Compassion Fatigue and Palestinian Walks

Here’s a phenomenon quite particular to our late-capitalist modernity: Compassion Fatigue, the unwanted offspring of middle-class postcolonial guilt. So significant that it even has its own wikipedia entry.

What is described by this phrase? I characterise it as the process by which our attentions are constantly drawn to – that is to say, by which we are made Aware of – a multitude of Issues about which we subsequently express Concern, and the eventual weariness that accompanies repetition.

This concept should not serve to veil a negative judgement on those whose compassion reserves become exhausted, nor should it be seen as a derisive retort to those who annoy us with (some would say) sanctimonious appeals to our goodwill.

No, we can say with confidence that people are genuinely Concerned about Issues and believe that raising Awareness can help in some small way. We are convinced, perhaps, that if everyone knew what atrocities and indignities were suffered daily by our fellow men and women, such suffering would surely have to cease.

And yet this is, of course, the central fallacy that is both exposed and sustained by Compassion Fatigue. We are in fact experiencing exposure to an overabundance of Issues; an Awareness glut. Through consuming newspapers and magazines, documentary and television, charity appeals and the advice of Concerned friends, we bear witness to an extraordinary exhibition of mistreatment, conflict and disaster – to the extent that whole regions or even continents can become identifiable by a single image of human misery.

Just as poverty, famine and malnutrition appear as native products of sub-Saharan Africa, so Israel/Palestine is imagined as a conflict zone and nothing more. We cannot permit such anomalies, such divergent interests as the Jerusalemite heavy-metaller or the love story between two young people from Jenin, or indeed, the lawyer from Ramallah who enjoys nothing more than a ramble in his homeland’s historic hills.

It’s harsh, but true: when you utter the words ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine’ – or worse, combine the two – and if your voice should betray the barest trace of self-righteousness, or even mere earnestness, the people you are trying to reach are fairly likely to just switch off.

Israel/Palestine is one of those Issues that both bores and divides, because people are either tired of hearing about a problem that appears so intractable, or they are pretty much fixed in their view on the situation. The task of recruiting new Concerned people, or shaking others out of their preconceptions and prejudices, can seem impossible.



Which is why a book like Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks deserves consideration. Structured around six walks in the hills of the West Bank undertaken by the author over a period of many years, this book provides an unorthodox route into Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and may thus avoid the shortcomings of more overtly polemical, historical or legal accounts and their tendency to ‘preach to the converted’.

Shehadeh intersperses rather straightforward accounts of his journeys through the landscape with memories from his childhood, past conversations, details from legal cases in his professional work, autobiographical reflections and more random observations. These aren’t woven together by any means seamlessly, but the narrative’s sometime awkwardness is all the more charming for it. Its strength is the author’s flatly descriptive style which belies a kind of restraint, a reluctance to sermonise uncommon in other writings set in the same political geography.



The subtitle of the book is Notes on a vanishing landscape, and at a reading this week in Stratford’s St John’s Church, Shehadeh confirmed that his efforts may be understood as an attempt to chronicle a pastime that is becoming increasingly constricted in an environment that is ever more degraded and forcibly fragmented. The six walks – the six sarhat, an Arabic word connoting freedom and lack of restraint – map the shift that has taken place over the last twenty-five years as Israeli settlements have expanded, land appropriation has continued, military checkpoints have multiplied, and the Separation or Apartheid Wall has been built. It is a shift “from sarha to suffocation”, as the author puts it, away from “a land that was open and free” to one in which the simple urge to leave one’s house and walk into surrounding hills must be stifled. We need not speculate about the psychological effects of such physical confinement; they are manifest in the frustration, weariness and occasional auto-destructive violence exhibited by Palestinians living in the West Bank.

*

As an aside, Palestinian Walks is a particularly interesting text to read in conjunction with Meron Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscapes: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. A central theme that emerges from Benvenisti’s book is the importance of the cult of ‘knowing the land’, knowing Eretz Yisrael. Its physical occupation through settlement is incomplete if there is not a simultaneous appropriation of the knowledge of that landscape; its symbols, its histories, its names. He describes the process by which the Palestinians’ local knowledge – which recognised every wadi, every stream and every tree – has been systematically erased as a key strategy in reducing the Palestinians’ claims to the land. First the Zionist cartographers renamed and Hebraeised these features of the landscape, and then the inhabitants of the land were increasingly denied access to it, through massacres, expulsions, or the physical strangulation that the checkpoints embody today.

In this context, Shehadeh’s attempt to record (in walks and words) a direct connection with precisely located, identifiable parts of the landscape, must be understood as an important political exercise, and one with considerable potential for empowerment. The youth at present have little memory of the relative freedom Shehadeh is able to remember, and cannot imagine the natural beauty that surrounds their towns and villages since they have such limited access to it – they are more accustomed to seeing the hills as a place of danger and insecurity. For Palestinians to retain their claim to the land, even as the population may be growing faster among the diaspora than within Palestine itself, it is this identification with the physical landscape that must be promoted and maintained if ‘Palestine’ is to be anything more than an ethnic marker or origin myth.

the day we met many Israelis…

this post was written for brightonpalestine.org during the April 2007 delegation to Palestine

The other day, having spent pretty much all our time in Palestine with Palestinians, we experienced “the other side” for the first time. It was a day of random conversations with random Jewish Israelis, and we somehow managed, quite by accident, to speak with a very diverse range of people with very different takes on the situation here.

First we went to the Dead Sea. The journey from our hostel to Jerusalem’s central bus station made us distinctly uneasy, since we were quite unused to the massive presence of soldiers - most of whom are younger than we are - among Israel’s civilian population. They milled around us, clutching their guns. Israeli society appears quite normalised to the latent threat of violence: all, of course, in the name of “security”…

So, at Ein Gedi [on the Dead Sea], after covering ourselves in black mud and floating for a while, we were drying off on a rock when a young lifeguard came to chat to us. I think he probably wishes he hadn’t. With the inevitable “Where are you from” and “What have you been doing in Israel” questions, we revealed that we had been spending time in the West Bank. He in turn revealed that he had been to the West Bank too - whilst serving in the army. We found him to be a very confused man. At first, he insisted that “the Palestinians are a wonderful people, very nice - really! I’m not being sarcastic! - they are very nice people”, and, since he was clearly making an effort to be nice himself, we were cordial back - asking him about his time in the army, what he thought of it, how he felt about some of the things he had to do, etc.. In fact, I was very interested to speak to an ex-soldier, and I told him so. We were very careful to be non-provocative and non-biased in the way we asked him questions.

The things he was saying, however, began to conflict with our own direct experiences over the last two weeks. For example, he told us that Palestinian schools teach children to hate and to kill Jews - there’s the propaganda working - and that maybe they should concentrate on teaching the skills they need to feed their families. So we told him how that was completely untrue (I mean, it seems obvious, but there you go), and we described the problems the Occupation has created for basic education in areas of the West Bank like al-Jifflik and Fasayil. We also tried to challenge (gently, since we wanted to keep the discussion on vaguely pleasant terms) his ridiculous stereotypes of Palestinians as terrorists-in-the-making, telling him how everywhere we went people did not speak a language of violence; but rather one of justice and peace.

As rational argument failed, however, he descended into blatant racism - he got really angry, shouting at us how we didn’t understand and how Palestinians should [and this is a direct quote] “stop teaching their kids to kill Jews and stop looking out for their own stinking asses”, and that maybe this would improve their situations. He said a lot of other stuff too, but it’s not necessary to reproduce it all here. The point is: underneath all his trying to say what he thought we wanted to hear, and indeed what he understood to be acceptable, lay an irrational but deeply rooted conception of Israeli society as eternal and vigilant victim and of Palestinian people as eternal aggressor and inferior - a conception of self and other based on [and constructed by] fear. All his direct experience of Palestinians came after he had become accustomed to dealing with them as an Enforcer of Occupation. 

Saddest of all, I did not think his views were untypical in Israeli society, or even the most extreme. For example, last week I was eavesdropping on what I think were an American-Israeli settler family, walking along the wall of Jerusalem’s Old City from the more Jewish area to the Muslim quarter. As we walked, looking down through some railings at the Palestinian stalls and shoppers below, the kid [he looked about 8 or 9] was going on and on to his dad about all the violent ways they could attack Arabs from this vantage point, about pouring boiling water on them down through the railings [which has actually been used as a tactic in places like Hebron], and about [again, a direct quote] “kicking them all out - it’s our land now!!” That a child was saying this was quite unbelievable, for me.

The next encounter with an Israeli that day was far less depressing. In a taxi back in Jerusalem, we were speaking Arabic [badly] to our taxi driver, as we would usually do, when we realised we’d misunderstood him - we thought he said he was half-Jewish, half-Palestinian, but in fact he was completely Jewish. However, he had a lot to say about the “Jewish democratic state”. Pointing vigourously at Orthodox Jews walking past, he insisted “They hate peace! They HATE peace!!” He was obviously upset by the fact that the Israeli state claims to act to protect and serve the Jewish people, but in fact fails to represent the diversity of opinion and belief with the population, seeming instead to represent the most powerful, the most violent, and the most fundamentalist.

Even more diverse were the Israeli activists we met later that evening, who looked like they would not have been out of place at Sussex or in the Cowley Club. They represented the tiny proportion of Jewish Israeli citizens who were not only critical of their state, but also acting to protest against it. One guy we met, who was still serving in the army, spoke to us about the “evils” he had to do, and how all those checks and raids on Palestinians in the West Bank had very little to do with security and were in fact designed to annoy and intimidate the Palestinian population. He had given his testimony to an organisation called Breaking The Silence, who are concerned with revealing the truth of the Occupation from ordinary soldiers’ perspectives.

Another girl we met made a really interesting point about the role of internationals and the role of Israelis. She said [and I am inclined to agree] that she found it incredibly patronising when activists come from overseas and treat Israel and Israelis as one homogenous lump, lecturing them on the evils of Occupation (she was referring to one speaker in particular, but I think the problem is fairly widespread). As an activist engaged in criticism and resistance, I think she felt mis- or under-represented. It’s vital that we recognise these sectors of Israeli society and seek relationships and solidarity with them too - for change to happen, it is not enough to focus on pressuring governments and corporations, nor is it sufficient to seek lasting friendships with Palestinians only. In order to undermine a state which claims to represent the interests of a particular group, it is necessary to recognise and make explicit voices of dissent within that group.

And that’s my massive ramble about Israelis!!

Sussex-Palestine zine 2007

This zine was published following the April 2007 delegation of Sussex students to the occupied West Bank.