For Jewish Israelis, It’s Personal

 

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For Israelis, It’s Personal

Philip Kraske • Sunday, December 24, 2023 • 900 Words

You wouldn’t think that two colorful ceramic bowls decorated with painted flowers and leaves would inspire someone’s hate, but these are tense times for Israelis.

A friend of mine who works in an NGO, flew to Jordan to meet with staff there. Having some free time, he went to the West Bank, to Hebron, this a few weeks after Hamas’s October 7 raid in Israel. My friend took a tourist’s walk and, though nearly all of the businesses were closed, he found a potter’s shop open and bought the two bowls in the picture.

Returning to Jordan, he passed through Israeli passport and customs control. The soldier searched his knapsack — lest he was smuggling out Israeli invasion secrets — and pulled out the two bowls.

The soldier spat on them.

The war is not business for Israelis, it’s personal. It’s not captains telling soldiers to shoot, it’s soldiers who are itching to kill their enemy — not even the actual enemy, just any Palestinian standing on what they consider their land. To the surprise of those three luckless Israelis who’d accomplished the amazing feat of escaping from captivity, Israeli soldiers shoot at anything that moves in Gaza.

This explains the Srebrenica-style massacre of Palestinians the other day — the raid on an apartment building, separation of the men from all others, their subsequent execution. The Israelis have taken their lessons from the Serbs, from the East German Stasi, from their guards in Nazi concentration camps, from Hitler’s and Mussolini’s air forces bombing the villagers of Guernika, and — this is Christmas, why not? — King Herod.

It fits with another bit of information I’ve heard about Israelis, in particular the men. From flight crews of both Iberia Airlines and Air Europa, pilots and flight attendants, I’ve heard first-hand accounts of the Madrid-to-Tel Aviv run, which female attendants dread. If they take too long to pick up meal trays, many Israeli men simply drop them in the aisle. And from takeoff to touchdown, the women face a barrage of ugly comments. To Israeli men, foreign women clearly figure in that category of “human animals,” just like Palestinians.

What a term: “human animals.” The Israelis have now coined it, and they’ll never live it down. Their athletes will be booed in every stadium, their businesspeople will never shake a foreigner’s hand without noting a certain look in the other’s eye. Israelis can invoke “self-defense” all they want; nobody but their politicians in Washington will take it seriously.

But to return to the bowls, my friend’s anecdote made me wonder about what provoked the ire of that soldier. Was it the bowls as a symbol of a successful Palestinian sale? Was he angry that the potter had made a few shekels that might make the difference between bread and hunger in the potter’s home that night?

Or maybe it was my friend, a Spaniard. Was the soldier angry with a country that wasn’t wilting before Israel’s self-righteous tantrums? A month after the incident, Spanish President Pedro Sanchez, along with Alexander De Croo, the prime minister of Belgium, made a full-throated plea for the two-state solution, this with the backdrop of the Rafah border crossing. Would the Israeli soldier have spat on the newly-bought bowls of an American?

Looking at the picture, however, I am struck by another thought. Perhaps what bothered the soldier was the simple beauty of the two pieces. In defiance of pitiless oppression, the potter could still celebrate something good and lovely in life. The human spirit was still alive. And what he’d made was one of the few expressions of the Palestinian soul that the soldier was forbidden to bust to pieces.

But he could still spit on it, couldn’t he?

I read that some 470,000 Israelis have left the country since October 7; the ones that remain rejoice in the war their government is waging. The decades of frustration in dealing with a people that lays claim to their land, that occasionally attacks them, that makes them tend to all manner of tiresome security measures — this has boiled over into rage, and its high priest is Bibi Netanyahu.

For the moment, pressure from the families of hostages has stayed his hand regarding the worst measures of the IDF, but after making a gesture or two with prisoner-hostage swaps, he will shrug off the last restraints. For nobody should doubt the implications of Israeli forces shooting Israeli civilians on October 7. The Hamas tunnel complex, though an astonishing construction for a people under relentless surveillance, is as much a deathtrap as a resistance network. Flooding it, gassing it or firebombing it to use up all the oxygen is the task of a day for the IDF. Their real mission is finishing the work Israeli settlers started in 1948.

As with any obsessed person, Israelis will pay no attention to the admonishments, rebukes, resolutions, threats, warnings or recommendations of friends. They have the American government in their pocket and nuclear weapons in Dimona. That is enough. This brash people will once and for all rid their land of Palestinians, and turn their obsession into reality.

Obsession: that’s what that soldier’s spitting meant.