Going to Israel

by Peter Rashkin

I'm going to Israel next month. Many people have asked me why, especially now, when it is so conflicted and possibly dangerous.

I wasn't always a news junkie and Israel has always been for me just one more trouble spot of which I was vaguely aware. This time around — since the current intifada started two years ago — I was paying more attention through the LA Times, Pacifica Radio, NPR. What struck me most was that the rhetoric on both sides sounded so similar. Only the names had been changed, and if you didn't hear a name you couldn't tell if it was an Israeli complaining about the Palestinians or a Palestinian complaining about the Israelis. At any rate. the speaker sounded very convincing; the argument irrefutable. I was intrigued.

When I realized that my friend Michael Alexander had a brother who moved to a kibbutz in 1972 and has been there ever since, I had the impulse to visit him. I contacted him in June and received an enthusiastic invitation.

Meanwhile, Cousin Mickey, perhaps intrigued by my travel reports here, had been asking when he could come with me on a trip, so I asked him if he would be up for this one. Now we are two.

NOW BEGAN the months of preparation: Reading, making contacts, pouring over maps. Buying tickets. Making plans. Becoming more intrigued by politics in history. It reminds me of when I was getting ready for my trips to Romania and Paraguay, where I went for eclipses, knowing nothing about the places when I decided to go there, but studying and becoming intrigued, for every place has its depth and mystery waiting to be revealed. So I try to get the lay of the land and a sense for the history of the area I'm about to visit, and I am drawn in.

SPIRITUAL ROOTS

Cousin Mickey lives back east, so when we booked the trip we arranged to meet in London and spend a full day there before flying on to Tel Aviv. Later we decided we would "Do Marx" — the apartment where he lived in squalor, the British Museum Reading Room where he wrote Das Kapital, and his grave. I began to think of it as an homage to our own spiritual roots (our folks were Reds) before going on to the place where so many others see theirs.

But a couple of days ago I was having lunch with BJ, a family friend I've known since I was 12, and I was telling him about this.

"I don't think that's your spiritual roots," he told me. "You don't have spiritual roots. More than anyone I know, you have made yourself up."

I tell this anecdote to make a point: If I can't really claim Marx as my spiritual source, neither can I claim the sites and symbols of the Judeo-Christian tradition. (I've discussed my ambivalence about my Jewishness elsewhere. Jews who fear assimilation could use me for a poster child.) They are no more mine than the symbols of India or Indigenous America or Ancient Greece, which is to say they are all mine. Israel is not particularly a Holy Land for me; I have never yearned for her. So I come as a visitor and an outsider, with respect but no particular connection. To walk where Jesus walked, or Moses or Abraham, that will be a kick, just as it has been to walk where and Cuatemoc and Quetzacoyatl walked in Mexico