Eyeless in Gaza

When I was a child, living in Athens, I got my first little taste of how the Palestinian/Israeli narrative was to be embroidered, rendered-into-myth—by all involved in the story—when my parents took me to see the film “Exodus.”

Now, “Exodus” was first a powerful work of literary fiction (by Leon Uris), and then a powerful work of cinematic fiction (by Otto Preminger). I went around singing the theme song to the movie (by Ernest Gold) for years after I first saw the film. Ironically, I can't bear to hear it today: it's about as appealing to me as the Horst-Wessel-Lied must have been for most Germans, after the Nazi Era.

But that first time around, in Athens, I didn't even get to see the end of the movie as I was rushed out of the theater by my parents. For some reason I couldn't fathom at 10, people were vehemently booing the film and pelting the screen with trash. I know my father tried to explain the reasons for this remarkable audience response—remarkable, and terrifying, to a child yanked out of Pasadena, whose first two movie experiences comprised “Gigi” and “Around The World In 80 Days.”

“Those people throwing things at the screen,” he said, “are Palestinian and Greek-Orthodox refugees who lost their land in Palestine when the State of Israel came into being.”

Aha. My father wasn't one to beat around the bush.

Very, very early in life, I was introduced to refugees, to the dispossessed, to people thrown out of one country and only grudgingly taken in by another, to impoverished, hopeless souls living in camps. My father was a psychiatric social worker: the dispossessed were his bailiwick.

“Exodus” had tried to tell me a lie, and I very likely would have believed it had I seen the film in the United States without my father. But there were people already living in Palestine in the 1940's. There were Jewish and Christian and Muslim “residents,” going about their daily lives, tending flocks and groves, living where they had been born, when “Exodus Part Two” began.

But, before and after The Holocaust, when Europe's Jews were fleeing the Nazis, escaping and seeking refuge elsewhere. . .The Powers That Be determined that Palestine, though already fully inhabited, would be just the place for them. (Just like the US and the UK and the UN to want to “settle” the dispossessed “elsewhere”: I would have offered up Texas—at least it's got oil.)

I once owned a house in South Carolina, most probably built, in 1830, on land belonging to the Cherokee. In South Carolina, I had to take out insurance, in the event the rightful owners returned and demanded the property. We white settlers drove the Cherokee we couldn't exterminate onto reservations (settlements just like Gaza and the West Bank), but our later guilt in THIS country, and the realities of modern-day jurisprudence, have given us pause—hence those insurance policies.

First, just beat the tar out of those you want to disposess. Marginalize and contain them. And then, bomb the hell out of them, decade after decade, when they dare to raise their heads and say, “Excuse me, but we really WERE here first. No matter WHAT you think your fiery bush told you. I mean: stuff happens; time passes; your Great Temple MAY well have stood here, thousands of years ago, but I and my Muslim and Christian and Sephardic kin have now held occupancy for, oh, hundreds of generations or so, and we're not going to take eviction quietly.”

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