My eighty-eight-year-old father, Elie Schalit, deserves a remarkable amount of credit for talking through Israel vs. Utopia’s main themes with me. Our conversations are littered throughout these pages, giving them a distinctly familial vibe that contributes to the intensely intimate feel of this book’s subject matter.
I’d also like to thank several others: my fellow editors and friends at Zeek, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser and Shai Ginsburg; Arthur Neslen, Vance Galloway; and former Ha’aretz translator Robert Rosenberg, may he rest in peace. All of you provided invaluable comments on the articles and editorials that served as this book’s basis. An equal but decidedly different form of thanks goes to the Old Jerusalem Restaurant in beautiful San Francisco. The salat Turki and knafe are positively utopian.
AngryI said you make us angryAngry peopleThat’s who we are
—Keith Hudson, “Nuh Skin Up”
Purple. Pink. Green. Orange. The brightly colored, flat-roofed, concrete residential buildings immediately stood out. No more than three stories in height, some still under construction, they could have been found in any Palestinian or Israeli Arab town, albeit one crossed with a United Colors of Benetton ad. I imagined that it could even have been a picture of one of the communities lining the highway between my parents’ home and Afula. If you weren’t familiar with such scenery, you might very well have assumed that this was a typical eastern Mediterranean Arab municipality.
The image in question was a promotional photograph for a London art exhibition, Occupied Space 2008: Art for Palestine, showcasing new paintings and photography by Palestinian and British antioccupation activists. Overshadowed in local media by the opening of an equally significant exhibit of contemporary political art from China at the Saatchi Gallery, the show had received a small but favorable preview from the progressive British weekly, the New Statesman. Given the subject matter, I knew I had to go see it.
An altered photo of a Palestinian refugee camp by Ramallah artist Yazan Khalili, the print had an alien quality that was perfectly suited to making a political point in this foreign context. Of course these buildings would appear differently. They were out of their element. The colorizing was intended to compel the viewer to look closely at something he or she might have otherwise taken for granted. (To wit, the same piece—from Khalili’s “Camp” series—was titled “Color Correction” in a ’07 collection, Subjective Atlas of Palestine.) Having just moved back to the UK after emigrating in 1979, I imagined I was being asked to see Palestine anew, through local eyes.
The walk between the Earl’s Court tube station and the Qattan Foundation gallery did little to persuade me otherwise. First, there were the Arab restaurants lining each side of the street serving halloumi, Turkish coffee, shawarma, hummus Beiruti, the ever-popular meze platters. Then there was a bilingual Arabic/English real-estate agency sign, followed by a curiously Israeli-looking blue and white advert for a dentistry office featuring Arab-named oral surgeons. Even more interesting was that the sign listed the nationalities of the dentists next to their Arabic last names: Denmark, Sweden, and, finally, Slovakia. For anxious Jewish rightists, who believe Europe to be a hotbed of Islamic extremism, this would seem like a nightmare come true. Here, listed on a piece of commercial signage in central Londonistan, to cite the title of journalist Melanie Phillips’s fear-mongering book about London’s Islamist-inspired decline, was testimony to the degree of Europe’s transformation by immigration from the Muslim world.
In musing on this curious sign, I allowed myself to conjecture how the most reactionary members of the Jewish American community would respond to being placed in such a radically mixed cultural environment.
Everywhere they’d look, they’d see only the enemy. This fear has become an inescapable feature of Jewish American life since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and one which contradicts every aspect of my childhood experiences in Israel and, subsequently, in a London in which nearly half my elementary school classmates were from greater West Asia. I had come halfway home, so to speak, to the place where I had first learned what it means to be Jewish—by living in a community with Muslims.
It is important to clarify my use of the term halfway here. Even though the United Kingdom is physically closer to Israel than the United States, it has always stood in my mind, while living in America, as being halfway. Not just because it is the place where I have changed planes for the last two decades between San Francisco and Tel Aviv (my parents moved back to Israel in 1994), but because it is a place in which the Middle East and Europe have, however problematically, come together to form what has been provocatively dubbed by some as “Eurabia,” a new Europe in which nearly 4 percent of the region’s population is of either Muslim or Arab descent.
Yet the Europe of my childhood was always the Eurabia that is now becoming fashionable in mainstream discourse. It was Eurabia because we had moved to London from Tel Aviv, and we considered ourselves to be a part of it—in contrast to the European Jews with whom we had little or no contact with, who regarded themselves as locals, not Middle Easterners. It was to this Europe that, while writing this book, I returned in the fall of 2008 with my wife, hoping that we would find ourselves more in sync with life there than we had in the United States during the final months of the Bush administration.
Truth be told, the America we had left was beginning to look far more like the Eurabia that we imagined ourselves headed toward. My home for the previous twelve years, San Francisco, had been transformed during that period. Already multicultural, with a mixture of recent immigrants and families with long histories there, San Francisco came to feel increasingly like a city in the Old World, with a density of otherness recalling places like New York and Chicago before it. More specifically, signifiers of the Middle East proliferated to an unprecedented degree.
In our neighborhood of Bernal Heights, for example, we could easily walk to at least three places to buy fresh hummus, and, during our last year there, we could even find za’atar pita stocked at the supermarket. Taking my dogs out for their evening walk, I would spy any number of bumper stickers related to the Arab-Israeli conflict: Hebrew-language stickers urging Israel not to return the Golan, hopeful designs combining the blue and white colors of Israel and the red, white, and green ones of its Arab neighbors, and blunt declarations in English to Free Palestine. I would regularly overhear Arabic and Hebrew being spoken on the streets, and there were even National Guard recruiting advertisements in Arabic, aimed at the area’s growing immigrant population.
Serving as the editor of Allvoices, an international news portal during my final year in the city, I found myself in a workplace where talk inevitably turned to media outlets from the Middle East: the Qatari broad-caster al-Jazeera, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, and the myriad blogs and newsletters sprouting throughout the region. Our goal was to assimilate as much as we could from all of them, as though they offered the best examples of success for us to emulate during a time of crisis in America’s troubled news business. The metaphor was not lost on me. Adding to my sense that the United States had moved much closer to the region was the fact my employers were Pakistanis.
When we worked with tribal journalists from Pakistan’s lawless frontier with Afghanistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Allvoices’ management advised me to conceal my ethnicity from them. Initially, this upset me. Over time, though, as I learned more about the politics of that area, I came to realize that it made sense to defer to their wishes. The wisdom of the request could not have been more forcefully driven home to me later in the year when Pakistani guerrillas conducted a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, singling out Jews and Israelis for hostage-taking and death. As the events unfolded, I made a point of keeping up with Diaspora Jewish and Israeli news coverage, wondering whether this attack might have something to do with Israel’s increasingly intimate military relationship with India. Israeli arms sales to New Delhi were at an all-time high. Israeli advisors were helping train Indian forces