Presenting a paradox.
Taglit-Birthright Israel, as per its Wiki page, is a Zionist Jewish organization that sponsors free 10-day trips to Israel for Jewish young adults, 18-26.
I just returned from mine.
Both the American and the Israeli staff worked very hard to make this an enriching experience for us, and for that, my honest thanks. However, the impression I carried away of Israel thanks to them completely killed any latent desire I might have had for making Aliyah, i.e. repatriating.
The trip was meant to show Israel to us young American Jews, so that we'd return to the States thinking of it in some way as our native home. And I know that at least for a few of them, that aspect of the trip was a resounding success.
As for me, FAIL.
Our Israeli guides - the face Israel turned towards us on this trip - completely put me off the idea I'd been half-heartedly entertaining of moving to Israel.
I wasn't so much interested in 3,000 year old ruins as I was in the real, live modern Israel, warts and all. Most of all, I wanted to know what the real situation with the Palestinians was.
And our guides didn't once talk about Palestinians over the whole 10-day trip.
Well, that's not true. They did occasionally drop condescending comments along the lines of "You know, when the Jews were wronged, which is pretty much always, and in much more severe ways than the Arabs, they never blew up buses."
Well, gosh. Have a cookie for your superhuman restraint. Anything else to say about the Arabs in Israel? They do comprise about a fifth of its population, after all...
*crickets*
The history of Israel that was presented to us was the height of awesome. I haven't heard such naked propaganda since elementary school days in USSR.
What's the history of Israel, according to the Taglit cribnotes?
Jews, Jews and more Jews, by divine Providence and historical TRU FAX!
Oh yes, and then there were a bunch of foreign invaders and usurpers for a long time. Then Herzl the Magical Jew came along; then there were the first re-patriants, who expended metric tons of tears and blood and sweat to make Israel liveable again; then Ben Gurion proclamed Israel's independence, and now yey! Jews again at the helm! And although there may be occasional squabbles in the Knesset, at the end of the day, we're all Jews together, and that's all that matters. Because Israel is a Jewish state, created by Jews for Jews.
That was the story, and they stuck to it.
We spent half a day in a town where, the tour guide told us with a hitch in his voice, Jewish presence had not been interrupted for over 2,000 years. Not a word on who had lived in the rest of Israel between 70 CE and the first Zionist settlers of the end of the 19th century. I guess no one lived here in between. Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and Brits just sort of staked their flags into the barren desert. One wonders why they bothered.
We heard a lot about Jewish re-forestation efforts in the desert. Nothing about Palestinian orchards obliterated in the wars of 1948 and 1967.
We heard a lot about the bravery of young Jews, who came to settle Israel in the early 90th century, without farming know-how or survival skills, but with hearts full of love for Zion. Nothing about hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from villages.
We spent a night in an "authentic Bedouin tent," served tea by "authentic Bedouins" and listening to their native songs. Not a word about how Bedouins had been robbed of their land and herded into concrete ghettos in the 1960s, their way of life completely undone, and the poverty, alcoholism, and unemployment raging among them today.
We heard plenty about Jewish valor again uncounted foes in the Independence War of 1948, the Six-day war, the Yom Kippur War. Nothing about any military actions afterwards, internal or international, as though Israel had turned into Sweden after 1973.
We heard about the Israeli Western parliamentary system and democracy. But when we sat down to pray in the parking lot near the Western wall, a woman in a head-wrapping with a badge yelled at us that men and women are not alowed to sit together on this hallowed ground, and especially not with a female Rabbi.
I'm not condemning Israelis or their PR teams. Their silence condemns them.
A state that wasn't ashamed of its ongoing military actions would have no trouble discussing them with visitors.
A state that didn't marginalize a huge segment of its population would include them in its historical narrative.
A state that claimed to be a secular Western-style democracy would recognize marriages of its citizens without demanding from the woman a gynecological trip to a ritual bath.
Thanks, Taglit. You wanted me to experience your vision of Eretz Israel, and now I have. And you can keep it.
I did hear one thing that gave me some hope. They tell me that up until 16 or 17 years ago, it was a custom among freshly drafted IDF artillerists to climb Masada and shout at the top of their lungs, "Masada will not fall again!" But around the time communism fell, this custom died out. No one knows precisely why.
Perhaps it's a sign the young Israelis are growing up without the blinders of bitterness and rose glasses of Zionism worn by their war-weary elders. One can only hope. In a few years, they will start displacing the old war horses from the Knesset, and then maybe real change will come to Israel.
Until then, it's Eretz USA for me.
EDIT: I understand that Taglit is a sales tour more than anything, and they will gloss over rough spots. But there's glossing over, and there's glossing over. Someone in the comments mentioned that their middle school tour of Washinton D.C. also didn't go into Vietnam bombings too heavily. Precisely. This tour treated Ivy League college students as though they were pre-pubescent children.