We're discussing Amos Oz's Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land at the synagogue book club this weekend. As you can imagine, pretty much ANY book about Israel is sure to engender lively discussion with a bunch of Jews, and, fuelled by strong coffee and East Coast bagels and cream cheese, it should be interesting. I'm kind of ashamed to say there are certain people who I'm hoping don't actually show up for this one, heated as it will be. Because the inner Hawks and Doves will surely be pouncing on those bagels, and on each other, and stick handling this discussion will require an experienced referee (mixing bird and hockey references there, I realize). Otherwise, we'll fizzle into the kind of black and white thinking that is getting the peace process nowhere fast.
If ever there was a country to whom the hashtag #itscomplicated applied, it's surely Eretz Israel. Even if you don't have an opinion, you have an opinion, and if you get any number of Jews together, you have any number of opinions. Including the opinions of the late Mr. Amos Oz, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, the Primo Levi Prize, author of 30-some books, and one of Israel's most famous sons. So when he writes three essays about the land that he loves in spite of its complicated status, Jews and everyone else really should take the time to read them.
I'm not going to philosophize here about his thoughts, about what he says Israel should immediately give up on, or pick apart his nuanced examination of the state of politics today - I'll save that for the bagel bunch. But what did strike me, as I prepare for my third visit next month to The Land is this comment at the end of his essays: "Now comes a little confession: I love Israel even when I cannot stand it....It's never boring here It is vexing, galling, disappointing, sometimes frustrating and infuriating, but almost always fascinating and exciting. What I have seen here in my lifetime is far less, yet also far more, than what my parents and their parents ever dreamed of." That really resonates with me.
The first time I went to Israel in 2011, a friend asked, "But why do you want to go there? Don't they just want to kill people?" Another hoped I would live to be seen again. When I came home and talked about Arab restaurants filled with Jewish families, Arab shops we had done great shopping in, Jewish businesses run by Arabs, my friends looked at me with eyebrows raised. When I mentioned our pistol-packing paratrooper turned van driver, who told me in heavily accented English, "There will never be peace here. But there might be quiet," the eyebrows got even higher.
I had to see Israel for myself, with my own eyes, and I've been fortunate to have done so twice now. Granted, my view is no doubt through the rose-coloured glasses of a Canadian tourist visiting family who say helpful things like, "Don't go there. There, it's fine, but not on Shabbat. Don't drive on that road, this one is fine," and who patiently explain history, politics, language and nuances that I as a naive Nova Scotian would never get in a lifetime of visits. And I've seen in their faces the hurt and humiliation they've experienced when they travel and are asked where they're from, even the left-leaning peaceniks. They love Israel too, even when people spit on them, or ban them from speaking, or don't invite them back to the next international meeting.
So it will be interesting to see what this trip reveals, the prime motivation of which is to visit my 90+ year old mother-in-law, and hopefully meet in person the far-flung descendants of the relatives by marriage who made Aliyah in the 1930's, another remnant of the family not murdered by the Nazis and the collaborators back in Vilna.
My mother-in-law, in the 5% (yes, 5%) of Lithuanian Jews who survived the Holocaust because she and her mother were deported to Siberia and who doesn't consider herself a "survivor" since she wasn't in a concentration camp, told me once "I am girl from war." The Shoah, the Yom Kippur War, the Gulf War, the Intifadas and any number of other events that could have taken out her Israeli children and grandchildren, after leaving all her family dead in Europe, have coloured her thinking about peace and politics. She could have come to Canada, but she stayed in Israel. And this complicated, misunderstood, meshugah country is one that I love too, like Amos Oz, which is what makes me want to read his thoughts again before book club, because, #itsccomplicated.
Lehitraot - see you again soon, Israel. Meanwhile, bagels!
