What did I do on my vacation? I stood on a hillside in northern Israel crying with a bunch of Jews. You can see a few of us in the picture above, a week ago today. Miriam’s at the left, then Rabbi Brian Walt, then Emma, Emma’s mom Alice Rothchild, and our guide, Hannah Mermelstein.
Why are we crying? Because we’ve just listened to Adnan Mahamid, below, 
explain to us that he used to live right on this beautiful spot in the Palestinian village of Lajjun, until 1948, and the Nakba, when his family was uprooted. He ended up in nearby Umm al-Fahm, also in Israel. Being an Israeli citizen, he’s always wanted to return to his village and build a future for his children and grandchildren.
But Israeli authorities have blocked his people again and again, and tied them up in the courts. When Mahamid first stood before us on his old land, he started to cry, too.
They planted trees on the Lajjun village lands. You can see the trees behind Mahamid and below, too. And beyond that, the plowed fields? Those are the lands of the sprawling Israeli kibbutz, Megiddo.
One reason we’re crying is that several of us helped pay for the trees. The Jewish National Fund told us we were making the desert bloom. In the top picture, Rothchild is telling Mahamid that we will do what we can to make things right.
It’s weird to be around people who are grieving over events that happened 62 years ago. But the grief is understandable– if you were lied to about what happened. A lot of American Jews are now going through this process. They’re discovering what the founding of Israeli involved, and what the ongoing life of the Jewish democracy involves, for Palestinian citizens like Mahamid, and Palestinians under military occupation who have even less freedom.
You can say we’re not connected to the here-and-now. And I agree. We’re struggling with a Jewish legacy. But there’s a beauty in these pictures, too. We’re liberal American Jews with an incredible sense of freedom. We spent that day on a bus traveling around Israel, seeing other sites like Lajjun, and the whole time we talked and argued about the uses of the Holocaust, the U.S. extermination of the Native Americans and how that bears on the Palestinian problem, what it means to be a minority culture, and whether it’s necessary to have a Jewish state.
I don’t know how these questions are going to be resolved. But the beauty of these pictures is that liberal American Jews are bringing their experience to this situation at last: our knowledge of how a modern society protects minority freedom. And maybe instead of accepting the Israeli Jews’ version of why things must be the way they are over there, maybe we can lead them.
