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.