Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

Homeland/Home 9
Jonathan Jay Pollard, the U. S. citizen who used his government job to
spy for Israel by handing over U. S. satellite intelligence, traced his infatuation
with Israel back to a summer spent there in his junior year of high
school. He felt “normal, ” he said. “I saw a Jewish prostitute.. . . I saw
things I had never seen before. ”35 Now Palestinian Arabs are in DP camps,
in filth and squalor; and, as one Israeli Jew wrote, “The Israeli authorities
seem to have discovered Palestinians’ most sensitive nerve in their struggle
to hold on to their land and homes, for the two harshest punishments
meted out to the Arabs in the territories are deportation and the demolition
of houses. ”36
Women live in a country called home. They are its indigenous population.
Sentimentalized by bad observers and romantic propagandists, home exists
in contradistinction to the wider world: warm against cold; kind
against cruel. Home is a refuge, a place of solace, safety, and comfort
(emotional if not material). There is no point in consulting the statistics.
They show that violence against women in their home(s) is commonplace,
in sociological terms normal as opposed to deviant. No one could
say how many women are beaten, raped, or killed in home any more than
count the numbers of beaten dogs, mules, horses, camels in the world.
Home may be the equivalent of a women’s prison: women may be locked
inside or not permitted egress or too injured to be able to leave; women
may be tortured or burned alive there; women may be menial, brutalized
servants; legal chattel; sexual chattel; reproductive chattel. An anonymous
Saudi princess asked the hardest question: “How could a mother protect
the young of her own sex from the laws of the land? ”37 Urgent and unanswerable,
it is a global question, because all nations have laws that hurt
women and girls. Recognizing that women are surprised by the momentary
experience of freedom, a sudden joy that ends as a dream ends, with
memory rare and partial, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva used these
words to pay homage to the freedom, fractured and irrecoverable: “And
this is how the smiling young girl who does not want a stranger in her
body, who does not want a him or a his, but only a mineymeets at a turning
in the road another me, a she, in whom there is nothing to fear, against
whom she does not need to defend herself.. . . For the moment, she is
happy and free, free to love with the heart, not the body, to love without
being afraid, to love without doing harm... ”38