I am Israeli. Not a villain.
By: Isotta Reichenbach
Tags: Israel, Palestine

The Dead Sea, Israel & West Bank

My day starts like any other. Well, if I’m meeting someone new. “Where are you originally from?” they ask, eyeing up my olive complexion, (proudly) crooked nose and frizzy hair. I smile and weigh up my answer. Nine times out of ten, I settle on telling the truth, that I am Israeli-Italian. The response is usually an eyebrow raise and an uttering of “Oh. Interesting…” It’s a reaction I have come to expect over the last few years. Unsure of how to proceed, my new friend then prepares themselves to pry. As we begin to chat, I imagine what is going through their head. I think it’s something along the lines of: “How can you stomach being from a place that awful?” Explaining or even defending Israel has become a knee jerk reaction. I weave my experiences and conclusions into anecdotes that seldom vary. However, my mother also recently reminded me that if I’m going to talk about Israel, I must talk about Palestine. I often do and I will come to it later. But first, I want to share my experiences, through my eyes, as a young, Israeli woman living in London.

Having grown up fairly ‘A-religious’, I began to explore my Israeli roots as a teenager and eventually moved back to the country with my Israeli boyfriend in 2016. I instantly relaxed at the thought of not having to defend my heritage. Everyone just got it. We were all the same — regardless of race, origin or religious enthusiasm and I felt bound to the people of Israel. There was an unspoken consensus that this pocket of land on the Mediterranean sea was the best and only option for us to live our lives as Jews. But the country was chaotic and heavy. The air was dusty and everyone shouted at each other all day long. The young soldiers, heading home for their weekly leave, lined the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with guns poking out around their lowly slung trousers. Whispers of war were everywhere and rockets flew silently, daily around the borders and war with Iran loomed. But now, in the comfort of my family home in London, all I remember was the feeling of being at home. Even if I was not completely Jewish, or my British mannerisms were too reserved, I slotted neatly into my life in Tel Aviv, fearing only that my apartment could be flattened by a bomb the next day.

The realities of life in Israel didn’t impact me until I moved back to London. It was 2018 and the summer of terrorist attacks across Europe. I found myself on edge and fearful of public spaces and crowds in central London. I also discovered that my stories of a charmed and dusky life in the Middle East went down like a lead balloon. In those first few months of moving back to London, I lost several friends over night. My friends had always come from an assortment of backgrounds and religions. Growing up, I was the only remotely Jewish person at school and I loved it. Nights and dinners out were varied. We used to lurk in shisha bars on Edgware Road and Irish pubs in Kilburn. We all heralded from strong cultures and found a way to mesh them together, relaying our stories of difficult uncles and our parents’ ridiculous rules. I remember the slow decline of those friendships around my late teens. Our differences, once celebrated, had become politicised and our interactions became hostile. However, some of those bonds stuck and we continued to share stories of our troubled homelands, promising faithfully to visit each other’s in the near future.

It was after university that I decided to move to Israel. Although many reactions to my news were warm, some were unsettling. My friends began saying that they would never go to Israel and went on anti-Israel marches. What disturbed me wasn’t so much the ‘anti’ war rhetoric, it was the ‘anti’ our existence part. I thought it unfair how they were fighting so vehemently against only one country in the world’s right to exist. Why, when so many other nations were born in circumstances — and behave in ways — far more atrocious? Protesters were openly waving swastikas and the hate I witnessed was unlike anything I had seen before. I was also targeted by a group of boys singing Nazi death camp songs at me on my way home. I felt frozen, unsure of what was happening. On the one hand, I couldn’t condone the war and still can’t. Yet, I felt that the opposition to Israel was obsessive and misinformed, and stirred up hatred towards Jewish communities. I couldn’t seem to have a reasonable conversation with anyone about the situation.

To many, in real time, Israel’s founding was symbolic of Jews’ resilience after facing genocide both in the Middle East and Europe. But now, we were called ‘Nazis’ and ‘Villains’, words that are purposefully vindictive. I remembered our ancestors, who were packed off in ships to Haifa port from Austria or sent roaming through the desert from North Africa. They were told that Israel, not their birth places, was home. As the famed Israeli writer Amos Oz writes in his autobiography: “Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: ‘Yids, go back to Palestine,’ so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge [sic] shouts at us: ‘Yids, get out of Palestine.” I also remembered the Palestinian Jews, living peacefully with Muslims under Ottoman rule, who were told in the early 20th century that they had to leave. There seemed to be so much more to our country’s history than people were willing to see. My rumblings of discontent led me to the conclusion that: this feels like anti-Semitism. It was subtle, and realigned for the 21st Century, but the feeling was unmistakable. Anti-Semitism is relentless; a masterful shape shifter, but Jews will tell you they have always been able to see it coming. How do you explain to a non-Jew what anti-Semitism is? If it were easy, or the audience receptive enough, countless deaths and centuries of paranoia would have been unwarranted. Yet, the concept of an endemic aversion towards Jews in society has never been realised until it is too late.

After moving back from Israel to London in 2018, I remember the palatable dread of knowing that I had spent a year in one of the most controversial places on earth. I could picture my friends’ faces and hear their words, which were tolerant of my choice at best. The ones that fell away from my life first were those who said that modern day anti-Semitism didn’t exist. Those who tentatively remained in my life acknowledged that anti-Semitism existed but that it was not to be confused with ‘anti-Zionism.’ It is this sentiment that I have found the hardest to rebuke and one that keeps me awake at night. It is impossible to condense all of my feelings about it here, now. I won’t lament the increase of violent crimes against Jews, nor the countless Middle Eastern Jews ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes in Yemen, Iraq, Iran etc. (the list is far too long) and packed off to Israel. I won’t languish over the fact that Israel is essentially a refugee camp built by the people who criticise it today. I will say, however, that we have suffered and still suffer greatly. I read an old interview recently with Natalie Portman (who is Israeli) which struck a chord with me. She says: “Often I wish I was from somewhere inoffensive to anyone, neutral, unproblematic. Like, ‘Hi, I’m Finnish.’ But I know that Israel — the place and its stories — engages me like nothing else. It has made me understand that so many conflicting things can be true at the same time.”

Being Israeli is the exact state of being many things at once. It is being a victim; a survivor; left wing; right wing; gay; straight; Middle Eastern; European; but most importantly, under extreme circumstances, a perpetrator. I want you to know that I don’t take that last one lightly. The situation in Israel is unimaginably difficult and we have managed to make the best out of it; but whilst we are still victims of abuse, Palestinians are perhaps even more so. I believe that we as Israelis should be better than our aggressors and acknowledge the fact that we are causing pain to others. We cannot rewrite our history, nor help the fact that we ended up in Israel, but we have a responsibility to ourselves to be better than our harshest detractors.

It is our right, like any other nation of people, to survive and rebuild our lives. But it is our responsibility to not turn into the people that our own perpetrators were and are. But honestly, this is a very heavy responsibility. Historically, the world has continuously attempted to exclude Jews from their native lands and even Palestinians have played their part in this. So the notion of rising above it and trying to do better, whilst admirable, can be complicated. Most, if not all Israelis are simply trying to live a normal life under extreme duress and having to defend and contemplate the conflict every time someone asks me where I am from, is tiring.

So, yes, I am Israeli. I am not a victim and not a villain — I am somewhere humanly in-between, just like you.