Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Today we met the six IDF soldiers that will be joining our group for the remaining five days of the program. All of them are between the ages of 19 and 21, half women, half men. When birthright was started around 2000, participants in the program were not allowed to walk through many parts of Jerusalem or go out at night, like we now are, because of the high level of danger during the second intifada. We are told that the IDF “encounters” program was incorporated into birthright to allow participants to meet and interact with Israeli citizens . . . The implication being that the soldiers were here to provide that connection between participants and Israelis, not participants and the Israeli military.
We played some name games and ice breakers in the morning, the soldiers still in full military garb (no guns). We then got ready for a somber day at Yad Vashem and Mt. Herzl Cemetery, the Holocaust museum / memorial and the burying place of nearly every prominent Israeli statesmen and soldier – among many others of lesser fame.
Yad Vashem is designed as a giant concrete triangle that one weaves back and forth through from one end to the other. From the inside, the it feels very much like the harsh concrete walls are indeed closing in on you.
Visiting places like Yad Vashem and the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. are such personal and introspective happenings in my experience that it is absolutely impossible to speak in any broad statements about how the entire group felt or reacted. For me, being confronted with the sounds and images of the Holocaust is always extremely difficult process because, over the course of forty five minutes or an hour, it completely penetrates the callused layers I have built up over the years in order to not feel the immense suffering of the world all around. Indeed, if we were to just feel this suffering all the time it would be difficult to enjoy life and move one’s energy to its fullest potential to do good work. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps also we don’t feel each other’s suffering today nearly enough. I feel both are true.
To see the Nazi propaganda movie knowing that every Jew feigning smiles in the film was directly afterwards shipped to death camps was a piercing experience that stopped me in my tracks. To hear how immense hunger completely dominated and twisted the psyches of many Jews in the ghettos and camps to unimaginable points of desperation is harrowing. For me, the hardest thing to see are the faces, one at a time.
All the layers are penetrated at Yad Vashem. The huge and unfathomable abstraction that is 6 million people is broken into an unending string of 6 million individual faces, lives, stories, and experiences. I believe this is their mission – to personalize and individualize the Holocaust, and I must say it is very effective and the best and most powerful memorial I have seen. They make a point to include many personal stories and faces as much as possible. There is a display in the floor of hundreds of shoes found at Auschwitz, and you can stand on the glass and see your own shoes at the same time as you look at the one from the camp. It is then not so hard to imagine people filling all those shoes.
For me, checking in with the reality of individualized suffering on such a mass scale reminds me of and connects me to the immense pain and unnecessary suffering that is still present in the world today. To check in with the terror, hunger, helplessness, etc that was experienced on such a massive scale during the Holocaust, works also to remember that that same terror and hunger is being experienced many different peoples and individuals today.
A short and somber bus ride then took us to Mt. Herzl Cemetery. Herzl is often referred to as the father of Zionism, and though he was buried in Europe n 1904, his body was moved to Israel soon after the creation of the state. Mt. Herzl is one of the most beautiful cemeteries I have ever seen. It follows the contours of the hill it sits upon, divided by beautiful stonework and sandstone staircases. One gave stood out from all the others; it was that of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the leader of Israel who was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli right-wing extremist for his efforts to create peace between Israel and Palestine. Rabin’s grave stood out from the others because it was covered with colorfully painted stones and a wreath that read, “the cause of peace for which you fought has become our own.” In Israel it is a symbol of respect and honoring to place stones on one’s grave; after we wove through the cemetery and made it to Herzl’s tomb, many of the soldiers and people on my program placed stones to honor the most famous Zionist.
We then drove two hours south into the Negev to experience a tourist’s version of Bedouin hospitality.
We arrived at the outpost of large Bedouin tents which were imitating the nomadic Bedouin tents of the past. We were treated to delicious tea, very strong coffee, and some freshly cooked pita made of only flour, water, and salt. Bedouin men wear white clothes, and women wear black or grey clothes with embroidery, or red to show that the woman is married, or green to show that she is mourning. We learned that although Israeli Bedouins are full citizens, unlike Jews they are not mandated to serve in the IDF (this is true of all Arab Israelis), though many choose to. After some Bedouin music by an apparently world renowned Bedouin musician (has been invited to play in world music festivals at places like Lincoln Center), we moved into a different tent and ate the most delicious freshly cooked meal we’d had on the whole trip.
During dinner I first overheard and then participated in a very interesting and revealing conversation between a few of my peers and one of the male IDF members. As I was finishing my dinner I overheard the beginnings of a conversation at the table (we were actually on the ground seated around large circular trays) behind me between a girl on our trip and a soldier; they were agreeing with each other that separation barrier / wall was a very effective and good thing because it protected Israel from terrorists. They saw that I was intrigued and invited me into the conversation, at which point I listened for a few more minutes before saying anything as not affect what they were willing to say by my own thoughts on the matter. The conversation moved from separation walls to Gaza, with the focus being on how Israel tried and tried to make peace with the Palestinians by doing things like pulling out of Gaza in 2005 and observing the cease-fire yet still southern Israel was shelled with tens of rockets by Hamas in violation of the cease-fire, etc.
When I entered the conversation I tried to make a distinction between Hamas militants and most Palestinians, and then I drew parallels between the psychological trauma of Israelis facing rocket attacks in southern Israel with Palestinians in Gaza who endured the brutal weeks of Operation Cast Lead. I tried to show that just as Hamas cannot bomb southern Israelis into supporting the liberation of Palestine, Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into being better partners for peace.
Sadly, there was no engagement with the arguments I raised. My peers retorted that the Palestinians were different than the usual enemy, “look, Syria does not want them, Egypt does not want them, Jordan does not want them – they are troublemakers that are anti Israel and anti American.” Without skipping a beat a friend of hers dovetailed off of the “troublemaker” comment. With Yad Vashem fresh in our minds, she managed to conflate the Nazis and Hamas, but also Hamas and all Palestinians. She reminded me of the Nazi propaganda from early thirties showing Jews as sub-human cockroaches and said, “that’s what they (Palestinians) think of us. They want to destroy Israel and they are not going to change.” In a similar way that Nazis essentialized all Jews as being sub human and unable to civilize or change, she was saying that all Palestinians were Israel/America-hating troublemakers. The latter example is not quite as bad as the first, but thinking about peoples in static and ‘essential’ terms is the basis for biological and cultural racism.
After dinner the girls left and I continued to talk with the soldier about Cast Lead. I kept trying to get him to explain to me how such an operation could logically produce more security for Israel in the long run, but mid conversation we had to get our stuff off of the bus, and then he was nowhere to be found when I wanted to resume the conversation.
We had the evening to ourselves, made a large bonfire, played music and sung songs, and all slept together under one large tent. There was a strong wind coming from the southeast, and I walked outside the camp into the desert night for a few hundred meters.
A nice report. It is gratifying to read about essentially non political human contact.