Living the Ugly Truths

I arrived here last February to start an internship that I knew would challenge my faith and my opinion of the Jewish State of Israel and consequently force me to scrutinize my people, the Jewish People and its management of the much-longed for State of Israel. I knew that coming across unlimited volumes, websites, books, journals, magazines, newspapers and people dedicated to exposing the injustices that occur here both against Palesitians and Israeli citizens as well, would shatter any romantic notion that I retained about Israel as a place where people came together to create something different from the rest of the world-- and that I wanted to be a part of it as a Jew.

In spite of the fact that I had prepared myself for accepting ugly truths, I don't think I understood what it meant to continue to live among the ugly truths.

I found a diary that I wrote in when I was ten years old. In it there are short paragraphs describing my desire to be helpful to the world, to make it better. To do good-- perhaps I even used the words human rights, I can't remember specifically now. I mention this because sometimes I think I'm a great fool to continue trying to do what I said I wanted to do when I was ten. Sometimes I wish I was in computer software or engineering or fashion or bookkeeping, something that would allow me to do my job 40 hours a week and be content with going to the mall, watching television programs on the weekends and the occasional opportunity to travel.

If I were pursuing any one of the professions mentioned above, I would find a decent paying job in Israel. I would live in Tel Aviv, as I do now, unabashedly throw myself into continuing to fall in love,and thus be able to ignore the constant state of violence being carried out only a few hours drive from where I am. Perhaps I would be able to see the conflict in black and white and I would fall asleep at night, trusting that the army and the government of Israel are acting in the best interest of the people and what they are doing is in the interest of my security and those of my neighbors. And when I read in the newspapers of arrests of Palestinians in the night, and young children killed in the soccer fields of Gaza because their people launch rockets from them and the children become casualties when the Israeli army retaliates, I would maybe accept that this is how it is, and no matter what the world says in condemnation or concern, Israel has to defend itself.

But every day, I read several news sources, each one more illuminating but simultaneously confusing in their descriptions and analysis of how and why decisions are made to manage the occupation or to defend the nation.

I get really worked up about all of this each day because I'm used to doing good and feeling good about it. In the States, when I helped Tibetan Buddhist nuns, or made a donation to the Heifer Foundation, planned a screening of documentary about Tibet for Students for a Free Tibet, it felt very satisfying to plan and execute a project. To receive the acknowledgment for the efforts and to be assured by employers, executive directors, peers and professors that my work has made a difference.

Here, I can work and work and work at "doing good" well, but at the end of the day, when I put my head on the pillow at night, another soldier is barging into the home of a Palestinian family, another alarm goes off in Sderot, giving the residents 15 seconds to take cover before the rocket explodes on the ground. For all the "good" work that I attempt to do and that of my colleagues in other organizations of peace making, we don't make the decisions for military incursions or high alerts at the checkpoints. We are not the commanders that set the examples of dehumanizing Palestinians, we do not teach lessons of tolerance in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms. Even though hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are working for peace in Israel and the Occupied Territories, it is one rocket, one suicide bomber, one assassination that can transform the tentative stability of today into chaos.

And the people here are so accustomed to this cycle of violence, the imagination for something different, something better that a return to bomb shelters and self-fulfilling prophecies is unbearably absent.

And there isn't much that I can do about it.

I can make my home beautiful. I can light Shabbat candles, eat sweet challah, put flowers all around and buy vibrant rugs from Egypt from a vendor on Dizengoff, but, unfortunately, it doesn't satisfy this persistent desire to witness a change, to be here for the reconciliation of two peoples that the world seems to thrive upon their misfortune.