Last
year, the American novelists Michael Chabon, Ayelet
Waldman and Dave Eggers led a group of writers to “bear witness” to the crisis
in Iraq, confronting the fate of that country during and since the American occupation
— the hundreds of thousands of dead, the vanished minorities, the chaos
spreading across the region. The resulting anthology adds up to a piercing,
introspective look at what it means to be American in the 21st century.
I’m
kidding! Reporting on Iraq is bothersome, and so is introspection. Instead,
they came to “bear witness” to the crisis in the West Bank and Gaza, where
thousands of reporters, nongovernmental organization staffers, activists and
diplomats hover around a conflict with a death toll last year that was about a
third of the homicide number in Baltimore. It’s the kind of Mideast conflagration
where writers can sally forth in an air-conditioned bus, safely observe the
natives for a few hours and make it back to a nice hotel for drinks.
The
resulting anthology, “Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the
Occupation,” includes essays by American and international authors such as
Eggers, Mario Vargas Llosa, Colum McCann and Colm Toibin — an impressive list
— with a few locals thrown in. The visitors were shown around by
anti-occupation activists and wrote up their experiences. Edited by Chabon and
Waldman, the 26 essays here constitute a chorus of condemnation of Israel...
The
essays vary in tone and quality, but experienced journalists covering the Israel/Palestine
story will recognize the usual impressions of reporters
fresh from the airport. Cute Palestinian kids touched my hair! Beautiful tea
glasses! I saw a gun! ... Arabs do hip-hop! The soldiers are so young and rude!
The writers interview the same people who are always interviewed in the West
Bank, thinking it’s all new, and believe what they’re told. Chabon, for
example, waxes sarcastic that in the West Bank you can spend months in
administrative detention if you forget your ID card at home. But that isn’t
true.
We
aren’t told, curiously, about who paid for this project. But we learn that it
was organized by a group called Breaking the Silence, one of many NGOs funded
by Europeans and Americans to critique Israeli policy... The hosts’ choreography
becomes evident the more you read, because the writers keep going back to the same
street in Hebron, the same village near the same settlement, the same
checkpoint activist. They avoid Palestinian extremists and average Israelis, so
it looks like all Palestinians are reasonable and all Israelis aren’t.
We
get comparisons to American racism and to South African racism, learn that
Israelis don’t use water cannons because they’re “not cruel enough,” and hear
Zionism described as “a settler ideology with prominent colonial features under
the cover of the Torah narrative.” We learn from Vargas Llosa
that a small number of Israeli Jews are “righteous,” which he thinks is
an old feature of Jewish life. The rest of us, apparently, are “blinded by propa-ganda, passion, or ignorance.” Jews reading this
might wonder how they became characters in a morality play by Vargas Llosa, but we needn’t worry — his criticism is “an act of love.”
I
know space in these projects is limited, especially with all the love that
needs to fit, but the Syrian catastrophe unfolding a 90-minute drive from the
West Bank could have used a few more words — half a million people are dead,
and millions of others have been displaced. Does this affect the thinking of
the Israelis and Palestinians next door? Are Israeli decisions influenced by
the bloody outcomes of power vacuums in Sinai, Iraq and Libya? What will
replace the occupation? In Gaza, it was Hamas — will it be Hamas in the West
Bank? If Israel’s police leave East Jerusalem, could the city become another
Aleppo? These are some of the big questions of 2017.
What
it’s really about is the writers. Most of the essays aren’t journalism but a
kind of selfie in which the author poses in front of the symbolic moral issue of
the time: Here I am at an Israeli checkpoint! Here I am with a shepherd! That’s
why the very first page of the book finds Chabon and Waldman talking not about
the 'occupation,' but about Chabon and Waldman. After a while I felt trapped in
a wordy kind of Kardashian Instagram feed, without the self-awareness.
Whatever
this anthology set out to be, “Kingdom of Olives and Ash” is an unintentional
group portrait of a certain set of intellectuals. Would they like a curated
trip to a foreign country? Sign them up! Do they think a few days is enough to
pass judgment on the participants in a century-old conflict? They do! These
people are taken somewhere, and they go. Someone points, and they look. They
can be trusted not to ask who’s pointing, who’s with them on the bus or who’s
paying for the gas.
Once upon a time, in
a different America, Mark Twain left on a steamer for a tour of the Holy Land.
He had grumpy opinions ... but didn’t spare the people with him on board: the
pompous, the addled, the hypocrites. He immortalized them in 1869 as “The
Innocents Abroad.” Twain would never have joined anyone’s chorus, and we can
only imagine what he would have done with the people on this tour ...