“I have a dream” – by a privileged Jewish post-Zionist woman

Written by Adi Mor, a participant in the Training Course for Change Agents in the Performing Arts 2021 as her final assignment in the course

When I was a girl, I loved books. My reading began with Kofiko the talking monkey, the first book my grandmother insisted I read, to learn Hebrew. After that, like any other ordinary Israeli girl I read Dvora Omer’s books, all of them — about early pioneers like Manya Shochat and Sarah Aaronsohn the heroine of Nili, and all the rest.

I used to imagine myself riding bareback on a horse, my hair wild in the wind, my expression impudent, caught between love and ideology, fearless, draining the swamps, sacrificing my aching heart on the altar of the new society — and my biography would be published in a hardcover edition by Dvora Omer herself and be adored by girls my age.

Thirty-some years later, instead of sacrificing my heart on the altar of Jewish settlement, I sacrifice my sanity on the altar of education. I stand facing a class and ask: If your commander orders you to fire, without your understanding why, will you shoot? “Of course,” most of them say confidently, “of course we’ll shoot, teacher! Those guys are terrorists.” “And,” I persist, “if you don’t know whether they are terrorists?” They have a hard time understanding. “What do you mean? If the commander says to shoot then he knows, and what the commander says, we do… If it’s a mistake, that’s on him.”

I can connect the dots with a straight line from my dreams as a confirmed reader of Dvora Omer to their shining eyes as they talk about their military commander. Not all of them, of course; I usually try not to generalize. But most of them.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I don’t think there has been a deterioration; after Baruch Goldstein repeatedly fired on worshippers, a child in my class at school said, “They deserve it.” My teacher paled at those words and then turned red and shot back, “Such words don’t belong here, leave the classroom!” But that was an era when every classroom activity involved cutting out cardboard doves and olive leaves and coloring them. I hated that, I’m not good at coloring within the lines. In any case, by contrast, today, in one of the classes I teach, someone suggested carrying out a massacre, including women and children, and I attempted to find out who this was aimed at so maybe I could warn my friends. The disappearance of shame is significant but that’s not the issue now.

Let’s return to the same imaginary line, one I’m not bad at drawing, every object of admiration hung around one’s neck is like the bell of a sacred cow, it’s dangerous, and whoever shakes their head in shame upon hearing the harsh statements of beloved students but smiles with pleasure upon hearing that sweet dream of riding bareback does not understand – that dream, that sacred dream, is the cow that birthed the calf we are busy nurturing now. What I am reaching for is that it is impossible to believe in complete equality and believe in Zionism, neither the shameless version of Zionism currently in fashion nor the Zionism of the past. The time has come to sober up and, yes, like any former denizen of Tel Aviv who lived mainly in the dismal gloom of the neighborhood bars, I know that sobering up is a painful process. But it is also a duty that attaches to any powerful “privilege.”

With your permission I would like to expand on the process of my disillusionment, and maybe because I’m a Pisces or maybe just because I am more comfortable in the world of the imagination than in reality, I’ll go about it by looking deeply into my daydreams.

My pioneering dream phase did not last long. I was fortunate to grow up in a family where the world is really not seen dichotomously in terms of good and bad. What can be expected of a family where the innocent question of a child, Is there a God?, meets the reply that “If God exists, can he create a stone he cannot lift?” Ah, and of course the crusher is “Where was God during the Holocaust?” No, in a place where there are questions, shallow forms of ethos cannot exist. Neither the ethos of the girl riding bareback nor the ethos of the military officer is omniscient. Because there is a very small distance between the question of Where was God during the Holocaust? and the question If I had been German during the Holocaust, would I have been a Nazi? At least, that’s how things stood in my anxious mind, and if that’s not clear, I’m a classic third generation.

In any case, that question, that horrifying thought, that maybe I could have been a Nazi, is the first pebble tossed in the well to create all my ripples of skepticism, the roots of my political tree.

When you launch a cardboard dove with an olive leaf, you have to ask yourself,  to whom are you addressing it? So that picture of myself as a fighter riding bareback expands, to reveal the people against whom I fight. But if there is no clear distribution of good and bad that means that I am a little good and a little bad, and so are they. And I don’t want to fight people who aren’t “the bad guys,” the optics aren’t good, just ask an American screenwriter.

And so my dream of pioneering sank to the depths of my memory and in its place a new daydream came.

The Robin Hood dream – fighting for justice for the weak.

My Robin Hood dream lasted many years, changing shape as I grew older. But at its foundation it remained the same, I, the strong one, fighting for others, for those with no voice. The word occupation in my home sounded like a synonym for great injustice. Thus in my young mind I already knew that my side was doing some very bad things.

During terrorist attacks I was sure I was about to die, and in my diary I wrote a will that included detailed instructions that I wasn’t interested in revenge being taken in my name. I imagined how my funeral would be covered by the media and that they would say what a child of peace I was, how good-hearted. And Liran, the boy I was in love with, would weep bitterly that a great spirit like mine could be so prematurely snuffed out. Because Robin Hood dreams are like that, they are mainly about yourself. In the army I refused to take my weapon home with me, which bothered no one considering that at the firing range I would weep bitter tears and aim for the legs. As a non-commissioned officer in the education corps, I announced proudly that I was unwilling to serve in a combat unit, but no one cared because all the other women in my cohort wanted to get into combat units themselves. The ease with which they agreed to all my conditions disappointed me since I had dreamt of an ideological struggle, one that would mark me as an activist. On the other hand I breathed easier because at bottom I am someone who lectures and I don’t like to make trouble. Whenever I met Arabs, they were shopping at the pharmacy or hauling my stuff when I changed apartments, and I would smile exaggeratedly and behave with excessive generosity so that they would think well of me and say to themselves, what a good person she is.

It took some time for the Robin Hood phase to pass, because a sense of superiority of that kind is hard to crack. I see it around me all the time, now that I’m so sensitized to it; it’s so comfortable and so mistaken.

There were lots of people and encounters and books and articles that began generating increasing discomfort with my daydreams. I’ll try to reduce them to just two, the first about the mind and about knowing, the second about the heart.

After the army I followed love and flew to South Africa, where I lived for two years; the love did not survive but Africa and the story of that continent were already resonating within me long since. It was there that I understood the nature of colonialism, I felt the deep wound, and it was also there that I felt my “whiteness” more than ever before. When I traveled around, children ran after me shouting mzungu, white person, and I squirmed when they performed for me so I would give them money or candy as they had learned to do for the enjoyment of white tourists. Being Robin Hood had never felt so bad. My boyfriend’s family was active in the resistance to apartheid which made me ashamed of doing nothing. And they admired Mandela, so I read his autobiography and then continued reading a lot of other books about Africa while I was making my way through the conversations of noisy volunteers for a day, who had read no books and for whom the pattern from which they were operating was the shallow one of the identical weak and needy black. My range of vision expanded; if that’s how it was there, how was it back home?

And then came Ahed Tamimi. Her story went straight to my heart. First of all there was suddenly a face, which was far different from everything I had seen in newspapers and on television. It’s sad how much our consciousness is built around images and how much our hearts are crushed, not from pity but from identification, by what looks familiar and known to us. But her story crushed me first of all because it cracked open my perception of myself as potentially speaking out on behalf of others; Ahed Tamimi knows how to speak out loudly and clearly, she really does not need me to speak on her behalf. I felt terribly ashamed, with my disguised racism exposed, my sense of superiority. I finally understood that what I need to be is a partner in the struggle, and not – seriously? – Robin Hood. What was I thinking? And anyhow I don’t look good in tights.

That they called her a terrorist kept me awake at night, how in a country like ours could they call a girl confronting an armed soldier in her own back yard, a terrorist? This made me ask the obvious question, which I had never asked: Who decides who is a terrorist? And I remember that the revered Mandela had also been described that way. And above all this made me think about Palestinian boys and teens, and from there it wasn’t a stretch to discover the imprisonment of children.

See, when you suffer from a superiority complex it’s possible to acknowledge the injustice of the occupation, it’s terrible but – there is always injustice like that in superiority – but we, the Jews, have some special gene that protects us from being cruel like the really dark regimes, our soldiers don’t rape, they wouldn’t kill casually, that just can’t be. Yet arrests of children, that doesn’t fit well with this fictitious gene. The occupation is not simply a distant and general concept, it’s made of thousands of injustices, and what I know about is only the tip of the iceberg, so the question is: Do I have the courage to look deeply into this?

The answer is yes, and it’s here that my disillusionment finds some momentum, and it causes headaches and nausea and problems of identity, but that’s nothing compared to continuing to live in the dark, and just so it doesn’t sound like I’m complaining, I get to ponder this from my very comfortable existence.

Today my Robin Hood dreams are long past, and I have a new daydream. One state where everyone is equal, and not just equal but living together. Once upon a time an older American man from Texas asked me, after a political discussion, “So your living situation is really like segregation?” For me this was a gut punch in terms of how much blindness there is among people in positions of power. And anyway, none of my pioneering dreams or my Robin Hood dreams could have happened if all of us had been living together.

Does the idea of one state frighten me? I’ll answer in all candor that yes, there is always the fear of the unknown, but all the other options are worse. And maybe I don’t know where God was during the Holocaust, and anyway I’m an atheist, but on this matter I understand, a little, the connection a believer has with God; sometimes, all we need is – faith.

So now I have a new daydream, a small community of Arabs and Jews, with lots of space and surrounded by nature. I’m wearing rubber work boots, milking a cow and gathering free range eggs, we are a green community of course, my children run around with the neighbors’ kids and speak a mixture of Arabic and Hebrew…