Seeing Reality In the Land of Israel

Clouds roll out as storms break? by Susan Weinstein

Dear friends, 

It took some serious manuevering, many hours spent on internet travel websites, days of worry and stress and a bucket of luck or divine support, but I landed in Ben Gurion airport a few days ago. I write to you from what was my early childhood bedroom and is now my father's study, with the familiar view of olive trees, bougainvilleas and houses built from old Jerusalem stone.

This morning around 5:30 I had a strange moment of dejavu. I was awakened from my deep, jet-lagged sleep by my father touching me lightly and saying "there's an alarm. We have to go down to the safe room." It was a confusing moment, not only because I was so fast asleep, but because I remember so clearly that very same wake up 35 years ago during the Gulf War. Then we used to go upstairs to the sealed room, because the greater concern was that Saddam Hussein would send rockets with chemical weapons, and those chemicals are heavier than air so the whole country went upstairs instead of down. This morning we huddled together in the coat closet under the stairway for ten minutes, in the middle of which we heard the interception of the rocket, until the announcement to leave the safe rooms came, and we went back to bed.

The Gulf War was the first time I ever came to New York. My parents decided they need to get me out. Despite my protests - teen age me felt guilty abandoning my people in their time of trouble - my father and little brother dropped me off in New York with my friend Eytan, whom I'd spend much of that war with. Now I came the other way.

Coming here is a bit like waking up into a strange twilight. Most of us Jews in the diaspora live with a rich connection to this place, that is primarily in the imaginative realm. Things happen here and we fill with emotion over there, and it creates realities in America that we take to be real. But they're not. At least not in the sense that you get when you come here and connect with the reality as it appears at the source. We are captive to our feelings and ideas about a place that we live oceans away from. So, for example I was surprised when both my sister-in-law and my good friend told me that the hardest moment in the last month was when the war with Iran ended and they were all expected to transition swiftly from fearing for their lives to the regular every day. The insanity of the whiplash was too much.

Or my mother, whose day-to-day reality includes a shift at the protest in front of the president's residence demanding a return of the hostages. When I sang her a verse from the Psalms yesterday - "Had I not believed that I would see the goodness of God in the land of the living..." She said: "That's hard." "True," I answered, "but you just came back from an afternoon with your grandchildren." "I'm thinking about the hostages and the Gazans," she said simply. 

There are two images that are simply everywhere in this country: the hostages and Israeli flags. "עד החטוף האחרון""Until the last hostage (is returned)," the signs you see all over the place read. In America the yellow ribbon means something quite different than it does here. Though more nuanced, over there it ultimately implies support for Israel. Here it means primarily a rejection of the government who is considered to have brought about October 7th ,and then proceeded to break the basic social covenant upon which the state is built, that we are responsible for one another. Over and over you walk by signs blaming the government for abandoning the hostages, and prolonging the war that endangers them, and has killed many of them.

But by far the most dream-like, strange experience I had so far on this trip, which was also the most connected to simple reality, was my near-sleepless night in Ras El-Ayn. I went down with my father and another two activists to perform what's known as protective presence in a Palestinian village in the Jordan valley. The neighboring village, Mu'arajat succumbed last week to years of settler harassment, intimidation, threats, theft and violence, and all of its inhabitants left. After a night in which settlers raided the village, pepper sprayed children in their homes, stole large amounts of money and destroyed property, all under the protection of the Israeli security forces, they decided it's time to leave. 

The village we came to has gone through similar things. The settlers have already built an (illegal under Israeli law) outpost right next to the village. Each day and night volunteers from Mistaklim LaKibush Ba'eynayim, Looking the Occupation in the Eyes, and other groups show up to be with the villagers in every frequent event in which the settlers descend on their village. The police and the army have long stopped responding to Palestinian calls for help. And now they don't respond to the Jewish activists’ calls either. Only when settlers call do they respond. The regional chief of police announced this week that supporting the settlers is a higher priority for the police than the rule of law. Nonetheless, the presence of activists prevents a lot of violence and damage. My short videos below will give you a sense of the beauty of the landscape, of the situation villagers and activists face, of what it all looks like. But I'll tell you this - no reading, viewing of videos, talking to people who have been there or anything else can sink what is actually happening into your body. Only being there and seeing it with your own eyes does that. The main commandment of Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem is called "seeing." Because only seeing with your eyes, experiencing with your senses has the ability to make you truly understand certain situations. 

What did I see? 

An old Sheikh sit with us and tell us over tea of how he used to live in the building where we were spending the night in 1980, how warm his relations used to be with the Jewish settlers in the kibbutz nearby, and how he doesn't think the water from the spring has dwindled this year because of the settlers nefarious actions, but because there was too little rain this winter.

Several warm, appreciative villagers trying to learn Hebrew, and teaching us Arabic.

The lights of Aman blinking all night long, where the villagers’ extended family live a very different reality on the same strip of land.

A 17 year old Jew with a big baton leading a flock of sheep right up to the house of a Palestinian woman and her two year old kid to intimidate them and show her who owns the land.

A Tel-Avivi Jew in his late forties stand confidently between those sheep and the house and speak with no fear to the wild 17-year-old. 

A brilliant 28-year-old woman who was forced out of her village, building a new life a few kilometers away, on a hill overlooking her old home. "We will plant," she told us, since the new location does not allow for the family to keep sheep, as was their trade for centuries. 

Palestinian strangers on the side of the road in the outskirts of Jericho come up to this kipa-wearing Jew who's writing these words with outstretched arms saying "peace be upon you!"

I saw the Land of Israel caught in the terrible grip of the State of Israel.

"I can't tell if we're on the cusp of a big transformation, a new day rising out of all this shit," my brother said to me, "or if we'll never get out of it."

In Ras El Ayn I didn't sleep. Not because of the fear or the settlers. Just because the dog and his friends wouldn't stop barking. At 3am I walked out to look at the stars and the nearly full moon. Then the dog quieted down, and I finally slept. 

Shabbat shalom, 
Rabbi Misha