Longings for Israel’s future

MIRA SUCHAROV

I’m not sure what will await me when I land at Ben Gurion airport later this month for a long-awaited return visit to Israel. Like writer Jay Michaelson (“How I’m losing my love for Israel,” Sept. 25, 2009, Forward), I too have struggled with an on-again, off-again passionate love affair with the Jewish state. I, too, am painfully aware that, 44 years into the occupation, “The ‘fantasy Israel,’ the one many [North] Americans seem largely to inhabit, doesn’t compensate for the erosion of the real one.”

But still, over a decade since I was last there, after having lived there for three separate years in my twenties, there are many things for which I hope.

I hope that my kids turn their heads hungrily toward the sound and sight of Hebrew. My kids will soon realize that their mom isn’t the only mom they know who speaks only Hebrew to her kids. “Mom, you’re addicted to Hebrew!” my four-year-old son likes to exclaim in exasperation.

I hope I can keep up with the slang, which changes quickly in Israel. I can picture myself using outmoded expressions, the equivalent of “hot diggity!” That won’t get me very far in finding the new hip spots in Tel Aviv. When I lived there, my friends and I hung out on Sheinkin Street, chasing a bit of Mediterranean bohemian. But I hear that Sheinkin is now yesterday’s news.

I hope that Abulafia bakery in Jaffa still cracks an egg in the middle of its pita, its sunny yoke belying the violence and poverty of the adjacent Ajami neighborhood.

I hope the bus stations still sell slim packages of Mentos candy, mints I used to chew on after a sleepy morning bus commute from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, when I worked as a Knesset intern.

I hope that the tiny fish in Sachne, the dreamy, aquifer-fed Galilee oasis, still want to nibble on my toes. And I hope they might enjoy meeting my kids’ toes, too.

I hope the wheels of my favorite Jerusalem potters are still spinning, and that I am able to make up my mind over which beautiful piece of ceramic art to bring back to the home-with-a-mortgage I didn’t own the last time I was there.

I hope I am able to come to terms with the changing kibbutz movement into which I once poured my heart. My kibbutz family and friends have since left their kibbutzim. Maybe visiting one that is a shell of its past will provide a way of coming to terms with the waning of that collective dream, a dream I thought I might one day come back to share. Maybe I can shoot some hoops with my kids, like I did with the kibbutz children when I was 10 and stayed with my aunt and uncle on Beit Hashitah.

But I know for what I most long. After I’ve ordered a falafel at my favorite joint on Ben Yehudah (the balls are smaller, rounder and fluffier than most), I hope to hear Israelis talking. I hope they talk of the new peace plan (the Israeli Peace Initiative) that was recently released by a team of Israeli political and defence elites. I hope the current Israeli government listens, and is able to stretch its imagination to envision an Israel living alongside a Palestinian state.

I hope to see Israelis craning to hear across the Green Line. The sheket (quiet) Israelis so badly and understandably crave will only come from a serious political rearrangement of the territory that two peoples are awkwardly and painfully trying to share. Really listening to the Palestinian experience will be necessary for Israelis to contemplate a meaningful retreat from territory that Israel has never annexed. Not a retreat from the Zionist dream; a retreat from the folly of territorial maximalism.

I hope I hear some of my favorite Israeli songs. I like listening to David Broza’s “Yihyeh Tov” (“It’ll be Alright”) on my iPod while working out, but it will be even sweeter to catch it on the radio at one of my old café hangouts in the German Colony in Jerusalem, hearing Broza’s honey voice calling for a reconsidered future.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at huffingtonpost.com/mira-sucharov.

^TOP