My Jewish great-grandfather, Nathaniel, was a teenager when he and his parents fled their Ukrainian town to escape pogroms — the mobbish destruction of Jewish life and property catalyzed by government propaganda scapegoating Jews for the sake of political expediency. Think the last scenes in Fiddler on the Roof, which are drawn from these sorts of events.
They left behind the Pale of Settlement — that geographic area within the Russian Empire in which Jews existed in a state of apartheid, denied freedom of movement and placed under severe economic constraints. They ultimately ended up in Chicago. There Nathaniel became a jazz musician (family lore has it he played bass in a speakeasy frequented by Al Capone), and married my great-grandmother, who was not Jewish. (Hence, I’m not either).
He died when my mother was 15, and a lot of the family history went with him. However, this little bit of heritage has long served to expand my sense of connection to those who have experienced great suffering. Since I was a kid, I have pondered the fact that I would not be here today had my ancestors not managed to flee murderous hate crimes endorsed by the state. Had they stayed in their homeland and survived, it is possible they might have later been among those Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated to Palestine in the pre-World War I era as part of the early Zionist movement. A likelier case, is that they would have been subject to the horrors of the Holocaust. Extended family members undoubtedly were.
An ever-deepening awareness of life’s precarity in the face of organized violence has been a force for good in my life. Peeling back the layers of intergenerational trauma compels me to do all that I can to preserve the precious gift of life. I do so by practicing solidarity with people actively experiencing oppression, whom Howard Thurman referred to as those with their “backs against the wall.” This practice invites the regular unearthing of my assumptions, the humility to be corrected, and the courage to face reality as it actually is. My own family story keeps me grounded in my humanity and accountable to the sacredness of all life.
As a young person, I naively assumed that intergenerational trauma being transformed in service to universal compassion was a relatively natural process. This perspective was abetted by the privilege of being a white American, three generations removed from my Jewish great-grandfather’s suffering. I really had no idea how deeply difficult it is for trauma to be transformed.
So imagine my surprise when I traveled to Israel — alone — at age 21, and found myself immersed in an apartheid system.1
Prior to this trip, my awareness of Israel’s settler-colonial occupation of Palestine was virtually nonexistent. I mostly had in mind what US evangelicalism had cheerily marketed to me — an ancient place, dusty yet gauzily preserved, full of sacred sites where one could freely follow in the footsteps of Jesus. I kept my parents’ concerns about safety vaguely in mind — they wanted to know if I would be going to the West Bank. I wasn’t sure, I told them, and promised to be careful. Of what, I didn’t really know.
My only sense of an alternative narrative came from an experience I had my first year of college: on a public thoroughfare at UCLA, a fence was constructed by Palestinian American students striving to illustrate the occupation. Counterprotests from Jewish students led to verbal clashes between the two groups, and I actively avoided the space for the few days it lasted.
Upon entering the gates of the Old City of Jerusalem, any illusions I held quickly dissipated. Whereas people who appeared Arab were curtly questioned by gun-bearing IDF soldiers and required to show identification before entering the Old City to go about their business, I continued on with little more than a glance from the guards. I was immediately troubled as I realized that my whiteness and appearance as a tourist conferred tremendous privilege that Palestinians did not possess.
There has been a great deal written about the racial and ethnic stratification of Israel, in which fairer-skinned Ashkenazi Jews (like my ancestors) are incentivized to move to Israel and have children, while Jews of other provenances are actively disincentivized (or even, as in this infamous example of Ethiopian Jewish women who were forced to take birth control against their will, sterilized). Meanwhile, there are nearly 7 million Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories and around the world (up from the 750,000 people originally forcibly removed in 1948’s Nakba, or catastrophe), who do not have the right of return to their homelands.
A 2021 report from Human Rights Watch noted that Israeli “authorities have adopted policies to mitigate what they have openly described as a ‘demographic threat’ from Palestinians.” Illegal Israeli settlements are part and parcel of the ongoing national project to preserve and grow a Jewish majority by pushing Palestinians onto smaller and smaller territories, with less and less rights.
I knew little of this history and context at the time. But as I made my way through the Old City, strolling through the Jewish and Muslim Quarters, visiting Christian sites and the Western Wall, I noted both the freedom of movement I enjoyed and that this was not afforded to everyone. Reading an article this week about the deportation to Gaza of Palestinians who had held permits to work in Israel (where salaries are six times higher), I was reminded of the jarring sight of buses bound for the occupied territories, packed with Palestinian riders, most of whom are not permitted to live in Israel. These glimpses of a deeply segregated society unsettled my spirit then and now.
In a matter of several days, my anachronistic, apolitical view of Israel was — appropriately — complicated by what I witnessed. It was increasingly apparent that the process of transforming trauma — such as that collectively experienced by the Jewish people in the Holocaust — is a longterm labor that must be intentionally, collectively, sustainably undertaken from generation to generation. There are some who take this journey. Others do not. When it is not taken, as Fr. Richard Rohr has said, “Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.”
My Palestinian American colleague, the Rev. Leyla Kamalick King, put it similarly in a recent article called “Talking to Children about the Holy Land:” as she gently reminded her readers: “Hurt people hurt people.” This is true of Israelis. It is true of Palestinians. It is true of you and me.
Escaping atrocities does not singularly render the human heart free and healed. People — whether individually or collectively — are not morally purified by simply passing through suffering. Questions haunt us: what will we do with the experience of suffering? Will we allow it to break our hearts open to the world, or will our hearts harden in fear and self-protection?
In the last month, we have seen the grief of Israelis over the horrific attacks on their neighbors, parents, children, siblings and friends be wielded as a weapon in the hands of the Israeli and US governments. As the death toll in Gaza surpassed 10,000 this week, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that Gaza is becoming a "graveyard for children."
Pain, transmitted.
In a video rejecting the dichotomous premise of “kill or be killed,” Jewish trauma therapist Katherine Wela Bogen says, “This (situation) requires global Jewry to acknowledge that we have an epigenetic trauma. Our ancestors were annihilated in the Holocaust and we are terrified — terrified — that that will happen to us again. And we are projecting that fear onto a people that just wants the right to exist absent persecution and policing. We are projecting our fear of mass murder because we have not healed."
Now is the time for healing. Individual healing. Communal healing. Intergenerational healing. Healing through justice. Healing through truth. Healing through the love that sees God in the face of the other.
For healing to happen, there must be space to cry out in lament.
To cry out we need room to breathe.
To breathe there must be a ceasefire.
The Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul writes,
In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent
Please join me in calling your representatives to urge them to push for a ceasefire. Let us work for healing, together.
The language of "apartheid" is consistent with a 2022 United Nations report, a 2021 report from B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and a 2021 report from Human Rights Watch.
Thank you for this essay, Lauren. I saw these things in the West Bank, too, in 2007. I wrote a poem about how I felt ...
"At the Refugee Camp"
It follows me up the steep hillside
In sidelong glances
From dark, sullen eyes
And in the clamor of children
Who throw rocks sharp with pain.
It curls its way through narrow alleys
With haphazard houses
That climb hopefully
To the freedom of the sky
Without foundations to support them.
It pulls tightly against my tourist armor
Of backpack, camera, and tennis shoes,
Squeezing my throat and stealing my breath
As I slip down gravel slopes
In my hurry to elude it—
The evil done on my behalf.