FIVE SHORT STORIES & A RANT on Israel/Palestine: CAN YOU FILL IN THE BLANKS?
I have an older cousin who I love dearly; she lives in Tel Aviv where her mother moved her at the age of 14 from L.A. She admits that Netanyahu is a monster but, as she has said on more than one occasion, “He is our monster”. And especially in the midst of a war, she will not criticize him. Her politics are fixed around the blessed memory of her son, who while only a teenager got shot and killed by a sniper in the West Bank town of Hebron. A part of her died with him; and all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren can never replace Yakov.
I have been to Israel twice, the first time on my own as a tousle-haired thirty-year-old gay activist from San Francisco who protested the new Jewish “settlements” in the West Bank. And the second time with my partner Ken, reticently part of an LGBTQ synagogue tour for a big Jerusalem Pride celebration. The parade got cancelled. In fact, the year before three people in the march had been stabbed with a kitchen knife by an ultra-Orthodox maniac.1
I have five personal memories to share from those visits, plus a well-deserved little rant, all followed by a short piece I wrote after the first trip about Palestinian and Israeli cooperation. These can be read in parts or in toto. Together it forms an essay to help explain enmity between different branches of my Semitic people. It might be of use to someone willing to go beyond simple-minded solutions, or slogans such as “from the River to the Sea”. Which btw has been used by both sides in this battle over a small sliver of land. Conflict between the two cousin groups dates from the last gasps of British imperialism with 1948’s Independence Day (for Israel) or the tragedy of expulsion (Nakba for Palestine). It has since been made far more deadly thanks to the totally lopsided effect of perpetual U.S. funding for arms, under presidents of both US parties. But on to my own little stories.
Story #1
Once there was an eldest daughter who, after her mother Annie had committed overdosed on opiates (in the 1930s that would have been laudanum), helped raise two sisters and eight brothers, mostly from her stepmother. In fairness it must be said the new bobeh Rose was not simply lazy but busy being perpetually pregnant. This daughter was favored by her otherwise remote father, my zayde, not only for being a “little mother” but also the most religious in her family—after him of course. She found a husband in a Zionist youth group plus a son and two daughters before they divorced.
No surprise, Aunt Alice was the only one in the large family who chose to move to the new land of Israel. In Hebrew this is called “making Aliyah” which translates to “going up”. I can’t stress enough how her siblings not merely loved her but more— they worshipped her. She was the one who followed her beliefs and went “to make the desert bloom.” They were the ones who either married well (like baby known as “Dada”), worked in a trade (plumbing) or scrambled to get degrees and start businesses (several sanitoriums) or begin practices (in law or psychology). They thrived in Los Angeles, then moved out to the suburbs. My Aunt Alice, meanwhile, was busy getting supplies by rope up to a Jewish hospital on Mount Scopus past the Jordanians, who still ruled the West Bank including East Jerusalem, while struggling as a single mom, and working as a housemother guarding the virginity of young girls at Bar Ilan University.
If stories had morals, this one would not be about how good Alice was— she was— but how less-than-good my father and his many brothers and sisters felt themselves in comparison. They made up for not wanting to live in Israel by putting coins in a pushke box and later writing checks, purportedly “to plant trees” in the arid land of Israel. Those particular boxes may not have funded ultra-Orthodox bigotry or bought weaponry for Jewish anti-British terrorists, but the trees were planted where Palestinian villages had once been, to erase their memory on land that were reserved for Jews only. But support for Israel, for the rest of my family, counterbalanced the comfort of living in America, which still carried a taint of “lesser than”; therein lies an ongoing story motif about The Holy Land.
I stayed with my Aunt Alice on my first trip to Israel in 1983. As far as she knew, my worst sin was that I once turned on a light switch in her tiny apartment on Sabbath; this is a serious no-no even among the modern orthodox, and one she got plenty angry about. God only knows what she’d have thought if she had known what I was up to while out on my own there in The Hot-Men Land.
Story #2
Such as one day walking in a residential area, where I came upon a tall, pale, pegged- jean-wearing and safety pin adorned punk plus a few of his friends. I couldn’t help but smile at this striking, black-eyed apparition of hipness; he was super friendly too, welcoming me as a fellow longhair— from San Francisco! Although I was a decade older, we had in common a shared Rocky Horror Picture Show fandom. After hanging out with them I was invited home for dinner. This was a big family holiday affair at the end of Passover (and the end of matzo-only restrictions) called Mimouna, which is celebrated by all the Jews of North Africa. His turned out to be a large Algerian family; American me and his uncle on leave from the Israeli Air Force were among the guests. The delicious lamb-and-veg couscous platter we served ourselves from seemed to take up half of the dining room table itself!
After the meal the guy and pals, including his girlfriend who also showed up, went up to his bedroom. They told me what it was like to be Early Punksters (these were the days of the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie) in Israel. They shared stories about friends who had sustained injuries— and everyone had suffered verbal abuse from macho Israelis on the bus. At some point he and his girlfriend un-cuddled and she went off with the rest of their group. That left just me and him, and in almost no time he assumed an offertory pose, and I found myself worshipping at the shrine of his long skinny body. This was a Barbary Coast pirate/punk rock fantasy come true!
On that visit I learned more (but never more happily) about the non-European-American-Ashkenazi minorities in Israel. I went to a street fair and found out about other Israelis. Bedouins (the Bedu predate Arabs in the entire region (think the Fremen in “Dune”). Sefardis descend from the Spanish and North African Jews who usually lived well alongside Muslims in Al-Andaluz under the Umayyad Dynasty. Mizrahis are from Iraq, Iran or Yemen, once Babylonia, Persia and proto-Syria. After a surprise victory by Israeli forces against the combined Arab forces in the 1967 War, many Jews felt less welcome in Arabic, Ladino and Farsi-speaking countries and left homes they had lived in for centuries to make their way to the young Hebrew-speaking country. Yet most found they were welcome only as second-class citizens by Ashkenazim who held higher places in government and the military, even as successful farmers on thriving kibbutzim. Settlement towns, largely built for Middle Eastern Mizrahi and the Ethiopian Beta Israeli, are far more barren, as I was about to see.
Memory #3
That same Passover Week I was out cruising, which here means perusing for partners, in Jerusalem’s Gan Ha-Atsmaut, Independence Park. This had to have been the most eerily beautiful place for such activity I’d ever seen. Its grounds contained open archeological digs, not even roped off after dark. Archeological sites in Israel/Palestine are not uncommon, but this one was an ancient Moslem cemetery. I am told that in later years it got built over to create the, ahem, Museum of Tolerance. What I recall are men appearing as if out of nowhere in the moonlight. One guy is particularly interested in me, and eager to take me home. Where is that? “Not far,” he insists. In his Army shirt he is very masculine and rather attractive. We get in a taxi and it just keeps on going. We get let off at a medium high-rise in barren flat terrain about twenty-five minutes south of Jerusalem, a Settlement Town apartment building. He is an Iraqi Jew, and quickly has all my clothes and his shirt off. But just then the doorbell rings.
“Wait in here. Don’t open the door or come out. I’ll be right back.” Okay. Fifteen minutes pass. I hear voices. He comes back in the bedroom, says it is some friends, but they won’t be there long. And again, not to open the door. The next time he comes in I notice that he has a gun in his waistband. This is clearly a drug deal, but not yet one that has gone wrong. “Just wait for me,” he insists a third time, but seeing my growing impatience he adds, “I told them I have a girl in here.” After another exasperating lapse, I prepare to overcome my fears and leave anyhow. But then I hear the front door click, and the other voices are gone. He has taken care of business and now has his way with me— before showing me the door, too. He’s sure I can get a cab downstairs, though it must be after three in the morning. I do.
As different as he can be from my lanky long-haired punk, neither one is nominally gay. And both come from the first- or second- generation of newcomers to Israel that made up the populist rightwing core of “Bibi” Netanyahu’s supporters— as opposed to old-school liberal Ashkenazis. Just like Hitler’s surviving Yiddish-speakers who made it to Palestine (after the U.S. wouldn’t accept them post-WWII), my American aunt and her daughter had to go to school to learn Hebrew. Yiddish was discouraged as a shameful vestige of European oppression. The Sefardi and Mizrahi refugees had to do the same. Immigrants start out being less assured than those born there, naturally feeling they have something to prove. Plus, there is still one additional wrinkle to belonging in Eretz Yisroel that deserves its own anecdote.
Memory #4
During the same Passover week I was passing through the most haredi (ultra-Orthodox) populated part of the city, looking for what turned out to be the last gay haram (bathhouse) in Jerusalem, a charmingly mixed Israeli Jewish and Israeli Arab establishment. But this is not that story. While crossing through Mea She’arim I saw a schoolyard full of little haredi boys in white shirts with tsitsit fringes, all crewcut except for their long payes (side-curls). I snapped a sir photo without thinking, and they all began calling me to take their photos with my little camera. Or that is what I thought they were asking. It turned out what they were clamoring for was “Money!” Then out onto the yard comes their elementary school teacher, with the full beard and flat fur hat and full coat— the whole deal.
He addressed me in English: “We do not allow non-Jews to take photographs of us.” Okay, “but I am Jewish,” I replied. “Oh really? Then where is your kippa (yarmulkeh in Yiddish)?” Before I could make any answer about different kinds of Jews, he continued: “And your tsitsit? And your payes?” No amount of discussion about the value of diversity or solidarity would have helped in this situation. And now a crowd was gathering to see just who dared talk back to their rabbi. I felt more in danger than I had when trapped in the drug-dealer’s bedroom. I knew that it was time to leave, not talk. But I was boiling over inside. I’ve experienced overt anti-Semitism rarely in my life, but never had I been accused of not being a Jew.
In the world of secular Jews who may go out to eat Thai or Sichuan non-kosher foods— and even among the large modern orthodox community (like my aunt’s whole family) who would never— there remain mixed feelings about the “black hats.” Anger that they stay isolated in their own communities, breed like crazy and then refuse to allow their children to be educated among others, not to mention accept service in the Armed Forces as all other Israelis must do. Yet there is also a nagging sense that they just might be the “truest” Jews, those keeping the pre-Holocaust Yiddish world alive, and with constant prayer perhaps spiritually saving the world, as they believe.
This drives home to me a basic realization about Jews in Israel. In this land nobody feels totally adequate. The original sabras (born there) could hold it over even those who made Aliyah, who can look down at the Jews in all the rest of the world— because we have not. Sefardim and Mizrahim can feel disregarded, sort of like Americans who are Country feel about City “elites”. You might think those whose family lived in Islamic countries and spoke Arabic would be able to create a link between the world’s two Semitic religions, but the opposite is often true. There is also a sense that in the Arab world people are “hard” and Jews, like the liberal intellectuals, kibbutzim and ravers raped, murdered or kidnapped on October 7 are “soft.” But when attacked, that we will be harder than hard.
MEMORY #5
And now the penultimate anecdote before the rant. I was told we are going on a tiul with extended family. This means hike in Hebrew, but it is also a walk into Jewish texts. One of my relatives carries a semi-automatic rifle and a copy of the bible (the Chumash or five books of Moses) as their guidebook. For each place we walk to in the West Bank a quote from the book is read. This is to “prove” that our people were always there first in what the Orthodox call Judea and Samaria, and the rest of the world knows as Occupied Territories. Here historical one-upmanship is neverending, and ultimately boring.
But for me the real lesson came when we arrived at an old cistern, probably part of an ancient Roman aqueduct. It was a very hot day, and a bunch of kids were swimming in it. I asked one of my younger cousins if they were going in? “No,” he responded, “they are filthy”. They were the Palestinians. I was a little surprised by my young relative’s vehemence, but I was more shocked by all the adult relatives present. No-one said anything to the child, not one word about the dehumanization he had just parroted. Judaism, just like Islam, teaches tolerance and respect for all human life, but that clearly did not apply to these Palestinian children. It might have been seen as weak to say anything. But is it possible to only believe in equality for yourself and your tribe, yet not for your enemy? To assert “Never again!” about the Holocaust, but remain blind to the unending damage caused to others in your, or your God’s, name?
This dichotomy underlies many of the land’s political beliefs. But it is no coincidence that among gay people, lovers and allies may cross all those boundaries. I convinced my partner to visit Israel in 2006 to attend a Jerusalem Gay Pride celebration. It got cancelled due to threats of violence before we arrived. Instead, an LGBT event was held indoors.
But we also did go out to the only mixed openly queer nightclub in Jerusalem, certainly in all the Middle East. Called Shushan (after the land of Queen Esther in the Purimspiel?), it was open from 2003-2007 and though physically drab it was an amazing place2. Jews and Arabs danced and often flirted. A drag show was enlivened by young queens from occupied West Bank cities who snuck across the then-more-porous security wall and entered with their slippers and sequined outfits in plastic bags, ready for drag performances. One night we also chatted with a sad and closeted haredi youth in full ultra-Orthodox garb, because nobody else would.
Then the next day we marched as part of a large international Rainbow contingent, led by lesbians and their children, to protest for Palestinian rights at the border wall.
Last story leading into the Promised Rant
One afternoon in Tel Aviv my partner and I found ourselves in a little café, the only customers of our fun young solo server. This was during the 34-Day War when Israel invaded Lebanon to get back two soldiers that Hezbollah had grabbed in a cross-border raid. Talk drifted to the IDF troops caught in a political quagmire in the south of Lebanon. Our waitress and we both supported Israeli Army protesters who swore to defend their country at home but vowed to go to jail rather than invade another. I had been to a meeting of Yesh Gvul (“There is a Limit/Border”). But then more news came on the tv, and suddenly our peacenik waitperson was shouting about the Arabs, “Kill them all, we should just kill them all!” And I realized that in such heightened circumstances, mixed emotions are the rule.
Another example of the “two Jews, three opinions” was a visit on my 1982 trip to a cousin who lived near Jerusalem, but in the West Bank. He was orthodox yet liberally educated, very intelligent and glad to give me a tour to show off his settlement. He took me to the site of a biblical tomb (one of many, for some Judge or Prophet) on which was a shul where we joined other Jews in praying. It was open three days a week, he explained, while one level below was a mosque where Islamic prayer happened on different days—a very civilized set-up. Then we went to his place, like a suburban U.S. house but no tract home; its large garden included lovely metal sculptures handmade by his wife. I knew this was not the complete story, but a charming one. Even then homes for Israeli Jews’ willing to move to the Occupied Territories were hugely government subsidized, there were separate roads for Arabs and Jews, Palestinians received daily harassment at roadblocks and police enforcement was inevitably one-sided.
About few years ago we began to hear stories of increased attacks on ancient Palestinian villages in the West Bank, wildings by so-called “Hilltop Youth” including brutal attacks on Arab children and the ripping out of ages-old olive trees in Palestinian farms. The youth were from settlements unlike my cousin’s, built for comfort, but impromptu ones specifically designed for confrontation with new neighbors. When I saw photos of the attackers they were bearded longhairs, like grunge radical fairies gone wrong. An explanation found in novelist Lawrence Wright’s 2022 book cleared this up. He tells of:
“Jews who believed it was time to redeem the promise God made to the Jewish people of a vast homeland far larger than the tiny nation of Israel, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. The[ir] Rav drew his teaching from Meir Kahane, an American rabbi who advocated that all non-Jews be expelled from Israel, excepting those willing to become enslaved to Jews. Kahane’s party, Kach, was outlawed after being declared a terrorist organization, but in the decades since Kahane was assassinated, in New York, in 1990, his influence persisted through his spiritual progeny.” His followers include “young Jews who had come from many countries to ally themselves with the Kahanists. Each of them had been summoned through some private revelation to surrender their previous identities—their relationships, the ambitions they might have had, their native languages—and prepare for the arrival of the Messiah to bring on the End of Days. The first order of business was to ethnically cleanse the West Bank, which they called Judea and Samaria. After that, many contemplated annexing territories in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan.”3 “The Human Scale” 2022
In the context of Israel’s military response to Hamas’ brutal foray of October 7, 2023 it is not hard to see those young zealots who had practiced wildings as Hilltop attack dogs in the West Bank now as the percentage of platoon leaders and snipers in Gaza responsible for the killing, among adults, of any Palestinian children caught in their sites. The horror of children non-accidentally shot in the head has been documented by over forty U.S. doctors trying to help with the injured in Gaza. Even my 93-year old cousin living in Switzerland has had to change her opinion of her esteemed Israeli Defense Force. She lectured me recently on the “brutalization” that comes in war, after a first traumatic killing, as desensitization takes hold. The days when Israelis could see their IDF as different, a morally-guided army based in Jewish ethics, has been ended, killed by our own religious extremists little different from those in Hamas.
And with that we are, as promised, well into the rant section.
The great negative motivator in the world is Shame, and my people have been saddled with it since the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 AD. It was the end of our little priestly empire at the hands of a far larger empire. Once again we spread out over the Known World. Literacy is required of all our male members (as it is for Muslims) so we became mapmakers for Europeans who largely couldn’t read or write, and also sword-makers for caped Tuareg horsemen in the Atlas Mountains, Jewish anti-Spanish pirates of the Caribbean, eventually violinists at Carnegie Hall (as in “How Do You Get There?” Practice! Practice!) Plus, we were 80% of comedians from Vaudeville to SNL.
We could feel pride, having been the last strip of land conquered by the Roman Empire before it went into its permanent decline. But there is still shame at being a people scattered, having lost its own territory. There is the shame after being blamed for all the woes of Europe, and the lying calumny that we marched to our deaths in the camps “like sheep”. Today even a person with not a scrap of religious belief of his own, while approving of those followers who wallow in anti-Semitism and even use the Nazi salute, then dares accuse us of “not being Jewish enough” if we don’t support his malicious mishugas.
But I saw in my own family how susceptible each Jew is to feeling “not enough” or not doing enough. Again today blamed for our own oppression, with nobody to take it out on— other than the “other” population in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. But hatred of Palestinians is also anti-Semitism.
What are we known for in the annals of anti-Semitism? We killed Jesus? Not! Dumb. Crucifixion was the punishment for enemies of Rome. And JC was clearly a Jew since there were no Christians until nearly 200 years later. That we kill their babies to bake into our bread for Passover? No. Matzo would be non-kosher with human blood. That we are all rich bankers? Wrong.Turns out people chose to borrow from the few of us who could loan money because Judaic law forbade charging interest. Excessive interest is a sin in the Old Testament and it is called usury. You hear me, VISA and Mastercard?
As a Gay Libber, I learned shame is what kept us “in the closet” for many deadly decades. As a Jew I could add that the shame of being Losers plus the crime of being too smart followed us across Europe and made Antisemitism into the model for all the other Racisms—from African slavery, to Indigenous genocide in the New World, to Hiroshima. Even after the Holocaust when we returned to our sliver of land on the edge of Club Med, this shame followed us.
It struck me in a burst of dark humor during my time traveling in that poor bedeviled place, that possibly all the healthy and sane people who could leave those lands have already left. For decades, as soon as their compulsory military service was over, young Jewish kids would leave Israel and go to places like Goa or Kerala in Southwestern India or to Koh Samui in Thailand [another story!]. Many even returned to Berlin; despite its obvious history, this was preferable to living in a country still divided and wracked by hatred.
Less well known is that young Palestinians, those not caught in the similarly crazed clutches of Hamas in Gaza, have followed their own diaspora, while supporting each other in starting small businesses worldwide. Many listened to parents who insisted they “Get an education!” and did everything possible to finish their degrees. Pressure to get educated, good at business, funny. Sound familiar?
They become writers, medical doctors (even within Israel), or the IT geniuses who run the tech in countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whose own young men are more inclined to a rich playboy lifestyle than to tech employment, and whose women are discounted. If you doubt that Palestinians may be the new Jews of the Middle East, just watch the brilliant Netflix sitcom Mo, with comedian Mohammed Amer. Or read Sarah Aziza’s sensitive new novel “The Hollow Half.”
How will this end up? How might it work out after the 54,000+ and 1,400+ killed— by extremist religious zealots on both sides? Will the Arab Palestinians simply vanish when vanquished? Even if all the people could be taken from their land? How did that work out for the Israelites removed in the Babylonian Exile when we no longer had priests, which began the rabbinic era? Or after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, our little empire finally defeated? One small Jewish cult developed into Christianity and was adopted by Rome. Was this the end of Jews? Clearly, nrrr! It was a time of survival and then renewal, a religion based in ethics, not territory.
Only part of the dispersed returned to the land of Palestine during the height of British imperialism. Most still prosper as part of a Jewish diaspora which also benefitted the countries who welcomed us. In Holland we helped invent capitalism, in the US we partially financed the American Revolution, in Germany and Britain invented socialism. Mexico welcomed us in the time of Frida Kahlo. Austro-Hungary and Russia at the apex of the Romantic Age. The Axis Powers allowed madmen to reign, to remove the shame of Germany having lost W.W.I. And those governments shifted blame onto their minorities—like Trump does now with trans people and immigrants.
But last words go to a friend, a performing artist, anarchist and longtime advocate of a free Palestine. Hearing my discomfort when demonstrating in public with our progressive peers— given the non-dialogue rampant after Hamas’ vicious October 7 foray and Israel’s mass butchery it invited— he reassured me with words to this effect, but less FaceBook “friendly”:
Huck Hamas, much love to the long-suffering Palestinian people. Nuck Netanyahu plus Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich (eager to cleanse “the Enemy”, even babies) yet love to Jews and Israelis. Buck Biden who never stopped the flow of arms when he could. Double-Muck Musk and Trump, but love the American people. Ayuck all Ayatollahs yet love for the beautiful Iranian people.
Will my cousin forget for an instant that her son Yakov (named after my grandfather) was mowed down by a zealot in his youth? Will the loved ones of all the young club-ravers killed, the teenage girls raped, or the grandparents kidnapped by Hamas ever forget them, or that their Israeli leader let them sit for 18 months in holes in the ground, mainly to keep himself out of prison? Or will the families of the now 54,000 Palestinians killed in the last 1 1/2 years, over half women and children, forget who carried out the carnage upon their entire land?
Descendants on both sides who have left their country suffer from another sort of shame, perhaps an Absentee Syndrome. And the one thing all those who remain and survive have to share is grief, an emotion even longer lasting and stronger than rage. It will fall to those who are not partisan first but human first, on every side, to find a solution for all the Palestinian and Israeli cousins. Because neither is going to go away.
*****
Lastly is this short piece I wrote after the 1983 trip about an oasis of peace in the Land of Israel, revised in 1988. Today the dream is a still alive and this unique place has grown from 35 to 369 inhabitants.
NEVE SHALOM/WAHAT AS-SALAM: Oasis In the Storm, @Mark Freeman 1988
“Our national desire to renew the life of the people of Israel in their ancient homeland is not aimed against any other people. As they enter the sphere of world history once more and become once more the standard-bearers of their own fate, the Jewish people, who have constituted a persecuted minority in all the countries of the world for 2000 years, reject with abhorrence the nationalistic domination under which they themselves have long suffered. We do not aspire to return to the land with which we have inseparable historical and spiritual ties in order to suppress another people or to dominate it…. By establishing a just alliance with the Arab peoples we wish to turn our common dwelling-place into a community that will flourish economically and culturally, and whose progress would bring each of these peoples unhampered independent development.” — Martin Buber, 1921 Twelfth Zionist Congress, Carlsbad
Halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in the rolling hills that used to be a No-Man’s Land during the 1967 War, there is a cluster of wooden buildings, a small herd of sheep, an olive grove and one of almonds, and a handful of families. This is a community with no similarity at all to the offensively placed “settlements” in the West Bank.
Its name is from the line in Isaiah: “My people shall live in an oasis of peace (neve shalom).” And it is dedicated to the revolutionary proposition—now more than ever—that Jews and Arabs, both nominally citizens of the same country, can live together.
In 1978 Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam took a practical turn, from an interfaith project to a planned living community for seven families, 35 people— Arabs and Jews together. And for the last ten years they have struggled to keep this community alive, without such amenities as government electricity, water, or paved access. Meanwhile, any Israeli Jew willing to move to the West Bank is subsidized by the government to a monthly tune exceeding the total annual operating budget of Neve Shalom.
Were this only an isolated experiment, a group of mad idealists willing to separate themselves off in the hills to prove a point, it would offer no threat to the fanatical closed-mindedness that afflicts every faction in that land. But the Arab and Jewish families, with their paid staff of two and a group of international volunteers do not produce only olives, honey, and sheep. They also deal in changing the minds of teenagers—a potent product.
By a combination of stubborn persistence, positive word of mouth, and a policy of non-alignment with any political party, Neve Shalom has developed a good relationship with the public education system. This is how groups of teens, Moslem and Christian Arabs as well as Jews, arrive for four-day seminars held three times a month all during the school year, and for week-long camps during summer vacations.
That is: two high school classes converge up there in the hills. One group of 30 fifteen-year-olds from a Jewish school, moshav or kibbutz, and a class of equal numbers from a neighboring Arab town’s high school, together. No groups are recruited from the occupied territories—from Gaza or the West Bank—since Neve Shalom does not consider those to be parts of Israel. Though the two groups may have lived only a few kilometers apart, chances are good that this is their first social connection. Sixty or so adolescents arrive and begin to look around.
Any idea that this will be a plush vacation resort are instantly dashed by the sight of the single classroom and a dorm over the communal kitchen. These are not facilities filled with state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment—even a functioning Polaroid camera was lacking. In winter the dorm spouts leaks, it is truly sieve-like. And the classroom is like a furnace in summer.
However, there is something about being on the crest of a hill, cradled in fields and skies. In the spring the hills are literally covered in wildflowers, and the grey-green new olive leaves begin to quiver. Year-round, the soil of this experimental farm proves itself fertile ground for communication, its primary crop.
The two different groups of kids, at the beginning, keep strictly to themselves. But it doesn’t take long for natural curiosity and a unique proximity to take effect. The program is simple and creative. If political discussions surface early, they are deferred until later, after better acquaintance with “the enemy.” First there are encounter techniques, facilitated by two adults (one Arab, one Jew, always) and often by youth facilitators as well, past graduates.
The two groups share personal information, cultural commonalities and differences, fantasies and stereotypes about the Other. There are games—soccer is international—plus songs in both languages—a Hokey Pokey in Hebrew was memorable. And by the third day of common meals and shared tasks, no one is saying “the Jews think this…” or “Arabs do that…” but rather, “Shimshon thinks…” and “Laviva says….” A solid layer of new trust is necessary fertilizer, before any talk of real issues can occur. Otherwise, it would just be the same deafening shouting matches that both Israeli Jews and Arabs are prone to, an understandable legacy of having family members jailed or lost in bombings or in combat on both sides.
Does it work? According to the kids, yes. They describe their experiences with the excitement of explorers of new territory. Over 1600 teenagers per year visit Neve Shalom, meeting their “adversaries” and “oppressors” as human beings. But can the experience hold up later, when they return to unequal social situations, where each side sees the other as monsters, as less than human? When one parent asks, “You made friends with terrorists?” and another is aghast that there were no separate dormitories for boys and girls! Though the country is still a long way from a mixed youth group or any ongoing social organizations, four days are better than none.
*****
Meanwhile, the “settlers” of Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam continue their lives. I spent an afternoon, stop-and-go, accompanying Eitan, one of the settlement’s two staff members. As we talked, he was all over the site, checking on the progress of construction of three new houses for families yet to be recruited, getting rid of the trash, helping put a door back onto the housing of a temperamental water pump, arranging a vehicle for two volunteers from Germany in charge of tending the sheep, then finally helping a mixed group of teenagers from a graduate training seminar to harvest green almonds (for sale in Arab East Jerusalem).
But at four in the afternoon his work parade came to a running stop. We hurried to the kindergarten, the best equipped building on the grounds. There the two teachers Aisha and Mickey (again, one an Arab and one Jewish) were winding up for the day. Here were several of the fathers enjoying an hour of near peace with the children. One, still in his Army sweater, was bottle feeding the youngest child. Eitan was teeter-tottering his own toddler. A four-year-old, meanwhile, terrorized a goose who had wandered into the area.
These are the images that stay in mind. Quiet men caretaking noisy kids. The fresh excitement and determination for friendship between the Jewish and Arab teenagers. And what Tsamadar, Eitan’s busy wife, yelled to me in farewell: “Don’t call us a MODEL! We live here. And it’s not easy. If you have to call us anything, say it’s an experiment in living. We live here.”
*****
Five years after my month spent wandering up and down Israel, immersed in all its age-old hatreds and divisions, Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam still feels like an oasis and then some. Since then that country pulled itself out of its mistake of invading Lebanon, and a substantial peace movement has grown up. It even includes a group of members of the Israeli army, calling itself “Yesh Gvul” which translates as “There are boundaries” with the connotation of “Enough Already”, pledging they would defend their country but not fight beyond its borders.
The demonstrations and horror films of the Occupation on the evening news have now even mobilized some American Jews to trust our own voice about Israel, our right and obligation to speak up. And I find myself wanting to tell people about Neve Shalom all over again. It still seems like one of the few spots in that land where the early, non-colonial but aspirational Zionism of Judah Magnes and Henrietta Szold and Martin Buber still takes root. It is decidedly inclusive of both the peoples who are cousins residing in the land.
“Who wants to follow the path of our Hebrew Biblical humanism will resist… patriotic bombast which clouds this gulf between the demand for life and the desire of the will-to-power. He resists the whisperings of false popularity which is the opposite of true service to the people. He is not taken in by the hoax of modern international egoism, according to which everything which can be of benefit to one’s people must be true and right.” —Martin Buber 1948 Israel and the World, pg. 241
Endnote June 2025:
There is some hope, even as news from Palestine remains abysmal. Even family members like my cousin who lost her son in Hebron has become furious with Netanyahu, blaming him for sacrificing the remaining hostages; she now hopes the Ultra-Orthodox parties bring about his coalition’s downfall! She is backed in this by a group of 41 Israeli intelligence officers from the IDF who call the continuing actions in Gaza an “unnecessary, eternal war… designed to preserve the rule of Netanyahu” and serving only to appease “undemocratic and messianic elements in [his] government.” (The Guardian June 11) The anti-war group “Soldiers for the Hostages” now refuse to fight.
A cousin my age, in Zurich, continues to write and organize in favor of peace and the (non-Hamas) Palestinian cause. She promotes gatherings to hear the actual fathers of two daughters, one Arab and one Jewish, both killed in Israel/Palestine, their story at the heart of Colum McCann’s 2020 award-winning novel Apeirigon.4 Her efforts to bridge Israeli family and Palestinian friends may in the long run be more truly supportive of a hopeful future for Israel than the “facts on the ground” of Israelis in settlements—who include many of our own cousins.
Footnotes:
1. Released after 10 years for knife attack, this man murdered again. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/world/middleeast/man-attacks-gay-pride-marchers-in-jerusalem-for-second-time-police-say.html
2. Last Jerusalem mixed Arab/Israeli gay bar Shushan fondly recalled. https://www.thejc.com/opinion/memories-of-long-evenings-at-the-only-gay-bar-in-jerusalem-t96ztmh9
3. 47 American doctors report children shot in the head in Gaza. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-doctor-interviews.html
4. An ongoing project between two fathers who lost their children: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/books/colum-mccann-apeirogon-israel-palestine.html
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