It’s ridiculously early. I have managed to get through airport security without any difficult questions being asked or the photo’s and videos filling the memory of my iPad and phone being looked at. I am relieved, I am a rubbish liar and I do really want to come back. So I have smiled and shallomed my way into Tel Aviv airport’s departure lounge for all my worth.
It is time to sign off. I will miss my companions, all of whom I have grown great affection for, some of whom will now, I know without doubt, be friends for life. I am looking forward deliriously to reacquainting myself tonight with my kids, my family, my friends, cats and of course my couch. I will be eating curry and drinking fizz with people I love, in my beautiful, quiet, secure and safe little village in a land where democracy, while not perfect, is real and where my, and the rights of my children are, in the most part and in many ways protected and cherished. I am aware how privileged I am. I am also aware that I have just experienced an extraordinary thing. I have been part of a group of ordinary people who have been invited by a community in Palestine to take part in proving a small miracle. And now I know such small miracles are possible to provoke I know that the lying couch is not the best use of our time here on this side of life.
Thanks to you for reading this blog and being with me on this journey. Knowing that your eyes have shared my experiences has been really supportive.
While I have been here I have been reading a lot of poetry written by both Palestinian and Jewish writers. Here with it’s introduction is a poem written by Felicity Currie, a Jewish writer who makes her feelings clear below:
“It is tragically ironic that many of the survivors of widespread persecution in Europe and the Holocaust in particular, and their relations and descendants, the Israelis, have themselves become persecutors in Israel/Palestine:
It is a strange story: some might say
Beyond belief, that a people who
Suffered persecution
Would so soon become the torturers
Of others.
Not all Israelis support their government’s policy, but opposition is difficult. Many Jews outside Israel feel a deep anger and shame about what has been done and is being done to this day in Palestine.”
I’ll tell you what I call a breach of faith:
A Jew by birth and nurture, I believed
That Zionism meant the promised land
For Jew and Arab working hand in hand.
Now, as I dare to say I was deceived,
I face each night my father’s vengeful wraith.
Well, let me be a traitor to my race.
The truth has to be told by Jews like me:
I see an Israel with a Nazi face,
A Lebensraum as plain as plain can be,
The victims of the Holocaust betrayed,
Invoked to justify that crime remade
You take the name in vain. Hear, Israel!
It’s your barbarity that makes our world a hell.
Felicity Currie
kateoffthecouch 