Zionism

Ruins / July 22, 2015 by Sophie Schor

Once a week, my class goes on a tour of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. To begin, our professor took us to the "Corridor," or the narrow but important sliver that connects the route from Tel Aviv to the heart of West Jerusalem. (Demarcated by the narrow yellow area between the borders and the Occupied territories here.)

As we gathered on the bus to return to university, our professor challenged us. Both these locations carry a certain narrative, how do we take a step back to put it into historical context? My thoughts ran, but I couldn't find words to answer. The history is still unfolding around us daily, and the story of Motza and Lifta are not far enough removed to be stared at objectively. The schoolhouse of Lifta is surrounded by the shopping mall near the bus station which I see every time I take a bus back to Jerusalem from elsewhere. The red roof-tiles and old stones glare at the city which has developed around it. Jerusalem is city that is ever-evolving and never-forgetting.

More Than Just Numbers / June 17, 2015 by Sophie Schor

I just covered 384km in 12 hours to sit at an army base where 387 soldiers, now officers, and 21 women, now officers, stood for 3 hours in 36 degree heat. They paraded around the yard. Left. Right. Left.

My cousin just finished his officers course in the army, and I hitched a ride with the family to the base down near Mitzpe Ramon, aka the Deep South, far from any semblance of urban life and surrounded by desert.

Grief and Hollyhocks / May 13, 2015 by Sophie Schor

I found that my grandma died as I was sitting in a room surrounded by Palestinians sharing their personal stories about losing their homes in 1948.

Nakba day is coming up, and at this important juncture in historical narratives, we gathered, 50 people, in a room to honor their stories. Each person who spoke began by situating themselves and their families by a chain of names. My father was….son of….daughter of….mother of…from the village of….They held onto these names as tightly as the heartbeats that continue to pump the blood through their veins.

My grandmother, Judy Bloom-Criden, daughter of Jacob Mirviss, was born in Connecticut, not in a village in the Galilee. And yet on Friday that is where she will be buried: in the Hula valley under the shadow of the Mt. Hermon with the only tiny sliver of snow to be found in this country. She was an English teacher, and taught almost everyone on the Kibbutz and their kids how to swim. She played the flute. She made a killer chocolate cake from some crazy combination of vinegar and cocoa. She moved here in the 1970s, following the death of her husband. Her sister had already lived in the Negev for almost twenty years; her parents had also recently made the permanent pilgrimage to the desert. I asked her once, under the gaze of a painting of klezmer musicians, why she came to Israel. “It’s the home of the Jewish people,” she said. Full stop.

A few days ago, it was Independence Day in Israel.

I had an entire post prewritten in advance ready to share with you about independence day in Israel--I've described this moment in the past to friends as the microcosm of the entire conflict. On this one day, two narratives collide and clash. Israelis celebrate the glory of their struggle and fight to establish an independent nation-state and home for the Jewish people. For Palestinians, it is a day marked as the beginning of the end. Called al-Nakba or The Catastrophe; the Israeli Declaration of Independence announced a return to a land for one people, and an expulsion of another people from that same land. Over 700,000 Palestinians fled, or were expelled during the events of the war.

Prepared as I thought I was, the actual experience of Independence Day in Israel was more than I expected; I was overwhelmed, and what I had written no longer felt adequate.

The silence of the morning memorials and the poignant remembrance of lives lost to this conflict was suddenly interrupted at sundown by massive patriotic partying. The nationalism of the people around me struck me as offensive. The manipulation of our powerful feelings of grief towards political and nationalistic ends was frightening.

I was in the city center of Jerusalem as this shift took place. Bars had set up large screens to display Israeli television broadcasts of the Independence Day programming, replete with hundreds dancing the hora in pulsating concentric circles and Air Force flyovers. I walked home, basically fleeing, from the commotion and the crowds who were amassing to drink and celebrate and smack each other with balloon blow up hammers covered with Israeli flags. The full 360-degree shift from a nation in mourning to a nation in celebration left my head spinning.

I had spoken with my great-aunt earlier that day. She moved to Israel with her husband in 1953 as part of a group that established a kibbutz in the Negev desert. One of the original Jewish pioneers, she came here with an ideological dream. We talked about the impact of memorial day, of the six graves in the kibbutz cemetery of soldiers who had died in various operations and wars, dating all the way to 1948.

She told me how pleased she was to see so many generations come to the memorial that morning to pay their respects. I asked her what she thought of the fact that Independence Day celebrations were so close to the Memorial Day silences, she told me that that is the only way to live here. We have to celebrate and live our lives fiercely for those who died for us, she told me.

I then spoke with my mom, who lived in Israel during the 1970s-1980s. In 10th grade, she was living on a Kibbutz up north and I asked her, what was Independence Day like for you then? She told me it was a barbecue, and there was Israeli dancing, a big bonfire, everyone was outside on the lawn and was wearing their nice, white shirts. At age 15, she was mostly concerned with where her friends were. It was a big party. Then she got quiet; we didn't know about what else was going on then, she tells me. Or what would happen next.

I recently watched the film Khirbet Khizeh, based off a book written by a soldier in 1949 of the events of the War of 1948. In the film, produced in 1978, a troop of young Israeli soldiers takes over a Palestinian village and kicks out the inhabitants. The book is translated into English and worth reading. The film takes place at a simple, almost slow pace--boredom and heat determine the soldier’s actions more than politics or ethnic superiority. The film toys with the irony of the creation of a new community of refugees in the name of giving a home to Jewish refugees from Europe. I was haunted by shots of the houses left abandoned, kitchen counters still covered with food for tomorrow's meal, pictures hanging on the wall; by the few sentences stated by the soldiers that could have been said yesterday. The parallels were left lingering in the room long after the film ended. I was left with the notion that what started in 1948 still isn’t finished; Palestinians are still being forced out of their homes via evictions and demolitions. It's still not over, and any attempt to live a life of normalcy here is forever underlined by the consequences of 1948.

If you're interested in the history of the conflict and the War of 1948, check out the best history of Palestine and Israel that I have yet come across, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel by German scholar Gudrun Krämer. She focuses on the collision of Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism in the beginning of the 20th century, the historical context leading to those interactions, and the complex ways in which "social grievances were intertwined with national aspirations." Well worth the read.

I lift my glass today, not to celebrate the end of the War of Independence, but rather to a fight that is not yet over. To the struggle that hopes to end with both a safe-home for the Jewish people and a home that honors the dignity of the Palestinian people. Call me naively optimistic, but if we don't linger in a world with slight traces of optimism, what else do we have left?

Remembrance / April 16, 2015 by Sophie Schor

April 16, 2015

Today is known as Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Day, in Israel. An entire 24 hours each year is designated to the commemoration and remembrance of the 6 million Jews in Europe who were killed.

At 10 am, a siren sounds. People stop everything they are doing around the country for 2 minutes of silence.

I stood at the junction of East and West Jerusalem this morning. My camera poised, my framing already picked out, waiting.

An Arab bus breezed past, and then. A siren. Cars pulled over. People got out. Stood. Silent. A taxi drove past.

Silence.

And then it was over. People returned to their cars, put it in gear, and drove off. Returning to the original programming.

Yet in that moment, the three seconds between the ending of the siren and the return to life, I felt the weight of a people. An object at rest stays at rest. An object at motion stays at motion. And that moment between rest and motion takes all the energy in the world to begin. The experience was moving in the sense that I was able to concretely see a collective, national consciousness being built. To know that all over the country, at the same time, strangers that you do not know also took 2 minutes to be quiet and to think of "over there" and "that time" in Europe. To reconcile he deaths of millions with your present daily existence in a country that was constructed on the identity for which they were killed.

It is powerful.

I sat with a friend of mine afterwards to talk about what we just watched. What we felt. What we thought. Our conversation turned to this last summer and the operation in Gaza. To other sirens we heard, to our experiences of sitting in shelters, to our experiences when we shrugged it off, to those without shelters. We spoke of Sheijaya, a neighborhood that has become a symbol of the destruction of Gaza this summer. My eyes watered, my throat grew tight.

We remembered.

The holocaust has evolved into being more than just an event--it is a symbol that can be politicized, banalized, contorted to political justifications, used to demonize your enemies, the punchline in a morbid joke, the justification for contemporary anxieties.

As much as I wanted to approach and experience this moment this morning with these critical thoughts in mind, it hit me in the heart. And to give a minute to think of the horrors of the world felt not only appropriate, but called for. To remember. To be called upon never to forget. And for me personally, to remember the determination to strive for justice and ensure that it is never again for any peoples.

The next two weeks are a microcosm of this conflict wrapped up in official commemorations and ceremonies celebrating or condoning Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Naqba. Stay tuned.

To see a video of the siren, see here.

Spring Blossoms / April 9, 2015 by Sophie Schor

April 9, 2015

I went hiking around the desert with my family. It's part of the post-Passover tradition we have. We wandered through wadis and climbed over the remains of Byzantine terraces. We waded through pools of water and took a nap under a 2,000 year old tree (or so they say). The flowers were unbelievable. Our hike began with my 2 aunts telling my uncle to slow down the car so they could properly see and name that purple over there. And oh wait! That red one!! Is it the normal buttercup or is it a tulip?? The two sisters spent the entire hike naming each and every plant and calling each other to come and see what they found. The joke of the hike became that you cannot walk backwards under any circumstance. And yet they would continue to backtrack to see if that white flower was really a "milk-blossom" or not. The moment when I dissolved into a fit of laughter was when they whipped out their binoculars to properly identify a clump of flowers far away on a hillside.

I was struck by how much knowledge the two of them had. They grew up on a kibbutz in the Negev; the classic Zionist ideology instilled into them from an early age. They were raised to be pioneers, laborers, redeemers of the land. They learned all these names from the yearly class trips, which still exist in the Israeli education system. Kids travel all around the country with their class and are introduced to the land. There's even a song they sing, "My land of Israel is beautiful and blooming."

This reminded me of the weekend I spent in Bayt Jala with the Palestinians at the Global Village Square conference. We had an afternoon walk away from the hotel and as we wandered through the grass, the Palestinian women I was walking with were running back and forth naming every flower and picking them and teaching me what to call them in Arabic. The men had wandered off to pick almonds that were still green on the trees and eat them. One guy handed me an almond and as I bit incredulously into its fuzzy green exterior, he told me, "Welcome to Palestine."

The people who live here truly love the land. That is undeniable.

Pains of Exodus / April 3, 2015 by Sophie Schor

April 3, 2015

I met Manel Tamimi while traveling through the West Bank in January. She welcomed us into her home in Nabi Saleh and spoke with us about the horrors her family faces under occupation.

Nabi Saleh is a well known friction point for resistance and holds weekly protests every Friday. The village organizes itself and attempts to walk from their homes across the valley to the spring that used to belong to them. The spring is now a part of the settlement which was built above it. There’s a brilliant profile in the New York Times that describes the Tamimi family and the village.

Manel told us that she classifies herself as a non-violent resistor, but could not call herself peaceful. She said,”I can’t be peaceful in that moment when an Israeli soldier enters my house to arrest my 14 year old son. When I’m watching 2 of my cousins dying in front of me. When my 8 year old faints after being shot with tear gas and the soldier is smiling. Yet, I am nonviolent because a mothers pain is the same pain. I refuse any mother to experience this pain because I’ve experienced it. I understand the meaning of losing your beloved and waiting for your beloved.”

Manel was shot by an Israeli soldier in the leg today with live ammo during the weekly protest.

I heard about this as I am heading to my family’s kibbutz in the south to celebrate Passover—a holiday that marks the freedom of the Jews from slavery in Egypt and their arrival to the land of milk and honey. It is my family’s tradition to have long conversations that are interrupted by food and singing all night long. We often discuss the idea of freedom and I have grown up repeating every year that we are not free until all peoples are free. This sentence has never rung more true for me than in this moment. While we were talking with Manel, she said “Even if one day we free Palestine, I am going to fight for others. Because if you are a human you are going to fight against the pain of others.”

There is weird parallelism in being here in Israel, on my way to the Kibbutz which was founded in 1953, to be surrounded by cousins and tradition, and to know at the same time that across the wall, not so far away, people are hurting because of this claim to this land.