Personal Fear, Anger Blunt an Israeli Liberal’s Impulse for Empathy

I was always a lazy leftist.

While trying to graduate from university, make a career for myself, have a social life, I would argue (the favorite Israeli pastime) with friends about how we must find a solution--give back the occupied territories, stop the settlements. Until last Dec. 9 “the Palestinian problem” was something intangible and impersonal. Not any more.

I had a nightmare recently about trying to enter Gaza. The army had closed the area off and I was trying to talk my way through. But when they let me in I suddenly realized that I was trapped and couldn’t get out. I woke up in a cold sweat and knew that “the Palestinian problem” had finally gotten to me.

I wonder if the government is losing as much sleep over the Palestinians as I am?

After weeks of riots, violent demonstrations and daily casualties, what I feel toward the Palestinians is a mixture of empathy, fear and hate. The empathy is for their desire to have a state of their own; the fear is that they wouldn’t mind seeing me dead. And I hate them because they made me a symbol. I am the army, the soldier with the club, the settler, the intruder on their land. I am the bulldozer and the oppressor.

If I am guilty of anything, it is the fact that I didn’t attend enough demonstrations protesting occupation, that I waited so long for an “uprising” to shake me up.

The problem is that it’s also dangerously easy to learn to live with this new situation. Seventeen year-old Hatem El-Sisi, the first casualty of the uprising, may have touched a nerve in some Israelis, but what about No. 75? Or 76?

I know my local geography better now than I did before Dec. 9. Arab villages and refugee camps that I previously never heard of, like Idna, El Arroub, Shati and Mughazi, exist. They’re alive and kicking.

I want to believe that the people who live in these places and hate me are not very different from me--that they, too, want to live a “normal” life in this crazy mixed-up country. But we never had a chance to meet. We were never properly introduced. In school I learned that they ran away from their lands in 1948. In school they learned that we drove them away. We were taught we have a right to the land. They were taught that we stole it.

Sometimes I feel like walking up to the first Arab I see in the street and saying to him: “Look, it’s not my fault. I was only 3 years old in 1967, when the war broke out, when it ended, and we occupied your territories. As far as I’m concerned you can have it all back.”

Every day the situation gets worse. Jerusalem, my home town, has become a battlefield. I once thought it would be nice to have an apartment in Abu-Tor, one of the beautiful neighborhoods facing the Old City. Now I’m glad I don’t live there. Abu-Tor is surrounded by picturesque Arab villages whose occupants are now throwing stones.

While driving through East Jerusalem, a Jewish taxi driver was speculating out loudon whether the state of Israel will still exist in 20 years. We were both a little nervous driving through that part of the city.

The thought of getting hit by a rock on my way to the grocery is constantly with me. Maybe the people living in New York still have more to fear as they walk in the streets, but still, it’s not as comfortable here anymore as it used to be.

There is definitely a threat in the air. It’s a small country. Hebron, Nablus and Ramallah are not somewhere out in the sticks. The threat is right at my doorstep.

If it’s meant to frighten, the Palestinian “uprising” is a definite achievement. I am one frightened Israeli.

If the Palestinians are intoxicated with the new understanding of their power, then many Israelis are devastated by the new knowledge of their helplessness. What else but a sense of helplessness can result from a mixture of empathy, fear and hate?