What's love got to do with it?

In my favorite essay of all time, Goodbye to all That by Joan Didion, she writes about loving a place. In this case, New York. She writes:

"I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way,
I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person
who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again....
Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been
different and the time been different and had I been different, might have
been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking
about myself I am talking here about New York."

So the question I keep coming back to is, what does it mean to love somewhere? Why do American Jews feel the need to "love" Israel in this intense, passionate way and where does it come from?

I am in love with Paris. I love sitting in a cafe for hours and people watching. I love adorable French children who are always dressed much better than me. I love coffee and wine and cheese and croissants as a way of life. I love the oldness and newness of the city. I love that you aren't allowed to walk on the grass in the Luxembourg Gardens, but dogs are allowed to poop all over the sidewalks. I love the way French people truly seem to not understand you if your "R" is not fine-tuned to perfection. I love the whole je ne sais quoi of it all.

I am in love with New York. I love walking all over Manhattan without seeing a single person I know. I love walking down 5th Avenue in Brooklyn and seeing everyone I know. I love feeling slightly superior about Brooklyn being better than the rest of the world. I love picnicking at concerts in Prospect Park. I love believing that I have discovered a restaurant that has been around for years. I love when New Yorkers stop and ask tourists staring at a map if they need help. I love that every single woman in New York somehow believes herself to be on an episode of Sex and the City.

I am in love with Michigan. I love how friendly Midwesterners are. I love Target and driving places and suburbia. I love cider mills and sledding and barbecues. I love spontaneously driving to Lake Michigan and I love that everyone has lake houses that have been in the family for years. I love the smell in the air when winter shifts to spring and that we stop wearing coats in March when it hits 40 degrees. I love the way we romanticize Detroit without actually knowing much about Detroit at all. I love raking leaves. I love that I still think Michigan State college students are older than me and I love that East Lansing High School really doesn't need to have reunions because we are all so obsessed with each other that we talk all the time anyway.

I am not in love with the United States. I love the convenience of living in the United States. I love speaking English and being able to use credit cards for small purchases and knowing who to call when something doesn't work. I love that we are so friendly and so full of hope and so naive. I love that grocery stores are open 24/7 and have everything you could ever need and more. I love that when I go to a chain coffee shop, the coffee is going to taste exactly the same, and that I'm not risking getting charged $4 for instant coffee (a running theme in Israel). I used to pretend I didn't like chain stores and restaurants and driving and convenience. I understand why I'm supposed to think it's bad, but I just can't help myself - who doesn't like a little convenience now and again. However, much as I love the American lifestyle, it's a lifestyle I'd be happy with anywhere. Meaning, I don't feel a deep, passionate connection to the land. I don't feel the need to prove that I like living there. If we were to all pick up and be plopped down in Canada or China or Australia, I don't think it would make any difference to me, as long as we kept those same American conveniences I used to pretend I didn't like but secretly do.

So what is it about Israel that I'm supposed to love so much?

I'm supposed to feel a connection here. I'm supposed to feel included, surrounded by Jews. On Birthright I sat in the building where the declaration of the state of Israel was signed, and was given a passionate speech about how this land is mine. I can move here whenever I want and the government will help me do it. They'll fly me here and subsidize my housing and pay for my Hebrew classes. Because I belong here. Because I'm Jewish.

But I can't get married here, because I'm not considered Jewish by the rabanut who control things like marriage. My children wouldn't be considered fully Jewish. And I can't pray too loudly or read Torah at the Kotel, because I'm a woman. I can't get on certain public buses dressed the way I am right now, in leggings and a tank top, because I'm a woman and the Orthodox Jews who essentially run Jerusalem will throw things at me. If I do convert under and Orthodox rabbi and get married and then want a divorce, I can't get one unless my husband allows it.

I'm supposed to be welcomed with loving arms here. And because I'm American and Jewish and white and Ashkenazi and totally innocent looking, I am welcomed. Until I open my mouth. When Israelis meet me, they ask me if I like living here. Am I thinking of making aliyah, they want to know. Have I seen how beautiful the North is yet? Don't I love living by the sea? Isn't Hebrew a beautiful language?

Sometimes I nod my head and agree. Yes, I say, I love living by the sea. Sometimes I say it's nice, but I don't think I could live here forever. I blame it on New York, I just miss New York, I say. But we have pizza and bagels too, they say. Sometimes I agree and sometimes I laugh.

Sometimes, though, I say it's hard for me to live here. I say it's hard to be on a beach in Tel Aviv when there is an occupation happening so close. I say it's hard to drive on a highway in the West Bank that Palestinians aren't allowed to drive on. I say it's hard to live in a country where, every way I turn there is an 18 year old with a machine gun. It's hard to be in Jerusalem, I say, and have my bag checked everywhere I go. Sometimes I just say it's too hot.

These opinions are greeted with less love and welcoming. You don't understand, I'm told. It's easy to have opinions from the safety of America. Didn't September 11th teach me anything? Don't I see that Israel only ever acts in self-defense? Don't I get that when the army goes to war, it's not just for Israelis, it's for K'lal Yisrael, all of Israel, meaning all Jews, meaning me. Don't I appreciate that they are protecting the land so that I can come here when the next big persecution of the Jewish people happens? Just wait, they seem to say, you'll be thanking us when Hitler rises from the dead and starts rounding up American Jews.

It's an argument I'm getting tired of hearing and a discussion I'm getting tired of having. I'm tired of defending my political opinions. I'm tried of arguing with people who can't hear the word occupation without launching into the historical narrative of the Jewish people. I'm tired of being told I'm a left wing radical because I think there should be two countries along the 1967 borders. I'm tired of being told to make aliyah, that I'm welcome in Israel, and that they would love to have me here, but that I shouldn't talk about the conflict if I've never been in the army, and that it's okay that the Kotel is segregated and I should respect the "more religious" Jews.

So I'm taking a break from arguing (I know, shocker, we'll see how long it lasts). I'm diving into the activist scene and am starting work with Machsom Watch and Just Vision. I'm going to protests and meeting other activists and seeing if there is a reason to love Israel and a way for me to love Israel and if it matters.

I spent yesterday driving around the West Bank with a few wild women from Machsom Watch (more about them later). We stood at a few checkpoints, were stopped by soldiers, delivered papers to a Palestinian man trying to get a work permit in Israel, and talked about "loving Israel." One woman was about my age and was also on her first trip with Machsom Watch. She is a Russian immigrant who came to Israel when she was six because, she said, "Everyone who could went wherever they could when the Soviet Union fell." Her parents live in Ariel, a settlement in the West Bank that has gained international attention recently because of an Israeli artist boycott of the new cultural center there. She is a left wing activist who served in the army in a non combat unit but says now that she would have refused to serve had she known seven years ago what she knows now.

Her confusion over American Jews' relationship with Israel sums up my question about what, exactly, love has to do with it. She said she doesn't understand what it is that makes American Jews so right wing and so passionate about Israel, and why the United States keeps writing huge checks to a country that has been breaking international law for the past forty years.

I just don't understand, she said, If American Jews love Israel so much, why don't you all just move here?