40 Years of Occupation
Forty years ago today, according to daily diary notes I just looked at for the first time in decades, I spent the day on Kibbutz Hulda loading bananas. Our group — the 1966-67 Young Judaea Year Course — had gathered at Hulda because our group leaders thought we’d be safer there during the expected war with Egypt. Some members had already left Israel. Those of us who remained were determined to avoid getting sent home.
That evening, my diary tells me, we had a meeting about morale. According to a letter I sent home that night (one of more than a hundred in a box my parents recently turned over to me), the meeting was designed to pacify group members like myself who had been forced to move to Hulda from Sde Boker. Apparently, Hulda’s atmosphere and bugs and food were not to our liking. Sde Boker — David Ben Guron’s small kibbutz in the middle of the Negev — was where our hearts and loyalties remained. They needed us, or so we liked to think.
The rest of the letter was chatty: who was doing what, college application details to be worked out, the rigors of working in the banana fields after waking up at 4 AM to avoid the late-morning bugs and all-afternoon heat. I said nothing about the likelihood of war except for a reference to where we’d go next “if the situation is all cleared up.”
The Six Day War began a week later. A week after it ended, back on Sde Boker, a busload of us drove through the West Bank up to Jerusalem, where we made our way to the Western Wall. Jerusalem was no longer divided as it was a few months earlier when our group was stationed there. It was all unexpected.
Do my letters capture the fears, the excitement, the uncertainties I remember, or are they only descriptive and cheery, designed to reassure worried parents and siblings at home? I plan to make my way through them, and to look at the hundreds of slides I took. I’m curious to see what I had to say about Israel’s situation and my own connection to it during this year that changed my life and, of course, the lives of so many others in much more devastating ways.
In 1967 I was critical of some Israeli policies, but still deeply enmeshed in my Zionist youth-movement training, as I’ve written about elsewhere. Only after jettisoning my Zionist identity was I able to see more clearly the occupation’s consequences and, even more difficult in some ways, its rationale for existing. Exploring this rationale and its underpinnings as well as the consequences for Palestinians and Israelis alike has been a primary motivation for my two recent trips to Israel and the West Bank, which I originally started this blog to describe.
In two weeks, on June 10th, I will be in Washington, DC with thousands of other Americans marching in opposition to Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. I will march with the contingent organized by the national organization Jewish Voice for Peace.
I hope a lot of people turn out for this demonstration and others like it in many other countries, including in Israel itself. I don’t know if it will help lead to a reduction of US aid for Israel’s occupation, but I hope at least it will galvanize those who hesitate to say what they know: the Occupation is wrong, and Israel must be pressured. Many people are considering taking that step, even if reluctantly. The time is now.
May 31st, 2007 at 12:00 am
Uri: Good for you. It’s so important for us all to speak up about the cruelty and injustice of the Israeli occupation. I’m an old lady and can’t go to Washington but my thoughts will be with you on June 10th.
June 12th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
I don’t understand this. I don’t understand how someone who was in Israel 40 years ago could talk about “shedding his Zionist identity”. I don’t understand how it is so acceptable to murder, transfer and destroy as long as it’s Jewish lives for the sake of Palestinian lives. If you are expecting equality and not “occupation”, where is the equality for the Jews? Where do you expect the Jews to live? Where do you expect the Palestinians to live? Do you suppose the Jordanian occupation of it’s 75% Palestinian occupation will cease once the world has accomplished the destruction of the Jewish State?
Nothing justifies the violence that the Israelis have to live with, not even occupation. In Mexico, thousands of citizens do whatever they can to improve their lives or leave Mexico for places of greater promise. If the Palestinians wanted to improve their lives, they would have moved. They don’t. They simply want Israel not to be here anymore. They have no tolerance to share the land, they want it all. No other country anywhere in the world would be as tolerant of residents who are so destructive.
June 13th, 2007 at 9:33 am
Judy, I understand your reaction. I’ve spent years trying to sort out these and other issues for myself. Much of my efforts are are reflected in this blog and in longer essays on my website. All I can really add reiterate right now is that I think your assumptions, which to a great extent I once shared, are less accurate than you believe. I hope you will look into the issue anew.