I am not an Israeli, nor have I visited the place. But I am Jewish, so I could go anytime I wanted, all expenses paid. I suppose, as a Jew, my Israeli passport needs only to be actualized.
Why is this? How Jewish do you have to be to get a free trip?
Sure, both my parents are Jewish, as are their parents before them. Almost every Passover, I sit down with an extended family who I mostly see only once a year, to eat matzah with horseradish and an egg dipped in vinegar. I recite a few Hebrew words. I spill sweet, red wine out of my glass, one drop at a time, with my pinky finger.
These are not empty gestures. The rich, layered symbolism of each act is in large part known to me (Spring, rebirth, sacrifice, bitterness); Passover or Pesach is, generally speaking, a celebration of freedom from oppression and slavery. Something anyone can get behind.
It’s usually after the Israelites exit Egypt that I stop following. After that, the atmosphere of the story gets stifling. Moses puts his foot down and lets the Chosen People know that Daddy isn’t going to let them freeload for eternity; all the idol-worship needs to go, or else. God doesn’t simply free people because men should be free; it is because He has holy work for them. Canaan is on the other side of that river; get conquering.
Sorry, that is more than a little vulgar. But so is the idea, prevalent in my family and among many Jewish denominations, that Jewish racial unity is synonymous with identity, and that that identity amounts to a destiny. Israel, as a political state, a religion, and a race, has achieved true Nationhood: exactly what Britain, Germany, or France aimed for so ardently until they imploded or disintegrated or gave up their colonies.
Germany aimed particularly hard for this. To get to this ideal, they excluded Jews, who were not racially German (whatever that meant), but who had absorbed its myths of the Nation-state. This blend of 19th-century blood-and-guns teaching about nation-building informed the 1948 creation of the Israeli state, and the simultaneous displacement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Arabs, the event referred to in Palestinian parlance as al-Nakba: the catastrophe.
Such national rhetoric also enabled Europeans to murder millions of Jews in the Shoah: the Holocaust. Indeed, any historian will tell you that the myth of a Jewish “race” was the Nazis’ master-stroke; sadly, this insight does not penetrate beyond the walls of historical study, and into the foreign policy of the state of Israel.
It is hard to say whether Israel is a British colony, or the colony of an idea; personally, I am comfortable, even proud, referring to myself as a Jew, even under these circumstances. After all, I am not Israeli, and my “blood” is not, should not be, a passport to anywhere. But I’d like to learn about the people who live there.
If those around me, perhaps my Palestinian fellow-students at U of T, think such a place is built on policy similar to South Africa’s, I don’t see how they can be blamed for making such inevitable connections.
