Since the Israel/Hamas war started, our congregation has looked for as many ways as possible to help us express all of our mixed feelings and get educated about what’s going on and how it impacts our Jewish lives in the United States. Recently, since tourism has all but stopped in Israel, the Israeli tour guide who led the synagogue’s last few trips to Israel has been doing zooms for us once a week, way too early on Sunday mornings, to give our congregation a connection to an Israeli point of view.
The Israeli tour guide knows a lot of my fellow congregants from the trips, and they know him, but he was mostly a stranger to me. Except, when he saw my name on the screen he said he almost cried, because his mother’s family were Mankowitzes too. I have no idea if we are actually related, because I’ve found a few different Mankowitz families on Facebook over the years who have been scattered around the world, but it was nice to feel that connection. I’ve never been able to afford to go on our synagogue’s trips to Israel, but I’ve seen pictures and heard stories and felt the pangs of jealousy.
One of the first things our tour guide told us was that, despite the danger he and his children and grandchildren face in Israel right now, he is grateful not to be in the US or Europe, where anti-Semitism has been making a roaring comeback. Instead, he’s surrounded by people who understand the existential threat to Jewish life, and the danger of living in such close proximity to a terrorist organization, and he doesn’t have to explain his complex feelings of grief and anger and empathy and fear, because his neighbors are feeling all of the same things.
They can see the same things we are seeing on social media, where some people are calling Hamas “freedom fighters” and denying the reality of rape and murder on October 7th. They too are hearing the UN be unwilling to condemn Hamas, and the International Red Cross say they can’t do anything to check on the wellbeing of the hostages in Gaza. And they can see Hamas’ lies being taken as truth by so many, even after evidence to the contrary has been presented, both by Israel and the United States government. And just like us, they are hearing Jews being called Nazis and vermin and being accused of genocide, and seeing huge protests calling for ceasefires, even during the temporary ceasefire, where people who have to know that Hamas will never stop attacking Israel are demanding that Israel stop fighting back.
The recent accidental killing of three hostages by the IDF, who mistook them for terrorists despite waving white flags, broke so many hearts in Israel and opened the door, a crack, to questioning the tactics of this war and if it will really bring the hostages home. Though I don’t know if the Israelis are questioning the efficacy of the airstrikes the way Americans are. I saw a report that said more than half of Israel’s airstrikes were made with “dumb bombs,” and I’m not a military expert but I assume that means that US critics believe Israel could be using “smarter” bombs that are able to be more carefully targeted and less likely to cause civilian casualties and collateral damage. If that’s true, I want to know why the IDF has chosen the strategy they’ve chosen. If they are capable of limiting collateral damage, why wouldn’t they do that? If they’re not capable of limiting collateral damage, why are their friends suggesting it’s possible?
I want to believe that the Israeli military is doing everything possible to limit civilian deaths and injuries, because I see them warning civilians to leave targeted buildings, and setting up safe escape routes, and bringing in humanitarian aid. But then why are whole families dying in Gaza? And journalists? And aid workers? These are my questions, and I don’t have the answers. Part of the problem is that there are no international journalists in Gaza right now. There are Israeli journalists embedded with the IDF and there are Gazan journalists, but none of the images coming out of Gaza show Hamas militants, and certainly don’t show Hamas fighters in the act of fighting. It’s as if they are invisible. And maybe they are, because they are in the tunnels, but the images from this war are incomplete, and the reporting of facts is incomplete and that leaves a lot of people retreating to their safe corners and believing what they want to believe is true, rather than being able to judge for themselves.
The almost unanimous calls for ceasefire from the United Nations General Assembly, despite the fact that Hamas refuses to return the rest of the hostages and has never stopped sending rockets into Israel, and has been stealing humanitarian aid and preventing the escape of civilians, confuses me. Is the rest of the world ignoring the existence of Hamas and seeing Israel invade Gaza with only civilians as their targets? Because if that’s what people believe, I can understand why they would demand a ceasefire from Israel alone. I just don’t know why the world would believe that.
With all of the noise in the outside world, our once a week zooms have been a respite. Our tour guide has children serving in the army, and so do most of his left-leaning friends in Israel, and he has grandchildren who could easily have been killed or taken hostage on October 7th, but he remains a progressive, believing in equal rights for Arabs and Israelis, and women and LGBTQ people. But his liberal point of view is informed by his service in the Israeli army and his knowledge of the many peace deals that have been attempted and have fallen apart over the past seventy five years.
He is as frustrated as we are by the settlers in the West Bank who keep attacking Palestinians, and he is as disillusioned as we are, no, more, by the current government of Israel and its anti-democratic leanings. He, like so many Israelis, has dreamt of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian people for so long, looking for reliable partners to live side by side with, but they know that that has never been the goal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
So I dutifully set my alarm clock each Saturday night, and try to remember to brush my hair in the morning before logging onto the zoom, and I listen to our Israeli tour guide lead us through the latest events in the news and how Israelis like him are experiencing them on the ground: like the incredible relief of seeing the first hostages come home; and the joy of finally being able to laugh again, even for a moment; and the horror of the IDF accidentally killing three hostages; and the frustration when the hostage negotiations broke down; and the reassurance of knowing that so many Israelis are working together to take care of the evacuees from the north and the south of Israel who had to leave with barely the clothes on their backs amidst rocket fire from Hamas and Hezbollah.
Recently, a young college student from our congregation came to the weekly zoom to tell us what it feels like to be a Zionist on campus who is also sympathetic to the pain of the Palestinians. She said that everyone on campus seems to have chosen sides and if you are not completely in one camp or the other it can be very lonely, but she has friends in every group and is doing her best to see the complexity of the disagreements and hold onto her empathy and connection even when those emotions are overwhelming. We were all crying, listening to her, but also feeling really hopeful because her ability to hold on to her own identity and point of view while also respecting and even loving people who disagree with her is a powerful thing.
There’s this funny thing about Israelis where it seems like everyone calls everyone else by their first name, or by their nickname, whether they know each other or not. Everyone is “brother,” and all of the hostages belong to everyone’s families, even when some members of the family, like Bibi, are deeply infuriating and would never be invited to Friday night dinner. And I have to admit that I don’t feel that way about the American Jewish community; we are much more spread out and divided than Israelis, or at least that’s how it feels to me. But I keep looking for ways to connect, and to feel less alone with my grief and fear and confusion over what’s true and what’s possible in the future. My hope is that the large majority of American Jews who both care about Israel and about liberal values can find a way forward, together with non-Jews who care about the same things.
As always, there have been a few articles and videos and songs that have given me hope:
Identity/Crisis: Believe Israeli Woman https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/identity-crisis/id1500168597?i=1000639057794
An Interview with a Druze/Israeli Reporter www.israelstory.org/episode/riyad-ali/
An Arab Israeli survivor of the October 7th attack: https://www.facebook.com/share/yjXk5jQtd33ZWhkA/?mibextid=WC7FNe
Three Children Released From Hamas Captivity Are Reunited With Their Dog https://youtu.be/_HqWdRwiv4Y?si=payDYwDNzfQGaHdO
Matisyahu’s One Day: https://youtu.be/WRmBChQjZPs?si=m4PG---Zhwleg9wI
Matisyahu’s One Day sung by 3,000 Muslims and Jews in Haifa, 2018: https://youtu.be/ZPBjAfmgC-g?si=GOvgbBNIyqf-jYLg
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
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