Impressions Post-Script
This past weekend, my last here in Israel, I visited several sets of friends to say goodbye, and in one case finally hello. The woman on kibbutz who, with her late husband, had much to do with my becoming a Zionist in 1964 at age 15, partly because their humanistic critique of the path Israel had chosen suggested a reasonable alternative might still develop. The moshav (cooperative farm) family I lived with for three weeks in 1967 during my 10-month post-high school Israel program. The American friend who came back here in 1972, just as I did, to live on kibbutz forever; I left several months later, my Zionism having dissipated and our group having fractured, but he still lives with his Israeli wife and children on a different kibbutz so transformed from its collective and communal roots that it hardly resembles the society we craved 35 years ago.
In conversations with these and other friends, and with many professors and students here at Ben Gurion University and elsewhere, and with a range of political and community activists along various spots on the left half of Israel’s political spectrum, I’ve repeatedly been struck by the combination of awareness and despair. It’s not just kibbutz that didn’t live up to its promise, or maybe to its propaganda, but Israel as a whole. The Zionist dream, it turned out, made sense only in a vacuum. Israel’s elites and supporters work hard to maintain ideological control and deflect attention from troublesome topics, but this visit has confirmed my suspicion that large portions of Israel’s Jewish citizens see through the blinders, even if sometimes reluctantly and sporadically. The problem isn’t that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t know what to do, especially those who are still wedded to Zionist fundamentals they absorbed in their youth.
In my previous posting I described some of my impressions at the end of my six-week Be’er Sheva visit. I’m glad to have had this experience, even though it wasn’t the place I had wanted to come. My goal had been to use my six-week Fulbright grant at a Palestinian university. Only when Fulbright told me the State Department wouldn’t allow that did I shift the location. So although my time in Palestine will be shorter than I hoped, just a week or 10 days before I have to return home, the experience has been useful in making sense of things, and the Negev remains magical, always.
One downside of Be’er Sheva’s southern location and of the abundance of places to go within a reasonable distance was that I never went north to Galilee, the one part of Israel where Jews and Arabs live in approximately equal numbers with a slight Arab majority. I’ve heard conflicting stories about the quality of this demographic balance, which someday will characterize Israel as a whole if current trends continue. I’ve heard talk of harmonious relations, of mostly separate existence, of barely described hostility and institutionalized discrimination, of conflict between Muslim and Christian Arabs. Maybe I’ll get there still. Or maybe next time.
Today I meet two professors I should have tracked down a month ago. Tomorrow my grant period ends. Wednesday, Ramallah.
