Isthere any reason to believe that something now under diplomatic discussion willchange this pattern? I don’t thinkso.

Doesthis mean I am pessimistic and cynical about the possibilities of peace in theMiddle East? I’m not. However, Ido think we are looking for solutions in the wrong places, expecting oftreaties and agreements what can only be brought about by work on the ground,grassroots work, listening, mutual cooperation, and conversation. It’s heartening to know that asthe peace treaties come and go work of this kind is taking place, right now, inIsrael/Palestine. I have devotedan entire chapter of my book, Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home, to a study ofthese efforts. The good news (and there is good news) is that these attempts at understanding between two embattledpeoples tend to spread.

I wroteabout a village called the Oasis of Peace: Neve Shalom/Wahat-ha-Salam in orderto study the way it grew from a dream to a reality, hoping to learn how othersin the region could make their dreams of peace come true. In the Oasis of Peace, Jews and Arabswork and teach and study conflict resolution together. At first hearing, this effort must seemmuch less significant than the grand events (Oslo, Camp David, Madrid, Cairo)that enter headlines and call upon the attention of the world. On the other hand, while these summitsare regularly taking place and as regularly failing, the little village is growing; there are six hundred children in the villageschool and tens of thousands of teenagers have gone through the School for Peaceprogram. When I think of them Itend to imagine them as individual glowing sparks seeded out over the landamong their embattled people. These, and those like them, are the people who will find resolutions tothe conflict in the Middle-East.

Theearliest writers and dreamers about Zionism must have looked absurd to thepeople who surrounded them. Theywere poor and middle-class boys and girls living in Russia who gathered insmall circles to talk about building a homeland for Jews in Palestine.Dreamers, who knew how to work hard, they invite us to dream on the same scale they did-always rememberingthat a dream must first be planted on earth, in daily activity, in sustainedcommitment.

In1997, Amin Khalaf and Lee Gordon, Israelis of Arab and Jewish origin,established a non-profit organization called Hand in Hand. In 1998, they opened an elementaryschool where Arab and Jewish children study together. Since then, three more schools have been opened; over 800 students are presently enrolled in the four bi-lingualschools. Here, in thiscountry of bombs and attacks and shelling and dispossessions, 800 students now know how to speak each other’s language. Their parents are alsoinvolved, actively working to create social change. Soon it is expected that an entire, countrywide network ofsuch schools will exist, educating children from kindergarten through thetwelfth grade, educating their parents too, and the neighbors of their parentsand probably anyone to whom the children or the parents happen to speak abouttheir lived experience of peaceful co-existence.

Someyears ago, I dreamed that I waslecturing about how we, the privileged in a society of growing poverty, aredamaged by our efforts to deny what is happening to our less privilegedneighbors. We do not understandhow to help them and therefore we close ourselves off to knowledge. In the dream I grasped in graphicdetail the way this self-insulation as making us shrink, impoverishing us,covering us in layers of stiff gauze, so that soon, I kept saying in my dream,we will have enclosed ourselves in an indifference so profound we can no longerbe said to be alive inside all those layers of denial. This was not a dream about Israel andPalestine; I dreamt it years before I wrote my book, but perhaps, working inthe subterranean way dreams do, it eventually instructed me to write the kindof book I wrote, in which I study our ability to ignore what ishappening to our neighbors.

As weare approach Yom Kippur and theDays of Awe, we ask ourselvesto think over the deeds of the previous year, to atone and repent, and to askforgiveness for transgression. Perhaps this year we will be able to bring particular regard to a prayerwe have repeated so often on Erev Yom Kippur we may no longer pay muchattention to it.

"May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who livein their midst, for all the people are at fault." As is customary, we will saythis prayer three times. The first time perhaps for what we have done to thePalestinians; the secondtime for what the Palestinians have done to us. The third time for the possibility that these two peopleswill be guided to forgive each other.

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I want to say a few words about why I became a writer.

When I was young the form of speech we now refer to as narrative had a different name. It was called lying, and I was good at it. In the beginning, I was not good at making people believe in my lies. But I was definitely, from an early age, well established in my predilection for telling stories. Perhaps I felt that on the whole life was better served by exaggeration than by accurate description. Or perhaps I simply had a good imagination and enjoyed exercising it. All would have been well, I suppose, if I’d said that I was making up a story about what happened at nursery school or on the bus. But I kept insisting that things were as I said they were, and not as other people held them to be. I think I could tell the difference, I’m pretty sure I could. But I was offended on behalf of my stories when people gave preference to reality. From a child’s point of view (which I still hold) what is so much better about the way things ‘really’ are?

It was an important day when my mother gave me an illustrated book by Dr. Seuss. And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street was the story of a little boy whose imagination brought him to ever more florid and enthusiastic descriptions of what he saw when walking down Mulberry Street. To me as a child the story seemed to say: ‘well, of course, we know that these things could not have been seen on Mulberry Street, but does it matter? Look at the beautiful illustrated tales we’ve been able to come up with. We’ve even been able to write a book about them. Isn’t that better than plain old ordinary Mulberry Street?’ I was surprised that my mother seemed to endorse this point of view and I was heartened by it. Somewhere, deep in her heart, beneath the constant criticism of my tendency to tell lies, there had to be another sort of understanding.

Like many post-modern people, I have a serious doubt that such a thing as Truth exists; like William James, I’m not sure how we’d recognize it if we came across it. Does truth come dressed in a uniform, or wearing a badge, or naked where other possibilities are clothed? Stories, when they are not considered lies, are perhaps as close as we can come to the elusive nature of ourselves which other forms of self-accounting (analysis, introspection, interpretation etc.) cannot reach. Just as, in a play, every character is speaking for the playwright; just as, in a romance, a child that never grew up is spinning its fantasies: so too, lost, neglected, forgotten, betrayed bits of the self get resurrected in our stories. Sometimes abandoned shapes of us get to consider what might have been had they been chosen. What if, after all, she had decided to remain on a Kibbutz? What if, after all, she hadn’t returned to America after her child was born? Over the years I’ve wondered if it is the sheer telling of a story, the activity of dredging up and putting the pieces together that serves a vivid purpose in reconciling ourselves to ourselves and to our ever-living past. A story organizes, gives form, draws out connecting threads, discovers or imposes meaning. It also reveals truths (note the small ‘t’) some of which hide from the surface of the story but peep through nonetheless in the telling.

I find it interesting, when I listen, as a professional listener, with open-ended fascination to a person’s narrative, how flexibly it changes and develops. People stop being afraid of self-contradiction, of the natural tendency for the story to change as details are remembered or dropped or the perspective shifts.

David Grossman, the Israeli novelist, writes wonderfully about the need to tell a story.

"The instinct of telling a story is such a primal urge. We have this need to re-organize our experience, our memory, to make order from the chaos. I remember how comforting it was for me as a child to tell or listen to stories. Every time I start a book, I think about it. There is always this moment when suddenly I start to fantasize, and the story becomes more concrete. Until then it’s very vague-you know, fragments. But then I have this spiritual feeling of being a child again; and being in this place, telling this story, suddenly makes all of this possible for me. And when I say "this" I mean all the complications of being a human being. I do not understand the world around me. I don’t understand why people act the way they do, why people act against themselves, why people are so subjugated to the things that destroy them, why people are so loyal to the things that subjugate them, why people are doomed to make themselves fail exactly at the point where they desperately need to be salvaged. It repeats itself time and again in the lives of individuals and in the lives of peoples-our people, as well. Telling a story creates for me the place where I really understand things, or think I do." (The Nation, 7/11/2005)

I love the emphasis on understanding as opposed to truth, the recognition that stories carry us to understanding, whether or not they serve up an accurate reflection of events. Sometimes when I am writing fiction I feel that I am making things up precisely in order to tell the truth, which needs this seemingly fictional form if it is to emerge. I love the ambiguity of all this; I try to bring it into my professional listening in the form of encouragement and permission. Most people apologize when they repeat themselves. They are embarrassed if they’ve already told a story before. I encourage them to tell it again, as often as they need to, because it is the telling that matters, not the information they might wish to impart. If there is need to tell a story again, in that particular moment, the need must be respected. Something in that moment wants and needs this story, no matter how many times it has been told before. And here, speaking as a writer I can only say: how else will a story get a chance to revise itself if it is not repeated?

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I’m not an activist – perhaps, at best, I’m a desktop activist. I can’t imagine myself part of these thirty-three Jewish organizations that guard the politically correct views of Israel. Yet, in my own conversational sphere I have been as intolerant of disagreement, as hot-headed, quick to take offense and strike back, as the members of these organizations.

That’s why I began my book; or, better said, that’s what turned my attention towards myself in a way that became the inspiration for my book. Storming out of cafes, refusing to speak for weeks to friends who disagreed with me, insisting that Israel, surrounded by a hostile sea of Arab nations, was seriously endangered -at some point I began to question myself. By profession I am a listener; sometimes we call this listening psycho-therapy or psychoanalysis. I call it intuitive listening and I practice it daily. If one of the people who came to talk to me was behaving as I had been I would wonder, and ask, and encourage us to discuss, this extreme behavior. Why so hotheaded? So quick to attack and defend? I would be curious about what was a-stir under the surface; some unrecognized conflict, some self-division, some terrible fear? Listening daily to others in this questioning way it was inevitable that I would begin, sooner or later, to question to my own stridency.

In general I am not an embattled person. I subscribe to the idea that we have points of view rather than Truths, different ways of perceiving and organizing reality. It was Israel that called up this storm of agitation and made me so intolerant. Was there something about Israel I didn’t want to know or see, something involving the strength and power of our nation? If what was unseen by me was visible to others how had I managed over the years not to know what they knew? I worked hard at this question and eventually pieced together a sequence of refusal to know. I set out this interlocking structure in the chapter I call A Land Without A People, where it can be read in detail. I mention it here to emphasize that I do not exclude myself from my analysis. What I have to say about other strident and embattled Jews has been true of me, their ignorance has been my ignorance and to some degree it remains our ignorance. There are many things this chain of not-seeing can help us not to know; most of all it can help us not to know almost anything about the lives of the Palestinians.

For instance: I had never read a book by a Palestinian author-not a single book, by either an individual Palestinian or a Palestinian scholar or educator. When I’ve asked other Jews what they have read I find, for the most part, a similar pattern. For me, this failure to have read and found out, was certain proof that my opinions were based on something other than knowledge and were very different than facts. I began my reading with Amira Haas, an Israeli journalist who has lived in Gaza. I regard her as the most clear-seeing and courageous of Israeli journalists and therefore, although I have never met her, I dedicated my book to her.

It helped me begin my quest for knowledge by reading a Jewish voice reflecting upon the Palestinian experience. What I learned was troubling enough. As I began to listen to the Palestinians directly what I heard was more disturbing still. Perhaps for other readers I can be what Amira Hass was for me: an introduction to the Palestinians as a people suffering as we Jews have historically suffered. What I think of as my traditionally Jewish heart, open to compassion, has been able to take in the Palestinians as individuals living difficult lives. It is no longer possible to think of them all as terrorists.

Here are a few of the things I did not know:

I did not realize that there were two, very different accounts of what happened in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared.

I had no idea that hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed; I think when you learn the actual number you too may be surprised.

I had no idea that the Israeli army was capable of acts that no one would consider an expression of its "purity of arms."

I was not aware how much water from the West Bank was sent into Israel proper and to the settlements, and was withheld from the Palestinians.

I thought many, many more Jews had been killed and wounded in terrorist attacks than actually had been.

I was stunned to realize the number of casualties among Palestinians, including women and children.

Talking to a friend some weeks ago I heard this: "Well, if life is so hard for them, why don’t they just leave?" She was surprised to find out that Jordan is the only Arab country that accepts the Palestinians as citizens.

These is a fact we should all know.

I have never lost my dedication to Israel, to our Jewish homeland, to our people. But I have had to ask myself what this dedication could possibly mean if it was based on ignorance.

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I started out by saying that I was worried about us, the whole community of us, American Jews. As Jews, inheriting a Talmudic tradition of debate and commentary, we have been a people given to disputation. We have been considered a stiff-necked, stubborn people precisely because we don’t easily yield our opinions to authority and because our authorities have not felt the need to require of a Jew a rigorous structure of necessary beliefs. You can be a Jew if you believe in God or not, if you are kosher or not, if you are observant or not, if you read or have read the Bible, whether or not you observe the Sabbath and welcome the Shekinah and the extra soul she is said to bring us for the Sabbath. You could even be totally ignorant of any of this and still be a Jew.

So, how does it happen, I ask, with a tradition like this, that we have become a people who can’t tolerate a difference of opinion when it comes to Israel? I’m serious when I say we cannot tolerate it. There are at present thirty-three distinct Jewish organizations formed into a coalition to watch what is said about Israel on college campuses. Yes, yes, I’m perfectly serious. The majority of them are off-campus organizations so concerned about attitudes towards Israel that they have determined to generate on campus a "pro-active, pro-Israel agenda." This does not sound very Jewish to me. It also does not sound much like higher education and that is what worries me. I want to understand why we Jews have begun to behave as if the holding or speaking of an opinion was, in itself, a threat to the survival of Israel.

In a recent article by David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi, I read the following (Tikkun, September/ October, 2009): "We have become increasingly concerned at the ways in which scholarly critics of Israeli policy have been cavalierly and maliciously misrepresented, mostly through ad hominem attacks on their characters, reputations, and careers."

Here is their recent example: The written reports of a panel, "Human Rights and Gaza," hosted at UCLA in January of 2009 have been for the most part misleading. The papers presented by the four speakers were received in an atmosphere of general tolerance, although on one occasion, briefly, they were "interrupted by pro-Israeli jeers." I have checked this account by listening to the podcast of the proceedings. It was a peaceful and civil public event. The reports, however, give a very different impression. It has been compared to a "beer hall political rally," the panelists have been characterized as an "anti-semitic lynch mob." They have been accused of leading a frenzied audience in chants of "F–k Israel" and "Zionism is Nazism." None of this, I repeat, absolutely none of this is accurate, there was no frenzied audience and there were no chants. One of the participants was Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. Can one really imagine this man as part of an anti-semitic lynch mob?

I encourage anyone interested in this issue to do what I have done and check it out online. Or you can trust me that the occasion was as I have represented it – civil, respectable, entirely appropriate for an academic setting, not the way it has been represented by Roberta Said, education director of Stand With Us, in an article entitled "Reviving 1920’s Munich Beer Halls at UCLA, Courtesy of California Taxpayers." Subsequently, articles in the Wall Street Journal (February 3, 2009), the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (February 18, 2009) and in The Los Angeles Times use her characterization of the panel and its speakers without bothering to check facts. Could it be that the writers of these articles actually believe what they are saying? That they are so alarmed by a criticism of Israel that they experience it as a deadly attack and then unwittingly invent the mood, the atmosphere and the comments that would justify this assertion?

I have come to think about this as a "siege mentality," a state of mind in which one believes oneself and one’s people to be perpetually under attack, living at an edge where drastic measures are needed for survival. I sense in it a raw, underlying fear of immanent destruction, as if the people who see the world in this way imagine that we Jews are still living through the Holocaust. Munich beer halls, vicious anti-semitic slogans, the fascist-style chanting, all taking place on a University campus in California in 2009? I sense here a serious confusion between past and present and also between acts and thoughts, so that a verbal critique is experienced as a physical attack and then comes to be perceived as a violent action – an escalating confusion between what is said and what takes place in the world.

How unfortunate this is, how tragic that members of our community are so traumatized by the past that they cannot easily join others of us in the present. We are not outcasts and victims any longer; we are a powerful people, we have accomplished a miracle of nationhood. What are these fears and worries that seem to express love and concern and support for Israel? Are they not (although not intended to be) an undeserved insult to the Jewish accomplishment? I see these fears as a heartbreaking failure to recognize what we have in fact achieved. In the world as it is now we have an indisputable fact, which these worriers cannot see: the Jewish people has become powerful.

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I am worried about us, the whole community of us, American Jews who have lost the ability to hold a reasonable discussion. I became aware of this as I was writing a book about Israel and Palestine. I had published many books before so it is customary, when I run into old friends or acquaintances, to be asked what I’m working on. In the past, people didn’t seem particularly impressed or interested; I guess the question was mainly polite and I learned not to answer it in too much detail.

But with this book, everything was different. The responses were often explosive and urgent, sometimes immediately embattled. I remember a few of them. "Why Palestine? Are you one of those self-hating Jews? What do you have to say that hasn’t been said a hundred times already? We really need another book about Israel? I sure hope you’re not going to attack Israel." Those were the negative responses from people who were not friends but belonged to a larger circle of acquaintances. It wasn’t clear to me why their response was hostile before I had a chance to describe the book or my intentions for it; perhaps the word Palestine in the title sounded suspicious, as if anyone writing about both Israel and Palestine was probably not going to take Israel’s side?

The positive responses sounded something like this: "Good for you. Oh, are you courageous. That’s the most important topic in the world right now. Oh boy are you going to run into some angry people. I hope you’re ready for a strong response." The neutral responses were few and far between. "What’s your point of view? I’ll be interested to find out what you are thinking." I explained, when given a chance, that my point of view was evolving; that the book was difficult to write, especially for a woman who had been a Zionist since she was a little girl, when the State of Israel was established in 1948.

Most of the discoveries I was making while doing research were about my own ignorance. I had lived in Israel for a time, I had strong opinions about Israel, but once I started to read it was clear to me how little I knew. I had a couple of basic misconceptions. I thought the Israeli army was fundamentally different than any army in the world. I took seriously that it practiced a "purity of arms." My boyfriend, when I lived in Israel, was a student at the Technion. He was studying to be an engineer but he loved poetry and was becoming interested in the Kabbalah. When he came to stay at our Kibbutz as the commander of an armed border patrol he had hair down to his shoulders, played chess in the Moadon after dinner, and was always engaged in serious discussions with members of the Kibbutz. For me, and for everyone else who met him, he embodied the idealism we wanted to associate with the Israeli army. In fact, for a long time, my entire impression of the Israeli army was based on him, and on an article I had read that Israeli soldiers cried at the funerals of their comrades and that the army higher command was debating whether this was an appropriate behavior for a soldier. Long-haired soldiers who read poetry and weep at funerals: that seemed at the time sufficient knowledge on which to base my strong opinions about Israel’s fighting men.

But my reading and research were opening up other views of the Israeli army, a ferocious fighting force, the fourth largest army in the world. Israel, my little-sister country, had nuclear weapons and the largest army in the Middle East. Did that mean that Israel was perhaps less endangered than I had thought?

My other misconception concerned the Palestinians: I had thought that all of them were terrorists.

These are pretty slim qualifications for writing a book, I admit. But in their own way this these misconceptions became interesting AS the subject of a book written by a hot-headed, opinionated, ignorant author. All I had to do was turn the focus on myself, to wonder how I’d come to hold such strong opinions in the face of such blatant ignorance and to wonder whether other Jews who also were constantly getting into heated arguments about Israel might have arrived at their condition in the same way that I had. I put a lot of facts and statistics and quotations and stories and anecdotes in my book but the book remained essentially a narrative of consciousness-how it shaped itself through what it was willing to include and what it forcefully and militantly kept out of itself.

It’s funny to think that one could be inspired to write a book because of one’s misconceptions. But here we are.

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