limestone buildings with doors of electric sky blue. I remember walking through the Golan Heights, cautioned to stay on the trail, that there were still landmines from the 1967 war. I remember our tour guide, Sarah, pointing across the valley from Misgav Am, “those hills over there, that’s Syria. And you can see from here, a Hezbollah flag in the window.” She showed us—there is the edge. The edge of this place, the edge of this identity, and over there, across the valley, is hatred, harm, violence. I remember Tsfat, the oldest synagogue I’d ever imagined. I remember Shabbat at the Western Wall, Sarah telling us, “Israel is your home, if you want.” I could feel the power of this. Belonging. But the cost was also palpable. I’d debated about whether or not to even participate in Taglit—I understood its political project as fundamentally propagandistic. But—I told myself—I didn’t have the resources for international travel on my own dime, and, how could being in a place leave me with a less nuanced understanding of that place? So, I went. And while we floated the Dead Sea and hiked Masada, while we socialized with IDF soldiers and ate falafel and shawarma, I listened to the story being told, and analyzed it with the critical consciousness that I’d learned from my dad. Overlooking Jerusalem, we engaged in icebreakers with our IDF companions. One of our tour group asked a soldier, “What’s your favorite Israeli food?” And he answered, “Bamba.” We laughed—Bamba, a sort of peanut butter cheese doodle, was a novelty we’d delighted in. But then, he continued, “Bamba is the only Israeli food. Hummus? That’s from Lebanon. Shawarma? That’s Egyptian.” And so on. Israel, he pointed out, was invented, was new. Even though he carried an M-16 for the IDF, he saw its edge. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ collection of essays The Message , he describes a protest at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, when dignitaries from Apartheid South Africa were welcomed there. Protesters decried the alliance with a morally bankrupt Apartheid government, but a survivor of Auschwitz, still bearing the numbers on his arm, spit in their faces, insisting that the nascent Jewish state would ally with whomever they needed to, in order to prevent a tragedy like the holocaust from happening again. I remember Yad Vashem. I remember its linear architecture, in which visitors are forced through a subterranean maze of this hardest of histories, and then, at the end, released outward onto a broad overlook, Jerusalem at their feet. The narrative is clear—a long night of suffering and oppression, and then, liberatory statehood, the promised land. And yet.
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