6 years later

Almost six years after my departure from the kibbutz where i lived and Israel as a whole my friend, who shall be known only as the Indian, handed me a plastic bag the contents of which are the things I left behind.

The contents are as follows:

One broken SLR camera with film in it

3 Army badges

1 Red Beret

1 envelope of developed film

1 remote control

1 empty sunglasses case inside of another empty sunglasses case

1 pair of dogtags

What an eclectic load of things to leave behind. I remember placing my beret and badges lovingly in my cupboard in my room awaiting collection. The other things I don't remember leaving at all.

The old photos show a much thinner me with various relatives during a Pesach holiday. I was April 2004, three months before I left the army. It was that holiday that made me realise that signing up for a third year was a waste of time. That holiday changed everything.

The things I left behind remind me what a hurry I was in to get away. How rushed I was to leave, I didn't tell anyone on the kibbutz I just abandoned what I couldn't carry and quietly set off with my suitcase to the airport, a plane for England waited and so did several years of...wondering why I had left and why I had gone there at all.

I am wearing my dogtags now, the tags i discarded without even a thought, I hadn't thought of them until I saw them again

all seems so surreal and strange now...like the circle has closed itself

Dinner Alone

Ok I am both boring and sad, I know it, I admit it, it's out there lets move on!

So I sitting in a restaurant on the corner of the street where I live, I have just noticed that Dan Kosky is sitting inside with his fiance Tash but I am not going to say hi because obviously they'll feel obligated to invite me to sit with them when they really just want to have dinner together.

I am sitting at a table outside the restaurant and have just finished my hot apple pie. There is another couple to my left and it looks like a blind date. He is wearing a couple and she has blonde almost white hair.

I wouldn't have paid them no mind except that I noticed that about two minutes after they sat down she started playing with her phone. Then she received a call and sat happily chatting away to, presumably, a friend and while she was laughing away he got on his phone too. There they sat while I finished my main course and ordered desert. There they sat talking away, each on their phone while I downloaded MS Office.

I hear him talking on the phone about how boring the girl is, how she can't speak Hebrew so it's ok to say it in front of her.

Eventually they are both of their phones and I wonder how they are able to now go through with the rest of the evening when they both clearly dislike being in each others' presence. It turns out that though he speaks Hebrew he is Swedish and she is Danish. No doubt put together by well meaning but stupid married mutual friends also hailing from some random part of Europe.

They have both made the mistake of ordering dinner before they have realised that they don't like each other.

He is constantly talking about Jews, Jewish, Judaism and Aish, she has nothing to say about these subjects and he is boring me to tears with his non stop talk of our religion. I don't think she is Jewish. As I write this I hear him say "according to Judaism you're allowed to..." and I roll my eyes, again.

He has finished his main course in a heartbeat and she comments on how quickly he eats. "Oh yeah, I eat really fast" he says as he checks his watch. Then he starts talking about how anything she doesn't want from her meal he'll take home in a doggy bag and I laugh out loud but stare down at my laptop hoping to avoid their gaze.

So now their dinner has been cleared up and I am still drinking my tea, he has moved on to talking about Israeli treatment of foreign workers and I am wishing that they will just call it a day. She asks blonde questions of him and he is only too happy to answer.

I am beginning to think that they are suited to one another.

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day in Israel is a solemn affair with ceremonies being held up and down the country. Some are small and intimate, others are large and open to the general public. The ceremony I attended was in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv. There were several thousand people crammed into the square to see the short films shown in memory of a cross section of Israelis who have been killed in Israel's wars over the years. Interspersed with the tales of loss were songs by well known Israeli musicians, many in the crowd sang along to the tunes. The atmosphere was a solemn one.

I couldn't stop myself from wondering how long this has to go on for. They say that when a baby is born in Israel the mother says "I hope that by the time my child is 18 they won't have to serve in the army". Our politicians are constantly telling us that our dream is peace but they don't act that way. Netanyahu's speech was full of compassion, he spoke of people that he had known who died in the service of our country. He spoke of his brother Yoni, the only Israeli soldier killed during the raid on Entebbe in 1976. He spoke from the heart and he spoke well.

Then, for some inexplicable reason he "pointed a finger at Iran for supporting terror, called on Hamas to return kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit and vowed to pursue the murderers." Can't we even mourn our dead without being told by our politicians that more are going to die? For one day in the year it would have been nice to reflect on the past without being told that the future will bring more death to us.

Today the headline of the print edition of the Jerusalem Post is that officials are telling the PA to crack down on demonstrations against Israeli occupation as they "might get violent". We should be celebrating the fact that Palestinians have moved away from violence not attempting to make the Palestinian Authority even more dictatorial than it already is. The fact that these non violent protests are happening suggests that finally Palestinian politics has matured to the point where we can effectively deal with them, demonstrations are a reflection of the power of democracy and free speech not something for us to fear.

If we continue to attempt to deprive Palestinians of any method through which they can express their frustration with living under the yoke of our occupation we will find that they really do turn to violence and that it is our fault.

Yom Ha Shoah

Holocaust Day – Israel

The streets are deserted now in Tel Aviv, no restaurant nor supermarket nor kiosk is open for business. The television is full of documentaries and films educating the populace of the events of the Holocaust and no one is in the mood to go out. Ceremonies are taking place at Yad veshem in Jerusalem and in the former concentration and death camps in Poland where the yearly March of the Living is taking place. A delegation of Members of the Israeli Knesset is also in Poland to attend along with other VIP's from the State and elsewhere. Tomorrow a siren will sound and people will stop what they are doing, wherever they are and stand in silence in memory of the one in three Jews on the planet during World War II who were murdered in the Holocaust.

The survivors will be sitting at home right now, reliving their horrible experiences during this dark age in our history, their relatives surrounding them, aware of their past though unable to truly empathise with their experiences.

My own experience with Holocaust survivors is limited. My Great Grand Parents on both sides were living in London before World War One, my Grandfather lost many relatives though this really never had anything to do with me. I didn't grow up hearing tragic stories or seeing anyone suffering the mental affects that friends of mine have told me of their grandparents. Yet I find myself miserable, pensive and drawn to the television documentaries about the Holocaust. More than this I think back to my studies at Manchester Metropolitan University where I took a module in the Holocaust, despite having promised myself that I wouldn't. I immersed myself in it, read the books and then read them again, wrote the essays and sighed with despair when my fellow students weren't interested enough in the subject matter.

I have never been to Poland, I have never seen the camps and I don't have any intention to go at the moment. For most of my life I once followed the view that those who allowed themselves to be killed by the Germans deserved no feeling from me. I hated the fact that we appeared to make it so easy for the Germans to kill us so easily. We registered as Jews when we were told to do so, we moved into Ghettos when told to do so, we jumped on trains when told to do so and we died when told to do so. Who am I to judge? I wasn't there, but I am here in Israel right now.

All of this sadness, all of this education and thinking about Einsatzgruppen, Zyklon B, Nuremberg Laws, Concentration Camps, Death Camps. The names of the six death camps that are etched immovably onto the consciousness of an entire nation; Auschwitz-Birkanau, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzeck, Majdanek, names that ring out like gunshots, names that are taught in Holocaust education all over the world and sites of pilgrimage to those who want to show respect and who wish to learn of the tragedy that the Nazis exacted on the Jews and other ideological undesirables of Europe.

So what does all of this mean for today? Where are we now? While the State of Israel exists and is powerful and has an army why is it that we still live under the shadow of an event that happened so many years ago? When will the time come when our politicians won't feel the need to invoke the past as the reason for the actions of the present?

The Holocaust is a tragedy of our history, our future is in our own hands, it is time to take responsibility for our future as well as mourn our past, to move forward as a free and confident people able to see the difference between right and wrong and to take the difficult steps that need to be taken in order to be the light we wish to see in the world.