Israel..it was bound to come up sooner or later

So now that Israel is officially on her way to becoming a senior citizen and getting movie ticket discounts and all of that fun stuff as of last week, I guess its time I start actually putting into words how being in South Africa has impacted my beliefs and feelings regarding the Holy Land. It is something I have subconsciously avoided because it is just one more thing that will most likely leave me frustrated, confused and torn. But I realize that it is a conversation of great importance because it ties so many things together and is one of the challenges that can reveal how much I have learned since being here.

Israel is a physical and spiritual location with a variety of dimensions of value that allows it to mean something different to all who care for her. For many, Israel is religiously important, for others its significance lies in its culture, history, spirituality or something else. Reflecting on the miracles that have occurred in order for Israel to have been established and sustained, I truly believe it exists in a dimension closer to heaven.

I have always viewed Israel as a central nucleus that links us to all those who live as Jews in the world, to all those who once lived as Jews, and to the Jews that have yet to be born. Its language is known in some capacity by people from all corners of the world, its flag is adorned with a symbol that penetrates not just the eye, but the soul, its anthem is a song that refers to millennia of history not just a few hundred years. For many it is a home one can feel welcomed by and safe within without even being physically present. I do not think there is any other place in the world that fits these criteria.

This is the lens that I think many observant Jews develop, through education, through communities, through discourse, through text. We are told to love Israel, we are told to live in Israel, we are told that Israel is our responsibility and our right, because of the value it holds to the Jewish nation and the divine textual evidence of our claim. We don’t grow up being exposed to the Palestinian population who lives in Israel with limited resources and opportunities. When we are, it seems that often these people are clumped together as a hindrance to the safety and maintenance of our homeland. Sometimes when we sympathize with the “other,” the “enemy,” we can be perceived as disloyal and unpatriotic (I realize that this is not the mentality of a significant percentage of people, but my experience has led me to believe that a large number of people seem to align with this way of thinking). So instead, when talking about Israel, we simply ignore the issue in many cases, because we are Jews, and the Torah grants us the land of Israel, and thus it is ours, no one else’s.

So many experiences in my life, especially my time in South Africa, have proven to me that the experiences of each person, each nation is their own, and that in order to understand how we function in the world, we need to recognize others’ entitlement to their own experiences. In Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s book Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America, she discusses her experiences as part of various dialogue groups involving Arab, Palestinian, Jewish and Israeli women. I remember one part of this book that resonated strongly in my mind was when she expresses the difficulty and stagnancy of these conversations. She conveys a great deal of frustration because no one will ever be able to convince the other side of their story, of their narrative, of their claim. There is no one truth. The truth of the Jewish people is at odds with the truth of the Palestinian people. Each group feels entitled to the land. Often, Jews understandably prioritize their claim above that of other people deeming it false. I have heard time and time again, well in the Torah it says…., and God promised us… How can we expect this vocabulary, this mentality to be understood by people who do not believe in the divinity of the Torah and the God portrayed within it? This is not just in reference to Palestinians, but anyone who does not align with this way of thinking. I do not believe that any one group has a monopoly on the truth, what I believe is not and does not have to be what someone else believes. We cannot expect people to give up their truth, in fact it is no one’s place to do so. Palestinians live in Israel, I personally do not think that we can ignore this reality; we cannot blindly discuss the wonders of Israel, the value we place on it as individuals and as a collective people without acknowledging that a population exists in the land of Israel with little access to necessary resources and positive national identity. While it seems as though being pro-Palestinian is often equated with anti-Israel and vice versa, I think that it is completely possible to love Israel and open our eyes to the circumstances of the Palestinians at the same time.

Much of this thought process has been impacted by South African perception of Israel as a moral pariah, as an oppressor, as the Apartheid regime that subjugated and dehumanized the majority of the population for so long. In the historical records of many of the southern African countries, the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is often held up as the historical reference to explain the racist imperialists and the indigenous, downtrodden natives. In my mind, they have legitimate reason to. In the era when the international community put countless sanctions and pressure to disband Apartheid on the nationalist government, Israel financially supported SA. Perhaps there are reasons for doing so related to the desperate state of the Israeli economy, but in the eyes of black and coloured South Africans, they were indirectly contributing to their oppression. This may be why the word Apartheid has been used in describing the Israeli governmental actions regarding Palestinians. While I believe it is clear that this comparison is completely inappropriate, while I believe that the Israeli government has not institutionalized racism like the Nationalist government, but has taken certain necessary steps to defend itself, when it is possible to see the plight of a people through the eyes of personal horrible experience, the link is, not justifiable, but understandable.

It is a very difficult situation. But it is ok in my mind to acknowledge the suffering of others without betraying that which you feel loyal to. While I feel as though I have recognized the second-class conditions of Palestinians in the past, I think being here has added new dimensions to that recognition. Its easy to say that people are living in awful conditions and I feel bad for them, but when you see it, when you feel it around you, when 9 year old girls in townships meet you and their first question is if you have any kids, when one student gets picked on because his skin is a pigment darker than the others, when you are in a little vacation town where the only black people present are cleaning your dishes and serving your food, when you meet white teenagers applying to university and are bitter because they think all the black kids are going to steal their spots because of affirmative action (black economic empowerment is what its called here), when you see the townships on the side of the road that are a few square miles and house 500,000 people who live in shacks made out of cardboard and tin, all of your sense are awakened to the suffering of others, you become overcome by a helplessness that seems unfathomable, unfixable. To me, it is not possible to look at Israel as the home of the Jews without recognizing her responsibility to treat all those who live within the country well and respectfully. Being Jewish demands that of us. Yes, protective measures are incredibly necessary and there is a huge percentage of Palestinians, Arabs and others who do not recognize Israel’s right to exist and pose a huge threat to her future, but in my mind these obstacles only strengthen the need for Israel to extend its hand, its resources, its recognition of humanity to all to establish its identity as a moral light unto other nations.

Similarly, in a book I am currently reading by Alister Sparks called Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa (having put my interest in fiction aside for the sake of taking advantage of the non-fiction literature available to me here that will never be at my disposal again), the author discusses the unique position that South Africa has found itself in the world, and the potential it has to be a model for other nations and grand-scale interactions. It is a meeting point of the first and the third world, the rich and the poor, the light and the dark. Yet its uniqueness lies in the reality that, unlike most countries that possess this same dynamic, members of the third world are the ones who currently sit in power since the democratic transition 14 years ago. As a result, a new form of communication is taking place, a process of creating a new social order that accommodates both the capitalist and the traditionalist, the Afrikaner and the Zulu.

The hierarchy of the world has naturally placed development and capitalism at the top and tradition and rural living at the bottom. Every battle seems to be observed through the polarized lens of West and East, democracy and communism, good and evil. Drawing on other regions of unrest, Sparks discusses the dynamic of America’s war on terrorism and the hate that produced it. The vocabulary of evil, enemy and fundamentalism became so easy to rely upon. The civilized nations believed it their moral duty to destroy the medieval, religious terrorists without ever understanding the point of tension, the source of hatred. Without condoning any acts of terror or destruction, it seems that the Westernized way of thinking never swallows its pride to acknowledge the value of any other way of living and instead waves wealth and “democracy” in its face and demands its opponents to change their way of life. If they don’t that is in fact the very reason why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We never take the time to look inwardly, to see that perhaps our own tactics are at fault, or have made contributions to the problem. We never try to create forums of understanding between different worlds, we simply use higher status as rationale for invading, for missionizing, for murdering and for destroying.

In South Africa, Israel is the illegitimate result of an imperialist, British mandate, a result of the same process and way of thinking that granted sovereignty to the Afrikaner Nationalist party of South Africa, coincidentally in the same year, 1948. Thus it becomes clear which side of good and evil upon which Israel falls in the eyes of the oppressed. It also becomes easy to understand why people must always deem support of the Israelis and Palestinians as mutually exclusive. I do acknowledge that recognizing both plights is extremely difficult, especially when the survival of such an important place and nation is at stake, but I personally see so much potential in embracing the spectrum in between the evil and the good, the first and the third world (vocabulary which I am not sure is politically correct, but know that my intentions are politically correct). I don’t think that this mentality is a form of politics, but rather a responsibility as a human, as a Jew, to entitle each person to their own experience. It seems to me, that while they possess very different circumstances and realities, South Africa and Israel, both have an unprecedented opportunity to introduce a new form of communication, a new form of social order.

South African (Cultural) Ulpan:

Pudding – dessert course, such as cakes, mousses, fruit salads and even puddings. MMMM.

“Hey kids, its time for pudding,” said mom as they all jumped for joy and screamed “yippee.”

Cheers!