Palestinian children witness their homes reduced to rubble
Photo by WAFA/Baha Nasr
STEFANIE FOX
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
—Adrienne Rich
One of my favorite Jewish sages and JVP advisory board member, Adrienne Rich, may her memory be for a blessing, talks about confronting hard truths in her classic poem “Diving into the Wreck” (Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972). In it, before the excerpt I just read, the narrator puts on a diving suit, climbs down a ladder on the side of a boat, and all by herself plunges into the ocean. She’s there to find something.
I came to explore the wreck.
Looking at Zionism, diving into the wreck of all it has wrought, past and present, has been a perilous but powerful journey for me personally. Much as the narrator of the poem holds a flashlight to make sense of a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea, different moments in my life were like a beam of light over a hidden truth.
I’m a teenager, and I hear racist, hateful words from a relative I love and trust. She’s talking about how “they” are out to kill us, but it’s the bloodlust in her eyes that shakes me to my core.
I came to explore the wreck.
I read Ella Shohat’s writing in my early twenties. I am shocked to learn that I know nothing about the devastations and damages of Zionism to Mizrahi and Sephardi Jewish life, community, and culture.
I came to explore the wreck.
Sometimes I am surprised by how I can still be surprised. On November 9th, with all we faced, the Jewish communal world stays largely silent. It was clearer more than ever that Jewish institutions, built to prioritize Israel’s own right-wing agenda above all, have gutted their own capacity to show up to the intersectional fight needed now.
I came to explore the wreck.
When visiting the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, I see a mural that depicts the alleged history of the city in three panels. In this mural, all of Jewish histories—centuries of biblical tradition—are condensed into a linear narrative that leads to this city where Stars of David haunt Palestinian shops and children can’t walk to school without being spit on and people have to travel by roof because they are not allowed on their own streets. The narrative in that mural was one of inevitability—that all of Jewish history pointed us to this twisted role of brutal occupier in a land that isn’t mine but is offered for my taking. I felt physically sick.
I came to explore the wreck. And no matter how long I have been scanning my flashlight against the hull, I continue to see new things.
What I have found over the years is that to find, as Rich says, the wreck and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself and not the myth, is a tall order given the layers of familial and communal mythology that surround Zionism in my life and in the Jewish world.
The thing itself and not the myth.
How many of you were raised, like me, to understand Israel as “a land without people for a people without land,” or were inculcated from a young age with fear that Palestinians wished only to drive us into the sea?
A few years ago, when sorting through some of the amazing curricular resources from our partners at Badil within JVP’s Facing the Nakba curriculum, I came across some pictures from 1948 of thousands of Palestinians from Jaffa fleeing the Zionist attack on their city.
By this point I am well acquainted with the ideology and violence behind the founding of the state: the upheaval and trauma and devastation that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. But this photo stopped me in my tracks.
In the background of the photo, the beautiful buildings speak to the vibrant metropolitan life of the 100,000 Palestinians—Muslim, Christian, and Jewish—who were living there before the establishment of the state. But in the foreground of this photo, we see those thousands fleeing the city, loaded at gunpoint onto boats to Gaza and Egypt, literally forced into the sea. There, in the sea, scores drowned. This picture of terrified Palestinians: a woman holding a baby in one arm and whatever she could grab from her house in the other, literally driven into the sea.
The wreck and not the story of the wreck.
I had not ever seen the exact picture of this Jewish fear played out, but backwards. It broke my heart. This was the wreck rather than the twisted story of the wreck I’d been told. This was the thing itself and not the upside-down myth around it. This was Jewish militias rounding up Palestinians and forcing them into the sea, to drown, not the other way around.
The thing itself, and not the myth.
I think Rich says something profound about confronting hard realities: the truth is not relative. The wreck is there. Whether we look at it or not, whether we choose to put on the equipment and find our way into the water, the truth lies just under the surface. It’s our job to know it is there, and to look at it.
I recall a time when I wanted to understand the Nakba as Palestinian history, a sort of parallel track next to the history of European Jewish experience. Zionism, I told myself, meant many things to many people. But I think this is one more way I was clinging to a story of the wreck and failing to see the wreck itself. I think for me the real journey into the water of Zionism has been about endeavoring to understand one whole story.
There, under the surface, is the whole story. The drowned face is always staring toward the sun. It’s ours to look squarely at it. It is devastating, yes. But what I want to say is that for me something has happened inside of that devastation. Once I got past those layers of denial, once I learned to acknowledge what has been stolen, once I could feel these truths about Zionism, not just as someone else’s story to feel bad about, but as my own story, my own history, something else happened. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.
In moving past the false comfort of mythology, it is easier to see where justice and healing must enter. The more I come to understand and see the ongoing Nakba, the greater my yearning for Palestinian refugees to finally return to their homes. The more I understand the interconnections between white supremacy, antisemitism and Zionism, the more I dream of a day when we live free of all of them. I think of my dear Palestinian friends turning the keys to their grandparents’ homes, my Israeli Jewish friends living in a free and equal society, preparing a picnic for a beach dinner together with those returning home, and I literally cannot imagine a deeper joy in my own heart.
The treasures that prevail.
For me, taking on the truth, as one whole story, I feel a reconnection to shared humanity. I feel a patching together of what looked torn apart in my relative’s eyes when she spoke with such hate. For me, connecting to and understanding the wreck of Zionism has opened up the possibility of a fuller participation in fighting for true liberation for all people.
— Plenary address at the 2017 Jewish Voice for Peace
National Membership Meeting