{"id":293,"date":"2014-07-16T06:38:09","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T06:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=293"},"modified":"2014-07-18T07:08:38","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T07:08:38","slug":"being-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=293","title":{"rendered":"“Being There”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photo-47\"<\/a>Some trips are marked by missing flights and sleeping in Heathrow overnight, or spending a day at the Embassy kibbutzing with the agents to prove you’re who you are so they can replace that stolen passport.\u00a0\u00a0 Some trips find you delayed due to debris falling over northern airs, or blizzards. \u00a0\u00a0Or bouts of diarhea that leave you clutching your cramped and useless stomach.\u00a0 This trip was different: it was framed by dead bodies at beginning, at the end; and had a dead body in the middle.\u00a0 And my stay in Israel spanned only ten days.<\/p>\n

Day 1. Two hundred women were about to start dancing at an outdoor restaurant in Tiberias as the sun set over the Mediterranean. \u00a0\u00a0The leader of this Jewish women’s renewal trip took the stage with tears in her eyes.\u00a0 The bodies of the three kidnapped teenage boys had been found.\u00a0 The dance became a mournful sobbing vigil.<\/p>\n

Two days went by, while we rode camels, floated like corks in the Dead Sea, felt baked at Masada, heard pertinent lectures, felt overwhelmed with so much experience and so little time to process.<\/p>\n

Day 3.\u00a0 During the intense shiva period, in the early morning of Ramadan, \u00a0a Palestinian teenager was kidnapped from E. Jerusalem. \u00a0Most of us intuitively felt it was retribution.\u00a0 In a country where everything is personal, where tribes are as deep or deeper than race in America, it was almost too obvious to miss. \u00a0Most were genuinely revolted.\u00a0 But as the world judged before knowing, some in Israel floated other possibilities – the boy was gay, that it was an honor killing in a crazy family.<\/p>\n

Day 5. As a taxi was taking me back from a free afternoon in Jerusalem, he pointed left, over there, to the nearby neighborhood where Palestinians were rioting after the burial.\u00a0 Part of the light rail that links their neighborhood to the city had been attacked.<\/p>\n

Day 6.\u00a0\u00a0 The police, who must have known earlier, announced the arrests of six young radical right Jewish boys. \u00a0\u00a0As the taking of innocent life is forbidden in Torah, many were shocked.\u00a0 They’re not “us,” the religious were quick to say.\u00a0 There are always a few bad apples, they give us a bad name.<\/p>\n

I read that there are boys from ultra-Orthodox families who can’t cut it in the demanding world of yeshiva.\u00a0 They drop out, their parents can’t deal with them and shun them, secular society doesn’t integrate them.\u00a0 They are prey for radical fringe that channels their anger into nationalist fervor and recruits them for dirty work.\u00a0 It’s a fringe of teenage boys and ugly adults.<\/p>\n

Then began the horrible tit for tat that became a week of intense shelling and war.\u00a0 Hamas started launching bombs at southern Israel, Israel responded with extraordinary power.\u00a0 Once it started in motion, everyone could see the “play” or “Greek tragedy” coming and felt powerless to stop it.\u00a0 Each attack needed to be answered with a bigger, louder bomb. \u00a0In the Middle East, being perceived as “weak” is as good as dead.<\/p>\n

By Monday night, day eight as the trip was ending.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I went to Tel Aviv with my friend Barbara.\u00a0 That’s when the bombs started reaching Tel Aviv.\u00a0 Just out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, I heard the circular whine, the unmistakable high pitch of anxiety as the air raid siren went off. \u00a0“We have to stop meeting like this,” I said to a German man as we huddled in the bomb shelter in painful repitition.\u00a0 The only people watching the World Cup braved the street that night. \u00a0 In the dark, we saw the succession of German goals, like clockwork on the flat screens, as we walked the ten blocks home from dinner.<\/p>\n

By day ten and eleven, we’d experienced five more attacks. \u00a0Meanwhile, Gaza was being pounded with inordinant fire and the world was seeing pictures of suffering inflicted by the “bully” Israel.\u00a0\u00a0 We got an email that a woman on our trip was staying in Israel as a lone soldier, a volunteer in the army, and was looking for contributions of clean socks and granola bars. \u00a0There is nothing like “being there” to clear the sinuses – one feels very sharp, on point, experiencing the reality of what it is to live in Israel. \u00a0The poets influenced me – especially Yehudi Amichai- and they still will as I travel on to the old land of conviviencia, Spain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some trips are marked by missing flights and sleeping in Heathrow overnight, or spending a day at the Embassy kibbutzing with the agents to prove you’re who you are so they can replace that stolen passport.\u00a0\u00a0 Some trips find you … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,27,15],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hamas","tag-israel","tag-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-4J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":299,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions\/299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}