Route 17: Valentines Day at the Checkpoints
Posted By Jonathan MarkRoute 17: Valentines Day At The Checkpoints / by Jonathan Mark
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After the Six Day War, Shlomo Carlebach suggested that Israel give free plane tickets to several thousand hippies; they'd go with Shlomo to every Palestinian, handing out flowers, offering hugs, playing guitars…
It never quite worked out.
Why didn't anyone think it would have been a great idea to go around Germany in 1932 (before it got really ugly), handing out flowers, and offering hugs? The answer is simple. Jews are Western, we think of Germans as grown-ups and we infantilize Arabs. Even in 1932, Jews knew the Germans would slap them upside the head if the Jews tried hugging them. On the other hand, to Jewish neo-colonial eyes, the Palestinians are not grown-up Europeans but childlike and so we can be childlike with them; we can teach them not to hit; we can win them over with daisies.
If The Jewish Week was Esquire, Helene Aylon would be one of the "Women We Love." Helene, a provocative installation/performance artist (heleneaylone.com), e-mailed me the other day with some suggestions for Israel's checkpoints. She warned me that the suggestions "may be fanciful but reality doesn't work. So why not try utopia?"
Helene is not a total utopian. She writes, "I always sense a bias when the checkpoints and the wall are equated as an evil with the evil of terrorism by many people on the far left. I, too, feel bad about the need for checkpoints and the wall but I understand that they are necessary as they have reduced terror attacks."
Nevertheless, she wonders, reminding me of Shlomo, imagine if at the checkpoints "there would be delicious Israeli and Arabic food and drink for those detained on lines… There should be gorgeous music, Arabic and Israeli musicians playing together as people wait. (Soldiers are paid; why not musicians?) There should be toys for the young children, and chairs for the mothers," books she said, for someone to read to the children, books to be exchanged for the anti-Semitic books Palestinian kids grow up with. "And therapists to talk to as frustration needs to be spoken out to someone."
Why not try utopia? Utopians believe that what Teddy Roosevelt really meant was, "Speak softly and, well, speak softly." Their favorite foreign policy question is: "Why do they hate us?" That question reminds me of battered wives wondering what they did to so enrage their husbands. Why do they hate us? It's the West Bank turned "West Side Story," "this boy don't need a judge he needs an analyst's care."
Someone, writes Helene, should teach "nice manners to Israeli soldiers." After all, at the checkpoints "there is the volatile issue for the Arabic population of being insulted and humiliated."
I envy the Palestinians for feeling insulted and humiliated. They can feel. It tells me they're alive.
I wonder, dear Jewish reader, are you ever insulted and humiliated by 4,000 rockets falling on Sderot -- blowing the leg off a Jewish boy the other week -- while we weigh the cost of amputated limbs against the shtetl-like fear that somebody, somewhere, might scold us if we fought back as men would in any other family, protecting our young?
The other day, the Israel Government announced that it would allow "quick and efficient passage through the checkpoints" because of "the upcoming Christian holidays in the month of February."
Security is relaxed for St. Valentine's Day?
I see the utopian point: If, as Israel says, security can be maintained while allowing "quick and efficient passage" through the checkpoints on Christian holidays, why can't security be maintained, quickly and efficiently, when there are no Christian holidays?
Reality doesn't work, so why not try utopia? Put up the grill and buy some toys. Make an "Islamofascist," and the kid he drives in with, have to slow down and sit through a schoolmarm with an Israeli accent reading "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Bring in musicians. Send in the clowns.