Social Tea and Israel

I have been avoiding any kind of Israel post for a few weeks, both because I am too upset, and because I feel I lack the objective, factual arguments that will hide how personal this conflict feels. But if I am honest, the thoughts running through my head do not require facts, or objectivity (objectivity that is more or less gone for me, if it ever was there to begin with) because for me, this is not about who did what to whom first, and which group are the *real* terrorists. It's about my heart, and my belief in God and about my belief in my people's essential goodness, and that all those beliefs have never felt so wrong, and the wrongness is situated in my heart, not in facts.

Simon and I just had another conversation where he expressed shock and I think some outrage over Israel's actions in the Gaza. Meanwhile, I felt that new pain in my chest. It's the pain you feel if your brother decides to open up a sweatshop in Guam, or abuses his kids while maintaining a high profile in the community. It's the shame of being on the inside of someone's evil, complicit without a choice. I have to love my (fictional, Evan would never ever do those things) brother, I am a Jew and for most of my life I have loved being a Jew and thus by default have loved the Jewish people.

And now I am ashamed of us.

Up to a few months ago I resisted and argued against comparisons that placed Israel alongside the Nazi regime. Those comparisons still make me feel nauseous and heartbroken, but today I referred to Israel committing genocide, so I guess that's that.

The state of Israel is committing racist genocide. And as a Jew who believes that her culture is wise, that it believes in its ethics, and to a certain extents in its laws (esp. viz. the sanctity of human life) I feel angry at my fellow Jews, I feel betrayed by their support of a murderous and unethical enterprise. I feel that support for Israel on the part of the Jews both inside the state and abroad shows, especially now, a total disregard for the ethics and the spirit that are the basis for our culture and our religion.

I know this isn't new, it's something I have struggled with since a visit by Benyamin Netanyahu caused a riot at Concordia in 2002.

Today though I have to accept that the state of Isreal and it's supporter are in the grip of a paranoid delusion, or are so virulently racist that they move continually further from the truth at the heart of the Jewish religion, which (as Karen Armstrong has written) can be summed up as: "Do not do unto others what you would not have done to yourself".

Are we so damaged that we forget that "Never Again" doesn't include the unspoken quid pro quoi "Never again (to the Jews)". Or maybe it was always just meant for us, maybe I am the one in the wrong expecting that a people subject to six years of genocidal hatred would try to avoid inflicting the same punishment on other people.

Did we forget that the political state of Israel has no more bearing on the biblical land of Israel then Uganda? Well, except that one is in the same place and the other is in Africa. The point is, God did not give the current incarnation of the Holy Land to the Jews, the British Empire did. Israel has convinced the world it is a biblical and historical inevitability. It is not, it will never be, because it sprang from the same broken jigsaw of colonialism that Pakistan, India, Vietnam and dozens of other similarly conflicted regions.

Today the value of one Palestinian life is apparently 1/80th (approximately) of an Israeli's. That number includes children it includes women, it includes all the people killed since the Gaza bombing began. It doesn't include all the Palestinians who have died in exile since 1948 or been killed in other wars, fights whatever. We are not a people who believe that one life has a different value than another. Why are we doing this?

I called this post Social Tea because yesterday I bought a package of social tea biscuits at the PA. Social Tea's are the most flavorless cookies you can imagine, that makes them good somehow. They are not too sugary and as the title suggests they are excellent when dipped into a hot beverage.

I first tasted a Social Tea biscuit in Israel. I was on my confirmation Aliyah, along with 39 other teenagers from the Toronto area. We were on our bus, driving through the Negev. Andy, the tour leader was at the front of the bus, explaining that our next stop would be at an Arab encampment in the middle of the dessert. We would be over-nighting at the camp, having a traditional Arab meal and sleeping in our sleeping bags underneath the stars. In the morning we'd visit the market in Beersheba and after go dune-jumping.

"The only thing," said Andy winking and holding up a package of cookies. "The only thing is, I know you guys, and I know the desert. There are no toilets where we are going to be for the next 48 hours. So I am going to pass out these cookies every few hours. Please eat 2 or 3 and keep yourself plugged until we get to the Kibbutz tomorrow night. Thank you and let's have some fun."

We dutifully ate 2 or three cookies every 3 hours for the next two days. In between cookies, we drank aromatic coffee, ate oranges, slept in a freezing cold circle on the sand, petrified of scorpions. Watched Andy talk in (probably piss-poor) Arabic to our weather-beaten and inscrutable hosts. We did go dune jumping (like sledding only with no sled, and lots of sand in your shorts), and at the market in Beersheba we bought bags of apple 'shisha, to be smoked in tall glass and metal pipes, and watched Arabic women carrying wide wooden baskets with live chickens in them.

Finally on the last day we rode our hosts' camels for a mile or two in the sunset to a wadi. At the wadi the camels bent their heads to drink, and I remember the feeling of leather and itchy camel hair on my legs as I stared at the bizzarre nature of the hump wiggling very slightly back and forth to the rhythm of my camels gulps. "Like a hairy jello" I thought, and watched the sun bouncing of the wobbly dome.

What's weird is I remember feeling very little curiosity about our hosts. Even then I guess, my "training" as a Jew made me pull back from inquiring. Arabs were not Jews, that was all we had to know. Despite Andy's best intentions, on this trip we did not learn very much at all about our fellow Arabs, or for that matter about our fellow Israelis. Culture and language separated us from basically everyone in Israel who wasn't an immigrant or another tourist. Also we were young, and we had that singularity of vision that meant every new experience was filtered through the lens of our own libidinal and experimentally narcotic desires. We spent the 5 weeks touring through Israel, enjoying the sites, buying cheap jewelery, and exceedingly cheap vodka, spoiled and silly North American teenagers.

Maybe that's all I need to know about this. I will never understand the Jewish compulsion to fight for Israel because I did not get to know Israel when I had the opportunity, and I did not grow up there. Conversely I will always be fascinated with (okay and a little in love with yes) Arab culture. Seeing it as somehow outside and different, despite the fact that historically and spiritually, we are neighbours, cousins, and should be the best of friends.