Palestine and Israel

Recently I wrote to my daughters indicating I wanted a line added to my obituary (I am in my ninetieth year, so it may be needed sooner rather than later!), to wit:

One of the most disheartening outcomes of his life was that, in the sixty-four years that he sought justice for the Palestinian people, he witnessed the steady deterioration of their plight culminating in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

This provided the opportunity to reflect on my experience of some facets of Jewish culture and people. I share some of this with you now, especially as it pertains to the Palestine-Israel conflict.

In 1943, at twelve years of age, I went to work on summer holidays (eight a.m. to six p.m., five days a week) and after school in a Jewish dress factory. My job was to oil sewing machines, sweep floors, and pack dresses for shipment. I was no doubt underpaid – twenty-five cents an hour, or about nine dollars a week – but this I believe was the standard pay at that time.

I was always treated with solicitude. When I had to go to the hospital for a couple of weeks, one of the bosses came to visit and brought me the book Bambi. One night, we all worked late – until ten p.m. – doing a major cleaning and tidying in the factory. At the end, the young boss took us all to a Jewish steak house (Moishe’s) where I had the first grilled steak of my life. It was scrummy. My boss noticed I was having difficulty carving up this big chunk of meat and offered to cut it up for me. The experience was so enjoyable that, ten years later, when I wanted to celebrate my engagement, I took Peggy to Moishe’s.

For my last two years of high school, I went to the High School of Montreal where a substantial number of the students in my Latin class were Jewish. Among them, the outstanding scholars. I remember no high school discussion about Palestine/Israel.

Things changed. In 1955 prior to taking up a year of study at the Facolta Waldese di Teologia in Rome, my wife Peggy and I hitchhiked and Vespa-ed around Europe and the Middle East.

In a youth hostel in Switzerland we encountered a group of Israeli young people with whom we shared friendship and conversation. One of the young women was characterized to us as one of only two operational women pilots in the Israeli air force. She flew war planes. On one occasion, she defiantly declared, “I don’t blame the Palestinians for their hostility. It was their country and we took it away from them. But we are not going to give it back.”

My perspective began to shift. Previously I had held to a conventional, unexamined liberal Protestant understanding of the Palestine issue: Israel was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy (we were not biblical fundamentalists, just theologically naïve); it was the only appropriate recompense for the brutality of the Holocaust; it was a “land without people for a people without land.”

Now I began to perceive that another people had for a long time made their homes in the land and somehow had to be removed to make room for the new Jewish immigrants. The fact and method of that transfer of population would become a bitter topic of debate to the present day.

When Peggy and I reached Israel and hitched our way from the Dead Sea in the east to the Mediterranean on the west, from the Galilee in the north to Judea in the south we discovered the sea of Bedouin-style black tents packed with Palestinian refugees. This was not a “land without people” at all. Nakba (as the Palestinians refer to it, meaning catastrophe) indeed.

Soon after the Six Day War in 1967, I conducted a solitary – and useless – picket of the Israeli embassy in Ottawa, with the message, “Israel’s chief export: Refugees” and “Let my people go – Home.” I would write pro-Palestinian letters to the editor of The Ottawa Citizen and The Globe and Mail and give talks on Palestine and justice, so I was known locally.

During this period, our family began to receive middle-of-the-night disturbing phone calls. No words were spoken during these repetitive calls, so I surmised their purpose was to intimidate and warn. They served as a barometer of Palestine/Israel confrontations. If we had been out and missed the newscasts we would know that there had been events harmful to Israel – a Palestinian guerrilla or terrorist attack, for instance – because the calls always coincided with such events.

A history professor at my university counselled me: “Be careful, Nino; you’d best lay off the Palestinian cause or you and your family may suffer the retaliation of the JDL (Jewish Defense League).” We never did either of these – shut up, or suffer – except for the fear engendered in our wakened children.