Thoughts on the Conflict: Do Jews Believe in "Intractable?"

The Israeli government ordered ground troops to enter Gaza Thursday evening, Israel time.  Though this raises the potential for immediate casualties for Israelis and Palestinians, most Israelis, it seems to me, support the incursion.

More and more, over the past week, I have heard Israeli lay people and leaders alike use the word “intractable” to refer to the conflict.  Perhaps the incursion will buy us a few years of quiet, I hear people say.

Unfortunately, the sense that this conflict has no clear end is hardly new.  In a Hartman session devoted to the poetry of war and peace, my colleagues and I read a poem called “The Winter of 1973,” written in 1994 by those who were born following the Yom Kippur War.  The narrators in the poem, written by Shmuel Haspri and set to music, are now themselves in the army and they speak out to their parents about broken promises and disappointment.  Here is most of the poem:

We are the children of winter 1973

You dreamt us first at dawn at the end of the battles

You were tired men who were grateful for their good fortune

You were worried young women and you wanted so much to love

When you conceived us with love in winter 1973

You wanted to fill up with your bodies what the war took away…

You promised a dove,

An olive tree branch

You promised peace

You promised spring at home and blossoms

You promised to keep your promises, you promised a dove

We are the children of the winter of 1973

We grew up and now we are in the army

With our weapons and a helmet on our heads

We know how to make love to laugh and to weep

We are men we are women

And we too dream about babies

This is why we will not pressures, demand or threaten you.

When we were young you said promises need to be kept

We will give you strength if that is what you need

We will not hold back

We just wanted to whisper

We are the children of that winter in the year 1973

And here is a video of a performance of the popular song, based on the poem:

As she spoke of this poem and others, Rachel Korazim, a scholar of Jewish education with expertise in Holocaust education and Israeli poetry and a former IDF officer, emphasized that in all of her experience as an IDF officer, mother of IDF soldiers and educator of Israeli youth, she identified two basic realities:  one, that what Israeli soldiers want most when they enter a battle is for them and their friends to come back alive and two, that what parents want most when they send their children off to battle is for their children to come home alive.  No heroics.  No vanquishing of the enemy.   Just coming back home safely.

With very few exceptions, she stressed, Israeli war poetry going back to the War of Independence in 1948 has not been about victory.  It’s been about the necessity of war, the horror of war and, above all, the unshakable love that army buddies have for one another before, during and long after battle.

Israelis deserve to live in peace, as do the inhabitants of Gaza.  Most Israelis I’ve spoken to believe both parts of that statement with a full heart.   Their fight is with Hamas, not the people of Gaza.  According to several newspaper accounts, they are not alone in this regard. Egyptians are increasingly critical of Hamas and blame their actions for endangering the lives of the residents of Gaza. 

When Dr. Rami Nasrallah, a Palestinian urban planner, native Jerusalemite and founder of the International Peace and Cooperation Center, spoke to our rabbinic cohort yesterday, he emphasized the need for greater collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian Jerusalemites for the benefit of the entire city.  

Dr. Rami Nasrallah, founder of IPCI, speaking to the Hartman Institute Rabbinic Leadership Initiative

He indicated that the current impasse is “lose-lose,” and that mutual benefit can accrue to both sides if they each consider the economic and security needs of the other.  He came across quite angry and frustrated, but also pragmatic in articulating plans for partnership in mindful urban planning. 

On Wednesday night, we had a session with Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum, a sabra from a Moroccan Jewish family, graduate of the Masorti (Conservative) Schechter Institute and founder of an egalitarian minyan in Jerusalem.  

Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum, founder of ZION:  an Eretz Israeli Congregation in Jerusalem, who spoke with our cohort

She described a scene that took place at her family seder when she was 8 years old.  In keeping with family tradition, her grandfather, at one point in the seder, said that it was time for the women to go into the kitchen to complete the preparations for the meal while the men continued the seder.  Tamar stood up at that moment and said, “How can that be, grandpa?  Everyone left Egypt and everyone should tell the story.”  After she finished speaking, there was a ghostly quiet around the table.  Her parents were mortified.  No one knew what to say.  And then her grandfather said, "הילדה צודקת hayalda tzodeket.”  The girl is right.  And everyone, men and women, boys and girls, sat together to tell the story of Passover.

Rabbi Elad Appelbaum finished the story and said, “Sometimes we think there’s a situation that will never, never change.  And it changes.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems intractable in multiple ways; in fact, conflict theorists have identified that it has virtually every quality of a classic intractable conflict.  But who would have imagined that a Moroccan Jewish grandfather would listen to his granddaughter and suddenly change a tradition of thousands of years?  And who would have imagined that Jewish and Muslim leaders would get together, as they did several days ago in Jerusalem and the West Bank, to end the Fast of Tammuz and the Fast of Ramadan?  

With no illusions that peace is around the corner and with full appreciation for the seeming intractability of this conflict, there are those Israelis and Palestinians who hold out hope and work toward that hope.

Having told us about her grandfather, Rabbi Elad Appelbaum shared something immeasurably valuable that she learned from her grandmother, who used to bake bread for the family every day:  "If the dough isn’t quite right, and often it isn’t, you keep hitting it and pushing it and shaping it and hitting it and pushing it and shaping it.  Until you get it right.”  

Somehow, the confluence of pressure and nourishment hit me in a profoundly uplifting way. Better to hit dough, which brings bread, which brings life.  Intractability, the rabbi seemed to be teaching us, is not a Jewish concept. Sustaining ourselves and others demands that we keep at it until we get it right.

Shabbat is about to begin in Jerusalem, the city of peace.  I enter Shabbat thinking of a grandmother who never gave up and a grandfather who switched gears.  And I think about Rabbi Elad Appelbaum, Dr. Rami Nasrallah and a generation of Israelis and Palestinians who deserve to move forward.  

Written on July 18, 2014