Israel

I am a mix of emotions and feelings at the moment, existing on two levels, one personal and the other more broad and worldly. On a personal level the highlight of my summer was going to be the 4 week teen service learning trip I was going to be leading in Israel. We were set to fly out of SF on wednesday but today the decision was made to cancel the trip due to the recent escalation in violence in the region so personally that puts a little bit of a hit on my summer since I was really looking forward to my third trip to Israel, a land and country I hold close to my heart. A conclusion this leads me to is that we as at least relatively comfortable and affluent Americans rarely have the rhythm of our lives disrupted by world events. They always seem so distant and far away and though I know we often feel the pain or lament the terrible nature of these events it is rare when they touch our own lives. I think it also important though to look at the bigger picture, obviously this is a personal bummer but just like if, god forbid, something prevents many of us from going to Thailand and beyond you have to think outside yourself. The real tragedy and sadness and anger and dissapointment I feel is not that I cannot do something that I want to do but the fact that a region that is more often than not peaceful and beautiful has once again gone over to hate and violence, also an all too frequent outcome for this volatile part of the world. I have trouble distancing my own personal views that timidly support most of Israel's actions and unashamedly support Israel's right to exist and legitimately defend itself from a balanced look at the whole situation. For those not following the news there is trouble on two fronts right now for ISrael. A few weeks ago an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped in Gaza by Hamas (Palestinian) militants. As usual, Israel's (over)reaction was to bomb and make incursions into Gaza. Then about a week ago, Hezbollah, a completely unrelated terrorist group based in Lebanon with strong ties to Iran and Syria killed eight soldiers and kidnapped two on a raid in the north of Israel. Israel responded by bombing the Beirut airport and hundreds of targets in Southern Lebanon where Hezbollah operates. Hezbollah has been firing rockets into northern Israel, killing civilians today in the city of Haifa, a place I have been along with many other places I have set foot and it is very weird to think that now those areas are war zones. In addition the fact that Israel is very small (geographically and population-wise) makes it so that I cannot help fearing for the many, many Israelis I know and have worked with. Just last month I was in charge of the counselor-in-training program at my camp and had 6 Israeli campers who came over to do the program. They were sweet, wonderful kids (who in two years will be in the army there) who a week and a half ago departed from one of the ultimate places of peace that I know on this earth to return to their country and promptly enter bomb shelters near their homes in the north. This highlights the human toll that is almost always lost in the cold, hard looks at conflict that we as a people have become so adept at. In Gaza, Israel and Lebanon peaceful and innocent people are having their lives damaged or ended because of intolerance and hatred, most of which I might opine is on the part of Arab terrorists in this case. I feel the root causes of the situation in Gaza (if one chooses not to go back decades as one could) are muddled but the attacks by Hezbollah in northern Israel were unwarranted, naked aggression that showed disrespect for international borders (something that Israel also does) and the current rocket attacks blindly target innocent civilians. It all makes me sick to my stomach, hearing things from both sides like "peace is dead" to "all out war" makes me wonder whether I will ever see a lasting peace in my life. Israel has been around since 1948 with no lasting peace and my grandparents, with relatives who survived and died in the holocaust, and for whom Israel must mean something beyond comprehension to me, will die without seeing a lasting peace and maybe my parents too. At camp we sing a lot of hebrew songs about Israel and the spirit and the human condition and in the last few days singing songs with translations like hativkah- the hope is real, a jewish home in yisrael, 2,000 years we prayed for freedom with pain and tears and oseh shalom bimromav hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu v'al kol yisrael- may the one who makes peace in the heavens make peace for israel and all the world, the words come a little more fervently and just like after being hurt by a romantic partner or a friend and dwelling in very strong emotions one knows even more and in an even more real sense what it is like to be alive and to be human, that word meaning frail, fragile, strong or anything else because I think we often surprise ourselves with ourselves. Anyways, tomorrow I go back to the camp tawonga office in San Francisco and back to the drawing board to plan a new trip in under a week for the teens to do service work somewhere else in the world as soon as possible. There are so many others things to discuss with this, not least among them the incredibly slanted media coverage from (mainly) European papers and the borderline anti-semitic statements made by world leaders regarding Israel and the current situation. These things all breed anger and shock and the feeling that the only constant that links us to history is war and that unfortunately the Francis Fukuyama types who proclaim "the end of history" after major world events sorely overestimate the human capacity for death and destruction and the fact that countries have departments and secretary's of war and defense but not cabinet level department of peace positions. Hmmm, let's think about this, if you have a department of defense or war or whatever then what do you think is going to happen: war. It is like predestiny for those actions, if you build it they will come. However, I feel like closing this blog post with a poem by the incredible israeli poet Yehuda Amichai called "wildpeace"

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.