Picking Teams

 

 

“Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way:

A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him;

then that other man's brother kills HIM;

then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another;

then the COUSINS chip in—

and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud.

But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time.

-- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

 

I was in the car with my mother, father, and brother, heading out of town to my cousin’s wedding, when my parents started to talk politics. The conversation turned to Israel and things got heated. My father spoke his pro-Israeli mind first. My mother countered with her pro-Palestinian views. Then my brother, only seven, and I, only five, chimed in: we had opinions too.

 

Soon enough, we were all shouting over one another. The cacophony became so overwhelming that my mother insisted we take turns speaking. When my turn finally arrived, I declared, “I am not on any team. I want the Israelis to be happy and I want the Palestinians to be happy.” My father corrected me, angry and dismissive. “You have to pick a team. And you pick Israel.”

 

The discord of voices that surrounded me that afternoon resembles much of the discussions surrounding Israel that I have since encountered. Having received a Jewish education from nursery school on, pro-Israel information was thrown at me daily. Support for Israel was built into the curriculum. All my classmates’ parents supported the school message, sometimes more enthusiastically than the school itself. But at home I heard a strikingly different message. My mother and grandfather spoke passionately about Israel’s immoral and unjust occupation.

 

For me, this personal conflict was daunting. So I dealt with the issue by removing myself from the issue. When I heard “Israel” in school, I zoned out. When I heard “Israel” at home, I walked away. As a result, I managed to graduate from high school knowing very little about the most explosive political issue of my first eighteen years of life. I still wasn’t picking a team.

 

When I decided to spend a year before college in Israel, along with ninety percent of my graduating class, my grandfather was disappointed. My grandfather’s anti-Israel sentiments were so strong that several years earlier, when my cousin took the same trip, he did not speak to her for an entire year. Since then, however, my grandfather had resigned himself to how his teenage grandchildren would do as all their peers did. So I went to Israel and fell in love. I fell in love with the breathtaking mountains, with the shooting star (my first) I saw while camped out in the desert, and with the opportunity the country gives you to start a day in the snow in Jerusalem and then hop on a bus so that, five hours later, you can end the day on the sunny beach in Eilat. But most of all, I fell in love with the culture. Here was a place that encouraged me to adopt hitchhiking as a standard form of transportation, that welcomed me with invitations to strangers’ homes every Sabbath because these people genuinely wanted to show me their town, introduce me to their friends and family, hear about my life.

 

During my trip, I wanted to visit the country of Jordan, but had a hard time convincing any of my friends to accompany me. Finally, I found a willing group. My experience could not have been worse. Despite my effort to dress respectfully, every guy I passed undressed me with his eyes and shouted disgusting, degrading comments. While I was on a donkey ride tour, the guide deliberately separated my donkey from those of my companions in an attempt to assault me. When I crossed the border from Jordan, I literally kissed the ground in Israel and hugged the soldier at the gate. That night I went to the hospital with a high fever, but in reality I was suffering from nightmare after nightmare from my trip. Horrified by the culture of Israel’s friendliest neighbor, doubts about the other Arab countries began to trickle in. Yet I tried not to let my personal experiences cloud my judgment.

 

Returning home with a strong sense of love for Israel, based solely on my travels, I felt it was time I actually educated myself on the full history of the Arab-Jewish, Palestinian-Israeli conflict. So my first semester at the University of Michigan, I signed up for a class that promised to teach me just that. I told my mom that I might finally come around to seeing her side, since I expected a college course to portray Israel in an unflattering light. But that is not what happened. There were students in the class with Israeli ties and students in the class with Palestinian ties, yet everyone seemed to feel that both sides were fairly presented. And I found myself supporting Israel.

 

I was horrified by the Palestinian issuance of the Three No’s (No Peace, No Recognition, No Negotiations); the Nazi-supporter leader Hajj Amin Al-Husayni; the Palestinian rejection of all three White Papers which greatly favored their interest; the Palestinian’s and Arab States’ inability to compromise; the horrific violence.

           

But more disconcerting than anything I learned about Palestinian actions was the day that I learned about the Israelis brutally massacring the Palestinians living in Deir Yassin, as well as other massacres like it. I called my mom after class, crying that my people could be responsible for such a thing. She told me that my grandfather built a memorial for the Deir Yassin massacre. I was blown away. In a way I had never experience before, I was honored to be his grandchild.

 

The most pressing question for me then became: How could my high school have spent such an extensive amount of time teaching the history of Israel, and never once mention how we brutally massacred innocent men, women, and children? And I realized what bothered me most about my childhood – what caused me to always shut my ears and walk away – was that I never trusted either side of the story. It was obvious that neither side was telling the full truth, so how could I believe any of it? The truths were lost with the lies, the facts with the fictions.

 

Both the Israelis and Arabs have done a long list of awful things. Both have been wrong. Both have been wronged. Both, also, have been right. You can’t possibly present a side to a conflict without acknowledging that truth first. And so I was sad – sad for the message that was lost by both my high school and my grandfather.

 

On Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Day of Remembrance, my school has an assembly to commemorate all the soldiers who have died while in the Israeli Defense Forces. I wonder what would happen if at some point during the three-hour-long assembly, a few minutes were dedicated to educating everyone on the wrongs we have committed, and commemorating those families who have suffered losses due to our acts of cruelty. What if we, together, raised money for a memorial? I know I would have been impressed with the school’s openness and would have, in return, opened my ears to their support of Israel. I know it takes great strength and courage for one to see the wrongs of his or her own people and for that my grandfather inspires me. I know he voices his disapproval of Israel so fiercely because he feels a sense of responsibility for his people’s actions, and not for the Palestinian actions. As Senator John McCain wrote in a letter expressing his stance against enhanced interrogation: “Our enemies may act without conscience, but we do not.” While in this sense I respect my grandfather, I wish in his struggle to make his voice heard that he had not made my ears bleed with extremist rants, comparisons of Israelis to Nazis, and crazy anti-Israel news stories of questionable truth. Perhaps I would have actually heard his words and learned about the tragedy of Deir Yassin years sooner, had I not trained myself to disregard his talk of Israel.

 

Many of us worry that there is no solution to complicated conflicts, like those in the Middle East, because both sides have reasonable fears and concerns, both have a legacy of hurt and anger. But every conflict has two competing viewpoints. And somewhere along the way of being raised in the midst of a conflict about a conflict, I learned that to prove you are right, you need to be open to understanding the ways in which you are wrong.