The Jewish Power Blog: The Power of Memory

President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu both seem quite excited about the prospect of encouraging the residents of “uninhabitable” Gaza to “volunteer” to emigrate. Then Mr. Trump could fulfill his dream of opening a resort on Gaza’s beautiful beach, and Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition partners could fulfill their dream of restoring Jewish life in all of our ancestral homeland. And the erstwhile Gazans would be free to start a new life in a far-off place where they would not bother Israel any more, and where they would soon forget their collective past.

A few reflections on emigration:

1. As the Bible and the Mishnah attest, despite God’s exhortation to get rid of the Canaanites, the Israelites were never alone in their homeland. Bible law and halakha repeatedly make provision for the gentiles living among us in the land – how to live with them, how to trade with them, how to treat them. A shtetl in Russia was closer to the ideal of a totally Jewish society than the Israelite or Judahite kingdoms ever were.

2. When the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel (the ten tribes) in 722 BCE, they followed their policy of population transfers and mixing as a way of preventing resistance, by destroying national identity. And indeed, the ten tribes became “lost” and no one today identifies as a descendant of them.

3. When the Babylonians conquered the surviving southern kingdom, Judah, in 586 BCE, they exiled part of the population to Babylonia where they allowed them to settle in semi-autonomous communities. Thus the Judahite exiles (i.e., Jews) were able to maintain their identity and to preserve the memory of and longing for their homeland. Later, as they moved on from Mesopotamia to the rest of the world, they took that autonomous community – and that memory and longing – with them and kept their identity alive.

4. Meanwhile, in 63 BCE the land of Israel was taken over by Rome. The Jews who had remained there rebelled twice unsuccessfully (67 CE and 132 CE), leaving the land economically and spiritually depressed. Many Jews voluntarily emigrated seeking a better life – but like their cousins in Babylonia, kept alive their memories and their identity, wherever they ended up.

5. While the Jews were away, mourning the loss of their homeland for centuries, the land was not empty. There were the local pagans-Christians-Muslims-Druze, as well as others who settled here at the behest of various foreign occupying powers.

6. The coastal strip containing Gaza city was, in biblical times, the stronghold of the Philistines (whose name was later Latinized as Palestine), Israel’s toughest enemy; it is not clear whether David and Solomon actually succeeded in conquering it. Later, the rabbinical boundaries of the holy land (Sifrei Devarim 51) did not include it.

7. There were Jewish communities in Gaza through the middle ages; most of the few Jews remaining in the twentieth century were killed in the Arab pogrom of 1929.

8. The UN Partition plan of 1947 included the Gaza strip in the proposed borders of the state of Palestine that never materialized. After the 1948 war, the strip was ruled by Egypt, and absorbed thousands of Palestinians who emigrated, voluntarily or not, from what became Israel. Today their descendants constitute about 80% of the 2.1 million residents of the Gaza strip. After the 1967 war, the strip and all of its inhabitants came under Israeli rule, until Israel unilaterally withdrew its occupying troops and its settlers in 2005 (while maintaining border control).

9. We tend to condemn the Egyptians for refusing to integrate the Palestinian refugees of Gaza into Egypt’s society and economy. And we tend to get angry when Palestinians pull out the key to the house their parents or grandparents were forced to abandon in Israel in 1948, and brandish it in our faces.

10. It seems highly unlikely that the United States will offer to absorb any Gazans seeking a new home. It seems even more unlikely that Israel will accept a population exchange by which Israeli settlers would move to Gaza and displaced Gazans would move to Israel…

11. And suppose a few hundred thousand Gazans were to emigrate en masse to Sinai, and/or Indonesia, and/or Somalia; who will pay their fare now that the US no longer dispenses foreign aid? And how many generations might we expect it to take for them to become fully integrated in their new home, to erase their collective memory of displacement, and to throw away that key so that we can all move on?

12. Hebrew poet Saul Tschernichovsky wrote, early in the last century:

A man is nothing but a small plot of land,
A man is nothing but the image of the landscape of his birthplace,

He was not suggesting that the Jews were unique in their bond to their land, but rather, he was making a universal statement that applied to Jews just like everybody else. Indeed, he was writing about the land of his birth, Russia. Early Zionists were strongly influenced by the models of European nationalism like the Italian resorgimento, or the German Wandervogel youth movement. Now, however, we often act as if others’ bonds to the land are not genuine, not authentic, not worthy of consideration; only ours must be treated with reverence.

13. The Syrian civil war generated over six million refugees. The vast majority, whom we rarely hear about, live in camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. The remainder are scattered across Europe, where their presence has been roiling society and politics for years.

14. In conclusion, here’s a free real estate tip: If you get a call offering you a good deal on a beachfront time-share in Gaza, complete with kosher kitchen and sukkah balcony, hang up.