By Hazem Saghieh.
Last Sunday (7/4) the Israeli newspaper “Haaretz” published an investigative report by Judy Maltz, the newspaper’s Jewish World correspondent, entitled “Six Months On: How October 7 and the Gaza War Transformed Jews Across the Globe.” It traces how these two major events have reflected on the lives of Jewish individuals: 7 in the United States, 2 in Argentina, 2 in Australia, 2 in Britain, 2 in South Africa, 2 in Canada, and 1 in each of Ukraine, Türkiye, Uganda, Chile, France, Iceland, Italy, Germany.
The sample surveyed includes 14 women and 11 men aged between 22 to 75. Some are married and others are single; some are believers and others are not. Moreover, the sample includes people from a very broad spectrum of social and professional backgrounds: one works in television, another at a Hasidic social center, a third is pursuing a doctorate in linguistics, and a fourth is a medical assistant. The sample also includes a historian, an employee at a funeral home, a rabbi, a director at a real estate company, a high school teacher, a veterinarian, a bank manager, an artist, and a retired sociology teacher…
The opinions they expressed are no less broad and discordant than their backgrounds. A young Australian man says: “I stopped speaking to my parents over some very rough arguments”. A young man from the US adds: “Being with pro-Palestinian Jews who were on the same page as me was such an impactful experience.” A Turkish woman protests: “Everything would be fine if we kept silent, but what kind of home is that?” An American historian deplores: “I think of Israel’s retaliation as a genocidal attack.” An American woman criticizes: “Israel’s response has not been helpful. It just doesn’t seem Jewish to me to be killing so many people indiscriminately.” A French woman is defiant: “I’ve never before felt the need to wear a Star of David around my neck, but since October 7, I do.” An American rabbi dissents: “I don’t get the sense that there is compassion for what the people of Gaza are going through. It turned me into an anti-Zionist.” An Italian woman is furious: “The leading feminist organization in Italy refused to condemn sexual violence against Israeli women”. A German woman says she “Sometimes thinks this is what it must have felt like on the streets of Germany before the Nazis came to power.”
Every one of their relationships with their family, friends, and colleagues is subject to discussion and reflection. Their relationship to space, from their place of residence to their homeland, as well as their relationship with Israel, are contemplated. The ramifications of the two events on where they live and work, security, and immigration are all put forward. As for the themes most frequently discussed (or whose core is addressed circuitously), they could maybe be divided into four:
– The end of the relationship between leftist and progressive movements and Zionism
– The generational divide among Jews from around the world regarding Israel, with older Jewish people generally attached to it while antipathy and disavowal is becoming increasingly common among younger ones
– Crises around the conditions of Jews, especially in universities
– The strains in the relationship between Jewish artists and the art world and its circles
Naturally, Haaretz is not Israel. It is nothing more than a voice for a narrow segment of Israeli society, which fanaticism and cruelty have taken by storm; indeed, it may even be one of the loudest voices opposing the genocidal tendencies that are taking hold of the Jewish state. Nonetheless, this voice is maintained through depicting a world that is diverse, critical, and transnational at the same time.
As for what Haaretz’s behavior demonstrates, in this investigation as in many other articles and much of their other reporting, it is a cultural vision haunted by concerns about the conditions of humanity, both as individuals and groups, with its great shifts and the intimate truths revealed by historical junctures. However, it is also haunted by the idea that when people are free, they are different; they do not think in the same way as those cast in the same mold or forced to echo the same collective narrative.
It is astonishing, on the other hand, how little interest our culture, through its mediums, has shown in portraying our differences and diversity, and in presenting us as varied and plural. In fact, it is obsessed with presenting us as a single, unified, and robust voice that only a traitor or foreign agent could go against.
Worse still, people’s conditions and opinions, under these circumstances, are not on the cultural agenda at all. This is just as true for those who reside in their home countries as it is for the millions of Arab and Muslim migrants scattered across the four corners of the earth. Do they not feel the impact on their bodies, places of residence, work, and relationships with others, or is this impact not taken seriously by our culture, which has dedicated its attention to exposing the West’s duplicity and digging up colonial themes? And that is when we are allowed a brief break from questions of “modernity and authenticity” and “innovation and imitation”!
Today more than ever, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the distance between peoples’ actual concerns and the infrastructure underlying “our culture” is astronomical. According to the latter, people are a block of stone, and there is an abundance of humans who embody the nation and a scarcity of individual- or even communal- humans, while we seem fated to obscure life’s experiences, relationships, and the particular way in which it interacts with the world.
As we wait for someone to awaken us from our “dogmatic slumber,” to borrow a famous phrase Kant used in discussing Hume, we will continue to march firmly towards glory “so long as we resist!”
Hazim Saghie is a Lebanese writer and journalist. After working for al-Safir newspaper in Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, he moved to London. He is now editor of the daily Afkar [Ideas] page for al-Hayat newspaper and the political weekly supplement Tayyarat [Currents]. He also co-edits Abwab [Doors], a cultural quarterly published in Arabic. Saghie has published several books in Arabic, including works on Umm Kulthum, Arabism, and the cultures of Khomeinism.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Levant’s Agora.
Original source: https://english.aawsat.com/opinion/4958641-questions-regarding-cultural-themes-war
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