Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The Cancer of Ignorance

Yesterday morning I awoke in a fit of rage. It took about an hour and a half and a strong cup of coffee for the cause to reach the surface but finally it did and the tears of frustration started rolling down my cheeks. A conversation about an upcoming field trip to the Arab-Israeli city of Umm al-Fahem with a religious couple that I know was received with the, perhaps, expected response of -- aren't you afraid? shouldn't you have security? shouldn't you .....?

And in my defensive knee-jerk reaction, I retorted, "'They are people too." Arabs, that is.

Toward the end of the visit, the religious couple mentioned that of course Arabs are people too but "we" Jews/Israelis don't kill people like they do. They, we, do, don't, us, them, versus, bad, better, good.

In the moment, I never know why these comments bother me. I need time to process what doesn't sit well with me. But then it comes.

Today, the State of Israel has a Jewish majority with a valid sense of historic and current victimhood, and a belief that survival by all means necessary is justified. Please make no mistake. Today, there is plenty of anti-Semitism. There is a constant call for the destruction of the State of Israel in Iran, in Yemen, in Indonesia, in Gaza, in so many places. These threats are not to be undermined and they are not to be overlooked or ignored. Rockets continue to fall on Ashkelon, Ashdod, Sderot. Same story, different year.

Living in Israel, I understand the need for a security apparatus on steroids. Really, I do. I understand the history and the mistrust and the effects on the baggage that a history of persecution has on a society, pretending to be normal, with their Juicy Couture, Uggs, BMWs and reality t.v. shows, a shameful import from the United States.

However, what alarms me, and will continue to alarm me is the ignorance that the majority of the Jewish-Israeli population has toward its collective ability to support and promote and engage in structural violence, cruelty, torture, killings, murders, etc....all those things that "we" don't do.

It is very dangerous when a people becomes convinced that it has no dark side.

Unlike the Arabs, in Jewish Israel we have secret service agencies, police, army, navy, and so on and so forth. They do the dirty work for us. We don't have to randomly kill out of frustration, we have a system that takes care of the "enemy" for us. We don't need bulldozers gone awry in the streets of Jerusalem, we have government funded ones that tear down homes in neighborhoods where Jews decide they are the ones who should inhabit the streets of East Jerusalem instead of the Arab families living there. We don't put bombs on children passing through checkpoints because we have teenagers who shoot suspicious people from rooftops, snipers unseen.

I hear the voices of protest. The voices of you don't know what "they" are like. You don't know, you aren't from here, you don't....

But I can see, feel, read and hear. And I can see how the collective society of Jewish-Israel takes no responsibility and makes no connection between action and reaction. I read how an influx of African refugees, Filipino caregivers, Thai construction workers are accused of threatening the character of the State. How Ethiopian Jewish children are bullied out of public schools by parents who don't want that color going to school with their kids.

No country is perfect, but no country in the world is so self-convinced that it is something that it so isn't, at the popular level. Just because you look it doesn't mean you are "it".

But we have a free press....

So we have a free press, and the journalists are screaming through their printed words that this place is insane, that we are bigots, racists, that Zionism is dead, that we forgot where we came from, that the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the Courts and the system are being violated time and again. And nearly no one responds. So what good is a free press if people aren't inspired to action by it? So it's a confessional? A dumping ground for those "leftists"? Lovely. Again, if it looks like a democracy on paper, it must be so. Apparently the memo that democracy doesn't exist anywhere and is always in process did not arrive on the desk of any decisionmaker ever to roam the halls of the Israeli Knesset.

In my humble opinion, it has become too easy in Israel to write off the other as just that. Broad generalizations, stereotyping, racial profiling....

My grandfather (may his memory be for a blessing) survived the Nazi death camps of Buchenwald and Dachau. In the last twenty years of his life, he sacrificed his own mental health to speak to youth about the horrors and the lessons of the Holocaust. The man wasn't perfect and he had his issues. Who doesn't? But from him more than anyone else, I learned that underneath the skin we all have the same red blood. We all behave badly. But we also have the strength to question those feelings, to put them in perspective, to understand how threat and scarcity can make us like animals. We have a choice in how we behave and sometimes, authority does NOT know best, and we have to question it and ourselves at all times. We are all capable of committing genocide, of shutting the other out when we perceive that the other threatens who we are and the system which we accept by habit, or by force, or by igorance. We are so weak in the face of hatred. It is unsettling.

You'd think after 2,000 years of exile and centuries of persecution, the Jewish people would get it, that they aren't going to fall into the dust, forgotten by history. No, the Jewish people persist and thrive against all odds. But today, I feel that in the context of the State of Israel, the means employed to survive do not justify the end. This society is sick, it is permeated with a cancer characterized by ignorance. It needs medicine, attention, and an honest look in the mirror. Because all I see are worms, decay, filth, and debris, beneath a thin veneer of Tommy Hilfiger and H&M. And I don't think it's sustainable. In fact, I hope it's not. No, I'm not calling for an end to the state. I'm just begging for a serious and meaningful overhaul from the inside, before someone on the outside forces it upon us.

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