Mall-walking in Gaza

Years after עופרת יצוקה cast lead, my best friend from the army was getting married and we were on Masada- somehow he knew a guy and sorted us a private tour. On the same day a pilot retiring from the Israeli air force was doing a תיסת ווסח swag flight over the desert in a C-130 flanked by F-16s trailing cool smoke behind them. It was swag as hell. Alone, on the top of a desert butte where thousands of years ago our people won a great victory by suicide (Masada’s a weird story) we talked about Gaza. It was a short conversation. קשה על המצפון hard on the conscience is what he said.

We had both waited years to have that conversation and when it came to pass there was nothing to say. It was already done. And it was hard on our conscience. The men we had wanted to become died in Gaza, too. Our innocence as young men buried under the rubble with the dead. The soldiers at Nuremberg said they were just following orders. John Musgrave, a Vietnam veteran once told me “I was just doing my job- and I was good at my job.” I was doing my job. I was never just following orders and never did I follow what I thought was a bad order. The opposite: I never had any problem disobeying orders I thought were shit.

The worst thing I’ve ever done was one of the proudest moments of my entire life. I risked my life to do it. And it saved lives. To save a life is to save the whole world but I don’t know what that means when you have to kill to do it. Whose world was saved? These questions are not stretch marks- they are scars that have never been allowed to heal. And if we continue this strategy: they never will. I have an answer to the question above, by the way, because one of the men whose life I killed to protect just had a son. And I think we owe it to him not to be fighting the same war when his son is older. That is the world that is on us now to save. It’s not about us. It never was. That young boy is destined for גולני golani (if you knew his dad lol) and I will not have him fight the same war we did. The same war we’ve lost because a war you won is a war you don’t have to keep fighting. Anyone that has ever been to war will tell you nobody wins: you either survive or you don’t. Because to survive- regardless- is to carry the dead on your back forever.

The nightmare that has plagued me since 2008 isn’t fiery or violent. It’s actually very banal: its just a shopping mall. I’m walking on the second floor, up the escalators, and I’m surrounded on every side by men in robes and women in burqas. I don’t know who they are- never have, but they’ve been there in my dreams for sixteen years. They never speak. They never look. They never acknowledge me. Once I had to brave a concrete bridgeway surrounded by razor wire just to get to the shopping mall. Sometimes I’m already there- sometimes I have to fight to get there. But its the same place and I think the lesson is that I can’t escape it. The moments when I am not there- I am compelled to return. Those are the men and women I carry on my back. People I never knew- never would know- people whom I visit every night. Or do they visit me? Or do we just live together like roommates in hell- which looks surprisingly like a shopping mall.

For many years when I would wake up from that dream I would have to physically clear the empty spaces of my house to feel comfortable to fall back asleep. I would look under the bed, behind the curtain of my shower, in the closet, behind the door, wherever a person could be hiding. The most vividly I remember doing this was in Africa- in a stilted yurt atop a forested sand dune hundreds of miles from civilization: it was fucking irrational. The troop of monkeys that lived in the tree canopy nearby laughed at me in the morning. Because it was laughable.

The second most vivid was different. It was years later, in Chicago, during film school. By that time I’d spent nearly a decade with the people in the mall; I wouldn’t say we’d become friends but we’d reached an understanding. I get pretty bad sleep paralysis and was trying to nap one afternoon between school and my full-time job and I could hear the humming of a small robot buzzing around the hardwood floor of my room. I couldn’t see it with my eyes but could see it the way you can see a thing in a dream- it was one of those mouse robots they had on the Death Star in Star Wars, the ones that skitter around between the feet of imperial officers. It wasn’t the enemy, though, it was my own people. Mossad lol. As if my own side had sent it to spy on me. The robot wasn’t real, of course, it was my own conscience spying on itself. In the limbo between reality and the shopping mall of souls I dispatched a tiny mechanical rat to spy on my own subconscious. In Africa, in Chicago, in Jerusalem: it’s just me and my own head. And it’s complicated.

And I return to the shopping mall to demand: is it not enough for us to carry? To what world have we damned the souls of our children? Because the truth is that a shopping mall in Johannesburg looks the same as a shopping mall in Portland looks the same as a shopping mall in Ramat Aviv looks the same as a shopping mall in Gaza City. They all look a little like Dimond Center in Anchorage, Alaska where I grew up- ice skating by the food court. Where my parents brought me. Where I was raised by the world to steal from the hobby shop because my dad wouldn’t give me an allowance. Where I would go mall-walking as an adult with my gen z girlfriend just to pass the time. Where I saw the Star Wars: Special Edition as a kid in the movie theaters upstairs. Just a shopping mall.

If you want answers I don’t have ‘em. That some questions are unanswerable is the answer you seek. I’m sorry. Genuinely, but ככה thats how it is

Tonight I will go mall-walking in the same shopping mall with the gold railings and faux-marble floors, the one with the soft lighting and all the people who never acknowledge me because I am from the world of the living.

I spent the last 16 years wondering where that mall was but a shopping mall looks the same in Portland as it does in Jerusalem as it does in Gaza city and when you carry another man’s soul on your back they’re all the same, anyways. The people won’t acknowledge you.

They can’t see you.

Do you really want them to?