The beginnings of rambling thoughts

Last night I stayed out until 4 in the morning. A friend of a friend of a friend was graduating from a masters program and we sat on the rooftop of a hotel on the beach in northern Tel Aviv sipping champagne, dipping our feet in the pool and dancing with Israelis, Americans and Europeans to bad American music. Because even at 4 in the morning the temperature was still hovering around 90 degrees, I made everyone walk home along the beach, and we spent an hour wading in and out of the sea on the way back to our apartments.

As I drank my champagne and as I walked along the sea, I wondered what all this means. It means, first of all, that I must still be jetlagged if I can stay out that late - we all know I like a 10:30 bedtime. But what I really wonder is what it means in terms of what I'm doing here.

I came to Israel because, as I joked, I wanted to gain the street cred to stand by my opinions. I was fed up with defending Israel to people who criticize it more than any other country in the world. I was fed up with the American Jewish community for being so forgiving of Israel, for refusing to acknowledge the possibility that Israel might occasionally do wrong. I was fed up with being told I was anti-Zionist or a self-hating Jew when I criticized Israel. I was fed up with being told by Israelis that American Jews don't really understand the conflict and should, to paraphrase, stay out of it, but still send a check.

Earlier this summer an article came out that became the big brouhaha of the American Jewish community. In his piece, The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, Peter Beinart says, "For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead." Beinhart's article also suggests that Jews are going in three directions with regards to Israel - one, an intense brand of by any means necessary Zionism, two, total apathy, and three, feeling completely appalled.

For now, I'm in the completely appalled category, and to keep myself from sliding straight into apathy, I felt like I had to come here. I don't want to check my Zionism at the door, because to me Zionism means supporting the right of Israel to exist. Period. End of sentence. Beyond that I can go into the pre-1967 borders and dividing Jerusalem and swapping land and right of return and blah blah blah blah. But at the basic core of Zionism as I understand it, I agree. Israel has the right to exist. However, I'm not willing to be a part of a country or a people that takes it to the next level, that says, essentially, Israel's existence trumps all other values for which the Jewish people stand. This brand of Zionism says things like: "In order for Israel to exist, we must oppress two and a half million people." "In order for Israel to exist, we must bomb Iran." "In order for Israel to exist, we must make separate trains for Arabs and Jews." "In order for Israel to exist, only Jews who can prove that their mother's mother was Jewish are allowed to be part of this country and this people."

This is the Israel that infuriates me and the Israel that I want desperately to understand and the Israel that made me want to come here in the first place. I want to figure out why so many people cling so intensely to this land and are so willing to die and fight and kill for it. I want to figure out what makes us all feel okay about partying while a 50 minute drive away (courtesy of google maps) over a million people are living with restricted movement, with monitored goods, with the threat that the Israeli military could come rolling in at any minute. Is it any different than going to a bar in New York while we bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, whatever the next country? The proximity pushes it to the front of my mind and forces me to be more aware. It's not another headline about another car bomb in Iraq, it's a constant sense, even in Tel Aviv, that another war or another bomb or another unjust killing is about to happen around the corner.

I know this all sounds like I am waxing poetic. And I have already been told once today that I'm just like every other American liberal Jew who thinks they understand the conflict and to come back to the conversation in four months. And, frankly, there is a lot of truth to that. I am 100% sure that in the next ten months my opinion on Israel will change approximately eighteen thousand times. I know my opinion has already changed dramatically from the time I started thinking about Israel. My mom pointed this out to me when, a few days before I left Michigan, she was skimming a book I had read in college five or so years ago about Israelis who refused to serve in the army. With amusement in her voice, she noted that the me standing in front of her would have taken serious issue with the conservative notes I had written in the margins of the book five years ago.

So, in conclusion, I'm asking you to bear with me as I word vomit my feelings on this blog, change my opinions, contradict myself, and sometimes, hopefully, agree with myself. I'm here because I wanted to make all this theory tangible. This is not the University of Michigan and I'm not here to talk about political theory in a classroom of white girls who grew up just like I did. I'm here to really engage in the work and learn the land and speak the politics and know the people.

So, in the hopes of right now making some statements that me in 10 months will agree with, below are a list of ten things I think I know about Israel:

1) August in Israel is hot. Really, really, really hot.
2) Israelis aren't as friendly as Americans on the surface. They don't smile and say please and thank you and apologize for bumping into you on the sidewalk. But they are so much more genuine than most of us are, and when they say, "You can move in with us if you can't find an apartment" they seem to really mean it (and I guess we'll find out in about a week and a half!).
3) Burekas are delicious, and if I keep eating them for breakfast I will gain ten pounds in the next month.
4) Hebrew is an annoyingly difficult language to learn. I'm glad Benjamin Franklin went with English instead.
5) Outside of the Palestinian conflict, this country has a LOT of other problems: sexism, racism, immigration, to name a few.
6) Cats in Tel Aviv might just be worse than squirrels.
7) The bus routes make no sense here.
8) Israelis seem to be genuinely interested in helping you learn Hebrew. Everywhere I go people seem totally happy to let me repeat words like "tomato" over and over again until I have the accent up to their standards.
9) Bad drivers. All of them.
10) There really, truly, honest to goodness is something about this land that makes me feel happy. I don't know if it's the sea or the rare breeze or perhaps I'm just sweating out my frustrations and a more rapid pace than I do in the States, but there might be something to this idea of it being a land that means something.