Jerusalem

Yehuda Amichai's poetry and Israel

Jerusalem, by Yehuda Amichai, 1967:

On a roof in the Old City
laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight:
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
the towel of a man who is my enemy,
to wipe off the sweat of his brow.

In the sky of the Old City
a kite.
At the other end of the string,
a child.
I can’t see
because of the wall.

We have put up many flags,
they have put up many flags.
To make us think that they’re happy.
To make them think we’re happy.

I revisited this poem after listening to Celeste Marcus, the wonderful executive editor of Liberties Journal, discuss her recent trip to the West Bank, where she bore witness to routine and coordinated acts of settler violence. The anecdotes, she made sure to repeatedly explain, do not do justice to reality. “The only way to understand is to visit… You have to visit.”

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Israel is descending into a fascist order. In many ways, it has imported the concept of the nation-state from Europe, in which the nation — the singular ethnic group — fits cleanly within the boundaries of the state. But this concept is dangerous. In reality, no nation fits cleanly in a state, nor a state cleanly around a nation. There have always been outliers and minorities, populations that are not part of the dominant culture.

In Europe, attempts to dispel the reality of this claim, attempts to cling to the illusion of perfect homogeneity, have led to brutal wars of conquest and projects of ethnic cleansing. In Israel...

We can be better than this. Or so the poet hoped.