Day 6

Connections

This morning we woke up and headed for Safed. It is relatively secluded in the north among the hills and forests and very close to Lake Tiberias. The air was cool this and some of the slopes leading to the town reminded me of the California hills around San Francisco. From some of the hillsides, we could see down the coastal plain that leads toward the Mediterranean and Tiberias. Everything was a very bright, lush green and imagine that this part of Israel about matches the description of Lebanon given to me by my good friend Ariana when she studied there a few semesters ago.

Safed is one of the parts of Palestine that has had a significant population of Jews ever since Roman era. By the end of the 16th century, there were about 20,000 Jews living in the city. The population had grown significantly after all the Jews were expelled from Spain, and the city became a center for Kabbalah study. Its seclusion and temperate climate made it an ideal place for mystics. In the 19th century a series of plagues, earthquakes and attacks from surrounding Arab populations had reduced the Jewish population to about 2,000. in 1947 the UN included Safed in the Jewish state as part of the Tiberias enclave (the proposed Jewish state was non-contiguous).

Ronnie gave us a great tour of Safed. We first visited a synagogue that was built sometime during the middle ages. Afterward we went to some famous candle shop and I got some sweet Shabbat candles, although they can function for any occasion really. I was also tempted buy a really nice talid and matching kippa, but it was very expensive so I settled for just the Kippa. Appearently it is very characteristic of mystical Jews to wear the type of Kippa I bought, which is just fine with me. A lot of the mystical Jews we met were very friendly. One Cabadnik wanted to wrap me in tfellin and say a prayer right next to a bomb shelter, but I had to decline. It was weird looking at the bomb shelter knowing that less than a year ago is was packed with frightened orthodox Jews rockets flew overhead.

After Safed we picked up the Israeli soldiers and stopped at a park for lunch and some ice breakers. The guys are named Tal, Shai, Dan, and Dotan and the girls are named Danya, Khan, Marit and Yael. Tal and Dan are in K9 units, Shai is a sniper instructor and Dotan is a scout. All the girls are air force I think. Our ice breaker was an Israel trivia game. There were 8 groups each with a soldier. My group won. Booya.

After lunch we went to Tel Kadesh. We hiked through the woods for a while until we came to the ruins of a Roman Temple. Ronnie talked a bit about its history and what it was for but didn’t tell us why we had gone there.

Next we drove up north and I saw a fence along the road. Ronnie got on the Bus microphone and told us that we were driving along the Lebanon border and that the land 20 feet to our right was a Lebanese orchard. I was really mesmerized, this border was legendary. Ronnie started talking a bit about Hezbollah and said that they were very respectable fighters, well equipped and well trained. They had given the IDF a very hard time last summer and it doesn't seem like the war significantly weakened them at all. We rounded a curve and up on a hill in front of us was some sort of dug in structure with barbed wire and guns around it. A big Israeli flag flew from a large flagpole standing in the center. Twenty meters away was another smaller structure with another flagpole in the center, but a Hezbollah flag flew from this one.

We pulled into another public park a few minutes later and into the ruins of an old village. Ronnie asked us what we thought it was. I saw the cross on one of the buildings and guessed that it was used to be a Maronite town. It was. Ronnie talked a bit about the complicated time that was the 1948 war. There is an ongoing debate over who was expelled from Palestine and who fled and why. Most cases are ambiguous with no real way of knowing weather a not a town was empty before the Haganah got to it, weather or not a rogue commander demanded the expulsion of town residents or weather or not that expulsion was warranted because of security concerns. Ronnie told us that there was no doubt about this town. It was expelled after its residents had acquiesced to Jewish forces. Fortunately for these residents, they were granted citizenship in Lebanon because of the religion. An overwhelming majority of Palestinians who wound up in Lebanon did not have this luxury. They wound up in squalid refugee camps.

We walked over to a building that was identical to the roman temple at Tel Kadesh. Most of us guessed that it was just another Roman temple, they seemed to be plentiful in this part of the country. Ronnie told us that it was actually a synagogue. A synagogue? Now I understood. Adaptation, assimilation, living in a non-Jewish country…these were the topics at hand. How much assimilation was too much? How much adaptation could there be while still preserving one's essential Jewishness. The contrast between the actions taken by the Sicarii at Masada and the striking Romanness of the synagogue in the field reminded us that this debate had been going on for nearly 2,000 years.

Diane read a poem called about the last Canadian Jew. The poem talks about the eventual disappearance of Jews from the West after succumbing to the pressures of living in a basically Christian society and eventually being lost to assimilation. They started eating pork, milk with meat, stopped keeping the Sabbath, stopped going to synagogue, and eventually stopped celebrating the holidays. Now Judaism was only a relic, no longer kept alive by anyone but a few museum curators.

It was time to discuss. We split up into groups of four, each with an Israeli. It was me, Casey, Dotan and Alana. The first topic was something like "talk about what it means to be Jewish." Dotan said that he doesn’t really think about it, and that he feels more Israeli than anything else. He said that feels more Jewish outside of Israel, especially in the U.S. This contrasted with Casey and Alana's take, as they said they felt much more Jewish in Israel than in the U.S. or Canada. The next topic was about the land, and the Jewish relationship to it. Casey asked Dotan if he felt like it was the promised land. Dotan replied that he thought the U.S. was the promised land, not Israel. I asked Dotan if he thinks he would like to see a state that was for all Israelis, considering he felt me Israeli than Jewish. I expected him to say yes, but instead he told me that he still preferred a state that was for Jews, and not all its citizens.

On the bus back to Degania I sat next to Shai. He asked me what I thought of Israel ad I told him that it was an extremely beautiful country. He wondered if I would ever think about moving there. I sort of danced around the question. He then went on to tell us that we weren’t really seeing Israel, that there is a lot of culture and a lot of the real stuff that we weren’t getting. I agreed but I said that they are doing that on purpose, because if they got us to into the real Israel we would feel alienated from the place, not more connected to it. This of course would undermine the entire point of the trip. He thought that that might be true, but he had faith that the holiness of Israel would still prevail and that we would come out feeling even more of connection.

When we got back to Degania, everyone started drinking. Me, Casey, Josh, Dotan, Shai, Brittany, Alana and Aaron decided to take it easy with a few beers around the hammocks as everyone else got thrashed. We talked a bit about the Palestinians. Shai didn't have a lot of nice words. I realized that I should have expected this, he's a sniper. You have to tell yourself certain things if you want to do such a job right. Casey and I responded to some of the things he was saying, but then Casey turned to me and said that we were experiencing raw emotion right then, and that we weren’t going to change any minds. I agreed and we dropped the topic.

We walked back to the kibbutz apartments and everyone had left for the bar. Jesse and Diane looked stressed. It was 1:30 am, we were going hiking in the Golan tomorrow at 7am and people were just getting to the bar. Casey and me calmed them down a bit, Ronnie was pretty cool headed too. Those people will have to deal with their hangovers tomorrow. They'll understand that it's their own fault.

I talked to Ronnie a bit about the Golan trip tomorrow. We looked at a map and he pointed out where we would be going. He also said that he would point out a certain village on the way. The village was in Lebanon, but had expanded southwards during the Israeli occupation. Once Israel withdrew in 2000, the border was redrawn right through the center of the town, cutting off its residents from each other.

During the day I was thinking a lot about the particular narrative we were getting which was telling us only about the Jewish claims to the land. We were getting nothing about the hundreds of years of Arab habitation of the same places we were told belonged to the Jews. We were told that the Jews bought the land, fair and square from the Ottomans or from Arab landowners. We weren’t, however, told about the different legal regulations under the Ottomans placed land under the ownership of absentee landlords while the Arabs on the land had a hereditary right to live on the land and secure an income from farming it. Surely a lot of those Arabs were allowed to stay once the land passed into Jewish hands; they were after all a good source of cheap labor. But when it came down to it, under western law, the new Jewish landlords had no problem expelling them, declaring them squatters, when it was most convenient. We are told plenty about the various attacks, ambushes and other offenses committed by the Arabs against the Jewish community in Palestine during the early part of the 20th century. We would like to believe that the land belongs to both people. Both people surely have an indubitable and very tangible connection to the place. It's tough, if not impossible to reconcile this, especially with the wrongdoings committed by both sides, time and time again on both sides. The fact is that right now, the land belongs to the Jews. They are here, they have built cities, roads, and lives on the ruins of Arab cities, roads, and lives which were in turn built on the ruins of Jewish cities, roads, and lives before them, all on top of countless other peoples' cities and roads long lost to history. Right now, though, the Jews won the war, a defensive war, several of them and they are not leaving. The law of return makes it so, and there is no refuting it, the land belongs to the Jews and no one else, not now.

Another brief observation is that I am amazed at how easily people become very comfortable with pure racism, even me. There are some people on this trip who are just racists, no question about it. Nonetheless, I like them. They are cool people, and fun to be around. It made me realize that I know plenty of people in Canada who are basically anti-Semitic or racist in other ways that I still associate with, that I still hang out with. I usually try to disassociate myself from racism of any sort, because I reject it and think it's disgusting. I am frequently dismayed by those who think that racism in the U.S. and Canada is no longer a problem, or that it will never be a problem in Europe ever again. People let their guard down very easily and when that happens, racism always comes back. I am letting my guard down here, but it's tough not to.