olive trees
I caught the phrase just before it left my lips and was covered in shame. It was a happy thing, said to me for my whole childhood, a hopeful thing with the concrete meaning squeezed out--something to say whatever it is, it'll be better soon, we have something better laid out for us.
Every year, over dinner, we would say this. Every year, lighting candles, we would say this. In high school, we even sang it.
But looking my Palestinian sister in the eye as she recounted the uncountable sufferings of her people, the enormity of that phrase, and what it meant, punched me in the gut.
When I was a child in Torah school--I went to Sunday school at my father's synagogue, and often Mass at my mother's church--they passed the collection can every week to plant trees in Israel, on farms--settlement farms. They tried to recruit us to visit and work on the settlements, as students, as tourists, as residents invoking a mystical "right of return." They never mentioned that the land was stolen. They erased the people who lived there--our cousins!--their greatness, their pushing-aside, their murder. They committed the ultimate genocide: erasing even the truth that the dead and the living pushed out of that homeland had ever existed. And all the while we lit candles for Yom ha-Shoah and ate "Israeli food" for lunch, which was Palestinian food appropriated, repackaged, renamed.
Hearing the pain of my Palestinian sister covered me in shame for not knowing. I had supported her cause, I thought, before. But the enormity of that phrase--that hopeful phrase--had never come home before. I had been so close to saying it out loud, forgetting what it meant, forgetting its bloody conclusions, forgetting the lie of an empty land ready to walk into that it encapsulated. Forgetting that the hope it presented was the hope of stealing a home from breathing families and taking part in their brutal subjugation. Forgetting all that I had read and heard and seen of a racist, colonialist regime that used my name to justify a thousand indignities and vicious wounds to a people who never asked for it, who never did anything to us. What happened to my Jewish people in the last century, what still happens in places, is unacceptable. What we have done in return is not only inexcusable, it is, in light of our own history, incomprehensible.
I almost said it aloud, and I am covered in shame that I never saw it clearly before, that I had let it go unexamined, that I could be so insensitive on such a towering level.
I was this close, before I caught myself and thought better, my lips frozen just in time.
"Next year in Jerusalem."
Every year, over dinner, we would say this. Every year, lighting candles, we would say this. In high school, we even sang it.
But looking my Palestinian sister in the eye as she recounted the uncountable sufferings of her people, the enormity of that phrase, and what it meant, punched me in the gut.
When I was a child in Torah school--I went to Sunday school at my father's synagogue, and often Mass at my mother's church--they passed the collection can every week to plant trees in Israel, on farms--settlement farms. They tried to recruit us to visit and work on the settlements, as students, as tourists, as residents invoking a mystical "right of return." They never mentioned that the land was stolen. They erased the people who lived there--our cousins!--their greatness, their pushing-aside, their murder. They committed the ultimate genocide: erasing even the truth that the dead and the living pushed out of that homeland had ever existed. And all the while we lit candles for Yom ha-Shoah and ate "Israeli food" for lunch, which was Palestinian food appropriated, repackaged, renamed.
Hearing the pain of my Palestinian sister covered me in shame for not knowing. I had supported her cause, I thought, before. But the enormity of that phrase--that hopeful phrase--had never come home before. I had been so close to saying it out loud, forgetting what it meant, forgetting its bloody conclusions, forgetting the lie of an empty land ready to walk into that it encapsulated. Forgetting that the hope it presented was the hope of stealing a home from breathing families and taking part in their brutal subjugation. Forgetting all that I had read and heard and seen of a racist, colonialist regime that used my name to justify a thousand indignities and vicious wounds to a people who never asked for it, who never did anything to us. What happened to my Jewish people in the last century, what still happens in places, is unacceptable. What we have done in return is not only inexcusable, it is, in light of our own history, incomprehensible.
I almost said it aloud, and I am covered in shame that I never saw it clearly before, that I had let it go unexamined, that I could be so insensitive on such a towering level.
I was this close, before I caught myself and thought better, my lips frozen just in time.
"Next year in Jerusalem."
Labels: postcolonial, race, religion
posted by little light | 11:05 PM
5 Comments:
I'm Jewish also, and I thank you for this.
It's only recently that I've been able to see the enormity of what happened - that we just *took* the land for ourselves, and committed the same crimes against a people that have been committed against us throughout history.
This is a big reason I left my supposedly "progressive" reconstructionist synagogue (and the movement) - even those who were all about the "peace" refuse to acknowledge how israel was "founded".
Yeah.
The (often willful) ignorance about this is totally unacceptable, as is the colonialism of the Israeli government (and of the people, both settlers and European governments, who got this thing started before there was an Israeli government).
The thing that gets me, though, is that the pain is the same. It's the same heartbreak. Everyone in my family survived the Holocaust, but with debilitating PTSD that was not only carried throughout their entire lives (and my grandmother is still alive), but passed onto my mother and then to me. The real damage, though, as my grandmother was telling me yesterday, isn't even that. It's the lack of a homeland, the interruption of culture; that is, exactly the injustice being wrought on Palestine as we speak.
My grandmother's worldview was irreconcilable with that of her parents, because she didn't get to live in their community long enough to absorb the culture. (She was born in 1936.) Later, when she went to Israel, she discovered, in her own words, more fascists, just as bad as the old fascists. She came to the US, meaning my mother was raised in yet another culture -- the chain broken again, all because there is no homeland, no place for the culture to continue. If the Israeli fascists are just the same as the European fascists (and they are), then we’ve done the same thing to another people without even creating a real homeland for ourselves.
It’s infuriating, but mostly it leaves me heartbroken. So many lost worlds.
Thank you for this.
The phrase 'next year in Jerusalem' has been repeated for over two thousand years. It is a fundamental principle of the Jewish faith to return to Zion, the heart of which is Jerusalem. Just recount the psalms, 'yay we wept, when we remember Zion' etc etc.
Now it might be a painfully ironic thing to say, given the bloodshed and misery that has been involved on both sides since the founding of the modern state of Israel. However, it is an historically and primarily religious - not political - statement.
That might sound harsh, but it is true. As it stands, I am not religious and while I'm a Zionist, I'm an extremely critical one. But I don't think it is yours or my right to jettison and belittle thousands of years of religious belief due to the past 60 years.
This ahistoric approach seems to me, sadly common to Jewish people who are Palestinian activists.
Describing refugees from the pogroms in Tsarist Russia as colonialist settlers? Really? Who were they colonising for? Given that colonialism is, by definition, a policy by an external nation to maintain or extend its control over foreign lands. Never mind saying things like Israelis are the same as European fascists - now really, hyperbole and despair at the current situation for Palestinians aside, is that actually true?
How can we get an effective understanding of what is going on now and therefore how we might solve it, if we divorce from the motives/intents of the past and render them meaningless?
It is all too easy, particularly when the humanitarian situation for Palestinians is dire, to stand stock still in 2008, divorce yourself from complex history, and retrospectively attribute dire motives to the Jews and latterly Israelis from time immemorial. But that is the easy way out. Morally and politically.
I have actively strived to find a place in my head on the Israel/Palestine issue that is informed by history and is compassionate to those individuals involved. In this place, there is no room to call penniless refugees from Tsarist Russia colonial imperialists, Israelis fascists or Palestinians terrorists. It is ahistoric and demonising which ever side you do it to.
When I was young my simplistic narrative was Israel good, nice place to visit, homeland etc and Arabs/Palestinians bad and terrorists (due to my upbringing, news coverage of hijackings, bombs in London etc).
This was wrong. So while it was challenging to read other narratives it was essential and just to do so. But I refuse to veer the other way into this self-flagellating 'Israel are the same as the Nazis mode' as expressed here. It's not correct and it doesn't help.
I also think it's frankly quite essentialist and racist towards the Arab/Palestinian leadership from then til now. They had agency too.
They chose to respond to Jewish immigration to the Ottoman Empire with violence in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before was even a distinct Palestinian nationalist identity.
They chose not to accept the many compromise plans (e.g. limited autonomy for Jews within the region) during the Ottoman and British rules. It was the numerous Arab massacres of Jews in the 1920s that led to foundation of the Haganah etc etc.
This has nothing to do with excusing Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians now, but everything to do with understanding the roots of the conflict. There are two narratives. Two sets of leaderships. Two sets of players. Two sets of refugees.
Dismissing the Jewish/Israeli one, due to the facts on the ground now, is just as bad as the previous other extreme.
I struggle with Israel. The political and religious brutality that dominate there are terribly incompatible from the cerebral, compassionate Judaism I learned as a child and continue to appreciate (if not always practice) as an adult.
My parents are there right now, and a good friend is moving there in a couple of weeks to learn Hebrew, study Torah, and think about how she wants to spend her life as a Jew. I wonder if I should do something similar--it seems to me like the kind of situation that needs to be seen and experienced firsthand to be understood.
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