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Erin Goes to War
I currently live in Kibbutz Bar'am, 300 meters from the border with Lebanon. Due to the land invasion of Gaza, Hezbollah, the same group of Islamic militants based Lebanon involved in the 2006 war with Israel, is seriously threatening to open the boarder and invade. No one knows yet the extent to which this is posturing (analysts suspect their infrastructure is still too fragile to support such an incursion, but the policies of reactionary religious groups are not always dictated by the impersonal calculus of probable success--remember the Boxer Rebellion, where the peasants believed themselves invulnerable to bullets, or, closer to home, to highlight our own susceptibility to wartime Magical Thinking, the animating fervor of the South during the American Civil War despite historian Shelby Foote's contention that she never stood a real chance), but if we get a call? We go to the bomb shelter. And if the KPC feel Lebanon's serious, we'll be relocated to another kibbutz, or possibly deported, according to our various nationalities.
There is something disquieting about Mariah, over-excitable and shrieky, whose voice always has that annoying continental-Spanish lisp to it when she's South American, saying over breakfast that in the last war the bombs got as far as Nahariya, as far as Haifa itself, which is maybe an hour further south. Draw a semi-circle from Lebanon to the resplendent seaside town of Haifa. Another from the Gaza strip, where Hamas is launching their rockets, to the university town of Beersheba. To the kibbutz in the south that got hit, not so terribly far from my own former kibbutz in the south, Gerofit. Circles in the larger urban centres where the Hamas calls for suicide bombers are most likely to be answered. A surprising portion of the country: the map clotting up with the probability of danger. People ask where I am, meaning to find out if I'm on the front. There isn't one, really. Just increased zones of risk, overlaying the banal constancy of life on the kibbutz.
Today I cut my thumb gutting pumpkin for the soup: the second time this week. I went home with the flu, and should head to the Doctor's before he closes for the day. Today the first Israeli casualties came back, and Yuda and George stood under the radio looking up at it like Torah scrolls were being removed, delicately unfastened, like it was Rosh Hashanah--a new year with the new war, cyclical and fresh. Would we pass the radio around, holding it high, and kiss it reverently? Touch the tips of our tallis to it for luck? The normally garrulous Galla-Galla-Gallat army radio station (vi-va la mu-sic-a!), its constantly-cycling, limited spit of American pop music gone as if it had never been, rattled off that they had no information, that they could not say, in a language I did not understand. Such a Hebrew clatter of consonants for 'nothing.' If G-d is a word, Kushner's flaming aleph, and creation was spoken, how is it that 'nothing' should have all those words, too, all that power?
I think I made out 'Golani'--Jeff's regiment. Special ops, but not too special, not the Mossad or anything so exciting and invulnerable. Urban combat--well, he's in then, isn't he? Deployed to Gaza with the ground troops. We thought he might be. No, we knew. It was a matter of time, for months it's been a calculation, a satellite slowly burning up in the atmosphere before crashing. He knows he's not ready for this: his Hebrew still too poor to understand what his commander wants. Making aliyah like a child running home to a mother who beats him. Mor and Haddas, thank god, are women, and have safer jobs in the army. Saved by the persistence of Israeli sexism.
Given the difficulty news agencies are having getting personnel into key areas of Israel right now, I thought it couldn't hurt to be intrepid and offer myself up as a work experience candidate/intern/junior reporter/general bitch to some of them and see if anyone needs me like that Christmas tree needed Charlie Brown. I wrote the BBC a brief letter, had it beta'd by two other writers, toned it down from the American job application standard (slavish, rabid enthusiasm) to something someone British could read without wincing (To![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mister_duster: 'I'd be delighted to' needs to change. Do you like 'I feel I'm capable of'? B/c the Brits are never delighted. They find the prospect disquieting.). Then I sent it off to draegonhawke's older brother, who's previously worked as foreign correspondent in China, to vet before I send it on.
But why stop with the BBC? I'll simultaneously prostitute myself to NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, print news, online!news, fucking 'Reader's Digest' if they want me. Because my CV with its scanty publication credits sure as hell wants them.
But that's war, then. Not the American 'off-in-Iraq-or-somewhere' 'War on Terror,' 'War on Drugs,' ''War on War's' a good Wilco song' knock-off. War-inna-box! New from IKEA. 'Do I have to assemble it myself?', she asks. Don't worry, War comes with washers and factions in tiny sachets. Not like Owen or Sassoon or any of the war poets--not so imperiled or gloriously bleak. It feels melodramatic to even be concerned, to even call it war, like it's Ypres or Hiroshima or Agincourt. It isn't. But it’s crept into this place like radon poisoning, making it eerie, denaturing it. Making it unhomelike, unheimlich, uncanny, surreal. I woke up this morning for work at five-something and wondered if I’d dreamed the ground advance.
How to interpret the feelings of the non-Israelis here? Is there an element of touristic voyeurism, of delight in the drama, the panic, the worried parents back home, the awed friends? Or more charitably, is any possible satisfaction derived from this more a re-evaluation of privilege? So much of the world lives in the constant psychological privation of martial threat. When had we ever known that aspect of the human condition, in America, the UK, some EU country? For us this is novel: Israelis-born Jews, Sabras, think it unremarkable. Perhaps a life lived without ever risking it is impoverished in some way. Perhaps that's just romanticism, more grotesque for acting on something so vital and dire to the Israelis, an elitist attempt to reconnect with something authentic, as if authenticity weren't destroyed in the very act. We don't know their condition, not really: we can, all of us, get on a plane out of the country. Perhaps not easily, but it's possible. Or we'll be coddled with assistance from our embassies if the situation worsens. This isn't our home.
Yet is there a value in experience that can't be undermined by one's own background? Is it enough to say I went here, I did this, I lived through whatever this war will end up being called, if it even earns a name? Can you write about such experience without it being appropriation? Can you claim your own life in that way, as if it were all yours, whole and integral, no breaks where you wonder if you've the right, no tears where you re-evaluate your experience against that of others and find it wanting? The act of memoir is a fundamentally arrogant assertion of the self. And yet it's human. Perhaps constructing personal narrative is not the assemblage of an artifice, but our right. And if we each of us has that right to reveal, to be performative, to essay, to appropriate and remake the world and call it ourselves, it might even be salvatory.
There is something disquieting about Mariah, over-excitable and shrieky, whose voice always has that annoying continental-Spanish lisp to it when she's South American, saying over breakfast that in the last war the bombs got as far as Nahariya, as far as Haifa itself, which is maybe an hour further south. Draw a semi-circle from Lebanon to the resplendent seaside town of Haifa. Another from the Gaza strip, where Hamas is launching their rockets, to the university town of Beersheba. To the kibbutz in the south that got hit, not so terribly far from my own former kibbutz in the south, Gerofit. Circles in the larger urban centres where the Hamas calls for suicide bombers are most likely to be answered. A surprising portion of the country: the map clotting up with the probability of danger. People ask where I am, meaning to find out if I'm on the front. There isn't one, really. Just increased zones of risk, overlaying the banal constancy of life on the kibbutz.
Today I cut my thumb gutting pumpkin for the soup: the second time this week. I went home with the flu, and should head to the Doctor's before he closes for the day. Today the first Israeli casualties came back, and Yuda and George stood under the radio looking up at it like Torah scrolls were being removed, delicately unfastened, like it was Rosh Hashanah--a new year with the new war, cyclical and fresh. Would we pass the radio around, holding it high, and kiss it reverently? Touch the tips of our tallis to it for luck? The normally garrulous Galla-Galla-Gallat army radio station (vi-va la mu-sic-a!), its constantly-cycling, limited spit of American pop music gone as if it had never been, rattled off that they had no information, that they could not say, in a language I did not understand. Such a Hebrew clatter of consonants for 'nothing.' If G-d is a word, Kushner's flaming aleph, and creation was spoken, how is it that 'nothing' should have all those words, too, all that power?
I think I made out 'Golani'--Jeff's regiment. Special ops, but not too special, not the Mossad or anything so exciting and invulnerable. Urban combat--well, he's in then, isn't he? Deployed to Gaza with the ground troops. We thought he might be. No, we knew. It was a matter of time, for months it's been a calculation, a satellite slowly burning up in the atmosphere before crashing. He knows he's not ready for this: his Hebrew still too poor to understand what his commander wants. Making aliyah like a child running home to a mother who beats him. Mor and Haddas, thank god, are women, and have safer jobs in the army. Saved by the persistence of Israeli sexism.
Given the difficulty news agencies are having getting personnel into key areas of Israel right now, I thought it couldn't hurt to be intrepid and offer myself up as a work experience candidate/intern/junior reporter/general bitch to some of them and see if anyone needs me like that Christmas tree needed Charlie Brown. I wrote the BBC a brief letter, had it beta'd by two other writers, toned it down from the American job application standard (slavish, rabid enthusiasm) to something someone British could read without wincing (To
mister_duster: 'I'd be delighted to' needs to change. Do you like 'I feel I'm capable of'? B/c the Brits are never delighted. They find the prospect disquieting.). Then I sent it off to draegonhawke's older brother, who's previously worked as foreign correspondent in China, to vet before I send it on.But why stop with the BBC? I'll simultaneously prostitute myself to NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, print news, online!news, fucking 'Reader's Digest' if they want me. Because my CV with its scanty publication credits sure as hell wants them.
But that's war, then. Not the American 'off-in-Iraq-or-somewhere' 'War on Terror,' 'War on Drugs,' ''War on War's' a good Wilco song' knock-off. War-inna-box! New from IKEA. 'Do I have to assemble it myself?', she asks. Don't worry, War comes with washers and factions in tiny sachets. Not like Owen or Sassoon or any of the war poets--not so imperiled or gloriously bleak. It feels melodramatic to even be concerned, to even call it war, like it's Ypres or Hiroshima or Agincourt. It isn't. But it’s crept into this place like radon poisoning, making it eerie, denaturing it. Making it unhomelike, unheimlich, uncanny, surreal. I woke up this morning for work at five-something and wondered if I’d dreamed the ground advance.
How to interpret the feelings of the non-Israelis here? Is there an element of touristic voyeurism, of delight in the drama, the panic, the worried parents back home, the awed friends? Or more charitably, is any possible satisfaction derived from this more a re-evaluation of privilege? So much of the world lives in the constant psychological privation of martial threat. When had we ever known that aspect of the human condition, in America, the UK, some EU country? For us this is novel: Israelis-born Jews, Sabras, think it unremarkable. Perhaps a life lived without ever risking it is impoverished in some way. Perhaps that's just romanticism, more grotesque for acting on something so vital and dire to the Israelis, an elitist attempt to reconnect with something authentic, as if authenticity weren't destroyed in the very act. We don't know their condition, not really: we can, all of us, get on a plane out of the country. Perhaps not easily, but it's possible. Or we'll be coddled with assistance from our embassies if the situation worsens. This isn't our home.
Yet is there a value in experience that can't be undermined by one's own background? Is it enough to say I went here, I did this, I lived through whatever this war will end up being called, if it even earns a name? Can you write about such experience without it being appropriation? Can you claim your own life in that way, as if it were all yours, whole and integral, no breaks where you wonder if you've the right, no tears where you re-evaluate your experience against that of others and find it wanting? The act of memoir is a fundamentally arrogant assertion of the self. And yet it's human. Perhaps constructing personal narrative is not the assemblage of an artifice, but our right. And if we each of us has that right to reveal, to be performative, to essay, to appropriate and remake the world and call it ourselves, it might even be salvatory.
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