I got carried away easily because of the winds blowing in Israel. It has not been a month since my arrival in Israel, and rather than read the book I had brought, I read reports from the Health Ministry. Rather than go to the beach, I got together with friends to demonstrations. Rather than hike in nature, I wandered around in Israeli twitter.
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I arrived in Israel in order to get some respite from the news and statistics in the US. I could no longer hear the words "serological tests" and here I am in Israel trying to figure out who qualifies for the 750-shekel government stimulus check. I don't even have a bank account in Israel, and I am here on vacation. Why have Israeli politics drawn me so forcefully like a magnet?
I remember how there used to be a time in which I would try to sever ties from Israel but just couldn't do it. It was after I had arrived in Iowa from New York for a writers workshop. In the open air, with the sweet smell of corn and the chirping of cicadas in the afternoon, I was enjoying every moment. In the evenings, after dinner, I would sit in the back yard and read under the lamp and the fireflies. This was the first week.
But during the second week, the Israel Defense Forces entered the Gaza Strip. In a flash, the light of the fireflies was replaced by the light of my cellphone, and the moon was replaced with a computer screen. The updates, the news, and the nightly arguments on social media prevailed.
One evening I walked into a bar, just so I could feel alone for a moment. Country music played in the background. There were the regulars, and then there was me, the only foreigner. "Where are you from?" the barwoman asked me. "Israel," I said. I stretched my back, preparing to present the case for Israel that I had prepared mentally. To my amazement, she just smiled and said, "oh, cool," as if I had just told her some factoid, that watermelon is actually a vegetable.
She wasn't even excited on an anthropological level ("I heard that Tel Aviv is great," would have been an example). My shoulders converged out of insult. "I am from Israel," I shouted in my head. "And there is a war going on. And demonstrations! And the tv screens are inundated ad nauseam with analysis, experts and vitriol!"
But then I realized that Israel was an Archimedean point for me, the prism through which I observe the world. It is there that my compass points to, the same compass that I had received in my Bar Mitzva. To paraphrase Rabbi Yehuda Halevi – my body may be in the West, but my heart, mind and soul are condemned to be in the East.
Before I could blink, the barwoman had already begun serving the other customer. This is the beauty in America, the land of the huge expanses. This is not just physical space. You can drive 12 hours in Texas and still be in Texas. It is also a space in which you can reinvent yourself, disconnect from your previous life. In America, reincarnation is a practice you perform before you die.
Politics is not just a practice. It is a language. And my language is the Israeli political system. In America, political language is foreign to me. It is still something that I have relegated to television. Most Americans would never get to see the White House in their lifetime. I saw Gilad Erdan eat at a Thai Restaurant. Us Israelis dream and talk and eat politics with our Pad Thai.
Perhaps I was too naive to think that I could just disconnect from the turbulent place in the Middle East. On the other hand, it doesn't matter where you go, I will always feel its burn on my flesh.
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