A few weeks before I came to this country, I was in Texas reading about the humanitarian disaster that was the war in Gaza. I worried myself sick about how I was going to exist here. I knew that I would be very close, a few kilometers, away from both the suffering in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. And I knew that the general population of Israel would not be discussing the reports of Palestinian devastation and that I would feel a roucous in my stomach about it.
Now that I am here, the feeling is very similar to the general sourness of guilt that I have living, working, and paying taxes in the U.S. There, I am reminded occasionally by the gentle voices of NPR that the U.S. governemt invaded a distant nation without justification and thousands of civillians and soldiers have suffered deeply in the process. The U.S. government is not only responsible for crimes against humanity, but most of its leaders don't even pretend to have any vision for an egalitatrian global humanity. I know that when I contribute to the U.S. economy I am contributing to a ruthless capitalism that makes unfair choices about who in the world will be fortunate and who will be exploited, who will be bombed and who will be educated.
With regard to living in a powerful and exploitive nation, being here feels quite similar to being in the states. A guilty nagging deep in my head motivates me to try to live in such a way that does not depend on the exploitation of others. In both places, I want to recognize and minimize the suffering of others while myself living as joyful a life as I can.
Like the U.S., Israel is also a democracy with freedom of speech and humane societies and social programming for Sudanese refugees and art. Like the U.S. Israel has racists and criminals and extremists. I just want it to be clear, that while I deplore the occupation and violence enflicted by Israel, Israel is also a wonderful place where a lot of really good people are doing a lot of really wonderful things. This blog is in large part about how I am sorting out those two realities. I assume that I will never be able to sort them.
I planned a schedule for this past Thursday and Friday that was intended to involve me in a peace/coexistance/environmental movement here in the middle east. On Thursday I was to go to "Chava V'adam," an ecological farm between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where I would meet up with a woman I had found on the internet. She is working on seed exchange among Israeli and Palestinian farmers and other coexistance projects. Then, the next day, Friday, I had scheduled to take a tour of the South Hebron Hills with an organization called "Breaking the Silence." The idea of the tour is to show people the situation of the settlements, the conditions of the West Bank etc.
Wow, Chava V'adam, the ecological farm, felt amazing. There were weeds to pull and kohlrabi to plant. Bok Choi and peas and lettuce and cilarntro were growing. The soil was alive, the toilets were composting my waste into useful material, and the communication pathway between myself and the people working there felt wide open and friendly. I wanted to stay there, planting, weeding, and breaking to eat collard greens.
I believe that taking responsibility for how you live and how you relate to your resources and community, is the most powerful tool for peace. Living "off the grid", growing your own food and managing your own resources, as they do at Chava v'Adam, is a response to the exploitive corporate stronghold that creates deep poverty and filthy wealth all over the world. The more localized an economy you live in, the less room there is for corporations and governments to widdle their way between you and your resources.
The American "peace activist/ seed exchanger" who had invited me to the farm was very inspiring. Finally, someone taking a practical approach to exchange between Palestinians and Israelis, an approach that will empower both. I revelled in hearing about ancient heirloom Palesinian wheat varieites and her efforts to save them. She talked about Palestinian farming villages, their effective use of draught resistant landrace crops and how the Israeli government isn't interested in adopting their methods. The Israeli-Palestinian seed exchange organization she is creating to increase the biodiversity in the area and support the independence of small farmers sounds amazing.
And then her address hit me like a ton of bricks. She lives in Tekoa, a Jewish settlement within the green line boundaries of the West Bank. She is a settler. She invited us, me and a few other travelling Americans, to her home for Shabbat to help her work on her garden and the new house she is building. I was at a loss. I had no category to put her in in my head. She didn't go into "Religious Zealot, deluded into thinking god gave Judea and Sameria to the Jews so the arabs who live there should just disappear" or into the category of "Racist Nationalist, deulded into thinking that Israel can be both an occupier and a peaceful nation." I couldn't make a drop of sense out of her.
That night I debated back and forth, should I go to her house for Shabbat? 'No!,' my moral compass shouted. 'You can't be just one more entitled Jew who takes a bus right on into the West Bank like you have every right in the world to do so. No! You cannot work in her illegal garden as though she has a right to grow kale in the West Bank. That Kale is a roadblock to peace and an oppressive occupier of a self determined nation! '
Another voice in my head sighed, 'Give me a break, one kale plant is not what is standing in the way of a peace deal. Often a person can learn the most and the deepest from putting themselves in uncomfortable situations. If Palestinians and Israelis, supposed enemies, are supposed to sit down and listen to each other then shouldn't you put some effort into figuring out what is going on with this very confusing woman? She obviously had some justification and some world view I can't even concieve of, so shouldn't I try to understand?' There was a major roucous in my stomach.
The question of whether or not to go into that settlement brought about another dilemna. Should I go on the "Breaking the Silence" tour that I had planned for the morning? If going into the West Bank is the act of a self-entightled occupier, why would I get on a tour bus, even if it is full of lefties and peace activists, and tromp around? I would only be able to do so because of the Israeli military presence there and I am very against the Israeli military presence there. But of course, I would learn a lot by doing so, and don't crimes against humanity happen only when we aren't looking? I am already against the occupation, so is it really so essential that I get riled up by what would be (as all brief one-day tours inevitably are) a simplistic education? By bedtime I was resolved to go through with both plans for the next day, the South Hebron Hills tour and shabbat in Tekoa. I didn't want to leave Israel without having faced the occupation of Palestine head on.
I slept through my alarm. Sivan tried to wake me up but I slept right through. I missed the tour.
I forced myself to call the woman in Tekoa at 10:45. It was then that I found out the last bus to her place left Jerusalem at 1:45 (buses in Israel stop running Friday evening for Shabbat and don't start again until Saturday evening). 1:45 was much earlier than I thought the last bus would be. Holy, stress ball. I rush rush rushed because I was a long way from Jerusalem and still in my pajamas. I got to Jerusalem at 1:50. Too late.
So was it fate that I missed it all? Was it my inner chicken that made subconcious decisions that got me out of it? Was it just coincidence?
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Part 2
On the airplane I was just me myself and I. I flew through the night in quiet calm, breathing air that had already grazed the lungs of countless other passengers. The windows were coated in black starlessness and I slept on and off.
With sour stomach and stiff knees, I sat in my seat as the metal crane that contained me descended onto middle eastern tarmac. Between the Mediterranean sea and the desert mountains, we landed on this tricontinental wedge of holy earth as a blue and white flag flapped in the earthly wind. I exited single file into the airport terminal.
"Where is the bathroom?" one of the forty twenty-five year old American Jews from our trip asked me. "Don't we both have the same set of information from which to answer that question?" I silently wondered. "Over there," I answered, pointing to an open doorway beside which was posted the image of a simple lady in a boxy dress standing next to a simple, boxy two-legged man.
I counted everyone to make sure we were all there and ushered them through passport control. I was to be a leader. I was disoriented by this new role and by the time spent in a metal machine above the clouds.
Beyond baggage claim, a man with a black hat, black jacket, and long beard was holding a large cardboard sign with the name "JANNA" written in English on it. I said "Shalom" to him, my cousin's brother in law, and placed the suitcase my cousin had sent with me precariously on the ledge that separated us. I knew that he was forbidden by his interpretation of the Jewish religion to touch my womanly hand and potentially even to pass an object between us. In order to prevent the suitcase full of children's clothing from American corporate bohemoths like "The Gap" from falling, we ended up having to touch it at the same time. He took the bag and left. I assume that his wife and sisters in Jerusalem unpacked the bag that night, excited to dress their holy children in the soft cotton pajamas sewed so cutely by Chinese sweat shop laborors. Off I went to the waiting tour bus and the forty some Jewish young adults that were chattily settling themselves into their carpeted seats.
With sour stomach and stiff knees, I sat in my seat as the metal crane that contained me descended onto middle eastern tarmac. Between the Mediterranean sea and the desert mountains, we landed on this tricontinental wedge of holy earth as a blue and white flag flapped in the earthly wind. I exited single file into the airport terminal.
"Where is the bathroom?" one of the forty twenty-five year old American Jews from our trip asked me. "Don't we both have the same set of information from which to answer that question?" I silently wondered. "Over there," I answered, pointing to an open doorway beside which was posted the image of a simple lady in a boxy dress standing next to a simple, boxy two-legged man.
I counted everyone to make sure we were all there and ushered them through passport control. I was to be a leader. I was disoriented by this new role and by the time spent in a metal machine above the clouds.
Beyond baggage claim, a man with a black hat, black jacket, and long beard was holding a large cardboard sign with the name "JANNA" written in English on it. I said "Shalom" to him, my cousin's brother in law, and placed the suitcase my cousin had sent with me precariously on the ledge that separated us. I knew that he was forbidden by his interpretation of the Jewish religion to touch my womanly hand and potentially even to pass an object between us. In order to prevent the suitcase full of children's clothing from American corporate bohemoths like "The Gap" from falling, we ended up having to touch it at the same time. He took the bag and left. I assume that his wife and sisters in Jerusalem unpacked the bag that night, excited to dress their holy children in the soft cotton pajamas sewed so cutely by Chinese sweat shop laborors. Off I went to the waiting tour bus and the forty some Jewish young adults that were chattily settling themselves into their carpeted seats.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Part 1 of Chronological Chronicle of my Experience on "Birthright's Israel Experts Bus 25" in February 2009
I'd like to start off by stating, just to get it out in the open and then get over it a little bit, that the term birthright make me very uncomfortable. Birthright is the English name of an organization funded by three groups; philanthropists, the state of Israel, and Jewish community groups. The idea is to send young Jews on a ten day tour of Israel "in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants' personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people" (http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main). While not all of Birthright's self descrtibed mission offends me, the English name makes me red because it assumes that Jews have a birthright to the land of Israel which I think is both melodramatic and dangerously presumptuous. By the way, the Hebrew name for the program is "Taglit" (meaning "discovery") which is far more benign.
Birthright is the funding organization that "accredits individual Trip Organizers to run their programs and sets down the basic guidelines, standards and security policies by which Trip Organizers must operate. There are over 20 Taglit-Birthright Israel-accredited Trip Organizers running programs this session from North America..." (http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main). The organizers come from a range of perspectives, from religious to secular, from right to left, from outdoorsy to urban, etc etc. The trip organizer that I went with, Israel Experts, describes itself as a pluralistic trip and it does lean left. Our trip, thank goodness, was only for people 22 and older.
The staff for the trip was as follows: a few behind the scenes Israel Experts staff who create the tour schedule and made arrangments, a professional Israeli tour guide who was essentially responsible for all of the educational content of the trip (within the guidlines of Birthright and Israel Experts), a medic who was with the group at all times carrying a backpack with bandaids and advil and a rifle with the safety lock on, the bus driver, and two staff members who counted heads, arranged food for the vegetarians and attended to administrative details. I was one of two staff members. In exchange for my work I recieved the free plane ticket and free tour. My co-staff member was a guy who was born in America but has lived in Israel since he was three.
As the only member of this staff group that started the tour off in the states, I organized everyone in Newark by myself and all thirty nine of us flew together to Ben Gurion airport. I tried to be enthusiastic but aside from the basic disagreement I have with the premise of birhtright, I am also a naturally kind of shy person in big groups. Needless to say, noone is going to give me a "birthright staff member of the year" award.
I don't think I'll get "birthright shit starter of the year" award either. I tried to take a gentle approach toward convincing the participants to be humanists before being nationalists. Acting as a radical didn't seem like it would appeal to the group. Most of the participants were urban professional types. Already my farmer-ness and lack of make-up probably struck them as waaaaaay out there. I didn't want people to think of peace and empathy as hippi values that they could reject off hand. I tried to encourage people to understand how to connect to Israel and be critical of it at the same time. The truth is though that I'm not a terribly charismatic leader so I don't know how effective I was.
Luckily, our tour guide was both charismatic, knowlegable and extremely left wing (for an Israeli). Wow, what a relief!!!!!
More to come...
Birthright is the funding organization that "accredits individual Trip Organizers to run their programs and sets down the basic guidelines, standards and security policies by which Trip Organizers must operate. There are over 20 Taglit-Birthright Israel-accredited Trip Organizers running programs this session from North America..." (http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main). The organizers come from a range of perspectives, from religious to secular, from right to left, from outdoorsy to urban, etc etc. The trip organizer that I went with, Israel Experts, describes itself as a pluralistic trip and it does lean left. Our trip, thank goodness, was only for people 22 and older.
The staff for the trip was as follows: a few behind the scenes Israel Experts staff who create the tour schedule and made arrangments, a professional Israeli tour guide who was essentially responsible for all of the educational content of the trip (within the guidlines of Birthright and Israel Experts), a medic who was with the group at all times carrying a backpack with bandaids and advil and a rifle with the safety lock on, the bus driver, and two staff members who counted heads, arranged food for the vegetarians and attended to administrative details. I was one of two staff members. In exchange for my work I recieved the free plane ticket and free tour. My co-staff member was a guy who was born in America but has lived in Israel since he was three.
As the only member of this staff group that started the tour off in the states, I organized everyone in Newark by myself and all thirty nine of us flew together to Ben Gurion airport. I tried to be enthusiastic but aside from the basic disagreement I have with the premise of birhtright, I am also a naturally kind of shy person in big groups. Needless to say, noone is going to give me a "birthright staff member of the year" award.
I don't think I'll get "birthright shit starter of the year" award either. I tried to take a gentle approach toward convincing the participants to be humanists before being nationalists. Acting as a radical didn't seem like it would appeal to the group. Most of the participants were urban professional types. Already my farmer-ness and lack of make-up probably struck them as waaaaaay out there. I didn't want people to think of peace and empathy as hippi values that they could reject off hand. I tried to encourage people to understand how to connect to Israel and be critical of it at the same time. The truth is though that I'm not a terribly charismatic leader so I don't know how effective I was.
Luckily, our tour guide was both charismatic, knowlegable and extremely left wing (for an Israeli). Wow, what a relief!!!!!
More to come...
Thoughts from Israel in 2009
Thousands of grey cranes stretch their feet toward this consecrated land as they calmly descend upon it each spring and fall. Africans in the winter, Europeans in the summer, these migrants feel at home in the lush green peanut and wheat fields of this tri-continental wedge of earth.
Bordering the desert, this earth has water, this earth has life, this particular earth is overflowing with human passion. For thousands of years, layers of human story, holy and unholy, have rubbed against one another, creating a hot and tangible friction. The place is quaking with human history and desire. This place is in the news.
Though I often wish I were, I am not a crane whose outstretched feet meet this land in happy reprieve from miles of flight. I have a human history and identity that brings me here and my shame is in dramatic conversation with my joy. My guilt and my pride taunt and tickle and test one another.
I am both a simple creature of the present and a complex daughter of history. I am a Jewish American College-Educated Vegetarian Heterosexual Leftist White Farmer Woman of Eastern European descent. I am an animal.
I am spending February of 2009 in Israel. In exchange for my free airfare I was the staff person on a tour trip funded by an organization called Birthright whose mission is to send young Jews to Israel on peer group trips. The leaders of and financial contributors to Birthright are Jewish Nationalists.
I am a humanist first and foremost. Secondly, I am a speciesist, meaning that I also believe in the multi-disciplinary worth of all species. I don't think I am a nationalist but I can recognize the appeal. I have yet to figure out whether or not those three -isms (nationalism, humanism, and speciesism) are mutually exclusive. I like to believe, that they can, at least in small ways, coexist.
The rest of my time here will be spent attempting to emotionally recover from and intellectually deal with the tour that got me here for free, visiting friends who I deeply deeply love, trying to investigate whether or not there is anything I can do to support the vision of Israel as a humanist state, hiking, learning, and indentifying my identity.
I'd like to create a few chapters/entries on this blog that will chronicle the things I have done so far in Israel. Who knows how much time I will have to write these but I'll give it a go. I want to use this writing as a tool toward understanding the layers of story that massage and aggrivate one another here and what my role is within that process.
Bordering the desert, this earth has water, this earth has life, this particular earth is overflowing with human passion. For thousands of years, layers of human story, holy and unholy, have rubbed against one another, creating a hot and tangible friction. The place is quaking with human history and desire. This place is in the news.
Though I often wish I were, I am not a crane whose outstretched feet meet this land in happy reprieve from miles of flight. I have a human history and identity that brings me here and my shame is in dramatic conversation with my joy. My guilt and my pride taunt and tickle and test one another.
I am both a simple creature of the present and a complex daughter of history. I am a Jewish American College-Educated Vegetarian Heterosexual Leftist White Farmer Woman of Eastern European descent. I am an animal.
I am spending February of 2009 in Israel. In exchange for my free airfare I was the staff person on a tour trip funded by an organization called Birthright whose mission is to send young Jews to Israel on peer group trips. The leaders of and financial contributors to Birthright are Jewish Nationalists.
I am a humanist first and foremost. Secondly, I am a speciesist, meaning that I also believe in the multi-disciplinary worth of all species. I don't think I am a nationalist but I can recognize the appeal. I have yet to figure out whether or not those three -isms (nationalism, humanism, and speciesism) are mutually exclusive. I like to believe, that they can, at least in small ways, coexist.
The rest of my time here will be spent attempting to emotionally recover from and intellectually deal with the tour that got me here for free, visiting friends who I deeply deeply love, trying to investigate whether or not there is anything I can do to support the vision of Israel as a humanist state, hiking, learning, and indentifying my identity.
I'd like to create a few chapters/entries on this blog that will chronicle the things I have done so far in Israel. Who knows how much time I will have to write these but I'll give it a go. I want to use this writing as a tool toward understanding the layers of story that massage and aggrivate one another here and what my role is within that process.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)