I got a direct flight back from Israel to New York and had an empty seat between me and the youth on the aisle, till the very last minute, when a small broad shouldered woman in a white eyelet jacket and a white skirt bustled down the aisle and motioned to be let in, saying a few words in Hebrew to the kid on the aisle.
Oh great, two Israelis. Now is the time to be Huck Finn, I thought. If you get talking to her, don’t give her anything. Don’t tell her your real story. There’s no percentage in that. Tell her – and I composed a tale in my head.
I’m an architect in the Hudson River valley. My first wife lives in Israel. Our son wants to go into the army. I went over to try and talk him out of it. My son is troubled.
Not a word about being a journalist or an anti-Zionist Jew. Don’t ask for trouble.
The woman turned out to be a talker. She told me her drama about buying a tefilin as a gift in Jerusalem and making the plane at the last minute.
“I’d be too anxious to be do that.”
She shrugged. “If I make it I make it. Your first trip?”
“Second. The last time was when I was a teenager.”
My first lie. But she seemed to buy the rest of ’em too. When I told her about my son going into the IDF, she said, “Why stop him. Let him. What can you do about it?”
I told her about the drug arrest in college and the gang he’d been mixed up with and the racism I was afraid he’d developed and would only get worse “here.”
She nodded. “It’s his life. Maybe they’ll straighten him out.”
I couldn’t argue with that. And as the plane settled into the long haul over Europe we had dinner and she told me something about herself. I was grateful to have her talking. As Mark Twain said, It’s hard keeping a story straight.
She said she went out on business and to visit her mother’s grave. She’s a Mizrahi Jew, and a New Yorker. They always stop her at the airport, question her.
“Arab names?”
“Yes and Yemen in the records. They know.”
So she was on to Israeli racism.
“Were they happy in Yemen?”
“Oh yes. Very happy. They did well.”
I took a risk. “I study history; what do you think about the idea that Zionists bombed the synagogues in Arab countries to get the Jews to flee?”
“I believe it. They needed bodies here. That’s all they wanted. Jewish bodies.”
“That’s not a vision. They don’t seem to have figured out a future here.”
“They haven’t. They have no way forward, and they see the world going against them.”
I played dumb. “What about the left?”
She rolled her eyes. “There are no real leftists in Israeli society. They’re all rightwing. I have a friend whose daughter wasn’t going to go into the army. He’s a big liberal. He had a crisis. He said, it would give him a heart attack if she didn’t go in, because it would destroy him.”
“Destroy his reputation in the eyes of his friends?”
“No destroy the ideals, in himself. When you start actually talking to the liberals, they’re as rightwing as the others right under the surface, though they spout all this stuff. The liberalism is a charade.”
She gave me the beef dinner she hadn’t eaten, and the desert.
“A friend of mine explained this place a long time ago. Everyone in Israel is orthodox Jewish,” she said. “And I agree with that.”
“Orthodox religious?”
“No. Orthodox Jewish. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be there. They believe strictly in Judaism. It goes beyond religion.”
Well I’d never thought about that. I was starting to regret my Huck Finn act. I said, “It can’t go on like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Palestinians have no rights.”
“Yes. So what?”
“They’re stateless. And they’re half the population. That’s not sustainable.”
“I don’t see why not. The Israelis live easily with hypocrisy. In Reform Judaism, we make the rules for ourselves so then we follow the rules. The Christian religions are mostly like that, they make the rules for themselves. Not the Catholics. They are completely hypocritical. But in orthodox Judaism, someone made the rules, and the people learn to get around them when they need to.”
I liked her. If I hadn’t lied we could keep going into politics. I’d tell her about non-violent resistance and BDS.
In the night when I went to the bathroom I climbed over the tops of the seats not to wake her. She was single and my age. She’d had a tough life. She’d lost jobs, and the person she was closest to. She’d showed me a photograph of her mother, in a Sana’a photo studio as a young bride, and the journal she keeps of thoughts she writes down about her mother.
I always find wise women. I gravitate toward them because they are my opposite. She would forgive me if I got out of my lie. But how? It would be a lot of work. She might think I was crazy.
Alright, so toughen up. There were just 5 hours left. I’d gone too far to turn back now.
I worked on an article on my computer and made the print super small so she couldn’t read over my shoulder and think, he’s a writer.
In the morning she gave me half her breakfast, the bagel and the yogurt, and asked more about my family. I really liked her. I moved from the bullshit to the real shit – because you can tell a wise woman anything. I told her about the worst thing that had happened in my life. A betrayal. A death. A lie. Sleaziness. A lot of pain, things I’ve never written about.
She listened quietly and said, “You have to move on.”
“I’ve heard that from friends,” I said. “And maybe you’re right. But I have to decide for myself.”
“You need to go forward.”
“Wait a second! You visit your mother’s grave and keep a journal of all your thoughts about her – who are you to tell me to move on?”
“It’s all positive, my journal,” she said without defensiveness. “You’re looking back at something awful. There’s a lot of wisdom in the story of Lot’s wife. She turned back to look and turned into a pillar of salt.”
At the carousel I offered to help her with her bags but she was as much of a fairy as she’d been coming on to the plane, her bag came early and she used her entire frame to throw it on one of those barrows and shook my hand. I gave her a big hug and she gave me a jar of nuts from a Tel Aviv deli. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, on BDS grounds. Get her name? Write her the truth. Leave the nuts in the baggage area? Send them back? I took them home and when my friend came over to hear about my trip we finished them off with red wine.
I’d lied to her and manipulated her. What a heel I am. And yet: I’m reading Camus’s last novel, about his family in Algeria, French colonials, and, they’re all unassuming people, the French workers of Algiers. His mother the deaf mute who cleans people’s houses. The teacher who saved young Albert’s life (Jacques in the book). His fierce grandmother who puts her arm all the way into the latrine when he lies and says he dropped a 2 Franc coin down it. The uncle who was in love with his mother and fought off her suitors when she was widowed by World War I. All humble people, and some very fine, swept away by the politics of decolonization.
In a conflict, there are great big-hearted wise people on the other side, but you don’t want to find out about them. That’s what happens in a colonized militarized situation. It’s necessary to dehumanize people in order to rationalize bloodshed. And there is going to be bloodshed. The politics are too imbalanced and inhuman. So if you’re utterly political (and I’m not) it is better to demonize them. Not know anything about them.
My wife quotes the Lot’s wife lesson to me. She wants me to move forward. She and friends had told me to move on, but all the counsel means nothing next to a good story, a parable. There’s more guidance in that story about how to live your life than in any lecture or nostrum. The wise woman on the plane gave it to me. The wise woman, whatever her name is, gave me a diamond of my Jewish life as I was lying through my teeth to her.
Next time don’t lie. Don’t say everything, but don’t lie Habibi.
Would be funny if she reads Mondoweiss. :D
A wonderful story. Don’t feel too bad about lying. You played the percentages — odds were, it would have been a very unpleasant flight if you hadn’t lied. I also find myself hedging when people ask what I do and what I write about.
The nice thing is, I’m finding the hedging less and less necessary. More and more people are at least curious and open to our type of perspective on this issue. Little by little, we are moving into polite company and the mainstream. It’s the others who will soon have to be hedging before admitting their views.
It is easier not to humanize “the other,” but it’s deeply dangerous for everyone. I read part of that settler girl’s book (the girl who did that awful Miley Cyrus settler video), and it also reads like a bit of a parody. (She calls her book “The Settler.”) Her childish sense of entitlement and complete blindness to the Gazans surrounding her family (before the disengagement) is utterly laughable if you know the larger reality. But she doesn’t see it. Still, you can feel for her family being thrown out of their homes of 24 years (after moving from perfectly nice lives in California to the subsidized villas and boutique businesses of the Gaza settlements). It’s jarring to lose something you feel you built, even if it’s built on stolen land.
You just think, “Look, people are people, everyone likes a nice life and an affordable home with lots of space next to the beach… But if only they could open their eyes just a little! Just broaden their perspective enough to realize what their little paradise costs other human beings… and what it ultimately costs them.”
In the book, the girl’s brother was killed in Gaza while trying to protect settlements. She squares that circle by saying that if the settlements weren’t there, the Palestinians would be attacking Israel inside the green line instead. But the whole thing feels like an attempt to inject meaning into life by simultaneously living in cushy luxury and living in constant danger, telling yourself you’re on the “front lines” of something important. I get it. My life also felt more meaningful, vivid, and charged when I was living in the West Bank.
But my God, if only they would open their eyes just a little… Have just a little compassion for others. You can’t do anything with people who live so far in a bubble of propaganda and paranoia, they’ve lost perspective entirely. And why should other people have to suffer so badly for their blindness?
Lying is never wise. There are times to speak truth, even if uncomfortable and times to say nothing. But nice story.
Wonderful story, beautifully told.
On the Tel Aviv nuts dilemma, I don’t think you have a thing to worry about. They were already paid for, your consuming them adds not a particle of aid to the oppressors. You may feel funny, but that’s just psychology and BDS is political, not personal. It’s about changing the behavior of an unjust actor, not enjoying the feeling of camping out on the ethical high ground (or, as may be more likely, suffering the guilt of consuming politically suspect filberts).