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A Land without People for a People without Land?
Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging
by Linda Dittmar [2023]
Linda Dittmar was born in 1938 and moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1942. Dittmar had great-grandparents who moved to Palestine in the early 1880s. She spent her younger years in Palestine, and she came of age in the new state in of Israel. She was, in those crucial years, an enthusiastic Zionist, partaking of the ceremonies and duties and culture of Zionism. Her forebears were secular and Labor Zionists. They also were settlers and saw themselves as fervent pioneers for, and in, Eretz Israel. Dittmar moved to the US in the sixties, went to school, partook of those heady years of skepticism and protest, of fear and hope and got a Ph.D. from Stanford. She taught film and literature at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Tracing Homelands is a mystery story, a subtle love story, a meditation on languages and ethics and myths, and an historical and archaeological inquiry into the 1948 Nakba, the Arabic name for the Palestinian exile, literally “the catastrophe.” Dittmar uses poetry, songs, memoirs and histories, oral histories, monuments, graffiti, and the land’s flora and fauna to examine and explore the landscape of Palestine’s Nakba. Through observations and analyses of the peoples of Israel née Palestine, she speaks to the sentiments and aspirations, the “claims of belonging,” and the constructed narratives -and silences- to Israel’s stories about its founding. In elegant and lyrical portraits, she examines sites of expulsion and destruction and massacre in the Nakba and the refusal of Israelis, certainly Zionists, to recognize the Palestinian extirpations.
Dittmar is no self-hating Jew. She is honest and compassionate and proud of her Jewish roots. She evokes with clarity and honesty her sentimental attachments to her youth but she also traces the changes and memories that led her to ultimately become anti-Zionist. She disentangles, eloquently, with passion, compassion and profound historical insight, anti-Zionism from antisemitism. She is methodical in her catalog of pain. This is a book to read and commend to your friends and fellow readers in the hard days we are now living through.
This historical account and personal memoir help us understand possible paths to peace in the Middle East. Dittmar sheds light not heat; she’s warm and sometimes painfully honest as she reconsiders the Zionist dogmas she grew up with. “What used to be a jumble of clichés and hazy memories clamoring for attention began to take shape, leading me to question the national narrative that inspired me for so many years [117].” The book can be read as a literary tour de force, a subtle love song, a sensual feast of the landscape: its smells, its waters, its foods, its birds and trees, its cacti, its ruins, its bulldozed villages, its intertwined human lives and deaths, and its linguistic transmutations over the millennia. Tracing Homelands is an ode to memory, to compassion, to quiet inquiry and to existential reflection on how to live and act in, and heal, our cruel, crazy, and beautiful world.
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=580710211&q=linda+dittmar+book&tbm=vid&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjH5tni6bWCAxX-MjQIHVOSDR8Q0pQJegQIDRAB&biw=1014&bih=584&dpr=2.61#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:cf34dadb,vid:VrvYhCOCFHo,st:0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK6oR5NwHFM
By Louis Segal. Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015. Retired but not withdrawn.
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