After Israel Part 1

The first, and most complicated, of my reflections on my recent trip to Israel with JNF

I’m grateful to have spent the last week in Israel, which is not to say that I enjoyed myself. It would have been obscene, I think, to focus on enjoyment on a trip intended to give us a chance to make some small contribution to the work of mitigating the impact of this terrible war with Hamas. We worked very hard—in my hips, I can still feel the day spent on my knees weeding cauliflower beds—and did little of actual use. It made clear, though, the complexity not just of this moment, but of life in Israel in general. Perhaps, more clear than the organizers intended to make it, I suspect.

Before I left on this trip, many people suggested I would “fall in love” with Israel as soon I was there, but this wasn’t a falling in love kind of trip. We did not see much of Israel’s beauty, or spend any time on its almost miraculous accomplishments in turning barren desert into thriving cities and farmland, though of course the evidence of both was apparent (as was the toll that having to abandon that work took in the months since Hamas attacked). We were, at all times, very aware of being in a country at war. Our hotel housed more displaced persons—mostly from the north, which is under attack by Hezbollah—than it did guests. We heard both mortar and machine gun fire, though never close enough to us to be a danger. (But can you hear machine gun fire and have it be far enough away to be safe?) We went to the site of the Nova Massacre, Hostages Square, and a rest-stop for IDF soldiers who were—just a few hours later—headed into Gaza.

(Yes, that’s mortar fire you hear a few seconds into this video of the Nova Massacre site.)

All of this I expected. I knew going in that Israel has been at war since Hamas invaded on October 7th. Or, rather, I thought that was when the war began. Then we went to Sderot.

The indoor playground we worked to get ready for returning children.

Sderot is a beautiful city, settled mostly by Jewish refugees from North Africa, Ethiopia, and the former USSR. There are parks everywhere, and more greenspace than should be possible in the desert. There are shops and apartment buildings and lots of public art. There are also the ubiquitous bomb shelters. Sderot is within the “15 second zone,” in which residents have no more than (but not always as much as) 15 seconds to get into a shelter from the time a rocket is launched into the area. And so we worked to get an indoor playground ready for the residents’ return, since it isn’t safe for the children to play outside.

We learn the history and purpose of the playground.

The playground is a delight if you think of it only as a recreational facility. It’s full of brightly colored climbing toys, a ball pit, and air hockey and foosball tables. There is an area for eating lunch and a cantina. There is an outdoor space for playing sports, but it’s small because every part of the facility has to be within 15 seconds of one of the many bomb shelters located there. (I counted five, but I might have missed a few.) And this isn’t a building that went up after October 7th. These rockets have been flying since Israel returned Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005.

One of the several bomb shelters; this one most recently used to host a birthday party.

Since our visit, I can’t stop thinking about the generation that’s grown up with rocket fire and sirens as a normal condition of life… and yet Sderot is still the safer option for refugees fleeing antisemitic violence. This place, with it’s fifteen second warnings, is the better place. It puts the lie to the JVP narrative that Israel is nation of white colonizers; very few of the people we saw there were white, and they were almost all refugees rather than immigrants, which is an important distinction. I tried, and failed, to imagine another place they might have gone. We certainly would not have accept them, housed them, given them work, made them citizens. When JVP argues, as it does, that Israel doesn’t make Jews safer in the world, it’s impossible not to notice that JVP seems to think the only Jews who count are white, American ones. The citizens of Sderot aren’t safe, but they are safer. That’s horrible, but it isn’t as horrible as leaving them to be massacred in their home countries would have been.

Tel Aviv was beautiful. Jerusalem was awe-inspiring. But Sderot is where I left a significant piece of my heart. And so I did not fall in love with Israel, but I did become a more committed partner to it. Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh. All of Israel is responsible for one another.