Master & Slave: Musings On Israel and Palestine

In the 1970’s, I was working as a dig photographer for an archaeological excavation at Tel Anafa in Northern Israel.

When I was not on the site, I stayed at the Albright Institute for Archaeology, at 26 Saladin Street, in East Jerusalem.

East Jerusalem may technically part of Israel, but it is by architecture, by feel and by population, an Arab town. In sharp contrast to the rest of East Jerusalem, which looks like it could be in Damascus, the Albright Institute was a remnant of the period of British colonial rule:1918–1948. With its verdant green lawn, black wrought iron fence and solid dark stone construction, the Albright could be a manor house in the Cotswolds. But it wasn’t.

Thus is Jerusalem a patchwork of many cultures, all reflections of its long history, carried in the people, the architecture and the religions.

The Israelis, the latest in a long line of conquerors, had then only recently taken control of the eastern half of the city.

One afternoon, in search of equipment for the dig, I accompanied Dr. Sharon Herbert, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan and Director of both The Kelsey Museum and the ongoing dig at Tel Anafa, to several shops in East Jerusalem to buy equipment.

In one shop that we entered, a 30 year old Israeli in a yarmulka was screaming at the poor Palestinian shopkeeper. He was endlessly berating him and directing him all of the shop, annoyed that the man was not moving fast enough and did not seem to have exactly what he wanted. The shopkeeper kept apologizing and jumping around, but each apology only seemed to inflame the Israeli even more. The conqueror and the conquered.

Both Dr. Herbert and I stood shocked.

Then, Dr. Herbert turned to me. She said, (and I remember it to this day, even if it was a lifetime ago), “One day, the Israelis are going to pay a price for treating people like that.”

And she was right.

Several years later, I shot the first of several news stories I would do in Gaza; this one for the PBS Newshour. I lived with a Palestinian family in the Jabalya Refugee Camp during the first Intifada. There, I interviewed a father, holding his young son in his arms. He looked into the camera.

“We want to live with them as equals,” he said. “Not master and slave.”

That was some 34 years ago. The son is now as old as the father was then, and nothing has changed; it is still master and slave.

I am a Jew. I am a Zionist. I have many friends who are the children of holocaust survivors. My father had a friend who survived the camps. When Auschwitz was liberated, he walked back to his village in Poland. Where else could he go? At the outskirts of his village, he came across another survivor from his home town, walking in the opposite direction.

“Don’t go back,” the man told him. “They’re still killing Jews.”

So many, like my father’s friend, ended up in the DP camps, for Displaced People — homeless, stateless, most of their families murdered. Many went to Israel. The Jews need a safe homeland. History has proven this over and over again. No nation can be trusted in the long run.

What Jews do not need, what they never needed, was to permanently occupy the West Bank and East Jerusalem, taking some 3 million Palestinians directly into the heart of Israel. This was a mistake. Give all of the Palestinians under your care, now for some 54 years, citizenship and a vote and you no longer have a Jewish State — you have another Lebanon; a disaster. Yet deny them citizenship and you have another South Africa or some simulacrum thereof. It’s not worth it for the ‘settlements’ — not in the long run.

There’s an old but very true aphorism:

-West Bank

-Jewish State

-Democracy

Pick any two.

Go ahead.

Pick.

The poet WH Auden summed it up nicely in his poem, September 1939:

Now I and the public know

what all schoolchildren learn.

Those to whom evil is done

do evil in return.

It is not to late to stop.