32. And everyone 'neath their vine and fig tree.
I wanted to write about figs and fig season.
I wanted to tell you about learning from
in her beautiful newsletter about making sugar cookies with fig leaves, and about walking with aka last week in the woods in the rain, and leaving her house with a bag of ripe figs in one hand and a bag of green fig leaves as big as your head in the other. I wanted to share with you the smell of drying the fig leaves in the oven, and the smell of roasting the figs, wrapped in bacon, in the oven, the taste of them, caramelized, with a drizzle of honey balsamic glaze. I wanted to tell you about the fig tree we planted in the backyard on Short Street when Duncan and I got the band back together all those years ago, gave it another go, burying money and burnt offerings under the roots in a one dollar thrift store wedding dress, and how we moved a few years later, and how sad I was to leave the fig tree, just starting to bear fruit, but then there it was again at the new house, growing wildly up and over the southwest corner, heavy laden, riotous with fruit and wasps and birds.But I am no longer of a mind to write about figs.
There is nothing new under the sun, the preacher said, and this new old war is no exception, and neither are all the things said about the war, and all the things said about all the things that are said about the war. The hell of occupation is not new, the pain and rupture and trauma that is visited upon the innocents is not new, the salting of the earth is not new, the ripping up of the olive groves is not new, the erasure of humanity is not new, the enslavement, imprisonment, rape, terror, genocide, all of it, old as the sea, old as the salt, old as the dirt, old as time.
It feels as if there is no future.
Never before have I seen a fissure, a divide, a fracture grow so deep and cavernous between groups of people so breathtakingly quickly as I have this week. I’ve cried with Jewish friends and colleagues who literally feel that the world is abandoning them again, that suddenly a line was drawn again and they were on the other side of it from the rest of humanity, again, betrayed, a target on their backs. In the course of listening and supporting them I have also, ever-so-gently, declined to agree on something or other I know to be false, centering the pain of the person in front of me while choosing not to affirm dehumanizing misinformation, only to see their eyes narrow as I watch them place me on the other side of the line in their mind, maybe forever.
I’ve been shocked by the severity with which binary thinking has flipped otherwise compassionate people into fundamentalists who see any acknowledgement of Palestinian humanity as anti-semitism, who tell me the situation is too complicated and I’m too removed from it for me to have a right to an opinion on the humanity of human beings, the sovereignty of human life, the right of human children to exist, the right to dignity of human cultures and communities and families and livelihoods and lifeways.
It feels as if there is no way forward.
So I go to work, past the doorman that sells headphones and loosies on the sly, everyone with a side hustle, to the clinic where I thought my AirPods were stolen off my desk on Wednesday and I felt my heart harden just a little bit more, even though I know the score, all the reasons and conditions. I found them, yesterday, at home, and I don’t know which feeling is stronger: relief that I was wrong, or shame for indulging, even a little bit, in resentment and blame.
And everyone ‘neath their vine and fig tree, shall live in peace and unafraid/ and everyone ‘neath their vine and fig tree, shall live in peace and unafraid/ and into ploughshares turn their swords, nations shall make war no more/ and into ploughshares turn their swords, nations shall make war no more.
I want to write about hope the way I want to write about figs: I want to tell you about living at Farm and Wilderness Camps in Vermont in the 90’s and learning to sing “The Vine and Fig Tree”—a prayer for peace set to the tune of a Hebrew folk song—on a hillside with a hundred children before every meal, a song I sing to myself all the time since, a song I used to think about every day when I walked into my house on Westwood Place past the muscadine vine ‘neath my own giant aforementioned fig tree. It felt like peace then, my own personal swords into ploughshares indeed, but what of the nations? What of war?
I have marched and bled and screamed in the streets, I have dropped banners and made giant papier-mache puppets and vats of soup for protesters against every kind of war, and the work of war, and weapons of war. And I had come to believe that my words could be my work in the world, and that the food I grow and prepare could be a song of peace. But now it seems obscene, not to mention absurd, to write of figs and bacon, of honey and vinegar, of sugar cookies, the cole slaw I made yesterday with paprika and cumin seed and lime. And I don’t know what to do.
So I walk in the woods in the rain, I watch the waterfall, swollen and furious, pummel the rock beneath, and I want to put my head under the water, I want to be the rock, I want to be pummeled by the water until I am clean and clear and bright again, until I know what to do again. I want to change, and change, and change again, until we can all live in peace, and unafraid.
A Word.
Below is a transcript of a 2021 interview with Dr. Gabor Maté—a preeminent expert on trauma and addiction who’s work (specifically his books “When the Body Says No” and “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts”) has changed my life—on the Israeli occupation of Palestine:
“…I’m personally a holocaust survivor. As an infant I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz, and most of my extended family was killed. That’s my personal background. I grew up ashamed of my Jewishness. In Hungary, after the war, I was still bullied for being Jewish, and I remember one of my friends coming to my rescue once saying, “Leave him alone. It’s not his fault that he’s Jewish.” It’s a fault but it’s not my fault. This was the defense, so I grew up with that.
My grandfather, a physician and an author, by the way, who died in Auschwitz, was a good friend of Vladimir Jabotinsky who was one of the major Zionist leaders and the founder of the party that became Likud, the current government of Israel. So that’s my family. This is my background.
In my teenage years in Canada, I became a Zionist—this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland, the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a of a Jewish state with a powerful army. I found it liberating. It was exhilarating to believe in that dream, and I absorbed all that perspective, and all that point of view. And I really believed in it. Then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that. In order to make this Jewish dream a reality, we had to visit a nightmare on the local population. There was a Zionist slogan called “a land without people for a people without a land,” but there was no land without people. There were people living there who’d been living there for hundreds of years or even longer.
As a matter of fact, if you want to hear something really interesting, David Ben-Gurion, who was the first prime minister of Israel, actually subscribed to this. He said, “Who are the Palestinians?” In Roman times some of the Jews never left Palestine. Many of them stayed there and some of them, hundreds of years later, converted to Islam. So guess what? The Palestinians might be descendants of ancient Jews. They are our cousins, to say the least, no matter how you look at it.
There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population, which is what they did in 1947, beginning in 1947. And first of all with British imperial protection, but they did this. And then in 1948, Israeli historians, Jewish Israeli historians, have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of the Palestinians was persistent. It was pervasive. It was cruel. It was murderous and with deliberate intent. So that’s what’s called the nakba in Arabic, the disaster or the catastrophe. Now in Canada, there’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust. I don’t believe in such laws, by the way, but in Israel, you’re not allowed to mention the nakba even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of the state.
So once I became aware of all this, I said OK, well, yeah, we created this beautiful dream, but we imposed a nightmare on somebody else. Then I visited the occupied territories during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw—the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the burning down, or cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations. And this went on, and it’s much worse now than it was then.
So this is the background, and it couldn’t have been any other way because, again, you couldn’t have created that exclusive Jewish state without oppressing or expelling the local population. It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st centuries. It’s still going on. And who are these people in Gaza? You have to go to Gaza. You have to go there to really appreciate it. It’s a small area where there are these multiple hundreds of thousands of people. Who are those people? The direct children or grandchildren of the people that were expelled from Israel or what is Israel now. Where’s the outrage?
And I’d like your Zionist friend to explain this. I, as a Jew, could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship under the law of the right of return, but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, Hannah, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit. Now if I have the right to return after 2,000 years—if that history is even the way it is [said to be] which is itself questionable, but let’s assume that it is—if I have the right to return after 2,000 years, how come Hannah hasn’t got the right to return after 70 years? So what sense does it make now? So who is in Gaza, this desperate, blockaded people… let me stop again. Am I talking too long about this? I’m sorry. This is so important to me, and I know so much about it that I don’t even know where to stop.
So then you have these miserable people packed into this horrible place that people call the world’s largest outdoor prison, which is what it is. There is incredible poverty, 50% unemployment. Hamas is an Islamic organization that was originally encouraged by Israel and supported by Israel as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization which Israel didn’t want to deal with. Given those conditions, of course people will go for extremist leadership. That’s what people do when they’re miserable and hopeless, and deprived of any possibility whatsoever. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights. That’s a complete falsity. But there were free elections monitored by the international community [in 2006]. They were declared to be the freest elections ever held in the in the Arab world and Hamas happened to win. Hamas won that election, then Israel and the United States immediately organized their military coup against them, which Hamas defeated, for which the punishment was this blockade that deprives Gaza of food, medical supplies, sufficient water. I could go on and on and on and on, and then you have this conflict.
Then every time there’s a conflict, Israel “mows the lawn.” That’s the expression they use. They call it “mowing the lawn” by which they mean the mass murder of Palestinian civilians. Now is it true that the Gazans shoot rockets into Israel killing innocent civilians? Yes, it is. Do I support that? No, I don’t, but when it comes to the death of innocent civilians, Israel killed 20,000 Lebanese civilians in 1982 using illegal weapons like cluster bombs in a war that had no justification whatsoever. I could go on and on and on, except I’ll say that the disproportion of power and responsibility and oppression is so markedly on one side that you can take worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians. Now that’s my view of it.
As to this argument that I’m not a practicing Jew, your friend can come and visit my family when we have Passover every year with our families. And we talk about how the liberation of the Jews from Egypt cannot just be a Jewish symbol. It has to be an international symbol. If after 2000 years we can look for liberation and freedom, why can’t the Palestinians? So for him to confuse Zionism with Judaism is a big disservice. And to argue because it’s not true… and because there were Jews all along right from the beginning… there was a Hebrew, a Jewish philosopher and writer called [name indistinct] who in 1895 said if we continue to treat the Arabs like this, we’re going to have disaster. He said this in 1895! So there were Jews all along [saying this]. So for him to conflate Judaism and Jewishness with Zionism is absolutely false, and for him to say that Jews who oppose Israel are not Jews is a slander. And for him to say that anybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true. And as for the final argument that Israel is subjected to standards that other people are not, it’s the other way around.
Look at the Western press: when Hong Kong demonstrators throw stones at the police in Hong Kong, that’s considered to be heroism in the American press. When in Myanmar the demonstrators shoot slingshots at the army, they are considered to be heroes in the Western press. When Palestinian kids throw stones at Israeli soldiers, they’re called terrorists. Israel gets away with a lot more with much less criticism in the Western press than any other country.
I’ll say one more thing. I was recently contacted by a Palestinian woman from Jericho. She runs a program for Palestinian children who spent time in Israeli jail—14, 15, 16-year-olds jailed for months or years. Sometimes they can’t see their families for months, and she runs a program for them. You know what she does? She meditates with them. She does Sufi dervish dancing with them, swirling dancing to bring them out of their stress. She says, “We don’t have post-traumatic stress disorder here because the trauma is never ‘post.’ The trauma is daily.” I just wish your Zionist friend would visit the occupied territories in Gaza like I have and let him speak the way he speaks now.” If he got any ounce of humanity left, he would cry like I did for two weeks when I was there.
And you know what? There are no ‘two sides.’ It’s always a complex question, but in terms of power and control, it’s pretty straightforward. There was a land with people living there, and other people wanted it. They took it over, and they continue to take it over, and they continue to discriminate against, oppress and dispossess those other people. That’s what happened, and that’s what’s happening.”
Home + The World is a weekly newsletter by Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Endlessly, thank you. <3
Thank you for sharing your unique and complex perspective on this crisis.