Joel
Schalit: Jerusalem Calling: A Homeless Conscience in a Post-Everything
World (Akashic Books, 2002)
The subtitle
of Joel Schalit’s book describes a sentiment that many on the
Jewish Left have felt in the past two decades or so. Schalit is descended
from socialist Zionists who arrived in Palestine long before the establishment
of the State of Israel. His family was involved in the fighting with
the British, the Palestinian militias, and the surrounding Arab states
before and after the declaration of nationhood. This is the legacy that
Schalit struggles to define himself through and against.
As he acknowledges
in the beginning of the book, the “700,000 or so Palestinians
left homeless by the 1948 war did not exactly leave willingly. Both
right-wing and left-wing Jewish military organizations encouraged their
flight.” Though there have always been elements of the Jewish
left that were critical of Zionism, increasingly larger segments have
had to challenge the attractive myth that Israel presents a purer form
of society than other nations. That myth was easier to accept initially
because of the desire for a place of belonging, something that could
ameliorate the pain of perpetual Diaspora and slaughter at the hands
of the Nazis and their collaborators. If there is an element though
that ties the essays in Schalit’s book together, it’s that
the left has been constructing easy myths like this one for itself for
far too long.
Schalit’s
book is divided into four essays which tackle the politics of the religious
right in America, the current state of left/anti-capitalist politics,
punk and alternative music, and Israel, respectively. The author is
easily at his strongest when discussing the role of religion in politics
and the left’s failure to grasp the scope and appeal of right-wing
arguments and rhetoric. The book’s first essay, “America
the Enchanted,” examines the ways in which the religious right
has increasingly eschewed traditional liberal politics to employ strategies
that work outside of the electoral/lobbying system. Schalit argues that
when organizations like Operation Rescue and the Christian Coalition
were unable to influence the legislative process enough to overturn
Roe v. Wade or reintroduce prayer into public schools during the Reagan
and Bush I administrations, the grassroots of religious right movement
began to look into alternatives. What emerged was “the strong
cross-pollination of Protestant evangelism with anti-government sentiment”
as witnessed in the Branch Davidians, the Montana Freemen, and Timothy
McVeigh, among others.
Liberals, meanwhile,
refuse to look at religion critically, assigning it all to easily to
the apolitical realm of personal choice. As a result, liberals can only
ever see extremist groups like the Montana Freemen or the Branch Davidians
as outlandish anomalies, in no way connected to a nationwide political
trend with an identifiable, if plural, ideology based on apocalyptic
readings of scripture. Schalit wisely cautions traditional liberals
to take religion very seriously. His warning might seem more relevant
in the wake of the 11 September 11 attacks and the consequent “War
on Terrorism” which has focused attention on Muslim extremists.
But Schalit is equally if not more concerned with the Christian and,
in the case of Israel, orthodox Jewish right-wing. Both of these movements
use the secular state so long as it serves their interests, but at their
core they remain theocratic. As Schalit quotes his secular Zionist father,
“What these [right-wing orthodox Jews] really want is to turn
Israel into a modern-day Jewish Iran.”
Schalit comes
into his own in his discussion of the cultural and political discourses
of the American right and center-left. A student of right-wing media
(Schalit was also part of a post-punk band called the Christal Methodists
which sampled Christian radio talk shows into its music), he questions
the liberal notion that the Internet is an essentially progressive and
democratic political medium. Accusing liberal technocrats of fetishizing
technology, he cites the ways in which the religious and anti-statist
right began to use the Internet from its very inception to organize
and communicate. By contrast, the global justice movement of the left
has been a late-comer to appreciate the uses of the Internet for its
organizing and independent media.
Schalit also
criticizes the idea, popular in mainstream liberalism, that consumption
is the best outlet for political activism. Because the current liberal
mindset takes the present economy as given, politics has become a matter
of buying power. Thus, when the Southern Baptist Convention decided
to boycott the Disney Corporation because it extended benefits to the
same-sex partners of its employees, the response coming from most liberals
was to “buy Disney.” Rather than critique the economic model
that makes us fight our civil rights battles by consuming, liberals
literally ‘buy’ into the fight without thinking of more
fundamental alternatives. This critique of consumer politics takes an
interesting turn in Schalit’s essay about punk rock, “Down
and Out with Rock and Roll,” when he criticizes the alternative
music industry for thinking that it can fight the capitalist establishment
solely within the cultural sphere of music production. Ironically, the
alternative music industry often ends up exploiting its employees and
reproducing some of the problems that it critiques in capitalism.
What Schalit
wants is what progressives from people like E.J. Dionne, Jr. (whose
book, Why Americans Hate Politics, is a good analysis from
a center-left perspective on the failures of liberalism and culture
politics in the 70s and 80s) to the activists on the streets of Seattle
and Quebec City have been writing or yelling for some time: economic
justice is important. While the struggles over gender, racism, and counter-cultural
expression are crucial, they cannot be considered without some analysis
of class conflict and economic inequality. Otherwise, progressives are
left with the phenomenon of downwardly-mobile middle and working class
people who believe that left politics is only about fighting cultural
battles on behalf of minorities better off than them. And when we consider
that the minorities the Democrats are actually protecting are only the
well-to-do of those classes, we discover the rest of the problem: that
the downwardly-mobile classes are partly right. The mainstream left
is more interested in people better off than them. Their misconception
is that most of those people are minorities; the mainstream left likes
people of color, gays, and women only slightly more than their counterparts
on the right, and then only if they can pay up. This is not to excuse
to excuse the racism, sexism, and homophobia of some of the downwardly
mobile who are moving into the arms of the religious right, but rather
to identify the failure of the liberal establishment to provide political
alternatives.
Schalit’s
discussion of Israel is not quite as discerning as his discussion of
American politics, but it is poignant nonetheless. Schalit’s essays
often suffer from the way he uses personal experience to illuminate
his ideas about politics and culture. Where we might fear that his stories
would hit the reader over the head with the point, it is sometimes unclear
why these stories are being related in the first place. Stories meant
to be evocative often end up being confusing. The book’s epilogue,
a touching piece about his older brother’s funeral in Miami, is
supposed (I imagine) to evoke a sense of Jewish dislocation and the
hope that it can be overcome, but it feels tacked on and out of place
in the greater work. Though I am sympathetic to any project that tries
to wed the personal essay with political thought, I often felt that
Schalit’s essays would have benefited from choosing one mode and
sticking to it.
When it comes
to Israel, however, some of Schalit’s personal stories are more
relevant. He, like many leftist Israelis and Jews around the world,
feels a strong connection to Israel but also feels complicit in Israel’s
systematic oppression of the Palestinians. Schalit presents Israel as
a country which, because it has had to rely so heavily on its military
for its survival, has become too comfortable with the tools of the trade.
Schalit describes his own ability as a child to identify and hold forth
on the weaponry of the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) as an example of
this national obsession.
However understandable
the emergence of this sort of culture may be, a preoccupation with instruments
of violence leads people to accept them as necessary. For those who
cannot remember a time without violence, it is doubly important that
they not have their imaginations circumscribed by a sense of inevitability.
Even so, Schalit
recalls moments that are more ambiguous, like one occasion when he and
his father were visiting an Arab friend and a group of Palestinian youths
began to stone their car:
Raising his
[unloaded] rifle in the air, pretending that he was about to let loose
a round of bullets, my father said, “Look at these children,
Yoel. They’re Arabs, yet they have blue eyes and a reddish tint
to their hair. You know what that means? They’re descended from
Crusaders.” […]
When I try
to make sense of the reality of my ancestral homeland, I remind myself
of my father’s comments about those children. His words provide
a double lesson. On the one hand, they are evidence of the depth with
which the legacy of European colonialism saturates the land. And,
on the other hand, they reinforce the notion that nothing in Israel
is as simple as one is initially inclined to believe.
Schalit is equally
uncomfortable with the situation in Israel and with his own feeling
of alienation from his native country. There seems to be no good answer;
acceptance implies complicity and rejection results in alienation. Schalit’s
nostalgia for a more innocent time can only ever be just that, nostalgia.
An adult who has read the history books, Schalit also knows that there
never was a wholly innocent period in Israel, just a time when Israel’s
religious right was a small bump on the political landscape and hundreds
of thousands of Israeli settlers did not live on occupied land.
Events like
the invasion of Lebanon and the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee
camps (where Lebanese Christian militias entered the camps with IDF
consent and killed 800-1500 Palestinian civilians) not only broke off
Schalit’s romance with Israel but also, “problematized one
of the chief mythologies about Israel and the Jewish people-that two
thousand years of persecution, topped off by the Holocaust, had turned
us into the most morally self-reflexive of people.” Though this
myth has been severely challenged, it continues to be believed by many
people in Israel and abroad. Schalit’s final reaction to this
problem, which stems in part from the necessary realization that no
national or ethnic group has a monopoly on moral reflection, is to embrace
some aspects of his own alienation without giving up on certain parts
of the Zionist project.
Schalit uses the Hebrew language as an extended metaphor to explain
his situation. When he was young, he relates, speaking Hebrew was like
“reinventing the world” because it was the revived language
of a new nation. Schalit then let his Hebrew fall into disuse when he
left the country “out of disgust with the moral inconsistencies
of Israel.” He now openly wonders: “Could my inability to
speak the language really be a way of recapturing the original utopian
spirit of Zionism, before it was drenched in the blood of state-making?”
Though Schalit’s
preoccupation with Hebrew becomes a little overwrought, he eventually
concludes, after hearing a radio broadcast in Arabic protesting the
occupation, that Hebrew is also a language of the Intifada, of the struggle
for liberation from division and violence; a language based on the longing
for a conclusion to hatred and death; a language that Jews also know,
regardless of how long we’ve suppressed it.”
Though Schalit’s
conclusion is in many ways annoyingly ambiguous, it also hints that
the initial homelessness of early left-wing Zionism might be a good
space to reclaim. Not only was it hopeful, but it also had the potential
to initiate an era of peaceful coexistence before the rest of history,
and the Zionist left’s own blunders, ended that hope. By reclaiming
homelessness as a political space, Schalit refuses to identify himself
with a nationalist cause. Homelessness is painful but it is also filled
with the potential for self-definition and renewal. The aspects of Zionism
that Schalit appreciates most are those that began with a radical hope
for a place where Jews could live in peace, a peace that it seemed Christian
Europe would never allow them. Though there is nothing in Schalit’s
equivocal ending to hint whether political homelessness would be desirable
on a permanent basis, the idea itself refuses to fetishize the land
of Israel as necessary to Jewish identity. Homelessness does not deny
the tug that Israel has for Jews, but it does not allow that affinity
to outweigh moral considerations; the geographical nation is not valued
above all else. In fact, a solely Jewish nation can never be the answer.
As Schalit notes: “Our experience of oppression in Europe should
have driven us to realize genuinely inclusive multicultural political
ideals. But today’s Israel is even worse at accommodating ethnic
and religious difference than the United States.”
Though Schalit’s
multicultural Israel is not likely to emerge anytime soon, what is important
about his statement is that space needs to be made for Jews to question
the romanticized myths that have been constructed about Israel and cease
to fetishize the land as fundamental to their identity (this is good
medicine for Palestinian nationalists as well). A homeless conscience
has almost become a necessity; i.e., one must be homeless, one’s
fetishized connection to the land must be severed, in order to continue
to have a conscience. If people are more important than land or nations,
then certainly political homelessness is not an alienated state, but
rather a radical reorientation of priorities away from national security
and towards livable and peaceful solutions for coexistence.
