What Dinah Thought - A Story for Israel/Palestine

As I am overcome with grief for the violence against the Jews and Palestinians, not entirely between them, I am taken back to an early novel I wrote to explore that on-going relationship and conflict. In the late seventies, I was asked if I knew the story of my name. I opened the Bible my father had given me forty years before when I was a child and began to search the glossary. What I found astonished me.

“Dinah, daughter of Jacob by Leah, was ravished by Shechem, a Hivite. For that reason, and with the help of a peculiarly low cunning, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s own brothers, revenged the insult. What Dinah thought of the whole matter is not recorded.”

What Dinah thought of the whole matter is not recorded!

There was no other commentary in the entire glossary. What was the editor of this Bible thinking?

“And Dinah, the daughter of Leah, which she bore unto Jacob went out to see the daughters of the land to dance and to beat drums. And when Shechem, the Hivite Prince, the son of Hamor, saw her, he was overcome with love and he lay with her.”

He was overcome with love!

When one is a feminist, it is not possible to disregard the statement, What Dinah thought about the matter was not recorded. Clearly, the story was waiting for me to discover what Dinah thought.

***

The novel has two narratives. The first is perhaps an origin story of the continuous distrust and violence: Dinah, Jacob, Shechem and Hamor were seeking a peace between their peoples. The two lovers would have married and the tribes achieved that peace had Shechem and his people not been killed, all the wealth confiscated and the women taken as concubines by the fanatical brothers, Simeon and Levi.

The second is a reliving, thousands of years later, by a contemporary Jewish American filmmaker and a Palestinian archeologist/activist, acutely aware of the hostilities.

Today, October 30, 2023 as the Gazans are living, or rather we must say, dying, under an unconscionable bombardment and invasion intended to wipe out Hamas but already killing 8,000 as innocent as the 1400 that Hamas slaughtered earlier this month, I return to the opening pages of What Dinah Thought, (Viking Press, 1989):

I am Dinah. I loved a heathen. My brothers killed him.

I knew nothing of what was to come. The novel developed, as books do, revealing itself slowly and carefully so that at the end I and, I hoped, the reader understood the contemporary relevance and implications of the two stories being told. This novel was a work of imagination in the way that imagination is a vessel for revelation. Thousands of years of grief stricken history, at the hands of a few.

***

Sometimes we live a story. Sometimes we live in history. In 1985, I was invited to the Non-Governmental Forum, UN Conference on Women, Nairobi, Kenya to participate in the activities of the Peace Tent after a Jewish American woman, who was to co-present with a Palestinian colleague, was killed suddenly a week before the event. I was invited to be a substitute because I am a peace activist and because of What Dinah Thought. Sadly, but understandably, the tensions between Palestinians and Jews were too strong to be overcome so quickly. Still, I participated in one or more of the Peace Tent panels and led a workshop on Personal Disarmament, work that I had recently developed and which seemed relevant:

An individual is also a country, one contains multiple selves who are governed as nations are governed, and the problems and issues that afflict nations also afflict individuals. For most of my life, I have been completely unconscious of the real mode of government that is within me. Here are some of the questions Personal Disarmament asks us to pursue:

What is the form of my internal Government? Is it tyrannical, a dictatorship, an oligarchy? Is it a military government? It is it a police state? Is it a false democracy?
Who are my ‘beloved enemies?” Whom do I identify as the enemy within? The enemies without?
What are my defense systems? What weapons are stored in my arsenal? Do I stockpile? Am I in an arms race?
What is the equivalent of my nuclear bomb?
Will I sign a no first strike treaty?

Afterwards, I was approached by the Russian women’s delegation. In their country, they said, there was no attention given to inner or personal work. Listening, they had realized how much they suffered for the lack of it. They understood such personal work to be women’s work and necessary if peace were to be achieved. I appreciate this even more now, given the war between Russia and Ukraine.

***

In 1996, I went to Mt. Sinai, in Egypt, for my 60th Birthday. We found a hidden place to sleep on the summit when the sun came up illuminating the waves and waves of the great sea of stone that can only elicit wonder.

Mt. Sinai

When we awakened, I found a niche among the rocks and concealed a copy of What Dinah Thought as an offering. Doing it, I dissolved into all time — I was Dinah, and Dina Z, the filmmaker, and myself, Deena, performing an ancient ritual: May peace come.

In Sinai, we met a young Bedouin man, a devote of Michael Jackson, who drove us around and then invited us to his home for dinner. We were standing on one of the craggy hills outside his door when his mother appeared from the stony crest in a Bedouin black embroidered dress, carrying an armful of greens she had gathered for our meal. We could barely communicate to each other; I do not speak Arabic and she does not speak English. Her son and my husband faded away while we found a common language. Spontaneously, I took off my gold wedding band and placed it on her finger and she, in turn, gave me her silver band which I am wearing to this day. Later, she and her daughters insisted on dressing me in their ritual clothes and when my face was covered so only my eyes showed, I saw the Arab, the Bedouin, the Hivite woman I had seen in the mirror since I was a child.

Yes, we are kin. How can I think otherwise? Yet, according to the Guardian on October 21, 2023, “The most successful land-grab strategy since 1967’ [occurs] as settlers push Bedouins off West Bank territory.”

***

On 9/11, 2001, I was at Great Zimbabwe, an ancient site of imperial collapse. From there, we went to Egypt in order to take our Zimbabwean friends to Sinai. We were apprehensive being in an Arab country in the aftermath of this attack but we were treated with exquisite care and concern as we watched the news on television together.

We always have been kin though prevented from living accordingly by small cabals on each side who believe in the necessity of violence and in military economies. But, as I recently posted on Facebook, I awakened from a dream a few days ago with the following words: The only protection for my people is not going to war.

I fear for Palestine and I fear for Israel and, frankly, I fear for all of us as this warfare can too easily become global. No protection will come from the escalation of violence and the moral injury to each of us, of pursuing it, is great. Everything, everything we need and desire will come from opening our hearts to each other as kin.

I dedicate this piece to Dinah and Shechem, my ancestors.

These are their last words:

“Shechem, my love, it’s done, everything as it should be. Why isn’t there peace yet?”
“Miracles, Dinah, work themselves out imperceptibly with the rhythm and form of history, that is very, very, slowly.”
“And in the meantime?”
“We live our lives as best we can, each time better than the time before.”

***

What Dinah Thought is out of print and we are trying to reissue it. When this occurs, we will announce it here.