In Memoriam Saba Shimon

Last winter, when traveling with a friend to the outskirts of Berlin, we passed by the city's monumental Olympic stadium, built by the Nazis in the thirties. Suddenly I was stirred by a memory. "You know," I told her, "This is the place my grandfather wanted to visit more than anything else, and couldn't."

In 1936 Shimon Waldman was a champion long distance runner, competing all over the Middle East. He was accepted to the olympics, but then Hitler decreed that no Jews could participate and my grandfather was forced to stay at home. Throughout his life he kept a clipping from a Berliner Jewish newspaper. The headline reads: "Waldman Kommt nach Berlin!" Waldman is coming to Berlin, a celebrity, a power to contend with.

My friend took a photo of me running in front of the stadium, symbolically fulfilling that old aspiration. Unlike my grandfather, who passed away last night, I'm a slow enough runner to be caught by a cheap lens. The Athletic skill was not something I inherited, but I'd like to think that he did bequeath the athletic spirit to all of us.

Berlin's stadium was the only place my grandfather wanted to go to and failed. No other destination was unattainable, be it the finish line, a high rank (he was an officer in the British Army's Jewish Brigade and later the chief of Israel's military police), faraway lands like Peru, the ripe age of 96 or a home he dreamed of. He dreamed of quite a few and moved again and again, so besides the determination I should also credit him for the travel-bug-gene.

After WWII, still in British uniform, my grandpa visited Rome and happened to be on St. Peter's square when Pope pius XII came out to greet the multitudes. My grandfather did not bow as the others. Religion meant less than nothing to him, but he remembered that Jews were not supposed to bow before a human being and that fit well with his stubborn, irreverent spirit.

The Pope approached the only man on the square left standing, noticed the symbol of the Jewish Brigade on his shoulder, and said to him in Hebrew: יברכך ה' וישמרך - may God bless you and protect you, the opening words of Judaism's most potent benediction.

A man who's gutsy enough to stay standing has little need for God's protection. A determined human being fulfills his own wishes. The night my grandfather met my grandmother he returned to barracks and told his fellow officers: "Tonight I met the woman I'll marry." Sure enough, the beautiful Malka Shtul was to be by his side for life. This life ended last night, but the determination remains in us, a very fine gift indeed.

Arabiyah Kushkushiyah

I spent the better part of yesterday interviewing members of the old Zionist militia "Haganah" for an article. I fell in love with them, these beautiful, silvery moustached men and ever-young ladies. I believe that they were the right people at the right time and that what their struggle was justified. Zionism was once a neccesity, a reality, a calling.

It no longer is so for me. How does Zionism die in the heart? Here's a review of three major turning points in my experience. In other words: here's how I became a self-hating traitor worthy of being thrown in the sea with all the Arabs, in three simple steps:

1. When I was eleven years old, the first Intifada was raging outside my Jerusalem window. At the time the news was only about one thing: wild, angry Palestinian boy throwing stones at soldiers, who responded with rubber bullets. I couldn't believe the viciousness of the boys. Didn't they know that tossed stones could kill? There was some talk about that in the press too, how deadly a weapon they were. We' on the other hand were humane, using virtual toys as ammunition.

Then one day I saw, in the newspaper, a cross section of a rubber bullet. It was only rubber on the surface, inside it was metal. Yes, Rubber bullets don't tend to be lethal, but they can seriously wound and are the sause of many a lost eye. Toys? not quite. Those were rubber-coated bullets. Using the term "rubber bullets" was a lie, one intended to make us feel better about ourselves. Eleven year olds don't like being lied to. Step 1 was completed.

2. When I was fourteen years old and living in Washington DC, we read an exceptionally interesting book in class. It was “Black Boy” by Richard Wright.

In his record of growing up black in the deep South, Wright recounts how he and his childhood friends would stand outside the store of the town's only Jew and sing:

Jew Jew
How do you Chew?

and also:

Jew Jew
Two for five
That's what keeps
Jews alive

Bloody Christ killers
Never trust a Jew
Bloody Christ killers
What won't a Jew do.

I was shocked that antisemitism filtered also to the ranks of southern blacks, who certainly knew the taste of prejudice. How could that be? I wondered, then suddenly remembered how me and my friends would stand by the fence of our kindergarten's yard and wait for Palestinian women to pass by, on their way to Shu'afat or Anata. Once a lady would pass, wearing an embroydered dress and balancing a full basket on her head, we would sing zestfully, loudly, over and over:

Arabiyah Kushkushaiya
Yesh la Tachat
Shel Gaviyah.

A bozo Arab woman
Has an ass
Like a wineglass.

When my parents caught ear of this they strongly repremended me, but the memory remained supressed for nearly a decade. Once it surfaced, I was changed. I may have accepted rubber bullets for a while, but I didn't shoot them. The case of Arabiyah Kushkushiyah was different. I grew up in an environment in which intolerance was tolerated. I had to wonder how that was possible.

3. Watching this morning a clip of MK Haneen Zoabi speaking at the Knesset made me sick to my stomach. The speaker of the house, Reuven Rivlin, is pretending to silence the restless auditorium, while in fact not letting Zoabi, who was aboard the Gaza flotilla, speak a word. At one point he tells her to shorten her speech to a minute and a half. By that point Zoabi spoke only two sentences. She protests and he tells her: "you've been speaking for five minutes."

In my mind, I add words he leaves unsaid: "You've been speaking for five minutes, Arabiyah Kushkushiyah".

"You spoke enough, shut up or I'll shoot a rubber bullet into one of your dirty Arab eyes. Choose which."

The Knesset this morning stripped Zoabi of certain privilages reserved to its members and the campaign to remove her as public servent is ablaze. Right wing parlamentarians have recently worked hard promoting various initiatives that would deprive non-Zionist citizens of their rights. Today Minister of the Interior Eli Yishai proposed to strip of citizenship "Anyone who acts disloyaly towards the State".

In the days of the Haganah, such move was certainly not unthinkable and indeed no Arabs were members of the Pre-state Zionist establishment. My interviwees of yesterday were at war with the country's Arab population. Hell, one of these sweet grandmothers admitted to burning a village, with dynamite, not rubber or rubber-coated bullets. Yes, but this was in 1946, before the State was founded. It's now 2010. Our national idology has for years not been what it wishes to be, what it pretends to be. We have a bullet, a song and a speech to learn from. Let's be attentive to all three and change our way of thinking.

The Last Outpost

You really need to know the right Admiral to visit the fortress at Atlit. It's a closed military zone.

I'm a bit lucky with knowing those who hold keys to forbidden places. Knowing the right German journalist, I got to join her as translator to the village of Rajar, north of Israel's fenced border with Lebanon. Knowing the right creative taxi driver lets me go in and out of Ramallah, where I'm not legally allowed.

Now I've met the right admiral too. As part of a non-military-related joint project he actually requested me to visit the unreachable coastal gem, 70 kilometers north of Tel-Aviv. I'm grateful to him for the oppurtunity and for the base's sweet and knowledgable education officer for walking us through.

Atlit is even further off limits than the other two locations. It's only open to several elite units of the Israeli navy. The ancient fortress, dating back to 1217 AD, is situated on a narrow peninsula securing a quiet bay and keeping it hidden. This provides the navy's commando and other units with discreet conditions ideal for secret operations and training. Naturally, I was allowed to take no photos. The one above is from Google, taken from outside the base's fences.

Even deprivation has its advantages. Yes, the public is banned from this ancient paradise, but thus it remains paradise. Tall thistles were in purple bloom on the ruins that I haven't seen in coastal Israel since my childhood. They are extinct mostly everywhere here. Walking on a barely beaten path among enormous bushes of prickly pear, the fantastic stone walls, the blue skies and gushing sea, was an intensely sensual experience.

Putting a railing along the path or carving stairs unto the ragged rocks would doubtlessly kill the place in a way, not to mention opening a branch of some cafe chain nearby. The soldiers seem to be treating the ruins with utter respect. I saw no signs of vandalism, trash or recent damage. If only the Israeli army treated certain people this way.

Underground, in caverns dug by the fabled Templar knights, bats were screaming. At times more than 1000 knights resided in this Middle Eastern Mont St. Michel, under the spire of an octagonal Gothic church of which little remains. Octagonal it was indeed. Those were the knights who received the Temple Mount to live on. Al-Aqsa was their headquarters. The octagonal dome of the rock was their church and all their other churches were designed in its spirit.

Atlit's fortress, with its exceedingly tall towers and walls, was never conquered. King Friedrich II of the Holy Roman Empire tried to overtake it from within while staying as a guest. He ended up imprisoned in its dungeons. Muslims who attacked it from the mainland, leaving still visible scars on the forbidding walls, finally burned the fort's fields in anguish and retreated. At the fall of the crusader kingdom, Château Pèlerin on the Carmel coast remained its last outpost.

The knights, seeing no way to recover control of the Holy Land on their own, left to sea. Later came an earthquake and demolished their extraordinary town, leaving in its wake a few strange relics: the carved faces of a man and a woman on a pillar, a moat overgrown with wild coastal weeds and one huge tower, clearly seen from the Haifa-Tel-Aviv highway, awaiting days of peace when it will receive all who are hungry for ancient beauty.

We

Israelis who feel more and more estranged from the collective psyche have some thinking to do tonight. If Holocaust commemoration day, which was observed last week, is charged, then Israeli memorial day, which begins tonight at sunset, is truly a challenge.

Israel has a powerful collective identity. We say "we" a lot, referring to Israelis as a whole. This is rooted in Jewish culture. The Passover Haggadah direclty states: "In every generation a person is obligated to see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt." Later on in the text, historical first person is introduced: "He took us from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, and from mourning to festivity..."

Us?

Ok, let's fulfill our obligation and assume it was us. It shouldn't be difficult, since there's no baggage involved. "We" probably shouldn't feel bad for inflicting the ten plagues. Firstly, it was "him" who did it, not "us". Secondly, "we" were slaves. Alex Haley would have approved.

A week following passover comes yom hashoa - Holocaust commemoration day. "We" had our beards cut off on the street in the 30, "We" were starved and gassed in Birkenau, "We" were slaughtered in Babi Yar.

Yes, several of the people who live in this country are Holocaust survivors and can use the word "we" in its original sense. The rest of us should probably be more humble. We were never in Babi Yar. We have no idea what it feels like to be starved and tortured. Sabras poked fun at refugees who came from Europe in the late 40's, calling them "soaps". This state has for decades been delaying compensation payments to survivors.

The trauma of the Holocaust does of course filter to the younger generations. It is very real and effects the actions of the Israeli society and state, still, the collective Holocaust identity is problamatic. It carries even less responsibility than that of the Hagaddah. "We" may have inflicted one or more bullet holes on the SS men in the Warsaw Ghetto, but "they" deserved it big time. By the way, "They" are now in Iran and Gaza and even Jaffa and the Oval office. A collective fear and grudge can be an enormous political treasure.

Then comes Yom Hazikaron - memorial day. "We" mourn "our" dead, victims of the wars and acts of terrorism. The fact that hostility in the region is a current reality that tragically effects both "us" and "them" is forgotten. The idea that the definition of "we" may be expanded to include everyone who lives between the Jordan and the sea, or maybe even every human being, is not acknowledged. "We" are always the same "us", so "they" must always be the same "them". No chance we'll make this day a day of mutual mourning and of aspiration for peace. What? after Babi Yar?! You must be kidding us!

There are several brave individuals who challange this concept of identity. Tonight at 21:00 an alternative memorial event will be held in Tel-Aviv's Tmuna theatre. It is organized by "Combatants for Peace" and features the voice of Palestinian pain as well as the Israeli one. I attended the Tmuna event last year and left it tantalized. a song by Zeev Tene about losing a friend at war and a speech by Bassam aramin, whose ten year-old daughter was killed by soldiers, both left me in tears.

Tonight I'll skip the event and go have a low key dinner with friends, but trust me, I'm mourning. "I" mourn our fallen and their fallen and the very fact anyone has to die for this sad strip of gravel. Once "we" are no longer the issue, the actual dimensions of the tragedy are revealed, and the day becomes all the darker.

(Artwork by Samuel Bak)

What I know because I'm a Jew

This city I live in is meaningless. It may be destroyed.
This home I live in is meaningless. It may be burned.
This object I hold dear is meaningless. It may be stolen.
This person I love is meaningless. They may be shot tomorrow.
This business I built is meaningless. It may be shut down.
This job I value is meaningless. I may get fired anyday.
This country I love is meaningless. I may get deported tomorrow.
This God I worship is meaningless. He may not stand by me.
This neighbor I trust in is meaningless. He may hand me in.
This freedom I have is meaningless. I may be jailed tomorrow.
This life I cherish is meaningless. I may be murdered tomorrow.
This moment I take to think of all this is everything. I am free.

Aux Armes

Sitting on a bus going through the slushy Polish countryside, I overhear a conversation about the two Warsaw insurrections, that of 1943, and that of 1944.

Oops. what is that about? I grew up learning of only one insurrection, the insanely heroic, ill-fated Ghetto uprising of 1943. I interfere the Pole and the Englishwoman who are chatting behind me and ask them about the other one.

The Pole then tells me an amazing story: As the Red Army was nearing the Vistula, in 1944, the people of Warsaw decided to take arms against the Nazis, in hope that Russian aid was near.

The Russians chose to wait west of the river and let the locals "do the job". While they waited, 250,000 Warsaw residents died in battle or were murdered by the Nazis. After two months of strife. The Germans kicked everyone out of the city and burned it to the ground as an act of revenge. 80% of Warsaw was destroyed, the carnage was greater than that of any other European city.

Dramatic, ha? How come I've never heard of any of this? I'm 33 years old, my roots are Polish, my people's history is strongly interwoven with that of the Polish people, but none of it was ever told to me in class, in Yad Vashem, in conversation about history... It seems as tough the Israeli education system makes sure we see no one's disaster but our own.

Is it an accidental hole in our education? I doubt it. Keeping silent about the suffering of others, or belittling it to the point that it's "not even worth mentioning", facilitates portraying us as eternal victims and the rest of the world as antisemitic. I hate to say so, but ignorance is a political tool in Israel, as it is in many other places.

It works, too. If you ask most Israelis about the relationship between Poles and Germans during the Holocaust, they'll tell you the Poles are an antisemitic people who handed Jews in to the Nazis gladly. No word about insurrections, about the murder of multitudes, about Polish prisoners in the camps, about destroyed cities.

We are vaguely aware of Poles who protected Jews, the "righteous among the nations". i'm glad about that, but even that is a Jewish issue. We know nothing of the disaster suffered by Poland during the war. The first time I arrived in this country, after finishing 12 years of Israeli schooling, I was stunned, no one told me any of this, and for a reason.

Last summer I traveled through Galizia with a group of Israeli guides who show the death camps to groups of Israeli schoolkids. the tour, organized by the polish government, was meant to show the guides "Polish Poland" so that they can give students background on the country, not only from a Holocaust perspective. Jewish and holocaust sites were also featured by the Polish planners, but they were not the focus.

For the most part, the Polish sites were canceled by the Israelis, who cared nothing for them. On several days we ended up visiting only Jewish sites, especially the remains of old synagogues, sometimes four in a day. Those additions to the program were truly moving places, relics of the tragically lost world of Galizian Jewery, but focusing on them beats the purpose: to learn more about something besides our own history.

It is very important that we develop empathy, because we seek empathy. It is also important because without empathy, compassion is impossible, and in our situation in the Middle East we must develop a capacity for compassion.

Knowing of the suffering of others is the key to both empathy and compassion. The Israeli ministry of education, especially under the current minister Gideon Saar, consciously keeps that information away from students, and not only in the case of Poland. prefer unquestioned patriotism to these two qualities.