Canada and the USA are friends. Allies. Close cousins tied together by culture, trade and mutual interest. That said, if a few million enraged Americans intent on swallowing our country suddenly rushed our border and made a dash for Ottawa — and announced their weird plan months in advance — the Canucks would not take this breach of sovereignty lying down.
In less than 48 hours, Israel will be in this situation. Well, sort of. The borderlands there are already inhabited by people who have either formally or informally boycotted the Jewish state. Several sections along the border are inhabited by lunatics who have on many occasions launched indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians — all for the sake of slaking their bloodlust, distracting the international community from the daily brutalities of Middle Eastern despots, or just getting a couple of days worth of friendly coverage by the BBC or the Guardian.
The actual number of participants will probably be in the thousands, not millions. But even a few thousand runners can put border police on their back foot. This is not a game. Continue Reading »
My novel, A History of the Middle Eastside, is now available for purchase as a Kindle eBook! It’s got all of the Yiddish-slang spewing gangster action of the original dead tree edition but at a great new price: $3.
Yup. You can download the eBook for less than you’d pay for a Starbucks latte or a bowl of matzoh-ball soup. Cheap like borscht.
Here’s what the reviews have been saying about the book:
“It’s a great piece of satire and political allegory, with a crime noir style that is a perfect fit for a narrative spanning years of bloody conflict and infighting.” — Libertas Post
“A History of the Middle Eastside is rife with violence, sex and Yiddishisms. It could be described, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction meets Alex Kliner’s Menschenings.” — The Jewish Independent
“European and Middle Eastern history is presented in novel form in Narvey’s work, beginning with what I take to be the Dreyfuss Affair of 1894, as witnessed by Theodore Herzl, founder of Zionism. Moving through the novel’s presentation of events set in fictional Manhattan gangwars, we see tough guy Gruber, (known to us not as Adolph Schicklegruber but as Adolph Hitler,) defeated; his rivals François, Big Ben, and Ivan, with the dedicated help of Washington, then vying for turf; Polanski, (whom I take to be Ze’ev Jabotinsky,) a refugee from the wars, showing up in the traditional Jewish ghetto of Manhattan’s Lower Eastside, here as The Middle Eastside, 1948. Thus begin the gangwars of survival “The Yids” must win– over and over again.” — No Dhimmitude
Shortly I first arrived in Vancouver, one of my first freelance journalism gigs here was writing for the Western Jewish Bulletin (which today is called the Jewish Independent). So it’s particularly heartwarming to see my novel, A History of the Middle Eastside, covered in that worthy publication. Thanks for the feature, people.
Explained Narvey to the Independent, “Two clichés I’ve often heard when discussing the politics of the Middle East, whether in formal surroundings or over pints at the pub: ‘It’s a rough neighborhood’ and ‘It’s complicated.’ So I ran with that: ‘What if I write a novel that breaks down the 20th century of the region into a simple parable of street gangs stabbing each other over turf?’
“I thought back to Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. I was also reading Michael Chabon’s incredible novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I thought that writing in that style, with the story set in a surreal world of gangsters and the underworld, might be both entertaining and also accessible for a mainstream audience.”
He added, “If you like a rip-roaring tale of action, it works straight up as a pulp fiction gangster novel. If you’ve already got a pretty thorough grounding in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and world diplomacy in the 20th century, or want to learn a bit more about it, it works on a deeper level as well. I like the idea that it can educate, though from what I’ve heard from some of my readers, it can also feed into preexisting biases. It is what you make of it.”
As Darfur and Rwanda have undermined the international meaning of the phrase “Never Again”, does this expression still have relevance? To Israelis, it absolutely does, though the creed has a much more specific interpretation in this country and among the diaspora:
The phrase, “Never again”, can be taken to mean that we are united in opposing the genocide of any group or nation in a new Holocaust (though Darfurians rightly wonder at why the rest of the world chose not to live up to that creed). But for Jews, it has other meanings as well: never again will they put their security in the hands of those who could and often did make the choice to abandon them in their time of need. Even among those who spilled horrendous blood and treasure to defeat the Nazis, the Israelis wonder why these allies did not, for instance, bomb Auschwitz and destroy a camp where a few hundred prison workers were able to apply industrial methods to murder thousands of people per day.
Update: The full article is also published in the Mark: Never Again?
We learned this week that Canada is the first Western nation to pull the plug on UNRWA, the United Nations-run relief operation for Palestinian refugees of the West Bank and Gaza. The government has been quick to clarify that relief is still on the way. It will now be dedicated to specific projects like food aid; hopefully with enough oversight to prevent mismanagement and inadvertent support to a terrorist organization.
The government’s move is also a not-so-subtle indictment of a broken refugee support program that has arguably only perpetuated Palestinian misery and held up the Middle East peace process. As we look forward, the international community might take a lesson from the other side of the border from the UNRWA camps to Israel, which may fairly take the title of most successful refugee camp in modern history.
The Forgotten Refugees
When someone uses the phrase, “refugees” in the context of the Middle East, we typically think of the Palestinian refugees who lost their homes during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967. The common narrative also holds that when we talk of Jewish refugees, we’re talking about white, European Jews who escaped the Holocaust to seek some measure of safety not only in the Holy Land, but also in the USA, Canada and elsewhere. But these narratives overlook a movement of nearly one million Jewish refugees from Arab countries during those same years, roughly equivalent in number to the original Palestinian refugees. They were largely persecuted, second-class citizens set upon by their neighbors and governments.
“We call these people the forgotten refugees,” says Regina Waldman, founder of JIMENA, an organization seeking recognition for these people in the context of an overall settlement in the Middle East. Waldman was herself a refugee from Libya in 1967, surviving anti-Jewish riots and other violence that claimed the lives of her friends and neighbors before escaping the country. Waldman wants to see a regional peace deal that puts Palestinians’ claims “on an equal footing with the Middle Eastern and North African Jews”.
“When the Six-Day-War broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors, I was 19 year old,” Waldman remembers. “My mother called me at work to tell me that thousands of people had taken to the streets rioting and burning Jewish properties… Killing people, rampaging and burning Jewish properties went on for days. I lived in hiding for a month before returning home.”
A Jewish community that had lived in that country for over 2,000 years, albeit under second-class Dhimmi status, was wiped out as Jews fled lynchings, mob violence and torture and imprisonment by the government. This process was repeated across the region in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran.
One Group Finds Haven, Another is Rejected
Most of the refugees were resettled in Israel. For many, their first stop looked much like refugee camps elsewhere: a sprawling tent city in the middle of a wasteland. But these traumatized survivors would have a vastly different outcome than their counterparts elsewhere, particularly the Palestinians. The refugee tent cities were way-stations, not permanent residences. “All of these people were absorbed into Israel and became part of the society, and without even taking a nickel from the United Nations,” Waldman noted. Israelis ignored the obvious difficulties for a tiny relatively poor state to take in so many refugees at once, understanding that the priority was to give people with a common heritage a home and a chance for better life.
In contrast, where Palestinians attempted to find homes among their Arab neighbors, they were nearly always turned back, despite the ancient links of culture, ethnicity, religion, trade and even close family ties that formerly bound them to other countries in the region. Notably, many Palestinian refugees have migrated quite successfully to countries well outside the Arab world such as Canada. But for the Palestinians who remain in the camps, they have inherited a United Nations welfare state. They’ve received billions of dollars since 1948. Meanwhile, conditions in the Palestinian territories remain atrocious.
Canada’s decision on changing its funding vehicle for Palestinians works as a wake-up call to the international community that we don’t want to keep reinforcing failure. We want to see better outcomes. Hopefully, when a solution does come, it will recognize the claims of all the refugees, including the forgotten ones.
NEW MEDIA EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are a Jewish refugee from the Arab world, the people at JIMENA would be grateful if you would share your personal story with them. They have a growing collection of personal stories of the refugees who immigrated to Israel and other countries. You can contact them here.
My novel, ![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
