arabs are deemed to be living in “unrecognized” zones and their hamlets and villages are denied electricity, running water and municipal services by the Israeli state. The Negev is a place where ethnic cleansing has been continuing over half a century and where an indigenous Arab population has been subjected to forced relocation and the denial of basic services.
Appelfeld’s evident indifference to the sectarianism and ethnic cleansing underpinning his agreeable existence as an academic is reciprocated by Gabriel Jospivici, who finds it appropriate in his Introduction to allude to TS Eliot’s anti-Semitism but whose bland reference to Appelfeld’s long tenure at the University of the Negev omits to note either its history or the telling reality that this institution, with hundreds of academics, has just three Arabs on the faculty. (“Israeli universities are among the most open and anti-racist spaces in Israel. They have large numbers of Arab students and teachers,” asserted the Zionist apologists over at Engage in a recent letter in the Guardian opposing the Natfe academic boycott. They were lying.) ‘The World of Aharon Appelfeld’ was the title of the University of Cambridge’s 2003 conference, attended by Josipovici and speakers from Ben-Gurion University, Bar-Ilan University (targeted by pro-Palestinian AUT activists because it has expanded on to Palestinian land) and The College of Jude and Samaria in Ariel, a college built unlawfully on Palestinian land. Quite appropriately, among the subjects up for discussion were those of detachment and silence.
Aharon Appelfeld is also, famously, a citizen of Jerusalem:
I’m writing mainly about Jewish fate. Jerusalem, I would say, is the heart of Jewish history. So I cannot imagine myself being a Jewish writer and not being in Jerusalem. It is not a question of it’s noisy, it’s not noisy. It is not a question of politics even. I’m a Jewish writer, I’m living amongst my people, and I’m trying to understand the complex of Jewish existence. So where can a Jewish writer live? "It's worth remembering that Zionist founder Theodore Herzl wasn't interested in Jerusalem," says
Waggish, in the course of his account of Appelfeld’s novels. Well, yes, it’s true that Herzl didn’t have the fixation on the Middle East that other Zionists did, and the Jewish state might conceivably have ended up devouring Argentina or Uganda instead of Palestine. But Herzl knew full well that the Jewish state involved taking over land currently occupied by non-Jews and then expelling them, a task which he advised should be carried out ‘discreetly and circumspectly’ (Greg Philo and Mike Berry,
Bad News from Israel (2004), p. 3)
Theodor Herzl visited Jerusalem in 1898 and dreamed of turning the city over to Jews. His dream was expressed in the characteristically racist language of Zionism:
The musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling alleys… If we ever get Jerusalem and if I am still able to do anything actively at that time, I would begin by cleaning it up. I would clear out everything that is not something sacred, set up workers’ homes outside the city, empty the nests of filth and tear them down, burn the secular ruins and transfer the bazaars elsewhere. In other words, get rid of the dirty Arabs. Herzl’s racist vision was duly implemented and Arabs now form only a minority of the city’s population. Arab citizens, currently about one-third of the city's residents, get only 12 per cent of its welfare budget, even though their poverty rate is more than double that of Jewish residents. They get 15 per cent of the education budget. A stunning 98.8 per cent of the city’s budget for culture and art goes to Jews. Overall, the Arab share of the services' budget is under 12%, meaning a four-to-one difference in spending per person between Jews and Palestinians.
When Appelfeld says, “I’m a Jewish writer, I’m living amongst my people, and I’m trying to understand the complex of Jewish existence” what he is blind to is his own privileged status in a sectarian society. Jerusalem's Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."
Palestinians in East Jerusalem, often the city of their birth, are not considered citizens but immigrants with "permanent resident" status, which, some have found, is anything but permanent. In the old South Africa, a large part of the black population was treated not as citizens of the cities and townships they were born into but of a distant homeland many had never visited. "Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem. "The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967." Fleeing from Europe, Appelfeld regarded German as “a language drenched in the blood of the Jews.” He blocked out the possibility of writing in German and reinvented himself as a Hebrew writer: “You see, it would be not only a paradox, it would be tragic, to write in the language of the murderers. Just to think about it is enough to stop it.”
It’s a dubious concept, I think, blaming a language for the crimes committed by those who speak it. Shakespearean English was also the language of those who committed atrocities against the Irish. American English is the language of torturers and war criminals but also the language of poets and novelists. Paul Celan’s response to the Shoah seems to me far more effective than Appelfeld’s: he chose to confront the culture which destroyed his family in its own language. He became the leading post-war poet who wrote in German. He made Germans aware of his suffering through their own language and culture.
Appelfeld’s differentiation between guilty German and innocent Hebrew is a deeply ironic one, in the light of the history of Israel. Who nowadays could deny that Hebrew is now also the language of racism, mass killing,
atrocity and a sectarian state? Hebrew is a language drenched in the blood of Arabs.
Uniquely, Jean Genet witnessed occupying troops who were Nazis and occupying troops who were Zionist Jews, and what he saw was not the guilt of German and the innocence of Hebrew but identity. Jean Genet was in Paris in 1939-45; he was also in the Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion. There is a telling moment in his book Prisoner of Love (1986) in which he describes his shock at seeing that “The road signs between Beirut and Baabda were in Hebrew”. It reminded Genet of that earlier occupation:
Arriving in Beirut from Damascus and seeing those signposts at the crossroads was as painful as seeing Gothic lettering in Paris during the German occupation.
The Hebrew language “induced a sense of unease”:
Not only did this writing belong to the enemy – it was also an armed sentry standing over the people of Lebanon.
Worse than unease, Hebrew produced “nausea”. Hebrew seemed to express the very essence of the bellicose Jewish state and the misery it had inflicted on the Palestinians:
the letters were separated by immeasurable spaces filled with several layers of time – a time as dead and incalculable as the space between a corpse and a living eye looking at it. In the space between each Hebrew letter, generations have been born and spread abroad, and its silence shattered us worse than bullets and bombs.
(Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, Trans. from the French by Barbara Bray [New York Review Books, 2003], pp. 310-311)
Ironically, the sectarian discrimination which defines the Jewish state in which Appelfeld so fervently believes is also evident at the most basic level of language. To Edward Said, Hebrew supplied a tangible expression of the Jewish supremacism that underpinned the condition of Israel:
It seems to me therefore absolutely crucial to achieve some kind of real normalization, where Israelis can become part of the Middle East and not an isolated sanctuary connected to the West and denying and contemptuous and ignorant of the Palestinians. One sign is that wherever you go in Israel, the road signs are written in English and Hebrew, There’s no Arabic. So if you’re an Arab and you can’t read Hebrew or English, you’re lost. That’s design. That’s a way to shut out 20 per cent of the population. So it’s very important for Israelis to be forced intellectually and morally to confront the realities of their own history.
(David Barsamian and Edward W. Said, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said [Pluto Press, 2003], p. 21)
Aharon Appelfeld’s The Story of a Life, and the interviews he gives to journalists, show all too clearly that even some of Israel’s finest writers and intellectuals refuse absolutely to confront their own history. Appelfeld, like the majority of Israelis, perceives Israel as a victim. He is a Naqba-denier, narrow in his sympathies, oblivious and indifferent to the Other, using phrases like “to erect walls” (p. viii) and “working the land” (p. ix) without a trace of understanding of what such terms mean to dispossessed Palestinians brutalized by sectarian Jews. He describes The Story of a Life as “a description of a struggle” (p. viii) but he is oblivious to the material conditions which allowed his reinvention, blind to the struggle of those who have an equal right to justice.
Appelfeld is clearly as incapable of understanding his own blindness as Heidegger was, which raises the question: what is to be done? Well, it would be nice for once if journalists challenged this old man’s complacencies, but somehow it’s hard to see that happening.
At the level of culture the challenge is to those who have directly suffered at the hands of the barbaric, sectarian state which Appelfeld has foolishly aligned himself with. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinian intellectuals are now fluent in Hebrew, as result of being incarcerated as political prisoners in the Israeli Gulags. What one of them needs to do is write a masterpiece in Hebrew which forces Zionist culture to acknowledge the Other in the way that Celan forced German culture to face up to the truth of his experience. To write in Hebrew and to write better than Appelfeld; that, at the level of culture and humanity, is one challenge for the victims of Zionism.
