What We Can't Talk About Right Now

Jewish women in Palestine circa 1915. From The Tower [http://www.thetower.org/article/some-zionist-dreams-still-unfulfilled/]

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO WRITE A SUBSTACK post about a book I’ve been reading called The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine. It’s a fascinating collection of short diary entries and writings by Jewish Zionist women who came to Palestine in the first two decades of the 20^th century. These snippets tell the stories about the new lives they made for themselves there out of hope and ideology and despair.

They were pioneers who had to fight for their right to do more than cook and clean. They wanted to farm and chop and dig and plant and fight just like their male comrades. And they did. They were an integral part of the Yishuv, the settlement, meaning the community of Jews living in Palestine before 1948.

More than 25,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine in the first years of the 20^th century. I’ve always been moved by the idea of so many young people coming together for a common cause. They lived communally; they worked toward a shared goal. They had, as Viktor Frankl would have said, a sense of purpose.

As a Jewish-American girl growing up in the 1960s and 70s, I envied that sense of shared purpose, that sense of community. I had none of it, and I longed for it.

But it’s impossible to really write about the Yishuv at this particular moment, when the Israeli government seems bent on destroying as much as possible in Gaza, bombing, starving, and killing Palestinians. Right now the Israeli government is committing genocide. I don’t write this lightly but it is impossible to deny. It gives me tremendous pain to acknowledge this.

Right now the Israeli government is committing genocide. It gives me tremendous pain to acknowledge this.

All of which means that this great shared endeavor, the Yishuv, Zionism, the Jewish homeland, all of which I have spent my life believing in and wishing I was part of, has culminated in horror for thousands of other people. How could I possibly celebrate it right now?

I hope that this isn’t the culmination of all of those hopes and dreams. I hope this is a horrible historical moment that we will move on from.

The larger situation is certainly not black and white. The Arab world bears a lot of responsibility for the long terrible conflict in the Middle East; October 7^th was only the most recent example of the violence and hatred directed toward Jews and Israel there.

But at the moment the balance of power is heavily weighted toward Israel, and what the government is doing is unspeakable. It has robbed me of my ability to talk about the state of Israel in a positive way.

I love the Israeli people, both collectively and individually. I have good friends there. People are separate from government. But people, also, are government. They can affect what government does.

Many Israelis are trying to do just that right now, by refusing to serve in the Army, by protesting, by speaking out about the injustices being perpetrated in their names. I hope they can make a difference.

In the meantime I’ll keep reading. Someday, I hope, we’ll be in a different historical moment, one where it’s possible to celebrate a different kind of state.