It’s the most unsettling experience of my life to be part of a people at war living amongst people who are not.
I can no longer count the number of friendships that have been damaged or destroyed, the number of professional relationships that are now adversarial, or the number of literary spaces where it’s been made clear I’m no longer welcomed. All of this not because I’m warmongering, but because I’m arguing for the peace that Palestinian and Israeli activists have been trying to forge for decades. I’m undone by watching my academic and literary colleagues shout down calls for peace in favor of support for the bloody, terrorist agenda of Hamas. The most harrowing thing is how many think they are calling for peace, how many demand things whose implications they clearly do not understand.
There was, then, a strange sort of rightness to being in Jerusalem, where things were more tense than they had been in other parts of Israel. Here, I was part of a people at war among others who were also at war. And I don’t just mean fellow Jews; we saw the war on the faces and in the actions of everyone we passed, and Jerusalem is a very diverse city. For most of the trip, we had one security guard, and he carried a satellite phone instead of a gun. In Jerusalem, we had to stay inside a perimeter of armed security guards as we walked from the Jaffa Gate to the Western Wall (Kotel). It was the start of Ramadan, and calls had gone out for the Arab population of Israel to commit acts of violence. In what should be, but apparently isn’t, evidence that Israeli Arabs are not on the side of Hamas—or any of the proxies of Iran waging war on Israel—the month-long holiday passed peacefully in the city.
My grandfather, who was not even a little bit religious, went to Israel once. My mother reports that when he went to the Kotel, he was surprised to find he felt something profound.
I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t feel anything particularly moving there. It was crowded, and I was deeply aware that I was meant to keep my prayer short, slip my piece of paper into a crack in the wall, and make way for another tourist. I sang Oseh Shalom quietly to myself, tucked a prayer for peace into the wall, and backed away. (You’re not meant to turn your back on the Kotel.) Maybe I’d have had that profound experience my grandfather did if it didn’t feel so very much like everyone back at home was clamoring for more war and working hard to silence the voices of peacemakers.
As we left the wall, we saw a group of young people gathered in a circle, singing Israeli folk songs and dancing.
I don’t know who they were. We asked one young woman, and she just said they were a group of Israeli students who’d all suffered some trauma since October 7th and who gather there every day to offer one another support, but it seemed a little more organized than that. I would like to tell you that it felt hopeful to see them. It didn’t. Watching children try to sing themselves into bravery in the middle of a war is more heartbreaking than heartwarming, at least for me.
The final prayer of the Seder is always L'Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim (next year in Jerusalem). As the days of Passover are coming to an end, I’ve been thinking a lot about life for those—all those—who live every day there, and how cheaply we seem to hold their lives here in the US. The peace in this city will be the hardest won, because it is the most contested part of Israel. But there are only two choices: peace or war. Next year in Jerusalem, may we see a world that supports peace for all the people of the city and unites against those who choose war instead.
Boy, do I hear you. I have too much family stuff going on here to even visit Israel right now. But that sense of disconnect. Oy!
Regarding the Kotel--I've always felt that it has been made profane by the ultra-Orthodox who run it. It just makes me angry to visit. The tour below is another story. But my place for feeling connected to the past is the Shrine of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are.