הצבע ארגמן - "The Color Purple" in Hebrew translation

By searching around a bit on the internet I discovered that "The Color Purple" has indeed already been published in Hebrew, in 1986. M. A. Orthofer of "The Literary Saloon" posted about the translation and even provides an image of the cover of the book in Hebrew, which I reproduce here.

I just checked on the website of the National Library of Israel to see if the book is found there, and indeed it is, under the catalogue number S 87 A 2447. I've ordered it and hope to look at it today when I'm in the library. It was translated into Hebrew by Shelomit Kedem (שלומית קדם). The publisher was Leduri (לדורי). 

Alice Walker refuses to have "The Color Purple" translated into Hebrew

This is no surprise, but it's still sad. Alice Walker refuses to authorize the publication of a Hebrew translation of her book "The Color Purple" because "Israel is guilty of apartheid." (For more on her views about Israel, Zionism, and Jewish self-determination, see my posts on her - Alice Walker).

Her opposition may not, in fact, prohibit the book from being published in Hebrew. Haaretz reports:

It was not clear when Yediot Books, an imprint of the daily Yediot Achronot newspaper, made the request, or whether Walker could in fact stop translation of the book. At least one version of the book has already appeared in Hebrew translation, in the 1980s.

The letter she wrote to Yediot Books refusing to let her book be published was posted on the PACBI website. Apparently when the book was made into a movie, the question arose as to whether it should be shown in South Africa, during the years of apartheid. She decided that it shouldn't be because "there was a civil society movement of BDS aimed at changing South Africa’s apartheid policies and, in fact, transforming the government." Walker is convinced that Israel is worse than both apartheid-era South Africa and the segregated South in which she grew up, particularly in how Israel treats the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and in how Arab citizens of Israel are treated.

I cannot speak to what it felt like to grow up in the segregated South as an African-American. I am white, and grew up in Massachusetts. My only taste of segregation was when I visited my grandparents in Washington, DC. What disturbed me was not the visible signs of segregation (for example, water fountains marked separately for "white" and "colored"), because I didn't see them, and they might have already been taken down by the time I was visiting. What disturbed me were the casual racist attitudes I encountered. And it's not as if there was no racism in the north - I lived in the Boston area throughout the period when the federal courts decided that the Boston schools should be integrated through busing. The courts did this because the Boston School Committee steadfastly refused to integrate the schools. It had members who engaged in the crudest racist demagoguery.

Despite what Israeli government spokespeople will tell you, the position of Israeli Arab citizens is not equal to that of Jews. As far as I can tell, the situation is quite mixed. Israeli Arab towns and villages suffer from decades of neglect by the government - the infrastructure in most of them is decidedly inferior to that in mostly Jewish cities and towns. Because most Israeli Arabs do not serve in the IDF, they have a great deal of difficulty in finding jobs in areas of the economy where IDF service is required. (Druze and Circassians are drafted into the IDF, and many Bedouin volunteer, but very few other Arab men serve in the IDF).

From what I can tell, the situation is improving slowly - the government is now running a program to encourage Jewish employers to hire Arab university graduates. There have been advertisements on the radio (and television also, I assume) urging Jewish employers to consider Arab applicants, and the government is also given monetary incentives to employers who hire Arab graduates. Arab Israelis go to colleges and universities (for example, the local college in Safed has a majority of Arab students, probably because of the large Arab population in the Galilee, where Safed is located). Hebrew University, which I am most familiar with, has Arab students - I don't know what percentage of the student population they are, but they are certainly visible on campus.

I do not think it is accurate to describe the situation of Arabs within Israel as "apartheid," or even "segregated" - I think it is accurate to say that they suffer from some discriminatory government policies and from widespread suspicion of them by Israeli Jews, which can lead to discrimination in employment or housing. The situation is hardly ideal, but it is not as bad as the segregated South or apartheid South Africa.

As for the description of the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank as "apartheid." I assume that is meant is the existence of separate, government-built infrastructure for Jews, including separate communities and roads. For example, Rte. 443 goes from Jerusalem to Modi'in through the occupied West Bank. There are parts of 443 that Palestinians are not permitted to drive on, for security reasons. (Israeli cars and cars belonging to West Bank Palestinians have different-colored license plates, so it's easy to tell - the Israeli ones are issued by the Israeli government, and I assume the Palestinian ones are issued by the Palestinian Authority). Is this apartheid? It definitely makes me feel uncomfortable, and I try not to drive on 443.

When I was first living in Israel in the late 1980s, as a graduate student, there were a lot fewer Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and there were no separate roads built to get to the settlements. If you wanted to ge to the Gush Etzion settlements, close to Bethlehem, you had to drive on roads that went through Palestinian towns. With the outbreak of the first intifada in December 1987, this became increasingly dangerous. I don't know when exactly the separate roads started to be built - the second intifada, which started in 2000, might have been the real impetus for the construction of separate roads, because it was so much bloodier than the first intifada.

In my opinion, the situation in the West Bank is getting close to apartheid, in the sense of government-imposed separation and favoring of one group (Israeli settlements) over another (Palestinians). This is one of the many reasons that I favor Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state with full sovereignty (unlike the partial control given to the Palestinian Authority in certain parts of the West Bank). I think that some of the settlements should become part of sovereign Israel, while others will remain under Palestinian state control - in other words, returning to the borders as of June 4, 1967, "with land swaps," as President Obama put it.

Is any of this relevant to whether Alice Walker's book should be published in Hebrew? I think that she should davka publish it in Hebrew, with a forward explaining her current political views. The book is very powerful, and I think that it could be influential, with sufficient publicity - not only with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also to the current disgraceful treatment of African refugees in Israel. If she refuses to publish it in Hebrew, she's taking herself out of any anti-racist and pro-peace movement in Israel, and that seems like a complete waste.

Open Letter to Alice Walker

My friend Bonna Devora Haberman, who lives in Jerusalem, has written a beautiful response to Alice Walker's presentation of her reasons for taking part in the US Boat to Gaza. I post it here with her permission.

Dear Alice Walker,

Though your riggings are tied, your heart has set sail. Your desire to deliver audacious hope to our region and your caring about children inspire many. As a person who lives in Jerusalem and dedicates many of my waking hours to Israeli-Palestinian collaboration, may I float some ideas that might advance commitments we share?

I co-direct an Israeli-Palestinian activist community theater project in Jerusalem together with my Palestinian partner, Kader Herini. YTheater—housed at the International Jerusalem YMCA. We work in those languages you cannot decipher—in Arabic and Hebrew, and in English. Our theater arises from shared exploration. We strive for an artistic language to express and respect our differences and to develop our joint potential for betterment. We train leaders in our process to inspire more collaboration. Our audiences, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, laugh and cry together; they participate in the enactment of joyous tolerance and creativity, where women and men, gay and straight, yearn and strive together.

I also parent Jewish children who risk at least three of their prime years to protect us. History proves that defend ourselves we must—today there are so many armed to harm us. My children have done National Service—caring for needy school children from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, and served in elite units of the Israel Defense Forces. My sons persevered through grueling training, navigating hundreds of miles by maps they memorized, plodding on without sleep in the black of night with more than 100 pounds of equipment on their backs. When our son Bezalel completed his training as a medic in his combat unit, the commanding officer emphasized to his class their obligations. Their oath to treat the injured with justice—saving friend and enemy equally—brought tears to our eyes.

The IDF ethics of engagement often expose our children to extra danger in order to avoid harming non-combatants, searching door-to-door for terrorists rather than bombing from above. In Gaza, Israel electronically relayed tens of thousands of phone messages and dropped harmless “knock on the roof” sound bombs to advise civilians to evacuate their homes where Hamas stashed weapons and hid military operators. The US army learns from our methods in their war against terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though their opponents pose no imminent threat to your life or your family and friends, your soldiers inevitably wound and kill women, men, and children far from your home.

After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinians were free to choose their leaders. Hoping for less corruption and dysfunction, and better social services, many Palestinians voted for the only alternative to Fatah, Hamas. The Hamas covenant seeks not only the destruction of Israel. Citing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hamas seeks to murder Jews.

Similar to the tough sanctions imposed on the South African apartheid regime, The Quartet—the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia—imposed sanctions on Hamas-controlled Gaza. Egypt and Israel imposed a blockade. The goal is to pressure Hamas to meet three conditions:

• recognize Israel,
• accept agreements made by the previous Fatah-led Administration, and
• denounce violence.

Refusing all of these, Hamas waged civil war, ousted Fatah, broke apart the Palestinian Legislative Council in June 2007, and rained rockets down on southern Israel. 3,278 rockets and mortar shells fired from Gaza into Israel in 2008 aborted normal life—kindergarten, school, and work, and caused trauma, death, and destruction daily. My daughter's medical school held class underground. While she was doing her rotations, the pediatric intensive care unit was treating children from Gaza. In all Israeli hospitals, Arabs and Jews routinely receive the same medical care together. Meanwhile, the university dorm of one of our sons in Beer Sheva took a direct hit—students were, thankfully, in class.

Israel launched operation Cast Lead in January 2009. Shortly after my son, Bezalel was mobilized during Sabbath, I wrote the following journal entry,

We spent an hour before he left reading poetry together, Coleridge and Blake, Wordsworth—romantics who defied social institutions with their embodied eros, and Mary Wollstonecraft's introduction to Vindication of the Rights of Women. He napped until it was time to go. We packed food—vegetarian rations for a gentle soldier. I shiver with our embrace at the threshold of our home, at the threshold of Shabbat and desecration, at the seam of peace and war.

We have not yet heard from him. It is impossible to imagine this, the most difficult thing that I have ever faced.

There are no words to describe the anguish and vulnerability, the fusion of Zionist conviction with empathy. The sheer fear for the life that we birth, nurture, raise, and cherish is beyond any comprehension. There is no safety for innocence.

Not for Israelis.

Not for Palestinians.

My son Bezalel is an artist. He spins wood and metal into sacred vessels, paints on canvas, welds, builds tools and furniture.

May he and all dear ones speedily return to their true passions, bodies and souls intact. Our life force could be so much better spent.

I write of love in the midst of blood.

May we enable peace.

Thank God, Bezalel completed his compulsory army service. He has undertaken a course of study that will prepare him to design new limbs and organs that communicate with the nerves and mind.

The Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza operation documents blood-curdling accounts of how Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank persecute their political rivals. At the same time as retracting the central and unsubstantiated claim of his Report that condemned Israel for intentionally targeting civilians during the operation, Judge Richard Goldstone maintains that, “the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.”(1) The Goldstone Report comments about Hamas strategy,

In July 2009, Hamas declared that it was entering a period of “cultural resistance”, stating that it was suspending its use of rockets and shifting its focus to winning support at home and abroad through cultural initiatives and public relations. (2)

In spite of this statement, the rocket bombardment of Sederot, the town where Bezalel goes to college, and the south of Israel has not ended; he is on the medic volunteer roster. On April 7, 2011, Hamas fired a laser-guided Kornet anti-tank missile at an Israeli school bus near Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

Willingly or not, Alice, you are participating in the Hamas cultural initiative and public relations campaign, a fusion of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

I share your desire to improve conditions for people in Gaza—they and we all suffer from Hamas policies. In June, 2010, Israel loosened restrictions to relieve the hardship by allowing all strictly civilian goods to enter; in May 2011, Egypt opened the Rafah crossing to women and to men under 18 and above 40 without a visa.

This brief sojourn in Greece is not a set-back, but preparation to make hope and love a daily routine, a way of life. As you re-group, please make plans to deliver love letters that arouse desire for a civil society in Gaza that denounces violence, recognizes Israel, and makes peace. Please long to deliver a love letter to Gilad Shalit who Hamas has held captive for more than 5 years, and please plan to unearth the love in Gaza to release this child to his parents, Noam and Aviva who ache for him. Please plan to deliver love letters to Palestinians in Gaza to support their choice of new leaders who will invest in cultivating and contributing to humanity.

With humility and hope, I offer these tenets of Israeli society as an agenda to share with the people of Gaza. Most Israelis accept Palestinian statehood—flourishing side-by-side with us in peace, with dignity and security. Israelis will surely open all ports to support the people of Gaza pursuing this building work:

• sustainable economic development
• universal education for civic responsibility and respect for all peoples
• women's liberation from systemic oppression and full participation in public life and leadership
• a comprehensive, high quality universal health care system
• academic institutions that promote open, critical thinking and innovation
• technology, scientific and medical research and development
• vibrant and uncensored media, culture, and arts

I close with a few lines of hope that I wrote after our soldiers came home from Gaza—a love letter to Palestinians in Gaza and everywhere, to Israelis, and to all who care.

Let us conceive
a new covenant with life
incise in our broken hearts
to open to one another
to give and to receive
to fix
to build and
to love

With blessings,
Bonna Devora Haberman

Jerusalem, Israel
______________________________________________________

(1) “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes,” Washington Post, April 2, 2011, retrieved May 3, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html.

(2) “Goldstone Report,” of the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” headed by Richard Goldstone, p. 523, 1680.

Some questions for the Gaza flotilla from Christopher Hitchens

Some excellent questions for the Gaza flotillistas from Christopher Hitchens.

A sample:

It seems safe and fair to say that the flotilla and its leadership work in reasonably close harmony with Hamas, which constitutes the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. The political leadership of this organization is headquartered mainly in Gaza itself. But its military coordination is run out of Damascus, where the regime of Bashar Assad is currently at war with increasingly large sections of the long-oppressed Syrian population. Refugee camps, some with urgent humanitarian requirements, are making their appearance on the border between Syria and Turkey (the government of the latter being somewhat sympathetic to the purposes of the flotilla). In these circumstances, isn't it legitimate to strike up a conversation with the "activists" and ask them where they come out on the uprising against hereditary Baathism in Syria?...

Only a few weeks ago, the Hamas regime in Gaza became the only governing authority in the world—by my count—to express outrage and sympathy at the death of Osama Bin Laden. As the wavelets lap in the Greek harbors, and the sunshine beats down, doesn't any journalist want to know whether the "activists" have discussed this element in their partners' world outlook? Does Alice Walker seriously have no comment?

Hamas is listed by various governments and international organizations as a terrorist group. I don't mind conceding that that particular word has been used in arbitrary ways in the past. But what concerns me much more is the official programmatic adoption, by Hamas, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This disgusting fabrication is a key foundational document of 20^th-century racism and totalitarianism, indelibly linked to the Hitler regime in theory and practice. It seems extraordinary to me that any "activist" claiming allegiance to human rights could cooperate at any level with the propagation of such evil material. But I have never seen any of them invited to comment on this matter, either.

Somehow I doubt that any of them will bother considering these questions, since it would require them to pull themselves out of their magnificent self-regard for a moment and think about the real world. The latest "action alert update" that I received from the US Boat to Gaza informed me about the eight members of the group who had just been arrested by the Greek authorities in front of the American embassy. Not a word about the people of Gaza about whom they supposedly passionately care.

Once again, Alice Walker

A good essay by Marc Tracy of Tablet on why Alice Walker Is Sailing to Gaza.

Alice Walker dreams of classic civil disobedience. She quickly name-checks Gandhi as well as Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman in an essay explaining why she will participate in the flotilla set to disembark for Gaza in a few days. But there is something fishy about her essay that betrays her stated cause of universalism (“One child must never be set above another”). It begins when she weirdly isolates Schwerner and Goodman, the two young civil rights martyrs who happened to be Jews, from Cheney, who was black, and it culminates in the story’s concluding anecdote, in which she reports what inspired her ex-husband to be a civil rights activist:

He was a little boy on his way home from Yeshiva … He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence.

Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head.

Walker seems unaware of how easily she—a novelist, who should know better—allows everyone their standard roles: The meek, pious Jew taunted by the evil, brutish goyim and saved by the goodhearted and even more powerful Magical Negroes (“appeared!”).... Regardless, a stereotype-laden fable, even if depicting a real event, is not a sufficient basis for a grown-up to adopt a cause. Does Walker’s objection to the blockade derive from liberal humanism or from a recoiling at Jewish power? Sadly, her essay suggests the latter.

I agree with Tracy. Walker does have a problem with both Jews and Jewish power. Despite the fine words about nonviolence she wrote in her CNN essay, she is not merely anti-Zionist, she is anti-Semitic.

From an essay she published a couple of years ago, about her trip to Gaza in 2009 with Code Pink:

And so I have been, once again, struggling to speak about an atrocity: This time in Gaza, this time against the Palestinian people. Like most people on the planet I have been aware of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict almost my whole life. I was four years old in 1948 when, after being subjected to unspeakable cruelty by the Germans, after a “holocaust” so many future disasters would resemble; thousands of European Jews were resettled in Palestine. They settled in a land that belonged to people already living there, which did not seem to bother the British who, as in India, had occupied the land and then, on leaving it, decided they could simply put in place a partitioning of the land that would work fine for the people, strangers, Palestinians and European Jews, now forced to live together....

[A description of meeting a Palestinian woman - RL] Coming upon another grouping of tents, I encountered an old woman sitting on the ground in what would have been, perhaps, the doorway of her demolished, pulverized home. She was clean and impeccably dressed, the kind of old woman who is known and loved and respected by everyone in the community, as my own mother had been. Her eyes were dark and full of life. She talked to us freely. I gave her a gift I had brought, and she thanked me.

Looking into my eyes she said: May God Protect You From the Jews. When the young Palestinian interpreter told me what she’d said, I responded: It’s too late, I already married one. I said this partly because, like so many Jews in America, my former husband could not tolerate criticism of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. Our very different positions on what is happening now in Palestine/Israel and what has been happening for over fifty years, has been perhaps our most severe disagreement. It is a subject we have never been able to rationally discuss. He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi. And that he objected to in his own Brooklyn based family. When his younger brother knew he was seeing me, a black person, he bought and nailed over an entire side of his bedroom the largest Confederate flag either of us had ever seen....

The people of Israel have not been helped by America’s blind loyalty to their survival as a Jewish State, by any means necessary. The very settlers they’ve used American taxpayer money to install on Palestinian land turn out to be a scary lot, fighting not only against Palestinians, but against Israelis, when they do not get their way. Israelis stand now exposed, the warmongers and peacemakers alike, as people who are ruled by leaders that the world considers irrational, vengeful, scornful of international law, and utterly frightening. There are differing opinions about this, of course, but my belief is that when a country primarily instills fear in the minds and hearts of the people of the world, it is no longer useful in joining the dialogue we need for saving the planet.

There is no hiding what Israel has done or what it does on a daily basis to protect and extend its power. It uses weapons that cut off limbs without bleeding; it drops bombs into people’s homes that never stop detonating in the bodies of anyone who is hit; it causes pollution so severe it is probable that Gaza may be uninhabitable for years to come, though Palestinians, having nowhere else to go, will have to live there. This is a chilling use of power, supported by the United States of America, no small foe, if one stands up to it. No wonder that most people prefer to look the other way during this genocide, hoping their disagreement with Israeli policies will not be noted. Good Germans, Good Americans, Good Jews. But, as our sister Audre Lorde liked to warn us: Our silence will not protect us. In the ongoing global climate devastation that is worsened by war activities, we will all suffer, and we will also be afraid.

The world knows it is too late for a two state solution. This old idea, bandied about since at least the Eighties, denounced by Israel for decades, isn’t likely to become reality with the massive buildup of settlements all over what remains of Palestinian land....

What is to be done? Our revered Tolstoi asked this question generations ago, speaking also of War and Peace. I believe there must be a one state solution. That Palestinians and Jews, who have lived together in peace in the past, must work together to make this a reality once again. That this land (so soaked in Jewish and Palestinian blood, and with America’s taxpayer dollars wasted on violence the majority of us would never, if we knew, support) must become, like South Africa, the secure and peaceful home of everyone who lives there. This will require that Palestinians, like Jews, have the right of return to their homes and their lands. Which will mean what Israelis most fear: Jews will be outnumbered and, instead of a Jewish state, there will be a Jewish, Muslim, Christian country, which is how Palestine functioned before the Europeans arrived. What is so awful about that?

As I wrote earlier, Walker's essay is marked by serious errors of fact. She doesn't seem to be aware of the actual history of Palestine before the establishment of Israel, revealing no knowledge of either the British Mandate or the Ottoman Empire. She refers to the "holocaust," as if doubting that it occurred, and thinks mistakenly that it was the British who decided to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza - does she actually know what genocide is? With such willful ignorance, how can she reach valid conclusions?

But what is most unnerving about her essay is not these errors, but her statement that Israel "is no longer useful in joining the dialogue we need for saving the planet." In other words, Israel is not a partner in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - it is an object, rightfully subject to the plans of others. It has committed crimes so awful that it cannot be worked with, only upon.

"What is so awful about that?" Walker asks about Jews becoming a minority in a unified Palestine. Do I need to instruct her in the sorry progress of Jewish history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Apparently, yes, because she refers to the "holocaust" without understanding its devastating effect on both those Jews who survived it and Jews living elsewhere in the world who were not physically affected by it (including the Jews living in Palestine during the British Mandate). She seems to have no knowledge of the growth of political and racial antisemitism that led to the birth of the Zionist movement and the conviction that the only way Jews would be safe would be to create their own state. Jews have a well-founded fear of becoming a minority, especially if it means living in a unified state of Palestine where Hamas and Fatah would have the upper hand. There would be no return to a mythical "living together in peace" - the one state solution is a recipe for an intense and cruel civil war, with the losers being massacred and expelled. And I do not assume that the Jews would be the losers. For the sake of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, a two-state solution is an urgent need.