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A People Let Down Will Go Down
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More in Forward ForumIn Israel, just about every immigrant has some kind of “family” that isn’t family, a generous soul or two who took them in and helped make a foreign land home.
And so it was with me. My Ima was a powerful woman, of almost no height whatsoever but of bountiful girth. Born outside of Baghdad, she lied about her age to get into nursing school, to make the money she needed to get herself, her parents, and her seven brothers and sisters to Israel in 1951. She didn’t clear 5 feet, but she moved mountains.
When I was 18 years old, I had the marvelous fortune to meet and be overwhelmed by her. I spent years attending weddings and eating Seders with those siblings and their children; I never left Ima’s apartment without buckets of food to fill my fridge. She died soon after teaching me how to make Iraqi kubeh.
Among my Ima’s best efforts was her son, a man I call “Achi,” my brother. Widowed early, Ima raised him on her own, and he turned out great: handsome, confident, the proud father of three lovely children, owner of an unusually spacious home in a sleepy bedroom suburb of Tel Aviv, his yard full of running kids and bountiful fruit trees.
And now, he wants out.
Not out of the suburb — he wants out of Israel. Or more accurately, he wants to get his kids out.
Having struggled for years with a growing, deepening sense of frustration with how Israel is run and the direction in which it appears headed, he now writes me emotional e-mails, occasionally in tears, about not wanting his children to build their lives in the country to which his mother escaped.
“I have reached the sad conclusion,” reads one note, “that if I want any kind of future for my kids, it isn’t in Israel… it’s a good time to start conspiring to get them out of here!” Later, on the phone, I asked if part of his reasoning is a desire that his children not be drafted. “Yes,” he said simply.
When I made aliyah in the mid-1980s, all of this would have been anathema, to my Achi and to Israeli society in general. Just as aliyah literally means ascent, the Hebrew for emigration is also corporeal: yerida, descent. In the 1980s, yordim were discussed with open contempt. To suggest that your Jewish children would be better off not serving in the Jewish army? Unheard of.
But here we are, and my Israeli brother is not, by any measure, alone. In 2006, the Absorption Ministry reported that there were some 600,000 Israelis living abroad. In 2005, the Interior Ministry and Central Bureau of Statistics reported that some 25,000 people left the country in that year alone, up from 19,000 in 2004. By way of contrast, 2006 saw about 4,200 come back.
I know third-generation survivors of Nazi Europe who have taken out German passports so that they can move to the European Union. Then there are the friends who moved back to Israel after a temporary stay in the E.U. because their visas to Canada didn’t come through. More than half a dozen friends from my 14 years in Israel have decamped — including myself.
My Jerusalem-bred husband and I left over politics, not wanting to raise our children in a country that appears incapable of taking responsibility for the mess it created with the occupation. The friends who hoped to move to Canada were looking for a more stable economy. The Germans just wanted more options. My Achi, for his part, is sick of it all.
The economy, he says. The endless wars. The corruption, the lack of respect for individual efforts and needs, the overwhelming social exhaustion. He can take it, but he wants something better for his kids. Everything, he says, feels hopeless.
Indeed, no less a figure than Avraham Burg, the Orthodox former head of the Jewish Agency and speaker of the Knesset, now has French citizenship and recently called on any Israeli who can to take out a foreign passport. In promoting his new book, “Defeating Hitler,” he said that he had begun writing out of sense of mourning over the loss of Israel. “Israeliness,” he told Ha’aretz, “has only body. It doesn’t have soul.”
I would disagree with that last thought — indeed, it is that very soul that I miss most, out here in the Diaspora — but I, too, have been mourning the loss of Israel. I know what I believed when I arrived on its shores, I know what mattered to those friends who have left and I see where my home — my one, true home — stands today.
It’s no longer enough to insist that Jews must live in their state, no longer enough to call people names if they choose not to. Something has to give, something has to change.
Or, as my husband said on a recent visit back, “If they want me to live here, they need to give me a reason.”
Emily Hauser, an Illinois-based freelance writer, is a regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News.
Comments
This article apparently has been paired with mine on the same day entitled: "Let My People Go Up to Israel." The original title was "The Real Jewish Conspiracy", but there is a disease of editor/titlemachers that always think they know better.
Surprisingly, there is no apposition between the two articles. The story of people disappointed with Israel leaving is old hat. Ten percent of anyone who has held Israeli citizenship has done so and that's fine, since most Western countries built on immigration, Canada for example, lost between 30-50% of their newcomers during their years of mass immigration.
Putting these two pieces together is the old Jewish chicken and egg dilemma, which we as a people love to wallow in.
Let's make it clear, the whole idea of Israel was based on massive in-migration, including from the blessed exiles of North America. Had there been even a serious attempt to realize this, there would have been many fewer peopel leaving Israel.
But the Forward, like the Jewish organized world that I critiqued in my article, prefers obfuscation to clarity, and prefers an unresolved chicken and egg pair of articles to owning up that the Jewish people have, well, screwed up, by not coming to Israel and that is the cause of Israelis leaving Israel.
One hears all the time of Israelis who have moved to America, or of immigrants from the former Soviet Union that decided to go back. And despite the fact that Emily Hauser became dissatisfied with life in Israel - it doesn't strike me as the main story of today's Jewish world. Israel has risen as THE story of contemporary Jewish history. It's not that Emily Hauser has come to the conclusion that Jewish life in the American Diaspora is better than the Jewish life offered in Israel. Rather, she has abandoned the idea of Jewish collective responsibility for a life where the Jews do not have collective responsibility for the shaping of events and policies. Jewish collective responsibility includes, for example, military service and the risking of one's life for the sake of other Jews. Abandoning Israel does not mean that you don't justify the use of force by Jews - actually, you're quite happy that the army of Israel is able to protect our people. However, your position is that "someone else" will do it. Still, the truth remains. The central story of today's Jewish people is taking place in Israel, the residents of which partipate in the heavy life-and-death decision making of Jewish history. Those who leave (just like those who have never even lived here) have decided to be sideline spectators of this history, preferring to be participants in the historical developments of other peoples.
Thank you Emily for that deeply personal article. It's too bad that people like David Chinitz are so invested in the idea that aliyah will solve all Israel's ills as to ignore the reason why more Jews don't come: Israel's perilous instability & lack of normalcy. I too considered aliya during my two years of study at the Hebrew Univ. But I refused to make a commitment to a nation that couldn't make a commitment to live in peace w. its neighbors.
The David Chinitz I used to know during our LTF college days was a great guy with a great sense of humor. He seems to have become a bit out of sorts & churlish in his old age.
It's simply not true that the reason more Jews don't come to Israel is because of its "perilous instability and lack of normalcy", as Richard Silverstein claims. Jews in need have always found their way to Israel, even in the midst of the War of Independence. Over a million immigrants arrived in the 90's despite waves of suicide bombers. The topic here is, of course, American Jewry which is not a community in plight. The only possible motivation for their potential 'aliya could be idealism. An idealist will come here despite all the problems (actually, an idealist would want to be here in order to help face the problems). However, the type of idealism that could bring American Jews to Israel could only be born in those for whom Jewish life and culture is centrally important. That is not the American Jewish experience. That experience has placed integration into American life and culture as central. So even if Israel would solve all her woes, American Jews would not be moving to Israel - the thought wouldn't even occur to them. The message of Israel is Jewish peoplehood. Most American Jews see themselves as part of the American peoplehood. It's interesting to see that the only issue of Israel in most Forward articles is political. Although, indeed, the conflict makes a lot of headlines, it really isn't the story. Israel presents another way to be Jewish. Those Jews who feel that this "peoplehood" way to be Jewish gives them content and quality in life will settle here despite all difficulties.
The claim of Richard Silverstein that Israel "couldn't make a commitment to live in peace with its neighbors" seems to adopt the Arab perspective that Israel is to be blamed for the continuing conflict. Yet, even if this (untrue) perspective were so, why would that be a factor in deciding about aliyah? America has gone to war many times throughout the decades, and she is at present occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Would that be a factor in deciding not to commit to living in the USA? Well, of course not. America is core identity, and hence there are no strings attached (as there are no strings attached in one's relationship to family). Jewish identity is much more secondary, obviously. That secondary aspect of Jewish identity is the real issue of why aliya from America will never be a major phenomenon.
To Richard Silverstein,
Too bad you don't spend more time in Israel where I do stand up comedy in my spare time. Churlish? Nah. Girlish maybe. No, I find great humor in the American Jewish attitude towards Israel that focuses on its instability and perilousness, and manages to get through the American Jewish day ignoring the fact that assimilation is happily destroying the community and that anyone can get a gun into an American University and act out his psychic drama, but in Israel you couldn't get a water pistol into a University.
Unstable? Do I sound unstable?
Come on Richard, come on over and have beer.
Best
David Chinity
I'm so glad you have become such an eloquent writer, Emily. I hope all is well with you these many years!
Yours Fondly, Michael Unger (yes, THE Michael Unger!)
read about silverstein here: http://kapodickie.blogspot.com/
I simply don't believe that the author left Israel over politics. I can't imagine that a Jew living in the USA would decide to move to Belgium because he feels that the American policy in Iraq was ill-conceived, or because the Watergate scandal shook his faith in the political system, or whatever. Nonsense. It's such a common phenomenon for an American Jew to move to Israel, and then to go back to America with his Israeli spouse. What is special is the need to blame someone else for your decision - and what is even more interesting is the tendency to shoot the arrow and then draw the target around it (i.e. after you first decide to leave Israel - then you find the reason for it). The deeper aspect of the article is the connection of the author to Israel - she misses her "one true" home. That's the reason that her husband can say: “If they want me to live here, they need to give me a reason.” Another country can have its problems, its wars or corruption - but he wouldn't insist that that country give him a reason to stay. Who would care if he stays or goes? But he knows that Israel is a special land. He expects someone to care. The articles ends with the call for change: "Something has to change." Those who feel that Israel is home, those who REALLY care, wouldn't come to the conclusion that someone else should fix things. A person for whom Israel is really home would say "these are MY problems, and I have to do something about it". VERY unconvincing article.