Dark Hope
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Dark Hope (2007) is a book by David Dean Shulman.
In 2007, he published a book-length account, entitled Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, of his years working, and often clashing with police and settlers, to deliver food and medical supplies to Palestinian villages, while building peace in the West Bank. The distinguished Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua called it:
One of the most fascinating and moving accounts of Israeli-Palestinian attempts to help, indeed to save, human beings suffering under the burden of occupation and terror. Anyone who is pained and troubled by what is happening in the Holy Land should read this human document, which indeed offers a certain dark hope.
Emily Bazelon, member of the Yale Law Faculty and senior editor at Slate Magazine cited it as one of the best books of 2007. In an extensive review of the book in the New York Review of Books, Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit cites the following passage to illustrate Shulman's position:
Israel, like any other society, has violent, sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise. Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach, and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorize the local Palestinian population: to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill - all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews' exclusive right to it.
Shulman's book addresses here what he calls a 'moral conundrum': how Israel, 'once a home to utopian idealists and humanists, should have engendered and given free rein to a murderous, also ultimately suicidal, messianism,' and asks if the 'humane heart of the Jewish tradition' always contain the 'seeds of self-righteous terror' he observed among settlers. He finds within himself an intersection of hope, faith and empathy, and 'the same dark forces that are active among the most predatory of the settlers', and it is this which provides him with 'a reason to act' against what he regards as 'pure, rarefied, unadulterated, unreasoning, uncontainable human evil'. He does not excuse Arabs in the book, but focuses on his own side's culpability, writing: 'I feel responsible for the atrocities committed in my name, by the Israeli half of the story. Let the Palestinians take responsibility for those committed in their name'. Writing of efforts by the IDF and members of hard-core settlements at Susya, Ma'on, Carmel and elsewhere who, having settled on Palestinian land in the hills south of Hebron, endeavour to evict the local people in the many khirbehs of a region where several thousand pacific Palestinian herders and farmers dwell in rock caves and live a 'unique life' of biblical colour, Shulman comments, according to Margalit, that:-
Nothing but malice drives this campaign to uproot the few thousand cave dwellers with their babies and lambs. They have hurt nobody. They were never a security threat. They led peaceful, if somewhat impoverished lives until the settlers came. Since then, there has been no peace. They are tormented, terrified, incredulous. As am I.
