It’s a really difficult thing to be made completely ashamed of your heritage, but the state of Israel is doing its very best to make that my reality.
And it’s not just heritage. Here I sit, frantic and worried for my family, my grandmother crying on the phone as my uncle heads back to their kibbutz near Gaza to act as a first responder, and things only getting more dire across the fence because the state has no humanity.
There are few things in my life I’m more thankful for than the fact that my father decided to move to Canada, meaning I didn’t have to be born in that place… When my cousin (who lives in a kibbutz that managed to fend off a massacre) told me on a video call over the weekend that the only reason I can have my views about the importance of protecting all life, including Palestinians, is because I don’t live there, I can only feel glad for that.
There is a lot of anti-Zionist rhetoric on the left that, in my opinion, flattens the experience of the actual people for whom Israel was the only hope for survival, including my own family, opting for a simplistic, theory-centric view of complex history and reality. But at some point, the reality is one where dreams of hope and survival have meant unbelievable horrors for Palestinians, with no actual hope for anyone, Jews and others in Israel included, at the end of the road. I’m as pessimistic as I’ve ever been about the situation. I can only see things getting worse.
In 2018, when my grandfather was dying in a hospital in Be’er Sheva, I jumped on a flight to be there to witness his passing, to be with my family, and to honour the legacy of a difficult, generous man who’d experienced some of the worst of humanity during the Holocaust.
After seeing him in hospital, I drove with another cousin and my grandmother to her kibbutz—where my mother grew up, where my parents met—to get some rest, and as we passed by the fenced border with Gaza, my grandmother became reflective in a way I’d never seen before. She began talking about her own father, another great and difficult man, a socialist who saw in Israel and on the kibbutz a chance to make a dream come true, to build a place where his family and generations could grow and labour together in community and live in security.
She was happy, she said, that my great grandfather was not alive to see what had become of things, with the Palestinians in Gaza he used to work with in the fields locked up in a massive prison, terrorized and made to live in the most horrid of circumstances. My great grandfather, she explained, was a man who saw only the human being in front of him. She was sad to see her country had extinguished that spirit.
I haven’t been back to Israel since, and these days the prospect of returning seems very distant.