Dustin M. Wax

If you’re Jewish and between 18 and 26 years old, Mayanot/birthright israel will fly you to Israel for a 10-day tour, absolutely free. The trip to Israel is a Big Thing for Jewish folks, particularly in the “Jewish Crescent” (what the goyim call the Northeast Corridor) — I remember once when I was on a temp assignment at Hadassah (the Women’s Zionist Organization of America), I was introduced to the organization’s librarian, whose first words to me were “Have you been to Israel yet?” I hadn’t, and still haven’t, for a number of reasons. Jewish identity didn’t come easily to me — I spent my formative years denying it explicitly, mostly out of a pervasive disjoint between myself and religious thinking. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties and began reading the literature of the Holocaust and of the Lower East Side that I began to understand that there was a heritage here separate from the religion itself, a realization that immediately put me in the camp of the “secular” or “cultural Jews”. What’s more, a big part of this took place in opposition to the pro-Israeli, Zionist Judaism that, as a New Yorker at the time, I was surrounded with. My own feelings ran towards the Bundists’: engagement with the problems of the diaspora, not disengagement and escape towards a Promised Land.

So to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have taken them up on this offer even if I was still under 26. Israel has little to do with my understanding of Judaism or of myself as a Jew — and that little is predominantly negative. What’s more, the security requirements of the trip (and do be sure to check out the security precautions) require the tour give a wide berth to hotspots like the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, meaning that an important part of the Israeli experience is ignored. (Bonus link: Have a look at the Onion’s archived front page from November 9, 1948, particularly the headline, “War-Weary Jews Establish Homeland Between Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt”.) To me, the settlements and retributive bombings and bulldozings and checkpoints and so on are of a piece with the Zionist ideology — they wanted to be a nation-state, and nation-states are defined by their use of coercive force against external threats and internally in the construction and regualtion of a “national” identity. To American Jews, remote from the threat of daily violence that shapes Israeli identity, these tours seem (to me, of course) to offer a stunted, attenuated image of the Zionist mission. I won’t go so far as to say the intent is to brainwash impressionable American Jews, but I will say I think the tours offer an unrealistically optimistic idea of what Israel offers to world Jewry.

I’m not usually much for conspiracy theories and the like, but why is it that a Google Image Search for “abu ghraib” doesn’t turn up any images of torture at Abu Ghraib? Even adding the word “torture” to the search doesn’t return any of the images we are now familiar with (or anything else torture-related, for that matter)? Seems weird — Google is usually a search engine that can be counted on to return appropriate results…