My People
I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write.
My ninth grade English teacher asked his students to keep a journal. If we didn’t know what to say, he asked us to write, “I don’t know what to write,” again and again, until the words came. I’m employing his technique now, because I don’t know what words can make a difference, SEVEN MONTHS into a GENOCIDE. What can I say, write, scream, weep, that I, that MILLIONS of people, have not already said? No one wants to hear about genocide anymore. So I’ll write a love story instead. A love story about a Palestinian family in Haifa who saved an American Jew’s humanity.
I was raised to be an observant Jew, and in the synagogue I was taught in, where religion and politics merged completely, being a good Jew meant being a zionist. Zionism, from its beginning until today, was and is a racist, settler-colonial movement that has stolen Palestinian land, and slaughtered, kidnapped, humiliated and tortured Palestinians for more than 76 years, and forced the Palestinians not killed or violently displaced, to live under an apartheid regime and military occupation. But this, of course, is not how zionism is taught. I learned a narrative that had nothing to do with reality, including lies such as “the land which is Israel was given to the Jews by the U.N. as reparations for the Holocaust” and “without the state of Israel, Jewish people will never be safe.”
In my childhood and young adult years, along with learning Hebrew prayers and longing to become a rabbi, I also dreamed of settling down in Israel and making a safe home amongst “my people”. And along with love for Judaism, love for the Jewish people, and love for the state of Israel, I was also taught another emotion connected to being Jewish: fear. Fear that is passed down from generation to generation based on genuine trauma, and fear born of the lies that zionism is based on. My grandparents and great-grandparents left Europe long before the Holocaust due to pogroms. In America, they found the safety they sought as long as they assimilated. I learned about the Holocaust, in great detail, as a child. I was also taught, again and again and again and again, “Arabs hate Jews, and that’s why they attack Israel.” I never believed that teaching — at least, I told myself I didn’t.
Judaism and Israel lived side by side in my soul, one a way to walk through this world, and the other the place I dreamed of walking to: my lifelong plan, from the time I was a teenager, was to settle down in Israel.
Life changes you. I lost my faith in my religion in my twenties. But my dream of Israel stayed rooted to me. Throughout many points in my life, reality felt absolutely unbearable, and the Israel that had been taught to me was, above all things, a hope and a promise — that one day, reality would be better. At least, my reality. I had never heard the word Nakba. The first time I learned the word Palestine, I was 18. And I thought the “conflict” in Israel was about religion.
In 2009 I made plans to settle down in Israel. My plan was to volunteer at a women’s and children’s shelter for a month, then take an intensive Hebrew course, then stay forever. My housing fell through on day two, and I arrived at the shelter, a place whose residents and staff were a mix of Israelis and Palestinians, with no place to stay. The first staff member who greeted me was an Israeli. I explained my situation and her response was, “chaval”, what a pity. The second staff member who greeted me, Wafa, was a Palestinian. She called her brother and told him I needed a place to stay. He offered me an apartment he was renting.
And this is the gut response I had, after years of zionist indoctrination: “Arabs hate Jews. Say no. Why would they help me? ‘My people’ will help me.”
Babies and small children embrace each other without a single thought to a person’s tribe, race, class, religion or any of the other barriers to humanity that these things often become. How long does it take to teach someone to respond to kindness with fear? How long does it take to uproot those teachings?
“My people” did not help me find an apartment. And when I returned to Wafa three days later, in tears, asking for help, asking for forgiveness, without a single word of reproach, without a single unkind look, she called her brother, who rented me the apartment.
I had been taught fear, hatred, and lies. Wafa had learned love. What a tremendous difference our teachings make.
On my first night in the apartment, Wafa’s niece, a tenant in the building, invited me to dinner. The following weekend was spent in Wafa’s village: meeting her family and friends, learning their history, learning about what their lives in my “dream country” were like, and speaking English with Wafa’s daughter Yara. Wafa and her family did not treat me like a guest. They treated me like family.
It was a weekend that changed my life. I never moved to Israel. I understood it was Palestinian land and it was not my right to claim it. I started a process of unlearning the lies and fear and hatred that had been indoctrinated into me from childhood.
And I came to understand who “my people” truly are.
It is my human sisters and brothers who are being tortured, slaughtered, and starved in a GENOCIDE in Gaza, and arrested, beaten, and killed in the West Bank. And it is my human sisters and brothers who are committing this GENOCIDE.
I cannot reciprocate the kindness Wafa and her family offered me, and provide them with the shelter from the world’s storms that they gave me, in a moment when I desperately needed it. But maybe I can do for another what Wafa and her family did for me, and remind someone who has forgotten, of the humanity inside every single person. For no matter who you are or where you are from, it is your human sisters and brothers who are being murdered in a GENOCIDE in Gaza, and it is your human sisters and brothers who are killing them.
A GENOCIDE is happening in Gaza. It is not a war or a conflict. And without funds, weapons, and complicity from countries around the world, especially the United States, this GENOCIDE would not be possible. The worldwide repression of any support for Palestinians should also make it clear that this slaughter is about something much, much larger than stolen land in Palestine.
I wish I had a different story to tell. I wish I could tell you that I saw through the lies of zionism from the beginning, and that nothing of that evil had ever taken root inside me. But my story is only one of the countless stories in this world that I wish were different. So one of the things that I hope you take from this, is that you reject every teaching that is not rooted in love for all life: people, animals, our earth. I also hope you remember this: dead bodies cannot be brought back to life. Dead humanity can be resurrected.
