It’s Not That Simple: My Experience in Israel

, by Syney Hausman-Cohen,

It’s the middle of the summer, and I’m talking to a friend from Israel. “Did you hear about the balagan that went down this morning?” he asks.

Balagan—a term of Hebrew slang meaning something between craziness (planning this party is turning out to be complete balagan), confusion (wait, were you supposed to bring the chips or was I? Balagan!), and a complete mess (oh, gee, thanks for having a party, guys, now the house is a balagan).

“No,” I answer truthfully, which makes sense because it’s 11 a.m., I just woke up, and the balagan happened in the middle of the night, Texas time. Then I hear that eleven were killed in a navy riot. He sends me the links to the New York Times and Jerusalem Post articles. I have no idea what to think, whom to trust. Balagan.

One year and three months earlier, I’m not so blasé about Israeli politics. I am volunteering for Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel’s ambulance service in Jerusalem, as a first responder. It’s my first day on the job. My team, and I are leaning against the ambulance, eating falafel, and then…balagan. The world suddenly feels incredibly fragile, like it’s made of glass, and I can’t tell if someone has just nicked it or if it is about to shatter. “Yalla!” our driver yells (Arabic for “Let’s go!”). Lights and sirens flash as we drive on the curb, practically hitting pedestrians, and I hear the radio chaos, balagan, a jumble of words. Pigua. Terrorist attack.
No one will explain to me what is happening. I flounder around, skirting out of people’s way, trying to hand them things that might be useful and generally failing. We arrive at the scene and go right through the police blockade. A police car and a taxi smashed against a pole. A school bus stopped—maybe hit?—on the other side. A tractor. People everywhere. Was there noise? Screaming? Shouting? Two gunshots behind me are the only sounds I remember.

“Seednee. You stay. Wait here. Too dangerous.” What? No! He was gone. I watch through the open back door as my team, sans useless American girl, extricate a policeman from his car, placing him on a backboard. They bring him back and I take his vitals, start to bandage a wrist.

They place terrorist and victim in the same room, separated by a thin curtain: a policeman, whose car was smashed straight into a pole by a tractor, along with the tractor’s driver, who was shot down by other policemen.

A trail of blood flows out of the room, through the hall, and outside, where an Israeli teenager, spending his mandatory army years working for the ambulance service, is trying to mop up the terrorist’s pooling blood with paper towels.

If there’s anything I learned from my work with the Ambulance Service, it’s that the situation in Israel is never as simple as people think it is.

One man died from a heart attack, and we waited half a mile away because the ambulance wasn’t armed and the people in the neighborhood are known to throw rocks and set fire to Israeli ambulances. Another boy’s family wanted him to go to an Israeli hospital, but he didn’t have the right papers, and it would have taken too long to wade through the bureaucracy that could give him those papers. And then there was that other terrorist attack, the one we heard about over the radio—an axe in a four-year-old’s head. Balagan.

It’s not numbers, it’s lives, yet I feel it’s easy to lose sight of that in a school like ours, where we often get lost in the passion for one perspective without stopping to consider the other side.

For example, when a student announced a meeting of a pro-Israel group on Wesleying last year, the negative comments were overwhelming. “You support a brutal occupation and what can almost certainly be termed as a regime of ethnic cleansing,” an anonymous commenter said. “Please go f*** yourself and die.”

Since when is Wesleyan a place where students are criticized for voicing anything that is pro-Israel in public? It is these kinds of comments that oversimplify the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and make it harder for people to look past their differences and work towards peace.

It’s crucial to remember that every single person complicates the Israeli-Palestinian narrative: from the girl who doesn’t want to go to the army because she opposes the war, to the family who refuses to leave their home in the occupied territories, to the man who has to cross a two hour checkpoint every day to get to work. Given this diversity of experience, how can we let ourselves become engrossed in such a bipolar debate?

I love Israel, but I am not a spokesperson for the country, do not represent its politics, and grapple with a headache of confusions whenever I confront its history. I love it for its people, its culture, and the ancient history buried under its cities. I love it because it provides a safe haven for persecuted Jews. I love it even as I am challenged by its politics.

But, in the end, no matter how much I love Israel, I just want peace. If we all confront and debate the complexities I have merely skimmed the surface of in this article, perhaps we can achieve that goal, and work
together through the craziness, through the hatred, through the Balagan.

  • Anonymous

    Students are merely superficially fashionable. Very few understand the conflict and allow themselves to be brain washed by crude but effective arab antu-Israeli propaganda, which draws much inspiration from nazi propaganda.
    Ask how many know that Hitler had a Muslem contingent, whom he loved and respected, because they were prepared to die for him

  • Jared Gimbel

    A little interesting thing of note perhaps to swerve any political furor off course:

    “Balagan” is actually a Tartar word. It made its way into Modern Hebrew through Russian, which borrowed the word from Tartar. But I have never found it a “trademark” word significantly used in any other language aside from Israeli Hebrew.

    I believe it originally referred to a chaotic inn.

    Well written. While I did feel intimidated while in Jerusalem myself (Sydney and I overlapped in our times there) to do things like Magen Dovid Adom or teach English to the Sudanese refugees in Israel, I always have a deep respect for all who do these things.

  • thank you

    it is now right after Yom Kippur in New York..i pray in a Syrian Sephardic Shul…the Rabbi today made a point of saying tonight to approach the world without a chip on our shoulder..without precondition about the past..if we expect Gd to forgive how can we walk out any differently…i enjoyed the article and a breath of fresh air…i am trying to look at things differently..thank you

  • robert arensberg

    Foreign Minister Lieberman called for the expulsion of all Paletinians from Israel while
    pace talks are going on. Israel has become a crazed, fanatical, religious aparthied nation that has taken the “chosen people” concept to justify any brutal and illegal action. Boycott!!!!

  • Jared Gimbel

    Ugh…

    Avigdor Lieberman is someone who we at Hebrew University used to make fun of very consistently. His views were not espoused by any of us, Israeli or foreigner.

    I love how many of you ignore the fact that Lebanon has barred its Palestinian refugees from not only citizenship but over fifty potential job positions, usually of the elite class.

    Not to mention that Black September in Jordan had more Palestinians murdered, on account of an ACTUAL ethnic cleansing, than all of Israel’s Palestinian civilian casualties combined throughout the years of its existence. (Thank you , Ben Dror-Yemini, for informing me of these).

    The countries in the region aside from Israel are significantly mean to the Palestinian people as a whole. Does that mean we should boycott them? No. I wouldn’t call for a boycott of any nation.

    But while turning a blind eye on these situations, much of the anti-Israel rhetoric, according to Yemini, makes the Arab countries look like “retarded children” (perhaps that was a poor translation?) because you expect more from Israel by leaps and bounds, while not censuring anyone else who behaves significantly worse, because “they are that way”.

  • Arafat

    Thank you so much for publishing this. It’s sad, and rare, that on today’s college campuses anyone has the courage to publish either a pro-Israeli editorial, or an editorial that honestly depicts Islam.

    I thought you might enjoy the following satire, which I think says it all.

    June 18, 2010
    Israel breathes; world condemnation instantaneous
    Andrew Pessin
    -Satire-
    Israel breathed this morning. There was a quick intake of air, and then a gentle exhalation.
    World condemnation was instantaneous.

    P.A. President Abbas decried the Israeli attempt to commandeer the Middle East air supply, and demanded a prompt return to the 1967 air distribution which Palestinian leaders had previously violently rejected. Iranian President Ahmadinejad interrupted his weekly call for the destruction of Israel in order to blast the Zionist entity for its blatant oxygen grab and call for its immediate destruction.

    Egyptian newspapers detailed the malicious Mossad plot to exhale germs into the air and then spread the poisoned air via high-tech windmills directly into the lungs of Muslim children. Exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshal announced that in response to the Israeli aggression, Hamas would not let the Red Cross visit captured soldier Gilad Schalit. When it was pointed out that they hadn’t allowed such visits in the four years prior to Israel’s action, he snorted, “And now you see why!”

    Turkey announced it would be withdrawing its ambassador, only to retract that announcement in slight embarrassment when it realized it had already withdrawn him last week, in response to some other Israeli outrage it could no longer quite recall. The United Nations General Assembly, after meeting for an all-night emergency session, called for another all-night emergency session. And the Security Council demanded an immediate impartial investigation, only to backtrack when it was informed that all its available staff were already tied up in ongoing impartial investigations of other Israeli actions.

    Indeed, outrage at Israel’s action was heard around the globe. People everywhere exclaimed that Israel’s aggression was against international law, and then asked for a copy of the newspaper so they could see just what it was, in fact, that Israel had done this time. Others, more intellectually-inclined, asked for some links on “international law,” curious to find out, at last, just what was this special code which apparently all non-Israelis had secretly agreed upon. And, of course, there were numerous calls for Israel’s leaders to be brought up on charges of war crimes.

    Loudest of these were from regimes as diverse as China, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, which took time off from their busy schedules oppressing Tibetans, Darfur civilians, women and all religious minorities, and their own citizens respectively to make their pronouncements. In fact, Israel’s action this time was so offensive that Muslim extremists actually paused from their work installing massive explosives in each others’ mosques in order to condemn Israel’s attacks on Muslim civilians.

    The criticisms could even be heard within Israel itself. “How can Israel call itself a democracy,” Haaretz asked in an editorial, “while allowing its Jewish citizens to consume 75% of the air?” Arab-Israeli MKs signed a petition demanding that the Israeli constitution, guaranteeing their right to sit in the Knesset despite their repeated calls for Israel’s destruction, should be dissolved, preferably in favor of something more totalitarian. “On this day I am ashamed to be a Jew,” proclaimed one prominent left-wing leader, a man who had repeatedly urged all peoples to be proud of their ethnic and religious identities, except for Jews.

    Israel initially attempted to respond to these criticisms, but quickly realized that speaking would require it once again to inhale and thus draw upon itself further global ire.

    And so, Israel stopped breathing altogether.

    This action, clearly aimed to destroy the regional economy and destabilize the entire Middle East, triggered instantaneous worldwide condemnation.

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