notes of a non-combatant

fear and loathing

In Tel Aviv, the protest began in the middle of the afternoon, on the corner of Dizengoff and King George Streets. I had been relaxing with Victor since lunchtime, hanging out at the beach and walking around town. In a city so calm and relaxing, it was hard not to be content and at peace.

The protest was an affirmation of things I had heard; it was nice to see so many Jewish Israelis gathered to protest Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces’ name for the recent violence in Gaza. There was a good showing of people, but the parcel of land that the protest took place on was hardly full. It was such a mixed crowd rife with language barriers and varying beliefs. I meandered around the crowd, trying to listen in on any political conversation taking place in English. No two people have exactly the same humanitarian or political views, but deeper schisms resided between the people in this protest. Hearing several girls chatting with a self-proclaimed anarchist, they had a difficult time narrowing his views on the issue at hand; putting ideology, hopes, and dreams aside, they couldn’t get him to focus on the fact that the death toll was past three-hundred bodies, with anywhere from a quarter to half of the dead being acknowledged as civilian casualty.

After wandering through the crowd for a little, I met up with a family friend named Yonatan. A tall, soft-spoken man, he would quietly chant the slogans being shouted before explaining them to me in English. For roughly an hour, he translated phrases such as:

“ברק, ברק, שר הבטחון, כמה ילדים רצחת עד היום?”
(Barak, Barak, sar ha’bitakhon- kama yeledim ratzakhta ad ha’yom?)
“[Ehud] Barak, Barak, Minister of Defense- how many children did you murder today?”

“בעזה ובשדרות, ילדות רוצות לחיות”
(b’Aza uv’Sderot, yeledot rotzot likh’yot.)
“In Gaza and in Sderot, girls just want to live.”

After translating for a while, I turned to Yonatan and asked him how he feels about his friends in the Israeli Defense Forces; as a former Air Force pilot, it must be hard for him to be on the liberal side of the protests when supporters of the armed forces were holding a counter-demonstration across the street. In a soft tone of voice, he explained to me that many of the people he had been family with in the Air Force are the ones dropping the bombs for the last several days. He described it as being that these men he was so close to are gang-raping people, a nation, and then going home at the end of the day to relax and rest, only to wake up the next morning and continue the rape.

I stopped asking Yonatan his opinion after that response, not because I wasn’t interested or that I couldn’t dig deeper, but out of respect for that fact that his description of the situation was as poignant as it could possibly be from the mouth of a native English speaker, much less from a person with limited English such as himself. He made his point and it would have been asinine to question any further.

The protest ended soon afterward and it was a chance for people to network with each other and find out about future events, especially for English speakers who wouldn’t have known had any information been broadcast in Hebrew. I spoke with a few people and took down their information before a small brunette in a long wool coat with a neatly-wrapped scarf around her neck had approached me. She asked me if I knew of anything more happening, but I had nothing to offer. Rather, I asked the same question of her, and we both ended up talking until police officers began clearing the area out. We walked slowly until one protester began shouting at a police officer, at which point the officer began physically assaulting the protester. The lady started to escape the area and I followed.

As we got down the block and further away from the protest site, we began trading stories. Sara came from Italy to finish her studies while volunteering at an alternative news service, a non-government organization that provides news reports from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She explained that the organization is only designed to cover stories happening regarding the Palestinian-Israeli situation, and is not a general news agency. As the night went on, I was able to find out more information about her and her coworkers as we all went together to get dinner.

Following lamb shwarma in pita, most of her coworkers were heading back to a village near Bethlehem where they all worked in the West Bank. Sara was staying behind with a friend in Tel Aviv since she needed to get her visa renewed before crossing any more checkpoints, but the Israeli authorities refused to renew it earlier that day. She was waiting to hear back from the Italian consulate, hoping to find a solution to continue working and studying.

After her coworkers got on a shuttle taxi to Jerusalem, her friend that she was staying with had to return to the motel, so Sara and I headed to a little shop to sit and eat a cup of frozen yogurt. On the way, we talked about our motivations for coming here. I found out that she has no ethnic or familial ties to the Middle East, being born and raised in Italy; her only link to the Middle East, and the work that she does to promote accurate reporting and dissemination of news, was simply her lust for justice and equality. When she began to describe her experiences in the West Bank, it was like a dam burst as she gushed words and emotions, weaving an intense tapestry of pain, anguish, and injustice. I was witnessing it again as I had seen in a select few people before- she cares so passionately about the cause she has devoted herself to that she has become personally connected with it and it has shaken her to the core. After witnessing children being arrested and various killings around Bethlehem, she said that she just “didn’t feel right with myself.”

We stood on the side of Rothschild Street for several minutes, an intense whirlwind of emotions and passion in our words. Although she was nearly a complete stranger, we could understand each others’ essence and why we dedicate ourselves the way we do. I looked her straight in the eyes and explained to her that she could be doing anything with her life and innocent people could still be having their land, lives, and family taken from them; the fact that she chooses to stand and fight is a beautiful thing, regardless of how much change will come of it.

For some people, “fear and loathing” is more than the title of  Thompson’s novel; the phrase is a savage journey of emotion that we have the smallest grasp on and the hardest time controlling. For peace workers, activists, humanitarians, or whatever people may choose to call themselves, fear and loathing can be our largest downfall. We fear that our cause will fail, or that the situation will get worse before it changes. We loathe aggression, oppression, and inaction, in others and in ourselves. We end up hyper-analyzing situations until it consumes us; in the Middle East, anybody with a political stance must know the entire situation, because lacking one percent of current information may be an Achilles’ heel in an argument taking place in a political landscape that is already heavily polarized. Yet this quest for knowledge, understanding, and change begins to consume us as dots begin to connect ourselves to the situations at hand. If racism exists so strongly and wreaks so much havoc, do I bear or exhibit elements of this racism? If my government oppresses an ethnic minority, by supporting my government in other areas, am I an oppressor? As part of an ethnic majority, do I owe anything to members of the minority, whether tangible or not? Must I make up for the bad deeds and ill will of my predecessors or of my modern brethren? How, exactly, do I fit into the picture?

Personally, I am much more stable and grounded having already answered those questions for myself. If Jews take from Arabs, and I am a Jew, that does not mean I owe a damn thing to Arabs- so long as I was not the one stealing or supporting the thief; however, to idly stand by and watch without exercising my own power would be a criminal act. Believing this to be so important, I choose to make it my priority to be a voice of justice and equality in this world. The same is true for similar situations all across the world. The argument I repeated is often made but the latter half is discarded; it is easy for a person to do no harm and turn a blind eye to wrongdoing, but it’s all sorts of difficult to take a stand for what is just, moral, and legal. For people of an ethnic majority that do decide to take a stand, it is often difficult to get past misdirected feelings of guilt and self-loathing, which are ultimately self-destructive.

Standing on the side of the street and watching Sara erupt in emotion, this mindset was the only thing that could help me get through to her; without it, we would both have probably drowned in our own emotion. Instead, we’ve learned to acknowledge that when our blood begins to boil, we can take our molten emotions and form them, letting them temper to become stronger and more effective. In that moment, we further define who we are- and this can be the greatest struggle of all.

Random graffiti in Tel Aviv- “המבשר” : “the messenger [of good news]”