first published on Consequence Forum
Uncovering Inconvenient Truths: A Review of Linda Dittmar’s Tracing Homelands
By Alice Rothchild
Linda Dittmar’s Tracing Homelands is a particularly important read following the October 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel and, with significant support of its Jewish citizens, the genocidal response of the Israeli military. Frequent media reports attempt to describe this conflagration as if it started in October, but there are decades of history that help us understand both Palestinian resistance and Israeli desires for a homeland.
The book is a brave, lyrically written, eye-opening account of a Jewish Israeli who was born in 1939 and raised in post-World War I British Mandate Palestine, with one set of ancestors rooted in 1920s Mandate Palestine and the other in the Ottoman Empire. Dittmar served in the Israeli military and grew up as part of the struggle to create a homeland for a traumatized and determined Jewish people. After settling in the US in the 1960s, she returned in the early 2000s to explore the meaning and cost of the establishment of Israel for the Palestinians who were dispossessed and those who were able to remain within the 1948 boundaries, though often not in their original villages. The book is a wonderful mix of the political, historical, and personal, making the story, the range of emotions, and the understandable anguish very real and accessible to the reader.
Dittmar at first saw a triumphal story of regeneration. She was reluctant to face the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), settler colonialism, racism, and shame directed towards Holocaust survivors, but her years in the US had opened her eyes to the civil rights and antiwar movements. She began to understand Israeli society as a pressure cooker of the traumatized rather than as a unified and rejuvenated ingathering of the exiles. This allowed her to struggle with the shame of the “original sin” committed by the founders of the State, to grieve for lost dreams and squandered opportunities, to acknowledge the shared inheritance of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, and to understand that the Nakba continues to this day.
Working with her non-Jewish photographer/partner, Dittmar slowly begins the painful unraveling of the “language of the land,” a detailed forensic study of the fragments of destroyed villages, stone houses, mosques and churches hidden from the traditional Israeli psyche yet existing in plain sight for anyone willing to see and grapple with the evidence of the Nakba. She invites us into the history with all of our senses: “floor tile fragments and bullet casings,” the “smell lingering in a wall.” With these fresh insights, she writes of grafting the new Israeli narrative onto the old, of overlaying the deeply rooted language of the land onto the new language of conscience and, I would add, consciousness. This is a unique journey from the inside looking out: “it is a choice whether to see a razed city block as empty or pause to reflect on what a rusting valve might mean”— to ask, Where did the people go?
During this meticulous exploration, Dittmar loses her sense of belonging and begins to understand that her happy family memories of picnics in Jewish National Fund forests, under growing pines neatly planted in straight rows, were drenched in Palestinian pain and loss. The pines were planted there for a reason. The JNF used forests to claim Palestinian land and to hide the evidence of the families who were attacked by Jewish forces and/or fled in terror after hearing of massacres that the Israeli government sought to erase from historical memory. The trees covered up the cemeteries, wells, olive presses, and hewn stones that the younger Dittmar had either failed to see or thought of as ancient ruins.
One of the unique aspects of this narrative is Dittmar’s vivid descriptions of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s: the war games she played as a child, the hunger and food lines, the strict food rationing, the sense that “the British were unwelcome and the Arabs alien,” the disdain and racism of Ashkenazi Jews towards their Mizrahi and Sephardic fellow citizens, the agonizing search for Holocaust survivors. Hearing this all from an insider who grew up with air raids and a “sense of menace,” where the “front and home front were not far apart,” is powerful. It makes current Israeli society and its fierce defensiveness and tribalism more understandable, though not forgivable.
“We willed ourselves into a surreal state of acute seeing mixed with blindness,” Dittmar writes, noting the “profound sense of existential injury that fused Zionist slogans of blood, fire, and revenge into Israel’s relentless and ever expanding hold over Palestinian lives and lands.” Her credibility as an Israeli and her ability to peel away the layers of Israeli mythmaking create a powerful and important contribution to our growing understanding of the deeply misunderstood history of Israel/Palestine.
Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker with a longstanding interest in human rights and social justice. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1970 and Boston University School of Medicine in 1974. She practiced ob-gyn for almost forty years. Until her retirement she served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Harvard Medical School and as a fellow in the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Alice writes and lectures widely, blogs regularly, and is the author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience, (translated into Hebrew and German, two editions); On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion; Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine; the middle grade novel, Old Enough to Know, and young adult novel, Finding Melody Sullivan. She has contributed to a number of anthologies, including Coping with a Miscarriage, The Women’s Encyclopedia of Health and Natural Healing, Routledge International Women’s Encyclopedia, Women & Health, Power, Technology, Inequality, and Conflict in a Gendered World, Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation, We are Not Numbers – Junge Stimmen aus Gaza, (published in German), and Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation. Her poetry has been published in Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine, Ariel Chart, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and Writers Resist. She directed a documentary film, “VoicesAcross the Divide.” She received Boston Magazine’s Best of Boston’s Women Doctors Award, was named in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, had her portrait painted for Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth, and was named a Peace Pioneer by the American Jewish Peace Archive. Dr. Rothchild is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council, the mentor liaison for We Are Not Numbers, and on the board of the Gaza Mental Health Foundation and Americans for Middle East Understanding. She was last in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza in August 2023. Her memoir, Inspired and Enraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician, will be published later this year. For more info: www.alicerothchildbooks.com and www.alicerothchild.com.