Birthrights (and wrongs)
“Within hours of arriving, our blood connection to Israel was firmly established. It was impossible to not feel patriotic, but the feeling was artificial, almost sickly sweet.” Personal revelations on the road in Israel
BY Peter Trainor
Photography by Peter Trainor
From the world’s lowest point, the Dead Sea, we work our way up the cliff, toward the lookout where we had been promised an incredible view. Forty-odd Hebrews trudging through the Judean desert, just like old times. The sun is low, the earth fiery below our feet. Above us, the sky is cloudless.
I stop and turn to look over the lifeless, salty stew in which we’d just spent the afternoon pickling ourselves like kosher dills. I can see the mountains of Jordan through the arid haze. I watch the dry, porous stone crack under my dust-covered sandals and try to feel ancient, but all around me American accents talk excitedly into cell phones to parents in faraway suburbs, reminding me that I am on a bus tour for Jewish youth, not a spice-traders’ caravan. Overhead, the sudden roar of an Israeli F-16 fi ghter jet completely breaks the illusion that this could be any other time or place. Our tour guide, Joe Yudin, a member of an elite Israeli paratroopers unit, turns to the group and throws his fi st into the air. “Jewish power!” he yells, and a great cheer goes up around me.
It was as if Joe were making a declaration not just to us but also to all that was ancient around us, to the world, and to history: We’re back! A wave of patriotism ripples through us. Sure, we are just tourists from the U.S. and Canada. Our parents weren’t born here, nor were our grandparents. Some of our families have only recently converted to Judaism. But the plane above us is our fighter jet, and the pilot is our friend and brother, here to defend us, and to defend our land from those who would take it from us.
It’s January 2005, and we are about halfway through a 10-day trip with the Birthright Israel program, which takes Jewish youth aged 18 to 26 on “peer-educational” tours of Israel, all expenses paid. Airfare, a tour bus, guide, armed guard, hotel accommodation and two meals per day are all included.
The program was founded nearly a decade ago, with a mandate to foster ties between Israel and Jewish communities around the world, increase solidarity among world Jewry and strengthen participants’ Jewish identity. It is funded jointly by the state of Israel, major Jewish and Zionist organizations, including the United Jewish Communities and the Jewish Agency for Israel, and private philanthropists, including Montreal’s Bronfman family. Having hosted more than 120,000 youth from 51 countries, the program is a part of wider efforts by the Zionist movement to foster ties between Jews and Israel.
Raised in a secular family with both Christian and Jewish ancestry, my interest in the Birthright trip is largely sociological. A long-time supporter of the Palestinian non-violent resistance movement against the Israeli military occupation, I had worked for Amnesty International as an Israel/Palestine research assistant, and as an intern with the Palestinian human rights group al-Haq in Ramallah. My five weeks there, during the spring and summer of 2002, gave me just a taste of what Palestinians have been enduring since 1967.
I woke up every morning to an Israeli tank or armoured personnel carrier rolling under my bedroom window, announcing the day’s orders on giant loudspeakers. Sometimes it was curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.; sometimes it was curfew all day, announced with a warning that, “Those who leave their houses put themselves in mortal danger.”
Joining a Birthright tour was my attempt to try to understand the other side of the story.
When we arrived in Tel Aviv, the first thing Joe said to us was, “Welcome home.” We were immediately put on a bus and taken to the building where, in 1948, leaders of the Zionist movement made their declaration of Israel’s statehood. Inside, the hall had been set up exactly as it was on that day.
We were given copies of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which we read aloud as a group. The room fi lled with the voice of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s fi rst prime minister, reading the same declaration on that fateful day 60 years ago. The screen in front of us lit up with mobs of anxious-looking Jews in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, listening to Ben-Gurion on loudspeakers and radios. When he fi nished, they burst into wild applause, hugging and kissing each other, their faces showing both elation and disbelief—finally, they had place of their own.
Perfectly on cue, the Israeli national anthem began to play. Joe stood up, took off his hat and began to sing. We stood with him, joining in as best we could, and watched images of our ancestors sobbing with joy. And so, within hours of arriving, our blood connection to Israel was firmly established. It was impossible to not feel patriotic, but the feeling was artificial, almost sickly sweet. The “good fight” we were being coaxed to join seemed just too good to be true. I wondered if any of my tour mates felt the same way.
Later that afternoon, we were taken by bus to Jerusalem. It was evening when we arrived and the sun was low in the sky. Joe asked us to close our eyes. We were led, lids tightly shut, off the bus and we stumbled around, trying to join hands to make a chain as instructed. Hand in hand, we were led down a path before being told to open our eyes. When we did, there was a collective gasp. In front of us, with the sun setting behind it, was the Old City of Jerusalem. Even I, who had seen it before, was amazed. The honey-coloured stone of the ancient walls and buildings had taken on the warm orange of the sun, and the city glowed.
Joe pointed out the landmarks: the Jewish quarter, the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount, site of the ancient centre of Judaism. There was also a building on top of the Temple Mount that, for most people, would be the first thing to catch their eye. It was the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest site in Islam. Its brilliant gilded roof sparkled in the sunlight. And yet, nobody in our group asked what it was and for our two days in Jerusalem, Joe only referred to it only as “that golden dome.”
The first day set the tone for the rest of our tour. Joe’s job was to show us that Israel was not only a beautiful country, but one with a proud moral history built around its military, which he repeatedly called the most moral in the world. Jewish history, he said, was a chain running back for thousands of years. To continue the chain, we needed to marry a Jew, raise our children as Jews, act as ambassadors for Israel on our university campuses, or even do what Joe—originally from Boston—had done, and immigrate to Israel, become a citizen and fight in the army.
We were told to be ready for a “thunderbolt.” Sometime during our trip, in a moment of incredible enlightenment, we would feel that Israel was our true home, and we would truly understand that we were Jews. I thought of images of American evangelicals being knocked over by the touch of Jesus and I realized that, if Joe had his way, by the end of our trip I would be a born-again Jew.
A few days later, Joe gave us his rundown on the history of what Israelis call the 1948 War of Independence and Palestinians call al-Nakba (“the Catastrophe”). He summed it up like this: “To make a long story short, they lost.” As for the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and the numerous other atrocities committed against them by Jewish militias, Joe hesitantly admitted that there were some “low points” during the Jewish offensive.
A week into the trip, I could no longer resist— it was time to ask Joe some of the many questions I’d been holding back. I approached, and told him how in every early Zionist text I had read, the authors described the movement as “imperialist” and “colonial.” In the diaries of Theodore Herzl, a Hungarian Jew considered the father of modern Zionism, for example, I had read that he intended the movement to solve the “Arab problem” by conquering Palestine, where the Zionists would create “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” I gave examples of many of Israel’s founding fathers speaking in the same terms, and Joe asked what I had been reading. I told him I had studied primary texts, as well as dozens of Jewish historians and commentators, including Noam Chomsky. “Chomsky?” Joe replied. “You might as well read Hitler.”
Later that evening, we were to meet a group of Palestinians living in Israel. The visit was touted by Birthright as an example of its balanced program, and I looked forward to talking with Palestinians and hearing their stories. I was sorely disappointed. As it turned out, they were high school kids who couldn’t speak English. Many of them didn’t know who we were, where we were from, or even that we were Jews. We sat in a room with them for an hour and tried to communicate, largely unsuccessfully.
I didn’t feel that “thunderbolt” on my Birthright trip. In fact, I left Israel feeling more detached from the Jewish community than before. As far as I could tell, only two or three of our group of 40 were skeptical about what we were being taught. I wondered why more young Jews weren’t asking questions about the wisdom of supporting Israel, and its army. And I didn’t understand how Jews, after so many generations of being on the wrong side of intolerance, could justify the oppression of others.
Though I didn’t become a born-again Jew, my Birthright trip did convince me to return to the Holy Land. I went back that fall to study Arabic at Birzeit University near Ramallah, in the West Bank. On weekends, I volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement as a human rights monitor and escort for Palestinians at risk of harassment or attack by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
I was sent to the southern West Bank city of Hebron, which is one of the flashpoints in the Israel/Palestine conflict. There, I saw a side of Israel concealed by the Birthright trip, and learned perhaps too much about human nature.
Dozens of Palestinian shops had been destroyed by settlers on what was once the busiest market street in Hebron, the Star of David scrawled on their windows—with no trace of the historical irony of the act. Palestinian homes had been ransacked and burned, and I almost stepped in human feces settlers left in the houses’ kitchens and living rooms. I read a spray painted warning to Arab women: “Watch out! We’re going to rape you!” and watched as settler children threw rocks at Palestinian girls on their way to elementary school while yelling slogans like “Slaughter the Arabs,” as if they were old Jewish proverbs.
I saw an anti-Arab race riot, during which Palestinian women walking home were followed by dozens of young male settlers, many armed with M16 assault rifles, jumping up and down and shaking their fists in the air while chanting, “Am Israel Chai”: Long live the Jewish nation! Israeli soldiers and police on duty in the area did nothing to stop it, and I felt the spit, stones and fi sts hit me as my colleagues and I tried to intervene. The settlers’ unrelenting violence has led 25,000 Hebron residents to flee their homes in the last six years alone. I tried to imagine how my grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, would feel when I told her what I’d seen. Then I wondered if I should tell her at all.
I thought a lot about my Birthright trip when I was in Hebron. I wondered what the other participants would say if they knew what was happening, especially the ones who had declared, during our group conversation on the topic of “What would you die for?” that they would die for Israel.
I decided to email them. I got a few responses, some telling me I was being led astray (or not putting it so nicely), and a few actually expressing interest in what I had to say. Joe responded with several messages that included the following:
“Just want to say that I admire Peter’s dedication to this cause even though it is the cause of a people who want to blow up my children. Peter’s misguided dedication proves how people, even intelligent people, can be led astray by masking themselves in the banner of righteousness. This is what Hitler did and this is what Arafat did. You have chosen sides ... the side of my people’s enemy.” Then he asked to be taken off of my mailing list.
The day my Birthright group swam in the Dead Sea, we also visited the Herodian clifftop fortress of Masada. Joe took us to a lookout at the edge of the cliff, and we stood looking over a huge gorge. Joe pointed out a collection of stones on the other side, which he explained were the remains of a Roman military camp built when the fortress was under siege during the Roman expulsion of the Jews from Palestine. He told us that we were going to yell a message across to the Romans. The message was in Hebrew. Am Israel Chai. He counted to three and we all screamed it out. Seconds later we heard the echo. It sounded like a thousand ghosts were screaming back at us. Perhaps they were.
