Coming to Terms with what Happened a Year Ago

Once you’ve had the experience of demonstrating against your government for starving babies, there is no turning back.  At the time it was too much to process.  I knew that was the direction things were moving in before it happened, but I still wasn’t capable of comprehending that it actually happened.  I still live here but I will never think of myself as an Israeli again. I am an American who lives in Israel.  If I had to pick one word to describe how I feel it would be home sick.

Two years ago I was in India and I started practicing Osho meditations at an ashram. I met two Israelis and we started to travel around together.  The war in Gaza had been going on for a year.

“Sometimes I’m not sure if I actually side with the Israelis,” Bentzy remarked one morning as we strolled from our hostel towards a nice spot for breakfast.

Bentzy grew up Haredi and was cynical about organized religion.  He had spent recent years wandering through Asia.  Lital had spent sixteen years living in a yoga ashram in Panama before returning home to Israel a year earlier.

After spending so much time practicing Osho’s meditations, I thought it would be a nice idea to watch the linnet documentary series about the hippie-cult city that was created around Osho in Oregon in the 80s.

“I want to make sure you know that the documentary is controversial. It’s not just about how great Osho was,” Lital explained.

I didn’t see what the problem was.

We set up Bentzy’s computer and started the first episode.  Some conservative Christians in a nearby town had ill feelings about their new neighbors. Bentzy and Lital made fun of them.  I found their perspectives to be interesting.

“The documentary is so biased!” Bentzy commented.  “They just focus on those people who have no clue what Osho is all about,” Lital added.

I thought the first episode was great.  I was really interested in hearing both sides of the story.  My new friends reminded me of American Jews who felt that the American media was biased against Israel.  At least during the time that I was still living in America it seemed clear to me that the media showed both sides. Someone who thinks that there is only one side to the story will always find the media to be biased.

We wandered around some remote villages near the border with China until I parted ways with my new friends and made my way back to Rishikesh.

I was sitting in a coffee shop when I overheard a man reminiscing to his friends about his days in the Osho community in Oregon.

“You spent time over there?” I interrupted, “I just started watching the Netflix series about that place!”

The man’s face turned red. “You watched a Netflix show and now you think you know about Osho?” he thundered.  The entire atmosphere in the room froze solid and dropped to the floor with a clunk.

“People say whatever they want about Osho now that he’s dead. They wouldn’t have dared say those things to his face,” the man continued.

I made some awkward remarks about how I had spent time practicing Osho meditations, trying to explain that the fact that I started watching the netflix documentary didn’t mean that I was hostile towards Osho and his community in Oregon. The man resumed his conversation with his friend and I went back to my herbal infusion.  I was upset that I missed my chance to hear about his experience.  I didn’t understand why he was so angry.

After I returned to Israel, I watched the rest of the episodes and saw that some crazy things did in fact happen over there.  I did some further research and discovered something even more disturbing that went down over there; widespread pedophilia. There’s at least one woman who came forward with an accusation of sexual abuse against the Bhagwan himself long after the playboy-guru had passed away.

The first time I moved to Israel, back in ‘09, it was a time of exploration for me. I read some books like From Beirut to Jerusalem and began to discover that the conflict truly was two sided. It was exciting for me to learn new things.  My peers weren’t always overly jubilant to hear about my discoveries.  Some were about as chilled out as that man in the coffee shop in Rishikesh.  I got the feeling that they were more closed off to accusations about their country than they would be to accusations about themselves.

I guess in a country that is so small where everyone serves in the military, accusations against the country are in fact accusations against one’s self.  I found this to be disturbing.  I didn’t think that Israel was the most oppressive country in the world, but seeing the way that people responded to this information made me think that this country could literally do anything and the people would still stand behind it.  Heck, if the wrong people came into power, maybe one day this country might even starve babies!

It was mid-spring, around a week before the 3 month blockade came to an end. I was at a gathering on understanding the language of nature in a forest in the north.

“What do you think about the war,” a middle aged woman asked me.

“I think the leaders in this country are war criminals who are starving children,” I responded.  I was a little nervous about saying that.  She was chill, though she also didn’t agree.

“Lo marivim yeladim. Yesh lahem dagim.”

No one is starving kids. They have fish.

I was never really afraid of rockets. One night I went to sleep, then woke up a few hours later and went into the bomb shelter.  Then some ballistic missiles rained down and vaporized some apartment buildings in Tel Aviv.  Some windows in the building I live in broke when a missile landed a ten minute walk away.  Then that “round” with Iran was over and I went back to work.  Then one day I checked the news and saw pictures of emaciated babies.

There was a certain perception that was believed wholeheartedly by some, partially by others, that there “are no innocent in Gaza,” that all 2.3 million of them were cheering on October 7th, and they were all complicit, especially Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish. When we sat down in the middle of Dizengoff blocking traffic, the phrase we ended up shouting was, “All children are innocent!” It was an interesting choice. We’re not going to argue with you about the adults, but the children… they’re just kids!  Police officers pushed people and dragged people across the street, then they backed off.

During the days following October 7th I felt proud to be an Israeli: The way that everyone came together, the days long lines for donating blood. Yet at the same time, I noticed a certain change happening. The unification around the nation state led to a heightened unification around the national narrative. They were monsters and we were civilized human beings piecing together the mess they left behind.  Anything that would contradict this indisputable reality did not deserve the slightest acknowledgement.  It would have been understandable for us to do the worst of things to them, but it was impossible for that to actually happen because we were the civilized ones. Israeli society had reverted back to the traumas of life as a helpless minority. Our innocence was self-evident.

I can’t count the number of times I encountered the term “blood libel,” in Israeli media.

The combination of the president of Harvard respecting the right of self expression of students demonstrating for genocide against the Jews, with the widespread condemnation of Israel’s invasion of Gaza as a genocide, all of this happening before the dust of October 7th had time to settle, definitely impacted how receptive the Israeli government and society was to feedback from abroad. The fact that Israeli ministers sometimes said things such as, “We should drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza,” didn’t make this accusation any less antisemitic.

This wasn’t a decision of the people.  Most of the people didn’t protest it, but they understandably had some other things on their minds. The decision was made by Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Well, they didn’t actually get what they wanted. Based on Times of Israel’s comprehensive coverage of this topic,  Netanyahu was standing in the middle while his Western allies and his radical coalition partners were each pulling one of his sleeves. To Netanyahu, the threat of his coalition collapsing was existential, so he only stood up to his bloodthirsty partners when the US was utterly disgusted by the humanitarian situation.  If you toss a glass vessel back and forth for two years, eventually it will break.

The rise of the radical right has enabled the world to finally see what the driving force behind the settlement movement has been from the beginning. The legitimacy and support that the settlers have received from the democratic part of Israeli society has emboldened their radical leaders to reach the point where they would eventually wield significant power over Israeli decision making.

The anti-judicial reform protests were largely about preventing this monster-in-the-closet on the other side of the green line from invading democratic Israeli society.  I was impressed by the pilots who refused to report to reserve duty.  But of course after October 7th all of that came to an end. October 7th led to a nationwide unity that extended beyond the lines of religious, political, ideological and moral differences. The nation now had to huddle together in order to survive the winter night.

It was during the first year of the war when I spotted a Times of Israel article about a Knesset meeting in which Netanyahu defended his decision to start allowing aid in again.  I was too disgusted to open that article.  I cannot imagine what it would be like to be part of that conversation. “Personally, I think we should stop blocking food from reaching hungry children for a little. What do you think?”

This really wasn’t so bad compared to other starvation situations, such as that in Yemen, as has been mentioned endlessly throughout the debates. It wasn’t even completely our fault; Hamas stole some of the  aid in order to sell it for a profit.  Wars often result in humanitarian crises.  It wasn’t done for purely sadistic reasons; it helped get the hostages out while minimizing the number of unapologetic murderers who needed to be released to pick up where they left off.

I can make my brain run in circles searching for logic, explanations, rationalizations, or at least some level of understanding, but when I remember the pictures I know that I will never be able to accept that the nation that survived the holocaust was capable of doing this.