The Jewish Guilt Trip

Surely it’s happened to you before. You visit a city in a country where a million plus of your nation were murdered in genocide within the past century, and you find yourself quickly, unhappily, liking it. I’m in Warsaw at an IB workshop this weekend, and, well… it would be silly to compare Warsaw to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. It’s a hundred times more beautiful, cleaner, more intelligently designed… if only, in the words of an Israeli woman I met here, it wasn’t a giant graveyard for our people.

One in five people who board the bus here trip as they do so because they have a book held in front of their faces. I want to press their hands in comradeship, to memorize the way their knuckles grasp the dust jackets. After three months of Israelis and their smartphones, it feeds something hungry inside of me. In fact, I scan the streets to realize that there’s a conspicuous lack of smartphones out. In both countries the youth rise for elders on the bus, though.

The sky is a marbled, pastel wonder—I appreciate it all the more after the flat dangerous white light of the Israeli sun. I consciously crunch leaves beneath my feet, aware that the sensation is one I must treasure against the gritty sand of Tel Aviv streets. In Łazienki Park, I want to mimic the dogs and roll in the fabulous fall foliage. I’m equipped to: for the first time in two months I’m wearing proper clothing, boots and jeans and hooded jacket and scarf, instead of the sweaty loose outfits which barely hide the fact that I’d rather go naked through Israeli heat. And this is no Gan Sacher or Gan HaYarkon; here I could find myself a private space and roll to my heart’s delight, and there would be nobody to see. I don’t need to stake out a few cubic feet of my own. I have an entire forest clearing to myself. I compromise by lying on my back to watch the sky through the branches and occasionally taste the raindrops on my face. The ducks watch me for awhile, then go about their business.

The city is a wonder of wide boulevards. It mixes periods well. I tramp upon cobblestones past skyscrapers, and bemusedly enjoy the monstrous Communist architecture rearing up near the Old Town’s quaint painted castles. At no point do I need to weave through the drippings of air conditioners, nor avert my gaze from Bauhaus architecture. Fluffy red squirrels scamper happily beside me along the paths planted with trees. There are no rodent-like cats.

The people are interestingly ugly. None of the silky bronzed unapproachable beauty of Tel Avivis. Only the sexy mystery of plain faces, made alluring by their expressions and simple similarity to my own. And by the way they wear their winter gear; toggled wool coats, well-wrapped scarves, and heeled boots are so much more attractive than clinging minis and undershirts. Their language beckons. I could learn Polish. I already joyously recognize many words: billet, and kontor, and skrive. They are just like in Norwegian.

Warsaw smells incredible. It is washed clean by regular wind and rain. On Nowy Swiat, the scents of bakeries and chocolateries and Italian pizzerias drift into the street, and sometimes the illicit smell of sausage tickles my nose. The rest of the city smells of autumn leaves, and by the Vistula, of the river. I am amazed at how clean the streets are, and remind myself that just because people live somewhere, does not mean they must contaminate it with their trash like Israelis do.

In the Old Town, a group of Israeli men surprise me. I hear them debating about where the ghetto wall was, and draw near. As they bicker about it, one of them glances at me.

 

 .תשאל אותה. בטח שהיא יודעת ושומעת עלינו

Caught. I grin and look at the map.

אני לא בטוחה, אבל נראה לי שזה בכיוון הזה... 

We were off. They insisted I join them on their tour, and told me all sorts of lies: they’re looking for jobs here, they’re a soccer team here for a game… turns out they all grew up together and came to Warsaw on holiday. We had a boisterous time through the Old Town. Finally I insisted that I had to leave. I had a pilgrimage to make. They couldn’t believe I was going, and wouldn’t let me go without shaking each of their hands: shalom, Nissim, shalom, Avi, shalom, Itzik v’Gadi, shalom, all the rest of you quintessentially Israeli guys.

 "!שבת שלום, ובהצלחה, מותק" rang in my ears as I caught my bus.

The Zydowski Cemetery is an eerie place. It's one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. I’ve been there once before, with a trip from my midrasha while on gap year in Israel. Then I was mostly irked at being surrounded by sem girls and the “isha tznuah” descriptions on so many of the women’s tombstones. Now, I pushed open the gate hesitantly, and emerged into a world in which pre-war Judaism merged with memorials for the many killed in the shoah. It was so easy to forget cheerful, bustling, beautiful Warsaw, and sink into the twisted shadows of the trees. Tombstones tumbled across tombstones in a nightmare of mossy, mulchy death. I stopped to consult a map of the enormous cemetery.

 

“Excuse me, you know where is the monument of Janusz Korczak?” Two clearly Israeli women approached me.

 "לא, אבל אני גם רוצה למצוא המצבה שלו," I answered, and that was it. They adopted me. Together we ranged through the cemetery’s section by the gate, identifying the mass graves for the Warsaw Ghetto dead, and Korczak’s monument, while one told me their family’s history of escape from the Holocaust.

 "את יודעת איפה הבית כנסת בוורסה? את שומרת כשרות?" they wanted to know, and then apologized for not being themselves. Finally I shook them off, and headed deep, deep, deep into the cemetery on my own. Twenty minutes' tramp in, far beyond the area where most tourists visit, a white sign nailed to a tree told me to turn right into the depths of the forest. I stumbled along the overgrown path. As all sound grew muted around me, and the smell of wet earth overpowered me, I found the place I sought: the ohel of the Netziv and Rav Chaim Soloveitchik.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do there. Perhaps to atone for enjoying Warsaw so much. Perhaps to leave a pebble to mark their greatness, or to remind myself that an entire civilization had been wiped out here. I’m not the type to pray at a tzaddik’s kever, but I wanted to visit. Within seconds, the smell of wet decay, and the eerie green light of the forest, was too much for me. I retreated. Not until I was back in my hotel could I shake off the sense of malevolent magic, the knowledge that once there had been thousands of people here, a thriving civilization who may have enjoyed Warsaw as much as me, and they had mostly been murdered. I showered, set out the food I'd brought from Israel, and lit shabbat candles semi-defiantly. Something about davening kabbalat shabbat in Warsaw seemed a proper retort to the shoah.

At the first day of the IB conference, I explained to many different people, who understood to various degrees, that I couldn’t write today, or eat any of the food that was so nicely prepared, or carry the workbook back to the hotel. I heard two Americans speaking, and felt moved to approach them to talk, but didn't spend long with them. They weren't Israeli and family, just American and friendly. And unlike the woman from Skagerak, I couldn't practice my Norwegian on them, an opportunity which tremendously excited me.

It’s all right, I think, for me to enjoy some things about Warsaw. The cringing that I feel when I see tiny statues of Hassidic Jews grasping a coin in souvenir shops, and the sense of alienation that accompanies a stroll down the sentrum, past where the ghetto walls stood, punches me in the face enough to send me back to Israel. I was born in chutz la’aretz, and will always have an affinity for rainy afternoons, autumn foliage, and the crisp clean smell of approaching winter.

And yet, over the past weeks, I’ve found a beauty in Israel. It’s not in the countryside—that’s as scrubby as ever. But in the urban parks, where joggers thread between playing children, and in the wide boulevards lined with palm trees, and the chic coffee shops at every corner, and the numerous squares that dot Tel Aviv with cultural meaning… Tel Aviv is a beautiful city, which lights up at night and turns pastel over the sea at sunset. And whatever Warsaw may have that Tel Aviv lacks, Tel Aviv has the people… the keen people that so urgently claim me as their own. Perhaps, over time, its place will have the same hold on me that a cool, rainy fall day has now.

I Would Vote For You

I led a class on racial profiling (technically, it was on comparing different text types, but the content was racial profiling) with my first years this week. That topic becomes a lot more complicated when you add Mizrachi and Ashkenazi Israelis, an Ethiopian student, several Palestinians, a half-Black French-Canadian, and a South African who casually mentions that last week one of her parents was jailed for being white, into the mix. They brought angles to the mix that other students had never considered before, and since this is a topic where I mostly tend to ask questions and see where the class can arrive with guidance, I found it educational, too.

Yesterday morning, I sat outside on a picnic table, thinking. My laptop charger had just fried, courtesy of Israeli voltage, and there wasn’t much else for me to do during my planning. One of my favorite students, a kid I don’t teach but whom I mentor in my homeroom, approached me.

“Ms. W? Can I join you? Do you mind? Are you busy?” he asked.

“I’m pondering."

"Can I ponder with you?” He sat down beside me, laying his pile of books to the side. “What are you thinking about?”

I debated telling him the truth, and in a rare move for an introvert who prizes the privacy of her thoughtspace, decided to. “The peace parade we had last night. It left me… dissatisfied.” We talked about our mutual feeling of missing the point in it. Then we talked about the coding club he wants to start, his grandmother’s farm up north, his dream of MIT, the fact that he should probably share more of his thoughts since he didn’t bother telling anyone as they were building the new sidewalk that rain would definitely pool in one area, and then it did and someone slipped, and that’s the sort of thing that happens a lot around him because he has so many thoughts to share but rarely gets them clear enough...

At one point he stopped and asked me, “What do you think of it, though? Really, I’m very curious to know what you think of the school. Is it fulfilling your expectations?”

I thought for a bit about how, as a teacher, it’s not my job to give students ammunition for complaint. But there was one thing that was really on my mind, and this is a very mature student, much more prone to coming up with solutions than complaints.

“Yes, it’s wonderful. But in some ways… look, it’s great that you are all together, Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs and Israeli Jews, and being kind to one another and sharing love for each other. Nothing could be more important right now. But at the same time, it’s not enough. In a few months, the Israelis are going to the army, where they’ll be put in impossible situations, and you and the other Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians will have to decide whether you’re going to stay in Israel or Palestine or leave the country, and whether to be politicians, lawyers, businesspeople, how to lead your people, whether you’re going to keep in touch with the Israelis and all of you are going to build peace together, or whether it will be just a nice interlude, a pleasant blip in your childhood.”

He agreed, vehemently. He mentioned MEET, the peace initiative he TA’s for, and its way of bringing participants to acknowledge their own and each others’ pain with such urgency that nothing can possibly be done except to meet together to end the violence. I want to know more about it, because I think it might provide a good model for our school, as we toddle towards creating rituals and institutions.

Today, the school was quiet—the second years are in the south for a trip. I enjoyed the peace and sat in the hallway with my laptop, working to the strains of Stravinsky. I took a headphone out at one point, and overheard my student from yesterday with one of the Jewish Israeli students. They must have been sitting on the couch around the corner. He was speaking insistently, but also with camaraderie; these two are close friends—they’re both incredibly goal-driven, serious but game for a laugh, and deeply intelligent.

“—because I don’t want you to forget where you came from. I don’t think you will, but it’s so easy, when you’re part of the system.”

The other boy answered, saying something I couldn’t hear. I lowered the volume on the “Firebird Suite.”

“I know. It’s more about thinking about it, preparing for it, because it’s easier to see something from the outside. I know you, and I can’t see you forgetting basic humanity. I mean, if you ran for prime minister, I would probably vote for you.”

The Jewish Israeli laughed. “Really? Because I think I will be center right.”

“I think you would be center left.”

The conversation switched to political parties and soon they were doing impressions of Donald Trump. At least, with everything going on in Israel-Palestine, we can still get a good laugh out of America.

As they left, they came back to their earlier discussion.

“Oh god, man, this world is so messed up,” said the polymath who will revolutionize whatever field he chooses.

“Yeah, but that’s exactly it, you find the people who work best in a messed-up world, and you stick with them,” said the future prime minister of Israel.

I hope they stick with each other.

Why Am I Wearing a Keffiyeh?

One of my Palestinian students walked into class a trifle late on Sunday. He was wearing a keffiyeh tied loosely around his neck, and as he entered, I felt a jolt of confusion. I’m not sure what a keffiyeh represents. I only knew that he was laying claim to an identity group, and that somehow, in that instinctive part of me that I’m not wholly conscious of, I had the primal response of recognizing someone from a different tribe as potentially opposed to my own. The jolt of discomfort that went through me was from a deeper place than simply recognizing otherness—this wasn’t just weird to me, it was in opposition to a group I belong to. I filed the emotion to consider it later.

As per class rules, he passed me a note a few second later that explained why he was late: “some kid from the kfar (village) tried to start up with me because I’m wearing a keffiyeh.” I thought a moment, and then scribbled a return note: “did you end amicably?”

Puzzled look up at me.

“Amicably means friendly,” I whispered, trying not to disturb my silently writing students.

“Oh. No. He wanted to fight me. But I walked away.”

“Way to be,” I answered.

At the end of class, while some students lingered to chat with me, he offered to clamber up on a table and turn the projector off. As he did so, he grabbed the end of the keffiyeh, and muttered to himself, “this is so hot. It’s choking me. Why am I wearing a keffiyeh? Well, I know why I’m wearing it.” I wish he’d answered himself out loud with a reason. I want to know, although I also kind of know. Perhaps it could clarify my own reaction.

I riffed a lesson off of a former high school English teacher of mine, and taught my students the rules to definite and indefinite articles (“listen up, German speakers!”), then handed them a bunch of sticky notes and set them loose on the school.

“Everything should have the correct article,” I told them. “The one and only principal, an arm, a hot mess in the coffee corner… but nobody can see you label it. If they do, you have to take it back. You need to sneak attack the school with correct grammar.” As I picked up my bag to follow the students out, I noticed it had a sticky note: “A bag.” Aces. I headed into the main building, following the trail of sticky notes pasted along the way.

The school had a “Peace Parade” yesterday evening. One of the Albanian students organized it in response to current events. Our students went through the village with drums and candles, and as they went, they called to the village students whom they drummed out of dorms: “Peace parade! Come and join!” The ranks swelled, and Israeli children of all ages came out with their friends and held the proffered candles. I eavesdropped on their conversations as they went along, wondering what my students would think if they could understand:

“Peace? I’m a fan.”

“What the hell do these kids from outside the land know about peace? Or war?”

“Trade you my candle.”

“The nation of Israel lives!” (This in song). “We’re still alive, still alive, still alive.”

“She’s so cute. Do you think she’ll laugh at me if I speak English to her?”

“Peace? Yeah, right. Hey, Yossi, come watch the foreigners do a parade!”

The march ended at the village outdoor auditorium. Students from our school performed “Amazing Grace,” read a poem in Spanish, in Hebrew, and in Arabic, thoroughly befuddling the Israeli students who had no idea what this had to do with peace. I happened to be around for the selection of the Arabic poem—my Yemeni student asked for my help in translating it. He and a Palestinian student chose a poem by a famous Yemeni writer in which the current war in Yemen is bemoaned, asking how nonsense has become common sense, the regular norm of our daily lives. It then goes on to cry for return to Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen.

“But we’re going to replace ‘Sanaa’ with ‘home’, and make it applicable to everyone,” they said.

“Hmm,” I thought out loud. “It really reminds me of classic Jewish prayers to return to the land of Israel after the Roman exile. Are you sure it fits the purpose of this parade?” They didn’t want to change it. As we headed out on the march, I noticed one of the Palestinian students had the Palestinian flag stuffed in her pocket. She didn’t take it out though, as far as I noticed.

The parade was a lot like the UN trying to come in and impose peace. It was very nice to see Albanian and Argentinian students in flowing white dresses and pressed slacks perform, but both the Israeli and Arab selections were more to the point: one was about this being the land of our forefathers, the other about return to a homeland. It strikes me that this is the same point that most of the world misses: two nations are vying here, but outsiders who have their own country can’t quite get the struggle. Many dismiss the vital need for nationhood of one or another of the groups. And, while Israelis recognize, ironically enough, the desperate need for a Palestinian state, Palestinians don’t seem to have the same approach to an Israeli state. Well. The kids got to play with candles and perform, so they were happy. Probably much like the UN.

Right now I’m writing in Kikar HaBima, before the iconic Habimah theater, watching toddlers play in the sand and run between the cactuses in the sunk garden in the middle and tell their parents with a high degree of seriousness, “Ima, I can’t come right now exactly, I am playing in the sand.” I’ve just come from my second run-in with Israeli healthcare, and it’s left me no less bemused than the first. After visiting a family doctor and orthopedist, I’m now armed with two prescriptions: one for an ankle brace, and the other for an ultrasound (my ankle better give birth to a diagnosis soon. It’s been five months). It feels like I’m on some kind of weird scavenger hunt through the Israeli medical system, at the end of which they will declare me a true Israeli.

Slowly, savoringly, I am learning Tel Aviv. It’s no longer odd to me that young children and toddlers play in the city’s squares deep into the hours of the night. Their calls echo against the white walls of HaBimah, and trail off in the green shadows of palm trees and cypress. Both of those trees show to best advantage at night, lit up against the white backdrop of Israeli architecture. As flute music floats from the direction of the theater, a few raindrops land on my face. I have never before felt this relaxed on a school night.

First They Came For the Palestinians...

My students are responsible for bringing in a text with a discussion question to jumpstart our classes; today one of my Palestinian students was signed up. Here’s the warm-up with which he started class today: 

He read out the quote and then asked his question. The room hushed as students wrote their thoughts. One of the Israelis looked at me expressively while the rest were writing; he didn’t like the question. I smiled, in an attempt to balance neutrality with understanding. Then I turned it over to the student who introduced it to lead the discussion, with the reminder to the class:

“This is a critical topic. So think carefully about what you want to say, and what you want to ask, what you want to understand from people who may think differently from you.”

The Palestinian picked an Israeli to answer first.

“It’s perspective. Right now it’s normal to Israelis to be attacked, and Palestinians are having another norm, from their perspective, of protesting with violence. But it depends on where you’re viewing it from, whether you view it as defense or protest or innocent suffering.”

We got stuck on defining “norm” for a moment, in that delicious way that high schoolers do get stuck on definitions.

“It’s ideology,” said the Israeli Marxist with the soft South African accent. “One group oppresses another, to the point to which it seems normal for them to do so.” Even though I think I know his political leanings, and that it's Israel doing the oppressing (the group without the political power can't exactly oppress-- it's a word that assumes control, right?) in his sentence, I'm intrigued that he doesn't spell it out.

The barefoot South American spoke up. “When something is the norm, like this situation, it’s a group mistreating another until it seems completely normal. So yes, here it’s the norm, but it shouldn’t be—it shouldn’t be normal that this becomes the norm.”

The student who brought the quote in wanted to add to that. “Exactly. So everyone is so used to the settlers, to the point where it’s become a norm for them to just take this land, to build on this land, and we consider it absolutely normal, without even thinking about it twice.”

The American Jew was getting upset. “I don’t see a connection between Martin Niemoller’s quote and the current situation, at all. There, nobody was speaking out for the socialists and Jews, and here, people are doing too much speaking out! I think the violence and all of the terrorist attacks are people speaking out, against occupation, so I think it’s the complete opposite problem where people are speaking out wrong.”

The Israeli who had raised his eyebrows to me earlier jumped in: “Yes, and I think this kind of comparison is part of the larger escalation of violence that happens here. It’s using the violence of the Holocaust, to try to make a point which isn’t true.”

Normally the student who brought the warm-up in wraps it up, but he didn’t want to, so I, keeping my voice steady though my hands were shaking, pointed out that the quote held a strong message for us all, whatever our political beliefs, and then moved on to “Goblin Market” without even remembering to ask them if they’d noticed the anaphora. The student who’d introduced the quote also seemed to need some space—he asked to partner with me instead of with another student for the analysis drills we were running. I wondered if being the only Palestinian in the class (the others in second year all happen to be in the other English A class or in Arabic A) bothered him now. It was nice to flitter through lighthearted Victorian poetry on the nature of temptation, and my students were easily distracted by their upcoming exam, but thoughts about the current situation kept running through my head.

I don’t want to write about it. My thoughts are unformed, my emotions raw, and yet it’s tremendously, keenly, enormously important to me that you know, well, that sometimes, when I’m not thinking about something else, I’m a little scared. After today’s four stabbings, in cities where my friends and family live, and the sense that any time, any place, any person, could be a target—well, I’m a little scared, sometimes, and really sad, at others. I don’t want to write about my stupid thoughts on how to neutralize threats when walking down the street (any woman who walks alone at night has had those thoughts, anyhow, on some scale, just not usually at daylight surrounded by people), or how I sat through the Arabic class I’m auditing with my phone in my lap, as incorrigible as any teenager, only the topic of my family’s whatsapp thread was checking to make sure everybody was okay after the two attacks in Jerusalem, or how it seems that every attack, the victims are within the three degrees of separation to me that connect Jews all over the world. I don't want to write about it at all. 

Nor do I want to to write about the inequality, the racism against Palestinians here and the morality of building a country in a land where others already lived, last week's impromptu march of a crowd of Israelis through Jerusalem shouting “death to Arabs!”, the doubts I’ve been having about whether there’s a difference between “normalization of colonization” vs. building towards peace, about the pregnant woman and her three-year-old son killed in an IDF strike this week, and the horror these things inspire in me. These are part of my fear and my sadness. But these topics, like the Palestinians who are running their cars into Israelis waiting at the bus stop, and lunging out of taxis to stab passersby, are all something I don’t know how to say anything about. 

Still, somehow it’s important to me that you know that something is happening over here, in Israel. People are going mad and sticking knives into other people. Any peace that might have been considered is being slashed apart by a cycle of retaliation and fear. And it's desperately, gravely important to me that you are aware of it. That it not become the norm.

There is something keenly poignant about being in Israel right now, and it's this: in the news, after an attack is described, the article always mentions that passersby apprehended the stabber, holding him down until police arrived, or the taxi driver who drove the attacker got out and caught her as soon as he realized what she was doing, or that a man driving down the road saw the attack and ran the stabber over before he could harm more people. Since I think that my first impulse when I see a stabbing would be to run in the opposite direction, I'm wistfully glad to see the strength of my people in this moment. Everyone in Israel is helping each other. People are offering defense classes for free, administering first aid to strangers, or just wishing each other, “better news soon.” Here's hoping.

Maybe the Cure for Terror is Terror

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.