I am happy for you, for anyone really, who has hope. But please, don’t tell me to hope that Israel will ever be what it once was to me. It has lost its exuberance, its vitality, which had been its defining nature. The people who had made it for me, a place where, as novelist Nicole Krauss wrote, “it is not possible to be unalive” are deadened by grief, anxiety and perpetual dread.
I often wonder about the Moroccan-Israeli mother of four who toasted herself on her 70th birthday at the table we were sharing in Akko at an inn now closed in deference to bombs from southern Lebanon. “I am not a glass-half-full woman,” she boasted. “I am not a glass-half-empty woman! I am a glass flowing-over-all-the-time woman!”
I lament with my friend in Haifa, whose ex-husband successfully sued for child custody on a claim that their young son and two daughters would be safer with him farther south in Tel Aviv.
I despair at the change in my friends, a couple in Tel Aviv, Meretz supporters who had hurled themselves into the pro-democracy demonstrations and who, after October 7, turned to face the wall when I asked whether the military’s response to that attack might be disproportionate.
I don’t have the moral standing to challenge a friend in Jerusalem who’s been so shaken by uncertainty, so spent by insecurity, she no longer has the strength or the stamina to hold the government in contempt. It is easier to believe that Israel’s leaders, however vile, have escalated the war with the safety and security of the nation at heart.
Again, if you have hope, please, please hope. Hope for us all, myself included. But I am reconciled to loss, including the loss of hope that Israel will ever be for me what it was meant to be: a place where the rights and dignity of all are acknowledged and upheld.
Yet, the unthinkable occurs time and again. And so a tiny but robust, obdurate, nanoscopic spot in my psyche goads me, dares me to think that maybe, maybe, just perhaps I will at some time board the late night flight to Ben Gurion, arrive at dawn and feel that mighty tug of life drawing me back again׃
ֹ֛את אָשִׁ֥יב אֶל־לִבִּ֖י עַל־כֵּ֥ן אוֹחִֽי
But this do I call to mind, Therefore I have hope:
Lamentations 3:21”
This piece is part of a series of reflections from the J Street community. Read the rest of the reflections here.