![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jan. 7th, 2018 09:31 pm
Some Thoughts About Jerusalem
When I was a kid everyone around me supported Israel. Most of the adults had survived concentration camps or had been in hiding during World War II, so their support was axiomatic: If we’d had a place to go to, they said, we could have escaped this horror. Not even the United States would protect them, they thought; they knew, as most people of that time didn’t, that during the war Franklin Roosevelt had turned away a ship filled with Jewish refugees.
Then as now I read a lot of fantasy, and to me the story of Israel’s rebirth felt like a myth or a fairy tale. A people who had wandered the world for nearly 2,000 years had finally returned home. Even better, that home was a real place, somewhere on the map that I could visit.
So support for Israel was in the air I breathed — I didn’t even think about it. Then, in 1967, I became aware of a growing worry among the adults. Egypt was mobilizing troops on the Israeli border. Israel, which was only 19 years old, was facing extinction.
War started on June 5. Six days later Israel had not only survived, it had conquered great swathes of territory, including the Old City of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was at the heart of my almost mystical feeling for Israel, an ancient city where with one step you could find yourself among Roman ruins or Ottoman towers, Armenian church-goers or Orthodox Jewish schoolboys. The Messiah, it was said, would walk through one of the gates of the city, and the world would be utterly changed. There was a song popular in Israel at the time called “Jerusalem of Gold”: “Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light/ I am a violin for all your songs.” People said that Israeli soldiers were singing it as they conquered the city.
Two years later, when I was 15, my parents sent me to a kibbutz to learn more about Israel and to study Hebrew. Of course it couldn’t live up to my romantic notions; nothing could. People are people, everywhere. Still, a great many things surprised me, even shocked me. The little children who could identify every military plane that flew overhead. The desire of almost every boy in the country to become a paratrooper.
One day we took a trip to the West Bank. We were going to Hebron, to the Cave of Machpelah, the supposed burial site of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. (This was, as I said, in 1969. I don’t think it would be safe to go there now.) As we got back on the bus I looked out the window and saw an Arab woman sticking her tongue out at us. I stared at her, nonplussed. I felt a fierce, visceral desire to run off the bus and explain to her that she was wrong, that we weren’t the oppressors. We were the oppressed, and had been so for hundreds of years.
But, of course, we were in conquered territory, in land that had belonged to this woman, to the people of Hebron, for an untold number of years. A small boy, maybe three years old, was holding on to her skirts. I think about that boy every so often. If he’s still alive he’d be over fifty. He’s lived under the occupation of a foreign power his entire life.
I started losing my illusions after this. It happened slowly, over years, watching the news and reading books and talking to my Israeli relatives. I think the final stage came when I realized that Israel was making no move to leave the West Bank; that it was, on the contrary, building new settlements there.
Despite this, when our so-called president stumbled through a speech declaring that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, I felt a sort of elation. Jerusalem the golden, the seat of ancient kings, would take her proper place in the world at last.
An instant later sanity returned. Like all of this man’s ideas, this one is stupid and half-baked, and it also has the potential to cause a tremendous amount of harm. Not only that, Sheldon Adelson is one of its backers. We’ve come to an astonishing moment in US history, where apparently you get to make foreign policy if you donate enough money to the right people.
I have no idea what to do about Jerusalem. But I think any solution has to take into account this mystical feeling, on both sides. It isn’t logical; it has to do with songs and heroes and holy books, with the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque and the ruins of the Second Temple. It has to do with stories above all, about the poet-warrior King David and the wise sorcerer King Solomon, about the magic horse Buraq, who carried Mohammed to the Al Aqua Mosque and took him from there to heaven. It has to do with the desire for justice that runs through these stories like a song.
I still have hope that Israelis and Palestinians can come to some kind of agreement, though I might not see it in my lifetime. I only hope Trump doesn’t do too much damage in the meantime.
Then as now I read a lot of fantasy, and to me the story of Israel’s rebirth felt like a myth or a fairy tale. A people who had wandered the world for nearly 2,000 years had finally returned home. Even better, that home was a real place, somewhere on the map that I could visit.
So support for Israel was in the air I breathed — I didn’t even think about it. Then, in 1967, I became aware of a growing worry among the adults. Egypt was mobilizing troops on the Israeli border. Israel, which was only 19 years old, was facing extinction.
War started on June 5. Six days later Israel had not only survived, it had conquered great swathes of territory, including the Old City of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was at the heart of my almost mystical feeling for Israel, an ancient city where with one step you could find yourself among Roman ruins or Ottoman towers, Armenian church-goers or Orthodox Jewish schoolboys. The Messiah, it was said, would walk through one of the gates of the city, and the world would be utterly changed. There was a song popular in Israel at the time called “Jerusalem of Gold”: “Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light/ I am a violin for all your songs.” People said that Israeli soldiers were singing it as they conquered the city.
Two years later, when I was 15, my parents sent me to a kibbutz to learn more about Israel and to study Hebrew. Of course it couldn’t live up to my romantic notions; nothing could. People are people, everywhere. Still, a great many things surprised me, even shocked me. The little children who could identify every military plane that flew overhead. The desire of almost every boy in the country to become a paratrooper.
One day we took a trip to the West Bank. We were going to Hebron, to the Cave of Machpelah, the supposed burial site of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. (This was, as I said, in 1969. I don’t think it would be safe to go there now.) As we got back on the bus I looked out the window and saw an Arab woman sticking her tongue out at us. I stared at her, nonplussed. I felt a fierce, visceral desire to run off the bus and explain to her that she was wrong, that we weren’t the oppressors. We were the oppressed, and had been so for hundreds of years.
But, of course, we were in conquered territory, in land that had belonged to this woman, to the people of Hebron, for an untold number of years. A small boy, maybe three years old, was holding on to her skirts. I think about that boy every so often. If he’s still alive he’d be over fifty. He’s lived under the occupation of a foreign power his entire life.
I started losing my illusions after this. It happened slowly, over years, watching the news and reading books and talking to my Israeli relatives. I think the final stage came when I realized that Israel was making no move to leave the West Bank; that it was, on the contrary, building new settlements there.
Despite this, when our so-called president stumbled through a speech declaring that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, I felt a sort of elation. Jerusalem the golden, the seat of ancient kings, would take her proper place in the world at last.
An instant later sanity returned. Like all of this man’s ideas, this one is stupid and half-baked, and it also has the potential to cause a tremendous amount of harm. Not only that, Sheldon Adelson is one of its backers. We’ve come to an astonishing moment in US history, where apparently you get to make foreign policy if you donate enough money to the right people.
I have no idea what to do about Jerusalem. But I think any solution has to take into account this mystical feeling, on both sides. It isn’t logical; it has to do with songs and heroes and holy books, with the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque and the ruins of the Second Temple. It has to do with stories above all, about the poet-warrior King David and the wise sorcerer King Solomon, about the magic horse Buraq, who carried Mohammed to the Al Aqua Mosque and took him from there to heaven. It has to do with the desire for justice that runs through these stories like a song.
I still have hope that Israelis and Palestinians can come to some kind of agreement, though I might not see it in my lifetime. I only hope Trump doesn’t do too much damage in the meantime.