MICHAL GOVRIN
295
Palestinian organizations declare an end to terror. This is the necessary
breakthrough for a truce, for getting the Israeli army out of the areas of
the Palestinian Authority and returning to the negotiating table. But it
is just as much of a breakthrough for escaping from the impulse of sac–
rifice, victimhood, and murder, and perhaps also for their rejection from
the triangular arena of conflict.
The story of the Binding of Isaac involves,
in
the name of Jerusalem,
the profound revolution from sacrifice to exchange, and from fanatic faith
to concession. Settling the problem of the refugees by giving up "the right
of return to all of Palestine" demands a similar revolution of myth and
consciousness-from the fanaticism of direct realization to the principle
of symbolization and exchange. Not an eye for an eye, a tree for a tree, a
sacrifice for a sacrifice, but a ram instead of Isaac-accepting a substitute
sacrifice and reparations in exchange for grief, harm, and shame.
This is also the condition for territorial compromise, which demands
that each society formulate terms of ownership, beginning on the mythic
level, that allow a lack of exclusivity. The Jewish notions of the Sabbat–
ical year and the Sukkah served as my inspiration in writing the novel
Snapshots.
A parallel Muslim move would allow giving up the Arab
notions of
tsumud
(clinging to the land) and jihad. Returning the mythic
triangular arena to Jerusalem, the woman city, desired by the exclusive
fanaticism of monotheism, and in a male voice, which has governed all
three versions of the story and turned her into an arena of wars of pos–
session, will demand moving from the fanaticism of ownership to a
principle of exchange and hearing the female voice in the mythic and
political revolution that is required.
My
WORDS, LIKE ALL PERSONAL TESTIMONY,
are personal-like the swing
of my feelings about the Palestinian people, between empathy and hope,
fear and despair. My words are sealed by my experience as a woman and
mother who lives in Jerusalem. But I am also the daughter of a Holocaust
survivor, one of the "second generation of the Holocaust." A person's
suffering can never be fully described through the suffering of another.
But maybe the lesson of survival can be communicated. Confronted with
the tragedy that binds us, I read the lesson I got from my late mother,
while turning to the Palestinians, companions in fate, children of the
"second and third generation of the Nakba." It was mostly a silent les–
son, told briefly, a constant lesson in the long struggle against the role of
victim. With a group of women, she survived Auschwitz, the death
march, and Bergen-Belsen after she lost her first husband and her son.
Among human skeletons afflicted with typhoid fever and covered with
