Voices from Israel: The Double Pain
An empathic counterpoint to the increasing polarization and exclusive partisanship for one side or the other.
Sahar M. Vardi, born in Jerusalem, has been active for many years against the Israeli occupation policy and for Israeli-Palestinian understanding. In her current publication, she expresses her pain on the occasion of what she calls the “dual loyalty” she feels for the victims on both sides. The desperate Israeli friends who don’t know if their family members are dead or kidnapped – but equally with the friend in the Gaza Strip who just fears every day whether his children will still be alive the next day. The NachDenkSeiten editorial team has decided to translate the text from Hebrew into German because the equal empathy it expresses for the victims of both sides sets a counterpoint to the increasing polarization and exclusive partisanship for one side or the other. –NachDenkSeiten
By Sahar M. Vardi, October 10, 2023 – English translation by DeepThought
We, the left (in Israel), are often accused of a dual loyalty. And on days like these, I feel it. Neither “loyalty” nor “dual” convey the right meaning. But the feeling is right. Let me explain.
At Mahane Yehuda Market (the central market in Jerusalem) this morning, a street musician was singing “Am Yisrael Chai” in a minor scale. The market itself was empty, and a woman was chatting with her friend about her regular vegetable vendor, who is not allowed to come and open his stall today. All the stalls in the market that belong to Arabs are closed. In Rehavia (a neighborhood in Jerusalem), families get out of two cars. Most of them are already crying, the others exude a sadness that is hard to explain as they hesitantly knock on the door of one of the houses nearby. The family of someone who was just killed? A hostage? On the Internet, I see a video of a cleaner who was beaten up in the city center because she is Arab, and I try not to avert my gaze.
“Dual loyalty” means seeing this and that with tears in your eyes.
Now is the moment to talk to friends who don’t know if their family members are dead or kidnapped and who can’t even begin to understand why it all happened. To hope, to see the helplessness, the fear, the deep pain. When I talk to a friend from Gaza shortly after, all he can say is that now every night is the most terrifying of his life. He calculates his chances and his children’s chances of getting up again tomorrow morning. “Dual loyalty” means having your heart broken by both one and the other.
It means holding that moment, caught between the heartache, pain and shock of the extinction of Nir Oz, thinking of all the people there, and the horror of the extinction of Shajaya, thinking of all the people there.
It is the urge to donate blood and assemble food baskets for the (towns in) the south (of Israel) and at the same time be in Susia (a town in the West Bank south of Hebron) to protect any shepherd who dares to leave the borders of the village from the settlers’ gunfire.
Loyalty is perhaps not the right word. It is double pain, double heartache, concern, love. It means holding on to the humanity of everyone. And that’s hard. It’s so hard to hold on to humanity here. It’s exhausting, and it feels like the world keeps asking you to let go. It’s so much easier to “pick a side” – it almost doesn’t matter which side. Just choose a side and stick with it to at least reduce the pain you feel. To at least feel part of a group and not so alone in all of this.
As if that were really an option. As if we don’t already know that our pain is intertwined; that there is no solution only to the pain of Ofakim (small Israeli town in the Negev region) without a solution to the pain of Khan Yunis (a refugee camp in the southern part of the Gaza Strip). We know it, we recite it, and we keep feeling the pain of it.
I’m sitting here trying to understand what I’m writing, and more importantly, why. What is it about, other than getting rid of some of that feeling of having two worlds that seem so contradictory from the outside, but feel exactly the same on the inside. I think I’m coming closest to answering why I’m writing this, because in a heart and soul wrenching way, it also feels like the only path for optimism. Optimism based on the fact that it exists (this singular doubling). And that it is possible. And this pain that some of us feel in our little community, this “dual loyalty,” is obviously the hope of this place.
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This article was first published in German on nachdenkseiten.de
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