Monday October 9

Every morning for the past month that I’ve lived in this apartment, I’ve watched the surfers on their brightly colored boards through my living room window, and the occasional jet-ski whiz by, while I sip my coffee and read the news. When I take my afternoon walk I can hear them talking in Hebrew, Russian or Arabic. Past the surf-beach there would be an Arabic-speaking father and son fishing on the rocks, and further down, another fisherman with a kippah and fringes sticking out of his shirt, with two young boys similarly clad running around impatiently behind him on the beach. This morning, there is a red flag on the beach. No one is swimming, and not a surfer in sight. No fishermen on the rocks. I can see some older couples in bathing suits setting up chairs on the sand, but there are so very few of them compared to every other morning.

When I was 17 turning 18 and took my gap year in Israel, I spent the first three months in absolute delight. I was on my own for the first time, but more than that, I was in a place that was so rich with culture, and history, and a feeling of community and mutual understanding that I couldn’t describe in words but many who are Jewish have shared when they come to Israel. It's not just knowing that this is the only place in the world that we can count on to take us in if the rest of the world kicks us out (as has happened countless time through our entire history) or tries to exterminate us, though that's definitely part of it. It is hard to describe this feeling to those who live in Canada or the US and have grown up feeling part of the country’s majority, taking for granted that everyone around them feels like they belong and never even thinking to question it. They never had classmates tell them they couldn’t have a playdate because their parents didn’t like Jews. They never had swastikas drawn on their desks at school, or Holocaust “jokes” told for their benefit about roasting Jews like marshmallows over an open flame – the kinds of experiences my daughter and I each have had, 30 years apart, living in Canada. Nor have they understood what it’s like to have friends, colleagues, and social media personalities explaining that while they are anti-Zionist they of course have nothing personal against Jews. (Some of these colleagues are Jews.) They have never had to explain to their students in a classroom, as I have, that the word “Zionist” is not in fact an insult, or a dirty word, nor does it denote a racist or white colonialist supremacist movement. I’ve had to explain to students, and follow up with historical evidence to support my claims – met with dubious looks and expressions that conveyed that their silence in response was only out of respect for the fact that I was their professor, and not because they thought I might know what I’m talking about – that being a Zionist simply means that one believes in the right of Jews to return to their homeland and govern themselves there. And that this longing for return and sovereignty has been a central pillar of Judaism – religious and secular alike – for as long as Judaism has existed. And that it finally came to happen in 1948 because 6 million Jews had been systematically exterminated, largely because they had nowhere to go that would accept them as refugees. When the war was over and still no one wanted to take in all of these Jews who had lost their homes and families and everything they ever had, many of them went to Israel and finally the UN granted them the ability to govern themselves in their ancestral homeland. [The history is a lot more complicated than that, but I'll follow up with more historical details in subsequent posts.]

Every time I have come to Israel I have felt it. And it’s not because I’m a religious person – I have been an atheist for as long as I can remember. It’s because I know that all of the Jew-suspicion and outright hatred that is latent, under-the-surface, and sometimes leaking into my life and the lives of my children wherever else I have lived, doesn’t exist here. Here, no one cares if I’m Jewish or not, and the only people who care that I’m not religious in any way are those who won’t speak or associate with me anyway. Here, everyone knows that Jews are not a race – as I look out my window right now and see people of absolutely every shade and color walking on the street and down the beach. We are neither white nor colonialists, and we don’t endorse apartheid.

I wish I had taken photos of the scenes on the beach and the boardwalk that I saw every day along the water through all of this past September, of Arab families – Christian and Muslim - and Jewish families, alongside Druze and Baha’i, some Filipinos, Asians, and Russian, Ukrainian, and North African refugees, all picnicking, swimming, fishing, while their children mingled indiscriminately on the boardwalk on their bikes, scooters, and roller skates to the steady hum of Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and other languages (not much English) punctuated by laughter and the occasional guitar or loudspeaker playing pop music as I took my 5 km daily walk. I would have posted them with the caption “This is what Haifa looks like right now.” But then I didn’t think anyone would care, or would want to know, or wouldn’t simply dismiss it as more Jewish propaganda to prove that in fact we are not monsters and being Israeli (or even just Jewish) doesn’t mean hating Muslims. One time I was stopped by a young girl who asked me in Arabic if the phone she was holding up to me was mine; someone had dropped it on the beach. I told her in Hebrew that I didn’t speak Arabic but I would take her photo with the phone if she liked. She tried to explain that this wasn’t what she was asking, and then a woman in a hijab came closer and told me in Hebrew that her daughter thought I had lost my phone. I said oh no, thank you – that’s not mine. And then the woman smiled and said, but actually, would you mind taking a photo of us? And she stretched out her hand with her own phone in it. I smiled back and said I would be delighted, and I took the phone and snapped their happy poses, while waves lapped over all of our feet.

Being here in my late teens, living on a kibbutz and learning history in a place with the wealth of history that Israel has, while spending my afternoons and evenings with my kibbutz family, deep in intellectual conversations about everything from politics to philosophy to Elvis Presley, was the most sustained happiness and true feeling of belonging outside of my own immediate family that I have ever experienced. The people were all interesting, relatable, and real. They didn’t pull any punches. They wanted to know about me and for me to know about them. The kibbutz residents my age were either in the army or preparing to enter it, and this made all the difference in everyone’s outlook and attitude, from their personal stake in their country to raising children (I had never seen children run so free without rules or discipline in my life – when I asked, I was told “we spoil them as much as we want when they are young. They are going to the army soon enough – we want to enjoy them while we can; and if they come out of it, they will be straightened out by the army”).

Three months into this life-changing experience, Saddam Hussein started raining rockets down on Israel. We were shown how to use gas masks and given directions to every bomb shelter on the kibbutz. One of my friends who lived there and had recently completed her army service, sat on the roof of her building and watched the rockets in the sky; the non-Israelis among us sat in the bomb shelter, our parents feverishly trying to reach us in a time when no one had cellphones or email. One by one, the other volunteers and students in my cohort left Israel – some quickly, some reluctantly. I stayed, along with two others who had similarly forged close ties on the kibbutz and were not ready to leave it behind. My parents’ voices were strained and choked on the other end of the line. They asked if I was safe, and what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to stay and see if there were ways that I could help. They never asked me to come home, though I knew they wished more than anything that I would. In the end, it was A. and R. who asked me to leave. They said there was nothing I could do there, that they felt terrible for my worrying parents, and that at this point I was one more person to crowd the bomb shelters. I had somewhere else to go, and they didn’t. I left, along with the two others. When I got back to Ottawa, I took a job and started saving up so that I could come back in the summer, when the war was over.

A. and R. were born on the kibbutz that their parents had helped build. A’s father was a refugee from Afghanistan and his mother from Poland. R’s parents were Holocaust survivors. Their stories were real, poignant, and fascinating. R’s father didn’t speak a word of English but invited me over regularly so that he could make me French fries and watch me eat them, smiling. A. lost an eye and his hearing to a grenade during the 1973 war. All four of their children have served in the army, some for extended lengths. Their youngest was called up to the reserves yesterday. I sent him a text. He asked if we were still in Haifa, and told us to stay safe. My daughter and I walked to a blood donation center a couple of kilometers away, and joined crowds of people being turned away and asked to come back tomorrow, or better the next day, because there had already been so many donations made that they couldn’t process all of them. At the grocery store, people were filling boxes to be sent to the south and to the army bases across the country. Fighter jets roared overhead, and back at the apartment we watched the coast guard patrols on the water. There wasn’t a surfboard to be seen.