Leave to Love It

It may very well be impossible to acclimate to the humid summers of Tel Aviv. Each year, around spring, which in Israel lasts approximately three to three and a half weeks, I try to imagine what it feels like at 2am on any night in August on Ben Yehuda Street only two blocks east of the Mediterranean Sea. The sensation of swimming through the air, sweating from the backs of my knees, the creases of my elbows, the temples, the upper lip, even from the sweat glands I didn't know about, located on my wrists. In those cool mornings of March, where the breeze is heavenly and the sun still delicate, the amnesia is the strongest and I think to myself, "this year I'll handle it better, this year the heat probably won't get to me."

Well, this year I reached a new low. After a summer of kicking taxis insensitive to pedestrians (mostly after very centering yoga lessons), throwing popcorn at a woman who physically assaulted me at the movie theater, and yelling at library security guards and bathroom maintenance women at Tel Aviv University for getting up in my business, I was itching to board that plane on August 15th, regardless of the nearly 8,000 miles that would separate me and my new husband for nearly three weeks. I had reached the point where hearing the Hebrew language itself made my heart beat faster, my already tense jaw clench tighter, and my blood boil a little hotter. I needed a break -- from the buses, from the news, from the religious, from the ways in which Israel is foreign to me -- an American by birth, an Israeli by choice, an alien by happenstance.

Waiting in line to go through customs at LAX, I experienced another episode of the experimentation with base behavior that I am currently trying out. A young woman standing behind me, holding her purse with an extended arm so that the leather mass kept banging against my ankles, brought out the inner monster in me. In a quick movement, I kicked up my heel, forcibly removing the purse from my range, just as the customs officer motioned for me to approach his podium. I didn't look back, I didn't care if I had scared the woman or received a look colored with disbelief or with disgust. Nothing could shame me out of the rage I'd been feeling in the six weeks of an increasingly scorching Tel Aviv summer, and the unshakable sense of entitlement to lash out against anyone who dared to get in my way.

From the safety and serenity of my parents' home, I have had the opportunity to explore this rage, this anger, this coming to the end of my rope, and what I have discovered is something much deeper than: it's just the heat that gets to me.

I think it became clear the morning that the story of the Israeli soldier posing demurely and provocatively with blindfolded Palestinian prisoners broke. As I read with horror the details of the photographs' content and the crass response of the young woman to whom they belonged, I felt the gravity and the despair that becoming a part of Israeli society has imparted upon me. And then, strangely, a moment of clarity and hope inflated my spirits the next moment after.

Israel is a place of myth and fantasy juxtaposed next to a despicable and inhumane reality. It is a place of innocence and the darkest forms of premeditated injustice, it is a place of survival, it is a place of human beings thrashing about trying to exist in a very ugly world, that is often indescribably beautiful as well.

It is challenging to explain what I mean.

It is disorientating to live in Israel. To do so one is constantly asked to live in a state of somewhere in between the past and the present. History is constantly being rewritten and reexamined, as though doing so will bring about greater understanding and an end to dispute. But as so many histories, so many truths are propagated, debated and published, it is difficult to keep track of what was, what is and what was wished would have been, that simply never was and probably never can or will be.

For many Jews who move to Israel, young and old alike, pioneers or those reuniting with family, the act of making aliyah is something of a rebirth and a chance to give purpose to one's life simply by paying the rent and taxes. To take one's place in a historical moment in which the Jews reclaimed a land that was promised and lost, regained and squandered, confiscated, and finally reconquered.

I believe that the realization of that dream seemed so surreal, so unbelievable and larger than anyone's imagination that, in coming to fruition, an assumption, perhaps fashioned out of gratitude and awe, was made or taught, that the inheritors of this part of Earth would be special, would be different, would know right from wrong, and when faced with moral dilemma, would always side with truth and justice. But it turns out they were and are just humans, capable of feeling hatred, bigotry, prejudice, xenophobia and every other blemish of the human psyche, particularly when every direction in which they turned and still revolve, they were and are met by the demons of human demise.

To the outsider thinking she wants in, what could be more devastating than waking up to the fact that the dream was only ever just that?

Bizarrely, that is where the hope sneaks in --- through the acknowledgment of rock bottom and the Knowing (and perhaps foolish, stubborn believing) that it could be better. That an army unit stationed at a check point in the West Bank has implemented a protocol involving morning greetings in Arabic language and direct eye contact with passersby, diminishing the incidence of hostile confrontations and smoother passage from morning until night at that particular checkpoint. That racism against Ethiopian citizens and African refugees finds itself as the headlines of the country's newspapers, becoming a national issue overnight. Isn't the first step to fixing a problem admitting that there is a problem needing to be dealt with in the first place? And while the time it takes to see change happen seems interminable, what else do we have in such abundance, but time itself?

Civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, welfare rights -- the movements for these rights didn't succeed in the matter of days or weeks, but rather after decades of violence, passive resistance -- decades of injustice, decades of hypocrisy that contributed to the articulation of the desire of the visionaries and the leaders for something different, something better, something that would honor human dignity.

I hate Israel. I love Israel. It's miserable. It's wonderful. It's a cesspool. It's a paradise. It is this and it is that and everything in between. It is the beginning and it is the end of understanding the glorious and the infamous human condition. And if only I knew the humidity would disappear by September 3rd, I'd be itching to get back.