Reflecting
Reflections upon Returning State Side
It has taken me a long time to let the mental and physical dust settle from my recent trip to Palestine and Israel. As expected, I find myself wanting to return to the region and wondering how and when that might be possible.
I have returned to Los Angeles, where most people are less connected to the land than they are in Palestine/Israel. I have gone back to New York, where I have more history with the land, but I find I am hungry for the air of Jerusalem, a city that both excites and sickens me.
Most of us are descendants of opportunists in America, particularly in the cities. Our ancestors, those who were not slaves or natives to this land before colonization, first set foot on the land seeking opportunity, or escape from circumstances whence they came. Now, we are a beautiful patchwork of diverse voices and expressions of human seeking opportunities in the city lights of a land that most of us have no blood lineage to. This American “land of opportunity” is populated mainly by people who do not have a blood connection to it while it is riddled with inequalities, oppressions, and issues of land rights and access to resources. These are issues that in many ways parallel those of Israel/Palestine and so one might assume that the two places would have a similar affect on people, yet I feel a sense of being more grounded in myself, my cultural history and land when breathing the the thin Jerusalem air.
Whether or not I, as a Jewish woman, have any legitimate blood lineage to Israel, I am comforted by a place where I am the norm and not an exception. In many ways we, Jewish people, have been made into an ethnic group by others (in particular white Europeans) who have in past centuries pointed their fingers at us, saying “you do not belong here,” and inflicting violence on our communities. Whether or not we are under real threat anywhere in the world, danger is a subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, fear in most of our psyches, in my psyche. But I am sickened by my desire to be in Jerusalem; I find that too often Jews romanticize the “holy land” ideal and use itas a means of colonization. So I am left to question: does my yearning for the Jerusalem air make me a part of that colonization? And then the larger question: what defines colonization?
I was raised with many mystical Muslim traditions as part of my spiritual practice, despite maintaining a strong Jewish cultural identity. And my father trained as a minister; he has held several unconventional pulpits at different times in my life. So, I question if I crave the Jerusalem air because it is the only place where I have experienced the coexistence of Muslim, Jewish and Christian prayers on the wind, where I have experienced a commingling of melodies and chants that have touched my understanding of the sacred. But this coexistence of religious practices exists in a place riddled with political and economic inequality, division, and a denial of the divine feminine aspect of God.
As a result of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and as an American woman with a Jewish cultural identity and the privileges that come with being a white Jewish woman, I feel a simultaneous sense of being at home in Israel and of being a guest in a home where I am overstepping the hospitality of my hosts. I have traveled to countries in Europe where my family lived before moving to the USA, and I feel like a visitor there, a guest among the tormented ghosts of my ancestors… And now I find myself in Los Angeles, a hundred-year-old concrete city covering old Tunva and Chumash indigenous lands. Here I am, cradled in the American Imagination Empire, where, as a musician/producer friend recently put it, we make “Art by the Pound” for global consumption, and I feel like a total alien, like a guest who walked in the side door and can’t find my way out of the damn house.
In the midst of my contemplations about how to check out of The Perpetual Guest Hotel, I am reminded of the music director of a dance/music company I worked with for many years, Bill Vanaver. About a decade ago he had a bumper sticker on his car which read, “WAKE ME UP WHEN POSTMODERNISM IS OVER”, and at the moment I have to agree. I want to be awakened, shaken out of this postmodern experience; it seems no matter how many cups of coffee I drink, I cannot shake the weariness I feel while trying to make some type of grounded connection to the land I walk on and the world in which I live. But every land is complex and carries a history of conquest. So I am left to figure out how to make sense of being the perpetual guest. Sometimes the only thing that saves me is putting on my flamenco shoes and pounding out my confusion as gitana [a person? Gitana?] wails her own landless sorrow while desert sun reflects off my eyelashes.
Final days in Palestine/Israel
After three weeks of gaining a better understanding of the type of persecution and occupation experienced by the Bedouin in the Negev/Naqab desert, getting brushed up on the issues of settlement expansion around East Jerusalem and taking a hard look at both my disdain and love for Israel and my hopes and fears for Palestine, I had the pleasure of attending a Sulhita Gathering. I spent four days with passionate, vulnerable and kind Israelis and Palestinians, telling personal stories, praying, deconstructing aspects of the conflict, cooking, singing, dancing and generally just existing in the expansive sky and piercing sun of the Naqab/Negev desert. (For more information regarding organizations that I visited and partnered with while in the region, please go to www.sariaidana.com/news.htm)
Sulhita is the youth arm of Sulha, an organization that brings together secular and religious Israelis and Palestinians from the three major regional religious traditions for the purpose of developing understanding. Participating in the Sulhita was a wonderful and challenging experience. I left knowing that dialogue is complicated and often requires translation, both from one language into another and from one human experience to another. In many ways, the Palestinian, Israeli, Arab-Israeli and African-Hebrew-Israelite youth were like oil and water, though music, movement and other activities created a space for inter-group interaction. I believe there is something very powerful for these groups to simply co-exist, with the exuberance of teenage energy, armed with the knowledge that they all want an end to the current division and violence. Laughter rang, tears were shed and there was very little sleep.
I witnessed the fear of the Palestinian youth that they were participating in a process of Normalization, and I believe this contributed a good deal to the lack of mixing between the Palestinian and Israeli groups, though language also creates a barrier. The Normalization issue is a real one, and it must be understood and addressed. There is a legitimate fear within the Palestinian community that mixed interaction will make the occupation look solved or resolved, that those interactions will Normalize the conflict and thus slow or halt the movement for equality for Palestine.
I believe real dialogue can only happen after Israelis/Jews can first recognize that we are the powerful, the oppressors in this situation. While the cycle of oppression is a complex one, and oppression is an experience that the Jewish community is all-too familiar with, it is essential that the current power dynamic is addressed before any real dialogue or any real change is possible. I believe the organizers acknowledged this power imbalance, though they did not address it outright and perhaps this is a wise choice.
I hope that the work of Sulhita, and similar work, will grow, and in so doing, build larger movements within the Israeli and Palestinian communities to support and nurture a lasting peace, in which all people in the region have equal rights and respect for the land.
Yom Kippur
As a result of changing my ticket to stay for the Sulhita, I ended up staying in the region for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, the Day of Atonement. This is the day to seriously ask for forgiveness; it’s also the only day every year that all Israelis, religious and secular, leave their cars parked. West Jerusalem was full of a stillness; all the roads were void of cars and sounds except for the few streets crowded with young Israelis mingling in the middle of the road simply because they could.
Holidays in Israel inspire an increased paranoia about security, especially Yom Kippur after the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War of 1973, in which the State of Israel was attacked by both Egypt and Syria on Yom Kippur. As a result, while much of Jerusalem was praying and accounting for a year of wrongdoings, the West Bank was on lockdown. The little freedom of movement that is normally granted to Palestinians shrunk even further. While some had the privilege to enjoy one of the most profound, sacred experiences of the year, others had to suffer the least. Another paradox, another imbalance of power.
It was powerful to be in Jerusalem for Yom Kippur for many reasons, and more or less by accident. For one, most religious Jews want to be nowhere else but Jerusalem for the holiday; I had the opportunity to witness the influx of people, mainly Americans, who flooded the city specifically for the holiday. I also had the opportunity to spend a day in deep contemplation, as the holiday encourages; thus I was in deep contemplation while on land that I have been deeply contemplating for years. The most profound experience, however, came from the shadowy history the land.
On the eve of the holiday, Erev Yom Kippur, I walked through the old city, to the Wailing Wall, and I found myself asking forgiveness from the city herself. I was muttering in my mind, and sometimes under my breath, asking Jerusalem forgiveness for being part of a group of people who have spilled blood on her stones. I was asking forgiveness for Al-Nakba, the catastrophe, the killing of thousands of Palestinians and turning 800,000 into refugees in 1948 in order to establish the Israeli State. I asked forgiveness for the recent attacks on Gaza, and for the continued occupation. I asked forgiveness for my yearning for home, for my desire for Jerusalem to hold me in her walls in a way that comforts me more deeply than land I was born on. I walked her cobblestones, seeing ghosts of peoples from many traditions and ethnic groups who have killed and been killed on her layered streets: Canaanites, Jebusites, Israelites, Romans, Assyrians, Byzantines, Persians, crusading Europeans, Ottomans, Palestinians, Israelis.
In the silent corners of a city in prayer, I witnessed thousands of years of bloodshed and I was overcome by both the magnitude of the history of the place and the fact that while it is called “holy land” and there is a vibration I feel rising from it, there has been so little peace in it; is peace not considered the holiest of experiences? While shedding tears of sorrow and confusion, I wondered if peace is even possible for this land, or for human beings as a whole. Politics and religion swept me into contemplation of the sheer human condition; I was left with a deep yearning to find peace from an inner place and a need to ask forgiveness for not finding that in myself yet, for seeking comfort outside of myself, in the arms of lovers and lands, and for confusing Peace and Justice, because they are two different things.
I approached the Wailing Western Wall, the Kotel, and a group of about a hundred men, mostly from New Jersey, it seemed, were dancing in a circle and singing songs of jubilation, and I was utterly confused. After sitting on the ground and listening to them, I walked into the women’s side of the Wall, pressed my head against the smooth surface, and wondered what I was up against, in myself, outside myself. I wondered what I, a nonreligious American Jew, can really do to influence Justice in the Middle East, and if it is even my place to try. I wondered if Peace and Justice actually existed if walls did not divide people from their holy sites and from each other, if my, jewish, and perhaps even human reason for being would cease to exist. Walls offer us opportunities to find another way around an obstacle and finding these ways round obstacles seems to be my, certainly jewish and in many ways, the human, reason for being. I then began asking forgiveness for the Walls closing in on Palestinians, closing them off from their land. Stealing their land. I asked forgiveness for not knowing how to imagine a Jerusalem, a world without strife. I asked forgiveness for always making things more complicated and existential than is probably necessary.
I smiled and was grateful for being alive.
Change
Change is happening and will continue to happen, slowly. In many ways it seems absent; there is a supposed Settlement Freeze, but illegal Israeli settlements continue to be built and the occupation continues to expand, particularly in East Jerusalem. A year after Israel’s deadly attack, Gaza is still entirely isolated, hungry and in need of aid. The West Bank’s thirst grows as more water resources go to Israel. Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit has yet to be swapped for a few hundred Palestinian prisoners. Hamas still claims the land “from the river to the sea” though there is a very real and existent nation of Israel that exists in that region and does not appear to be going anywhere. But I urge the international community to know that there is work being done to create justice on the ground in Palestinian communities, in Israeli communities and between Israelis and Palestinians. This work is complex and often conflicted/imperfect, but it is happening. It is happening and it can be strengthened by participation from the international community.
I strongly encourage members of the international community to recognize their power as consumers. We can all take action with the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement against Israel that has been modeled after the BDS movement that ended apartheid in South Africa. There are many ways to engage in this movement, particularly if you are connected to an institution of some kind, for example a campus, religious organization or company. There are numerous aspects of this movement, and many make people uncomfortable for a variety reasons. There is an economic boycott, an academic boycott, a cultural boycott and a sports boycott. I invite people to engage in this movement at whatever level they are capable and comfortable. But if nothing else, I urge people not to support industries and companies that profit from the occupation, specifically products made in occupied Palestine that claim to be made as Israeli Products. For a list of these companies and products go to HYPERLINK “http://www.whoprofits.org/Involvements.php” http://www.whoprofits.org/Involvements.php
Here are a few more resources to investigate the BDS movement.
www.bdsmovement.org
http://endtheoccupation.org
www.icahd.org
www.freegaza.org
But mostly I urge you to pay attention to the news without becoming overwhelmed. Seek multiple perspectives, be informed about where your money is going, and allow yourself to imagine the world you want to create.
