November 30, 2004

Alison on Aliyah:  The Making of an Extremist

            I received quite a number of responses to my last article, many telling me how brave I was to express my opinion and how hard it must have been for me to do so.  The truth is, the first draft of the article was much harder to write and far less easy to listen to.  It has prompted me to spend a bit more time thinking about the political situation in Israel today and where I fit into it.  The truth is, I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.  Each weekly session in my “Co-Existence Through Life Narratives” class seems to open new doors of inquiry, expose new intractable problems, and reopen old wounds that I spend the rest of the week trying to sew shut again.

            Two major realizations are starting to dawn on me, and I am finding them startling on a fundamental level.  One, that I have become, by quite a large degree, the person farthest to the right on the political scale in our class group; and two, that I have made a fairly dramatic shift in political views in the thirteen and a half months that I have lived here as a citizen.  I am literally unrecognizable from who I was and how I thought two years ago.

            Growing up in Seattle in the ‘80s, I was bombarded with messages of equality, tolerance, and consciousness of humanitarian rights and values.  I was one of the only Jewish kids in my neighborhood, in my schools, and in my group of friends.  I went to high school in the middle of Seattle’s “Central District,” which meant the minority of students was white and racial tensions were at an extreme.  If there was one thing that was drilled into my head over and over, and if there was one thing that I internalized completely, it was that racial, cultural, religious, and lifestyle groups other than my own should be respected and treated with total equality, and that all efforts should be made to bridge gaps and create communication between us.

            I was zealous in my desire to follow these directives.  Most of my friends and all of my boyfriends in high school were non-white.  I started an extra-curricular group, “Cultural Relations,” within which I planned and executed an entire day of school-wide forums on race relations and tolerance.  I did volunteer work at the American Civil Liberties Union and attended seminars on curbing race-motivated violence.  I was a poster-child for American liberal values.

            Meanwhile, I was visiting Israel on a fairly regular basis, once every two to three years starting from age seventeen.  I saw the country as extraordinarily accepting and tolerant; after all, it was the only place in which I had ever felt safe as a Jew and as a woman.  I could never understand when my Israeli friends told me that I had “no idea” what was going on underneath the surface.  Indeed, I can see now that up until the moment I made aliyah, I really had no clue.

            Once I became an Israeli citizen and began living here as a real member of society rather than simply a tourist or observer, something inside me changed.  I realized that tolerance is a lot easier said in America than done in Israel.  When I see an Arab get on my bus, I feel fear.  When I hear that there are approximately fifty attempts to carry out a terror attack inside of Israel per day, I feel anger.  When I see one of these attempts succeed, I feel more anger.  With each successive bombing, I can feel my fuse becoming shorter.  I feel more outrage, more pain, more desire to do whatever is necessary to curb the violence, regardless of the consequences to non-Israelis.  Indeed, I have developed a strange and yet not displeasing sense of over-protectiveness for my fellow citizens.  There have been times that I would not hesitate to offer my life if it were to save one of theirs.

            In truth, I am just tired of being scared.  I am tired of Israelis being killed.  I am tired of worrying that one of my friends will be killed.  I am tired of worrying that I will be killed.  I am furious that Israelis have been made to live this way for so long, and I am sick of hoping that it will simply “get better.”  I have no more sadness at the plight of the Palestinians, and no more interest in their humanitarian struggle.  I simply want this to stop.  And I am willing to support pretty much any plan that will accomplish this, as long as it will protect us.

            And so I have been driven to the extreme of the political spectrum – by fear, and anger, and exhaustion.  And it only took a year.  As I look back on where I was ten years ago and where I am now, both physically and mentally, I can barely believe the transformation.  And unfortunately, I am not alone.

This is, in my opinion, the gravest mistake that the Palestinians have made by waging the war of the past four years.  They have pushed what used to be moderate Israelis to the polar edges of the political stage.  They have made relative extremists out of positive liberals, and they have succeeded in creating an atmosphere here of intolerance and immovability.  There are no more moderates here; there are only people who are tired, and angry, and scared.  And so, when I sit in my class discussing co-existence, I think about who I am now, and what I have become, and how, in the span of a single year, this country has created an entirely new me.  Perhaps, at the end of the next year, I will find that this course has repaired the damage.