I went to with a million questions and left with a few answers and many more questions.
Most fundamentally, I feel like it’s hard to retain a sense of emotional distance from your intellectual perspective after you’ve been there. Intellectually, I think I’ve been able to be critical of the policies of the state of Israel because I hadn’t really been extremely emotionally invested. I had considered myself a Zionist, a believer in the existential right of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael, but I think I always had some intellectual doubts about that. I used to joke that we should have given Montana or North Dakota to the Jewish people – a feat I now know was tried when the British offered Uganda to Herzl and he seriosuly considered it – because the importance of the holy land itself was lost on someone as secular as I. Our Taglit group visited the Syrian border in the Golan where an attempt to imbue us with a secular sense that the Golan is land that has been rightfully won and it did not impress me really. However, visiting the Kotel and exiting Yad Vashem to the skyline of Jerusalem really challenged my ability to keep that emotional-intellectual distance. Until now, I desired to separate the state of Israel from Judaism itself and, as much as possible, the Jewish people. I now can’t do that anymore. Taglit, as I know it tries to do, succeeded in connecting the state of Israel to my individual Jewish identity.
All of these questions were made more pressing in light of the war that was occurring in Gaza. We flew from JFK on the day the airstrikes in Gaza started. More importantly, we visited Rabin’s memorial in Tel Aviv the day Israel launched its ground invasion. I felt really exhausted thinking about the lack of prospects for peace. We had five young Israeli soldiers and two former IDF members traveling with us. It was devastating to hear their certitude that peace would not occur neither in their lifetime nor that of their children. After a couple of pretty wrenching conversations with several of my new Israeli friends, representing both ends of the Israeli political spectrum, I had to ask myself at what point the endless cycle of violence really seemed worthwhile. (Obviously this was meant as an intellectual exercise. It wouldn’t be possible to remove all of the Jews from Israel, nor would I ever intend for that to happen… But this intellectual dialog was an important step for me personally in reconciling my conflicting thoughts.) My conclusion was if I truly believe that the state of Israel ought to and must exist, the state of Israel ought to and must fight to defend itself. However, I couldn’t have addressed any other political questions until reconciling that important initial question -- what was fundamentally a determination of my comfort level with Israel's essential right to nationhood.
I continue to have a hard time with the death of 1000 Gazans on a mission that seems to have an ill-defined goal, and perhaps even more of a problem of the unspoken goal of regime change. However, in some ways the ferocity of the response seems inevitable and even appropriate. What else is Israel supposed to do? Not because I think the western media is biased but because the death of 1000 people in just three weeks is more comprehensible than three years of sustained attacks, it wasn’t until I was in Israel that I truly understood the importance of the mortar fire on Sderot, Ashkelon, and Ashdod. It wasn't until I was in Israel that I could appreciate how important the reality of rockets hitting Beersheba truly is. Less consequential action just doesn’t seem to be an sufficient response for a battered people whose existence is constantly in question and threatened. While I still have my questions about the casualty levels in Gaza, it doesn't seem unfathomably inappropriate to me anymore.
Most of all, being in Israel made me to understand how integral each individual Israeli life is in the eyes of the Israeli people, in both an absolute and a relative way. As an American steeped in the values of multiculturalism and who has been raised in a period of peace, excepting 9/11, this concept seems foreign and wrong. What I mean to say, and Israelis may object to this, is that each Israeli (and Jewish) life is valued more than human life absolutely and generally speaking. All around Israel hang banners for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped during the Second Lebanon War. This summer's prisoner exchange for the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev speak also to this concept, as did Rabin's heroic rescue of the Israelis and Jews on the hijacked Flight 163. Israel is meant to be an asylum for Jews. It is the home of all Jewish people. Its existence, for philosophical and purely demographic reasons, depends on the arrival of diaspora Jews and the propagation of the Jews in Israel. (I can't help but think of Nietzsche's criticism in Beyond Good and Evil that the Jews had the potential for greatness but stymied it due to their near-obsession with self-propagation.) On this point, many many questions remain.
To conclude and to clarify my probably difficult-to-understand thought process here, what I am saying is that I think what happened in Gaza was acceptable to Israelis in large part because Israelis value Israeli and Jewish lives more than they value a human life absolutely. Again, for someone from the culture that brought you John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum, whose Halocaust museum celebrates coexistence, and who sees itself as "an empire for liberty" and "an asylum for mankind," this is difficult to reconcile. But Israel is very small and each individual is connected and affected. So, to bring this full circle, after going to Har Herzl with people my age who have lost relatives and friends, it is impossible not to have a changed perspective.
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