Just days ago the mighty Jerusalem Raiders lost 3 to 1 in the do-or-die Israel Association of Baseball championship game to the Bet Shemesh Chili Peppers. The Raiders—a little league team with players ranging in age from 11 to 14—played their last game on the historic Gezer field, with a fabulous view of Tel Gezer—the archaeological site of the first positively identified Biblical city. The night before, the Audrey Delisse Ballet studio had mounted a full two-hour production of Coppelia with over fifty ballet dancers ranging in age from 3 to 17. That event took place in Jerusalem’s Masorti High School, one of the flagship schools of the thriving TALI educational movement—dozens of schools not in Israel’s religious system committed to teaching about Zionism, Judaism and democracy. Full disclosure: my eleven-year-old son alternated between pitching, catching and playing outfield on the Raiders as my fifteen-year-old coached, and both my ten-year-old and seventeen-year-old daughters danced in Coppelia.
These thoroughly normal moments—despite their dramatic settings—are worth mentioning because thoroughly normal moments should be part of any “new conversation about Israel, Palestine and the Jewish future,” which this Website aspires to launch. Celebrating the poetry of the everyday in Altneuland, the Jews’ Old New land, is not dodging “the subject”—it should frequently be The Subject. And yet, a quick survey of the first 320 posts of this Website, shows nothing about regular, everyday life in Israel—or Palestine for that matter. I have not read anything that would prepare me for the extraordinarily ordinary and delightful student-faculty interactions I experienced when I visited Al Quds University in Abu Dis or the easy interactions between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim patients and staffers I saw when I was hospitalized last month with a running injury at Hadassah Hospital.
We need to celebrate the normal because it was one of Zionism’s great dreams and is one of Zionism’s greatest achievements. The Jewish people were so marginalized, ostracized, and persecuted in both Europe and the Arab world for so many centuries that many doubted the comfortable, casual interactions that characterize modern Israeli life today would be possible to foster.
And, yes, there is a political dimension here too. Palestinian propagandists have succeeded in making people believe that Israel and the Palestinian territories are a perpetual warzone. Stories of ordinary life on both sides of the divide, instances of easy interaction, even cooperation and friendship, between Jews and Palestinians, threaten the dominant distorted narrative. The venom of an Alice Walker, who does not want her novel The Color Purple translated into Hebrew, but would not block the book’s distribution in Syria or Saudi Arabia, is partially due to this pathologization of everyday life in the Holy Land.
Let me be clear, this is not some guilt-inducing, call for Open Zion to be “responsible”—with all the complexities inherent in such a word regarding any blog or journalistic endeavor. This simply is a call for Open Zion, and others writing about the Middle East, to be more accurate.