Gaza Cousin, You are my Kin!

This morning, once again, my heart is exploding, breaking, shards flying throughout my body and brain. Shrapnel has lodged itself in my head, another in my neck, a third in my back. Yet, many in this world cannot see the internal fragmentation of the spiritual collapse. I keep trying to dodge the bullets, the torrents of fear, the hate that is spewed on the email pages from people I love. My parents and friends, colleagues and the various organizations to which I belong, are sending a myriad of opines about Gaza. I am furious. I am appalled. I understand and I am confused. I ache spiritually, emotionally, physically and I am not, technically, in a war zone at all.

I make my Peet’s French Roast coffee, while my “cousin”, (as we Israelis refer to our brethren Arabs), on the other side of this imploding planet, eats the visions of carnage for her dinner.

I am a Jew, an Israeli who fights daily to remember that we are all human, in need of connection. I must choose minute by minute mantras that support love, compassion and trust - All those feelings and actions I have been taught to walk away from in order for my people to attempt to survive in a world that does often blame us for anything and everything.

That does not mean we, an oppressed people, are not culpable of wrongdoing at times.

Blame is passé. It’s futile and stunting. All of us are doing our best with the tools that we have. Some of us have very little tools. But, to me, it is unacceptable to point the finger at another, waiting for them to change, so that my own life can change.

What is my role as my cousin loses her home, her children or her desperate, trapped, Jew-hating brother? Do I wait for his hate to subside? Do I support the killing of his body spurring his spirit in a hundred others like him? Do I let understandable, yet inhumane, patterns of exclusion, fear and loathing be the swords of perceived justice in my name?

Absolutely not.

How can I bury my Palestinian cousin with a bloody hand and plant with the other an olive tree on her grave?

This is not a choice. We are all on the same side. The human side.

To call my cousins by any other name is to sign an endless war pact. It is short sighted. It is anti-human. It is an abomination.

I have been called naive. I have been told that I have been “Americanized”, an immigrant who has lived in the safety and ignorance of the American media sheltered from what Israelis face daily. It’s true. I left Israel when I was ten, but at the age of seven, I was in the bomb shelter, wondering if my parents would return from the front. Particular sirens heard today still make me hold my breath and feel as if an attack is imminent. The talons of war are deeply embedded and tear across the years, oceans and cultures.

I am confused often by the clashes of “information” from the left or the right. I experience anti-Semitism from the most loving of people and find allies in the most unlikely of communities. I may not be the most knowledgeable Israeli. I may be the most gullible of Jews. But for me, to live in the black or white, the “choose a side”, the “us “vs. “them”, the trust-no-one-because-they-will-knife-you-when-you-turn-around, is not only a way in which I choose not to live, it is detrimental to my hopes for all people. It is contradictory to my living fully as a human, not separated from any other. It is a way that I refuse to teach my children who would be bound to repeat this cycle of violence, apathy, terror and hopelessness.

No, I must reach, no matter what, to my grieving cousin. I must look in the mirror and ask myself: What will I do today to stop the destruction of the temples which we all inhabit?