Mediterranean Seas

We are now a week past another week of senseless killing in that skinny hinge of land on the eastern s Mediterranean Sea known as Israel and Palestine. How you know it, what you name the land, and what part you view as legitimate depends, of course, on your point of view. It’s been a hard week for me and many of my progressive-minded friends on various spots on the map of the Jewish community (religious and Zionist; religious and anti-Zionist; non-religious and anti-Zionist; Zionist-agnostic; mildly religious and not interested in Zionism; mildly Zionist and not interested in religion; and several other permutations), divided between universal concern for human rights and particular concern for relatives and friends inside Israel. I have my own opinions, which I could add to the multitudes of words typed on computers and broadcast across the planet with one sideways motion of the right pinky to the Send button, a motion remarkably similar when performed by Muslims, Jews, Christians and atheists alike.

I will spare you that for now. But instead I’d like to disseminate several random impressions, in the hope that language not be served up to slice us into various killing categories but rather serve as a pond we can jump into, because who we are is more fluid than we think and what we all want is just one drop.

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It is 1976 and I am in Israel for my junior year of high school, part of a Zionist program to encourage American Jewish youth to emigrate here. As I struggle to learn Hebrew, family and friends teach me a little off-the-books slang as well. Only two words in Arabic enter our discourse. One is a swear word for a forbidden part of the human anatomy. The other is the word for cockroach, which the Israelis have adopted into their language.

***   ***

I sit in a room in a town in northern Israel with Tali, the daughter of my father’s friend from his hometown in Poland, a fellow survivor of a death camp. Tali is a typical sabra (native-born Israeli Jew): short brown hair, tall, tanned, and athletic. We are both sixteen. From time to time, Tali’s father calls up the stairs to her: “Tali! Afo at?” (Where are you?) She calls back, “Ani b’cheder.” (“In my bedroom.”) We resume our conversation, and then five minutes later, her father calls again: “Tali! Afo at?” She answers him in the same way, over and over of the course of an hour. Every time he asks the question, he sounds more worried.

***   ***

On the pavement outside the bus station in Tel Aviv, I see people unlike any I have seen before– dirty, emaciated, some with missing limbs, hands held out, forming shallow wells for coins. I have grown up in a middle-class suburb of Chicago, and have no context for this. I can only hurry by, repelled and confused. Later, I realize that all these destitute people are Arabs, but I learn nothing more about them, nor do I meet anyone to whom I can talk to about it.

***   ***

“Everybody hates us.” I hear this refrain so much from the people I meet in Israel that I wonder if has been taught in their schools. “Everybody hates us,” I hear from a young farmer leaning on his tractor. “Everybody hates us,” says the middle-aged housewife buying vegetables in the market. “Everybody hates us,” comments my cousin Bennie, slinging a rifle over his shoulder, on his way to guard a kibbutz in the Golan.

***   ***

On the radio, on websites, in eloquent, tragic , and increasingly desperate circulars I am sent in the mail, I learn about Palestinians detained for hours at checkpoints, jeered at and spat upon by Jewish settlers, unable to access their farms to grow crops for their family, subject to endless power outages, shot at, unable to bury their dead. Their embattled state evokes in me a sense of sorrow and outrage, a sorrow and outrage I am familiar with in my upbringing as a Jew.

***   ***

In the newspaper I view a photo of an anti-Israel demonstration in Europe. Several demonstrators bear replicas of the Israeli flag with swastikas superimposed over the Jewish star. Others parade a large caricature of Ariel Sharon, features fleshy and distorted, a gross parody of a person, resembling anti-Semitic posters used by the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s. I realize with surprise that I feel a sense of solidarity with this political figure whose policies and actions I find reprehensible. This demonstration, which has extended its members’ objections over a state to include objections over a whole people, has strangely united us.

***   ***

I read a book about a Palestinian man who politely asks to see the house in Jerusalem he grew up in, now occupied by a European Jew. They form a friendship and visit each other from time to time either in Jerusalem or in the West Bank, where the Palestinian is jailed on and off for activities in an organization that vows to remove all Jewish people from the land, an organization named Hamas.

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In the car on family trips when I was a child, my mother liked to muse on some big questions. “Why are people so cruel to each other? Why do they love to kill?” she would ask, followed closely by, “Why does everybody hate the Jews?” None of us had an answer for her, certainly not my father, whose own family had been slaughtered in 1942 and who had narrowly survived the camps. I remember no one giving an answer to my mother, only the steady thunk of the tires hitting the seams of the highway while I viewed  the solid, inexpressive back of my father’s neck as he steered the car.

***   ***

I read about children in Gaza being killed, a boy of twelve who threw stones at a soldier, a girl of three in a bomb exploded in the building of a Hamas leader, a boy of five caught in crossfire. Just the other day, a seven-year-old boy was killed by a rocket. I read sources who say this is an instant of Israeli savagery. I read sources who say Hamas is using the children as civilian shields, that they are terrorists with no respect for human life. A woman calls up my local radio station and blames the situation on Jewish culture and its laws for ritual butchering. A Jewish website claims the child was killed by a Hamas missile gone astray. A left-leaning website claims the child was killed by the Israeli military as a deliberate policy of genocide. On no website or radio station do I learn what the child was like, what his fears were, what his favorite sport was, what his first words were on the morning of the day he was killed.

***   ***

I am presenting these scenarios, this little takes to you, but I am refusing to connect the dots. I am not able to stitch together the images, sensations and impressions into a discernible meaning. I don’t want to tattoo a message on your face with my stilettos of belief, nor do I want you to perform the same sad act with me. I am contrary, you see: argumentation is in my blood. If you are pro-Palestinian, then I am an avid Zionist. If your eyes tear up when you hear Ha Tikvah and you count David Ben-Gurion as your guru, then I am an anti-Zionist and will remind you of the plight of the Palestinians. If you wear a keffiyeh and want to boycott all things Israel, I will remind you of the Holocaust survivors who clap their hands over their ears when they hear an air-raid siren, of the African refugees making a new life in the country, of the Jewish refugees from Syria, from Yemen, from Morocco, descendants of those who were forced out of their country in 1948. I will do all these things, you see, until you stop seeing me as a category and sculpting me into the opposite of what you are in the process. I will do this until we see each other beyond scenarios made of languaged labels, at which point we can seal our mouths, dive into our respective yet stubbornly overlapping Mediterranean Seas, flap our tails, and disappear.