So this is a picture of my great friend Alana humping an ancient pillar in the old city of Jerusalem. I think it sums up our attitude towards the actual spiritual and historic value of some of the sites we visited.
I felt like metaphorically humping a lot of the sites we went to on the trip. I personally hate war stories and war memorials. Unfortunately, it just happens to be that almost every inch of Israel is a war memorial or at least the site of a famous battle. I'd say we heard a war story almost every other day.
This was problematic for me in many ways. Its not that I don't value the lives lost, or the courage that they showed in fighting, its just that I think the point is missed. First of all, it must be made clear that every story was obligatorily told in the Zionist narrative. This means that the story was framed as "Heroic Jews bravely killing the Arab enemies." This is expected and does not reflect any racist values because they were in a war and the enemies were Arabs. My problem is that there was great suffering and bloodshed on both sides. Both sides had courageous soldiers who didn't think twice to fight for their country. Unfortunately we never hear about how many Jordanians died in a battle for Jerusalem, how many Syrians died in a battle for the Golan, how many Egyptians died in a battle for the Negev. There are no stories about them, instead we praise Israelis for killing them and sadly recount when Israelis died in battle.
This made me sad and upset at different times on the trip. Very few people identified with my sadness because they were firmly in the mindset of, "If they didn't kill them then we wouldn't be here today." Besides the fact that I don't care about that particular fact (call me Anti-Zionist if you like), I like to look at it in a different light. A war is seen as thus: For some reason two different groups decided to settle their dispute, land or otherwise, by killing one another. Therefore a certain number of people had to die in order for the conflict to be settled and all those people must be respected equally. Thats my view of war in general and thats why I am disturbed by the winner's narrative.
Anyway, this entry has strayed quite a bit from the picture of a girl humping a pillar. I guess I'm just empassioned about this subject.
2 comments:
Gil, the problem is that Zionism is basically the idea that Jews have national territorial rights to Palestine, and unless you accept this, which you don't, then you are not a Zionist, much like I am not a Zionist. This is why Habonim should stop calling itself a ZIonist youth movement, and rather an "Israel-Oriented" (or some such BS) movement. Don't cup my balls.
Anyway, this entry has strayed quite a bit from the picture of a girl humping a pillar. I guess I'm just empassioned about this subject.
Pillar humping?
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