After journalist and author Jeffrey Goldberg spoke to group in Berkeley, Calif., that was somewhat hostile to Israel, an angry woman approached him.
As Goldberg recalled during a talk in Milwaukee last week, the woman said, “I disagree with everything” that he wrote in his widely-praised book “Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide.”
And Goldberg, the Washington correspondent for the New Yorker magazine, said he replied, “That’s impossible. I take both sides.”
Indeed, in several ways, Goldberg seems to have acquired a kind of “double vision” in his observations of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
“I agree with two positions simultaneously,” he said. He believes that “reconciliation is possible,” but it also is “sometimes impossible.”
That duality also shapes how Goldberg views some American activists interested in the conflict. For example, he is “not a big fan” of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee because “its arguments are over-simplistic,” its events tend to be “cheerleading sessions,” and “I don’t like the way money influences politics generally.”
Nevertheless, “When I read the idiocy and malevolence” of some activists and writers who describe Israel as “the greatest sinner” of all of the world’s nations, “that makes me want to join AIPAC,” he said.
Goldberg told The Chronicle that Jewish readers of his book have expressed equally paradoxical reactions to his words. “Some people tell me I am betraying Israel, others say I am a hopeless apologist,” he said.
Goldberg spoke to a group of more than 100 on Wednesday, April 11, at Congregation Shalom as part of the Jewish Book and Culture Fair of the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and the Edie Adelman Political Awareness Series of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Women’s Division. His appearance was also co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
‘Beyond the tr ibe’
Goldberg acquired his dual vision via early experiences. He said his encounters with “schoolyard anti-Semitism” in Long Island led him to read about Zionism, which to him fundamentally meant that “Jews, when hit, will hit back.” So he “discovered Jewish nationalism” and “I decided I wanted to join the Israeli army.”
But “if I raised myself to be a nationalist, my parents raised me to be a universalist,” he said. As “left wing union people” and “nominal members of a Reform temple,” his parents tried to teach him that “all people deserve freedom” and that one should “work for equality beyond the tribe.”
So when – after youthful involvement with the socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatza’ir group — Goldberg finally did go to Israel and join the army, he had in his personality “two strands of Jewishness” that “I still live with,” he said. “Sometimes they meld, and sometimes they don’t.”
When the Israel Defense Force assigned Goldberg in 1991 to serve on the guard staff of Ketziot, a prison camp in the Negev Desert for some 6,200 Palestinians of the first intifada (uprising), Goldberg decided he wanted to “try to get to know” the prisoners.
He did this he said, partly as “an incipient journalist” who knew that some of the Palestinians’ future leaders would be in Ketziot; but also because “I thought that if I get to know them and I find the humanity in them and [have] them [find the humanity] in me, maybe I could try to ameliorate a little of the hate.”
Goldberg became friends with one in particular, Rafiq Hijazi, who seemingly was the only prisoner who could maintain an “ironic distance” from his surroundings, who could be “self critical” and “critical of the Palestinian national movement” and who had a sense of humor.
Goldberg’s book is primarily a chronicle of this friendship, as well as a narrative of Goldberg’s meetings with other Palestinians.
In response to a question from the audience, Goldberg said that Hijazi has read the book, and “while we have not had a full discussion yet,” clearly “there are parts he does and doesn’t like.”
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