8 - Kite Runner and Israel

One of my classmates talked about The Kite Runner, and  the evils of war. He passed around photos of the war that were stunning. Children were lying on the street, dead. He mentioned that a reason why he left for the U.S. was that Israel had attacked his native Lebanon.

I did not want to talk about Middle East politics because I don't know a solution. But I wanted to tell him of my experience: I worked as a volunteer in an Israeli kibbutz for a year, 20 years ago (I am not Jewish, by the way).

Just after the collapse of the Soviet Union a flood of young people immigrated to Israel and were granted citizenship. Most were from the disintegrating Yugoslavia; their home had been bombed and they had lost several relatives. Others were from Russia, where they were discriminated against because they were Jews. In Romania there was scarcity of food. One girl told me that one day she had stayed home from school, waiting with a kitchen knife to kill a giant rat the was eating her family's provisions.

In Israel they were given hospitality in a kibbutz, a sort of commune. There they studied Hebrew for a year while they worked picking avocados and dates in the surrounding fields (together with us, travelers from the West). After that, like all young Israeli males and females, they had to do three years of military service, patrolling marketplaces and bus stations, to prevent bombings. If they survived, they went to university, all expenses paid, and had subsidies until they found a job. They were intelligent and highly educated. I was peeling potatoes with a former computer programmer and a biologist. For the final essay in Hebrew class, they had to write on the topic  “what is my goal in life.” Most of them wrote “my goal is to stay alive.”

I went with my boyfriend to visit a famous touristic place, the Elijah caves on the Mediterranean Sea, near the Lebanese border. The ubiquitous young soldiers were there. They told us not to worry, visiting the caves was safe. It used to be dangerous. The Lebanese used to position rockets on their side of the border, and bomb Israel and the caves. But now the Israeli had permanently occupied the strip of land next to the border, so the Lebanese could no longer launch bombs from there. I just wanted my classmates to understand why the Israeli had occupied part of Lebanon, and who were the young kids sent to war to protect their new country. I am sure that Israel has done plenty of wrongs too,  but this side of the story is worth knowing.