This is Entry 19 in the Mondo Awards end-of-year Inspire-us contest. The writer has asked to use only one name.
I live in the US now, a country I threw my lot with well over 30 years ago. Though I lived in several towns and moved between two states, I feel strangely rooted - as an America - in a way true immigrants to this country know. But my story is not quite the same as many other immigrants. It is neither tinged with the nostalgia for the “old” country, nor guilt over those left behind. It certainly does not have the bitterness of the refugee, reluctantly departing. Instead, my own experience is one of double estrangement - not just of a place that once was and no longer is, but of my own memories of it, which somehow cannot be reconciled with either the person or events of the present. It’s as if memories of both self and place were somehow corrupted by time, twisted in way that I cannot recognize as personally mine. The loss of personal history is perhaps the steepest price one pays for moving beyond an ideology, one so deeply engrained, that to cast it aside meant disconnecting, both literally and emotionally, significant parts of one’s own past.
I had a different home once, back in Israel, the country I immigrated from, on a one-way ticket, never intending to return, much as immigrants do and did the world over. But there is this one unique aspect that when you emigrate away from Israel, it is called Yerida – a “descent”. You – as a once native of the land of Israel - are expected to never really cut the ties that bind, and out of guilt, continue to offer life-long excuses for why it was that you left, and, more importantly, just why have you not returned. In my case, the reasons I had for leaving at the time were probably simple enough; I say “probably”, because such reasons as they were, have long ago been meshed with newer, more sophisticated rationales that evolved as opinions and viewpoints changed and deepened over the years. Not too surprising that, given that reasons we may have had in our twenties to do anything often seem to matter little decades later, if only because the narratives of what we thought we were change as we accumulate years and settle into our adult version of view of ourselves. So yes, we all play games with our own history, individually and collectively. It’s just that typical immigrants from Israel tend to do so more consciously because it is expected of them – by way of offering perpetual amends – to themselves, mostly. I do know that long ago, I checked what guilt there was into an empty locker somewhere in the emotional basement, right along with much nostalgia and who knows what else. Nowadays I am fond of saying that for me, moving to the US was a form of “aliyah”, an ascent to the Second Zion, the better one. It sounds like a good reason – in retrospect.
The place I grew up in was in a nice little town strung along high rocks overlooking a goodly expanse of beach on the Mediterranean shore. The sand was white, the sea blue, the beach goers deeply tanned, at least in the summer. Life was as carefree as it can be for those who have little by way of material goods, and much by way of certainty. An aptitude for swimming, sports, ball games and easy tanning helps to keep one near the top rung of that particular ladder. The town was little then; it no longer is, of course. No town on a beach anywhere can remain quaint and small decades later. Not if it is popular with tourists. Still, when I last came for a visit, in 2008, that town felt somehow as foreign as a shopping district in Hong Kong, yet strangely familiar, like a beach town transplanted from some nowhere town just outside Miami, Florida. Hotels sprung up all along the beach, where small, nondescript friendly bed and breakfasts, and modest villas used to be. The multi-storied hotels cast long dark shadows, breaking the horizon into a jumble of concrete and glass blocks, the unmistakable mark of a supposedly advanced civilization. The once rickety lifeguard tower of my stow-away memory now looks like an inhospitable, fortified structure, the lifeguards aloof in their towers, securely settled behind trendy dark sunglasses, as they scan the tanning multitudes and the sea horizons beyond. Those who once were approachable, the symbols of ready-access beach culture, have now morphed into authority figures, skimpy bathing suits notwithstanding. Many more breakers now cut deep into the smooth lines of the sea, carving up the continuity of water in a way I find disconcerting, almost violent. Restaurants, coffee shops and changing stalls dot the beach, and loungers, once the province of the “older”, are now ubiquitous for all, young and old alike. So the pretty wild beaches gotten all built up - as often is the fate of small town beaches everywhere developers have the ruling say, and sensibility cowers before greed. The tourists have changed as well - they seem to be mostly from France now, rather than Scandinavia. Where have all the Swedes gone, I kept asking? To Dubrovnik? The locals would suggest and shrug. Only main street, small beach town, Israel – a familiar fixture in my imagination, has been mercifully preserved, even as shops changed hands, displays updated, decaying facades painted over. Quaint, unremarkable main street shops, relics of smaller less presumptive times, projecting a measure of that old world warmth I seem to remember - or think I do. Still I wonder - why does it all feel somehow so artificial? Wherefrom the cold shivers in such a warm climate? Is it just that over-active imagination and tricks played by a shifting memory combine to take on the look and feel of a software patch, one that needs periodic updating to keep up with newer histories?
What did undoubtedly change, big time, is people’s hearts. The intervening years seem to have hardened them, and then some; young and old alike. I don’t think I am imagining that. A defensiveness has crept into encounters with the visiting stranger, an attitude that I seem to tease out better than most, just by being – and speaking. Conversations do not seem to flow easily; even if allowances are made for the resentment directed at the once-resident who chose to pitch their home in a supposedly more comfortable elsewhere, or even the sense of suspicion that greets my somewhat aggressive affinity to English. That suspicion, at least from those who knew me once, is understandable enough. Most ex-pat Israelis – all I know, in fact, instantly revert to Hebrew when meeting compatriots, exclusively so when they visit the old country. That is probably plenty common for the vast majority of immigrants from anywhere. But I have come to prefer English, accented though it is, perhaps because a newly heightened political state of being and the diversity of thoughts that need expressing were all cultivated outside Israel, in another language. I cannot relate the tenor of my current life in Hebrew, which for me, at least, does not appear to have either the breadth of vocabulary or the emotional nuance I need to do justice to the substance being communicated - be it on matters large or small. It’s also all too easy to be angry in Hebrew, almost inevitable, in my case, so perhaps better not. Yet, even with those who do not recognize me as a once native speaker of Hebrew, and are oblivious to the accent, conversations seem to have become increasingly strained, especially when American places, names or events come up, such as the approaching election. Quite a few offer, unbid and unsolicited, an off-handed derisive comment of Obama – a code of sorts, no doubt designed to elicit the tourist/visitor to stake a position -- for or against? Friend or foe? Once I let on to being a supporter of Obama, the sense of disapproval would become palatable. The code has been recognized. A potential foe. Should I, at any point, admit to having grown up in Israel, the look of suspicion would harden further, becoming set in concrete. Nothing spells otherness more than abandoning the native tongue, especially when accompanied by supporting a “black guy”, a “kushi” for president. Why – isn’t he a Muslim, they say? The ultimate betrayal – confirmed by being in the Obama “camp” – leads to immediate circling of the wagons. Not surprising that my visits tended to stray to the confrontational all too readily. I know, based on all I hear and read, that since 2008, opinions have only hardened further among the majority of Israel’s population. It’s really a good thing I did not try to visit since the attack on Gaza and the publication of Goldstone's report or I'd be in real trouble.
Sure, distance is bound to develop between those who left a place and those who stayed. It’s just that in my case, I can’t help but notice that the increasing distance from Israel’s present was accompanied by a growing emotional distance from my own past in it. Sometimes, in a way that seems to dismiss that past, even though it was, by and large, a positively eventful one. It’s not even that memories are fading, as they are bound to. It’s that something seems to deliberately keep them at arm’s length. The Israel I lived as a child-person took place in more innocent times, at least for those of us who grew well encased in the impregnable bubble of the Israeli/Zionist narrative. We were, all through childhood and young adulthood, hermetically sealed within it. The times before and just after ’67 were times occupation in all its inglorious ills, has not yet reached its tentacles into every section of society, slowly strangling its soul, corroding its view of its collective self as basically good; a process that’s been steadily and tragically unfolding for all who care to see, for many decades now. Many of us within and on the sidelines of the conflict sense that a seemingly victorious, powerful country, or at least its ruling ideology, is set up for a precipitous fall. The fall itself is inevitable. The shape it takes eventually unknowable at the present. Somewhere between tragic and mundane, but it does matter where.
Still, once upon a time, Israel was a place where we, the children of refugees from Europe’s collapse, could grow idealistic and oblivious to society’s ills, as we were blissfully unaware of the concerns – and lives – of others outside our group. It was possible then to remain ignorant of what was happening in much of the world outside, and indeed, of the deep fault lines within the country, or even inside any one town. The immediately visible local inequities could be easily cast aside – none of us were politically awake on any level that mattered. We had no access to TV and little use for newspapers, getting almost all our information from newsreels and radio. The one intermittent, the other well censored for our consumption. Precious little chance for any alternative narratives to seep through the impregnable boundaries of our cocoon. Life in a small town in Israel in the later 50’s and into the mid 70’s was a perfect set of bubbles within bubbles, set up like nestled Russian dolls. We lived in complete isolation from groups other than our own. Seculars away from orthodox, or even observant; Ashkenazi away from Mizrahi, Kibbutznicks away from urbanites or Moshavnicks, Polish away from Hungarians and everyone away from Arabs. I had not a single friend who was not from my own, carefully constructed milieu. Nothing to challenge the crafted histories we were handed - of Zionism and founding myths and the pre-ordained role of the Jews in the world. We were persecuted because we were both different and smarter; the Palestinian inhabitants of the land, primitive farmers for the most part, just upped and left one day, because their attachment to the land was less than their fear. Our war triumphs were the natural product of righteousness, made manifest. We knew as little about conflicting tales, as we knew little of the struggles of our own parents. For the most part, none I knew cared to learn more. None asked questions. Not even I, a designated rebel who asked questions about everything else. Ignorance is bliss, and cliques and clans helped keep it exactly so. I cannot now think of a more cliquish society than Israel was then and, to all appearance still is. Maybe cliques are necessary to sustain a tribal society, though of course, we thought of ourselves as cosmopolitans with advanced consciousness, taking great pride in supposed personal individuality that was in glaring contradiction to the conformity all around and within us.
I now believe that the insularity I experienced growing up in Israel has, over time, led to a caste-like system, rife with matter-of-fact exclusion of others, weighted down by perpetual friction between the haves, the have-a-bit-mores and the have-hardly-anythings. Over time, the bubbles of enforced innocence in which we grew, shielded from each other and from reality, seem to have hardened their outer shells, turning into a series of interweaving gated communities. The gates serve to separate and exclude, rather than protect. As idealism receded, the gated community bubbles started to shrink in on themselves even as they continued to diverge from each other ever faster. And so citizen was separated from citizen, even as the boundaries of the self-contained bubbles expanded to touch, eventually coalescing to grow outer skins, much toughened to better keep the entire Hebrew community away from the world at large. The better to prevent it from interference from a more universal sense of morality? Who knows? What I do know is that such deep internal separation of society from itself, its internal break-up into ever smaller fragments, even as the external shell surrounding them all became harder to penetrate, is the mark of a doomed collective. Somewhere along the line, the Israeli body-politic became more like a cult, its members brain-washed into conformity, its young immersed in a toxic brew that’s bound to tear the country apart -- eventually. Ironic it is, isn’t it, for the country of Israel, once so promising, to have become a boiling rather than a melting pot? Worse yet, the culture of rejection of the other appears to be endemic to such bubble dynamic, corrupting, over time even the best of the very 'Hebrew' culture that liberal Zionists such as Bernard Avishai extol so much. That much heralded culture seems to have ossified over time, having extracted the Yiddish and the Mizrahi and the Arab, turning its back on those quaint European customs of civility. A bit of a sad culture it is now, encased in invisible cement, with the best appreciated only by elites. Most of Israel seem to partake in something of a diminished 'culture', mostly consisting of popular crass elements - mostly imported from the US -- the worst of it, I dare say, recast in Hebrew and spiced with a good measure of exceptionalism, parochialism, rejectionism and sheer arrogance thrown in for a good measure. Repackaged as “evidence” of a vibrant cultural life.
As for the future, during that last visit I couldn’t help but note the pervading sense of fatalism that seems to have taken hold of most Israelis -- especially among the secular (I don't know the orthodox so well). It's a "live today for tomorrow we die" outlook which bolsters still more inertia. Why try a difficult compromise if things can be left well enough alone? I call this the "manyana' attitude -- a form of extreme laziness, where will itself -- political, spiritual, communal -- has been sapped to the bone. The statement one hears most often in Israel - a common refrain to almost every complaint or criticism -- from inside or outside -- is: "Ani kvar ayef mizeh" -- freely translated as "I'm too tired for this' which naturally leads to “ me tzarich et zeh” -- the hell with it all. That's the mentality quagmire where all issues -- and proposed solutions -- go to die a not so quick and not so painless death. It's a sink or swim attitude with sink being the likely result. Be it the environment, the water scarcity, the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Americans, the government, taxes, traffic, crime, Russians, Ethiopians, ultra-orthodox, civic responsibility, fire fighting equipment, soccer, sports, what not.
Especially – and most notably - Obama. They are all so very “tired” of Obama. We in the US, may have serious issues with Obama’s approach to the ME, to be sure. But in Israel, they are just “tired of him”, just as they are “tired of it all”. Is that the mark of a forward looking society? Or is it the sign of something decaying, deep underground, the rumble of a house coming apart as the seams give way, bubbles expanding beyond their natural elastic limits, eventually to pop, or just leak air and slowly shrink.
Seeing it in this light gives me little hope for any “peace” process. The ground is hardly fertile for the changing consciousness real peace would require. I do not – and cannot share in the hopes expressed by many others, seeing what I see, be it two state, one state, any state, really. Perhaps when I can reconnect with my own memories of the place, reattach them, so to speak to the self of the present, I’ll be able to find the hope for the future. All I know is that in the meantime, the reaching out between Jew and Muslim, Israeli and Arab, is a necessary ingredient to bring about, some day, a rapproachment of sorts between deeply conflicting narratives. That is the only antidote I know for toxicity. I come to this site often to see the few positive and spirited signs out there that some day my own history can return from exile, and memories be played out in color again.
It’s not even that memories are fading, as they are bound to. It’s that something seems to deliberately keep them at arm’s length. The Israel I lived as a child- person took place in more innocent times, at least for those of us who grew well encased in the impregnable bubble of the Israeli/Zionist narrative. We were, all through childhood and young adulthood hermetically sealed within it. The times before and just after ’67 were times occupation in all its inglorious ills, has not yet reached its tentacles into every section of society, slowly strangling its soul, corroding its view of its collective self as basically good; a process that’s been steadily and tragically unfolding for all who care to see, for many decades now.
there are so many remarkable passages in this essay just choosing one doesn’t do it justice. there’s so much discomfort that oozes out of it at every juncture. thank you for sending it in, i can understand why you chose to publish anonymously. i like your ending too.
“i can understand why you chose to publish anonymously”
I can’t. I don’t see how remaining “anonymous” on this issue is in an way justified, helpful or admirable. Cowering in the closet just gives more power and amunition to Zionists.
Thank God for those who came out of the closet and are fighting for Palestinian rights, standing up boldly and getting right in the face of Zionists. Now this is the kind of courage I really respect.
“I come to this site often to see the few positive and spirited signs out there that some day my own history can return from exile, and memories be played out in color again.”
No. Your memories will never again be played out in color. I’m sure you understand, and you touched upon Zionism briefly, that Zionism comes with a short-term expiry date and that date is long since passed and gone and the rotting or the decaying started the moment it was unpackaged and put in motion. It’s been rotting ever since, and one day you will figure out as you are already doing, that you were, whether you wish to disown it or not indirectly part of the injustice, the crime, even when living innocently sheltered from the outside world in your unspoiled town of yesteryear. Your ignorance then, and your conscious decision to remove yourself from the scene of the crime doesn’t exonerate you from having to pay a price for having once just innocently frolicked in the waves of your hometown beach while others were being cleansed by fear tactics and violence from their villages.
So no, you can never again reclaim your memory in color. Consider yourself lucky, not only to have woken up, but to merely suffer the price of not being able to cherish the memory of your town “in color” without it being tainted by the horror that Palestinians remember, a remembrance that they are not even allowed to commemorate yearly, the Nakba.
Before you take offense and tell me that this piece was not an exercise is self-pity or a cleansing of the soul, let me just say that I commend the fact that you have awakened and acknowledge what is happening as morally wrong, but please do not cling to a false hope that maybe something can be salvaged or a miracle might happen on its own. The only way that Israeli society will emerge from its stupor is for the rest of the world to cry out: APARTHEID! repeatedly, and do something about it. So I see more of a stick with sanctions being the catalyst for any substantive change rather than the kumbaya you witness on this site “catching” on with Zionists in Israel and abroad and somehow transforming them.
kalithea, i can’t help but think you are missing the trust of what anon is saying there at the end. what i took from it is she does not have hope in a “peace” process, ie..a sort of numbness and dead end..but i read the meaning of “… reconnect with my own memories …….to the self of the present, I’ll be able to find the hope for the future. “, if not to say ” see thru new eyes” meaning facing reality. to “reattach” meaning to take the memories and merge them with present awareness. because it seems like in essence that is what it will take to change the situation and it can happen.
my own history can return from exile, and memories be played out in color again “in color” means not numb or in denial. recollection in awareness. try reading the last paragraph again with a more open perspective.
The only way that Israeli society will emerge from its stupor is for the rest of the world to cry out: APARTHEID! repeatedly
i agree that is crucial and essential and also i think it requires more than just defeat of sorts, there requires an awareness and transformation and acknowledgment why we’re crying out. not tossed off like we just don’t like jews or some lame thing like that, but that what they did was wrong. a process of awareness….and i do think that will come just as it happened in SA.
“and i do think that will come just as it happened in SA”
Well of course it won’t happen as it did in SA if everyone keeps clinging to a Zionist utopia of “a little town by the sea where things were purer once, and people mollycoddle Zionists or former Zionists in their struggle to recapture that pure, illusive memory that was but a false mirage based on the hardship and suffering of millions of Palestinians.
It’s time to break off from that false illusion and commit to justice, human rights and equal rights for all not lick the wounds of withdrawal and selective memory.
“not tossed off like we just don’t like jews or some lame thing like that”
Please don’t use this innuendo with me. I may be resentful that many not all Jews are implicated in this crime, but there’s nothing personal in it. I used to cry rage when I witnessed films of the Shoah. It’s in my nature to be intensely outraged against the perpetrators of inhumanity and today I cry rage when they use that past as a cover for what Israel is up to. In this case I have no problem criticizing or condemning Jews who fail to heed their conscience, so don’t use the “we just don’t like jews” line on me. I really don’t appreciate being condescended to.
not tossed off like we just don’t like jews or some lame thing like that, but that what they did was wrong.
……
so don’t use the “we just don’t like jews” line on me.
i wasn’t speaking of you at all. i was speaking of the narrative coming out of israel or the lobby or whoever who try to pin this “cry out: APARTHEID! repeatedly” on us for our alleged anti semitism.
wrt the rest of what you said ..i think perhaps we’re reading different essays. i’m just not geting what you’re getting out of it. that’s about all i have to say.
here it is again, i just have to point out to you my own memories of it, which somehow cannot be reconciled with either the person or events of the present. It’s as if memories of both self and place were somehow corrupted by time, twisted in way that I cannot recognize as personally mine. they are not ‘in color’ they are deliberately keep … at arm’s length. the mind has a way of preventing recall, it is a protection device. my guess is there is some stored memory that threatens coming to the surface, now they are in an empty locker somewhere in the emotional basement.
The only color the memory of that quaint town by the sea deserves to resurface in is grey, because anything more is a total whitewash. I personally don’t give two hoots about that town or whether there were sand dunes where hotels now stand. I care about the truth, not selective memory as things were no better then, than they are today. Then, was merely the onset of the tragedy.
” the mind has a way of preventing recall, it is a protection device. my guess is there is some stored memory that threatens coming to the surface”
Sometimes PROTECTION is a very bad thing because it forever keeps us from dealing with the truth about ourselves, our past and the evolving dysfunfunctional reality.
And let me tell you, something about this whole recall exercise bothers me, it’s too intellectualized. I like simplicity; I trust it more and I much prefer something like “the land, the gun, the olive tree” that takes us from a recurring dream to the brutal truth without excuses.
Kalithea, I hate the Zionists for what they have done as much as you do but you are unfairly holding all their sins against Danaa simply for having been born in Israel. Her reminiscing of younger days and sandy beaches had nothing to do with having dispossessed the Palestinians and from her past posts, I can tell that she knows very well all about the brutal truth; she talks about it all over her essay but you got hung up on the sand dunes and couldn’t see it past them. I’m sure that if you were to give the essay a second reading, you’d see it too.
Kalithea, it takes coming at the issue from all sides, doesn’t it? As an aside, you may want to take into account that it is not possible – at least not yet – to get the average Israeli and/or his/her American Jewish sympathizers to read any of the first rate stuff put out on Mondoweiss and elsewhere. They’ll turn away the second they see an Arabic name attached or realize – sometimes from the very first sentence – that they are in danger of having to confront the humanity of the “other”. But they do read the kind of things I write sometimes (even if way too long) – partly because they can relate to some of it, partly because it is just analytic enough to allow them the pretense of emotional distance, even if they get inexplicably angrier in the process. See – making people angry by getting past their natural defenses – even if for just a moment – is a kind of specialty of mine. May be that too is part of the battle we are all engaged in ?
In time, I intend to do more weaving in of some of the riveting accounts from the “other side” – I might pick a few passages from another mondo entry titled “Gaza Riviera”. Should make a nice contrast, don’t you think?
In the long run, I think we can all agree it would take a concerted effort by everyone, to knock down the walls. My peronal hope is that they’d not come down in a blood bath, but will crumble, one stone and concrete block at a time. Towards that end every voice and every means counts, BDS being a very ignificant part of this, an effort I support wholeheartedly. For now, I try to remember – no matter how difficult it is sometimes – that none of us have much of a choice about where we come into the world and where and in whose company we spend the early part of our lives. What is important is what we choose to do – and say – once we wake up – whenever that happens to each of us.
Walid, much obliged……..
kalithea – you seem to overlook the first line of this essay: I live in the US now, a country I threw my lot with well over 30 years ago.
Danaa doesn’t sit in Israel making excuses for her occupation of stolen land.
Yes, Walid, I took it the same way as you. During the lingering Jim Crow days as late as the 1950s, many Americans grew up oblivious too; their innocent out-dated MarkTwaindum was real; it’s a past to those still living that seems like a 19th Century dream. Another analogy too comes from America, where many seniors no longer feel part of the country they grew up in–some of this is simply battered age, and knowing one literally is on the end of one’s life span. OTOH, Israel and the OT are so small, it’s hard to imagine any Israeli kid growing up since the state was founded could not have been aware all along of what was being done with the Arabs in their midst. Yet we read quite often of Israelis who’ve spent their whole life without ever knowing a single Palestinian as an individual, or at least a neighborly acquaintance. The real wall has been there all along and has just become lately cast in concrete.
That was really nice. Deeply moving. You should write a book under a pen name.
“All I know is that in the meantime, the reaching out between Jew and Muslim, Israeli and Arab, is a necessary ingredient to bring about, some day, a rapproachment of sorts between deeply conflicting narratives.”
That, and Justice.
That was very deep. Thank you.
Annie, thanks for the good words and the spot-on interpretation – you gave me quite few words and ideas I’ll maybe use in my next feeble attempt to tease something out from under that veil of grey that seems to have wrapped itself over my past.
Kalithea – I see where you are coming from and accept the verdict of over-intellectualism. Being on the analytic side is a cross I just have to bear – my training is as a scientist, not a writer – so I am in a learning mode. No wonder that, personally, I feel rather partial to the excellent poems and poignant accounts of activism and endurance submitted by others -out on the battle lines.
Thanks again Annie and Phil for providing a forum for so many excellent – and very diverse – entries on Mondo’s pages.
Thanks Danaa, and thank you for your piece, which I found very moving. Also for your engaged and not-taking-yerself–too-seriously manner… Happy new year, Phil
i actually had a lot more to say danaa but did not want to get into an extended debate w/critic. i really liked your metaphoric use of “life” “guard” “tower”… your use of architecture and the physicality of your town as a metaphor for your experience.
The once rickety lifeguard tower of my stow-away memory now looks like an inhospitable, fortified structure, the lifeguards aloof in their towers, securely settled behind trendy dark sunglasses, as they scan the tanning multitudes and the sea horizons beyond. Those who once were approachable, the symbols of ready-access beach culture, have now morphed into authority figures
The multi-storied hotels cast long dark shadows, breaking the horizon into a jumble of concrete and glass blocks, the unmistakable mark of a supposedly advanced civilization.
like i said before, so many passages…
thank you very much.
Danaa has always been one of my top favorites on this site. Without expanding too much on it, (I’m on the run) one can easily see here why..I just love this woman, her humor, her razor sharp intelligence, her humanity and much more…but I’ll stop here, I don’t want to give the impression I’m making any advances, haha…
You really describe this all well, almost like looking into one’s own past but not recognizing the person.
It seems to me like this turning inward has been necessary in order to protect them from these more universal principles, as there is an internal logic to it – the problem is that when this internal logic brushes up against the rest of the world, it breaks down. Hence the need for the barriers, to not stray outside of them in order keep from exposing the inherent contradictions in some basic assumptions about the world.
Breaking out of them is like a rite of initiation.
Danaa, that is beautifully written, deeply moving and extremely perceptive. Not only are your personal recollections fascinating, so were your observations of the modern-day Israeli consciousness and the sense of resignation leading to inertia. Like everyone else, Israelis have to be pushed from their comfort zone, because the situation there, while not perfect, is as tolerable for them as it is intolerable for the Palestinians.
I think that human nature is fairly similar the world round, but each culture has its own peculiarities. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that gave me as much insight into those peculiarities of Israeli society.
Already quoted, but I also need to do so…
“All I know is that in the meantime, the reaching out between Jew and Muslim, Israeli and Arab, is a necessary ingredient to bring about, some day, a rapproachment of sorts between deeply conflicting narratives.”
Danaa, just thought you might like this…some people are trying…
link to interfaithencounter.wordpress.com
I can see how one narrative can lose its power or come to seem inauthentic. I can also see how conflicting people can achieve rapprochement, but how is this possible with narratives? How can statements that conflict begin to imply the same things? I mean this as a genuine not a rhetorical question.
How can statements that conflict begin to imply the same things?
i don’t think they do but i didn’t read it as implying they did. i read it as saying that for people with conflicting narratives to find rapprochement it is necessary they reach out to eachother.
Very nice read danna. You paint a very interesting and provocative picture of your mindscape as you deal with your personal history in exile. This is the question, Jewish life – and I claim to be no expert on that topic – but it is no secret exile was served as a diet, almost punitive in nature, like eating spinach – good for you, came directly from the heavens and it was accepted as such. Now Israel/Zionism come along offering a refuge to those Jews living in perpetual exile. In your case, your exile didn’t end with Israel but instead you found true refuge in a country that is without all the tribal trappings, without all the drama that follows perpetual victim-hood and perpetual wars. There are many perks living in a great empire – for one, no sense of being besieged as many feel in Israel. Aside from the politics of post 9-11 and the Bush years, one can’t argue with the good life found here. Your thoughts on your memories today – nostalgic or critical – of Israel past tend to follow a typical pattern that comes with the passing of time. All people mourn the passing of something. Time is unforgiving. In the case of Israel, time has worked to displace enlightenment from it’s culture. An insidious habit forming condition that shuns sunlight – turning people to the right – turning the masses more fanatical, be it under the banner of religion or nationalism will likely invite tragedy. It is a recipe not likely to be digested well once all the ingredients fall into place. A country needs enlightenment – it’s moment to shine from within it’s borders. It can’t be measured by how good computer software comes from Israel or inventions of man/woman but has to be in regards to the most fundamental question of humanity – relations with your fellow man/woman?
For those who value such relations, not hard to see why so many Jews choose to live outside of Israel.
The layers of protection the system has put in place to make sure the reality being shaped by government prevails is very impressive. Congrats on your emancipation.