Being Human is Enough

Different Israelis have different opinions about being Israeli. Naturally.
There are those with immense national pride. There are those with great guilt and shame. There are Israelis with resentment of a condemning world. There are Israelis whose lives are not affected by that upon which the world is focused in this region but rather, and simply, their own lives.

But what most fascinates me, or gets thinking sometimes is the generation of Israelis that are my peers. Young, educated, pursuing professions in medicine, law, engineering, product design, journalism, linguistics and so on and so forth, who are not interested in being Jewish. They know the stories of Purim and Hanukah, the traditions of Yom Kippur and Rosh HaShanah. They are aware of the customs and practices and rigid, manipulated rules of the religious community. They do not keep kosher. They shake their heads at the aspects of Judaism that may sound strange to someone on "the outside."

They are not concerned whether or not their partners are also Jewish or whether or not they will raise families and grow old in Israel. They are not concerned with the Zionist dream, and definitely not with the more religious Zionism that is prevalent today.

But they are Jewish and most of them are Israeli because their Jewish families fled from Eastern Europe before or during or after World War II. Certainly, particularly among the families of European descent, reasons for coming to Israel stemmed from too long a history of anti-Semitism. Different rules for the Jewish people. Different opportunities for learning, discrimination in schools. State and local government organized sabotage of businesses, talent, revoking of property and other rights of ownership.

These Israelis are the descendants of families who created the modern State of Israel. Perhaps their grandparents were religious in that they kept kosher and attended synagogue, married only other Jewish people and envisioned a future for the Jewish heritage, in the land of Israel. Perhaps they weren't. Perhaps they were the cultural Zionists who wanted to revive Hebrew as a modern language and simply create a haven for the Jewish People because no matter where or what era, there always seems to be a problem for being who they are.

A voice inside of my head speaks when I meet Israelis not interested in being Jewish. It says something along the lines of, what a shame it is that the parents and grandparents of some of my Israeli contemporaries sacrificed and chanced their lives to come here where they could be Jewish. What a shame that one, two generations later that which they held so dear and that which was the cause of ostracization from other nation-states is so easily tossed aside for a secular existence.

The voice asks, doesn't the ancient Jewish heritage of which you are a part mean anything to you?

Then another voice makes itself heard. It asks, is it their humanity or their Judaism that was and is more valuable?

In the Jewish community-at-large there is, at some level and in some communities more than others, an underlying message of the fear of extinction. That through intermarriage and rapidly reproducing Arabs, as examples, the Jewish People, the Jewish Race will gradually decrease and threaten to disappear. But, is that why the Jewish People had and have a right to a land of their own?

It's a strange stream of thoughts that I am having in which the reason there are Israelis today, the ones whose families came here before World War II and because of World War II, is because their families were fleeing persecution for being Jewish. Human but Jewish. Now, these young Israelis, who are also Jews are eschewing their heritage because it no longer, in most of the world, is a hindrance to the pursuit of their dreams and aspirations. The very thing contributing, literally, to some of my peers (Israeli) existence is something they very adamantly wish not to make as a part of their lives today.

I wonder how this plays into the conflict. The humanity of today's "other" (in this region at least) the Palestinians. People who deserve a land not in my mind because they are Palestinian but because they are people with human rights that the majority of the global community, at least on paper, has agreed to work to promote and uphold.But apparently we don't see each other as simply but most importantly human. We "deserve" independence because "we" are Palestinians, because "they" are Jews or Tibetans or East Timorese or Kurdish or Kosovar and histories of each other's inhumanities to one another are what merit a people's right to sovereignty, when enough other people who have power manage to influence more people to take action to get the deprived and persecuted people some safety and respect on territory upon which they can create or rebuild the present and therefore the future.

And all these clashing aspects of identity -- that fill the newspapers, academic journals, books, seminars, think tanks, policy groups with material for critical analysis and evaluation, as the causes of the conflict, the obstacles to explore and negotiate in order to get beyond impasse become less salient and precious once that goal of self-rule is attained. That people fight with everything they have, their survival instinct, to be "who" they are as a "people", only to achieve that goal of self-determination as a Jewish people, for instance, so as to have the choice to simply let it go.


I don't quite understand what I am getting at except maybe I'm tired of finding reasons translated through the language of history, religion, politics to express why I believe there should be an Israel, why I believe there should be a Palestine. Isn't it enough that we are human and expect to have the same rights to life as those of our neighbors?