BOOKS
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Israeli soldiers, Emerson never tires of telling us, are obscene and in–
solent. They are arrogant, possessing "the greatest swagger that any army
ever chose to have." They "clap and hoot" after taking prisoners. "The
soldiers loved seeing the casualties and began to clap or whistle as if a
celebration was in order." A marksman, afert a "quick success," accord–
ing to the author, begins "the usual macabre celebration, clapping his
hands or yelling with glee over his kill." In the entirety of the book,
there are few Israelis who seem human. Emerson presents the Gazans in
sharp contrast. She describes Dr. Zakari Aga (Zakaria al-Agha) is de–
scribed as "massive and magisterial." Even when "facing guests she did not
want or like," Alya, the proprietress of Marna House, "always stayed
serene but distant, as if royal blood had taught her how to rise very far
above it." Yusra Barbari, head of the Palestine Women's Union, is "stern
and elegant ... as if a tutor to a royal family had once instructed her."
Her tablecloths and runners "were always of very white linen which
looked so pure and immaculate it was hard to imagine them in the dirty
cities of America and Europe, to be spotted by ketchup or mustard on
dining room tables." This is both pure silliness and a telling triviality, as is
the author's romanticization of the fish of Gaza - the fish Gazans can no
longer catch because of Israeli restrictions, the fish "whose names West–
erners did not know." The fish of the eastern Mediterranean, needless to
say, are much the same whether found off the shores of Gaza or the Isle
of Capri. The restrictions the author mentions are not only Israeli but
Egyptian.
Emerson's tendency towards romanticization often forces her to
gloss over or, more commonly, to ignore the "revolutionary violence"
literally written on the walls that surround her. At a number of points in
the book, she discusses what many Palestinians call their "newspaper," the
grafitti that covers not only houses and shopfronts, but also, on occasion,
trees, cacti, stones, and bodies. She mentions slogans like "Yes to death
and starvation" and, as might be expected, various versions of "The
Israelis are not stronger than the Americans; the Palestinians are not
weaker than the Vietnamese," but some of the most ubiquitous slogans
are ignored. One need not know Arabic to recognize guns, knives,
swords, and Molotovs. In and around one of the hospitals in which the
author spent a great deal of time, one can find stencilled Kalashnikovs,
calls to
jihad,
and messages like "The destruction of Israel is a Koranic
inevitability." If Emerson had read more closely the writing on the wall,
she would have found there one of the most crucial tensions of the In–
tifada - the pull between the dream of "the glorious armed struggle"
and the realization of the limits of power, between rhetoric and reality,
imagination and pragmatism.
Emerson plays apologist of the worst sort when she writes of Hassim,
