Love everyone's children: a grandmother's lament for Israel-Palestine
October 12, 2023
TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL VIOLENCE, TERRORISM
The first time I tried on my Hebrew name – Chaya – was the summer of 1977. I was 18, working on an Israeli farming village north of the Sea of Galilee.
The Hebrew name Chaya has many English meanings – living thing, animal, beast, force of life. I embraced all of it.
I lived in the home of a chicken farmer. It had six rooms: the front door opened into an all-purpose atrium where we ate lunch and dinner. Around the atrium was a living room, where I slept, though it had no door; a narrow galley kitchen at the back; and two small bedrooms, one for the parents and one for the three children – two boys and a girl. The summer I stayed there, the father’s youngest brother was also living with us and helping on the farm.
Maybe ten days into my stay, I walked in from picking tomatoes, and the mother and father were screaming back and forth. They had been taught modern Hebrew when they immigrated to Israel, she from India and he from Tunisia. Their accents were so heavy that it was as if they were speaking in completely distinct languages. As their voices got louder, I noticed a few words they both repeated: “tamid” (always), “yeladim” (children), and “laezov” (leave). Before I pieced together what was happening, the wife stomped out the front door with a small suitcase and her two-year-old daughter, sobbing, leaving me to tend to her husband, their two sons, and his teenage brother.
Before the day was over, the father’s other brother arrived, wearing an army uniform and carrying his rifle. His face was dusty, like his uniform; he smelled like the men’s locker room; he left his boots by the front door. The mother had made us dinner and set the table before she left: a spicy lentil stew, homemade bread, and a couple of cold salads. After dinner, we sat outside and watched the stars. The army brother was to sleep on a cot in the living room, where the couch was my bed. By the end of the night he was on top of me and inside me, slobbering in Hebrew, his hand over my mouth, until I bit his neck hard enough to leave a mark. He jumped off and left the room.
The next morning he made himself coffee and left before I was awake. Two days later, the mother came back home. She brought her mother with her. The husband took three chickens to the rabbi for slaughtering, and after the blood ran out the mothers plucked the chickens on the floor of the big room. A vegetarian, I sat on the floor with them, plucking and crying to myself; it felt as if I was pulling off my own skin.
In 1977 I thought of Gaza and the West Bank as part of Israel, territories conquered and won in the 1967 war. It was dangerous to visit Gaza City, I was told, “but they make the best falafel.” The boundary at that time was porous, and so I visited with two friends and ordered the few things I could say in Arabic.
The next time I approached the Gaza border, in the summer of 2006, was after Israel had withdrawn the Jewish settlers. Israel had turned over the land to the Palestinian Authority, but still controlled the water, the power, and the movement of people in and out.
We visited Kibbutz Erez, very close to the border, which Israel had built over the destroyed Palestinian village of Dimra, to make soap and honey for export. We were touring a bomb shelter that doubles as an artist’s studio, and I stopped to look at the art. The artist – I don’t remember her name – shoved five watercolor and ink drawings into my hand. “The big fish,” one of them says in Hebrew, referring to the huge Israeli surveillance balloon that was patrolling the whole area while we visited. “This is the beginning of something terrible,” she said, “take these and remember,” and we were scurried away by the tour guides.
Glued to the television last weekend, watching the horrors of Hamas firing missiles, driving into Israel and taking captives, and Israel retaliating with massive air strikes inside Gaza, I googled Mishmar HaYarden, the moshav where I had lived and worked in 1977. How had I not previously known that Mishmar HaYarden “was founded in 1949 on the newly depopulated Palestinian village of Yarda” (Wikipedia). Depopulated is a word lacking agency. What happened, in so many places all over Israel-Palestine, is that the new Jewish nation emptied and often razed Palestinian villages, erecting new homes and towns on top of the rubble.
By then I knew the Palestinian side of what Jews call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, from Elias Khoury, Bab al-Shams, a brilliant novel called Gate of the Sun in Humphrey Davies’ English translation. And I’d heard personal and family stories from Palestinian students and teachers many times when I was working on a peace initiative with American, Israel, and Palestinian high school students in 2007.
And yet I maintained – until perhaps yesterday – my belief in, my attachment to the heroic, democratic, better than others idea of Israel. What was keeping me attached to something the thinking parts of my brain knew to be, at best, only partially true?
I am not a politician. I am a mother, grandmother, and teacher who longs for healing and repair of the wounds that cause these horrific events to occur again and again. What weapons do I have at my disposal to counter such deep and abiding hate?
After the Six Day War in 1967, my parents were visible leaders of the local fund-raising campaign for Israel. This was the first time I’d thought of my family as Jewish. Night after night, in front of the fireplace in our living room, my father told this story: Israeli soldiers recapturing the Dome of the Rock, site of the First Temple, and Jews praying at the Western Wall of the Temple for the first time in over 1000 years. I can still feel in my belly the heat of that moment: After the horror and loss of the Nazi holocaust, over six million Jews murdered (including great aunts, uncles, cousins of mine), the hope we carried was embodied in this ideal of the heroic, democratic Israel growing up miraculously in the wild desert.
My attachment to this heroic myth of Israel has died slowly, replaced by something more complicated and painful over the past week. I see how that Jewish state, that miracle rising out of the desert, repeatedly erased the stories, homes, and lives of diverse Palestinian people already living there. This cycle of violation and retaliation we are watching now has been going on in Israel-Palestine for generations. For me it helps to think of this generations-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict as something akin to fratricide. The murder of Abel by his brother Cain is the founding story of this tragedy in the Hebrew book of Genesis that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all treat as sacred.
In this sense, it’s in all of us, in our bodies and memory, the stories we tell ourselves; the boundaries we enforce between ourselves and other people. None of us gets a free pass for figuring out the best interpretation of who is to blame. None of us is free from the blood and emotions that flow from this wretched, repeated traumatic wound between people who grew up on different sides of the same stories. [10/13/23: this paragraph needs more work. I am experiencing more and more that there is no "all of us." In this instance I'm talking about all of us who descend from the three Abrahamic religions: Abraham a father who would have sacrified his own son in the name of his god. And the phrase "all of us" is part of the normalizing, deadening, difference-razing part of the colonialist enterprise to own land and people.]
As a child, when something horrible happened, like a flood or an earthquake or a massacre that killed many people, my grandmother would say, “The mothers are weeping.” Once, very near the end of his life, my father said those exact same words remembering what he saw in Nagasaki just after the U.S. bomb exploded there, decimating the place and the people who lived there.
Most white people in the United States – including most white Jewish people – have never experienced life under occupation as Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank continuously endure. There is no amount of “we are all human” that can replace the more complicated history of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and apartheid since 1967.
I see many moments, throughout my life, when I’ve participated in this Jewish Israeli arrogance and erasure of others. My Grandma Tillie, who took on everyone’s mourning as her own, was extremely judgmental. She was hard on herself and everyone else; quick to anger and slow to move on. I have that streak in me, and it has often harmed others. It’s not just a personal thing; it’s structural. And we can’t just flip a switch from the wrong approach to the right one. These are moves we need to make again and again: loving others as we seek love ourselves, and loving ourselves as we seek to love others.
I understand why Black Lives Matter in the U.S. put out a statement affirming the integrity of Palestinian life. Israel controls the border and the flow of water, power, and fuel into Gaza. As many have said recently, since Israel removed Jewish settlers and infrastructure in 2005, Gaza resembles a prison with the guards moved just outside the walls.
I also understand that what happened last Saturday morning – when Hamas terrorists fired missles and rushed over the border into Israel – felt to many Jews in and out of Israel like genocide, the enactment of Hamas’s stated mission to annihilate the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
Israel does not get a free pass on ignoring the Geneva Conventions because the Nazis wanted to annihilate the Jewish people (and many others, including Roma, Sinti, gay people, and neurodiverse people) or because Hamas is a terrorist organization.
We are in the midst of a reckoning. Who will be on the side that commits to love, and who will be on the side that continues to justify violence and hate? If I could do one thing right now it would be to nurse children who have lost their mothers to this fratricidal struggle, literally feed them and nurture them into life. This is the strongest longing I know. It makes no difference who was the father of this child at my breast; they are some mother’s child and I will love them.
These are fragments, notes of longing for a more nuanced understanding of myself and other people. I’m curious, if I open my own experiences of otherness — both being othered and constraining and harming others who are not like me — what happens when we listen to the individual, family and community stories that have gotten us to this turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What new stories do we need to guide us forward as a community?
I am choosing once again to call myself Chaya to embrace my own and my ancestors’ complexity: living thing, animal, beast, life force. My survival instinct is extremely strong; I pray that my sometimes overpowering grief helps me, through these unthinkable times, to temper this fevered longing for life with soothing and enduring love for all humans, all living things. If you need someone to sit with you through your grief, whatever its source, I am here.
Thank you to the many people who asked me to write this and publish it while the pain is still fresh. I welcome your comments and your stories. If you spew hate, I will block you. There is no binary that will save us; no interpretation that will be a balm to all this human suffering. - CB 12 October 2023