Peace AND Safety

 It won’t surprise any of you that I’ve been struggling with this war over Israel. In some ways, I’ve been struggling over it my whole life, just as the world has been struggling over it for generations. To me, it goes beyond the need for a homeland. It is a matter of peace versus safety. I want both.

This weekend, I considered going to New York City for a visit with some friends. I don’t feel safe doing so. The protests at colleges like Columbia and NYU are threatening not just to Israelis but to Jews, and they are not threatening just to Jews but also to humanity. Recent protesters have threatened that “October 7th will happen to American Jewish students 10,000 times over,” and Jewish people have been told to return to Europe or Poland. Professors have been blocked from entering buildings, and students have been forcibly blocked from entering their dorms. This is an assault to the very essence of what America represents.

My own house, once, was sprayed with swastikas. It was terrifying, and I felt very alone. This is occurring on a much grander scale. I wish I felt alone. I wish it were only one small house in the rural northwest of New Jersey. But no, these are organizations of progressive thought all over the US. Because I “look Jewish”, I do not feel safe among strangers in a city with escalating protests.

October 7th was a large-scale pogrom. It was Israel’s Kristallnacht. It was – and remains– a nightmare. It brought up generational trauma and has left a pervasive trail of anger and fear. As a peace activist, I want to turn that anger and fear into reconciliation and connection, into improved conditions for everyone. But as a human being, I need to feel safe and to be protected.

The massacres this autumn were a result of bad political policy going back over a hundred years. They were not caused by the victims. Somewhere out there, in some tunnel or dungeon, there may be people who were wrested from their homes, shot at, raped, tortured, threatened and then held hostage. Some may still be living. “Bring them home!” is a cry that I fully support.

The children slain in Gaza (we are all somebody’s child) are also not responsible for this, and yet they bare the punishment. Again, bad political policy is causing this ongoing trauma. A new generation of terrorists is being trained, not by base camps but by lived experiences. Terrorists are borne of horrors like we see on the news each day. They, too, need to be safe.

So here I am, wanting a homecoming and accountability. Here I am, wanting safety and peace. And, here I am, confused because our society says you can’t have both.

The irony is not lost on me– it is education which can help us have both peace and safety, but the main riots in the US are occurring at our highest seats of education. Most of our public education sector is cautious enough not to say anything on this matter, though we build up our Social Emotional Learning curricula and hope it will be strong enough to barricade our young ones from the news.

My mind, then, turns to my own education. What did I learn that can help me weather this storm and perhaps give some guidance to friends in need? What did I learn about hatred that has helped instill in me an endless love? It pains me to admit this, but the first time I heard the word “Palestinian” was through the lens of prejudice.

Over forty years ago, Israel wasn’t even forty years old. There were many more living Holocaust survivors and society was just beginning to allow itself to process the horrors of just a few decades prior. The next anecdote I share comes from an era of societal post-traumatic stress that I had been protected from.

When I was little, I didn’t connect being Jewish with a genocide; I just thought it meant being different from my peers. It also meant hearing Yiddish phrases, celebrating Chanukah, and singing songs of peace and friendship in Hebrew and English. There was nothing quite as guttural (or phlegmy) as Dad’s rendition of “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem”, an song about peace. In second grade, I begged to attend Hebrew School because I wanted to learn a living language, and I wanted to know about Israel, a place where I knew there were other Jewish people. I wanted to learn how to communicate with children overseas.

Mr. Rubin was my first Hebrew School teacher and he quickly became a “bad guy” in my diary entries; today, I’ll give him some grace because of the era he was from, but I also see him as a warning. His first crime: bribing my tiny class to behave with a five-dollar-bill for the best-behaved student. That was a hundred times the tooth fairy’s going rate! I was the only student who was not obsessed with flinging sharpened pencils at his rear that year; I was also the only girl in our group of five. Earning that prize was an embarrassment for me, as well as a danger. I knew that being the teacher's pet had already targeted me for physical bullying in school; I didn’t want that in Hebrew School, too. Each week, my earnings went into the tzedakah (charity) box. Each week, my rage at him boiled a little deeper.

Then, he began to teach us about Palestine. (This was my first time hearing about the nation.). I don’t remember much that he told us, but I remember it was around the time of Lag B’Omer and we were not going to have the promised barbecue party that year because of Palestine. Not having any foundations in traditional Judaism, I only knew about this holiday from what we had been taught that year: we were going to have an outdoor festival commemorating the end of a plague thousands of years ago. The tradition is to count down to the celebration and then have a big bonfire. Pyromaniac that I have always been, this appealed to me. Mr. Rubin, however, announced to us that he was canceling Lag B’Omer celebrations that year, sometime in May. “The plague of the Palestinians is still here,” he said. I remember that vividly.

"The plague of the Palestinians...." I knew the word “plague” from our first Passover just a month prior. Simply put, plagues are animals or illnesses that are bad. I didn’t see how a group of people could be a plague. We are all individuals. Of course, as a feisty seven-year-old, I was not happy with this big man with a kippah and had to push him. “Who are the Palestinians? How can they be a plague? People aren’t plagues.”

Seven-year-old me was wise. My teacher wasn’t. He should have left well enough alone, but he started speaking about his view of the Palestinians who “won’t accept that their country changed names and is now Israel. They still use the old name: Palestine.” Maybe he said more; looking back, my guess is that he also spoke about the PLO and the imminent war with Lebanon. This was, after all, the spring of 1982. But as a second-grader, I wasn’t thinking about wars. I was thinking about people. I was pondering potential friends. He was one of many teachers I cast off as blatantly wrong, one of many I told thusly. I didn’t get the five-dollar prize anymore. To this day, I’m very proud of that. I was also thrown out of Hebrew school until there was a shift in leadership, but that’s another story.

I went on to become a Holocaust scholar, and know more than most people about the dangers of comparing anyone to vermin. People are not plagues. But hatred is. And no one is immune to it.

My experience with Mr. Rubin was evidence that schooling can promote radicalism. Once you teach a student that any culture is a plague, you are part of the cycle of dehumanization. When children are taught that other people are less than human, they also learn about the need for violence. Mr. Rubin also told us that we would do a great honor to our families if one day we spent two years in Israel volunteering for their army. (“Not my family!” I declared.)

Unfortunately, I was not in the only classroom where ill-will toward another population has been cultivated. I have seen first-hand the textbooks in several Arab countries that not only blacken out Israel from their maps, but which also include math and physics problems specifically encouraging the destruction of Jews. I am aware of the outsider status placed on displaced Palestinians throughout the Arab world; they are unable to have the benefits of citizenship in lands where they grew up and where their mothers grew up, because nationality is patrilineal and they cannot return to the land of their grandparents. This is by governmental design; governments want to cultivate ill-will in order to have more wars that will reclaim more land.

Palestinians are not the plague. Israelis are not the plague. Bad government is.

People become the products of bad governments. We also become the victims of civilization gone awry. We learn to resent one another, and hatred leads to violence which leads to more hatred. This cycle grows more and more agitated and nobody wins.

I was raised as a secular Jew, but I consider myself a Jewnitarian Quaker. I need activism and discussion in the vernacular to help the world. I need silence and awe to find the peace within me. And I am American, a scholar brought up with privilege and freedom. I can travel where I wish, study as I please, and befriend anyone who is willing to befriend me. I celebrate these liberties and I want this kind of peace for everyone, everywhere.

With that all said, I am torn beyond my own ability to articulate.

Every human being has inherent worth and should be treated with respect. We may teach that in my school and we may talk about that within many communities, but the system is broken. It was broken then, and it’s broken now. We need to find a way to get across this vital message: we all deserve to be safe.

Mr. Rubin tried to impart a different message. My kindergarten teacher, explained how lucky we were to be in America because everything had to be gray and brown in Russia “the place where Emily’s people come from.” (Wait, my people come from Brooklyn!) My eighth grade social studies teacher ridiculed me and blamed my “people” for his injuries fighting for us in the western theater. The list goes on and on. I’ve experienced it firsthand, and I’m sure that many of you have, too.

Right now, we can’t depend on existing structures to promote the message of inherent worth and protect the safety of all. There’s been too much violence–not just about Israel, but about guns and health education and so much more. There’s way too much vitriol, fostered by social media and politicians who spew hatred to improve ratings. Our society is not only split; it is fractured in this respect.

The only solution I can think about is open communication. I went on from Mr. Rubin’s Hebrew School classes and swore not to be like him. I learned languages of people from so many different cultures so I could make friends with children in countries other than the US and Israel. As a fringe benefit, I learned songs and stories and cultures from all around the world. Best of all, now I find myself advocating for children because I know their language and their countries’ history.

I know that history is taught differently wherever you go. One country’s birthday is another’s disaster. One army’s triumph is the other’s travesty. But a pyrrhic victory is no full victory. There are no winners in war.

The hostages may never come home. The Gazans have homes that they can never come home to. And still the fighting continues, and as it continues, nobody is safe.

College students, I beg you: speak to one another. Learn of your commonalities.

College leaders, I beg you: lead by example. Encourage civil communication. Create listening circles. Develop protocols. Invite everyone to the table.

Everyone: call your Jewish friends and wish them a peaceful Passover. Call your Muslim friends and check in on them. Reach out to someone you don’t know, someone who looks or sounds a little different than you do, and share some bread and stories.

Start a conversation, but make it guided towards peace and safety. We can’t fix it all, but we can each do our bit.

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28Dawn Noonan, Lisa Heath Painter and 26 others

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