Of transplants and transcendence:
Questioning social and symbolic categories in Israel
Laurie King-Irani, The
Electronic Intifada, 14 November 2005
http://electronicIntifada.net
Boundaries and borders. Checkpoints and chokepoints.
Walls, barriers, cantons and enclosures. This is the
terrain of our security-obsessed world -- particularly in
the Middle East. Here is the bleak landscape of
supposedly pure nation states, exclusive ethnic and
religious groups, and monolithic mentalities that
separate groups into neat little boxes, ranking people
according to distinctions that are assumed to be natural
and enduring, but which are always human constructions.
The British anthropologist, Mary Douglas, observed in an
article entitled "The Two Bodies" that the
human body serves as a symbolic template for the social
body, i.e., social roles, organization and processes.
Douglas hypothesized that societies with a strong sense
of group solidarity and purity would also be
characterized by strong ritual and symbolic emphases on
guarding and covering the body and protecting its various
orifices. Taboos on social contacts, certain foods, or
the display of particular parts of the body would thus be
part and parcel of everyday life in strongly
group-oriented societies.
Social and cultural demands to keep the inside in and the
outside out are illustrated by how the body is treated,
regarded, displayed, and handled, in life and as well as
in death in any society, accordihng to Douglas. The
degree to which the social body is symbolized by the
physical body, and the physical body is shaped by social
conditions, becomes clear when we consider common
metaphors: the "head of the family," the
"long arm of the law," "breaking the
back" of one's opponents, and "going to the
heart" of a matter, not to mention numerous obscene
examples of employing bodily images and processes to
describe strong emotions about social or political
situations.
Daily media images from the West Bank, Israel, Gaza and
Iraq are saturated with images of destroyed and
dismantled bodies. Children ripped to shreds, Passover
and wedding guests torn to pieces. Civilians blown apart
in cafés, at bus stops, theatres, and markets. And
afterward, amidst the acrid smell of burning flesh and
scorched metal, the images of body parts on the sidewalk,
pools of blood and intestinal matter splattered across
public spaces. Everything inside is now out; bodily
borders and boundaries are violated in the most horrific
and shocking manner, whether as the result of suicide
bombings or as the consequence of proximity-fuse shells,
phosphorous explosives, or one-tonne bombs crashing into
civilian residences.
A common sight depicted on television screens after
suicide bombings in Israel is the work undertaken by
teams of rabbis who painstakingly collect every bit of
human flesh that they can find. This is not just an
arcane religious duty, but rather, a practical attempt to
recover and repair the integrity of individual bodies so
as to repair and mend the social body; it is a
particularly arresting example of Israelis resisting
attempts to fragment or destroy the Jewish people. Even
in death, even when ripped to shreds, the body carries
meanings that transcend the individual person.
Images of these rabbis solemnly searching for bits of
flesh, hair, and organs heighten the sorrow of such acts,
and also illuminate the poignant limitations of human
responses to murders of this kind. But attempts to
reassemble the pieces of damaged bodies are rooted in
religious and ideological principles and beliefs that are
also represented by Israeli attitudes and practices
towards those outside the social body of Israel, i.e.,
non-Jews. Zionism is premised on the belief that the
Jewish people need their own exclusive home and haven,
that they must live as a people apart, distinct from
others, proteced from others.
But there is not yet, in Israel, a firm and clear legal
definition of who is a Jew. So the focus on keeping
inside things in and outside things out, as a social and
ideological focus of group life, is a matter of perpetual
concern and anxiety. Defining the conceptual borders of
the Jewish state is translated into laws, policies,
towering concrete walls, and everyday, unspoken attitudes
and practices towards the physical bodies of the Other.
Everytime I visit Israel, a verse from a song by the
Indigo Girls echoes in my head as I notice the ever-
increasing barriers, walls, wire fences and checkpoints:
"I wrapped my fear around me like a blanket/And I
sailed my ship of safety till I sank it."
Elaborated social classifications are echoed in the
classification and control of actual physical bodies in
Israel. Arab citizens, whether Muslim, Christian, or
Druze, are classified as non-Jews, defined not according
to what they are, but what they are not. Though tax-
paying members of Israeli society, they are not and can
never be members of the Jewish social body. Thus, Israel
cannot be both a democracy and a Jewish state simply
because not everyone inside is considered deserving of
being inside. One quarter of the country's population are
non-Jewish, though fully human.
For Palestinians in the West Bank, or in supposedly
liberated Gaza, the social categorizations and bodily
treatments are even harsher: Israelis do not consider
Palestinians under occupation to be human, otherwise, how
could their human rights be violated in a daily and
systematic fashion for four decades while the whole
worlds watches and does very little? Palestinians' homes
can be demolished, their children gunned down, their
olive trees uprooted, their villages bisected by 30-foot
high walls, and they can be held in "administrative
detention" without charge for months or years, all
with complete impunity.
The interplay of the two bodies, social and symbolic, is
intrinsic to much of the daily political news emanating
from the Middle East. Images of bodily violation resonate
viscerally among North American audiences, who find such
actions evil and incomprehensible. Evil they may well be,
but incomprehensible they are not.
Torture, for instance, is never about causing one
individual body to feel personal pain. Rather, it is a
systematic practice intended to break and wear down the
social body, a way of tearing apart the tissues of a
community's intersubjective reality by damaging the
muscle tissues of the torture victim. Torture is
simultaneously the most private and public of crimes: a
violation of the flesh that is meant to send a chilling
message: "You are powerless," to anyone in the
same category as the torture victim.
Crimes against humanity also pack a heavy symbolic
wallop. For instance, in the Sabra and Shatila massacres
of 1982, few women and girls who were murdered were not
also raped first, often in front of their horrified
families, who were then killed with the last image in
their minds being the most profane violation of their
sisters', daughters', wives' and mothers' most private
and sacred orifices. Women's breasts were cut off. Men
were castrated. Babies were sliced in half.
These violations of individual bodies were not haphazard
or random acts carried out in the heat of murderous rage,
but rather, part of a grammar of political exclusivity, a
systemic and coherent -- though certainly deranged --
message that an entire group could be violated, perhaps
even eradicated, with impunity. The message of that
massacre endures and echoes a quarter of a century later.
Its scars are social, physical, and symbolic, and are
felt far beyond the scene of the crime.
Symbolically, suicide bombings in Israel can also be read
as statements: "If you won't let us in, if you won't
let us breathe, if you won't allow us to cross
boundaries, if you won't recognize us as individuals or
as a group, then we will violate your most sacred
boundaries by blasting your individual bodies to bits; we
will turn your insides out. We will shatter your group by
shattering your flesh and bones, and we will so with our
crushed and excluded bodies."
Suicide bombings in Iraq, Jordan or the UK are not, in my
opinion, symbolically equivalent to those committed by
Palestinians in Israel. The same crime can have different
meanings in different contexts, although the mainstream
media tend to conflate all such attacks as being rooted
in a sinister Arab-Islamic propensity for violence and
evil. All suicide bombings are grave violations of
international law. They are clearly indefensible acts of
murder targeting civilians. But lived meanings of the
body and local languages of emotion must also be
considered. The act is in the intention.
Suicide bombings by Palestinians in Israel are usually
rooted in immense frustration; they stem from dignity
denied and inviolability violated. They take place on one
land claimed by two peoples, a land that, eventually,
will be shared as one state by all. This is an economic,
political, and ecological inevitability.
In Iraq, and this week in Jordan, suicide bombings fit
more clearly into the interpretive framework of
"asymmetrical warfare." More so than in
Israel/Palestine, these attacks are rooted in ideological
excesses that have reached, indeed surpassed, the level
of criminality and are committed by those lacking the air
forces and tank formations to make their demands known on
a conventional field of battle. This is not to deny the
often understandable grievances of those who commit such
acts in Iraq and Jordan, nor is it an attempt to excuse
them, but rather, an effort to highlight the disparate
meanings of actions that appear, on the surface, to be
all one and the same. In Palestine, suicide bombings are
personal, in Iraq and Jordan, among the Osama-wannabes,
it has become, in the mafiosi argot of "The
Sopranos" series, "professional." It's
business.
The past week brought us particularly stunning media
images of violated bodies, of insides turned bloodily
out, of shattered groups and brutally blurred boundaries
between one body and the next, between the living and the
dead. Over 60 killed in hotels in Jordan, dozens killed
in Iraq, and, less prominent on mainstream media screens,
several Palestinians, among them children, shot dead in
the West Bank.
But there was something new, too: a story which conflated
the symbolic and social bodies in a surprising, creative
and moving way. Amidst the usual vicious cycles of death,
this was an act that transcended and questioned
suffocating borders and arbitrary boundaries and granted
a glimpse, however short and fleeting, of a new logic of
social and political being, a new grammar whose coherence
surpasses and cancels out the criminal language of
killings and counter killings. It was also an act that
illuminated the intimacy of suicide bombings in Israel,
an complex emotional dimension that is usually lacking in
suicide bombings in Iraq.
Earlier this month, as Palestinians were celebrating the
Eid al-Fitr, a young boy from the traumatized Jenin
refugee camp, 12-year-old Ahmed Khatib, was shot by an
Israeli soldier who thought his toy gun was real. Ahmad,
critically wounded in the head by a sniper firing from
100 meters away, was taken to an Israeli hospital in
Haifa. He had no hope of survival, and lingered between
life and death for a few days. Doctors told his grieving
parents he had no chance of recovery.
Ahmed's parents had many choices of how to react. The
choice they made violated the grammar of the conflict and
illuminated the interconnections between people whom
policies and practices divide and separate. Ahmed's
parents decided that their brain-dead son's organs should
be given to people needing transplants. On Sunday,
Ahmad's organs gave new life to six Israelis, Jews and
non-Jews alike.
In Israel, the dearth of transplant organs is
particularly severe. According to Dr. Yaakov Lavi, an
Israeli surgeon who writes regularly for YNet forum, a
website featuring news and views of interest to Israelis
and Jews throughout the world,
"The Israeli medical establishment is one of the
most advanced and developed in the world. In every
medical area we hold our heads high at international
forums, and we are considered frontrunners and experts.
There is just one area we fail to address, and we have
been rightly criticized for it - organ transplants. And
not because there is a lack of knowledge or means to
carry out this mission. We have an abundance of both
means and the knowledge.
Rather, we lack only the most critical part of the
equation, the only part of the equation not in the hands
of doctors - a willingness on the part of Israeli society
to save other people.
A combination of prejudice, a lack of rabbinic support,
and especially terrible indifference leads each year to
the deaths of many patients in Israel, lives that could
have been saved if only for an organ donor.
Just 45 percent of potential donation families in Israel
actually agree to donate their organs, as compared to
70-80 percent in other Western countries.
And when this is the face of the society we live in, how
can we complain about patients whose lives are flashing
before their very eyes, and who look for any solution -
including outright immoral ones - to save their
lives?"
Ahmed's family demonstrated the opposite of indifference,
the reverse of exclusiveness and prejudice, and in so
doing, offered an antidote to vengeance. Although
devastated by their loss, Ahmed's family thought beyond
borders and boundaries. They said they immediately
decided to donate Ahmed's organs as a way of remembering
and honoring a relative who died at the age of 24 while
waiting for a liver transplant that never came.
They also wanted Ahmed, or part of Ahmed, to live on,
inside of others, no matter what their culturally
constructed identities might be. Instead of turning
others inside out in understandable rage at their loss,
they took something precious of their own and put it
inside others as an act of humanity, compassion, and
magnanimity that exposed the barriers placed by policies,
prejudices and practices between Palestinians and
Israelis as both arbitrary and permeable.
"We made the decision to show we want peace -- even
if the organ recipients are Jewish," Ahmed's mother
said. "This way I feel Ahmed is still alive."
"I have taken this decision because I have a message
for the world: that the Palestinian people want peace --
for everyone," Ahmed's father stated when
interviewed in his home in the Jenin refugee camp.
"I am trying to do something humane at the same time
that the Israeli Army is killing our sons."
As a result of their action, which is, socially and
symbolically speaking, the reverse of a suicide bombing,
three Israeli children -- two Jewish and the other an
Israeli Arab from the country's oppressed Bedouin
community - got a new lease on life by receiving Ahmed's
lungs, heart and liver.
Perhaps this moving story lacked the shocking gore, the
visual horror and macabre fascination of the suicide
bombings of three hotels in Jordan a week after Ahmed was
shot. Maybe that is why a search of news sites showed
that few mainstream media outlets in the United States
had featured the story of the Khatib family's inspiring
magnanimity.
What is more perplexing and amazing? Four dehumanized
individuals cruelly blowing themselves and sixty other
people to bits, or the breathtaking lesson in humanity
shown by a family that would not have been blamed for
seeking revenge, but who instead repaid murder with
magnanimity?
Pondering this question, and saddened by the media's
constant focus on, and deficient interpretations of, the
Middle East's grammar of violence, I recalled this
passage from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Who shows a
child just as it stands? Who places him
within his constellation, with the measuring-rod
of distance in his hand. Who makes his death
from gray bread that grows hard, or leaves
it there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the
core
of a sweet apple? The minds of murderers
are easily divined. But this: to contain death,
the whole of death, even before life has begun,
to hold it all so gently within oneself,
and not be angry: that is indescribable.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, concluding stanzas of the
Fourth Duino Elegy (1914).
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The minds of murderers, whether Jewish, Christian or
Muslim; American, Israeli or Arab, are much easier to
understand than the actions of Ahmed Khatib's family.
Unlike suicide bombers or IDF snipers, Ahmed's family
violated the grammar of the conflict. They brought the
symbolic and social bodies of opposing groups together
and illustrated the arbitrariness and barbarity of
erecting walls, whether actual or metaphorical, between
human beings. Theirs is a story that deserves to be told
and retold, in an effort to create a new social and
political grammar in Israel/Palestine.
Laurie King-Irani, a co-founder of the Electronic
Intifada, is a social anthropologist and
freelance writer living in Madrid, Spain.
For more information, see http://indictsharon.net
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