We have hit the one year mark. Israelis are often taken aback when I say that I am an oleh. It seems like a difficult endeavor to them. They know life is tough in Israel. And they can imagine how much tougher it is when one doesn't know the language or system.
And they are right. Those challenges are very difficult, but none are the toughest part. The toughest part is watching the politics here and the treatment of the Palestinians because that has required me to disassemble my entire sense of Jewishness. In America, most Jews are liberals. And whether that choice be knowledgeable, practical, or wise is a separate matter from its undeniable historic element of being a choice of compassion and justice. Even Republican American Jews come from a certain idealism, believing, as influenced by Milton Friedman, in the power of the market to improve lives.
In Israel I see a different kind of Jew, one that seems to lack any idealism. Not everyone, but most. Here it's a scratch and survive kind of place. People really just don't seem to care about anything. And the treatment of the Arabs here is downright barbaric. Where I come from, the Jews were usually the most compassionate and justice conscious of people. Here, they are like the worst gentiles in America.
And so I have learned that Jews when in power are as bad as the goyim we have complained about for 2,000 years. And that is the most difficult part of Aliyah for I have had to rethink a lifetime of assumptions about my people and even my family and my self.
And they are right. Those challenges are very difficult, but none are the toughest part. The toughest part is watching the politics here and the treatment of the Palestinians because that has required me to disassemble my entire sense of Jewishness. In America, most Jews are liberals. And whether that choice be knowledgeable, practical, or wise is a separate matter from its undeniable historic element of being a choice of compassion and justice. Even Republican American Jews come from a certain idealism, believing, as influenced by Milton Friedman, in the power of the market to improve lives.
In Israel I see a different kind of Jew, one that seems to lack any idealism. Not everyone, but most. Here it's a scratch and survive kind of place. People really just don't seem to care about anything. And the treatment of the Arabs here is downright barbaric. Where I come from, the Jews were usually the most compassionate and justice conscious of people. Here, they are like the worst gentiles in America.
And so I have learned that Jews when in power are as bad as the goyim we have complained about for 2,000 years. And that is the most difficult part of Aliyah for I have had to rethink a lifetime of assumptions about my people and even my family and my self.
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