Israel Day 5 – Friday - Yad Vashem

Let me just start this post by saying, if it wasn’t for Ophir’s guidance on this particular day, I would have been lost, confused and flattened.

Settlement of Efrat

We left Bethlehem early (and shivering) to travel to the Settlement of Efrat, south of Jerusalem and Bethlehem in the West Bank.  Efrat has been in existence for over 20 years, so it has more of the feel of a suburb rather than frontier community.  We were to be hosted by Rabbi Aryeh Ben David, a psychiatrist and American-born Jew from New York that made aliyah (Hebrew word meaning Jewish return to Israel) in the idealistic spirit of the 60’s or 70’s.  The home was very comfortable, similar to a smallish townhome, situated on a hill with a beautiful view out of the patio doors. (In terms of size, it wasn’t much different from the Palestinian home where we overnighted.  The main differences were view, condition of the streets outside, and quite frankly, the heat.)  Ben David was an intelligent, hospitable man who tried to be as authentic as possible – knowing that many of us would not be sharing his point of view regarding settlements, so after introducing himself, he took a round of questions.  He related that there used to be the potential for neighborly relations with the Palestinians when he first arrived, as he had attended Jewish wedding celebrations with Arab attendees.  His 1960’s liberalism was tested when the PLO began punishing Arabs seen as too friendly with Israelis (or Israeli settlers?) by hanging them from telephone wires.  Israel demanded the practice stop or electricity be discontinued to the territories during that particularly cold winter, but according to Ben David, the Palestinians responded with, ‘go ahead, cut it off’ and continued to hang targeted community members.  Ben David pointed to that interaction as his impetus to put his life into the ‘battle of wills’ and decided to move to a settlement.

View from Ben David's patio

Ben David oft repeated that the land was Jewish land, and Jews were forced from it against their will, creating a ‘historical glitch’ similar to a woman who remarries after her first husband goes off to war and is presumed dead. He repeatedly returned to Arafat’s statement that Israel should be wiped from the map as justification for dismissing the Palestinian concerns and moving forward with unregulated settlements. Ben David seemed to dismiss Israeli culpability in the conflict, while insisting that Palestinians must prove their peaceful intentions for at least 10 years by changing their curriculum and halting all bombings before Israel should make any concessions.  In the meantime, settlements should continue, in his opinion, because the land is the Jewish inheritance from God.  (Interestingly, during our homestay in Bethlehem, our Palestinian host made the offhand remark that Jews claim it is their land from God, but their people broke the covenant, and therefore have no more right to the land.  It was an unsolicited comment, but apparently she knew this line of religious-political thought.) 

Home in the Efrat Settlement

Ben David has never been to a Palestinian territory, and has known Palestinians only through his military service and limited interaction with his gardener.  He shared a harrowing tale of the complex builder, an Arab, who was spotted in the settlement grocery store by a neighbor who, confused by his abnormal presence, looked closely and recognized explosives.  This settler neighbor, who happened to have a gun on him, shot the man in the grocery store and avoided a bombing that might have been the end of the Efrat settlement. Regarding peace with Palestine, our host explained that he specifically prohibits his children from saying they ‘hate’ Arabs (a meager answer if there ever was one).  He also made a point of letting us know that any American who thinks they know the answer to the conflict is simply naïve.  When challenged, Ben David bristled, saying that he does want peace and will sacrifice his home – given conditions like those above are met (which he thinks will never happen).  You got the sense of a self-fulfilling prophecy that allows him to believe he supports peace while exploiting the situation without acknowledging his complicity. However, in the last few moments we had with Ben David, he pulled on his psychiatrist hat and with grave seriousness and admirable vulnerability, reminded us that this is the Holocaust generation that is in power in Israel right now.  He argued that the trauma from the Holocaust is alive and well in Israel, and we can’t discount the effect that has on a population, when more than half of any gathering has a family legacy of loved ones murdered under genocide.  In contrast to our American arguments about prosperity, the argument in Israeli politics is existential (whether the state of Israel will exist tomorrow) and he indicated that the legacy of trauma alters the way a people react to this issue.

Ophir Yarden, the Director of Educational Initiatives at the Interfaith Coordinating Council of Israel, joined us on the bus to debrief some of what he heard from Ben David, and I found his layout of the political views in Israel extremely helpful.  Since Ben David had mentioned former Prime Minister Menachim Begin, the founder of the Likud (right-wing) party in Israel, Ophir explained his political reasoning.  For someone who supports the right wing, there are generally three reasons for the settlements:

Right-wing;

1. Historically, the West Bank is ‘ground zero’ in the conflict with Palestine
2. Religiously, the geography of the West Bank has religious significance, and is mentioned in scripture many times.  To do anything other than embrace that land is to spit in God’s face.
3. Strategically, if Israel doesn’t hold onto the highlands (Golan Heights), all of Israel is vulnerable to attack.

For the left-wing, the answers to these arguments look like this;

1. The West Bank has been ‘ground zero’ in the conflict, but we shouldn’t let history dictate the future
2.  Religiously, this argument falls on deaf ears because the left is not typically religious.
3.  There are equal number of military experts on the left testifying that Israel will not be vulnerable if it doesn’t hold the highlands.
4.  Lastly, the left asks, what about demography?  What about human rights?  What about the price of occupation on the Israeli people – both in mental health and blood spilled?

Ophir continued to provide some of his personal (opposite) feelings to the Settler’s opinions.  For instance, where Ben David says he doesn’t allow his children to say they ‘hate’ Arabs, Ophir enrolls his children in a joint Arab-Jewish school so that friendships can actually be made.  When Ben David says peace is unlikely, Ophir paints the potential for land swaps and compromises. Where Ben David has shut the door on his conscience, Ophir keeps opening a window for hope. 

We head to Yad Vashem, (which denotes, from scripture, to give one a place and a name) the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, but before heading in, Ophir provides a frame that alters my understanding of Israel going forward.  He asks us to pay attention to the messages of Jewish heroism and bravery throughout the museum.  We’ve walked along the path of the Righteous Among the Nations, where Carob trees are planted for each non-Jew who took action to save one from the Holocaust, and are standing in a courtyard that displays two statues – one depicting a march of broken, despairing people under military guard, the other a bust of 8 or 10 proud individuals in the midst of resistance and fighting.  The day Israel has designated for Holocaust remembrance is called “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day”, placed in the middle of a religious month of celebration (rather than on days of mourning), with emphasis on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as much as the millions dead.  There were hundreds of instances of terror on Jewish populations in Europe long before the Nazi regime, particularly with the programs (or riots) in Russia against Jews starting as far back as 1821 in response to the assassination of the Tsar (rumours blamed a Jew for the assassination), but getting much more violent in 1881-1906.  Thousands of Jews were killed, often children, and rarely fought back.  Jews in Israel, on the other hand, were cultivating a militancy in their mindset – one necessary for their goal of an Jewish state.  Ophir talks about how State of Israel ceremonies and press conferences held in the square would always emphasize the statue of resistance, and that there was shame in the Israel mindset that Jews complied passively with Nazi regulations, like ‘sheep to the slaughter’.

Ophir says that Israel is a judgmental society, (or was in the 1950s), and Holocaust survivors, when they arrived in Israel, were often met with skepticism and suspicion, something I would never imagine.  They were asked questions like, “If it was so impossible to survive, how did you get out?  Did you steal someone else’s food?  Did you work for the Nazi’s to save yourself?” People who had fought the 1948 war, and suffered 6000 losses, felt that they, too, had been through hardship and were not receptive to airing the trauma of the Holocaust.  There was even slang to denote survivors, Hebrew for ‘bars of soap’ and referring to the Nazi’s use of bodies from the crematorium.  As a result, survivors were known to always wear long sleeves (to conceal the numbers on their arms) and for nearly 20 years, the Holocaust is not spoken of in Israeli society.  Not until 1961, when Adolf Eichman was apprehended by Israel’s Mossad intelligence force, and brought to Israel for the first public trial of the Nazi regime, were any stories of survival made public. And then, following the 90 Holocaust survivors who testified against Eichmann, who was the key figure in the deportation and ‘final solution’, the memory of the Holocaust was broke open in society and people began to talk about it.  

Tomb of Theodore Herzl

This is the development of Israel’s civil religion, Zionism – the right and safeguarding of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel.  The theme of Jewish bravery and heroism continues central importance in Israel history.  Prior to WWII, Jews living in Israel were executing terror plots on the British authorities – partly due to the British limits on Jewish immigration (10,000 per year in spite of the rise of the Third Reich).  This rioting and conflict with native Palestinians caused Britain to turn the conflict over to the UN, which decided on the 1948 establishment of Israel (albeit with much different borders). In 1967, on the eve of the second war for Israel, Ophir says that Israelis are certain that they were on the brink of annihilation, but still marshaled themselves for a war they expected to lose – and yet are shocked by the fast victory.  The body of Theodore Herzl, founder of Zionism in 1891, is exhumed and brought to Mt. Herzl, adjacent to Yad Vashem.  He is interned in a box on a mountaintop – denoting the secular spiritual centrality of the (secular) Jewish people, in a striking parallel to King David.  Ophir calls this ‘secular messianism’ and credits Ben Gurion with the idea to make a secular shrine where the not-very-religious can make pilgrimage.  But in 1972, when the Israeli wrestling team is taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists in the Munich Olympics, the post-mortem analysis reveals that none of the hostages, premier athletes of Israel, fought their attackers before death.  The internal narrative of Israel’s civil religion continues to evolve regarding bravery, militancy and security – and we see it play out in the political debate concerning Palestine, the wall, and a two state solution.   

There are no words to adequately convey the experience of Yad Vashem.  Suffice to say, I thought I knew the holocaust.  But Yad Vashem will cause you to reconsider the concept of evil in the world.

 “I will surely bless you and make your descendents as numerous as stars in the sky”  

-Genesis 22:17

For thus saith the Lord unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant;  Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.                  

-Isaiah 56:4-5;

    -Scripture that inspired the memorial for the 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis.

…

The view upon exiting Yad Vashem

Reflection: Betrayal

I left the Holy Land Trust confirmed in my deep belief that face-to-face human relationship is the harbinger of peace.  I was affirmed in my call to break down the barriers that divide people in order create a sense of community that recognizes each other’s humanity.  That is by knowing each other, respecting each other, having simple solidarity with our commonality, we each have the ability to create cohesion, mercy, and community health.  I left convinced in my calling to work towards beloved community, which values compassion, justice and mercy for all kinds of peoples.  I was even challenged to recognize where I abstractly ‘other’ people (as in label, define, and decry them as ‘the other’) by labeling their theology or politics as creating exclusion or division.  And then each of those certainties was broken.

At first, I was just betrayed by my own sense of comfort. As we pulled into the Settlement of Efrat, I recognized my own spirit relaxing ever so slightly at the wide, clean streets, pretty homes, and welcoming heat of our host home.  It was disturbing to recognize that it was a place I would be comfortable living, as opposed to the disorganized, chaotic and dirty disrepair of Bethlehem.  Testament to the quality of life I was accustomed to, I immediately felt like I had already betrayed my solidarity with the Palestinian people.  Our Settlement host, Rabbi Aryeh Ben David, wound his self-validating circular logic (Palestinians aren’t willing to sustain peace, and therefore Israel should continue with theft of the land, regardless of the fact that land theft is what caused retribution to begin with), and it twisted me all up in knots.  I started to realize that Israel’s Fox-News-like narrative about security isn’t just for the outside world, but probably more useful and deadly in persuading the minds of Israeli citizens.  I couldn’t believe how Ben David didn’t connect the hypocrisy of his own narrative – that the Jews were forced from the land, and therefore have the right to return, regardless of the fact that they were now the same as the Roman Empire, forcing out the less powerful.  Micah rang in my ears from the sermon I had just preached on December 23^rd…

They confiscate the fields they desire,
and seize the houses they want.
They defraud people of their homes,
and deprive people of the land they have inherited. (Micah 2:2)

You wrongly evict widows among my people from their cherished homes.
You defraud their children of their prized inheritance.
But you are the ones who will be forced to leave! (Micah 2:9)

I marveled at how Ben David had betrayed his own 1960’s idealistic roots to accept the systematic demeaning and theft of an entire race of people.  How from a betrayal of trust in the humanity of the Palestinian people, caused by one suicide bomber or the gruesome semantics of Arafat, this very decent man had not given up hope, but rather dismissed the necessity of dealing justly with an entire population of people.  How it betrayed the entire principles of a Jewish state run by the morality and principles of the Jewish faith that I have come to highly respect in America.  As he mentioned the Nazi-induced trauma inherent in the Jewish people’s worldview, I thought of the ripple effects of Hitler, creating a PTSD generation of Israelis, joining forces with 9/11 Islamaphobia to create a whole new set of hated scapegoats across the globe.  And then, before I knew it, and to my utter humiliation, I was just weeping while sitting on his couch…my façade betrayed by my emotions.

But you don’t really know what betrayal is until you’ve visited Yad Vashem – Israel’s Holocaust Museum.  I thought I knew the Holocaust.  We’ve studied it since 4^th grade – I can still vividly recall the video shown of naked, starved bodies being bulldozed into graves.  I know about the effort to demonize, then label, then quarantine, then exploit, and finally extinguish the Jewish race. I knew they were starved, shot, and gassed; that some suffocated on the train ride to the camps; and that many Jews were made to do the killing work inside the camps of their own people.  I know the details of Anne Frank’s hiding, and can recite Martin Niemoller’s quote, ‘first they came for…’ from the bathroom stall in my college dorm. 

But I didn’t know about the Ukraine.  I didn’t know that, when the killing first began, the Nazis would enter a town and announce that 20 Jews would be killed in the town center that evening – and people would go out to watch.  Maybe even to cheer.  The villages were encouraged, not only to turn in their neighbors, but to take action themselves – so many willingly assaulted, raped, and murdered their own neighbors.  Neighbors.  People they knew, people they did business with, people they sat next to on the bus.  My belief that human relationship defeats evil fails in the reality of the Holocaust. I didn’t know that, in ghettos, Jews were compelled to turn in any of their own family members who couldn’t work – infants and elders - sometimes carrying their own parents on their backs to turn over to the Nazis for murder.

To betray your own parents, to be forced to betray your responsibility to your child – your basic human instinct towards care and compassion bent and twisted and stripped is a wound I can’t imagine.  The betrayal of every relationship, everything you had come to expect as normality, would collapse anyone’s trust in humanity. And it would have ripple effects.  At this moment, for me, the core of Israel and our study tour changed, and just like that, I felt like I betrayed my commitment to fight for the underdog during this trip.