Englander Cannot Realize Reality

In an interview, author Nathan Englander uses this example to illustrate why the two sides in the Arab-Israel conflict, or rather the Arab Conflict with Israel, simply is "not the same reality":-

He realized that a Jewish person could stand on a hill in Jerusalem and recognize it as the holy Temple Mount, while a Palestinian could stand in the same place - "literally the same spot" - and view it as a different holy site, the Haram al-Sharif.

Actually, the real problem is not with a "reality" but with a process of denial of reality.  And Englander, I fear, may bot be able to grasp that or, at the least, accept it.

It is that while the Jews all recognize there is a Haram al-Sharif and an Al-Aqsa, Muslims do not accept that there is a Temple Mount.

In fact, it's worse.  Muslims deny the hill was Mount Moriah where the Temple stood.  And those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, think even worse:

Jerusalem's Jewish connection is denied.

Temple denied. Yes, really. The book.

Jerusalem must be purely Arab.

Jews have no right to a Temple.

Violence is the proper response to Jews.

Jews defile Jerusalem's Temple Mount:

There is so much more.  As Dennis Ross wrote:

On the ninth day of the 2000 Camp David Summit, Yasir Arafat, then Palestinian National Authority President, told President Bill Clinton that “Solomon’s Temple was not in Jerusalem, but Nablus.”

So, why does a seemingly intelligent author get things wrong and then pass them on to his audiences so they remain ignorant, too?

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Nathan Englander's Inability: A Non-Fiction Short Story

A few days ago I posted a rather long and detailed critique of Tom Suarez's book accusing Israel of being a terror state, not so much due to its current actions but based on its creation which he sees was instrumentalized solely through the terror committed against the Arabs and the British by all the Jewish underground organizations.  That book almost totally ignored the historical context of the period of 1900-1948 besides getting dozens of facts wrong (the book continues into the 1950s but it is more of the same screeding by Suarez).

I now see these words of Nathan Englander published in the NYTimes:

I just couldn’t shake it — we’re killing them because they killed us and they’re killing us because we killed them. Everyone always avenging. I just couldn’t shake this notion of the inability to see the other side.

and he does the same thing. It's all just tit-for-tat. Mindless I-smack-you-and-you smack-me. We Jews are no better than the Arabs. We're all a bunch of losers.

But I am always reminded of Dr. Israel Eldad's quip:

Yankel and Moshe are hauled into court for fighting. The judge, who also happens to attend the same synagogue as these two miscreants and grew up with them in the neighborhood, calls them over to the bench and says:

"Okay, chaverim, let's see how we can stop a full-scale legal contretemps. Yankel, how did the fight begin?"

"Yuiz, er Judge," says Yankel, "it started when Moshe hit me back." 

And to transplant the real-life humor to the Middle East, the Arabs have always - since Jews came back to the Land of Israel in increasing numbers these last few centuries, and sought to purchase land, living first among the Arabs in Jaffa, Hebron, Tiberias, Safad and Jerusalem's Old City - employed their weapons of violence.

The first Jew murdered by an Arab just for purchasing property in the modern era is Avraham Shlomo Zoref. In 1851.

Here's a list, not complete, of Jews murdered between 1873-1920.

Jews set up self-defense units: Bar Giora, HaShaomer, Gideonim.

Defense.

Original Palestine was truncated by 75% and Transjordan was created.

The Arabs rejected territorial compromise in 1937.

And in 1947.

They rioted and pillaged and raped.  In 1920, in 1921, in 1929, in 1933, during 1936-39.

They renewed their terror in the summer of 1947 and on the morrow of the UN's November 29, 1947 Partition Plan, they went to war.

In the 1950s, there were the fedayeen.

In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded which renewed terror (Nathan, what were the borders of the 'Palestine' they sought to violently liberate?).

After the Six Days War the Arabs initiated, they rejected peace at Khartoum (Three Noes).

Rejected Menachem Begin's 1977 autonomy plan as they did Yigal Allon's 1968 plan.

And everything else offered.

Oslo was sabotaged by Arafat's terror campaign.

Englander is best at fiction.  Not at history or politics.

He does, however, have an inability.

P.S.  This was a non-fiction short story.

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Englander Being Facetious

Nathan Englander is about to publish his first novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” about a poor Jewish couple in Buenos Aires whose only son is “disappeared” in 1976.

Deborah Solomon asked him some questions and he gave some answers.

Q. For a first novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases” seems unusually inventive, avoiding the familiar account of adolescent angst and giving little sense of your own history as an Orthodox Jew educated at a yeshiva in suburban Long Island.

A. It’s true. In terms of personal experience, my only other option was to set this novel at the Roosevelt Field mall. But it would still be about the same thing — community and identity and injustice. It would still be about Kaddish.

Q. You’re referring to your protagonist, Kaddish Poznan, a man who erases the inscriptions on tombstones for a living and is named for the Jewish prayer of mourning. Isn’t that a little heavy?

A. I thought about it for a long time. I knew how loaded this name was. There is a long Jewish tradition of using symbolic names to trick the angel of death. [a Speaker of the Knesset was named Kaddish, Kaddish Luz]

Q. In the novel, Kaddish’s own face is erased when he accepts a nose job for himself and his wife as payment for a cemetery job.

A. We do this to ourselves. People are taking knives and spending a fortune and having their faces altered to look like another face. In America, there is one acceptable face, and it doesn’t look like a real face. It looks like the other faces that are not real in this acceptable way. I am trying to say something about the self-erasing and self-policing of identity.

Q.Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?

A. No. I would deny everything.

Q. What kind of name is Englander [a former Supreme Court judge in Israel is Yitzhak Englander]?

A. Someone must have had shoes from England. I don’t know. We all pretend we’re not from the Pale of Settlement.

Q. You were living in Israel when your story collection came out; these days, you’re back in New York.

A. I’m a big Jerusalemite. I moved there in 1996 to write literary short stories and starve to death and have this romantic life — there was going to be world peace, and we were going to hold hands from Tel Aviv to Baghdad.

Q. Sorry it didn’t work out.

A. I’m an optimistic pessimist. I always think the world is ending, but if you ask me about Middle East peace, I say Jerusalem could have peace tomorrow. Things are hopeless unless everybody chooses for them not to be hopeless.

From the Sunday NYT Magazine - sorry, permalink not working at present.