Living the Dream
There are moments in life when the second it happens you know everything will forever be different. And then there are moments that are just as life-changing, except you don’t realize their significance until years later.
When my family landed in Israel in August 2019, I didn’t know we would ultimately sell our house in Denver and make the town of Ra’anana our permanent home. But when, a little over four years later, terrorists infiltrated Israel and went on a rampage of rape, murder and kidnapping, we knew immediately that life would never be the same.
I remember after moving to Israel, I returned on a visit to Denver and a friend remarked that I was “living the dream.” And of course, in a way, I was. Our people have always longed to return to our indigenous homeland through centuries of exile. But in truth one can never live a dream. Dreams, by definition, are not real. And reality, by definition, is not a dream. That difficult lesson became unmistakably clear after October 7, 2023.
Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman wrote in his recent book To Be a Jew Today, that discussions about Israel “are constantly oppositional… For every argument that Israel is good, there is an opposite argument that Israel is bad. For every argument that Israel is bad, there is a corresponding argument that it is good… The result is that the very idea of Israel conjures up a field of ongoing argument that extends in all directions, as far as the eye can see.”
Feldman was writing about being Jewish in America. But for those of us in Israel, this place is not a “very idea” to argue about. It is our actual home. Israel, like all real places, is neither purely good nor purely bad. It has leaders who sometimes make wise decisions and sometimes make poor decisions. Like citizens of all other countries, we argue vehemently over politics. But just as other people take their existence as a given, we don’t debate whether ours is a good “idea.”
I travel to the United States frequently, and over the past year I have felt more and more out-of-sorts during visits to my former home. I have come to realize in the past year that much of the world does see us as an “idea,” a theory, a metaphor. To some, we are the fulfillment of a dream. To others, the embodiment of a nightmare. But to very few are we actual flesh and blood.
Take, for instance, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent anti-Israel screed, The Message. In a recent interview with Coates on CBS News regarding his book launch, Tony Dokoupil was excoriated by network executives for failing to meet “editorial standards” (which apparently require journalists to fawn over certain progressive heroes and avoid tough questions). What struck me about that interview was not the substance of the questions but Coates’s defense of his selective retelling. In his essay about the horrors of life for Palestinians in the West Bank, Coates never once mentions Hamas, the numerous wars against Israel, suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians, or the multiple efforts to create a Palestinian state that were all rejected by Palestinian leadership. When asked about how he could talk intelligently about the conflict without any of this context, Coates retorts, “I’m a child of Jim Crow – I’m a child of people who were born into a country where that was exactly the case.”
Of course, while Palestinians have suffered injustices both from their leadership and from Israel, any serious observer understands that it is not “exactly the case” of Jim Crow. Black Americans, for one, did not create a massive terrorist army sponsored by a regional power that sought the destruction of the United States and the massacre of all non-Black Americans. But Coates does not see Israelis as people. We are for him merely a symbol of the white segregationists who tormented his ancestors.
Coates’s book has three chapters describing three very personal journeys: to Africa where his ancestors were shackled and exported like chattel, to South Carolina where his more recent ancestors faced the most brutal manifestations of Jim Crow, and to Israel where he can imagine a modern-day allegory to his own tragic history. Coates is explicit about seeing Israelis and Palestinians not for who we are but as stand-ins for his own experience. He remembers as a young man having a “dull sense that the Israelis were ‘white’ and the Palestinians were ‘Black,’ which is to say that the former were the oppressors and the latter the oppressed.”
In an encounter with Israeli soldiers, Coates describes “the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs.” He quite literally does not look us in the eyes and does not see us as human beings. Coates thinks he is making an astute observation of the Middle East as he looks at the sunglasses of an Israeli. Instead, in those mirrored lenses we are merely a reflection of his own story. And since segregation in the United States was based on racial animus, therefore checkpoints in the West Bank must be the same – never mind the security concerns that he fails to mention because they do not fit into his Jim Crow metaphor.
Metaphors are seductive because they simplify a complex narrative. Coates lives in a country where the legacies of slavery and segregation echo loudly in a present society plagued by overt and veiled racism. But it is also a society that has enabled his success as a journalist and author, where he has been showered with prizes and accolades from a MacArthur Fellowship to a National Book Award. Burning down the entire United States, therefore, is neither a feasible nor just answer to the injuries inflicted on him. But in training his ire instead on an imagined Israel, he can ignore complexity, nuance and history since our actual lived context is irrelevant to our role as his metaphor.
I have come to realize that this is why I feel so out of sorts whenever I travel abroad. I go from being an actual human being to a symbol. The conversation is so polarized that even among some diaspora Jews, I am a symbol as well – although for many we are a symbol for all that is good. We are “living the dream” as my friend mused several years ago. It is why inside Israel protests are different – we support the government or we oppose it, we agree with our leaders’ strategies or we think they are disastrous. But at every demonstration you will see people waving Israeli flags. Overseas, on the other hand, the protests are either “pro-Israel” or “anti-Israel.” Our flag is either waved or burned. As with the Coates interview on CBS, the conversation is so elemental – do we have a right to exist – that it is impossible to talk about Israelis and Palestinians as human beings rather than ideas.
Make no mistake, especially this past year, expressions of support of Israel from diaspora communities are important – and appreciated by those of us here. When surrounded by a sea of hatred, with mobs of people concealing their faces with keffiyehs, waving the banners of terrorists, calling for mass murder, and projecting their seething anger at every injustice on the planet – from transphobia to racism to climate change – against a metaphorical bogeyman that happens to be a real country with real people, it is a natural reaction to counter that madness with a categorical defense of Israel.
I thus hope people will keep standing up for our country in these dark days. But if we are to see better days ahead, all people must recognize a self-evident truth: Israelis and Palestinians are real people. We are not stand-in symbols for whatever unrelated injustices vex Ta-Nehisi Coates, Greta Thunberg or Queers for Palestine. Coates waxed that “you can see the world and still never see the people in it.” He is so proud of this idea that he uses that excerpt to market his book. It’s ironic that he failed to heed his own advice. Israel may be many things, but as Theodor Herzl famously said, ain zo agada – it is no fairy tale.
