The Ghetto and Gaza

On Wednesday I stood on cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto, my head half-cocked for a particular sound. Sure enough, as the tour guide described the enclosure of Jews into tiny neighborhoods across Europe, I heard a loud thump from behind a picture of a wall topped by shards of glass. Before the stool had even rolled into the doorway, I was yanking a bag of chocolate from my purse and heading into the next room. I know the sound of someone fainting, and had all my bets on the Ethiopian student who had been steadily sagging as we moved through Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum. The museum is enough to drain anyone, and he is a particularly sensitive person.

But it wasn’t him. A woman lay on the floor, with some of my students making vague motions towards her. I fed her chocolate and got her to the water fountain. She was from Mexico, and her Hebrew was not that good, but I only realized afterwards that I might have tried English; neither of us was speaking our native tongue, but it didn’t strike me until I’d returned to my classes.

As we moved through the museum, the Israeli and Jewish students slid into silence. I was awed by the tiny minority of students who chose to giggle and chat their way through the museum. They weren’t from my classes, or I would have said something. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism. I don’t know; I’d rather not know what was passing through the minds of the students who came from near Babi Yar as they laughed in front of a picture of it-- rather not guess what was in the minds of some local students who chatted their way through scenes of murder.

I hate visiting holocaust museums, and I hate teaching about it. My tone becomes incredibly matter-of-fact as I reject any added emotion; one doesn’t need to read Eli Wiesel in anything but a monotone. And yet one needs to speak; moments of silence are only made significant by what precedes them.

My English classes have been covering autobiographies, so we read some excerpts from Anne’s diary. And then the students wrote their own diaries. “No,” I assured them again and again, “nobody will read this but me.”

I tend to ask for rather a lot of personal reflections in the course of my teaching. Texts which allow the students to connect to what we’ve read or what we’re learning. Answer Mary Oliver’s poem: what are you going to do with your one wild and crazy life? Copy Satrapi’s style to describe an event from your own life. Choose one of Anne’s themes to reflect upon in a diary entry.

So I read their diary entries about larger themes: diaries about identity, and morality, and loneliness. Some were wildly uplifting, and some punched little holes in me. Some I brought with me to the school counselor, clenched in both hands, and held up the ragged edges of a child’s life appealingly to ask her to sew them back together. But mostly I did the first thing I had to do, and protected their privacy. The notes I scribbled back in the margins felt like patching band-aids onto flesh wounds.

On Friday, schools from the region visited to attend a Seeds of Peace workshop at our school. I ended up talking to a social studies teacher from the American school in Gaza. It became clearer and clearer to me that I have no idea what it’s like there, and talking to him did not illuminate things for me.

"...about six hours of electricity a day, and the school has 24-hour electricity, so the kids are happy to come. Their parents pay a lot of money for our school, too."

“What do most of your friends work at?” I asked.

“Teaching, engineers, you know,” he answered.

“So do most people have jobs?”

“No, we’re the lucky 1%. Actually there’s about an 85% unemployment rate.”

“Do your students go to international universities?”

“Yeah, mostly. They have to pass from Gaza, to Israel, to Jordan, and then fly out—Egypt closed the Rafah crossing and now we can only get out through Israel. The soldier from this morning—I really give him credit—he was really human, you know? Helped us get out early even though usually it’s only the medical cases that get through before 10 am, and he even went out of his way to call and convince the Palestinian side to let us through.”

 

He kept using the words “open-air prison,” a phrase that reminded me of the exhibit I’d visited earlier this week. The principal of his school, at lunch, had talked proudly about how he runs his school with an ideology against politics, and I reflected that I had no clue exactly what he meant by politics. It was clearly a euphemism for something radical, some extremism, and yet it was totally out of my experience.

The social studies teacher suggested a one-state solution, since only when people live together, integrated, can we have peace. He spoke of the way international aid cripples Gazans by making it unnecessary for them to work or produce anything, creating a dependent system, but that they couldn’t do so anyhow without Israel allowing them to import resources. He spoke of how people cycle through anger and are content to sit and wallow in hatred, of the way religion can be coercive, and of projects he’s done with his students. Then he told me that he really wanted to interview people in Israel, to ask them this question:

“Why are Israelis afraid of Palestinians?”

I almost laughed. At lunch, one of the Palestinian students from our school had told us about the first time he saw Israeli soldiers manning the ice cream station at the cafeteria—he’d been shocked, since in his experience, Israeli soldiers only intimidated him and bullied him. I told the teacher that our student’s experiences had built his fears, and only extended interaction with Israelis had added nuance to them. Same thing on the other side.

“There have been ongoing attacks, every week almost, for the past half year. Someone I know was killed in October, and this is a tiny country—everybody knows someone. It’s hard, if the attacks are happening on the streets you hang out on, and to the people you know—it’s hard not to fear a whole group, until you start to meet the people who make up that group and realize that most of them are normal human beings.” I didn't add that he was the first Gazan I'd ever met; that our discussion about PBL was my Israeli soldier offering ice cream.

By the end of the day, I’d been offered an invitation to visit Gaza for a few days and see their school. The principal assured me that he could make it happen. And I am very, very curious about what actually exists there. Yet quite aside from the safety considerations that would make me almost certainly not go, I feel there’s a moral issue here: I can’t travel to Gaza on a voluntourism trip when there are people there waiting for medical permits to travel, for permission to visit family they haven’t seen for five years or for important business reasons.

And yet talking to the teachers today piqued a deep curiosity in me; a thirst to actually know what the reality is on the other side of the fence. I have always found it difficult to ignore banned spaces. I peek at the kohanim when they give birkat kohanim; I have visited men’s bathrooms after hours and stand on top of furniture just to make certain that I have experienced every space. So I want to go to Gaza and see what is there. I don’t want to use my ignorance as a shield, ever.