Nuance 33

Accommodating the stranger, welcoming and integrating the newcomer. Such a lovely concept. One that is fraught and problematic. I was having a conversation yesterday with a couple of friends about Israel and Palestine. Unlike me, both have visited. One lived there for a while. Neither one is Jewish or Palestinian. For various reasons, they were just there. And they observed. We more or less agreed that Israel, similar to Canada, the US, Australia, South Africa, (and we forgot to mention New Zealand and the Latin American countries) are all settler-colonialist countries. I do have trouble with the terminology if not the concept, but that more has to do with my allergy to politically correct language and postmodern narratives. Or with any narrative, really, since narratives tend to have value as tools for understanding and forming ideas and concepts, but are rather useless as conveyors of truth, and a lot of people don't seem to get that distinction. Of course, every colonized land has its narrative and its founding myth. Here in Canada, the myth goes that British and French explorers were seeking new lands and better opportunities to thrive and survive, given how problematic and overpopulated Europe had become, and here they came across a vast empty land just waiting to be settled, cultivated and civilized. (In the case of Spain, or Mamá España, it was more a case of greed, and they plundered the new world for gold and products, but so also did England, France, Portugal, Germany and Belgium) But this was not an empty land, being the home of some four hundred plus nations of aboriginal inhabitants speaking more than sixty distinct languages, and all with distinctive cultures and customs and traditions, who had already been here for thousands and tens of thousands of years. In most cases, the early settlers were welcomed and often helped by the native inhabitants, but at some point things always have turned ugly. The settlers would soon lose their exotic appeal and become a threatening invasive species. They would denigrate, or outright deny the humanity and dignity of the aboriginal inhabitants, referring to and treating them as animals and mistreating and slaughtering them at random, sometimes as systematic genocide. There are also differences between the various colonial experiments, notably with Israel. The Jews had been mostly scattered across the earth since the Roman Empire, with only a small population of Sephardic Jews remaining in Palestine. The constant persecution reached its nadir with the Shoah, when six million sons and daughters of Abraham were slaughtered in the charnel houses of the Nazis. The survivors were, understandably, very desperate to hie themselves to Palestine and create the modern state of Israel, where they would have self-determination as a Jewish state and freedom from persecution. Even the earliest Jewish settlers, however, were pushy and considerably less than tolerant of the Arabs who had themselves been living there for centuries, and no proud Arab was going to take lightly this slap on the face. It wasn't too long before hostilities were igninted and now we have this chronic nightmare of oppression, violence and racism as the Israelis continue to marginalize and steal the land of the Palestinian people, and the Palestinians go on reacting with violence and rage. Nobody wins, but it is especially bad for the Palestinians. I understand that under the radar there is a lot of work and organizing being done collaboratively between Israelis and Palestinians in the interest of justice and peace, but I am not going to go on about something I know so little about. A friend of mine, who is also a scholar with some knowledge of this troubled region, once said that people who have been in Israel and Palestine for one week, go home and write a book about it. Those who have spent a month there go home and write an article. Those who have been there for a year keep their mouths shut. In the meantime, I am interested in this delicate and often clumsy dance that occurs between strangers and one is never quite sure what is going on. The stranger is welcomed and helped with open arms, then is shunned or even persecuted as an invasive threat. Or the newcomer simply refuses to recognize the prior rights, human and otherwise of their hosts and will move heaven and earth in order to dominate the land and turf out the original inhabitants. To coexist peacefully, productively and, dare I say, joyfully? Oh, you've got to be kidding! But maybe this hasn't really been tried yet.