An American Jew’s Awakening in Cairo   

By Laura Duane

I was studying in Egypt in 2006 when Israel invaded Gaza and the Israeli soldiers were kidnapped. I was on a Nile cruise with many of my classmates when Israel attacked Lebanon, and we heard a rumor that the Israelis were bombing the Beirut airport. Worried and without any other way to confirm the news, a Lebanese classmate called home to find out her uncle had flown into Beirut that day, the airport had indeed been bombed, and her family had not yet heard anything.

Another classmate worried about her dying grandfather in Gaza, tethered to a slowly depleting oxygen tank. Even if he had been strong enough to travel to the nearest hospital, he wouldn’t have made it past the Israeli blockade. Although she had planned on visiting him in the following weeks to say her final goodbye, we knew that, because of the war, she wouldn’t get that chance.

I called a friend in Haifa that same day to check in, and he mentioned, casually, that two Hezbollah-sent katyusha rockets had exploded a few hundred yards from his bedroom, that he had moved into a bunker. When he became convinced death was coming, he left the bunker to get baklava—if he was going to die, he told me later, his last meal wouldn’t be stale Cheerios.

In Upper Egypt we cruised down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan all day, most of us sleepily sunbathing on the top deck while a war picked up momentum nearby. With no news sources but rumor, we pooled our fears for friends and family in Gaza, Beirut, and Haifa, while we toured the tombs and temples of a civilization long dead. I was a student and a tourist while soldiers and civilians alike fought and died, and continued my day-to-day life. But after the war began, things changed in Cairo. Tyranny, poverty, and injustice were no longer the causes of anger—Israel drove the protests in the street. The paddy wagons that lined the streets of Talat Harb, usually filled daily with protesters who offended the sensibilities of Mubarak’s emergency state, for once stayed empty. Illustrated protest signs were left leaning against an elementary school, and every day we drove past images of the red cedars of Lebanon tattooed to the forearm of a rifle wielding man, of a dove that had been murdered with a knife that bore the Star of David.

As the war in Gaza picked up steam this past winter, these were the things I thought about. Born and raised Jewish, I grew up in a heavily Jewish town, went to a heavily Jewish high school, left for a heavily Jewish college. The opinions I have been inculcated with from my first experience sat heavily in my stomach as I wanted to support Israel, to support the Jewish people. But after seeing the shockwaves of an Israeli war in the faces of my classmates and friends, fellow Americans and foreigners alike, the idea of voicing those opinions—which I had defended in Cairo—was incompatible with my sense of right and wrong, and of justice.

I was relieved when J Street released a statement that said, “neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong,” and that “there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.” I was less relieved when the storm of opinion that followed caused them to not only apologize, but to eradicate the piece from their website in its entirety.

I can only to speak to what I know, and I know that the Jewish people have suffered—this is undeniable. Anti-Semitism still lurks in the dark corners of civilization, exemplified in the recent attack on the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., or by Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s comment that “them Jews” are responsible for President Obama leaving him behind. But, for such a beleaguered people, we are not always willing to acknowledge the suffering of others, a flaw that I have noticed in the larger community and in myself. It should not have taken a trip to the Middle East during a war to awaken me. It should not have taken the fear of people I respected. And while it’s hard for anyone to see past his own life experiences, his own people, or his own tribe, it is necessary for peace.

I found that it was easy to ignore the problematic side of Israeli action from afar, and difficult to support the war in Lebanon when the people it affected were the relatives of friends. Distance allows us the luxury of feigned ignorance, the ability to shut our eyes when the picture offends. The surest cure to this selective apathy is to work to bring home the essential humanity of all sides involved. Taglit Birthright http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/PageServer trips introduce young Jews from around the world to Israeli soldiers, to create a sense of community and to put human faces to the amorphous American Jewish community and the IDF. The hope is that in times of violence and war, Birthright alumni will worry first and foremost about the safety of their Israeli friends, that supporting Israel will have a very human face. In this same mode, we must begin to bring together young Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Arabs from across the United States and around the world, so that we can begin to feel that same sense of worry and urgency for those we too often ignore.

It is easy to hate or, worse, ignore someone you have never met, to ascribe Orientalist characteristics to someone half a world away. But by putting even a single face to a group, by sowing a single seed of doubt, we can begin to bridge the gaps that generations of mistrust and ruthless propaganda have created. The difficulties of such a project loom large—it would be hard to convene such a disparate group of people, hard to break them down into groups small enough to truly engage in conversation, hard to overcome the innate tendency to socially self-segregate. But the opportunity to engage young men and women, and the hope to cure and reverse not only hate but the more insidious apathy we can all fall prey to, is something to be worked towards, that can only be reached through true dialogue between groups, not just within them.

Laura Duane, 23, is an editorial assistant at Random House.  She received her BA in religion from Columbia University in 2008.  

This essay was submitted to Tikkun's Under 25 Writing Contest in the summer of 2009. The other essays can be found here or hit the back button if you got here from the Writing Contest intro page.