In 1899, a hand-drawn illustration was published in the New York City-based Harper’s Weekly under the name Joseph Jastrow. The image is one that now, in the 21st century, is widely familiar. It showed a duck, its long beak quizzically parted. Or wait, was the creature a rabbit, and was that beak really a pair of bunny ears? The trick drawing was an optical illusion. Joseph Jastrow was a Jewish-American psychologist who emigrated from Warsaw as a toddler. His father was a scholar of the Talmud, but the younger Jastrow devoted his career to debunking perceptions.
People saw one animal or the other — or both in succession, if they could consciously flip a mental switch. But a viewer could never see duck and rabbit simultaneously. Their grasp of the big picture dictated which details they focused on. In this way, the image created not only diverging perspectives, but different realities.
The last year of the 19th century, the year that the image circulated among hundreds of thousands of the magazine’s subscribers in the United States, was the same year that the Third Zionist Congress took place across the Atlantic in Basel, Switzerland. Theodor Herzl, the journalist-turned-lawyer-turned-political activist heralded as the “father of Zionism,” addressed the attendees. The Jewish people, he said, “desires to emerge from darkness into sunshine.” Herzl gave the Jews of Europe a choice between “apathetic submission to insult and misery” in their adopted lands and soaring “upwards to a higher degree of civilization” along with an “awakening for social justice” by colonizing their own home.
Jews had been subjected to the whims of kings and nobles and punishing restrictions by the Catholic Church for centuries. Then nationalist sentiments, and the novel idea of nation-states consolidated along ethnic lines, each one with its own heavily mythologized collective history, had turned Jews into Europe’s ultimate “others.” Zionism meant banding together to create their own collectivity. That the establishment of a Jewish national home in the ancient Israelite homeland — which, for the previous four centuries, had been an administrative province of the Ottoman Empire, part of Greater Syria — might turn at least parts of its Arab Muslim majority into a minority was not lost on Zionist leaders.
“If it should occur that men of other creeds and different nationalities come to live amongst us, we should accord them honorable protection and equality before the law,” Herzl insisted.
Still, “protection” implied vulnerability. In miming the mythos of the consolidated nation-state, Zionists also replicated the “minority question.”
Following World War I, Ottoman Palestine was handed to Britain as a colonial mandate, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration that vouchsafed a Jewish national home in Palestine under the aegis of the British caused tensions to deepen. Palestinian uprisings bookended the 1920s and erupted again in the second half of the 1930s. Jewish numbers continued to grow, as Nazism tightened its noose around Europe and armed Zionist paramilitaries began patrolling their plots. As nationalism blew in like a sandstorm, pleas for interfaith harmony — among Zionists, as well as Palestinians — became a tougher sell. In 1947, a partition plan was devised. If a duck can’t be superimposed onto a rabbit, then at least both creatures can be chopped up and reconfigured. But the proposed partition — with 55% of the country earmarked for a future Jewish state — led to war.
The question of whether the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians amounts to ethnic cleansing remains subject to fierce debate. What’s clear is that a kind of architectural cleansing took place, as the Jewish leadership gained possession of the territory allotted to two states. An almost equivalent number of Jewish refugees poured in, largely from the Arab world, although their origins were de-Arabized. The Judaization process began, an act of conversion in which rabbit became duck and Palestine was transformed back into the Land of Israel, once and for all.
Decades later, remnants from before 1948 still dot the countryside. Tangles of stone peek behind bus stops and alongside highways. A dented minaret emerges from spiky overgrowth. A domed shrine falls into picturesque disrepair. They protrude like mute witnesses, some streaked in blue and white paint, the colors of the Israeli flag — used as nationalist war paint. But mostly, outside of strenuously staged historical zones, the past stays out of sight.
To see what has remained of the rabbit, you must rub your eyes and scratch the earth. You must change your focus.
You might say the rabbit is what brought me to Israel. I am a researcher fascinated by ruins, and I am interested in ghosts as a metaphor for a lingering, haunting, liminal presence at the edge of perception. Rather than rigid boundaries, it is the fuzziness of borderlands that captures my attention. When casting around for a dissertation topic for my doctorate, I seized upon an exploration of this land’s vanished landscapes — geographical, cultural, emotional. All that remained for me to do was hit the road.
When I landed in Tel Aviv back in 2011, I based myself in Florentin, a graffiti-splattered hipster enclave. It was within walking distance of Jaffa, an ancient port city home to a Palestinian minority, where I was taking weekly classes in Palestinian Arabic. Learning the language, I felt like a vestal priestess helping to keep a flame alive. I didn’t realize that merely learning how to say “I live in Tel Aviv” could be considered a provocation. But one day, seated at an outdoor cafe in central Tel Aviv, my grammar book with its green-domed mosque cover splayed on the table, a stranger admonished me.
“You shouldn’t be studying that,” he grumbled. “You should be studying Hebrew.”
A few months later, I relocated to Ramallah, where I aimed to improve my broken Arabic by signing up for a language exchange. It wasn’t an auspicious time for a Jewish American to move to the West Bank. At least, not unless you were joining an Israeli settlement. The same year I walked off a plane into the balmy heat of an Eastern Mediterranean fall, Juliano Mer-Khamis, founder of The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp, son of a Jewish-Israeli mother and Palestinian-Christian father, was shot by a masked assassin. Just by existing, Mer-Khamis embodied the enduring peacenik hope for a single state where everyone lived side by side — intermingled, even intermarried. Now he was gone, and coexistence seemed an even shakier prospect.
That didn’t stop my language partner and me from becoming fast friends. No one likes hokey observations about shared humanity overriding all odds. Then again, there are some people with whom you just click, and things like sex, nationality or religion take a backseat to whatever magic has sparked. That’s how it was for Mohammad and me.
A couple of summers after we met, I invited Mohammad to join me on a field research trip across Israel. He secured a permit and queued in the long line snaking through Qalandia checkpoint, while I rented a car. We headed north. Cruising along the highway, sirens sounded behind us. I pulled to the shoulder and an Israeli police officer approached the driver’s side window. He glanced from me to Mohammad, then back to me. “Are you OK? Are you safe?” he asked, as if expecting a reply in coded blinks.
I assured him I was. When we drove away, Mohammad and I erupted into laughter: nervous laughter, gallows laughter. We laughed a lot that trip, because grappling with the past was a poison that needed counterbalancing.
“I thought there were only like, 10 Palestinian villages that were destroyed,” Mohammad said, staring gloomily out at a sunlit field.
“No,” I said at the wheel. “Over 400.”
Using Walid Khalidi’s “All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948” as a roadmap of sorts, we made our way to Hamat Gader, a spa and water park built atop the destroyed village of Al-Hamma. The former railway station still stood, though trains no longer chugged their way onward through Syria. I’d read there was a mosque hidden somewhere, though to find it we’d need to shell out 81 shekels ($22) a pop for entry. So be it.
Mohammad and I picked our way through a dismal zoo, euphemistically billed as a safari, pausing to cradle a baby rabbit in our palms. We passed a cold pool, where Israeli kids ran shrieking up slides. Finally, on the verge of giving up, we spotted a white structure that had been boarded up, looming above a bed of bramble. Its doors were smashed. In an uncanny bit of visual incongruity, an array of tidy picnic benches surrounded the defunct mosque.
Slowly, after that first discovery, the rabbit came into view. No special incantations were needed to awaken the ghosts of the past. They were all around us. Like a third eye opening, I saw pre–1948 Palestine everywhere. The image that formed revealed something of the Nakba’s complex afterlives.
Mohammad’s permit didn’t extend until the weekend, so he returned to the West Bank. My friend Nathalie, a Jewish leftist from Berkeley, California, who’d immigrated to Israel a few years before, took his place. We hopped on a bus to Lifta, a ghost village of weather-eaten stone homes perched around a grassy slope on the edge of Jerusalem. Israeli teens thronged its ice-cold spring. Someone had etched a blue Star of David above an arched doorway. The crumbling houses — hollowed edifices, with ceilings that opened to the cloudless sky — were occupied by a troop of squatters. Their ringleader was Laia, a young Australian with fuchsia lipstick and punky sideburns. She wasn’t Jewish or Palestinian, just an adventure-seeker who’d blown her travel funds on room service and hotel suites, ending up here, in a cavernous domed ruin — probably once a mosque, now outfitted with a rumpled twin-sized bed.
I was considering if the squatters had given any thought to the weight of their infiltration when a man with matted blond hair entered.
“As-salaam-alaikum,” he said jokingly in a sonorous drone.
“Wa-alaikum-as-salaam,” tittered back Laia. Ah, so they were cosplaying as Palestinians.
Not far from Lifta, in a middle-class suburban neighborhood where shiny cars sat in asphalted driveways, Nathalie and I hunted around until I found what I was looking for: a minaret protruding like a chimney from the tiled roof of a single-family home. I lifted my camera to take a photograph. “No picture!” a voice roared. A 50-ish Israeli man was headed toward us with a look of fury. He mimed crushing my camera beneath his sneakered feet. “Bitch! Bitch! No picture! Bitch!” he called, until Nathalie and I reluctantly retreated.
I wondered why so many people considered it taboo, even threatening, to simply recognize what once had been. The Nakba was a joke to the squatters, but at least they acknowledged it. And now that my third eye had opened, I was seeing the rabbit everywhere I looked. It seemed to me that you would only be able to not see the rabbit through practiced cognitive dissonance. Of course, the reason it was suppressed went back to Jastrow’s illustration, for duck and rabbit could not exist in the same sphere. They did not, in other words, coexist. To recognize the rabbit was to erase the duck, and vice versa.
The next summer, I claimed a spare bedroom in Mohammad’s vast apartment in Ramallah. By now it was 2014, the year Palestinian militants abducted three teenage settlers who had been hitchhiking in the West Bank, the year Israelis abducted and immolated a Palestinian teen in Jerusalem in retaliation, the year Israeli airstrikes leveled parts of Gaza. Hamas missiles thudded into a nearby industrial zone of the West Bank. Mohammad laughed as I cowered under the bed, a newbie to explosions. “We are used to this,” he shrugged.
It was Ramadan, and walking to an iftar buffet, an unseen assailant pitched stones at our path. Days later, a car full of men screeched to a halt at the sight of us on the sidewalk. They climbed out to shove and punch Mohammad. “You should not be walking with this woman,” they shouted.
After we filed charges at a police station, the men and their aged fathers shuffled into Mohammad’s apartment to formally apologize. I stayed hidden in the back bedroom, but not before spotting glasses of juice and cookies prepared on a tray.
“Why are you serving snacks to the guys who beat you up?” I asked.
Mohammad sighed. “This is just how things are done.”
Later, listening to the men murmur Arabic pleasantries from behind a locked door, I’d consider how Mohammad’s flustered explanation had mirrored that of his attackers. They’d sized up the pair of us with a seething pronouncement: “This is not how things are done.”
But why? Why couldn’t we be friends, I thought, a woman and a man, a Palestinian and a Jew? Nerves strained, I decamped alone to Ein Hod, one of Israel’s so-called artists’ villages — formerly the pre-1948 village of Ein Haud. It had been depopulated, as robotic-sounding a verb as “deplane.” In a surreal twist, Palestinian descendants of the original occupants established an adjacent community named Ein Hud. The village’s stone mansions and cottages have long been gutted. What were once Palestinian homes are now white-walled art galleries. They display ruby-glazed pomegranates and murky oil paintings featuring shtetl scenes and Chagallian goats. The mosque, minaret intact, serves as the town cafe.
I wandered around, brushing past elderly tourists and youth groups cooing over the artworks. An American man stage-whispered into a cell phone from a shaded courtyard: “She’s made some very bizarre comments during discussion.” My eyes dropped to his lanyard: “Birthright.” “I just want everyone here to feel like they’re having a positive group trip to Israel,” the trip leader added morosely, moving out of earshot.
By this point, I was nearing the end of my doctoral research. I’d encountered plenty of ghosts. I’d questioned the limits of liminality from within my own friendships. But Ein Hod presented a new spin on erasure. History had been repackaged here as “heritage.” The past was simultaneously vaunted and obscured, curated and picked clean. Old-timey aesthetics lent the village a muted authenticity, but there could be nothing less authentic than a place that has been shrewdly repurposed.
Here again, my mind slid back to that turn-of-the-century optical illusion. I wondered what bizarre remarks the misfit Birthrighter had made. Something like: Hey, didn’t this village used to be Palestinian?
It turns out that Joseph Jastrow, popularizer of the duck-rabbit trick illustration, had an older brother. That older brother, Morris, was a scholar of the Middle East. In 1919, he published “Zionism and the Future of Palestine: The Fallacies and Dangers of Political Zionism,” which turned the Zionist quest to secure Jewish survival on its head. The elder Jastrow argued that the reason Jews persisted into the modern era, unlike the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Lydians or forgotten ancient peoples like the Amorites, was precisely because they were dispersed and absorbed. A state wasn’t protection — it was a target on your back.
Pluralism, a multiethnic melting pot exemplified by Jastrow’s adopted city of Philadelphia, was something worth striving for, he asserted. “From having been the ‘Promised Land’ for one nationality, Palestine has become a land of promise for many peoples,” he wrote. He dismissed Herzl’s vision of an inclusive commonwealth as “verbal camouflage,” insisting — as many do today — that a Jewish democracy is a contradiction in terms.
“We have seen that the great civilizations of antiquity, as in modern times, have all been produced by the mixture of nationalities and not by a single nationality,” Jastrow concluded. “Culture is the spark that ensues when diverse ethnic forces meet.”
The year before Jastrow’s book appeared, his father’s native Poland won independence from the Russian Empire following over a century of imperial rule. Jastrow had high hopes for the Republic of Poland. Many speculated that Jews might live peacefully again, free from the prejudices and pogroms that had dogged them under the reign of the tsars. But in Poland, “Poland for Poles” nationalism surged. Knowing what we know now, Jastrow’s upbeat tone is hard to bear. Only a few hundred thousand Polish Jews would go on to survive the Nazi-built ghettos and gas chambers out of a population that numbered 3.3 million in 1939, on the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion. After the war, the Soviet regime made short work of anyone who remained.
Europe is home to its own haunted landscapes. But at least publicly, governments seldom shy away from commemoration. In Vilnius — once nicknamed the Jerusalem of the North — a Lithuanian artist has painted Orthodox Jews on street corners, grayscale, as if they’d sprung from old photos. Sure, there’s a touch of Dara Horn’s aggrieved book, “People Love Dead Jews,” but at least they’re trying. In the forests of Paneriai, where the SS and Lithuanian volunteers massacred 80,000 Jews between 1941 and 1944, the gaping ditches where families were shot are marked with monuments. Nobody forages the wild mushrooms there, a guide told me when I visited, “Because everything grows from their ash, from their bones.”
To coexist, one must inhabit the same reality. And reality begins with accountability.
Aside from the Israeli nongovernmental organization Zochrot (the name means “they remember” in Hebrew), such efforts in Israel remain rare. Jewish-Israeli activists formed the NGO in 2002, after the failure of the Camp David Summit and the outbreak of the Second Intifada, when prospects for peaceful cohabitation hit a nadir. It maps destroyed villages, organizes tours to ruins like Lifta, collects testimony from Nakba survivors, and advocates for the rights of refugees and their descendants. A decade after Zochrot formed, Israeli and Palestinian educators collaborated to produce “Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine,” which revisits a tumultuous century through dual narratives: One page is written from a Jewish-Israeli perspective, the opposite from a Palestinian viewpoint. We hear about the Jewish longing for refuge in the face of unspeakable violence, but also of Palestinians’ dispossession of their homeland.
The point in either of these examples — and in the field research I carried out, all those years ago — isn’t to say, “Look, people! The duck is really a rabbit.” This risks replicating the Judaization process, with its singularizing rhetoric of redemption and return. A Palestine cleansed of Jewishness would be nothing to celebrate, nor is the global trend toward exclusion of the other. No, the point is to exit out of nationalist binaries altogether.
I used to hang out regularly with Nathalie, my leftist American-Israeli friend from Berkeley, and Mohammad, a Palestinian from near Nablus: drives to the Dead Sea, meetups in Ramallah, encounters in those rare spots within the West Bank to which both Israelis and Palestinians have access. Over the past decade — and most acutely, in the past year — we’ve all been sucked back into separate silos. Each has three children now. “How are Mohammad and his kids doing?” Nathalie messages me. “How are Nathalie and her kids doing?” Mohammad messages me.
Maybe it is the next generation that will train their eyes to do the impossible. If anyone is to look beyond the wreckage of this moment, duck and rabbit must dissolve into one.
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