Tenara's Walkabout Question: WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE EACH OTHER.

The more and more I learn about the conflict, the less and less confident I am that I can truly express my opinion, because I really can't solidify my opinion.  Although if you read all the way down to the end of this blogpost (bless you for that, by the way), you'll disagree with me.  Believe me, I have a lot more inner turmoil than I might exhibit (HA).

Today I met the elusive Samer (he's really nice) and another Arab girl who helps out with the program but doesn't stay in the commune.  Her name is Diran.   Diran, Samer, Ro'ee, Yotam and I watched two movies today about 1948.  The first was called The Time That Remains by a Palestinian director Elia Suleiman.  The movie really focused on Elia's biography and that of his father's.  It began in 1948 when Nazareth was claimed by the Israeli army.  In 1948, Elia's father, Fuad, made guns for the opposition, and while the rest of his family left for Jordan, he stayed behind and eventually started a family.  I really liked the beginning about his father, but after Elia was born it was less about the root of the conflict and more about growing up in Israeli occupied Nazareth.  The movie was actually quite funny at times, and every so often you would catch a glimpse of Israel's influence on Palestinian life in sharp relief: an Arab girl's choir sang two Zionist songs; one in Hebrew, one in Arabic, the relationship between Israeli soldiers who know their Palestinian neighbors very well, etc.  My favorite part of the movie is when the children of the school Elia went to were shown Ben Hur and everyone was so confused as to how that movie was supposed to represent their homeland, especially since Charlton Heston and Elizabeth Taylor were supposed to be 'Israelites'.

The second movie was a much older Israeli movie made in 1973.  It was called The House on Chelouche Street, and apparently, according to Yotam, there were a lot of really famous Israeli actors in it.  This movie was also about 1948, but focused much less on Israeli/Palestinian relations around the start of the country, and more about the Jews that were living there at the time.  The story centers around a fifteen year old boy, Sami, whose family came from Egypt.  At first while I was watching the movie, I thought for a second that his family was speaking Spanish, and I could understand everything they were saying!  Then, later on, Sami explained to someone he had just met that he spoke Hebrew, Arabic, Ladino, French, Armenian, and some Greek (??) and English.  I realized what I had been hearing was Ladino, which is a combination between Spanish and Hebrew (sort of like how Yiddish is a combination of German and Hebrew), although I heard a lot more Spanish than Hebrew.  Anyway, throughout the entire movie Arabs were only mentioned once.  It was a very interesting movie to watch, as it really provided me with the Israeli narrative for 1948.  Every Israeli character had either been born somewhere else or their parents had been born somewhere else.  Everyone was dirt poor and everyone spoke Hebrew and a billion other languages.  And throughout the entire movie, there was this subliminal feeling of dissatisfaction, that even though they were in Israel, they were really only there because there was nowhere else they could be without getting beaten up for being Jewish.

So yes.  There is the basis of the right wing argument: Jews have nowhere else to be, nowhere else to go without being persecuted against.  The Palestinians are Arabs and have several other Arab countries to go to - why won't they leave and give us the one country we can live in and feel safe?

It's important, I think, to know that the anti-semitism that was the result of the diaspora really fueled Zionism, and that happened long before the Holocaust.  I suppose the Holocaust was a final push, but the idea that Jews are entitled to this land was there long before Hitler was a live.  The problem is, no matter how you spin it, even if Jews are entitled to some kind of land, there were kind of maybe sort of people here when we decided "hey, this is the land we want".  Not like someone just spun a globe and put their finger LUCKILY on the same place that a bunch of the Jewish people's religious history existed, but it was either here or Uganda.  And let me tell you.  I would NOT have wanted to live in Uganda during the South African apartheid.

When I talk to people who are right-wing or center-right wing, a lot of what there saying has merit.  Yes, Jewish people were persecuted against for hundreds of years, and as a religion, they have always been a minority.  I think it's interesting that for Israeli kids who are right wing, the idea of being a Jewish minority is so frightening to them, even though they've grown up in a place where being Jewish isn't at all foreign.  When they asked me what it's like growing up Jewish in America, I find it hard to answer in the way they're expecting.  Maybe that's because my kind of "growing up Jewish" is so very different from their "growing up Jewish", but my "growing up Jewish" is even different from other Jewish kids in Columbus.

Here's the thing.  I never felt like I was a minority.  I really, really didn't.  Yeah, so everyone around me was Christian.  Yes, my parents purposefully didn't put me in a Jewish school so I could meet other humans that were different than me, but I never felt different to them.  Religion really wasn't a central part of my life, actually.  It still kind of isn't.  I like to tell people that I'm culturally Jewish - I like chullent, latkes, playing dreidl, lighting candles, and Jewish humor, but I don't feel that I AM A JEW - I don't know why, I just don't.

And another REALLY REALLY important part of not feeling like a minority in America is the fact that I'm white.  That's really where I feel the difference comes in.  Being white in Israel is very different than being white in America.  It's not even about how many white people there are vs. black people: the nature of white imperialism made it that even though there are neighborhoods where you don't see a single white person, you are also very not likely to find a single rich person either.  I never felt like a minority in America because I was well off, middle-class, white, blonde, and blue eyed.  I mean, let's be serious here.

So, maybe it's the fact that I don't have the background narrative to being a minority as a Jew, or maybe it's that I really can't buy that excuse, at least not anymore.  I think the first problem that arose from Zionism was the idea that the Jewish people were 'entitled' to anything.  No one, not a single person is ever ever ever ever ever 'entitled' to anything.  Call me whatever you want (actually, bring it), but not one person deserves something more than another person, unless it's like medicine when you're sick, or, you know, a hug when you're sad and your friend isn't.  I just can't see the value in arguing that Jews were entitled to a homeland because they were beaten up in the past, so that's the underlying excuse to occupying a group of people.

Everyone deserves basic HUMAN things, like the right to practice whatever freaking religion they want and not get killed, like the right to food, water, shelter, love, art, happiness, ambition, knowledge, whatever.  These are the basics.   Everyone deserves these things.  So yes, as a people, the Jews were right to look to the world for a change, and when they found that the world really wasn't going to help them, that they had to do it themselves - even then, I don't have a problem.  My problem is that the entitledness creates within someone an arrogance that they can choose to storm into someone's home and decide that this is the place where only Jews can be citizens, even though they weren't even citizens to that land in the first place.

The angrier and angrier I get, and the farther and farther back I look to solve the problem (HA), the more and more I realize that this is honestly an unsolvable puzzle - you've basically lost the bottom half and there's no real way you can put together so that it makes sense in the future in any linear way.  You basically just have to weld the puzzle pieces (I like how in this metaphor, the pieces are metal???) into new pieces and be creative and think outside the box so that the puzzle is finished even without the bottom half, which is lying in a Crazy Chaos Pile at the floor.  

Not to be negative, but people reeeeaaallly didn't like the Jews starting from like, forever until forever.  And this isn't me trying to guilt trip anyone or anything, because people reeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaallly don't like Muslims now or ever, and people reeeeeaaaaaallly don't like communists now and (even though there was a slight window of hope for communists back in the late 1800s) no one is ever GOING to like communists ever again ever.  The point is just I really can't find a way to answer the question "Well, Miss Smarty Liberal Pants, If the Jews Were Jerks When It Came to Israel, What Do You Propose They Do?  Just Keep Getting Beaten Up?  Just Keep Getting Killed?  Just Keep Suffering Through Anti-Semitism?  Just Keep Converting To Christianity?  Come On, Miss Smarty Liberal Pants, Tell Us!  What's Your Answer to THAT Question!!!!".

I can't.  I honestly can't.  No one can.  What happened happened happened happened.  And it's done.  I disagree with a WHOLE LOT of what happened, but now the only think I can think of focusing on is welding that puzzle together in a new way.  The Holocaust Syndrom isn't relevant anymore, I don't think.  The Jews have no more reason to fear death any more than any other 'minority' in the world.  And guess what?  As long as anyone is slightly different from whoever's in power, they have reason to fear.  As a woman, I have reason to fear - rich, old, white men are trying to redefining 'rape'?  As in, if I knew the guy, or if I was drugged, or if there isn't visual physical evidence, I wasn't raped.  My body WASN'T violated.

I really can't find it within myself to be afraid of being a minority as a Jew or as a woman.  I really can't.  Maybe it's because I don't actually think of myself as a very serious Jew, or that being a woman really has nothing to do with ANYTHING except the fact that you can grow lungs and stuff in your stomach.  Has anyone ever seen that Family Guy episode where Brian and Stewie go to alternate universes and they visit the universe where dogs are in charge and humans are kept as pets, and the Human Brian comes back to Human Quohag with them?  And Stewie says to Human Brian, "Thank God you're white, you have NO IDEA how big that is here."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If it wasn't for Udi and Alon's Carl Jung Study Group in the next room, I WOULD SCREAM.

WHY?  Why does EVERYONE HATE EACH OTHER.  I AM SO DONE WITH IT.