My last memory of Israel is from nearly 20 years ago. The intifada had ceased roughly six months before, and there was a weary, hopeful peace. That’s what I felt. I went to a few places, including places I probably shouldn’t have gone. But the memory that sticks out is a falafel place on the beach in Tel Aviv. Soccer was on the TV. Everyone watched, and ate together. There were Jewish people and Muslim people and Christian people together. Eating, yelling, the kind of yelling people do when they watch sports. It was so ordinary.
I wonder some days how many of those folks are still alive. If any brutalized each other. From outside, it’s easy to forget how many people are just, and probably felt helpless as children were massacred in Gaza by the IDF over the last year. The same helpless feeling some had for a few weeks when Hamas did the same, though I caution the comparison, because it would create the illusion that the life of one child of one nationality is worth the lives of twenty of another. All I see when I can stomach to look are dead children, and traumatized children alive but with a look in their eyes I partly recognize. Dead children, and mothers, and fathers, and friends, and the survivors left to pick up rubble, and all for nothing. As if the purpose was to simply traumatize a generation of people. There’s some people who believe deeply the idea that, “if only these people were dead life would be better,” and I’m grateful I’m able to keep these people at a distance from my personal life. Because it’s the foolish wish going through the minds of the people who shoot a missile at a hospital and congratulate each other as it burns.
The same helpless feeling some of us have when we see ICE beating and kidnapping people off our streets, and I know from the outside no one sees us, either.
So I let myself think about that falafel, and lemonata, and the people watching that soccer game, which feels more like a dream every year that passes. And I hope for a time when our days pass simply like this, when the ambitions of tyrants and violent warmongers everywhere are simply impossible to be because the raucous joy of a simple game is everywhere, and all that we want. While I quietly read my books and write and let myself see what makes me smile.