ON THE USEFULNESS OF DESPAIR

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.

— BLAISE CENDRARS

There is action, and there is thinking about action. The two are sometimes at odds. Acting, doing what one can, the best one can, is (for me) the easy part. It feels good. You are with real people. Often it all takes place outdoors in some ravishing setting rendered less ravishing by human ugliness and cruelty; there is an adversary to be confronted or even, sometimes, with luck, overcome. The simple physical business of moving, walking, climbing a hill, racing to help, your blood flowing faster, your breathing fuller — all this is its own reward. We were not created to be sitting inside in front of a screen. I like the feel of the wind on my skin in the South Hebron hills, the dusty taste of the air, the active business of doing, the intense moral satisfaction of taking a stand, especially when risk is involved.

That's the easy part. The hard part is the nagging sense of futility and despair. I want to explore the meaning of those feelings and of the dilemmas they present to us. I know I'm not the only one to feel, all too often, like I'm battering at windmills.

I've been active in Ta'ayush — Arab-Jewish Partnership — for the last fifteen years. I've been in South Hebron and elsewhere in Palestine probably hundreds of times. From the start, we established a special connection with the shepherds and subsistence farmers of South Hebron. They're a small population, a few thousand, clinging fiercely to the land in the face of immense pressure by a state that seeks to drive them away and by the often violent, and insatiably greedy, Israeli settlers who have been planted in their midst, on their lands. We've stood by the South Hebron Palestinians and even helped a little, but it's their astonishing, everyday courage and tenacity that explain why they're still there, against all odds. If you want to read more about the situation in this area and how it evolved, you can find more information in my book Dark Hope. There is perhaps something to be said for the fact that we've concentrated our efforts, over years, largely in this one area, although all of us have experience, often extensive, in other parts of the occupied territories. I think the Palestinians' situation in South Hebron, while objectively terrible, is still somewhat better than that of Palestinians in the central and northern West Bank, where there is less of a steady, ongoing presence of Israeli peace activists.

At the beginning, the futility quotient was very low. In fact, we were usually euphoric. Everything was new. It may sound strange, but it's true, nevertheless, that like most Israelis — including those firmly in the peace camp, on the left — I had only the most rudimentary experience of Palestinian life and Palestinian people until 1988–89, when the early dialogue groups sprung up. The first strong tastes came at that time: spending a day in Beit Sahour, south of Jerusalem; eating with our hosts in the village; sometimes sleeping overnight in their homes; seeing the world as they saw it, confronting the soldiers and the police together with them. A world opened up for us. All this deepened immeasurably in the early years of the second Intifada, under the emergency conditions that were in force everywhere in the territories. Now there was action of a far more radical kind — pushing our way past the army blockades, facing the violence of the soldiers and the settlers, finding circuitous and ingenious routes to our friends in the villages, marching together, bringing food and medical supplies, breaking down the roadblocks with our bare hands. It was sometimes dangerous, but the rewards were immediate. And there were many of us: the first time I was in South Hebron, in early 2002, I was one of some 250 activists, and large-scale actions like that were more or less the norm. We thought (I'm a little embarrassed to admit this) that we were the catalysts for what would, perhaps, someday become a mass movement for peace.

We were wrong.

We know the reality all too well. We know what we're up against. The vast machinery of the Occupation has proved remarkably resilient so far, certainly capable of containing our acts of solidarity and struggle, both on the ground and in the courts. We haven't given up, we'll never give up, but I, for one, am haunted by those feelings I mentioned.

Let me give you an example. Take, first, the trivial business of getting out of bed before dawn on a winter morning in order to leave for South Hebron. It's very tempting to stay in bed beside my wife, Eileen. And it's not just a matter of what's comfortable; going to South Hebron means I won't see my grandchildren that day, I won't have time to be with Eileen, of course I won't get to everything I need to do for work, and I won't rest, an art I have so far fruitlessly tried to cultivate. I'm not complaining: it's a choice I happily make, in fact I should be in the territories much more often, what am I doing living my life as if it were really mine when my country and my people are inflicting grievous pain on another people? I know I can never be free in any meaningful way if they are not free. This is the task that has been given me and that I have chosen. If you hear an undertone of guilt, I won't deny it — it's a kind of default, not just for me — but nonetheless I think I can say with confidence that it is not from guilt that I go to South Hebron.

But the real problem with getting out of bed before dawn is the insistent, unnerving inner voice that says: It's all for nothing. It's anyway a lost cause. We can't make much of a difference. A handful of well-intentioned activists are no match for the malevolent system firmly in place in the territories. A monumental crime is going on, literally hour by hour, and we are not able to stop it. We are banging our heads against a wall. No one even notices what we do. The Israeli public couldn't care less. The international press is generally unaware of or indifferent to our existence. Our victories, such as they are, are minute, our ultimate defeat certain. And so on. This voice is astonishingly versatile in its range and cleverness. It's much smarter than I am. So why not stay in bed?

But I always go anyway, and I'll tell you why.

First, let me make the context in the field more explicit, because it is there — usually after the "action" is over — that despair sometimes seeps through my defenses. So let us take a real, quite common situation that I have experienced many times. At Umm al-Ara'is, just under the "illegal outpost" of Chavat Yair, there is a fertile wadi — a narrow valley at the base of the hills — whose fields belong (some individually, some collectively) to the extended al-'Awad family. The settlers have stolen them. But since the al-'Awad family has by no means given up on these lands,...