<<"Israel Isn't David . . . It's Goliath"
by Matthew Rothschild
Irena Klepfisz was born in Warsaw in 1941. Her father, Michal Klepfisz, was a hero in the Warsaw Uprising, the most famous effort by Jews to fight back against the Nazis.
Like almost all of the half million Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, he did not survive. But, as Irena Klepfisz put it in her 1990 poetry collection, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, "he chose deliberately, in split-second consciousness, his own style of dying."
Here's what happened: On April 20, 1943, some resistance fighters were trapped in an attic, and a German machine gunner was training his sights on them. Thirty-year-old Michal threw himself on the machine gun, silencing it, and the trapped Jews were able to escape. A little while later, after the resistance fighters had cleared the Germans out, they found his body "with two neat rows of bullet holes across the stomach," according to one written account that Klepfisz cites in her opening poem, "Searching for My Father's Body."
Klepfisz spent part of the next two years in an orphanage, but her mother, Rose, who had false Aryan papers, got her out and took her into hiding for the rest of the war. In 1946, they went to Sweden. When Irena was eight, they came to the Bronx and lived near other Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish Labor Bund (her father, a socialist, had been a member of the Bund).
Today, Klepfisz teaches women's studies at Barnard College, specializes in the history and literature of Jewish women, and translates the works of Yiddish women writers.
But she also is actively opposing the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And she is outspoken about the indifference or racism many American Jews show toward the Palestinians.
"The American Jewish community has insulated itself from the real meaning of what is going on and what Israel is doing," she says. "Israel is not David in this case. It is Goliath."
I've wanted to interview Klepfisz for many years, ever since I got hold of a copy of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, which sits on a shelf in my office.
It is impossible for me, as a Jew, not to be moved by the Holocaust poems.
In "Searching for My Father's Body," she writes:
The search leaves me weak.
I am still not hardened.
Often caught by a particular sight
I begin to read, despite myself,
and learn a new name, another event,
still another atrocity. I smell again
the burning bodies, see the flames,
wade through sewers in a last
......desperate effort,
till some present distraction,
like hunger or cold, draws
me back and I begin closing windows
and preparing dinner.
When she discovers, finally, how her father died, she is not relieved: "I am dissatisfied. I am angry. . . . I do not want this death."
In "Death Camp," she writes:
when they turned......on the gas......i smelled
it......first...........coming at me......pressed myself
hard to the wall . . .
when they dragged my body......into the oven
......i burned
slowly at first......i could smell my own flesh . . .
when i pressed through......the chimney
it was sunny......and clear......my smoke
was distinct......i rose quiet......left her
beneath
In "Bashert," which means inevitable or predestined in Yiddish, Klepfisz writes about a childhood friend named Elza, who also made it to New York but committed suicide at twenty-five. Her parents, who died in the Holocaust, had told her, "Never admit who you are."
There is much more in this book: an abiding respect for her mother's survival skills, reverence for an aunt who had passed as a Gentile but refused to deny her Jewish identity when she was dying, and intimate poems about women she has loved.
The last poem in the collection is a departure: It is entitled "East Jerusalem, 1987: Bet Shalom (House of Peace)." In it, she recounts a meeting that Jewish women writers (American and Israeli) had with Palestinian women. After one Palestinian woman makes her plight clear to Klepfisz, the poet writes: "We understand the actions of a desperate people."
She closes with this powerful verse:
Night.......Jerusalem.......Yerushalayim.
Jerusalem. If I forget thee
Oh Jerusalem......Jerusalem......Hebron
Ramallah......Nablus......Qattana......if I
forget thee oh Jerusalem
Oh Hebron......may I forget
my own past......my pain
the depth of my sorrows.
A good friend of mine, Madison activist Allen Ruff, attended the founding conference of Jewish Unity for a Just Peace, which was held in Chicago May 4–6. He recounted some of the debates at the conference, which was convened to protest Israel's ongoing violence in the Occupied Territories. And he told me that one of the people making a lot of sense was a woman named Irena Klepfisz.
At that moment, I knew I needed to give her a call.
We talked for about an hour and a half. She told me she "came late" to the issue. But Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacres jolted her. She had been to Israel in 1963 and had spent three months on a kibbutz, yet she found a different, more militarist and expansionist country when she went back in the 1980s, she tells me.
"I went to Hebron and Ramallah, and I was shocked," she says. "These were completely Palestinian cities. Yet they were controlled by Israelis."
When the first intifada broke out, she co-founded a group called the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation, which held weekly vigils in New York City, first in front of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, then in front of the United Jewish Appeal, and ultimately outside Zabar's, the deli on the Upper West Side.
"We met a lot of Jews on the street who argued with us constantly. And that's what we wanted," she says. "We wanted to engage with the community." (Her thoughts on the first intifada--as well as some stunning essays on anti-Semitism and class bias within the women's movement, Jewish lesbians and homphobia within the Jewish community, the importance of Yiddish to Jewish identity, and her return visit to Poland with her mother in 1983--can be found in her book Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes, Eighth Mountain Press, 1990.)
The new intifada has brought her, and many of her old comrades, back into the streets. "In Chicago, I saw people I hadn't seen in ten or eleven years," she says, almost ruefully.
She recognizes, though, that the organizing is tougher this time around. "The first intifada made a lot of Jews really start looking again at Israel," she says. "This, I think, is different, is harder. People say, 'We gave them an offer, we tried a two-state solution, they rejected it, there's nothing there!' That's the line. And I hear it. I hear it from people who were very sympathetic to the Palestinians during the first intifada."
So how does she respond to that?
"It's not easy. It's not a one-liner," she says. But she sets out to dismantle the argument.
First, she says, the point that Israel's former prime minister Ehud Barak was willing to give back 95 percent of the Occupied Territories that Israel took after the 1967 war neglects the fact that "from the Palestinian perspective, they lost 78 percent of their land in 1948."
Second, the 95 percent would not have been contiguous; instead, it would have been carved up by Israeli settlements, which the Israeli military would patrol right in the midst of Palestine. "That's strangling the new state and just continuing the thirty-four-year-old occupation in a new form," she says.
Third, these settlements, she argues, are a bit of a misnomer. "There's a whole language problem in this," says the poet. "The word 'settlement' to me has a sort of primitive, early-stages connotation. But if you've been to the settlements, they're the best of the best, which, of course, need to be protected. So the military is there. And, on top of that, there are roads leading to the settlements that connect to other settlements, which Arabs, Palestinians, are not allowed to use. When you see the roads, you see lights, modern highways, and then you see a dirt road, with no lights, going off to the Arab villages. So the word 'settlement' doesn't even convey it."
Barak, she points out, built more settlements than Benjamin Netanyahu, his Likud predecessor. "How do you negotiate with someone over land when they're expanding the land appropriations at the very moment they're negotiating?"
Fourth, "Palestinian life under the peace process got worse and worse," she says. "It didn't get better. Their economy dropped, especially under closure [when Israel would block off its borders]. Unemployment kept rising. There were more and more checkpoints for Palestinians. Since the new intifada, it's even worse. We had reliable reports of Palestinian women giving birth at checkpoints because the eighteen-year-old Israeli soldiers wouldn't let them through to a hospital. I mean, it's unbelievable! And this is supposed to be 'a light unto the nations'?"
Klepfisz gets agitated about the failure to recognize the occupation for what it is: "the military control of a civilian population by a foreign power. American Jews don't really think that the word 'occupation' means violence. To me, it's amazing," she says. "If you have military control of a village and you don't shoot a single bullet, then somehow that means that there's no violence there? The meaning of it is avoided. Home demolitions are ignored."
But Klepfisz is buoyed by the renewed activism that emerged at the Chicago conference. And she was excited about the worldwide demonstrations that were planned for June 8, the anniversary of the occupation. An Israeli protest group, Women in Black, called the action, and groups of Jews organized events in more than 105 cities around the world, including many in the United States. (For more information, go to www.junity.org or www.batshalom.org.)
Klepfisz advocates "a total suspension of military aid." She finds it unconscionable that "American hardware is enabling Israel to do this."
I ask her about the common canard, "self-hating Jew," that many of us get hit with when we criticize Israeli policy.
"Well, people have a hard time calling me a self-hating Jew," she says. "I'm a child survivor. I lead a very Jewish life. I'm committed to Jewish survival. I don't want the Jews in Israel to die. I want them to be safe. I think they're on the wrong road to safety."
She says that such labels are a blackmail against criticism. If Jews can't criticize Israel for fear of being called "self-hating," and if non-Jews can't criticize Israel for fear of being called "anti-Semitic," then Israel gets off scot-free.
Part of the problem, she says, is that many Jews cannot conceive of themselves as oppressors. "It's the legacy of the Holocaust," she explains. "They see themselves as victims and say that we can't compare the Holocaust to anything, we can't compare Israel's actions to any other country's actions. They see themselves as out-of-history, almost."
Throughout our conversation, Klepfisz is careful not to draw direct analogies between the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation. She elaborates on this in Dreams of an Insomniac, where she writes that she is "always aggravated" by such a comparison. But in the same essay, she adds: "Has Nazism become the sole norm by which Jews judge evil, so that anything that is not its exact duplicate is considered by us morally acceptable? Is that what the Holocaust has done to Jewish moral sensibility?"
And so, today, she demands that Jews own up to the role that Israel is playing in the Occupied Territories.
"It's a real problem," she says. "How do you make people really take in the fact that though they had a horrific history, which they did, and though they were horribly victimized by the Nazis, which they were, and though they lost this immense population, a third of their people, fifty years later they're occupiers? And they are. You can't get away from that."
A two-state solution, with Israel withdrawing to 1967 borders, is the only immediate solution she foresees. "Most of the violence is taking place in the Occupied Territories, and it would end tomorrow if Israel just left," she says. She recognizes that suicide bombings may be impossible to stop now, but Ariel Sharon's military offensive won't stop them, either.
Long term, Klepfisz is confident the Palestinians will get the Occupied Territories back. "I really believe that eventually justice happens," she says. "Unfortunately, it happens very, very late. I don't believe you can forever repress people. I just don't believe that."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive. >>
progressive.org |
