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The American writer
William Cook writes beautiful, noble prose. Like many of us, he is inspired
by the tragic events in the Holy Land. Entombment of live people, this classic
subject of Edgar Poe, finds new poignancy in his writing. In Cook's unpublished
novel, Nefaria, Sharon is alive, he hears and sees, but is unable
to give a sign of life. Thus, according to Cook, Ariel Sharon was punished by
the punishment he meted to others: he is entombed in his almost-dead body. Here
we publish his short essay, a part of a post-scriptum to this novel.
Life Inside the Entombment
Wall
By William A. Cook
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to
hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.”
(George Bernard Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, ACT II)
Terrorists struck once again in Jenin this past week
killing four, wounding twenty-eight civilians, including two journalists and
four children and women. Fifty five civilians were kid napped including six
children. Three buildings used for agriculture were destroyed and 199 dunams of
agricultural land confiscated. Other attacks occurred in Far’oun village where
six homes were demolished that stood too close to the Wall. Terrorists beat
civilians in Bil’in village, west of Ramallah who were protesting the
demolitions and the extension of the Wall. The attacks continue, unreported in
the United States since they are carried out by our allies, the Israeli Defense
Forces.
Despite the deafening silence that accompanies the
on-going construction of the illegal Wall, declared such by the International
Court of Justice, despite staged non violent demonstrations in Bal’ein, Jayous,
Bethlehem, Ramallah’s Bil’in village and elsewhere through out the West Bank,
despite the outcry this week raised by Sinn Fein’s International Affairs
spokesperson, Aengus O Snodeigh against the mounting atrocities committed by the
Jews on the Palestinians, those who have a conscience, both international and
Israeli, stand in the streets chanting and singing that the wall will fall and
freedom will come to the Palestinian people. But no one listens. Instead, “a
large contingent of Israeli forces, including soldiers, police and border
guards, began assaulting the nonviolent demonstrators with rifle butts and
truncheons.” (Palestinian Center for Human Rights, 22-24 February, 2007).
Indifference, Shaw tells us, is the essence of
inhumanity; it is worse than hatred precisely because it does not recognize the
living, breathing brother and sister who suffer the agony inflicted on them by a
people who proclaim to be civilized even as they inflict bestial and barbaric
acts on the helpless. That makes the citizens of the world worse sinners than
the IDF and the Jews in Israel who tolerate the racist hatred that drives their
government. Indifference costs nothing, requires no judgment, raises no
principles, imposes no action, causes no discomfort; it is the void that rests
in a soul that cares only for self and nothing for its fellow man. It is the
beast that John describes in The Secret Book (11:4-5): “The rulers
brought Adam into the shadow of death so that they might produce a figure again,
but now from earth, water, fire, and the spirit that comes from matter, that is,
from the ignorance of darkness, and desire, and their own contrary spirit. This
figure is the tomb, the newly created body that these criminals put on the human
as a fetter of forgetfulness.” The indifferent finds recourse in all that
satisfies self, all that pleases the body – drink, food, pandering – and all
that pleases the desires – gold, silver, presents – and so isolates self from
the world that might disturb that absorption lost in forgetfulness. Should that
isolated world be threatened, the fear aroused against such a person – terror,
servility, anguish and shame – locks them in even more.
That fear can be triggered by those in power. It is a
tool used to control the conscience of a people. Arthur Miller wrote about it in
The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692.
Citizens threatened by fear for self, even in the form of invisible forces
determined to exist by their ministers, blindly accept what they cannot know and
become accomplices to the criminal acts of their leaders. They have literally
turned their individual consciences over to their government. That is the case
in Israel. The Wall is the visible icon of an invisible threat created by
Sharon’s administration to accomplish a political end, the confiscation of
Palestinian land and the psychological death of the Palestinian people. The Wall
is built of fear in order to engender fear in both the Israelis who see
themselves as victims once more, and in the Palestinians who see themselves
entombed, without hope, without compassion, without justice. Indeed, the Wall
rises in all its grotesque greyness like the cement box into which a coffin is
placed, and in its image casts a pall over the people of Palestine that
suffocates their spirit even as it separates brothers from sisters, children
from parents, friends from families, making impossible a normal life. How can
one people inflict such heinous conditions on another? How can the people of
America sit idly by while their representatives cow-tow to the dictates of AIPAC
and the world looks on in disbelief. What has become of the America that cares
for the tired and the poor?
Consider what Sharon and now Olmert have constructed.
The Wall rests entirely within Palestine while it snakes over hills and valleys,
down the middle of streets, carves towns and villages into parts separating
people who have lived together for decades, centuries even, confiscates to the
Israeli side the aquifers and wells belonging to the people of Palestine, as
well as the olive groves and crops belonging to the people, and the arable land
that will become the settlers fields and additional settlements for those who
never lived a day in Palestine and have no history here, no memories, no culture
that is indigenous if two thousand years is considered a measure. Completely
surrounded, without access to their fields or mosques or friends or hospitals or
employment, they have but two choices, leave or die. They are indeed buried
alive by the Jews, a fate less absolute than the gas chamber since they can
choose to leave, and leave behind two thousand years of history and land that
has given life to generations of family embodied in 1000 year old olive trees
summarily ripped from the ground by Israeli bulldozers, leave mosques in which
they have worshiped decade upon decade, and leave their memories as those driven
from their homes in 1947 lost theirs when their towns were razed and all that
had been was no more.
Or they die; a living death that drags on day after
day in poverty and need, dependent on those not indifferent to their plight:
Israelis that have not capitulated to the wanton waste of human life because
they know what victim hood is and recognize it; friends from all countries of
the world who care enough to come as witnesses to the humiliation, the
degradation, the racism that permeates the settlers and is embodied in the
Israeli government; Jews from around the world who decry the inhumanity
inflicted by their own on another; and Americans who care because they have
faced the same threatened fear that enabled a corrupt and amoral administration
to invade and occupy countries against international law. That is their fate.
Ironically, the conditions imposed on the
Palestinians in their tomb, the benumbed state of their being, the years upon
years of isolation and alienation, the loss of sensitivity to the rising and
setting of the sun, the loss of friends and family, the loss of consciousness to
all that surrounds them since it has been turned to ashes and waste, the loss of
memory that gave identity to their being since none know now that they even
exist behind the Wall, the loss of their very purpose to live, the loss of hope
that has been entombed with them, their dependency on strangers to sustain what
life breathes in their lungs is mirrored in the metaphor of Sharon lying in his
sheeted shroud as day crowds on day, unable to respond to anyone or anything,
entombed in his own flesh, unconscious, as the indifferent are unconscious, to
his own plight or that of those he has buried alive.
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