The Reality Tourist (Part I of III)
By Adam Gutride
Trip Participant, Palestine & Israel Reality Tour
Post Oslo: Peace at Last or Conflict Renewed?
June 15-27, 1999
I arrived at the Jordan River crossing from Jordan to Israel on June 18, almost three months after beginning my travels in the Middle East. Egypt and Jordan had been fascinating, beautiful and fun, but I was excited about my first trip to the Holy Land, the land of my ancestors and the homeland of the people who share my faith, the Jews.
I intended to spend six weeks here, not just as a traditional tourist, but also trying to learn more about the prospects for peace and justice between Israelis and Palestininans. I even had signed up for a group "Reality Tour" for the last two weeks of my visit, in which we would travel throughout Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights to talk to people from all walks of life about the conflict. I came to learn, as perhaps I should already have known, that reality bites. But before I give you the details of my reality tour, I'll tell you a little about my first few weeks in this country.
The river crossing itself was surprisingly brief, "river" being something of an overstatement, and the famous Allenby "bridge" being barely long enough for the whole bus to be on it at once. But given the importance of this border, the biblical importance of the watercourse, and the fact that it connects a lake called the "Sea" of Gallilee to another lake called the Dead "Sea," maybe 'river' is the right term after all.
I arrived in Jerusalem on the week of Shavuot, the festival commemorating the day the Torah was supposedly given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. On the first evening of the holiday, thousands of Jews in Jerusalem stay up all night to study and attend seminars held around town. I joined in. Before sunrise, tens of thousands of us made our way to the Wailing Wall in the old city. (As you probably know, the Wall is a retaining wall for the temple mount, that is, it holds in the dirt on which the Jewish temple was originally built, and on which the Dome of the Rock is now built. So it's something like your nearest freeway embankment, only much older and imbued, after the passage of time, with the aura of holiness.)
On the way to the Wall, people I'd never met were wishing me Hag Sameach (happy holiday). It was my first mass Jewish experience, and I felt like I was being embraced by a giant family. My sense of connection was only increased by the fact that at one of the seminar locations, I noticed on the wall a picture of my cousin, whom I learned had been a student there several years ago. I was warm and tingly all over.
Beware of Dogma
Unfortunately, those feelings would soon be replaced by much less welcome ones. I had chosen, along with the friends with whom I was staying, to attend an "egalitarian" Shavuot service, meaning one in which men and women would be able to pray together, and in which women could read from the Torah. In the synagogue of my youth, like most in the U.S., egalitarian prayer is the norm. In Israel, however, it is rare. Orthodox Jews believe that the sight or sound of women distracts men from the task at hand, so they require women to sit behind the men or in a screened area to the side and to pray silently. Accordingly, the Wailing Wall itself has a screen dividing the men from the women. In the men's section, there are tables around which the men can gather to read and sing, but in the women's section, each women prays silently on her own, and there is no access to the Torah.
I and the others participating in our service don't think that the orthodox interpretation is required by, or even justified by, Judaism, so we decided not to abide by it. So as not to offend the sensibilities of the orthodox, the authorities decided that our service should be held in an area not at the Wall itself, or even in the tourist observation area behind the prayer section, but rather behind that observation area, about 200 meters from the Wall, in an area typically used as a parking lot, from which one can view the Wall only obliquely. Fearing problems despite this out-of-the-way location, our prayer area was surrounded by a double wall of metal police barricades. As we were ushered into our prayer cage, my feelings of togetherness and community quickly were replaced by separation, anxiety and distrust.
Initially, our service went very well. As time went on, however, an increasing number of young men clad in the black suits and hats of the ultra orthodox sects (called "haredim") began to surround the outer barricade and to shout at us in Hebrew to drown out our prayers. In short order, there were several hundred of these men around us. As our Torah readings were ending, one of them flung a plastic one-liter bottle of soda over the barricades and into the forehead of a woman who had just finished reading the Torah, knocking her to the ground and raising a huge welt. During the remaining 30 minutes of the service, they threw about 15 more bottles at us, several hitting their targets. At each volley, they cheered loudly. As you might imagine, the distraction from the taunting and the need to watch for incoming missiles was far greater than whatever could result from seeing or hearing a woman during prayer.
Many of the people in our group were truly inspirational, including the woman who was reading the Haftarah, who did not look up or lose track of her place during her ten minute reading. I, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to jump over the barricades and beat the shit out of someone. Guess I wouldn't have made a very good Freedom Rider. At least I had enough sense to know that my emotional response would not be particularly productive, and I stayed where I was.
The police made a pathetic attempt to control the crowd, but because they couldn't see exactly who was throwing each bottle and were unwilling to do anything to the group as a whole, the barrage continued. Eventually an army unit in full battle gear and automatic weapons arrived and pushed the haredim back from the area around the barricades. After the our service ended, as we walked out of the old city singing (ironically) the Israeli national anthem, more bottles were thrown at us from the yeshivas (religious schools) lining our route.
The experience was, to be sure, upsetting. On the very day that I was celebrating the creation of the Jewish people and the beauty of the Torah, I was being told that I was not worthy to celebrate my membership in that people or my connection to the Torah, because my beliefs were inconsistent with those of the self-appointed diviners of Jewish truth. Like the "wicked son" of the Passover parable (a parable I never much liked), I was being told that the Torah was a gift to them and not to me, for if I had been a slave in Egypt, I would not have been redeemed.
The Creation of the Other
I came to see over the next few weeks here that the sort of intolerance I experienced--being made into an "other" by the dominant group--pervades, and distorts, nearly every aspect of life in Israel. The religious Jews "other" the secular Jews and vice-versa, the Askenazi Jews (of European origin) other the Sephardi Jews (of Mediterranean and semitic origin) and vice-versa; the Jews other the Arabs, and on and on. I think that the historical basis for this intolerance is that the Jewish community was preserved through the ages by forcing on its members a long list of rules to prevent assimilation with the outside world. The threat of assimilation made it vital to know who was a Jew and who was not, and later to know who was a "real" Jew and who was not. Now, I fear that the behavior is part of Jewish culture.
With respect to the Shavuot prayer session in particular, there was a lot at stake for the haredim. For them, the holiday is not just about receiving the Torah, but about the fact that Jews were supposedly "chosen" by God to receive this gift and were accordingly distinguished from and elevated over others. I attended some classes on Judaism while I was in Tzfat, an especially religious town in Israel, in which I was told, in all earnestness, not only that God has a special preferential connection to Jews and that Jews are a holier people, but that Rabbi Hillel's famous aphorism "Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you," applies only to conduct towards fellow Jews, not the rest of the world. This sort of teaching is so flabbergasting that it deserves little comment. I realized later how lucky I am to have been raised in a place where most of us have a common understanding that "all people are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..." To be sure, Americans face many inequalities--of social class, race, gender, etc.--but at least most of us (in 1999, at least) view all people as "spiritually" equal, or equal in the mind of their creator. Imagine building a state (in the twentieth century) that rejected such a view. You can draw your own connections to American history, and even the history of the Jews from the Inquisition to the Holocaust.
I saw several examples in Israeli society how the concept of "difference" becomes equivalent to the concept of "bad." For example, there is intense effort to control the image of what constitutes a "true" or "ideal" Israeli.
Secular Jews say that the religious Jews are not true Israelis because the religious reject army service. As a result, the secular political majority has excluded hundreds of thousands of religious Jews from civic society, shunting them off to perpetual Yeshiva study and welfare-dependency by making it illegal for them to work until they complete military service. Religious Jews say that the secular Jews are not true Israelis because the secular refuse to abide by the strict religious laws. As a result, the religious groups make Judaism an "all or nothing" choice, excluding millions from any sort of spirituality. Both groups coalesce to say that Palestinians cannot be true Israelis because they are enemies of the Jews. As a result, the discrimination against this group is extremely widespread (more on this later). Only one in a thousand people has the faintest idea about the value of diversity, or about the idea that there can be many different types of Israelis, and that each person has something to contribute.
It was really difficult for me to have some of these thoughts, because like most Jews I truly wanted to love Israel, the country built by my own people.
I learned that love is rarely unconditional.
The Old and the Beautiful
There certainly is a reason to want to love this place. The land itself is beautiful, as are the people who live in it. And the history is so rich. Indeed, my time here has been tremendously rewarding, even in the traditional sense of the happy tourist.
I spent a week walking in and around the old city of Jerusalem, visiting 2500-year-old ritual Jewish baths (mikvahs) with still-visible mosaic floors; sitting under ancient but still-living olive trees that once shaded Jesus and the disciples; standing in the incredibly beautiful first Moslem building in the world, the 1400-year old Dome of the Rock. I found Jerusalem so full of histories that nearly every square meter tends to have several competing ones. My favorite example was a building in which the ground floor is supposedly the tomb of King David, the second floor is supposedly the site of the Last Supper (which was turned into a crusader-era church), the whole building was surrounded by and incorporated into a mosque, and then the mosque was taken over by the Israelis and made into a yeshiva. I'm campaigning to turn the site into a buddhist shrine.
Seriously, though, this sort of competition--over both the land itself and the right to make a historical claim on it--has been going on for a very long time. It was pointed out to me that the Old Testament itself goes to great length to describe how Abraham acquired the site for his burial tomb and the Jews aquired the site for the construction of the temple, not by conquest or gift, but by purchase. These biblical passages suggest that, even thousands of years ago, the claims to these spots were hotly disputed, and that something needed to be written to cement the Jewish claim and/or to motivate Jews to defend it.
After Jerusalem, I traveled the length of the country. I floated in the Dead Sea, the Sea of Gallilee and the Mediterranean. I camped in a crater in the Negev desert, peered down the well of Beersheva which reputedly was dug by Abraham, partied in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, climbed on the crusader fortifications of Acre, and played archeologist in ancient Canaanite and Israelite cities. I'd love to tell you all the interesting details--like learning that some Israelites weren't monotheistic even after they had finished wandering in the desert, had been chastised about the golden calf, and settled here. For example, I saw clay idols they made until only a few hundred years B.C. But I've got enough to say about other things. As you'll see if you say tuned.
My overall sense of the country as a happy tourist was that this place has quite a bit going for it. It's truly impressive how, in its 50-year lifespan, Israel has been able able to develop first-world systems and institutions of commerce, transportation, housing, telecommunications, water, sanitation, tourism, education and culture. Its neighbors like Egypt and Jordan are far behind. It's also impressive that, although the standard of living here is relatively high, there is not a terribly wide gap (at least among Jews) between rich and poor. We could undoubtedly learn something about the communal effort that must have been involved to achieve these results.
But the happy tourist sometimes needs to be a reality tourist, to get out from behind the rose-tinted windows of the air conditioned bus. I must admit that I was afraid to plunge into the nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations, not (like many people) because I feared for the security of my person, but because I feared for the security of my emotions and beliefs. I was right to fear, but I hope that I've emerged a stronger person in the end.
To hear more, proceed to part 2.
