The Israel I Know
From a hotel bed in Arlington, Va., we read the news of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. Around midday, we drove by the State Department, and I wondered how our nation’s foreign policy response would read. Before the attack, in Israel and worldwide, Jews had been celebrating Simchat Torah, our annual ritual of completing the Torah readings.
The following day, my daughter ran the Army Ten-Miler, the reason we made the trip to Washington. Walking to the start line outside the Pentagon, I stared at the mustard-yellow glow in its windows, wondering again what our leaders were discussing.
On the asphalt roads and parking lots outside the Defense Department headquarters, dogs trained their noses on the 35,000 runners who were walking to their wave positions, staking out where they would start the country’s second-largest race of its distance. As a spectator, it was not lost on me that I was standing at one of the sites where another group of terrorists attacked our country in 2001.
It’s upsetting that thousands of people are dead in Israel and Gaza, and hundreds are being held hostage. How Hamas could kill and kidnap civilians and terrorize millions more in service of a political statement is beyond the pale.
Hamas doesn’t recognize the existence of Israel. The terrorist organization controls Gaza, where roughly half of the 2.3 million people who live there are children. Many lived in inhumane and untenable conditions before this month’s attack. Now, they’re being told to evacuate south toward Egypt as Israel is expected to invade Gaza after cutting off the territory's food, water, medicine and electricity.
There’s a long history of injustice that precedes the current conflict, but I’m not here to make pronouncements on how to resolve the issues. If there were easy answers, the problems would have been solved long ago. I simply hope the people in power can find a way to bring an end to the suffering in the region.
To be a Jew in the U.S. is to have the freedom to practice our religion. To be a Jew in this country is also to greet a police officer before I greet my rabbi at Shabbat service each week. To be a Jew is to hear fellow Americans repeat antisemitic conspiracy theories. To be a Jew is to be proselytized on an Air Force base by a fellow airman intent on recruiting me to join “Jews for Jesus” whenever she spotted me hanging out in the courtyard outside our barracks.
“You know, you can be Jewish and still love Jesus,” she would press.
Now, flip around the order of that sentence and imagine how it sounds to a Christian.
Eight years ago, I traveled across Israel on a trip organized by the Jewish National Fund. I’ve traveled to several countries over the years, but that vacation remains my favorite. An El Al ticket agent at JFK Airport presented me with a boarding pass only after grilling me for ten minutes on security issues and the particulars of my chosen religion.
“Did anyone give you items to pack in your luggage?”
“Has your luggage been in your possession the entire time?”
“What’s your religion?”
“What are the major Jewish holidays?”
“What’s on the Passover Seder plate?”
El Al’s passenger profiling is a response to terrorism. In 1968, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an El Al flight en route from Italy to Israel. That event is said to have marked the advent of air terrorism, and it informs how the airline operates to this day. El Al is the only commercial airline that equips its planes with missile defense systems to protect against surface-to-air missiles.
The Israel I know is hummus, shawarma and falafel. It’s roasted eggplant with tahini sauce. It’s halva, dates and olives. It’s freshly caught, grilled fish. It’s touring the wineries in the North and the Golan Heights. It’s eating homemade pistachio ice cream at an artist residency.
It’s shoveling a small patch of dirt to plant a sapling, one addition to the hundreds of millions of trees planted by the Jewish National Fund. Israel is one of only a handful of countries that entered the 21st century with a net gain in the number of trees.
Israel is a self-applied mud treatment and an effortless float at the lowest point on Earth, the briny Dead Sea, its waters reaching not only the shore of Israel but also the West Bank and Jordan.
It’s hearing several languages in the morning as I walk barefoot along the beach in Tel Aviv. Hebrew isn’t all that hard to learn. I learned the alphabet fairly easily. Hebrew only has around 33,000 words, compared to the English language, which has at least five times more words.
Israel is lacing my shoes and walking down Rothschild Boulevard to tour the world’s largest collection of Bauhaus architecture, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site that numbers 4,000 buildings. German Jewish architects who fled Germany after the Nazis rose to power designed the buildings.
It’s stopping for dinner in the Old City of Acre, a gorgeous, walled port city. It’s platters upon platters of lean meats and colorful vegetables, boisterous conversation and bottles of wine.
Israel is its pioneering drip irrigation technique and the produce that grows in the greenhouses of the Central Arava region.
It’s the Hula Valley, a major stopover for birds migrating along the Syrian-African Rift Valley across three continents. Birds don’t pay any mind to borders.
Israel is the Star of David pendant that a clerk at HStern gifted me during the trip.
It’s music, dancing and drinking on an evening boat cruise on the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus is said to have walked on water and where John the Baptist baptized him. I think those two guys would have enjoyed our party that night.
Israel is paying respects to the victims of the Holocaust by visiting Yad Vashem.
It’s remembering former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the square where he was assassinated by a fellow Jew while getting into his car following a peace rally in 1995.
Israel is visiting the grave of David Ben-Gurion, the primary founder of the state of Israel and its first prime minister.
It’s taking a cable car up to Masada to tour the ruins of King Herod’s Palace, built on a plateau in the Judean desert in the style of the early Roman Empire. It’s a symbol of the ancient kingdom of Israel and a symbol of Jewish heroism.
Israel is staying at the jaw-dropping, 5-star Beresheet Hotel, built on the edge of the Ramon Crater in the Negev desert. It’s the ibexes that roam the country’s largest national park. It’s a sunrise dune buggy ride into the crater that’s shaped like an elongated heart.
It’s squeezing our way through the tunnels of Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, tracing the steps of Israeli soldiers. The hill is the site of one of the fiercest battles of the Six-Day War, where 182 olive trees were planted to commemorate the war dead.
Israel is visiting the Western Wall but being mindful that women are directed to segregate from men.
It’s making good on a promise to place my friend’s handwritten prayer in an opening between the massive limestone blocks and then realizing the significance of where I was standing.
Israel is approaching the Temple of the Mount complex, which includes the Dome of the Rock shrine, access to which is heavily regulated for people who aren’t Muslims.
Israel is stopping at a gift shop, only to be cornered by a shop clerk who tried to coerce me, against my better judgement, to follow him upstairs to enjoy a cup of tea.
It’s visiting the 9/11 Living Memorial Monument in Jerusalem, the only memorial outside the U.S. that includes the names of all the people who died during the attacks. The monument is a metal remnant from the remains of the Twin Towers.
Israel is our highly-skilled tour bus driver, Naftali, who left Romania for Israel at the age of 9, who was always quick to offer a smile and a helpful hand and who loved sharing pictures of his wife and kids. He took part in the Cherbourg Project, an Israeli military operation staged on Christmas Eve of 1969. Naftali and other sailors were tasked with bringing home the five remaining armed Sa'ar 3 class boats from the French port of Cherbourg. Israel had paid for the boats, but France refused to release them because of an embargo, so Israel took matters into its own hands.
It’s visiting the Ayalon Institute, which is the former site of an underground ammunition factory. The factory was cleverly disguised as a kibbutz that ran a laundry service. The site was built in one month and produced ammunition for several years in the 1940s, under the nose of the British military. The public wouldn’t discover it until thirty years later.
Most of all, to me, being a Jew and a Zionist is to revere the symbolism of a dove while also understanding that lasting peace requires a specific set of conditions. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that peace begins with me.