In completing his Rituals of Truce, the Israeli-born poet Ben
Hollander, who moved to New York at the age of six, offers both a
compelling and a perplexing work. Its seemingly disjointed
citations remind one of a parallel work (counterpart would not be
quite the right word) on the Palestinian side: Elia Sulaiman's
Divine Intervention. Both works appear driven by a tragic-comic,
post-structuralist tenor, which governs the very form of their
presentations. Both works refuse to follow linear or realist
pronouncements in their respective diagnosis of a treacherous
nationalist existence.
The viewer/reader of both works is challenged to connect what seems
initially disconnected or randomly articulated. This apparent
randomness, verbalized perhaps in Hollander's reference to James
Baldwin about "daring to say everything," leads one to wonder if
his work entails a visceral response to a colonial condition
closing in on the colonizer as well as the colonized. But the jumpy
nature of Hollander's text does not make it any less worthy of
following. In my comments below, I am less interested in the
content of political stances that Hollander articulates. I am more
interested in how he articulates them and what implications they
have on one of his main goals for this work: establishing
conditions of truce between Israelis and Palestinians.
In unexpected ways, the concerns of Hollander's work conjure
another poetic composition, this time from the classical Arabic
poetic tradition: Lamiyat al-'Arab by al-Shanfarah. In this
pre-Islamic ode, which the Prophet Muhammad reportedly recommended
teaching to children, the brigand poet documents solitary life
outside the tribe. Like al-Shanfarah, Hollander is searching for
trust. While al-Shanfarah invested his trust in wolves of the
wilderness more than his own tribe, Hollander chose to trust his
Palestinian interlocutor more than his own position about a
collective version of Jewish identity, history and mythology. It is
not irrelevant therefore that Hollander's work is published by
Parrhesia, a Greek phrase connoting truthful and fearless speech.
In that sense, Rituals belongs to a tradition of committed,
irreverent Jewish works contesting foundational premises and
promises of the Zionist project that is Israel.
Although Hollander's oscillates between different audiences of his
text, it is safe to assume that he strives for conditions of trust
among Jews and between Jews and Arabs and perhaps even among
different affiliations within his self. Endorsing Baldwin's
position about the futility of arguing with someone's experience,
belief or position, Hollander conducts in the first part of the
book four "rituals," which are expected to beget conditions of
trust. Arguing derived from the Latin arguer used to mean
demonstration as well as contestation. Today, it is the latter
sense that is more commonly known. It is arguing in the sense of
quarrelling and contesting that Hollander is implicitly evoking and
explicitly avoiding for the sake of truce. Instead of contesting,
he conducts confessions in a series of four rituals. His
confessions aim to reveal the limits of both his rhetorical and
moral authority. Through the very act of delineating those limits,
Hollander hopes to obtain the trust of other Israelis and Jews as
well as Palestinians, such as Raja Shehadeh whose writing has
significant influence on Hollander's. To the first two groups the
author discloses his abrogated nativity as an Israeli who has no
interest in returning to the homeland he left (but never completely
so). To Palestinians he confesses Jewish wrongdoing that led to
their misery.
It is of course possible that in mutual confessions lie the Third
Way, which Shehadeh and Hollander identify as a potential release
from the prison of animosity between those endowed with and those
deprived of national sovereignty. Yet it is also possible that what
has been lacking all along in the colonial encounter between both
peoples, now more than a century old, is precisely that: an
argument in the sense of a contestation driven by just,
enlightened, even if conflicting positions. As such, what has
supplanted the absence of an argument is a military and financial
might necessary for the creation and fabrication of facts on the
ground. And it remains within reason to expect that the side that
has a state is more efficient at this task than the side that does
not.
Throughout his rituals and the whole book, Hollander employs a
method of interception: history intercepts the present, pain
pleasure, facts fiction, seriousness humor, pictures words, and
writing meta-writing. These interceptions come from a diverse array
of media: novels, e-mail correspondence, poems, film script,
dialogues and monologues. This inchoate diversity of sources belies
any rituality that Hollander's presentation may strive for. Save
his attention to the rules of English grammar, it is hard to
discern what is ritualistic about his rituals. However, if one
takes rituals as that which steps into the beyond, into the
extra-ordinary, then perhaps the title and the content of
Hollander's text would seem more compatible.
This invocation of rituals appears especially applicable to the
second part of the book where Hollander strives to tell a story
outside the order of the day, outside history as we know it. He is
obviously troubled by the ramification of the Jewish State on Jews
and by the proposition of two states for two peoples. Neither
state, Hollander seems to believe, is capable of ridding the two
peoples from their existence as questions: the "Jewish Question"
and the "Palestinian Question." What Hollander strives for is a
state of being for both peoples where they can talk to each other
from histories that do not pit them against each other by commonly
recognizing the limits of their respective historical claims.
I am not exactly sure what premises about history Hollander is
working with, yet I wonder in what ways are they predicated by the
foundational modern condition that Nietzsche diagnosed as the death
of God? Would what we know today as history figure as it did in
Hollander's work were it not for this death? In other words, it
remains to be seen, if it is the shedding of "history" and certain
"historical" claim as opposed to other forces that would prove to
be the necessary requisite for the arrival of a new Israeli or a
truce between Israelis and Palestinians.
Whatever one takes the subject of that monumental modern death to
be - god, God, history, language, nature, ideology - it is clear
that Hollander is proposing that Israelis/Jews face the limits of
their moral authority and historical positions. And it is as though
in reaching these limits would they be able to reach the Other who
is necessary for a truce, whether that other is located inside the
self or outside it. Taken to its logical limits, his strategy of
lowering defenses by mistrusting one's historical claims opens the
possibility that in Hollander's there lies the work of more than
the Other Israeli that is in him but also the Other Palestinian
that a Jew could be. Such blasphemous redrawing of nationalist
boundaries and the resultant admissibility of one's Palestinianess
rests, of course, on a perilous and daring excavation into what
Palestine or Israel was, is, and could be about. Towards such a
daring excavation of the place and the self, Hollander's is a
welcome initiation.