DAVID TWERSKY
287
writer is stolen.
It
turns up later in a washing machine. He also quotes from
Jewish sources, including Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, a great teller of tales.
Not only keyboards appear and disappear. People who play some part in the
story in the 1940s reappear forty years later as hitchhikers or wanderers.
A pair of shoes made by Anton's father is purchased by a Palestinian
refugee fleeing Haifa, who is later murdered in a Lebanese mountain pass.
The shoes are then taken by a Palestinian fighter who returns to the village
where, caught by Israelis and forced to collaborate, he ultimately hangs him–
self because he "could not bear the humiliation of exile and the shame of
wandering." Those shoes, made by Anton's father and sold to a wealthy
refugee, ended up on this man's dangling feet: "And the shoes, which had
been intended for endless wanderings, dance on the cold wind."
Shammas is a gifted and intelligent writer - and , moreover, one who
gives voice to a central question that arises from within the internal Israeli
reality. Unfortunately, he has wedded his writing to a political agenda. He
seeks to "de-Zionize" Israel, not only to stretch Israeli identity beyond its
Jewish context - but to sever the dialectical connection between the two.
Shammas wants not to amend the Law of Return in order to narrow its ap–
plication, as do many Orthodox Jews, but to eliminate it altogether, since it
codifies in Israeli law the state's special connection to something beyond itself
and its own human and geographical boundaries: Jewish history and the
Jewish people. To Shammas, this special connection is an affront to demo–
cratic norms.
As
in
all
successful demagoguery, his critique has more than an
element of truth.
To the degree that the bifurcation of functions between the state and
Zionist movement expresses in structural terms a national schizophrenia, with
Arab citizens receiving fewer services than their Jewish counterparts,
Shammas is certainly on strong ground. But the Arab minority cannot deny
the Jewish majority its right to self-determination, which in Israeli terms
translates as an affirmation not only of Israeli statehood but also of a global
Jewish peoplehood. The natural process of inclusion of Israeli Arabs will be a
long one, and it must follow a peace settlement which will act to demystify
"Arabs" to Israeli Jews (as well as the other way around).
In rejecting Shammas's answers, one need not dismiss his questions. If
the Israeli Jewish majority must have the right to insist on projecting its sig–
nificant symbols onto the Israeli state - symbols such as the Star of David or
Jewish holidays, derived from Jewish history - the Arab minority has the
right to make room for itself at all levels of society. Such a change, which
must be seen as a function of rather than a prerequisite to a peace
settlement,
will
require a revision of many fundamental assumptions of Israeli
society but not their wholesale abandonment. Put another way, Shammas's
elegantly conceived but discordant notes must
be
incorporated into the Israeli
symphony, but they cannot replace that symphony. One is inclined to extend
