Palestine | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

This Week's Show •

The Split Screen View in Jerusalem and Gaza

One split screen wasn’t really enough for the asymmetries we’re looking at now, but there it was: Ivanka unveiling the Trump embassy plaque in Jerusalem, and 40 miles away, the massacre at Gaza, Israeli soldiers killing dozens of Palestinians in unarmed protest. It was a 70-year birthday party on the ground of what the Arabs of Israel call their 70-year-old catastrophe. It would take another split screen to see the pulling apart of the Atlantic alliance, the broken consensus on keeping nuclear arms out of Iran. More split screens would show other breakdowns underway—in the attachment of American Jews to Israel, for example, and a deepening split over the odd couple, Netanyahu, and Trump: in the US, four out of five Republicans love them; three out of four Democrats do not.

This was a juxtaposition of buzzwords and loaded images—realities and truths, as people kept calling them–to challenge and possibly change the grand narrative of where the world is at, and not just in Israel or the Middle East. So we are listening to this hour for adjustments in storylines among a sampling of interested parties: Jewish, Palestinian, American and more.

This Week's Show • September 11, 2014

What’s Left of Liberal Zionism?

We're looking at liberal Zionism, enduring a crisis after a brutal summer in Gaza. It's prompted handwringing for American Jews and Israelis who are still looking for a way to peace, and still worried about the clash of democratic and Jewish ideals in the political culture of Israel.

We’re looking at liberal Zionism, enduring a crisis after a brutal summer in Gaza. It’s prompted handwringing for American Jews and Israelis who are still looking for a way to peace, and still worried about the clash of democratic and Jewish ideals in the political culture of Israel.

It’s a testing time for a moderate ideology in an age of extremes. In his new and controversial book, My Promised Land, the Israeli journalist Ari Shavit — perhaps the most prominent of the liberal Zionists writing today — begins his history in Lydda. The Palestinian town was evacuated of its 50,000 residents by Israeli force in 1948. Shavit concludes that this is where the problem of Zionism lies:

The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be. In retrospect it’s all too clear.

Where does this leave us in 2014? Two peoples, two claims to territory, two distinct histories — and no agreement. Is something like a liberal Zionism possible?

Podcast • November 16, 2011

David Grossman: looking for an end of “the situation”

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with David Grossman (52 min, 26 meg) David Grossman is considering my question: why the “good guy” solutions have availed so little in the Middle East, over such an ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with David Grossman (52 min, 26 meg)

David Grossman is considering my question: why the “good guy” solutions have availed so little in the Middle East, over such an ominously long time.

Patriot and peacenik, critical-thinker and oppositionist, Zionist and humanist, David Grossman is a good guy, and then some. I feel grace, something like nobility, in his presence as in his prose. One knows that his son Uri was killed, age 20, at war in Lebanon in 2006, when David Grossman was in the thick of writing To the End of the Land, his epic novel of 21st Century Israel. But the nobility of suffering is not what I’m looking for or feeling as much as the steady brave honesty of the inquiries that David Grossman undertook even before Uri was born — of the unrelenting question “What happened to us?” as he put it almost a quarter century ago. The Yellow Wind, translated into English in 1988, was his non-fiction examination of the brutal, brutalizing occupation of the West Bank. “I could not understand,” he wrote, “how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched… The history of the world proves that the situation we preserve here cannot last for long. And if it lasts, it will exact a deadly price.”

David Grossman has seen more deeply into the Middle East nightmare, and been seared by it more than most of us could bear. And still I’m unclear after our long conversation here whether his brilliant penetration of the madness has equipped him and us to find a way out.

The basic Grossman diagnosis in The Yellow Wind was that by the 1980s, Palestinians and Israelis were living under a curse “placed on both peoples — the curse of self-destruction, the curse of the fear of peace.” Both parties are much worse off today, he tells me: programmed to hate and now paralyzed to help themselves — deeply damaged, disabled people, desperate for outside intervention. This is the strong case for putting the Middle East into locked-up receivership. But don’t we also keep seeing the power that paralyzed people develop to fend of their best friends?

Can we imagine a peace “contract” fair enough, and political leaders dedicated enough, to create a ten-year interval of stability that would begin to change hearts? Or must changes of heart come first? How many more “wars for peace” can we rationalize, like the Second Lebanon War? And how should we apply the curious strategy that David Grossman has contrived in To the End of the Land for his heroine Ora, as a means of distancing herself from the madness, “the general almost eternal conflict” that has engulfed her for 40 years? With the help of her Palestinian driver, Ora dutifully, grudgingly delivers her son to his Army unit for an extended tour of duty. “Don’t hurt anyone… and don’t get hurt,” she admonishes the boy, and then she deliberately disappears in a long hiking tour of the Galilee. Her thought is that no bad news about her son can be delivered if she cannot be found to receive it.

It’s important to David Grossman that President Obama is reported to have read To the End of the Land on vacation last summer, but I am still figuring how the book might instruct him. Barack Obama remains for David Grossman the one figure on the political landscape with the “contradictory capacities” to present a transformative vision of peace to the Middle East and at the same time rescue two damaged peoples from a trap of their own making.

Podcast • February 23, 2011

Philip Weiss: A Jewish Argument around the Arab Revolt

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Philip Weiss. (65 minutes, 30 mb mp3) Photo from bigthink.com Philip Weiss, exulting in the glorious news from Egypt, says: “the handwriting on the wall is Arabic.” The ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Philip Weiss. (65 minutes, 30 mb mp3)

Photo from bigthink.com

Philip Weiss, exulting in the glorious news from Egypt, says: “the handwriting on the wall is Arabic.” The 55-year-old meta-journalist dedicates his website MondoWeiss to “the war of ideas in the Middle East.” His project is more daring and difficult than that sounds. Really it’s to start something between a moral argument and a civil war over the big book of Jewish tradition and “spiritual wholeness” — over US national interests, the Palestinian condition, Israel and the whole modern idea of Zionism, by which he means the judgment from 19th and 20th Century European experience that Jews cannot be safe as a tiny minority in non-Jewish countries.

On the page and in conversation Philip Weiss is celebrating the revolution in Egypt for the bold non-violent genius of the Arab street. It moves him to tears that youngsters are using the social Web — Western technologies of gossip and hooking up — to liberate a great people. He also writes bitingly that the revolution is a gift for us Americans, too, to help us purge decades of disinformation and denial about what our policies have accomplished.

Not the least of many ironies in the story is Philip Weiss’s acknowledgment of “another feature writer,” the Austrian journalist Theodore Herzl (1860 – 1904), usually cited as the father of Zionism. Herzl grew up, as Weiss did, a “Christmas tree Jew,” but he was alert to the reality of his day in Vienna and Paris in the late 19th Century — personal threats to Herzl and shouts of “Death to Jews” on the streets of Europe’s capitals. “Anti-Semitism made me Jewish again,” was Herzl’s line. Philip Weiss’s analog is “Neo-conservatism made me Jewish again.” The reality of Philip Weiss’s day in America is that “I went to Harvard-fucking-College. I lead a really privileged life. I’ve never had an obstacle placed in my way, career wise, that I didn’t put there myself. And that is true of my whole generation, and the next generation… So what does that say — what does that real experience say — about the central tenet of Zionism which is that a minority is unsafe in a Western country? It’s bullshit — that’s what it says. And the type of society that we treasure in which a minority is safe and free is one that we as a community are destroying in the Middle East! destroying that idea! … The denial of the real conditions of Palestinian life by Jews is shocking to me… that my people would be so blind to the suffering.”

We are sitting in Philip Weiss’ living room in a snow-bound house high above the Hudson River, an hour north of Manhattan. Iraq was “a war of ideas,” he’s arguing — many of them out of the Jewish-American right wing. It’s not enough to hate “that bastard Bush,” as his mother does, because George Bush wouldn’t know an idea if one bit him. The Best and the Brightest, Phil Weiss reminds you, was not about JFK but about his brains-trust. Iraq “came out of a Jewish neo-con fantasy… We haven’t dealt with it, but we’re starting. In five years it will be debated at centers for Jewish history. It will take a while.”

I want a civil war in Jewish life. My dream is to have a Jewish family on stage, arguing about this in front of everyone. Remember what it did for gay rights that Lance Loud was coming out on television in the early 70s. That family — whatever price they paid in their privacy, and certainly they entertained us — also helped liberate a lot of suffering homosexuals… I want the Jewish family on stage to be having that reality show around this issue. So that people get to see my surrogate in that family — there are many of them out there, the young Jews. I want to see the tears. I want to see the rage. I want to see the charges of betrayal. I want this all out on the stage. I want “you’re a traitor,” “you’re a self-hating Jew,” I want the whole fuckin’ thing. I want everybody to watch, because it’s vital. It’s just like the gay people. In the Jewish family, these people have been closeted. You know, I never thought about this before: they are just like the gay people, when they were closeted. A lot of them are afraid to come out, and a lot of people who help me on the website are not public. A lot of the Arabs aren’t, and a lot of the academic and government officials aren’t because their careers would suffer. One guy says: “you can’t use my name because my father will have a heart attack.” But this should be done publicly. Right now I want to tap into reality, and I’m actually trying to find a Jewish family that will do it. Because the Neo Cons believe what they believe. But I think as soon as they start offering their bullshit on stage, and start talking about Anti-Semitism on stage, I want Americans to understand what price we’re paying for the belief that Anti-Semitism is a persistent factor in Western society, and that Jews need a refuge. Americans have a right to judge the reality of that statement.

Philip Weiss in conversation with Chris Lydon in Cold Spring, New York, February 16, 2011.

Podcast • May 14, 2010

Kai Bird: Cancel the Apocalypse

Kai Bird, as a Pulitzer-grade biographer and historian, is drawn to the apocalyptic. He’s been “obsessed with things atomic,” as he says — with bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer; with the Bundy “Brothers in Arms,” McGeorge and William; and now with the Middle East, where he grew up, and especially Jerusalem, “a city where apocalyptic literature was born and nurtured.”

So it is striking that opportunity is the keynote of Kai Bird’s memoir Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, from his boyhood past the check-points of Arab and Israeli Jerusalem in the 1950s. His half-century chronicle is of promising roads not taken, yet in both the book and our conversation, he is talking today about an epochal turn, in Arab and Israeli thinking, out of stalemate toward secularism and sanity. There’s an extension in spirit here of the stubborn pragmatism that Mustafa Barghouthi voiced with us about a non-violent route out of fanaticism.

At the core of Kai Bird’s vision, Barghouti’s too, is an old idea among Zionists, early and late, of a “Hebrew Republic.” It is the vision inside Bernard Avishai‘s writing from Jerusalem today and his 2008 manifesto The Hebrew Republic. It was much the same vision that fired a fabulous, largely forgotten character that Kai Bird introduces from the 1940s, Hillel Kook:

Even though he was a member of the Irgun and working with Menachem Begin at that time… [Kook’s] argument was that the new state should be secular, very much a division between synagogue and state; that this would open the door to a society inclusive of non-Jews, Christians or Muslims that were also in the state; … that the state would be imbued, drenched in Jewish culture as such; but the state’s identity would be based on its language: Hebrew. And as such, the state of Israel would become a state like any other state. The Hebrews of Israel would be Hebrews, like Frenchmen in France. It would be a modern 20th century secular state…

I would argue, as does Bernard Avishai in his brilliant book, that Israel is going in that direction. Most Israelis live along the Mediterranean Coast in Tel Aviv, and they’re highly educated, inventive, cosmopolitan, high-tech and productive members of their society. They’re secular, and yet they are drenched in Jewish culture and in the Hebrew language. And If Israel becomes more of a Hebrew republic and less of a Jewish state as such, that opens the door to becoming good neighbors with their own Israeli Arab citizens but also with their neighbors in the West Bank and Egyptians and Syrians. It becomes less a religious conflict, and more a question of where the borders are going to be between these states…

Ironically, the radical revisionists of the 1930s and 40s envisioned a secular republic. They did not talk about a Jewish state. They talked about a state where Jews could simply be modern human beings filled with multiple identities, not simply a religious label… But today we’ve been going for 60 years in the other direction, precisely because the conflict has been prolonged, because Israelis are drenched in a sense of victimhood, not only from the Holocaust, but now from all the wars and the suicide bombers. And they face an enemy, the Palestinians, who also are drenched in victimhood and see themselves as the victims of this 60-year conflict. So it’s a terrible tragedy. So this notion that a secular Hebrew republic as such, a more secular Israel, will evolve over the next 20 or 30 years of globalization is a hope, I would argue, that this conflict can eventually be resolved.

Kai Bird in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, May 7, 2010.

Podcast • April 30, 2010

Mustafa Barghouti: Is there Room for Gandhi in Palestine?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mustafa Barghouti. (53 minutes, 32 mb mp3) Ask Palestinians why there is no Gandhi in their movement, and often the answer comes: but there are several, and Mustafa ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mustafa Barghouti. (53 minutes, 32 mb mp3)

Ask Palestinians why there is no Gandhi in their movement, and often the answer comes: but there are several, and Mustafa Barghouti should be recognized more widely as one of them.

A medical doctor, born in Jerusalem in 1954, trained both in the old Soviet Union and in the US, he is the advocate of a strong, non-violent push to a two-state deal with Israel. He got his break in the show biz of American opinion last Fall on the Daily Show. His B. D. S. campaign this Spring in the world press and on American campuses stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions to bring the pressure of international attention and law on the Israeli government.

Mustafa Barghouti has set his own course in the famous Barghouti family and in Palestinian politics. With Edward Said and others in 2002, Mustafa Barghouti helped found the Palestinian National Initiative. He was the Initiative’s candidate (and ran second to Mahmood Abbas) to succeed Yasir Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority in 2005. His Initiative banner waves for “a truly democratic and independent ‘third way’ for the large majority of silent and unrepresented Palestinian voters, who favour neither the autocracy and corruption of the governing Fatah party, nor the fundamentalism of Hamas.” In a long conversation at Brown’s Watson Institute yesterday, Dr. Barghouti seemed a model of the old virtues: patience, long-suffering, gentleness and a certain deep enthusiasm.

There isn’t any place in the world where apartheid is so systematic as it is today in Palestine… You are talking about a situation where we the Palestinians are prevented from using all our main roads because they are exclusive for Israelis and Israeli Army and Israeli settlers. This did not happen even during the segregation time in the [United] States. People could not use the same bus or same restaurant. But here you can’t use the same road even. I am an elected Member of Parliament. I ran for president in Palestine; I was second in the presidential race. I was born in Jerusalem. I worked as medical doctor, as a cardiologist, in a very important hospital in Jerusalem for 15 years. And since five years I am prevented, like 98 percent of the Palestinians, from entering Jerusalem. If I am caught in Jerusalem, I could be sentenced to seven years in jail.

This is unbelievable. You have a situation where a husband and a wife cannot be together. If a husband is from Jerusalem and his wife is from the West Bank, or the opposite, they cannot live together. Because if the husband or the wife comes to the West Bank they lose their ID, they lose their residency. And the wife or the husband from the other side cannot be granted citizenship in Jerusalem. We have never seen a situation where a country occupies a city like East Jerusalem and then declares the citizens of the city — who have lived there for hundreds, and some of the families for thousands of years — “temporary residents.” And if one of them goes out to study at Brown for five years for instance, they would lose their residency. This is what you see are acts of ethnic cleansing.

There isn’t a place in the world where officially the policy is, if I have a person with a heart attack and I need to get him to a hospital in Jerusalem or in Israel, I have to get a military permit from a coordinator in the military headquarters. And this can take hours or days, or it can not be granted at all. I’ve had patients die in front of my eyes because I could not get them through the checkpoints. We had 80 women who had to give birth at checkpoints, and 30 of them lost their babies. And to me, the fact that a woman cannot give birth in a dignified manner, and having to give birth in front of foreign soldiers out in the street, is equal to the utmost injustice. Tell me, where does that happen anywhere in the world? And this is happening by a country that is claiming that it is a democracy and that it is civilized. And by people that have had suffering in the past. I mean, that’s what amazes me, you know. People who understand how terrible it is to be discriminated against…

So we ask ourselves: how do we make the Israelis change their minds? How do we convince them to stop the oppressive system which is hurting our future and their future? …We have to make their system of occupation painful; and we have to make their system of occupation costly. This can be done through only two ways: either you turn to violence, which I totally disagree with, I don’t believe in and I think is counterproductive; or you turn to non-violence and mobilizing international pressures on Israel, as people did in the case of the apartheid system in South Africa. If it wasn’t for the divestment sanctions campaign in the 80s and 90s we would never have seen the apartheid system fall apart in South Africa, simply because the balance of forces between the regime and the people is so big in the interest of the regime. We have the same situation in Palestine. That’s why I speak about divestment and sanctions to encourage non-violence. This is the only way we make non-violent resistance succeed, by having an international component, especially in the United States. We are not talking about boycotting Israel, or Israeli people. We are talking about boycotting occupation and about divestment from occupation and military industry that is exploiting people, that is destroying people’s lives and that is consolidating an apartheid system. So we are calling for divestment from occupation and apartheid and injustice…

Let’s say we have a Palestinian state and an Israel state. This will make many Israelis calmer because they will not be afraid about the Jewish nature of Israel as a state, although 20 percent of its citizens are Palestinian today. Eventually there will be cooperation between the Palestinian state and the Israeli state, economically, say. I don’t see a problem with us and Israel joining the European Union together, for instance. But Israel has to answer a bigger question.

I mean, Israel is not an island in the ocean. Israel is an island in the Middle East. What we have so far is an Israeli government that is always in conflict with others. They seek conflict, in my opinion, and they use this conflict to justify oppression of Palestinians, and to justify a lack of solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. First it was the Soviet Union: they could not make a solution because a Palestinian state would be closer to the Soviet Union, for instance – or with Egypt which was at that time closer to the Soviet Union. Then it was the problem of Egypt and Syria, and then they had peace with Egypt and ceasefire with Syria. They had a problem with Iraq. Today they speak about Iran. Tomorrow if Iran is no problem they probably will start speaking about Azerbaijan. They keep looking for an external justification for a problem that’s internal.

Many Israelis speak of this. And they ask: in a globalized world when you have economic cooperation, why does Israel want us not to be a democracy? Why did they kill twice already our best experiences developing a democratic system – once in 1976 when we had the first municipatlity elections, and they didn’t like the results. At the time there was no Hamas; at that time Israel was cooperating with Islamic parties against the secular national democratic groups like us. And they killed the results of the 2006 elections which were praised by the United States and the world community as the best democratic elections in the Middle East. You see, I see racism here. Why are Israelis entitled to democracy and Palestinians are not? The question is why are they afraid of us being a democracy? Because we will have a government that cannot be manipulated?

Mustafa Barghouti in conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown’s Watson Institute, April 29, 2010.

Podcast • March 25, 2010

Jared Malsin: the kid next door reports from Bethlehem

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jared Malsin. (27 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Jared Malsin looks, sounds and writes like your bright and earnest American kid from down the street. Until two months ago, ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jared Malsin. (27 minutes, 16 mb mp3)

Jared Malsin looks, sounds and writes like your bright and earnest American kid from down the street. Until two months ago, he was reporting in the Palestinian Territories for Ma’an News Agency. A dozen voices like his in our ears, telling the day-to-day story of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, might force us to change a cruel, foolish and dangerous misuse of our power in the region. Which must be part of the reason Israeli authorities detained Jared Malsin in January, without charge, kept him in jail for a week and then denied him re-entry into the West Bank.

So he’s cooling his heels back home, and we’re getting to know a model reporter before he’s famous. Three years out of Yale, Jared Malsin is the child of teachers in Hanover, New Hampshire, and a graduate of Hanover High School. After college, his news instinct pointed him to Bethlehem, because “you look to the side of the story that’s not being told.”

… As a journalist your natural inclination is to give voice to people who don’t have a voice. There’s nothing like being on the ground and seeing what’s happening with your own eyes. You can read about the settlements and the wall. It’s another thing to be in Bethlehem, the city I lived in for two and a half years, and see how the wall cuts across the main road to Jerusalem and wraps around the gas station and then cuts between two house and through an olive field and has just completely mangled the city. Something about being there, and seeing it with your own eyes — there’s truth to it that you can’t argue with. The challenge is to get that across in reporting, in writing, in photography or whatever medium you’re working in.

The story in Palestinian these days, Jared Malsin remarks, is not the consuming flap around new housing for Jews in East Jerusalem. It’s that four teenagers have been shot by the Israeli Army in the last few days — deaths that will not be explained or investigated. “If you’re on the ground you get a different sense: you can sense the wind shifting and right now I get the sense the conflict is in one of those periods where it’s going to start becoming more violent.”

If you’re living in the West Bank or Gaza, your water gets shut off for a week or ten days at a time, in the summer, routinely. Which means that if you live in a refugee camp in Bethlehem, for a week or ten days in the summer you can’t wash yourself; you can’t wash your children. You can’t take a shower. You can’t cook food. It’s incredibly dehumanizing, but it’s one of these issues you just don’t hear about because there are no explosions going on. It’s one of these daily lived ways that people live occupation. And that’s what I think the real meaning of it is… Those are the stories I’m interested in.

Where, I wondered, is the Palestinian Gandhi between the warring Fatah and Hamas factions?

People ask me that question a lot: ‘where is the Palestinian Gandhi?’ My response is that he’s in jail. There are lots of people who are champions of non-violent modes of political protest. Palestinians have a huge tradition of non-violence. They protest every day, every week, in the West Bank, everywhere, and in Gaza also. Most of the tradition of Palestinian resistance to occupation has been non-violent, and yet most of those people who are leading those protests wind up in Israeli prisons, most of them. Boycott campaigns, protest marches, all the same techniques used by the Civil Rights movement in this country, Palestinians are always using today. But they’re met with tremendous violence.

Jared Malsin in conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown, March 24, 2010.

One of those might-be Gandhis, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, was scheduled to speak at Brown this week until his US visa was unaccountably held up. When he gets here, we’ll ask for a conversation.

Podcast • August 5, 2009

Jeff Klein’s Excellent Adventure in Gaza

Jeff Klein’s excellent adventure this summer was a mission to Gaza, the Palestinian beachhead between Egypt and Israel, to witness resilience, as he says, amidst horrific destruction. From Jones Hill in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Jeff Klein is a retired machinist and union leader. He’s an almost regular working-class hero from the heart of the Boston melting-pot, with a highly irregular susceptibility to strangers and suffering, and a need to see things for himself.

He was going to a place that most of us Americans have chosen, or been persuaded, to put out of mind. It’s part of the charm of Jeff Klein’s voice to get us there matter-of-factly: The Gaza Strip, he notes, has roughly the size, shape and sandiness (and roughly ten times the population) of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. But his great gift is his eye for the human essentials.

Most of his fellow-travelers on this trip were Palestinian-Americans. Mohammed, an environmental consultant from Illinois, was going to see his 90-year-old mother in Gaza. Abu Raouf, who called himself Ralph, was going from Tampa to see his mother and brother. The most heart-rending story was about Maher, an engineer in Kansas City who’d left his American family in Gaza before the warfare last year.

And then the siege began, and his family, all American citizens, were effectively trapped in Gaza. They could not get out. And he was going both to see them – he had not seen them in over a year, and to try and bring them out… At the border there was this horrific confrontation. Here he was with his wife and small children, and told that they couldn’t leave. He could leave, but they couldn’t leave… In the end, he decided the only thing he could do was leave himself, and hope to go to Cairo and make some arrangements to get some pressure from the U.S. embassy to get them out. He was in tears, his children were hysterical. The oldest one looked to be 11 or 12. This was our departure from Gaza.

Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009.

The beauty of the human voice is that your ears can judge the authenticity of Jeff Klein’s story. He’s tried it on the neighbors:

My neighbors are curious – they say, you went to Gaza, why? To people who aren’t politically active it’s something odd, something out of the ordinary. So it takes a little bit of explaining, but people you have a relationship with, your neighbors, they’re prepared to listen to you in a way they wouldn’t otherwise… My neighbor knows now that his tax money is going to buy bombs to kill people in Gaza. And he doesn’t like it. And that’s the reaction I generally have: if you can get their ear, when you talk to people about it, I find they’re universally understanding and sympathetic about this issue, because as human beings there’s an empathy we have with people who are suffering. And if you make them human, people will respond as human beings. For people to accept the brutality against other people, part of it requires not considering them fully human. As human beings, we can’t be that cruel to people whose humanity we recognize.

Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009.

It seems to Jeff Klein “a miracle,” and a tangible reality, that the Palestinians have been able to sustain their national identity through generations of hardship and diaspora around the world.

And the second and third generations in the United States who’ve never even been to Palestine have this strong sense of identity with the land of their ancestors. It’s a little bit ironic that in some ways the Palestinians of today are what the Jews were of yesterday… Adversity has made them stronger… Soomood is an Arabic word that you’ll learn if you go to the West Bank. Soomood means steadfastedness, sticking to it. They have that, and they have kind of a determination and a calmness about it which is quite remarkable. Whenever I visit the West Bank, and I have friends there, I always feel like I’m the angriest person on the scene among my Palestinian friends… They’re in it for the duration, and getting angry doesn’t help. So they’re calm and determined. I’m more of an American – we want instant gratification. And I’m furious – every time I get to an Israeli checkpoint with my friends and see what people undergo, I’m angry, but they’re calm and steadfast. Of course, if they get angry it could cost them their lives – it’s a different situation for me, I have my american passport to protect me and they don’t.

Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009.

Jeff Klein finds it “almost embarrassing” to have found so much joy in a journey through a lot of misery and pain. Slow paperwork and delays let him digress to the pyramids at Giza and to the desk and chair of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy in Alexandria. Jeff had a copy of Cavafy’s poems along for the ride, and the Egyptian caretaker at Cavafy’s house inscribed it:

From a human being who was born in an area which is turbulent and full of problems, who has struggled since birth with bad news every day, and I keep asking myself how long I will be hearing bad news, I found the answer with common sense and logic: that each human should respect the other regardless of ethnicity, color or belief. God has created us to choose. He didn’t create to choose for us. All the thanks to Mr. Jeff in the path of goodness and love.

Inscription by Mohammed El Said in Jeff Klein’s book of Cavafy poems, July 2009.

“Can you beat that?” Jeff says. “I feel blessed.”

Podcast • April 2, 2009

After Gaza: The road back from shame and silence

Henry Siegman: a “fierce urgency” How many setbacks does it take to induce moral clarity, or to create an opportunity? This seems to be the general question at the Harvard-MIT conference on Gaza this week. ...

Henry Siegman: a “fierce urgency”

How many setbacks does it take to induce moral clarity, or to create an opportunity? This seems to be the general question at the Harvard-MIT conference on Gaza this week.

In the short term, horror seems to freeze hearts and harden old positions. The hundred-to-one ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths in the Gaza bloodbath, the gross imbalance of forces and weaponry stir remorse and rage.

To what effect? As Meron Benvenisti observes in our conversation, the shaming of Israel (even the self-shaming in Israel) stir up defiance, too, and helped elect a new right-wing government of Israel.

My conversations on the sidelines at MIT on Monday and Harvard on Tuesday are with two stubborn peaceniks who never give up – on their almost opposite ideas.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Henry Siegman and Meron Benvenisti (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3)

First Henry Siegman, a pillar of the liberal Jewish establishment in America (Roger Cohen’s hope, on the New York Times site) is using a direct channel to President Obama to say: only you, Mr. USA, can make and enforce a fair 2-state peace when clearly Israelis and Palestinians cannot.

Meron Benvenisti: the one-state reality

Then Meron Benvenisti, once the deputy major of Jerusalem. His answer is: No! the two peoples will learn to live (respectfully, as they now live contemptuously) in a single state. Civil rights and legal equality will be the substitute for Palestinian self-determination. Ireland and South Africa are his current-day examples of power-sharing as the alternative to separate-and-unequal sovereignties. As Benvenisti feels it, the inescapable reality of geography and history in Palestine-Israel is the common fate, the intimately scrambled fortunes of two peoples. In this main argument, Benvenisti sounds a lot like the late Edward Said. And it’s among the “occupied, dominated” Palestinians, Benvenisti says, that the logic of collective and civil rights in a unitary state will keep gathering momentum.

Podcast • November 11, 2007

A Piano Master Class with Saleem Abboud Ashkar

Young Abboud Ashkar, just 31, could be the late Edward Said's successor in the exquisitely tantalizing dialog with the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. In counterpoint and close harmony, they are teasing out the implications of music for a world at war.

The aura around the Palestinian pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar — performing, teaching and talking at Brown this weekend — suggests a major musical career coming into bloom, and at the same time a world-historical conversation being extended to a new generation.

Young Abboud Ashkar, just 31, could be the late Edward Said‘s successor in the exquisitely tantalizing dialog with the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. In counterpoint and close harmony, they are teasing out the implications of music for a world at war.

The must-see film version of the story is Paul Smaczny’s documentary on the Ramallah Concert of 2005.

The concert and the movie marked the triumph of Barenboim’s experimental leap with Said. What we saw and heard was a gorgeous collective of young Arab and Israeli all-stars — sharing music stands, probing identities, arguing politics and delivering masterpieces of the European repertoire in Spain, in Switzerland, on the West Bank.

The theory behind the brilliant execution could be fuzzy and subjective. Barenboim had major music directorships in Berlin and Chicago when he started this West-Eastern Divan Orchestra; it wasn’t as if he needed another job or another ensemble. Rather, he says, what the Middle East and the world needed was an exemplary working design of cultural and human interdependence. He doesn’t profess to lead an orchestra for peace. He says: “we are an orchestra against ignorance.”

Said, under a death sentence from leukemia when I last interviewed him, didn’t want to measure political effects. He saw the orchestra as a new frame for probing human differences and the epic struggles of his lifetime. The core problem, living with The Other, “has preoccupied me most of my life, intellectually and politically,” he reflected in our conversation:

I think it’s the main problem. I think fear and ignorance are the two main factors here–that somehow contact with the other will somehow threaten your identity; and second, I think we all have a mythological view of identity as a single thing that is basically intact and has to be protected. I think that’s simply nonsense. History teaches us that all of us are mixed, that every individual is made up of several maybe competing strands, and that is to be cherished. Rather than laundering out the strands that are competitive or contradictory, I think one ought to encourage them… well, in the way, in music, there’s this thing called counterpoint, where you manage the voices in a fugue and it makes it more interesting that there are more voices working together than less. And I think the same thing applies in society. And I think we’re moving gradually in that direction.

Edward Said, A Last Conversation… with Christopher Lydon

This is the conversation and the direction that Abboud Ashkar embodies on his second visit to Brown University. The first was with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra last December. Saturday evening he performed a giant one-man program of Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Medtner and Schoenberg.

This afternoon he gave an interactive, two-piano master-class with five students playing Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Scriabin. And then he stretched out in a gabby ramble with me, touching on Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Proust, a great deal of Brahms, and the moral example of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said in “engaging with life.”

He is a child of Nazareth, an Arab town in Israel, and of middle-class comfort — his father an engineer, his mother a school-teacher. His life resounds with Edward Said’s description of the Middle East as “a place of possibility — not because there are these separations,” as Said once said to me, “but because there are these mixtures, you know… the incredible variety of lives there, and cultures that it’s possible to excavate.”

I see that day to day. Israel is full of Arab music… Our music schools in Nazareth are full of Israeli teachers. My life is exactly that story, that possibility of integration and enrichment.

Saleem Abboud Ashkar, in conversation at Brown University. November 11, 2007

His heart is Palestinian, and it does not soar with hope at the prospect of the Annapolis conference called by the US Secretary of State, the accomplished pianist Condoleeza Rice:

I have no way out but to say: if her Brahms sounds like anything I’ve heard from her till now, I don’t want to hear it.

As an artist, I would like my art to be outside politics, but I am Palestinian and you can’t separate the two. The region I come from is very political. It’s impossible.

There is a clear moral solution, which is to give the Palestinian people the human right to live. The rest is complicated, but it’s soluble.

Saleem Abboud Ashkar, in conversation at Brown University. November 11, 2007

After an encore performance of a Brahms’ late, magnificent cluster of short piano pieces, Opus 116, I asked Abboud Ashkar if there was enough Brahms in the world to tame the savagery in the Middle East, in all of us. He thought probably not:

I think… without certain savage instincts in us, there would be no Brahms. [Music] doesn’t tame the animal; it includes the animal. For me, music is what includes everything else, including the ugliness in human nature…

But once we stop and give in, there is no meaning anymore. In every aspect of life we have to aim for the impossible. Sometimes aiming for the impossible is easier than aiming for the merely difficult. You almost know that it will not happen, and yet you try to make it happen. There’s something very inspiring about that. When you aim realistically for the difficult, it gets more difficult.

Saleem Abboud Ashkar, in conversation at Brown University. November 11, 2007