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INTRODUCTION

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 in counterinsurgency tactics in the disputed Kashmir territory. An Indian military delegation was even visiting Israel during the attacks.

The harrowing reality of what happened in Mumbai reinforced a lesson from my childhood, showing once again the dangers that confront Jews outside of Israel, even in a historically welcoming place like India, the crown jewel of Israeli hippie culture. From the crematoriums of Auschwitz to the raves of Goa, life in the Diaspora hadn’t changed as much as I had hoped. In this context, I thought it significant that no one seemed willing to highlight the parallels between the 1972 kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the events in Mumbai; Indian Special Forces, like their German predecessors, had failed to rescue the Jews they were charged with protecting. Indeed, given many Jews’ predilection to see Islamists and jihadis as inheritors of the Nazi legacy—or, more dramatically, to regard the entire Muslim world as a reincarnation of Germany in the 1940s—I had expected the media to at least invoke Munich. This glaring oversight pissed me off, reminding me that, despite my commitment to secularism and diversity, I still had the political reflexes of a postwar Jew.

The tendency to see Europe in the Middle East, and, as I noted earlier, to see the Levant in Europe, conveys one of the core themes of this book: that the Middle East has become a metaphor for the world. Whether you chalk it up to undue Zionist influence on post–World War II American foreign policy, the disproportionate impact that the Arab-Israeli conflict has wielded over Western political life, the growth of Islam in Europe and Arab immigration everywhere else, or the global impact of Persian Gulf petrodollars, the point is ultimately the same: for a variety of reasons, the Middle East has become more tightly enmeshed in the West than ever before. The jihadi terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan during the War on Terror have had the ironic consequence of colonizing American culture and politics.

Israel vs. Utopia analyzes this change from the perspective of an Israeli American who, having been raised in Israel, the United States, and Europe, finds that they all have much in common despite the repellant “othering” of Israel that takes place in the latter—even by Israelis themselves. If the West has infiltrated the Middle East, and vice versa, then how could Israel, one of the chief conduits for this transformation, remain something so thoroughly unknowable? Particularly given how many of its citizens, especially those with centuries-old backgrounds in Europe, continue to live abroad. The best answer I can provide is one that, instead of issuing a prescription, seeks to outline a struggle to know Israel better. Specifically, I want to consider and complicate the relationship between the misconceptions of Israel that flit about in fantasies of the place, whether positive or negative, and what I call, with a nod to the Cold War Left, “actually existing” Israel.

My desire to reform American understandings of Israel is significant in this regard, because so much of today’s anti-Islamic invective in the U.S. is purported to be “pro-Israeli.” When I hear such talk I consistently perceive a racist conflation of my national and religious identity, as though what defines my Jewishness is its inherent opposition to someone else’s religion. To be pro-Israeli, to be pro-Jewish (whatever either of these things really mean), is not the same thing as being prejudiced. Unfortunately, making that equation is the easiest way to assign a specific politics to being Jewish, a fact which conservatives both in Israel and the United States have regularly exploited. Under such circumstances, Israelis like me have difficulty finding any ideological freedom of movement. And pressure from Diaspora Jewry only makes matters worse.

The negative reaction that many Israelis tend to have when Americans act as though Israel is solely reducible to its religious character illustrates a larger tension between the two peoples. Americans are able to “construct” Israelis in this manner because of the unequal relationship between the two countries. In return, Israelis typically respond as though they are colonial subjects straight out of central casting, consistently rejecting being defined by their unofficial “parents” in such a biased fashion. But they are also aware that this feeling of colonization brings them uncomfortably close to acknowledging Israel’s treatment of the non-Jewish population within its own military aegis. If pressed, most Israelis will admit that the settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories is a textbook colonial endeavor. The implications of that realization, though, pose psychological problems for a people raised on the conviction that they are always on the brink of being at the mercy of hostile forces.

Hence my title, Israel vs. Utopia. First dreamed up six years ago, at the depressing height of the al-Aksa In-tifada, when I was living in my old apartment in San Francisco’s Richmond District, it forced me to imagine scenarios where the cold, hard facts permitted only the continuation of the status quo—a problem many progressives confronted during the Bush administration—and to do so without having to determine what that utopia should be. Given how certain many people in my circles had become about Israel, their impressions hardening into reflexes, I thought there might be some benefit to suspending the impulse to draw conclusions. If Israel had become the most popular global synonym for dystopia, I reasoned, why not tease out the negative space of that assumption?

By setting Israel in opposition to what it’s supposed to be, by creating a framework in which it is possible to substitute “America” or “Europe” for “utopia”—or even “settlements” for “Israel”—I wanted to restore movement to the discussion of its past, present, and future. Certainty has its appeal, but it also has a way of cluttering the mind with obstacles to reflection. Where the concept of Israel is concerned, what we need right now is room to maneuver. My hope for this book is that it will contribute to that worthy cause, helping to break up the blockages that have impeded the peace process, whether specific to the post–9/11 era or dating further back in the history of the Middle East.

Joel SchalitJuly 2009Milan, Italy