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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I was disgusted last week as I watched some of the Gaza settlers using their children as pawns. Then I realized that I fill my kids' heads with dogma too.
Aug 29, 2005 | When one settler family was forcibly removed from their home in Kerem Atzmona in the Gaza Strip last week, the patriarch put a sign on the door: Judenrein. His wife instructed their children to walk with their hands raised above their heads. She had sewn orange stars on their lapels. Their dramatic and scripted exit was clearly meant to evoke the famous 1943 photograph of the little boy surrendering to the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. Some of the members of the Israeli army who were supervising their removal wept. Had I been there, in uniform, I'm not sure I would have been able to refrain from hauling the parents of those children out of the house by their hair, and giving them a klop on the ass for good measure.
The treatment the settlers received from those Jewish soldiers was so thoughtful, so judicious, so tender. The officers in command of the evacuation spent hours negotiating with the settlers, listening to their ravings, before gently escorting them away. And yet, over and over again we heard the settlers analogizing their suffering to the massacre of millions during the Holocaust. Dikla Cohen of the settlement Neve Dekalim said, "I feel that today was a pogrom."
Are these people so blinded by their fanaticism that they believe that the trauma of relocation can be compared to the horrors of Auschwitz and Babi Yar? Are they so benighted that they believe that being given a quarter of a million dollars in compensation for your house is akin to watching a Nazi soldier spear your newborn child on the tip of his bayonet?
I watched the Gaza settlers with rage in my heart, but I watched the soldiers managing their evacuation with only admiration. This was the Israeli army of my childhood, the one for whom my oldest brother nearly lost his life in the Yom Kippur War. I had long since considered that army a myth, one born of my father's romantic storytelling. When I was a girl I'd listen to him recount battle stories from the War of Independence in 1948, when he and his compatriots fought with insufficient weapons and ragged uniforms, but with more than enough will to forge a country. But the myth of that army had faded for me, lost in the gloom of the Lebanon War and the bitter misery of the intifada.
I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was "Never Again." We moved back to North America in 1967, when I was 2 years old, but my father was never happy here. He pined for Israel, and he instilled in me both a sense of longing for a place I barely remembered, and the conviction that no Jew could call anywhere else home.
When I was younger I was a good soldier in my father's army of memory. I retained my Israeli accent, took up Israeli folk dancing, marched in the Israeli Independence Day parade in New York wearing blue and white. I was a member of a Zionist Socialist youth group, and spent my summers at its camp, wearing ugly leather sandals and singing songs about the scent of eucalyptus along the banks of the Galilee.
The person I was back then would surely have had a less extreme reaction to the evacuation of the Gaza settlements. I never supported the settlements; my own family of former kibbutzniks was far too well ensconced in Israel's left wing to think of the West Bank and Gaza as anything other than occupied territories. Still, I probably would have felt pity for the settlers, and some part of me might even have understood their fanaticism as a starker version of my own Zionism. When I was still under the sway of my father's opinion, I believed passionately in the necessity and inevitability of a Jewish state. Now, however, my sense of tragedy outweighs my hopefulness, and while I still tell my children stories of riding horses through the Jordan River, I can't help fearing that the Zionist enterprise will one day be seen to have done the Jewish people more harm than good. Our tenacious hold on this strip of homeland has become the scapegoat for the world's terrorism and this wouldn't be the case if we remained a people of the diaspora. My father is sure that Israel keeps the Holocaust from happening again. I worry that it might hasten its recurrence.
