It's funny how the preset title is perfect for my post. No book has ever impacted me quite as brutally as my late grandfather's.
I was born in Israel, but raised predominantly in Europe. When I returned as a young adult, I was a closeted ball of self-loathing courtesy of a borderline personality disorder, among other things. When you grow up fat and femme, you grow up with CPTSD. When you grow up as an undiagnosed autistic, you get some more CPTSD. Until one day, you decide to kill yourself. But I lived, and I vowed to make it everyone's problem - through Zionism.
“People lie to protect themselves.”
I gobbled up all the islamophobic propaganda. All of it. I took in every single - biased - detail of any situation in real life where I could excuse hating Muslims some more. The young delinquents in Brussels? Not poverty drove them, not marginalization, no - Islam. I conveniently didn't live in or pass through empoverished neighbourhoods whose inhabitants were not predominantly Arab or Black, or Muslim. Every fart a Muslim broke, I convinced myself it smelled worse than that of any other person, because of Islam. And so, when it came time to return to Israel, I finally got to pass over, from the bullied to the bully: from ever-abused fatty to righteously abusive Zionist.
When Palestinians led protests past my Haifa apartment, I'd scream "Death to traitors" out my kitchen window. I even turned down an easy entry into art school because I bent over backwards to feel disgusted by the high number of hijabi students. I was your stereotypical stupid, self-sabotaging, self-hating, insecure alt-right piece of trash. Except, I worked hard to re-convince myself of the righteousness of my views every single day. They were fragile.
What wasn't fragile, was my crush on am employee of a local business I frequented. Cheeky glint in his eyes - typical Israeli! - sassy smirk, short, but charismatic. Needless to say, we fucked. Repeatedly. As was common in Israel, I asked him what his ethnicity was. We Israelis don't do that with the intention to other the other - on the contrary, we do so to find out what part of the Jewish Diaspora this brother or sister was returned to us from. Yes, I assumed he was Jewish, and sure enough, he answered that he was Yemeni.
Until I learned that he wasn't. In fact, he was Bedouin. Not "only" Arab - although Bedouin don't identify as Arabs - and not "only" Muslim, no - BEDOUIN. Oy vavoy. I flipped my shit at him. I said all the things to hurt him. No holds barred. I gave myself an anxiety attack writing that hurtful, awful email and hitting Send.
A small part of my anger was justified. Deceiving someone with the intention of getting their consent to sex, is rape. 99% of people, including perpetrators, don't know this. But if consent has to be obtained through cheating, coercion, pressure, guilt, or anything other than enthusiastic reciprocation, it is, indeed, non-consensual, and thus, rape. The other reason was that "honour killings" are not exclusive to - or all that common in - the Muslim community. Jewish families commit them, too. One reason they can happen is when the Jewish daughter sleeps with "the enemy": a Muslim man. This Bedouin Casanova did not know what kind of family I was from. He had reason to assume that they were not fanatics, but still, there was a certain readiness to put me at risk.
However, most of my anger was completely irrational and born from equally irrational racism that bore the face of Zionism and Jewish purity. The more I thought about my behaviour, the more disgusted I became with myself, and the more horrible I felt for this beautiful, beautiful man. What did I fall in love with? His presumed Jewishness, his ethnicity? Was that who I was or wanted to be? Or was it his smile, his smirk, his cackle, his "all out of fucks but sun shining out his ass anyway" vibe?
And one day, he called me. He was done fighting. I wasn't; I screamed into my phone, "You fucking lied to me!". And he said, calmly, "Anna. Listen. People lie to protect themselves."
There I stood, in the middle of Tel Aviv, disarmed. Lying is bad. Lying to get laid is rape. But why did he lie? What society did he live in, that gives him the impression that he needs to invent a whole fake identity - his official handle was a Hebrew name - in order to participate in it on a reasonably normal level? In order to feel safe around, and equal to, everyone? Wasn't he basically just the closeted gay man who miserably marries a woman and performs a heteronormative, absolutely agonizing, existence of self-denial as a survival strategy?
And I contributed to Israeli society being that way. I was part of the problem. I was why this man denied his perfectly wonderful identity. I, with my militaristic fashion sense and outspoken Zionist views, made decent Muslims think they have to adopt a Jewish identity and con everyone into accepting them as human beings. And that's awful.
Ironically, the men who sexually assaulted me in Israel were all Jewish "brothers".
But back to how reading changed my perspective
I am the granddaughter of late anti-Zionist - previously very Zionist - activist Naeim Giladi. Iraqi and other Mizrahi Jews may know him from his extensive articles on Jews in Iraq, and he also worked with the Black Panthers of Israel. I never had the privilege of meeting him, which is one of my life's greatest regrets. But I found myself reading his book, Ben Gurion's Scandals, at my post as a security guard one day, after years of refusing to even touch that tome of treason. How could my own family be stinking, pro-Arab leftists, after all? For shame! But the matter of the Bedouin fling had already cracked open one of my eyes, and light had come in. I could no longer ignore my doubts regarding my convictions, and so, I read. And with every page, my rage grew hotter. Until, by page 50, I was sitting there in tears. From his grave, my grandfather ripped off the wallpapers of my worldview, pardon, israelview, like an angry, intact tomcat, and exposed the raw brick underneath.
Ben Gurion's Scandals barely focuses on the Palestinian plight. Instead, it highlights how the State of Israel and its henchmen, anonymous or official, undercover or outspoken, treated Jews. Mizrahi Jews, Jews from the Arab world, in particular. Attacks were staged, pinned on Muslims, in order to pit them against their local Jewish communities and give Jews reason to abandon their lives and flee to Israel. A whole boatful of Jewish refugees got eradicated by the Haganah "by accident". With half of its content proven true, the other half not yet disproven, it's safe to say that the birth of Israel was an absolute shitshow that victimized not only Palestinians, but Jews themselves. It is a testimony to the racism that defines Israel to this day, using us Mizrahi Jews as pawns, as poster children, as examples of "the poor, persecuted Jew", only to dump us in shitty refugee camps and prime us for cheap labour that couldn't be inflicted on Ashkenazim whose money was building the nation. You know, after kicking out or antagonizing the Arabs one could have exploited instead.
Fifty pages into this poorly written, weirdly structured account written by a man known in my family mostly for having been a shit father who raised more shit parents who, in turn, parented sociopaths and trust fund babies, broke my heart and my convictions. Convictions so fragile I had worked hard to uphold them against my basic programming, which was always left-leaning, or as I call it, being appreciative of human decency.
Thank God the IDF never did want me.