Talking About the Occupation at a U.S. Jewish Summer Camp
The American kids were attentive and polite as Sayed Kashua spoke. The Israeli ’emissaries,’ however, were a different story.
Sayed Kashua Jul 23, 2016 5:29 PM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.732545
(...) Armed with a book about revolutionaries waiting to be executed, I arrived, after a nine-hour journey, at the Jewish summer camp on the lake. The camp was dotted with American and Israeli flags, and the walls of the assembly hall were painted with portraits of Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Golda and Begin. The words “Hineh ma tov umana’im, shevet ahim gam yahad” – “How good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together” – were inscribed on the wall like a banner headline.
“It’s supposed to be ‘shevet’ with the letter tav and not the letter tet” – because with tet, the word means “tribe” – I told one of the American organizers of the encounter I was participating in. He was surprised. “Actually, the Israelis wrote that,” he said.
It’s a summer camp straight out of American movies: log cabins, playing fields, dining room, indoor sports facilities. “We have time if you want to see the lake,” one of the organizers said, but I declined politely, preferring coffee and a smoke. The campers are high-school kids, my hosts told me: They’ll learn a lot about Israel in the weeks ahead, but we wanted them to hear a different viewpoint, too, to challenge their thinking. Naturally, it’s essential to talk about Israel’s right to self-defense, and it would also be useful to describe the situation today in the Middle East, with all the rampant violence there, I was told.
To be on the safe side, they’d invited an Israeli intellectual to take part in the meeting with me, for the sake of balance. As though these B’nai Brith kids hadn’t been raised on Zionism and weren’t nourished by pro-Israeli media and dialogue.
For a moment I wondered what I was doing here, under an Israeli flag in this godforsaken place. I tried to persuade myself that this is the least I can do: I’ll say what I have to say in my allotted half-hour, and then answer questions, and maybe I’ll manage to stir doubt in a few hearts, or at least induce a few kids to ask questions and have second thoughts. And anyway, I’m being paid.
The American kids were extremely nice, they listened to what I had to say. I talked about ruling another nation, about discrimination, about the problem with the state’s character and about the practical implications of that character on the lives of the minorities living in the country and on those who live under its occupation. I talked about the need to acknowledge the other’s pain, the obligation to recognize the Nakba [what Palestinians call the “catastrophe” of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948] and the hope that a democratic state would arise where all citizens would be equal.
The Israeli intellectual lamented the rapidly fading values he’d been raised on. He talked about the trend toward Haredization, the danger faced by democracy; he spoke of his love for the country and about the Arab world raging all around, about women and gays whom the Muslims are killing, about radical Islam that is making Israelis feel threatened and enclose themselves in a bubble.
The Jewish children were attentive and polite. In the question period they asked about writing – for example, when does a person know he’s going to be a writer, and also what did we speakers think about the American media’s coverage of Israel-Palestine. One kid asked what he, as a 17-year-old, could do.
“Join the Communist Party,” I wanted to tell him. But ultimately – as I scanned the landscape and conjectured what the parents’ incomes must be – I said: “Try to enjoy life, until you can’t anymore.”
At the end of the discussion, the shlihim, or “emissaries,” as they call themselves (post-army Israelis whom the Jewish Agency scatters in Jewish summer camps), crowded around me. They’re the ones who had misspelled shevet and who didn’t know the difference between West Bank Palestinians and those who are citizens of Israel. The emissaries were totally unaware of the violence they were projecting. They were “stunned.”
“You expressed your opinion as though you were speaking about facts,” one of them said, and I was not sure I took her meaning fully. The group accused me of not mentioning the fact that Israeli Arabs kill Jews all the time and that Israelis can’t walk on the street safely, and asked how I even dared to talk about the Nakba without mentioning the UN partition plan or the fact that the Palestinians started the war.
“I was in a state of shock,” one of them said, “and I’m not even with Bibi or anything like that – but for someone to talk like that about Israel? What organization are you from, anyway?”
