Gaza

Returning from my parents’ house in Texas last week, I was shocked and embarrassed to realize Israel was in its third day of air strikes on Gaza, and I’d not realized it. I can excuse myself, saying that I was so occupied with my father’s cancer and aneurysm, my Uncle’s unsuccessful brain surgery, and what was probably my last visit with him alive. But then I remember my student from Ramallah whose mother was undergoing cancer treatment while bombs fell around their family not so long ago.

But the second thing I thought was: damn! This was about the very worst week of the entire year to serve Babydaddy papers in order to sue for full custody of my child and a “reasonable visiting schedule” so that I can move with her to Israel. What judge on earth is going to award a parent permission to take a child into a country at war?

Babydaddy phoned the first night of the air strikes to discuss mediation. There have been no follow up phone calls.

I fully support Israel’s right and obligation to defend itself. And when I am face to face with my student, who has spent significant amounts of time praying that the last suicide bomber was not from her home town, I am at a loss. The West Bank is not Gaza. But even if it were, Hamas must still be made to stop its incessant rocket fire, whose only purpose is to provoke Israel and to prevent any two-state solution, any hope for peace.

But why is the world so screwed up that innocent civilians cannot move out of the way of fire? When she asks me this, I won't have an answer.

This student has sent me an invitation to sign petitions, and to subscribe to her blog that tracks the death of every civilian in Gaza. Before the strikes, she was awarded a national prize in Israel for an essay she wrote about her mother’s cancer treatment—a prize she received at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. She clings tenaciously to the distinction between the people and the politics of politicians. Or she used to.

So far the tactic we have both taken is never to lose sight of the humanity of the other. She is going to be in my class this spring, translating the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who passed away late this summer. I really hope we can do this.

She has the assurance that most of the world views her and her people as the victims and Israel as the oppressors. She has the experience of having bombs fall all about her. She once wrote movingly about being unable to distinguish the broken jars of strawberry jam from the blood in the kitchen. I have the burden of loving Israel, and evaluating the student’s work, thereby, in the worst-case scenario, duplicating the political power structure in the realm of personal relations.

I hope the poetry we’ll be translating is elastic and profound enough to absorb the mental and emotional chaos. Because if two people who are invested in this situation cannot find the humanity in one another from a distance, imagine how impossible it is for those who are in the heat of it all, who face being killed or killing.

I hope that the war accomplishes all that Israel needs it to, quickly and with as few casualties on either side as possible.

I hope all of the soldiers that I saw daily on the bus between Tel Aviv and Bar-Ilan, new recruits who came in to pick up their uniforms and receive assignments, will be safe. They were boys who spoke to their mothers on cell phones in Hebrew, Russian, French and English; who teased each other and shared their snacks. Of course they annoyed me at the time, since I often had to stand for 45 minutes while I graded papers on the bus; they and their baggage took up all the space.

And if I have any wishes left, I hope that this war will not prevent my daughter from living with a man she loves so much she calls him Ima. That I can take her to Israel and she can grow up in a loving family.