War

The Yitzhak Rabin Center is a mausoleum-like museum and research center in northern Tel Aviv, with sweeping views of the city and a funereal landscape of rosemary and olive trees.  It is a history of the State of Israel, using the chronology and influence of Rabin’s Life to tie Israel’s timeline together.  The visionary ideals, the desperate courage of a decimated Jewish people to build a safe home for themselves, and the sheer amount of blood shed on the land since Israel’s establishment is profoundly evident in every corner of this monumental building.  It is a wonderfully designed exhibit, centered on a large descending spiral of the historic timeline and inset with corridors that expand upon certain important phases of Israeli history.  In absorbing the (translated) words of national leaders around the world, descriptions of historic events, and footage of crowds and wars and marches and massacres, I could distinguish what I thought were several different voices, describing the early triumphs of the Jews over Arab attacks and defenses, or lovingly narrating the shaping of Rabin’s personality in his years in the Palmach, or providing accounts of Arab citizens and property brutally destroyed by the IDF.  On second thought, I believe that, although the exhibits may indeed have been written by several individuals, the museum was in general a reflection of the schizophrenic position of the modern Israeli Jewish viewpoint.

Jews here know about at least some of the atrocities committed by the IDF, and they can see Arab villages all over Israel with inferior conditions and facilities.  They are also, unless they are ultra-orthodox, required to serve in the military, and nationalism, in the Israeli mainstream, is synonymous with Zionism.  The view that God promised this land to the Jewish people and them alone resonates just as strongly with today’s secular Jewish culture as it did in the bleak years following the Holocaust.  Israel is regionally powerful, both in its economy and in their military, but these resources are largely unavailable to its own Arab citizens, who are paid far less than what their Jewish counterparts make and who, rather than being protected by the national security the IDF is supposedly providing, suffer death, harm, property seizure, and indignity at their hands.  Israel has taken drastic measures to retain control over its own Arab citizens, and the disempowered and marginalized residents of the territories are either under military occupation or, in Gaza’s case, effectively sealed off, unable to acquire freedom, security, or a working economy.  Over the years, Arab communities in Israel have become even more segregated, even more invisible to the general Jewish public. Invisibility is dangerous for everybody: it is dehumanizing.

Yitzhak Rabin was a complicated, multifaceted character. He recommended violent measures against the Intifada, a view that had far-reaching consequences in military practices towards both Palestinian Israelis and the Palestinians in the territories.  Yet he also, and against the furious opposition of the majority of Israeli Jews, signed the Oslo Accords, a beginning framework for Palestinian independence – an act for which he was killed by a right-wing Israeli Jew.  He is considered a war hero, a humble man, a practical man, and a dreamer.  The museum was full of young soldiers taking education sessions. There is a commonly accepted narrative among Jews concerning Israel’s history, and I wondered if these kids had ever questioned it.  As a foreigner, if I read between the lines, if I searched for multiple perspectives, if I searched out secular Jews, soldiers, human rights activists, elderly veterans, Palestinian Israelis, Palestinians living in the territories, Knesset members, high school students, and so on, I can find a more complete understanding of Israel’s complicated, tragic history. As one of my mentors in my organization put it, "It's not a tragedy only because it isn't over yet."

Here’s what I think: I don’t think attack is the best form of defense. I think that no people will ever lie quietly

down forever under subjugation and oppression.  I think that there is no such thing as a war hero.  I think that systems and institutions are not worth protecting at the expense of human life.  I have found that I have an aversion to all manner of nationalism.  I think that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is not driven by religion, but by urges much more fundamental in human nature, which are being manipulated by those in power.

Most of all, I believe that every single terrible aspect of Israel’s history, every piece of violence committed by the Israeli government, the Israeli Jews, the Palestinians, and the Christians, is understandable.  These are human beings naturally driven to strange ardors and revenge by extreme conditions.  I also think that these acts of violence, especially the institutionalized discrimination, the deplorable treatment even of Israel’s own Palestinian citizens, and the insane destruction of the suicide bombers, are nevertheless inexcusable. I can understand and still not tolerate the angry mob beating the innocent, penniless Sudanese immigrants last night in south Tel Aviv.  Discrimination and disempowerment of a people is the biggest threat to Israel's security.

In regards to assigning power among ourselves, none of us have a choice in this matter.  We must coexist or we will die.

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

"Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted." - Franz Kafka

I've been working in Israel for three weeks now.  I have learned the value of paying attention by putting my own reactions and feelings aside. Without understanding what is going on around me, there is no way I can work for positive changes here, and the best way to do that is quiet down, sit still, and listen.

In that spirit, here is a cocktail blender drink of the experiences I remember most.

I stood with Muslim and Christian Arabs and tourists on the harbor dock at Old Jaffa, watching the sunset.  There were families all around me, and everyone was quiet, even the babies.

I went to the border of Jordan in the Golan Heights, and the only person whose eyes I could meet and whose eyes would meet mine was the 19 year old soldier with whom I lunched on olives and pita and coke.  He spoke admiringly of Bedouin trackers working for the military, joked about animals triggering the border sensors, and looked relaxed and confident. He carried a machine gun, like the other soldiers I've seen.  A United Nations van pulled up and seven men exited, five of whom unrolled prayer rugs and performed their midday prayer towards Mecca.

There was a little swallow nest at the small shawarma shop where a suburban Jewish Israeli family and I stopped, owned by Palestinian Arabs.  I was terribly hungry and the swallows were silent, flying back and forth to feed their young. We (the Arabs, the Jews, and I) were also quiet while we waited.

I visited a 16th century Jewish bakery in Tzfat, recently unearthed and in the process of being excavated. They pointed out the tiny skylight in the corner of the Mikva (ritual bath), where they had entered the place after so many years.  It smelled like river stones and dry earth.

I had jet lag for two weeks, and heard the birds that sing in Tel Aviv at dawn as a result. There are different stages of birds, and the last birds of morning are swallows, which have a sad, distant cry, even though they are right next to the window.  The first ones, who sing when it is still dark, sound like Kurt Vonnegut's birds from Slaughterhouse Five: po-tee-weet?

I ate lunch with my co-workers on a trip to Tzfat at a Yemeni cafe, where an old man with a white beard cooked the most perfect food, a little like crepes with freshly made Za'atar, goat cheese, vegetables, and smothered in new olive oil.

I saw graffiti on a corporate building in Tel Aviv.  It said, across the whole building, "WHOSE STREETS?"  I saw other graffiti art, anarchy symbols, bits of poetry, racial slurs against Arabs, drawings of women and rabbits and popular cartoons.

Independence Day in Israel was a big outdoor party.  Everyone was walking down the middle of the streets, there were singers and electronic music on stages in Rabin Square, children were screaming and playing. I went to an alternate event, where protestors from the Occupy movement in Israel last summer came out and spoke, and lit torches together.  There were teachers, artists, journalists, photographers, and social workers.  They smiled at one another, but there was no joy, no dancing.  Afterwards I walked through the streets filled with people dancing and laughing and spent the entire rest of the night reading "I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity" by Izzeldin Abuelaish. I read the last sentence as Vonnegut's birds were beginning to sing.

I sat in Old Jaffa in the mid-afternoon sun, listening quietly to a Russian man playing folk songs on his guitar, in the shadow of one of Jaffa's elegant minarets, while sailboats glided through the blue Mediterranean Sea and the sea wind blew steadily from the west.

I saw a medical researcher's laboratory in Tzfat, and the large, empty faculty of medicine, where many Jews and Arabs will study together to save people's lives someday.  The faculty is new and kept echoing.  I kept on thinking I heard voices all around me, but there was no one except for us.

I saw the tiny neighborhood of Achbara, at the southernmost section of Tzfat, a beautiful Arab village, very pastoral, with goats and horses and cows, and a pine forest around it, with a view of the mountain bridge to the main township, and a mosque with a golden dome and its soaring white minaret in the very heart of the neighborhood.

There's more, of course.  The human mind and its animal and philosophical tendencies, and its mystical inclination to describe the indescribable and so gain power over all it perceives, is the cage, and all the ghostly dreams it solipsistically encounters along its way are the birds. But the key to open the cage exists, though it's hard to find.

This is where we begin.

Eden

The Day of Remembrance

"War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I arrived in Israel the day before yesterday.  Tel Aviv sounds different, smells different, tastes different; all the delicious indicators that I am far away from home are all around me.  I am overwhelmed by work almost immediately, but I do have an unexpected respite.  Today is Israel's Memorial Day, Yom Hazikaron, the day Israeli citizens honor fallen soldiers and victims of (Arab) terrorism.  It is a very nationalistic day, and concentrates some of the problematic dimensions of nationalism.  Israel has adopted a position that recalls in some ways, to my mind, the McCarthy era in the United States.  Criticism of the government is equated with the delegitimization of the State of Israel, thus any questioning of government or military action can be seen as treason.  This is not to say that Israel has become paranoid to the point of brutally silencing dissenting citizens, as in the case of Argentina's desaparecidos, but this constraint on opposition, this culture of suppression, is a feeling that circulates within the mainstream into all arenas of life in Israel.  A co-worker of mine attended an event by an organization for nonviolence, "Combatants for Peace," yesterday, which memorialized both Israeli and Palestinian victims of the conflict, recognizing government and terrorist activities on both sides that killed innocent people.  Israel Today's headline was: "Radical Leftists to honor Palestinian terrorists on Memorial Day."

Yesterday, we had a special presentation, in which several texts from Israeli military personnel were read and analyzed, and a discussion followed.  The one that struck me the most was written in 1956, by Moshe Dayan, who first served in an early Jewish militia known as the Haganah, and who would eventually serve as Chief of Staff under David Ben Gurion, in 1953. Dayan was baldly straightforward about what needed to be done in order to secure a state of Israel for the Jewish people, and throughout his career openly expressed uncertainty about the defensibility of what he was participating in.  He said that his tactics were "effective, not justified or moral but effective," and he was responsible for the deaths of many innocent and unarmed Palestinians, and instrumental in the creation of the State of Israel, and to the relative safety of two million Jews, most of whom has nowhere else to go, themselves under violent siege.  Dayan wrote, at his funeral oration at the death of a young Israeli farmer at the hands of a Palestinian Arab:

"Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers.  What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us?  For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.  We should demand his blood not from the [Palestinian] Arabs of Gaza but from ourselves.."

Yesterday, Dayan's words taught me the perspective of terror.  When you are fighting for your life, you can either demolish the enemy and their children, or you can lay down and die with yours.  This is the perspective human beings gravitate towards when they live suffused in an atmosphere of unrelenting danger, an atmosphere that Israel has never completely extricated itself from.

For all I know, this perspective is true.  I come from a life within a privileged bubble where war has not yet touched. Perhaps there really is no other choice other than to kill your enemy or allow yourself to be killed. I can't really say.

Nevertheless, my feeling is that it's a lie told to us by throwback human instincts and emotions from a time of ancient tribal survival.  I don't think there really is any enemy.  Dayan later went on to say, "without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house," but I am increasingly sure that, whether or not a displaced people had to build their future that way, none of us today may build our future that way. That house is made of the bones and blood of all of us.

I am searching for a solution, or at least the components of one, here.  The dialogue continues.

Eden