Unheroic Conduct

When I was 20, I saw my American Jewish friends get attacked by a group of Israeli men by the Kineret. The attack revealed truths about zionist chauvinism, and my myopic loyalty to the state of Israel

The year I turned 20, I lived in Jerusalem, in a dormitory full of foreign exchange students on Har Hatzofim, in occupied Palestine, then in an apartment, which I shared with two other American girls my age in Tel Aviv.

I was a college student, and this was my junior year abroad. I had opted out of the opportunity to spend the year at Oxford University because I had heard it was academically demanding. I told my advisor I wanted sunshine and parties. I wanted to meet boys. It was supposed to be an unchallenging year of leisure. If I ignored what was right in front of me, it was.

I try to have compassion for my younger self. This myopic idiot. This bleached-blond girl who dressed up in a sexy military costume for Halloween to entice her disinterested frat boyfriend. I remember her on the Sarah Lawrence campus the year before leaving for Jerusalem, pacing up and down the lawn outside the Titsworth dorm, hungover from her favorite drink, an Irish car bomb, wearing Payless boots and a jacket from the ridiculously named clothing chain, Wet Seal.

Before living in Jerusalem, I had visited twice. Once with my high school class on a trip that began in Poland, to see concentration camps. Then, on another fully funded Zionist youth trip the following summer. We spent eight weeks on a bus that smelled of the toilet’s blue chemical water, driving up and down the country, flirting, eating spoonfuls of Nutella, mocking the counselors. There was a conflict in the North and the hostels filled up with people fleeing south. With nowhere to board us, the trip organizers drove us to the Negev desert, where we camped with camels for five days. I was allowed to call my mother. She asked if I wanted to come home.

“Israelis do this all the time,” I told her.

“Do what?” she asked.

“They live through wars. Wars are a part of life.”

My mother had wanted me to have somewhere to go for the summer for free. I don’t know if she anticipated the efficacy of the trip’s indoctrination.

Sometimes I think about my teenage Zionism as an extension of the class-based alienation I experienced as a kid who received a lot of financial aid. It was mostly the rich kids in high school who visited Israel or had second homes there. Having a relationship with the state of Israel was a way of assimilating into a culture I never felt I belonged to.

I was able to transfer my financial aid to cover my room and tuition at Hebrew University and it was the party I had hoped for. I spent the first semester smoking hookah and hash in the dorm rooms of AEPI boys from Beverly Hills, binge drinking Taco Taco tequila substitute at Yankee Bar, sunbathing, and carpooling to parties on kibbutzim and once, at a mansion in Herzliya.

Double fisting vodka red bull, 2009

One night, at a bar in Kikar Chatulim, a part of Jerusalem where Birthright kids party, named for its many stray cats, I was sitting at a table with a group of American girls, a man I found very hot approached me and offered me a beer. He was around the same age as me, still in the army. There was Israeli folk music playing in the bar. The crowd sang along to a song I knew from my Jewish elementary school called Od Lo Ahavti Dai, which means, “I haven’t loved enough.” I didn’t know what the singer wanted to love so much. But the very mention of love filled me with longing, and cast a nostalgic haze, which made me believe I was already familiar with everyone in the room, even the stranger who had given me this open beer.

The hot guy put his hand on my leg. He asked me where I was from, what I was doing in Jerusalem, if I could speak any Hebrew.

“Do you know what it is, duvdevan?” he asked.

“A cherry,” I said.

“Ah so you know some Hebrew,” he said. Duvdevan, he explained, is not only a cherry, but the name of an elite combat unit of the IDF.

“Do you want to see something cool?” he asked. I hesitantly agreed. Then, he took out a Nokia flip phone and showed me a small, grainy image. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at. It was an image of a person sitting on the floor with their hands tied together and a tarp bag on their head.

Though perplexed, I know I couldn’t have been that bothered because I took him back to my shitty dorm room and we had sex. He reached for a condom wordlessly. I noted his pubic hair was too long. He lay beside me for a while, until the Muslim call to prayer, talking about a trip he’d taken to London “for shopping.” He was the nephew of a well-known right-wing politician who had gone to jail for corruption. I guess Jerusalem is small and word gets around. Later, a friend of a friend told me this man was a “jobnik,” which is a derogatory term for an office worker who does not have a combat position in the army.

After he fucked me, this guy didn’t answer any of my texts. But the image of the prisoner stuck with me as a reference for something so obviously bad about him I knew I shouldn’t have missed it— a chauvinistic desire to seduce through force and subjugation.

I searched for a translation of the lyrics to the song I’d heard in the bar. The love referred to in the song was the love of settling the land:

My hands have yet to build a village/Have yet to find water in the barren wilderness/Have yet to paint a flower/And I have yet to find the path that leads to my destiny.

Among the statues and monuments and songs, I gathered a narrative, still seductive to me at the time, of a nation built in an empty desolate land through masculine corporeal strength. I studied the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at Yad Vashem, noting the muscular arms and torso of the sculpted man at the forefront.

In Jerusalem, I lived with two girls from Los Angeles. And when the semester was over, we moved together to a one-bedroom apartment in Tel Aviv.

We lived in the north of the city, on a street lined with clementine trees, crawling with cats and German cockroaches. The apartment was crowded with our damp bathing suits, and our big, sandy beach towels hung over the back of the chairs. We took turns sleeping in the bed, on the cot, and on the small white leather sofa, and ate little beside for watermelon and popsicles with gummy bears stuck in them.

The street we lived on, Rachov Nordau, was named for the fascist, Max Nordau, the Zionist cultural critic who coined the term “muscular Judaism” in an article arguing for the creation of the “new Jew,” of physical and moral strength, and a rejection of the degenerate “old Jew,” a pale and emasculated weakling of the diaspora.

My roommate had an American boyfriend named Jacob who came to Tel Aviv with us. Like the “old Jew” he was a scholar of questionable physical strength. He volunteered with an organization that provided legal assistance to asylum seeking migrant workers from Sudan. He was good at finding good restaurants in neighborhoods I would never have thought to visit. He took us to a place that served Iraqi Kibbeh and to an all-night café on the beach where we ate shakshuka and watched the sunrise after a night of drinking. I liked Jacob and he liked me too, but he would sometimes too bluntly call out my vapidity and my singular interest in parties and hooking up with new boys.

I liked to hang around the neighborhood bars where I could meet surfers or aspiring photographers who took polaroids of naked women. They were almost always back from their post-army year of travel in South America or India. I went on a date with a club promoter who took me to his apartment, which was in fact the finished basement of his parents’ house in Herzliya. “They are psychoanalysts,” he said. He must have been about 24 or 25. There were Tibetan prayer flags hung from the basement ceiling. We smoked a spliff together and he told me about his time in Thailand. He said it was good to travel after the army, which had not been a good environment for him.

“They made me shave every day,” he said, taking a long drag of his spliff, looking sad and determined like the statue of the freedom fighter I’d seen at Yad Vashem.

“The commander would tell us to look in the mirror every morning and ask, ‘what kind of man are you going to be today?’” he laughed.

There was something traumatized yet still uncritical about these men’s experiences, like they couldn’t say exactly what had bothered them. Or, I never got close enough to really know. That night, we had sex and he drove me home on his moped. The next weekend he invited me to another party on a rooftop and told me to “bring girls.” I waited around for him in a tube top and mini skirt, sucking down vodka redbulls in plastic cups, posing for high exposure professional photographs, which would later be posted to the venue’s Facebook page. The club promoter greeted me in a hurry. He said he was very busy. I gathered I was not his date.

“Don’t be sad,” he said, “enjoy the party.”

I was often disappointed that summer because men didn’t take me seriously. I could capture their attention only very briefly. I thought it was because I was slutty. I never meant to be slutty. I kept having the same experience over and over with different men: they’d grab a condom quickly or not at all, before I had a chance to realize what was happening. Even when I enjoyed the sex, it seemed to happen to me, without my active participation, or to put it plainly, without my consent. I’d heard Israelis repeat the cliche that American women are easy. I’d been told overtly that American women don’t know how to say no like Israeli women do. “Israeli women are tough because of the army,” was the rationale they expressed. “American women are soft and have no boundaries.”

There was another guy in and out of the picture that summer, also about 25, the son of religious Zionist Americans who had emigrated to a settlement outside Jerusalem. He had a two-part nationalist name like “Ami-El” meaning, God of my nation. I met him on campus at Hebrew University. On Israeli veteran’s day he listened to a playlist of sad slow songs about comradery and sacrifice. I tried to distract him from his quiet brooding by sitting on his lap and removing my shirt. “Not now,” he told me, “This is not like your Memorial Day. We don’t BBQ.” I felt so silly. I was such a silly American girl.

I felt my childishness, my incapability, at work as a server on a beachside restaurant, where I misunderstood everyone’s orders but delighted in the attention I got walking up and down the restaurant in shorts. It was a horny summer, spent in and out of the water all day and night, on the backs of mopeds, in the style of a tween movie about girls abroad.

But it wasn’t really that. There was always something sinister lurking beneath the façade of ease and freedom. I think about the ignorance that had been deliberately cultivated for me by donors and PR machines. And everything I conveniently overlooked: the Palestinian girl in my Hebrew language intensive class who told me could not travel to any of the cities I had visited, the checkpoint at the West Bank where I saw lines of ordinary people, searched and interrogated on their way home from work, and of course, the photograph of the prisoner I’d been shown at the bar. I visited a refugee camp in the West Bank with my roommates. Our tour guide described the dehumanizing experience of living under military occupation. When we got back to our dorm room, I was angry, and I reasoned that the tour guide had lied about the abuses he described. “They want to take away our humanity” I remember him saying. I had gone on dates with men who used genocidal language to describe Palestinians. “They’re roaches,” one guy said. I refused to believe what was right in front of me because it would have required me to ask why I was living and studying there to begin with.

At the end of the summer, my roommates and I took a trip to the beach in Netanya. Jacob came with another American guy from the volunteer organization. We planned to stay the night and take a bus home the next day.

On the shores of the Kineret, we lay our towels in the sand beside a group of people, mostly men, a few women, and a little girl. I knew they were Israeli because they were speaking Hebrew and one of them had a star of David tattooed on his chest. They were listening to electronic music and eating watermelon.

I stayed on the beach to tan while Jacob and his friend went into the water. I have only a fragmentary memory of what happened next, pieced together from an article describing the events that was published in the Jerusalem post:

I saw the tattooed men follow my friends into the water. I saw them talking to them, yelling, then my friends screaming for help. The Israelis were pushing them down under the water. One got out and took a wooden chair, which he used to smash over Jacob’s head. They grabbed a metal pole and smashed it into his back. They threw rocks at my friends until their heads were bleeding. We ran down the beach where an Arab family sat on a picnic blanket. They offered us water and tried to clean the wounds. But the Israeli men were close behind us and began pelting the family with heavy rocks.

I ran away to a public bathroom, still holding my towel and my phone, and shut the metal door to the stall. My vision blurred in panic. I called the man I was romantically attached to that week, Amiel. I remember him asking, “what do you expect me to do?” and “you ran away?”

“Yeah,” I told him.

“Your friends are being attacked, and you ran away?” he asked. I thought of the mixtape of songs about comradery and knew I had revealed a weakness he wouldn’t forget.

“But I’m going back to help them,” I said, hanging up the phone.

I thought, Israelis know how to handle war, terror, violence. I did not know what to do. But the obvious fact I missed in the moment was that it was Israelis who had attacked us without reason.

I didn’t call the police because I didn’t know the Israeli number for 911. When I got out of the bathroom stall, the police were still not there. The Arab family and my American friends had formed a human fence to block the assailant’s car. When the police finally arrived, they let the car go.

We spent hours in the ER, waiting for someone to properly clean and stitch up the open wounds. We were still in our shorts and bathing suits, using our towels to stay warm in the air conditioning.

In the article about the attack, Jacob is quoted saying, "This is Israel and I'm Jewish. I came here for many reasons. I always thought this is the place where I would be safe. The men who attacked us were also Jews." In the comments section, now deleted, readers were outraged by what he said. I remember one man, likely American, wrote a lengthy comment about how spoiled we were and how Jacob should stop complaining about Israelis and enjoy the beautiful land he was lucky enough to visit.

When I was young, I believed Israel was my country and my culture. I trusted Israelis because they were Jews, and we were part of the same people. spent the year trusting Israeli men with my body, but after the attack, I realized they had usually taken advantage of their “easy” access to it, by taking whatever they could without consent or emotional accountability. I had trusted them only because they were Jewish.

And I cannot forget the Arab family who helped us. Perhaps it sounds reductive but It’s true that their kindness revealed the truth of the racism I’d been raised with.

The day after the attack, we went to the police station in Tel Aviv to file a witness report. Or maybe the other women and I went to the police station in Netanya while the men waited in the ER. I don’t remember. But I do remember the officer who took our testimonies, eating an ice cream as he wrote. He questioned whether it was true the attack was unprovoked. Jacob said the assailants had accused him of “looking at their women.”

“So, were your friends looking at their women?” the officer asked.

The officer asked us why the men had not fought back. He said that was the problem with the Jews outside of Israel. They don’t know how to defend themselves.In the myth he reinforced by dismissing us, we needed the Zionists, the muscle Jews, to come and save us from the dangers of the diaspora. Which is ironic, as Jacob pointed out, because we’d never been in so much danger as we were in the land we supported because it kept us safe.

The attack was a fluke. It was an abnormal experience, which is why it took me so long to make sense of the experience. The attack was an anomaly, but the Israeli police response was representative of a pretty common experience of being gaslit by Israelis into believing we were in danger because of our vulnerability in the diaspora.

“Don’t worry so much,” the officer said, “Go enjoy your time here.”

*

After the attack, we struggled to enjoy the rest of our time in Tel Aviv. I was shaky in crowds and flinched at the sound of loud voices. One of my roommates returned home early. The other mistrusted me for running away. I kept thinking, I ran away like a coward. Like someone without courage or loyalty. I wanted to save myself.

During my last weeks in Tel Aviv, I got bored enough one day to write a proposal for a senior thesis on “conceptions of Jewish masculinity” in literature. In this project I planned to read books and stories by Philip Roth, Shalom Aleichem, Kafka, and S.Y. Agnon. I wrote “these writer’s male protagonists share a common feeling of emasculation as Jewish men, which can be attributed to the state of the Jewish people as a victimized minority in Europe and the United States.” Reading this now, I realize I too viewed Jewish masculinity as feminized, a pathological response to the diaspora.

My advisor emailed me back and told me I had to take a class on queer theory before writing my thesis, which I strongly resisted at first. She suggested a book called “Unheroic Conduct” by Daniel Boyarin, which was my first exposure to the idea that gender roles are a construct, which are not universal. Boyarin challenges Nordau’s fascist insistence that Jewish men must conform to a Western “patriarchal/warrior” construct of masculinity, of the kind adopted by Zionists.

I spent my last week in Tel Aviv mostly alone. This isolation hurt more when I remembered the scene at the bar where the crowd sang in unison. The song had made me feel like I belonged to this land. And I believed there were no such songs about the Jews who had moved to California or New York.

When I was a kid, my mom taught me a song in Yiddish, which she called the Partisans Hymn. It was a song my grandmother had learned in the concentration camps. She said the prisoners would sing it together. “Zog Nisht Kein Mol,” the partisan’s hymn, was written by Hirsh Glick in 1943, in the Vilna Ghetto. This too is a song of perseverance, about fighting for humanity and believing in a future, but few people have heard it, because it is a song of the diaspora.

I waded into the tepid Mediterranean for the last time before my flight to JFK. I knew I might not ever return to Israeli occupied Palestine, and I did not care because this place was not my home. Never had I ever felt less at home and less at ease. I was floating in the water, on my back, when a man tapped my shoulder and startled me. He asked if he and his friend could buy me a drink. I turned to him weary and irritated and over it. “Fuck off,” I said.

The next day I landed at JFK. My aunt picked me up at the airport with a paper bag from Bagel Oasis waiting in the car. I promise it is true I cried tears of relief, holding the warm bagel, as we sat in traffic on the BQE.