Fighting Words
“You didn’t know?” My friend looked at me. “Three boys disappeared from the hitchhiking post between Alon Shvut and Kfar Etzion last night. They haven’t been found yet.”
I didn’t know, but I knew the post. I hitchhiked there with my roommate Naomi during my second gap year in Israel. Naomi wore multicolored vests that she sewed herself and had left school to go backpacking for a few months. I told her that I did not understand her. She explained that this was because I am American. Late one night we hitchhiked together to sit under the Lonely Tree in the West Bank and drink Turkish coffee, reading the ancient historian Josephus by a twig fire. As Israeli tour guides love to do, she told me that the battle we were reading about had happened a few kilometers away, in this direction — no wait, it was over there. The location didn’t really matter. What mattered was the trick, the rhetorical flourish that set the archaisms of Josephus in our backyard. In a land where history is argument, it was the archaisms that made this place our backyard.
We waited at the hitchhiking post between Alon Shvut and Kfar Etzion, and an empty bus stopped for us. “We’re all brothers,” the driver beckoned us in. I felt like I should’ve pointed out that my grandfather was Belgian and that the driver was Yemenite, reminded him that none of his ancestors suffered in the Holocaust and that I didn’t even know enough about Yemenite Jewry to know what memories of suffering he lugged around. I nodded and stepped on the bus. I guess adopted brothers are just as good as any other kind. He drove off into the windy curves of the West Bank, rolling hills kissing star-crowded skies like something out of a C.S. Lewis novel. Like something too good to be true.
***
An old friend of mine from seminary came over to me and squeezed my arm. “Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded. “I’m fine,” I said. Somewhere in the Middle East someone is crying, but I’m fine. “Why shouldn’t I be fine? I didn’t know them.”
My friend looked at me. “It was Racheli Shprecher’s son.”
Racheli Shprecher was a teacher in my school. Once, poised tall and stately in a circle of young women in a Jewish study hall, she poured forth: Once there was a woman who looked for a book in a Jewish study hall that would be hers, but the books were by men for men and men laughed at her. So she went home and told a bedtime story to her son and the story became wild and beautiful and conquered worlds and the story was hers. The powerful stories are the ones we give our children.
***
We heard the end of the story eighteen days later. I did not know who killed Racheli’s son or where they came from. I did not know anything about them but the twisted story inscribed upon the flesh of three boys. The powerful stories are the ones we give our children.
***
My mother called to tell me that Joey’s tank unit had gone into Gaza. Sitting with a summer school textbook in Tucson, Arizona I did not know what that meant, but I did know that Joey had chased me once across the synagogue basement to give me a swirly, and when he caught up with me I was afraid and he said he wasn’t actually going to give me a swirly so we kept running together. I did know that two years ago I sat next to a small child in a small town seven kilometers out of Gaza and she told me that her father had traveled to America a few months before and had brought her back an iPad. America, Land of the iPads. Something exploded. The child shrieked. There was the cloud of an overhead rocket. An embarrassed silence and she turned back to me.
“You don’t get rockets in America, do you?” she asked, wide-eyed.
The silence became more embarrassed.
“No.”
***
This summer, while the mountains of Tucson were being blue, there was a war in Gaza which meant nothing but that my Facebook newsfeed erupted into a clamor of friends, classmates, and high school acquaintances all sharing half-baked arguments and half-read op-eds, all explaining what is really happening, the real story, the Real Israel. The Real Israel is the world’s newest manifestation of white oppressive colonizing power and The Real Israel is the ground my forefathers walked and The Real Israel is an eighteen-year-old boy with a gun at a checkpoint who might slap your laboring wife or delay her from reaching a hospital and The Real Israel is the parenthesis that brackets off two thousand years of anguish and fear and mothers eating the flesh of children and it is the light that flashed a “Never Again” so armed and defiant it can hold off the “Why Not?” The Real Israel — even though there is no Israel, only stretches of deserts and high-rise towers and ultra-Orthodox women that language somehow frames and filters into one cohesive unit, just as it frames coherent arguments for the benefit of those who fight the war and protest the war and write opinions about the war that make sense, who can sculpt well-defined narratives out of the fragmented nonsense of a newsfeed. The narratives, I’ve heard, are evil. If we could only forget the narratives we could live in peace. If we could only forget the narratives we could live.
For what? An iPad?
***
One day I picked up a collection of essays by Edward Said, and he told me how much this mess of emotion and power and violence somewhere in the Middle East is about words. “Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them,” Said said.[ref]Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate” in The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 254.[/ref] This was true for me. This was true because of the way the stories I was taught determine what information I can swallow, because of the way actual events never seem to matter as much as the interpretive frameworks that digest them.
Once I told a friend that security protects human lives and that this matters more than the inconvenience caused by checkpoints. He told me that I was not talking about security but about paranoia. I reminded him about the murder of the Fogel family, the memory of a twelve-year-old girl opening the door to her home one evening to find the corpses of her parents and siblings. He reminded me that the Fogels were settlers. As if that settled the matter. As if he could erase a baby-sized volume of blood from his narrative as easily as one might delete an unnecessary comma because it ended up on the wrong side of someone’s line. Seeing my horror, he apologized with regret as sincere as a conversation-changer. As sincere as my horror at the deaths of the four Palestinian boys who were killed on a beach this summer — when “security” sprang to my mind before the “sorry” left my mouth. Facts are malleable.
Narratives are less so. “Each of these communities, misled though both may be, is interested in its origins, its history of suffering, its need to survive,” wrote Said. “To recognize these imperatives, as components of national identity, and to try to reconcile them rather than dismiss them as so much nonfactual ideology, strikes me as the task at hand.”[ref]Permission to Narrate 268.[/ref] The narratives exist even if they are false. I imagine myself as heir to the Judean exiles of last millennium even if I’m not and I guess a Palestinian can be a member of a Palestinian nation even if she’s not.
Even if I can’t actually admit that she is. I slept in the home of Palestinians in Bethlehem and sat through The Death of Klinghoffer and read books that scratched ever so lightly at the Zionism that family dinner table conversations branded upon my facts like a circumcision and sometimes I wonder how I can try on other narratives without betraying my own. Sometimes I feel Edward Said burrowing into my history and churning European colonialism onto the proud sheen of my refugee grandfather who barely escaped Hitler’s Europe and nearly died fighting in the Israeli War for Independence and by what right, Dr. Said, do you deprive me of the heroism of my grandfather? Other narratives exist beyond the personally laden facts that I can throw at them — but if they break mine, why should I listen to them?
That was not a rhetorical question.
I hope.
***
They say that the war is over. My newsfeed has long since moved on to the standard string of selfies, and Joey’s mother flew from Ohio to Israel just to hug him, and I guess Racheli will survey her broken life and piece together the pieces. But peace was always just a story.