This touches my psyche on so many levels, i never thought of many of the ways the orientalism colors our perception of the world. My family was torn for many years by the us and them mentality of the jewish state of isreal, my grandparents being zionists and giving birth to liberal children in America after their immigration. I know that a great thorn in my grandfathers heart was that my father refused to go to Israel until there was peace and equality between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel was a beacon of hope and pride for my grandfather after fighting as a Zionist and losing family and friends in the holocaust and his, and my grandmothers and many of their surviving families flight to the United States for survival and the hope for prosperity. When I went to Israel with my grandfather in 1998 he made me kiss the earth as soon as we got off the airplane. His Israel was our holy land and the land he fought for. Meanwhile during this time my cousin had taken on a project called Promises and interviewed children over 4 years in a Palestinian refugee camp and an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and neighborhoods of Jerusalem to try and get a picture of where the separation and otherness begins and where it could end in a more fluid mind of a child. His softer view of the Palestinian world changed my grandfathers outlook but could never alter his fervor for the state of Israel. My grandfather was able to see the Palestinian suffering in a new way and have compassion for the children my cousin was befriending. It brought a little more peace to the dinner table. I always found it odd that the Jews could take their experience of oppression and torture and turn it on another people, how could they justify it to themselves? I could never have those painful talks with my grandfather, I unlike my father did not want to fight him on the subject and I never felt educated enough to really talk about it and was afraid of opening the gates of trauma to his personal painful experience. I have several friends who used to be in the military both Israeli and American who speak of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghanis as being cockroaches and a blight on our world. Some how they are unaware of the brainwashing their personal experience has caused them. I mean to kill someone and maintain your view of yourself as good you must view the person you are killing as bad or better yet not human. How else can you justify your actions? Of course they point out that they experienced children being used as bombs by mothers and fathers among other terrible horrors of war and that I was not there and what do I know? And I am silenced by their personal trauma as I was by my grandfathers. How can I even try to fight their vision of themselves? To do so could hurt them even more, already suffering from PTSD and paranoia as they already were...Will it bring them peace to have their view of reality shaken? In my minds eye I travel to the Israel I visited in 1998, the year of the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel, people were certain there would be fighting on that day, massive protests, bombings...but I was there in Jerusalem that day and it was peaceful. That year we were hopeful for change and for a solution for the crisis that is Israel. I chose to stay in that place of hope. I pray that I live to see a day where there is no more refugee camps, no more check points, and that there is equality between the people of Israel/Palestine, because if they can do it in that land steeped with conflict and tragedy there is hope for the rest of the world and the possibility of world peace. Om tare tuttare ture swahah
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 12:28:18 +0000
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