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by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-05-09
© 2011 Peter Belmont
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Many Israelis are unable to forget the exterminative intention of the Holocaust and project it on the Palestinians, retaining extreme fear, and (perhaps in consequence) refusing to make peace, apparently on the principle that “the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian” (or a distant one).
Many Palestinians are unable to overlook the continuing dispossession and scattering (to exile) of their people by Israel, begun in 1947 and continuing energetically today, retaining extreme fear. The inexorably displacing mill of Israeli settler-colonization is just as fearful, just as much the tread of doom, as ever the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews was, even if the end, generally speaking, for Palestinians is displacement and exile rather than death.
While thinking about all this, I have returned to the story of the last “wild Indian” in California, Ishi, who wandered into “civilization” years after the death of the last of his tribe and family.
I am re-reading “Ishi in Two Worlds” by Theodora Kroeber (1961). I am struck by the universality of the desire of human beings to be in communication, to find someone with whom they can talk, even an enemy, to end the dreadful punishment of solitude (even after massacre or genocide). I am struck by the kindness of the anthropologist who visited Ishi in his first civilized habitation (a county jail cell) and spoke to him in (his best attempt at) various Indian languages until at last he found one that Ishi recognized.
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Jews generally and Israelis in particular are in no danger whatever of being wiped out, of massacre or genocide, of military defeat. But they carry these things in their military knapsack, as it were, in their memory of the Holocaust, a memory it should be said that is kept alive for political purposes long past its sell-by date by a vigorous program of Holocaust remembrance. And it is a military knapsack in which they carry these memories, because these memories are used for the political-military purpose of continuing to justify (in the Israeli mind if in no-one else’s) the dispossession and scattering into exile of the Palestinian people, begun in 1947 and still being done today, with enormous vigor, even though in well-known violation of international law, by the colonization of the occupied territory of the West Bank (including east Jerusalem).
Palestinians cannot forget their dispossession and scattering into exile for long, because the exiles are largely stateless (Israel refusing to re-admit those exiles who wish to return to their only proper country—in violation of UNGA 194 (1948) and in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and because the dispossession and forcing into exile continues through the relentless Israeli colonization of the West Bank.
We all know these things. For a view of the Palestinian experience, read any of Raja Shehadeh’s books, such as “Palestinian Walks” and “When the Birds Stopped Singing.” He is far from the only talented writer of the Palestinian lament.
One might like to step away from these large-scale experiences of whole populations, millions of Jews and millions of Palestinians, and look at the experience of a single man.
Ishi was the last member of his tribe (and of his family) of Yahis, Californian Indians. The arrival in force of Americans in 1850 was the beginning of a sort of open hunting season on Indians, who were murdered relentlessly[1] (rather as some farmers kill wolves) until Ishi, having survived alone for several years, finally came down out of the solitary hills, starving, and essentially gave himself up to die—in 1911—by walking into America. And collapsing of hunger and exhaustion. He was taken to jail and locked up in the cell for crazy prisoners, in part to protect him from the curious public. No-one could speak to him.
An anthropologist in San Francisco read a newspaper story about Ishi and came to visit him in jail, armed with word-lists of as many Californian Indian languages as he knew of. When at last he managed to say one word (and gesture to a related object) that Ishi recognized, the language was identified and they began to more-or-less converse.
Ishi had been alone for years after the last of his close family died (or was killed—I cannot remember, and I read the book last many, many years ago). He had not spoken to a human being in that time, but had hidden himself, made fires without smoke, lived alone.
Ultimately his was a solitude that became insupportable. He might have died in the hills but, instead, walked into America and met—us. And by this and another of her books, “Ishi: Last of His Tribe”, we meet him.
The name “Ishi” means “man”, given him by Krober. When asked his name, he said: “I have none, because there were no people to name me,” meaning that no tribal naming ceremony had been performed. The destruction of his tribe had not prevented his knowing the customs of his people or its complex language, but had prevented social events from happening that required more (or more specialized) participants.
The anthropologist who first interviewed him said that He has a yarn to tell about his woman, who had a baby on her back and seems to have been drowned, except that he is so cheerful about it. Waterman misunderstood. In the excitement and relief of having someone to talk to, Ishi poured out confidences and recollections which Waterman could by no means comprehend even with the aid of an elaborate pantomime. Ishi’s seeming pleasure was not in the recollected event, but was rather a near hysteria induced by human interchange of speech and feelings too long denied.
Israelis continue, cheerfully wrenching Palestinians out of the land and landscape in which they and their forbears have lived, often for 1000s of years, over the years as Jews, as Christians, and as Muslims, the land where farmers know the rhythms of the seasons, the land where the people are connected to each other and to the land itself.
Israelis don’t understand this connection. They came to Palestine not to a land they remembered but to a land known only in promise, a land they all too readily transform in the modern fashion, with bulldozers, destroying the land known to the Palestinians and creating something almost entirely new—although in the same “place”. David and Solomon would have felt right at home in the Palestine of 1930, but would not recognize today’s Israel. If they magically returned and wanted to talk to someone, my guess is they’d want to talk to a Palestinian farmer, not to an Israeli soldier or banker. Family is a strong thing. And so is connection—real connection—to a land.
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[1] This oversimplifies. The American gold-rush settlers ruined the streams and the salmon fishing, their pigs ate the acorns upon which the Indians depended for sustenance, etc. The Americans killed enslaved, raped and prostituted Indians, and when the Indians raided farms for food or retaliated for crimes, they were hunted down. A lot of the killing of Indians was by the more lawless segment of frontier society, and indeed for a long time there was no “law”. Much of this sad history calls to my mind the killing of Palestinians by settlers, all unpunished, the ruining of cisterns and wells, etc., the difference being that although the Israelis have created an artificial lawless space (by refusing to police the settlers), the entire settler project is formally illegal at international law whereas the gold-rush in California was not formally illegal.
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