B-Towns, USA, K-Towns, Israel, and lots of Lost.

On Thursday I got word that I was not accepted into Tufts University, one of the colleges that I had applied to.  With this, I was pretty much ready to declare my loyalties to Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont (which I have thus dubbed B-Towns, USA).  So with that, my parents are taking care of the necessary forms to send into the college while I have joined the "Official Bennington Class of 2015" facebook group.  It's so interesting/weird/frightening/hilarious to see the people I am going to go to school with next year.  I mean, I am going to KNOW these people.  Maybe one of them will be my roommate.

I spent Thursday and Friday night in Moda'in with the Kagans again.  On Friday we went to a bat mitzvah in a Kibbutz.  I forgot how much I love kibbutzes.  They're so quiet and removed from the rest of the world, but it's so much fun to explore and poke around.  I found a tree hidden from sight with a plank of wood nailed to some of the branches as a sort of tree-house thing.  Climbing up and onto the wood reminded me of my youth, climbing trees in Israel.

Last night I took the only available train (at 9:15 at night) from Moda'in to Kfar Saba (which I have now dubbed K-Towns, Israel).  I taught at Brener School today.  The students I worked with were really nice and awesome and I had a lot of fun.  When I got home to Shaked's house, I found her and Inbal napping (WHAT IS WITH THESE NOCTURNAL ISRAELIS?).  When they awoke, the three of us went out shopping and for dinner.  It was a very girly evening.

The most important thing of these past four days has been, of course, LOST.  It's nice to me that I feel at ease and at home enough in this country and with the people I am spending time with that I can fall back into old home-like patterns of caring about stupid things, like the show Lost.  I don't feel in the least bit guilty about creating a new obsession - I spend part of my week in a very intense and highly serious internship and then I have the time to relax and fall into a Lost extravaganza (I'm on Season 2, Episode 6, but I've already watched the last half of Season 2 with Shaked and episode from Season 4 with another friend).  Besides.  It's a good show.  So no judgment, guys.

It's so strange that I have been here five weeks and still have five more weeks to go.  Oh well.  Everyone's talking about Passover.  I know I'm spending it with my dad's old host family that have sort of become like my adopted grandparents, so no questions there.  Rena makes the moooost incredible food, and I can please her just by sitting on the couch watching TV and eating that food.  I'm not in any way complaining.

Chicago and The Dexter Theme Song

Yesterday I got up sore from the night before and took the bus to the Sadaka-Reut offices to help Hana finish up some office work and to read over a half-year report in English.  As I was sitting at the office computer, I heard the music from the musical Chicago playing near me.  I walked out of the little mini room where Hana's office is to where the main computer room and saw Yotam blasting the music from his laptop.  I expressed my deep aproval and went back to my computer.  A little while later, I heard the unmistakeable sound of the Dexter show theme song.  Instead of walking calmly, I burst into the main computer room and saw Natali, the youth group coordinator showing Yotam the Dexter opening.  God, I love this internship.

After staring at a computer screen for forever (ha) I took the bus down to the beach.  I sat on the sand for a good hour reading, writing, taking pictures of myself to document my abundant happiness, and then walked to a falafel stand where I had had my first falafel a month ago.  Today, I went back to the offices to start writing my first article: an article that details the two different Israels I have experienced - the Zionistic Israel I saw while on my exchange program and the major political issues I am seeing now on this internship.  Underneath both Israels there is the base of the country that I know and love: things that have carried over since I lived here as a baby.

I finished the article and sent it to my father and to Amy Bradley to edit (Amy, check your email), and then took the bus back into Tel Aviv to take the train to go to Moda'in.  I'm spending the weekend in Moda'in, then from there going to Kfar Saba to teach on Sunday and Monday.

I'm happy and tired - now that I'm officially busy, I'm having the time of my life.  In between the internship, officially deciding that I am attending Bennington College in the fall, and watching gripping episodes of Lost (curse you Shaked for hooking me onto this show), I find myself realizing that my activities with Sadaka-Reut and Israel in general are really giving me the opportunity to become the person that I want to be.  Walking down the street in Yafo to catch the bus to the train station after having written an article about Zionism vs. The Reality of Israel (possible title?) for an Israeli-Palestinian peace organization was sort of a moment for me, in which I caught myself being really happy and proud of myself and what I am doing.

So now, if everyone will excuse me, I am going to go eat Mexican food with the Kagan family, and then bunker down to watch Lost with the Kagan boys, who are obnoxiously hinting as to who is going to live and who is going to die.  I will hurt them if they give up any details.

Lod, Protest Tactics, and a Camera Party

I could write an entire book on my day today, and it still wouldn't be enough.

Yesterday was fun - I was working with a couple groups of nine to eleven year olds on their English, and I was impressed with myself at how well I was able to communicate with them in Hebrew.  According to the English teachers, Idit and Lily, all of the students really enjoy spending time with me.  I really enjoy spending time with them too, and all of the teachers seem really surprised at that, like I'm going to rush into their room sobbing that it's too much, I can't handle it.

Today, I took the bus down to Yafo where some of the volunteers from Sadaka-Reut were going to Lod for a demonstration.  I was really excited.  I haven't ever really been to a demonstration before, not even in America.  I mean, I was at an Obama rally twice, but it's not really the same, and anything I was at before I was too young to understand the significance.

Diran drove me, Yotam, Ro'ee, and Mahmoud to Lod, which is a small Arab town outside of Tel Aviv.  When I had spoken to my father about my plan to help with the demonstration, he had told me that Lod will be interesting for me to see because it's such a poor town and a good example of the kind of conditions Arabs and Palestinians in Israel are living in.

Mahmoud is actually from Lod, so our first stop was his house, where his friends and family were making signs and posters.  From there, we went to eat at a typical hummus and pita type restaurant, and on our way back, we stopped at a bakery to get what is called Knafe.  (The k is actually pronounced.)  I asked Ro'ee what Knafe was made out of, and he said "Uh...cheese...honey...um..."


It was literally just cheese and honey, with something baked on top.  I was given an enormous piece, and as Ro'ee, Yotam, and Mahmoud practically inhaled their pieces, I was slightly more dubious and slightly slower in my consumption.  In the end, I only finished half of it, as it was far too sweet to be believed.


When we got back to Mahmoud's house, the four of us sat at a table outside, all of us with different sections of the newspaper (I had Sudoku).  I really like these tiny details, these small moments between me and the guys, because I feel like I'm getting to know them on a level that is not directly related to the conflict.  Before I felt my conversations with them were so serious all the time, but now we just hung out like humans.  I mean, they're not that much older than me.  I don't know specifics, but I think Yotam and Ro'ee are 20 and Mahmoud is 21.


Soon thereafter, the four of us walked from Mahmoud's house to Abu Eid Refugee Camp, where the demonstration was going to meet.  About four months ago, the Israeli government bulldozed eight houses in one of the neighborhoods of Lod, claiming that the Palestinians that were living there were not living there under the right documentation, and therefor did not actually own the houses.  Since then, there have been weekly marches and demonstrations starting at the site of the wreckage (now called Abu Eid Refugee Camp, as the eight families are all living in tents) and then walking to City Hall.


Today was the same kind of demonstration, except that it was a much bigger deal, because tomorrow is Yom HaAdama, or Land Day, which is very special to Palestinians, as it represents reclaiming their land.  Bus after bus after bus after bus of protesters pulled into the site, and soon the demonstration was full of hundreds of people, which was a big step up from their average of fifty.


I had two rules for myself in the demonstration: do not chant anything unless you know what it means, and do not hold up a sign unless you know what it says.  That being said, I held up a sign that Diran, one of the Sadaka Reut volunteers, had made, which said: Stop the Racial Discrimination.  I did chant a couple times with the only thing I could participate in with my lack of Arabic.  There was a chant where the man with the megaphone was shouting out different occasions where the Israeli government had displaced Palestinians, and the crowd would shout (in Arabic, which sounded so much cooler than it does in English) "WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH", except the Arabic was only two syllables.


It was incredible to be in the middle of the demonstration.  I literally was so amazed, and it never ever ever went away, that feeling of awe.  I have never seen that level of brotherhood before, that number of people - that number of YOUNG people coming together for a shared cause.  I know that there were significant protests at the State House only a little after I left, which is ironic, but I wish that rallies and marches existed like that in Columbus.  Or maybe I don't, because that might mean that our shared living situation is awful or something or we're being denied the rights to be citizens...


I stayed by Diran's side for the entire rally.  I was really impressed by how many people I saw at the march that were my age.  By the time we started marching, it was already dark, so my photos are really bad, since I had to use the flash and I don't play that game.  I did manage to take some pictures that I feel really capture the energy there.  At one point, one of the female facilitators of the rally came up to me and Diran and told us that they wanted the women to go to the front.  Diran didn't know why they wanted this, and immediately I thought of the protest tactics I had learned through Tom's Radical 60s class - in Chicago, they would put the nuns, priests, and women in the front of the protests so that even if things got hairy, the police wouldn't attack.  In the end, though, the police attacked the nuns, priests, and women anyway.  Hana also said that a possibility of why they wanted the women in the front was to make it look like it wasn't a bunch of radical Palestinian men - that it was more balanced, with a large range of people.


On the way back from the rally, I sat with Hana on the bus and we had a really good talk.  I asked her some questions that I had been thinking about, like why Sadaka-Reut didn't have more opportunities to bring Israeli kids and Palestinian kids together.  She said that the organization used to do a lot more of it, but what they found is that they were more effective when they were promoting critical thinking about all kinds of subjects with the students separately, and then when they came together once or twice a month, they were allowed to just BE together, and not have to press a dialogue on them.  She also told me that Matan, my cousin who was my mentor from La Escuelita (we're almost ready to go 'public' with the website) and his grandfather, my great Uncle, Ruvein, are like, famous in the activist community.  Ruvein's kind of like one of the Last of the Mohicans, as one of the last really faithful Marxists or something.  And Matan, his grandson, went to jail for two years for refusing army service on the grounds that the IDF is no longer a defense force, but an offensive force.  They're pretty hard core.

When I was in the rally, I felt really good.  I counted how many times the march stopped to boo something - once at a construction site where the government was building new apartments (representing the dislocation of Palestinians in order to move in more Jews), a Yeshiva - a place where religious Jews study (representing the Palestinian disdain for the religious Jews' Zionistic fervor), twice at the Police station (representing an offensive force, not a peace keeping force), and then at City Hall (representing the failed policies that are oppressing Palestinians).

I didn't boo with them, and I only chanted once.  I was more just walking around, taking pictures and probably looking very shell shocked and out of place.  My jaw was open half the time and I focused so much on listening to their rhythm Arabic chants.  I don't know why, I love that language.  It's so interesting, and even when it's just conversational, I feel like there's a secret rhythm to it.  Maybe that's my Western Civilization-instilled Orientalism, but I still want to learn it.  It's one of the most difficult languages to learn, however.

Mahmoud, Yotam, and Ro'ee's backs.  I am creepy.

A street in Lod.

What you first see when you enter Abu Eid Refugee Camp.

What you see next in Abu Eid Refugee Camp

There's a door in the rubble.

This used to be a family's house.

They now live here.

The flag of Tunisia

The flag of Palestine.

Yotam and Diran.

Blurry fervor.

Chanting.

These guys led the majority of the chants.

"Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies."

Thoughts from Places

So there's this whole world of Youtube video bloggers (aptly shortened to vloggers), and because I am a Giant Nerd, I partake in the watching of (nice) several of these vloggers.  Hank and John Green are brothers (recognize John Green as the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, and others??) who video blog back and forth.  One of the series of vlogs they do is something they call "Thoughts From Places", in which they basically capture clips of them in different places around the world and record their thoughts.  And I thought it'd be really cool to make my own Thoughts from Places video, except that I have zero video making skills and zero video making camera.  But...this blog is basically a written forum for Thoughts from Places, right??  I mean, isn't that what I've been DOING?

Today I woke up in my friend Shaked's bed, groaned and bemoaned the fact that I was awake before ten thirty, and got dressed.  Shaked, her friend Ofir, and I had been out the night before like dumb people, especially since I had been out the night before that and got a total of four hours of sleep.  All three of us had school (in a manner of speaking) the next day, and so when I collapsed at one thirty in the morning on Shaked's bed, I realized that Israelis Don't Sleep and while that works for them, I, the eighty-five year old lady, need me some of that sleep.


I took the bus from Shaked's house to Brener Elementary School, which is a local elementary school in Kfar Saba.  Brener Elementary School is located in one long strip of schools, and so one of my very greatest moments this past trip was waltzing into the principle's office of the wrong school.  Win.  She kindly redirected me to the right place, in which I spoke with the right principle this time.  One of my connections had made a connection who had made a connection for me to aid the English teachers around Brener.  Once everyone knew who I was and why I was there, they were very kind to me.  The sat me down in the teacher's lounge while my distant connection was on her way to the school to meet the principle to speak about not only my volunteer work, but a program they're setting up with the Columbus Jewish Day School in New Albany.  I spoke with Enat, who is a special education student aid, and shortly after, the teacher who I am going to be working with came in.

Idit is Australian, and when I was observing her classes, she is one of those hard-ass teachers who everyone loves but doesn't want to cross because she will yell at them.  The students totally respected her, and even when she was glowering, there was a general atmosphere of amity.

One of the things I realized while watching the classes, helping a bit with the students, and basically observing the way elementary schools work in Israel was how much I want to be a teacher.  It's such an annoying compulsion, especially since I made that bet with Amy last year that I wouldn't be a teacher in a school district by the time I was twenty-nine.  Oh well.  Looks like I've ruined that bet.

I don't know why - maybe the fact that both my grandmothers and my parents are/were teachers engrains teaching in my blood.  I fantasized about having my own theater program at a school (we'd do a Shakespeare show every year) and teaching Social Studies or English.  By the time the day was over, I would zone in and out of dreaming about what classes I would teach.  How immensely nerdy is that?!?!?!

I had the same feeling when I was interviewing Ibsitam last week.  I don't know why - I think maybe I felt obligated to pass on knowledge of current events and history to people who aren't aware of it, so that Ibsitam's voice could be heard, something romantic like that.  Maybe my need to teach is really driven out of dumb romance - oh well.  It doesn't matter - even if I am going to end up a teacher, I'm not going to college in the fall for a teaching degree (which is good, because I'm pretty sure that the school I think I'm going to doesn't actually have a teaching degree).

It looks like I'll be teaching at Brener on Sundays and Mondays, when they have school.  In two weeks, the schools are out for basically three weeks for Passover break, but as soon as they resume, I'll be teaching again (I think I'll be leaving shortly after that).  Then, I'll go back to Ramat Gan on Monday afternoons so that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday can be devoted to Sadaka-Reut.  I've been thinking about the newsletter Hana, my mentor, wants me to put together, and I'm not quite sure what I want to write yet.  She had mentioned that maybe it would make sense to finish the newsletter when I get back from Israel, so I have more time to digest everything that I experienced.  I don't know if that's necessarily good or bad, but it looks like what might happen, as I really have no idea what to write about.  I thought about writing about the universalism of friendship, but that was back when I thought that the majority of Sadaka-Reut's workshops integrate Palestinians and Israelis.  They actually don't - most of the workshops separate the two.  I guess I could write about the universalism of friendship within the organization, but this is a group of very like-minded people all sharing a philosophy (wow, the definition of friendship), not a group of younger kids who come from very different places politically.

Oh well.  I have time to think about that.  I also want to wait to start writing until after I've visited checkpoints around Jerusalem, and if I AM going to Nazareth, after I've gotten back and digested everything I saw there.

Here are two of my favorite Thoughts from Places videos, both made my John Green:

Lust and Folly in London and Scotland,  I'm Not Going Down: Thoughts from Amsterdam

RAIN and a Camera Party

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  Rain does not equate total debilitating fear.  It's surprising that more Israelis will freak out over rain than they will about a bomb going off in Jerusalem for the first time in seven years.

Yesterday I went to Bat Yam again with Ro'ee and Yotam, except this time I sat in on Yotam's workshop.  The only problem was that none of the students could come to the first half of the workshop, so we ended up sitting and talking for a half hour before he met with three students.  His workshop is more about critical thinking through writing, and so what he did was assisted the students in picking out an article from a newspaper and then each student would write about what happened from a different perspective.  After the workshop was over, Yotam told me that the student's were insanely scattered and it was a really bad class.

I went to the offices after we were finished in Bat Yam.  I was there to interview one of the commune facilitators, Ibsitam, for my collection of interviews.  While she was finishing up work, I walked down the street from the office to a small market.  I bought several freshly baked borekas, which are basically puffy pasteries filled with either potatoes or cheese.  They were so incredible.  So incredible that I needed to mention them in a blogpost.

When I returned to the office, Ibsitam was ready to be interviewed.  I didn't even get to ask the majority of my questions with her - she talked steadily for about an hour, and touched on many things.  I'm glad that her interview was like that.  I think I prefer when the subject just talks and so they end up talking about the things THEY think are relevant, instead of what I may think is relevant.  One of the things she pointed out that I had never even thought of was the way the landscape of the land of Israel has changed once it became a state.  The European Jews brought over tons of different kinds of trees that were foreign to Middle Eastern soil, and many Palestinian villages were destroyed, and so even the architecture is different.  She said it looked much less Middle Eastern.

I was really kind of depressed when I got home last night, after having interviewed Ibsitam.  I was very confused as to how I was feeling.  Most of me was angry, and then I felt guilty at being angry.

This morning, I woke up late, stalked the Bennington College website for a good hour, and then left to go to the Sadaka-Reut office to meet Samer there.  Samer, myself, and another woman named Mariam walked to an Arab school.  The first thing I noticed when we reached the school was that it was A) a lot bigger and B) a lot prettier than the school in Bat Yam.  When we got to the classroom, all of the students, having been told by Samer that I don't speak Arabic and only a little Hebrew, started yammering and crowding around me, speaking in either Hebrew or broken English.  Everyone, and I mean everyone, introduced themselves, once, twice, three times and wanted to know about me.

In general, the feeling I got from the students at this school was that they were just plain friendlier to me than the Israelis in Bat Yam.  I don't know what this is attributed to, but I also noticed that they took the workshop a bit more seriously than the Israelis had for Yotam and Ro'ee.  Samer is making a documentary with the students about Women's Rights, and today he had the students interviewing each other and filming each other about their opinions of Women's Rights in the Palestinian community.  Everyone was interviewed and everyone took it seriously enough to give a long, quality response.  I was really impressed.

I walked around Yafo for a bit when Samer and I got back from the workshop.  As we were walking to the offices, Samer said there would be a possibility of me and the commune boys going to Nazareth for a day or something.  I had told him I was originally born in Nazareth and he suggested the idea.  I would LOVE to go to Nazareth - not necessarily because it's where I was born (I have Pardes Hana to haunt me for days about the idea of 'home'), but because it's an Arab city, and I really want to go.

When I was introducing myself (in Hebrew) to the students in the class, I said I was born in Nazareth.  I used the Hebrew word "Naz-rat", and then immediately several students in the classroom corrected me.  "Naz-eret," they said.  This is the Arabic word for it.  One of the girls also taught me how to write my name in Arabic.  I practiced it when I got home.

The doorway to Sadaka-Reut.  Sadaka is the Arabic word for friendship, Reut the Hebrew.

One of the boys of the class is being interviewed on his opinion of women's rights in the Palestinian community.

One of the girls, Ronda, is being filmed.

Samer (left) and one of the boys from the class.

Rim.  She was very nervous.

Antonelli.  She was much less nervous.

One of the main streets in Yafo.

 

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.

Purim Party Fun

This weekend I spent in Kfar Saba again with two friends of mine who weren't in the exchange program, but who I met in a Starbucks in Columbus once for an hour, and the wonderful world of Social Networking allowed that I grew close with Shaked and Inbal.  When I came to Israel for the exchange program, I stayed with them for a night, and this time I've spent a weekend with them.  Inbal and Shaked are two very beautiful very nice girls also in their senior year of high school.  I spent Friday with Inbal, as Shaked was working.  Inbal's mother absolutely stuffed me with food - I was still full from lunch when dinner rolled around.  She said, "Don't you want rice?" I said, "I have rice on my plate right now."  She said, "No you don't.  Not enough."  Yeah, she basically redefined the whole Jewish mother thing.

Inbal and Shaked took me out on Friday night.  It was Purim, and so everyone was dressed up in costumes.  I had so much fun.  On Saturday night, I went with Shaked and her family to a family brunch thing, and in the evening we went to Shaked's friend's music recital.  In Israel, every senior has a national test for whatever high school focus (basically like a college major) they've chosen.  Shaked's friend is a music major, and so she was doing her practical exam that night (they're called Bagruyot).  She and another girl (who is actually the best friend of one of my very close friends from the program - yeah, Kfar Saba isn't that big) sang six jazz songs.  It was really interesting to get to see Shaked and Inbal's high school.  Because Israel is such a small country, school works so differently for students here - the thought of every student taking the same test all across the United States seems so strange to me because in each state, the curriculum can be different, even within cities (i.e. GRAHAM).  Of course, since from the top to the bottom of Israel it takes about seven hours driving distance, everything is much smaller.

On Friday night when Shaked and I finally rolled into bed at about five in the morning, I could hear the birds outside waking up and begin to sing.  It was the most beautiful peace.  And on Sunday morning when I awoke after seeing the Bagruyot performance and hanging out with Shaked all night, bonding with her over boys and life and our interests, I realized something.  Remember that metaphor of the square hole in my chest which was supposed to somehow fit Israel and Columbus together, but never managed to do so?  I figured out that I was completely limiting myself that way.

The point should not be to struggle to fit Israel into that hole but to widen that hole, stretch it out, chisel it so that I can fit everywhere that I feel at home within this giant mess of a shape that can't really be classified as a circle or a square or a rhombus or whatever other shapes exist (I hate geometry).  I don't want to fit everything about Israel inside that hole (nor do I want to fit everything about Columbus in there as well), as there are parts of Israel that I definitely do not connect with.  In that same sense, there are places and people and things where I feel at home from all over the world - not just Columbus or Israel.

I guess this should have been obvious to me from the start, but it wasn't.  I'm glad that even if, in theory, this stretching and pulling and chiseling is difficult for me to accomplish, at least I know that I don't have to feel pressured to feel completely at home in one place or another, or both.  I can feel at home where I feel at home, and the rest is like an enormous journey, or whatever.  I wonder if that's the immigrant's syndrom, because, as weird as it is to classify myself as this, I am techincally an immigrant.  I moved from Israel when I was five to another country.  My parents are even more confusing - they're immigrants to both countries - first to Israel when they were young and then back to America when they were old-er.

I think the syndrom is that you leave the place you call home for another place, and even though you long for your home, you begin to create a home where you are.  Then, when you should return to your original home, you realize not how much it has changed, but how much you have changed, how much you have been effected by living somewhere else, by creating another home.  Isn't it like that quote by Nelson Mandella?  "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."  That's a pretty sucinct way of putting it.

I can't believe I've been here for nearly a month.  I was talking to Myca the other day and said something about my being here for three weeks.  "Three weeks?!" she cried.  "You mean like three years?  Three DECADES?"  It's true that I feel like I've been here for an eternity and at the same time, I feel like I just stepped off the plane.  I find that any time I think about the six more weeks I have left here, coming home, knowing what college I'm going to, prom (I spent a loooot of money on an Israeli prom dress, guys), Walkabout Presentations, Symposium, gra...graaa...graaadduuuu...graduaaattttiiiooo- no I can't even say it.  I start to get panicked again.  I also found out today that my mom isn't going to be able to take me to college since she has to start working really early.  The idea that these thoughts are already in my head makes me want to simultaneously get on a plane right now and figure out the rest of my life and also curl up with my computer and watch That 70's Show for hours on end.  Life?  What life?  What reality?  I don't play that game, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.