This is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

by Ahdaf Soueif

I find that the settlers’ Judaism is both very difficult and worryingly easy to understand. It bears very little relation to the tolerant, intellectual, profoundly moral Judaism I am proud to have grown up in, a tradition that is acutely aware of its outsider status and therefore highly sensitive to the vulnerabilities of other communities. Settler Judaism is something else altogether: messianic, fundamentalist, indifferent to pain, soaked in violence. But it arises from tropes well within the Jewish tradition. Its claim on the land is there in the Torah, a land that, after all, is promised to the Israelites rather than being their place of origin. The Tanakh tells a story of bloody warfare waged by the Israelites to take possession of it. The perversity of settler Judaism is to privilege this of all parts of the Jewish inheritance, to pursue the one commandment to settle the land at the expense of the other 612.