Letting Go

Suffering does not guarantee wisdom. I know this because I come from a land populated by two peoples who have known great suffering. A land where suffering could have, should have, nurtured compassion and empathy for the suffering of one’s adversary. Instead, it has sprouted a harvest of bad lessons and brought forth acrid conclusions from the inhabitants who have inflicted unending suffering upon each other and themselves.

In 1969 I was an eighteen-and-a-half-year-old private in the IDF and my unit was tasked with helping enforce a curfew in Nablus. The day prior to the curfew an Israeli captain in the infantry was stabbed by a 10-year-old Palestinian kid in the Casbah of Nablus and tensions were running high.  Thousands of Palestinian men, children and the elderly, were crowded in a large square in the middle of town, sitting on the ground. We were instructed that under no circumstances were we to allow any civilian to move from their position.

In the heat of the day, a young child, about 4-5 years old, sat with his grandfather just a few feet directly in front of me. The old man, wearing a dark woolen jacket and a white shirt, was becoming visibly distressed and gestured that he needed to go to the bathroom. I stared at him, holding my FN automatic rifle and shook my head in refusal. He mumbled apologetically in Arabic and I stayed silent in Hebrew.  After an unbearable length of time the old man relieved himself in his garment, urine running down his legs and trickling unto the pavement. His grandson just held his hand and stared at me. Forty-five years later that child is still staring at me and I’m still looking into his humiliated grandfather’s eyes.

When I went home on leave a week later, I placed my rifle in the front closet, took off my uniform, went to the bathroom and vomited and swore I would never again hold a gun unless I was forced to. Visiting my parents, I said to my mother: “Remember the stories you told me about the British soldiers during the Mandate? That’s me now, mom.”

I’m telling you this because that was a time when I still believed our cause was just. A time when order had to be kept on the West Bank so that (what many of us believed was) the temporary, stunning situation we found ourselves in after the Six-Day War would not disintegrate and become violent. So that no civilians or soldiers would be harmed unnecessarily. So that peace could be kept in our ancient ancestral towns of Bethlehem, Hebron, and Shechem, in which Palestinians had been living for over a thousand years.

The Jewish people have suffered unimaginably for the past two-thousand-five-hundred-years. Devastation, exile, crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, and the Holocaust are seared into our souls and consciousness. As an Israeli Jew, I grew up in constant awareness of the fragility of our location in a very hostile neighborhood. From my bedroom window, just fifteen minutes east of Tel-Aviv, I could see the hills that were Trans Jordan; the hills from where my neighborhood was briefly shelled during the Six-Day War.

The Palestinian people have suffered greatly over the past one hundred years under the corrupt  Ottoman Empire, the waning British Empire, and even more so under the heavy-handed Israeli rule. They have been exiled from their land, their homes, humiliated, denied self-rule, even self-definition. The Palestinians have also consistently chosen some uniquely despicable leaders over those years, starting with Haj Amin Al Husseini, an admirer of Hitler, and on through Yasir Arafat, George Habash, Ismail Haniyeh, and Yahya Sinwar, to name just a few. Palestinian organizations such as Hamas, Hizballah, The PFLP, Islamic Jihad and others are vicious terrorist organizations with blood on their hands and blind hatred in their hearts and have brought their Palestinian brothers and sisters death and devastation.

I am saddened and, at times, angered and outraged by choices that have been made by my Palestinian neighbors. But I am a Jew – not a Palestinian, and the choices I must concern myself with are the ones made by my people.  The idea that not only has the occupation of the West Bank gone on for forty-seven years unabated, not only have settlements expanded and cut off entire segments of the West Bank cities and towns from each other — but that my own people would sprout racists, vandals, and murderers, idealogues of hatred and bigotry, who think nothing of raiding Palestinian villages, burning cars, destroying homes, uprooting ancient olive groves, and even killing civilians all in the name of some contorted pseudo-messianic Jewish ideology — leaves me numb.

I used to be comforted by the fact that while too many in the Palestinian population considered a suicide bomber a Shahid, a martyr, we Israelis, for the most part, considered Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down twenty-nine Palestinians during prayers at the Cave of The Ancestors in Hebron, a mass- murderer. But that is no longer the case. Now, supporters of Baruch Goldstein and his mentor, Meyer Kahane, sit in the Israeli government and make decisions whose brutal results will reverberate for generations to come.

Yes, we are at war. Yes, we were viciously attacked in a most savage way. Yes, we are threatened by some hostile countries that want us gone and, yes, we have been hated and reviled by way too many in this dangerous world for two-thousand years preceding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The question is: What next? Where do we go from here? How does all this horror end? These questions demand answers from both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.  So far, the answers we are getting from the so-called leadership in both camps is more of the same. There is no vision for a hopeful future – just an apocalyptic nightmare in which one side crushes the other into dust.

It seems as though both sides would rather cling to their victimhood and  suffering – which are real — in place of owning up to their part in this disaster, because to do so would leave them vulnerable — and vulnerable is the last thing they want to feel at this moment. Both sides are blinded by rage and anguish and cannot see the humanity that Genesis, Chapter One, tells us was implanted in us by the One God in whose image and likeness we were created.

There is so much wisdom in both Jewish/Israeli and Palestinian cultures and traditions, in the three Abrahamic religions that sprung from our tortured corner of the world. There is so much to learn from the suffering we have all endured, so much compassion still available in our hearts – all of our hearts – if only we choose to access it.

Suffering does not guarantee wisdom, but it does hold a key for unlocking the chains of hatred and revenge. Let us use our collective suffering to tend to the holy plot of earth we have been entrusted with. Let us use our tears and anguish to wash our trashed Eden and begin the process of healing it in our days, soon. It is no panacea, but I believe that not doing so will ensure only more devastation and more suffering.  There are no guarantees in the Middle East – just possibilities. Let us waste no more time. Im Lo Achshav – Aymatai?