I asked a friend of mine from the States whether she had
heard the recent news from Israel. She hadn’t. So maybe you haven’t either.
Maybe you don’t know about the tense ball of stress clenched
in Israeli chests the past week.
Maybe you haven’t read about the people who have been
killed, parents shot in front of their children, children stabbed in front of
their parents, protestors attacked, about a Palestinian leadership that pretends to urge restraint,
while accusing Israel of taking over the Temple Mount (Netanyahu has forbidden
MK’s to go on it, and most Israelis don’t care about it—this is Abbas building
an excuse for murder and a third intifada) and an Israeli leadership that has told Israelis to carry guns in self-defense.
Maybe you haven’t read about Palestinian kids throwing
stones at Israeli cars—and when I say stones, I mean dumping boulders on
windshields of cars that have slowed down because the drivers don’t want to hit
a child by accident, but then must listen to their own children scream through
blood and broken glass as they try to get away, or
Maybe you haven’t read about the Israeli teenager who stabbed
four Palestinians and claimed he “thought they were terrorists” as he decided
that murder is the answer to fear.
Maybe you haven’t read about Palestinians protesting
violently because in their papers, they’re reading “Palestinian shot by Israeli
police” without the accompanying fact that the Palestinian first stabbed a
couple and their baby. Maybe you’re reading the same headline—if your news
source is the BBC or Al Jazeera, you certainly are.
When my sister texted me on Thursday, “I’m fine, wasn’t in
tlv” and I nervously checked Arutz7 to find out that an Arab construction
worker had used a screwdriver to stab people in Tel Aviv, I was sitting in the
staff room with my East Jerusalem colleague and four of the Palestinian
students, all of whom were berating him in Arabic to help them with their
economics work first. He winked at me and told me, sotto voce, that he was
going to use the fly swatter to get them in order, and I tossed it to him in
encouragement with a laugh.
What went through my head, what automatically goes through
my head when there’s a terror attack like that, is “Is it my family? My friends? It could have been.” And that’s what the terrorists are counting upon.
That we feel terror, that we feel so much fear that we’re driven to insane
lengths—that we stay inside and stop our lives or attack innocent Palestinians
and fuel a war. But in the wave of violence that is gripping Israel and
Palestine right now, I’m doubly terrified. Because now I also have to ask myself, "is it my students?"
When I hear that there’s been an attack on Israelis at a
light rail station in Jerusalem, I calculate the statistical probability that
someone I know was there—is my sister in class? My grandparents on their way to
the supermarket? When I hear that there’s been a teenager detained in Hebron or
killed in Shufat, I calculate the statistical probability that someone I know
was there—were our students out on weekend break? Was my East Jerusalem
colleague at work late today? The chances of the former are much greater. I
know a lot more Israelis than Palestinians. But either way, the fear that
surges and grips, the fact that I am terrified of this violence no matter what
part of the country it is in, means that I want it to end for both sides. Now.
Maybe if everyone were as bi-partisanly scared as I am, as
viscerally terrified when someone is attacked as I am to hear that it could have been Hassan
or Omri, Siwar or Maya, then the conflict would end. If you are
feeling terror for both sides of this conflict, then you want it to stop, now, unilaterally and completely. Perhaps if we propagate more feelings of terror by ensuring people are
scared for both sides, we can end the actual terror. Because if it's just human life that matters, and not where that human lives, then suddenly everything changes.
Despite the reports of terror, of shootings, stabbings,
riots, and violence issuing from Israel and the West Bank, the students are
mostly focused on their studies. When I asked my mentor group to check-in on their
emotions, only one student mentioned her fears for what’s happening in Israel.
The rest are occupied with their workloads, their extracurricular activities,
the fact that the washing machines haven’t yet been hooked up, and when the
wifi is going to kick in for the new building. Our school is a glorious oasis
in the midst of madness, where mornings on my way in I pass two quiet students,
one Israeli, one Palestinian, walking together in their pajamas towards the
breakfast hall, taking solace in each other’s serenity.
In the staff room, most of the Israeli teachers are talking
about the situation:
“We’re just sitting and not doing anything! Where’s
Netanyahu?”
“An Arab who lives in Israel has a better life, better
rights, a better job, than anywhere else in the Middle East. And they know it.
So why?”
“They’re making a big mistake. They're living in the past. Every time I
visit Germany, do I throw rocks at old people because they murdered all my
family?”
The
Arabic teacher said, “I don’t like talking about the situation. It doesn’t do
anything.” The economics teacher from East Jerusalem tends to say, “religion
causes problems” dismissively, and then naps or jokes with me about Disney
characters when the Israelis launch into debate. I wonder if their avoidance is
representative of why they can work at the school in the first place, or a
coping technique in the middle of majority Israeli peers, or a political
response: although Jewish Israelis are distraught at the violence that is
welling into our cities, perhaps the Arab Israelis don’t deign to notice it in
the face of the continuous oppression of the people of the West Bank.
Luckily,
most of the political conversations happen in Hebrew, so the people passing by
can’t necessarily understand. And I don’t want them to. I don’t want the
international students to freak out or the Palestinian students to feel
outnumbered. A German student told me her mom hasn’t called yet, so it can’t be
on the German news yet. A Palestinian student showed me Ma’an news, a
Palestinian news source I’d never seen before, and overwhelmed me with its
strangeness. It was as though the deaths of Israelis in the past week never
happened—all focus was on Palestinians detained or beaten. In the articles
where attacks were mentioned, headlines reported: “Palestinian shot by Israeli
police”. The rest of the sentence—Palestinian stabs four people, then is shot
by Israeli police—simply doesn’t appear. The utter remove of our two worlds was
too odd to grapple with. We went back to helping him apply to college in the
States. And after all, that’s the point. To move on with life despite the chaos
outside.
At the start of each of my classes this week there was a
scramble to find a suitable room, with a working projector—the building going
on means everything is up in the air. Classes went well, though, even with the
stress of instability. The kids in the lesson on technology and language
appreciated the fact that we used Today’sMeet as the platform. The kids in
their Socratic Seminar on language policies made it fascinatingly personal: the
two Quebec kids argued about French, three of the Palestinians expressed their
fear that Arabic is becoming diluted by Hebrew and English, and the Danish kid
just dreamed of a universal language in which we could all understand each
other like the Scandic languages.
I love different languages. I don’t want one universal language
that takes over the nice distinctions, the new ways of thinking, my different
Israeli and Norwegian and English personalities. But right now, at this
particular moment in space and time, I think my Danish student has a point. Not
a universal language, but universal comprehension, human-wide understanding, is
needed right now. And in our globish-speaking little international campus, we’re
sort of trying to achieve it.
No comments:
Post a Comment