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.