Shulamith Hareven Quotes

The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the history of two societies in extreme distress: anyone who speaks only of the anguish of the Israelis is not telling the whole truth, nor is anyone who speaks only of the misery of the Palestinians.

Today, we can discern from the vocabulary the underlying ideology of a text or a speech. No self-respecting liberal would freely use the terms "enemy," or "annihilate," or "avenge," which no fundamentalist can do without.

The radical, right-wing parties-Tehiya and Kahane-America's "gift" to us.

Any given discipline contains a majority of priests and a minority of prophets, and the eternal question is who prevails.

My feeling is that at our present stage of Judaism, knowledge and creation within the culture have come to replace ceremony, just as ceremony and prayer, in their time, came to replace the sacrifices.

Her laugh is like slivers of sunlight. (about Hulda, chapter 3 p40)

The ways of the world began to turn upside down about one hour after sunrise. (first line of "Prophet")

Ido chatters gaily as a sparrow.

Day by day, hour by hour we create Hebrew, Israeli culture, and we take it for granted-not because we wonder whether or not it is "justified," but because this is our existential circumstance. Every day children are born here whose right it is to live, and in peace. Is not all this reality?

I held on to the parapet and breathed hard. A fierce desire had come and gone and left me reeling.

If I am the sole and eternal victim, then I create around and within myself and raise my children to an inability to see anyone who is not me. If I and only I occupy the throne of the victim, then no stranger can occupy it. This blindness reaches proportions that distort reality. I am not talking only about right-wing Jewish settlers, professional blind men who never see the residents of the West Bank...If I am the sole and eternal victim, then of course I refuse to accept any information that is liable to ruin my self-image. My receptors simply do pick it up. I have no need of it; I already have a map, with one marker it only: I am a victim, and everyone is against me. I refuse to hear not only about the Arabs, but also about myself. I break the mirror. At the base of this attitude is a dangerous thing: it is as if all of Zionism, if the fact of our living in Israel, is dependent on our not knowing and not wanting to know. Those who hold this attitude do not see the Israeli who gets up in the morning, goes to work, pays taxes, waters plants, raises his children, and does reserve army duty. Rather, they see the eternal victim, alone in the world, who sits upright on his throne with his eyes closed, smothering all other peoples (especially Arabs), and is always, always right, right with the blind, cold righteousness of the victim above whose head flutters the banner, "Vengeance is mine!" How many of us, today, see ourselves in this picture?

The sounds of a small city. As small as a man's palm. (chapter 2 p22)

After Auschwitz, absolute justice has no meaning; the Nuremberg trials did not bring a single murdered child back to life. We do not expect absolute justice today, perhaps not an absolute anything. The preferred term now is "beneficial justice," one that would do most reasonable good to all parties concerned. Conflict management has taught us that presenting each other with lists of grievances will not bring about any justice at all, and that it is the feasible, rather than the absolute, to which we should aspire. The astute listener will of course understand that the moment we use terms like "cooperation" and "conflict management" we have given up the old or neo-Marxist vocabulary of power struggle as the sole human motivation. Thus do linguistic changes, new semantic habits, usher in a different era.

The question remains: aside from a great writer, or a writer-historian of Barbara Tuchman's stature, who can draw an accurate picture of the situation and not enrage those who were there? Who can highlight the distress of both sides, without betraying either one?

And yet, thought many of the camp dwellers without saying it, and yet we should have had a god to show them. So as not to be shamed. (p 32)