Gaarder’s ‘Palestinianism’
Some remarks on Jostein Gaarder’s Julemysteriet / The Christmas Mystery
by Sylvia Haworth
I gather a furore has erupted in Norway concerning author Jostein Gaarder’s fairly hostile remarks about the state of Israel.
I cannot say I am surprised.
You see, I have read Gaarder’s highly-acclaimed children’s book, Julemysteriet/ ‘The Christmas Mystery’ (1992; English translation 1996; abridged English translation, 2002).
A Norwegian child named Elisabet vanishes in December 1948. She makes a mystic pilgrimage southward in space and backwards in time, through European Christendom to Bethlehem where she witnesses the birth of Jesus. After that, we are led to assume, she suddenly finds herself in 1948 ‘Palestine’, is adopted into an Arab ‘Palestinian’ family (p. 95, and p. 139) and becomes an advocate for their cause. There is a hint that the ‘mystical’ reading of her journey may parallel a this-worldly reading. I quote:
Elisabet thinks she was kidnapped by some very unhappy people who were willing to do almost anything so that the world should have its eyes opened to the suffering of the Palestinian people… Elisabet thinks they must have intended to take her back. Perhaps the people who kidnapped her wanted to try to get her father to write in the papers about all the people who were driven from village to village and finally herded into huge refugee camps outside their own country (pp. 156-57).
If one superimposes the mystic reading on a this-worldly reading, then one must accept that the ‘angels’ and ’shepherds’ and innocent gambolling lambs that escort Elisabet on her journey, are pro-Palestinian political activists. Except - small problem - I’m not sure that such people existed in 1948, especially in Norway. Anyway:
Elisabet grew up in a little village near Bethlehem; the people there lived off the poor land they tilled, but even this poor land was taken away from them. When I met Elisabet in Rome in the spring of 1961 she had lived in different refugee camps, first in Jordan, afterwards in Lebanon. She went to Rome in order to explain the refugees’ situation… (pp. 155-56) Elisabet really did go to Bethlehem in December 1948. She came to poor, persecuted people who needed God’s help (p. 156).
Gaarder’s novel is a brilliant, exquisitely sentimental, and - once one thinks it through carefully, reflecting on its silences and reversals - thoroughly creepy piece of what Jacques Ellul called ‘Palestinianism’: a merging of Jesus with the Palestinian Arab cause which has gained ground in some Christian circles. Jesus’s Jewishness is never really imagined or emphasised; 2000 years of Jewish agony in exile are totally eclipsed by the (unique and unprecedented?) suffering of the Palestinians. In one scene, Elisabet and the angels stand among the ruins of Jerusalem in 71 AD: the angels tell her that ‘the Jews’ arrested Jesus and also that they rebelled against Rome. Their city was smashed and ‘from this time on the Jews will be scattered over the whole world’ (p. 126). End of story - we are not encouraged to feel any sympathy for them. Bethlehem in 4 BC collapses into Bethlehem in ‘Palestine’, 1948 and the Palestinian Arabs become THE archetypal innocent victims. We are not-so-subtly encouraged to weep with sympathy for these peaceful, simple Palestinian Arabs, gentle unwarlike shepherds and farmers one and all, who have been treated so very badly. At least ‘Tebasile’ isn’t represented as a member of the PLO - yet.
The timing of the story’s beginning is interesting. December 1948 was when the resurgent Jewish state, having survived a savage invasion by Arab attackers, was seeing off the last of the Egyptian forces. But Gaarder, in this very year in which the Jewish state of Israel was reborn, takes Elisabet back in time to Bethlehem not, so it seems, primarily in order for her to witness the birth of Jesus the [Jewish] Messiah but so that she may take part in the apocalyptic moment of the ‘birth’ - in unjust suffering - of the Arab Palestinian ‘nation’ and become one of them, their servant and advocate. This witness is her divine mission, given her by the angels - which the novel wants us to share. This is the gospel of Palestinianism.
I still can¹t work out why the author thinks April 1961 is important - except that Adolf Eichmann was put on trial, and the Jordanians protested to the UN concerning an Israeli independence day parade in Jerusalem.
And Gaarder’s book was first published in Norway in 1992, after Europe had seen twenty-plus ghastly years of PLO terrorism. (Perhaps this is why the novel has Elisabet/ Tebasile appear in Rome as a Palestinian advocate in 1961, but does not say anything at all about anything that has happened in the world between then and 1991/ 92 when the story closes - Elisabet is about 50 when she comes back to Norway).
No, I was not surprised by Gaarder’s attack on Israel.
Dr Sylvia Haworth studied English at the University of Queensland with an honours thesis on comedy in Chaucer and Langland, and later wrote a doctoral thesis on pre-modern English translations of Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’, De Consolatione Philosophiae, at the University of Sydney.
