Still Loving Jerusalem: Conversations with My Palestinian and Israeli Friends

By Annette Peizer

Much of what my friends had to say boiled down to this: My Muslim and Christian Palestinian friends want justice, respect, and dignity. My Jewish Israeli friends want safety, security, and trust. All of them are incredibly family oriented. All of them are more hospitable than I am used to. All of them want to live in peace in Israel, the land they all consider their home.

Annette Peizer writes of her close friendships with both Palestinians and Israelis while living in Jerusalem during three of her six extended trips there. She vividly brings to life her experiences while living in Israel on a yearlong study program at 18, when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. During the summer of 1990 as a single woman in her mid-thirties, she listens to the differing perspectives of her Israeli and Palestinian friends and men she dated from both sides, as people prepared their bomb shelters for threatened attacks from Iraq. In 2009, now a mother and wife, she returns to find old friends and meet new friends while staying at Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, the only official village in Israel where Palestinians and Israelis live together in peace.

Readers have the opportunity to listen in to detailed, personal and political conversations and experiences Annette had with her Palestinian and Israeli friends, cab drivers, soldiers, kibbutz members, boyfriends, holocaust survivors, Jerusalem merchants, and many more.

On a date with an Israeli man, she listens to his perspective of the village of Ein Karem in Jerusalem and later, on a date with a Palestinian man, she listens to his perspective of the same village. She describes being a guest in the home of her Palestinian friends in the  Palestinian town of Tamra, and also describes being a guest in the home of her Israeli friends in West Jerusalem. She converses about politics and other cultural topics with her Palestinian cab driver while driving to a few areas inside the West Bank, as well as with Israeli friends while commuting between Jerusalem and the village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam.

Annette has discovered that by simply listening and talking with an open heart and mind in relaxed environments with people thought of as "the other," one can transform years of stereotypes and fear into empathy, understanding, and friendship.

Annette Peizer received her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine, and has published poetry and prose in local and national literary magazines and newspapers.

She has taught writing and humanities courses at colleges and universities, and currently leads creative writing workshops and tai chi/qigong classes in Seattle community centers and at Mary's Place, a nonprofit serving homeless families. Annette lives in Seattle with her Bulgarian/American husband, her daughter, her daughter's boyfriend, their Chihuahua-mix dog, and her own Aussie Shepherd mix dog.

This is her first book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Annette Peizer
• Release date: Jan 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780999854914

Book preview

When it comes to discussions about Israel, we often find ourselves speaking with authority about entire groups of people whose individual stories are unknown to us. This book is a personal story of innocence and vulnerability, of being willing to be surprised and changed by individual stories. Annette’s open-hearted journey has the potential to help us question assumptions about what is possible between people.

Beth Huppin,

Director of Project Kavod/Dignity,

Jewish Family Adult Education Educator,

Congregation Beth Shalom

Still Loving Jerusalem Conversations with My Palestinian and Israeli Friends is a great book from the heart of the author. It brings out so much of the region, the conflicts of real people, and how they deal with issues. Annette writes about her own experiences, and these are not to be missed. I remember reading the manuscript when she first started it years ago, and to this day I remember so many parts of it.

Rita Zawaideh,

Founder and President of

Salaam Cultural Museum, Seattle

Owner of Caravan-Serai Tours

Throughout her journey and at different ages, Annette is willing to ask the tough questions and put herself in uncomfortable situations with both Israelis and Palestinians. American Jews who went on similar programs at that point in their lives can identify with her experiences. What stands apart is her curiosity and courage to engage with the other of Israeli society. Anyone who has ever visited Israel and really looked around will find something of themselves in this book. Her personal encounters reveal where the source of peace in the region may finally come from.

Barbara Lahav,

Pacific Northwest Finance Director, J Street

Through her conversations with Palestinians and Jews, the author has found fundamental areas of conflict impacting people’s daily lives, whether at Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam or in the shuk in the Old City of Jerusalem. I was certainly seeing her journey through her eyes.

Deborah First,

Director, American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam

Associate Professor Emeritus, Nazareth College

Still Loving Jerusalem: Conversations with My Palestinian and Israeli Friends

Copyright © 2018 Annette Peizer

All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form without written permission from the publisher.

eISBN: 978-0-9998549-1-4

First Edition, [month] 2018

Printed in the United States of America

Compassionate Lens Publishing

Seattle, Washington

[website info when it is up]

Maps by Pen Pease

Book cover design by 1106design

Cover Photo: Editorial credit: Elena Dijour / Shutterstock.com

Headshot photo by Andrew Achong

Book Interior Design & Typesetting by Ampersand Book Interiors

To my Palestinian & Israeli friends

Introduction

The experiences I describe in this book took place during three of six trips I took to Israel, and cover a thirty-six-year time period.

In Part 1, I write of my trips in 1973 and 1990. In 1973, I lived in Israel for almost a year on a study and work program after I graduated from high school. A few weeks after my arrival in Israel, the Yom Kippur War broke out, and I record memories of living through that war when I was eighteen.

In 1990, I returned to Israel (after an earlier trip made in 1979) because I missed being there. I stayed for the summer, volunteer-teaching English to low-income Israeli children, and teaching English reading comprehension to Israeli students at the Hebrew University.

On that trip, I made more Palestinian and Israeli friends, and since I was still single, my friends were often men with whom I went on dates. They expressed their thoughts, feelings, and stories to me, which they would not express to each other. As an open-minded, single Jewish American woman, I felt like Switzerland, neutral ground where both my Palestinian and Israeli friends felt safe to open up.

In Israel, I kept a detailed daily journal of what my friends from both sides told me and what we did together. When I returned to the United States, it occurred to me that my journal entries may be of interest to others, too.

In Part 2 I write of my trip in 2009. Now married and a mother, I returned alone to Israel to better understand the tensions between the Palestinians and the Israelis. I also wanted to search out my old friends, and stay at Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam—the only official village in Israel where Palestinians and Israelis live together in peace. In addition to retracing familiar Jerusalem neighborhoods, I visited a few areas in the West Bank and spent some time in the Palestinian village of Tamra with my Palestinian friends.

If you wish to first read about my visit in 2009 to the village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salam, along with my experiences in the West Bank and other conversations I had with Palestinian and Israeli friends as an older, more settled woman, you can skip to Part 2 first. Then you can read about my more youthful experiences in Part 1 to fill in the background of some of my friends and life experiences. The narrative works either way.

Because of my Jewish heritage and lengthy trips to Israel, I feel a deep connection to Israel as one often feels with an extended family—even when the family is dysfunctional, as I think Israel is now. This dysfunction, I feel, is mostly because of the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Yet I still feel close enough to Israel and its citizens to not just give up on them when I think they are on the wrong track. Some of my friends, along with many young people that I know of, are so turned off with the current policies of the Israeli government toward Palestinians that they don’t even want to visit Israel, let alone live there. But by simply avoiding the controversy, progress there doesn’t even have a chance.

To reach out and try to engage with both Palestinians and Israelis no matter how difficult, awkward, or messy the situation has become, and to try to understand both sides from a wider perspective, that’s just something I have felt compelled to pursue.

I reveal my personal and sometimes painful coming-of-age experiences when I was a teenager in Jerusalem, and later, the discomfort I felt as a single woman in her mid-thirties who wanted to get married and start a family before it was too late. But what I want to do more than anything in this book, is to share with you candid conversations and meaningful experiences I had with so many open-hearted, interesting, and intelligent Palestinians and Israelis.

Much of what my friends had to say boiled down to this: My Muslim and Christian Palestinian friends want justice, respect, and dignity. My Jewish Israeli friends want safety, security, and trust. All of them are incredibly family oriented. All of them are more hospitable than I am used to. All of them want to live in peace in Israel, the land they all consider their home.

Notes

The names of my friends and most of the other people I talked with were changed to protect their privacy. There are no composite characters.

For clarity and consistency, I refer to Arab citizens of Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza, as Palestinians, even though Palestinians who live in Israel but not the West Bank or Gaza can be referred to as both Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. I refer to Jewish residents of Israel as Israelis except on rare occasions when I summarize or quote from someone else, or when I include Jews in general, along with Israeli Jews, in a topic.

The events and conversations from my trips in 1990 and 2009 were taken straight from my handwritten journal that I usually wrote in the same day, or within one or two days after I had experienced them. During my trip in 2009, I let my friends and aquaintances know that some of my conversations with them and other comments they made may appear in these pages with their names changed, and they were okay with that. A number of them told me I could use their real names if I wanted.

The events and conversations from my trip in 1973–74 were written from my memories.

I did research after my trips to fill in some background information connected to certain events mentioned in my interactions.

In Part II, I refer to the village I stayed at as Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam since that was the name of the village when I was there, and sometimes I or a friend would shorten the village name by calling it Neve Shalom. However, in the interim, the village name has been changed to Wahat al-Salam-Neve Shalom.

In Hebrew and Arabic, there are several letters not found in English that have light, guttural sounds that come from the back of the throat. For these letters and sounds, the combination kh are used.

Maps show places mentioned in this book

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Part 1

Youth, War, and Dating Men from Both Sides

Chapter One

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, what am I?

If not now, when?

—Rabbi Hillel (110 BCE–10 CE)

Fatigues

Eighteen, or khai, which means alive or life in Hebrew, is the good luck number. Jewish people make donations to charities in increments of eighteen with appropriate zeros after the number or, if it’s more suitable, thirty-six—double khai.

On this trip to Israel, I was almost double khai, almost thirty-six years old. Double life. Time for me to create another life and settle down. Being Jewish seemed to only add to the pressure. So why hadn’t I accomplished these basic goals yet? Was this the by-product of independence?

Most of my past boyfriends, with whom I had felt deep connections, were now married with young children. Some of them were married to women much younger than I—women who seemed less serious, less intense. I looked back on these men with the same kind of tough loneliness I imagined cowboys in the Old West must have felt when glimpsing families through the windows of cozy cabins, eating and laughing together, as they galloped by into the wide-open night.

But I was almost double khai, damn it! Double life energy was coursing through my veins. I felt like a richly fertilized tree in its prime, flowering and ready to drop fruit.

It was July of 1990. My Israeli friends in Los Angeles and Seattle told me I wouldn’t be affected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since I was only visiting for a few months this time. Just stay in safe neighborhoods, they said, meaning Jewish neighborhoods as opposed to Palestinian ones, and you won’t have any problems. Their advice was well intentioned, but they were wrong. Even in the safe neighborhoods, I felt suffering on both sides.

The soldiers wandering the streets in Jerusalem used to thrill me when I was eighteen and living in Israel on a year-long study and kibbutz program. They were everywhere in 1973—sitting at outdoor cafés, walking through the streets in pairs or groups, laughing together in their green fatigues and black leather lace-up ankle boots, with Uzis or M16s slung casually over their shoulders. They were a little older than me, and I found many of the men dashingly handsome. I remember feeling both attracted and shy around them.

Seventeen years later, the soldiers looked like kids to me. As they sat laughing and talking at outdoor tables or strolling through the streets, their confidence struck me as naïve. It wasn’t their fault they were only eighteen to twenty-one years old, straight out of high school and too young to have experienced university, international travel, careers, long-term relationships, marriage, or children. They were just young, too young not to feel confident. On this trip, instead of looking straight into their eyes the way I used to, I couldn’t stop staring at the barrels of their guns and feeling like a Palestinian child, scared.

But when I looked at the soldiers some more, I saw that some of them were older men, called in to do their miluim, reserve duty. The women soldiers, who in the early 1970s seemed to me like living proof of women’s liberation, now carried their guns like overworked airline attendants lugging heavy carry-ons. And instead of the macho, overconfident expressions I remembered in the faces of the young men, more than anything, they just looked tired.

Two months into this visit to Israel in 1990, I stopped feeling anything when I looked at the soldiers. They became such a familiar part of the scenery that I hardly noticed them. The green uniforms, black boots, and dangling Uzis and M16s blended into the landscape as naturally as the fatigue-green olive trees growing in the soothing hills and valleys of Jerusalem.

Old Israeli Friends

When I arrived in Jerusalem, I called Yoni, an old friend from Kibbutz Ein Gedi in the Negev desert, one of the kibbutzim where I’d volunteered on a previous trip. The last time I’d spoken to him was ten years ago in Los Angeles.

Since it was late in the afternoon on Friday, almost Shabbat—the Sabbath—and the buses had already stopped running, he insisted on picking me up in Jerusalem and taking me back down to Kibbutz Ein Gedi, a two-hour round-trip drive. The very next day he had to leave for his miluim, he told me with heaviness in his voice, so this would be our only chance to see each other. All I had to do was meet him by the highway that led straight down into the Negev.

When Yoni arrived in the kibbutz van, I didn’t recognize him at first. I remembered him with a bushy beard, kibbutz style, and huge brown eyes that made me melt every time he looked at me. Now he was clean-shaven, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, and telling me I still looked the same as I had ten years ago. He was excited for me to meet his girlfriend on the kibbutz.

We sped south into the Negev at breakneck speed, sometimes on the wrong side of the highway. I told Yoni that his driving scared me and asked why he didn’t move over to his lane, but he just laughed good-naturedly, explaining that if another car came up the road, he would see it in plenty of time and move over. Israel’s dirty little secret—that more Israelis had been killed in traffic accidents than by all their wars combined—was on my mind throughout that drive.

In the car, we caught up on our lives. He told me he wanted to marry this girlfriend, that he’d never felt this way about any of his past girlfriends. I tried not to think about how I was briefly one of those past girlfriends. He told me that the timing of my visit was perfect since our mutual friend Zehav and his new wife, Karmela, would be visiting the kibbutz that evening.

A little nervousness danced through my chest at the thought of seeing Zehav and Karmela together. I had already heard from Israeli friends in Seattle that Zehav had married a woman from his kibbutz, but I hadn’t expected to see them on this visit.

I’d known Zehav as long as Yoni, having met both of them when they were roommates on the kibbutz. Zehav had moved to Los Angeles to attend a university there, and after years of friendship, I fell in love with him. He was unusually sensitive for an Israeli man, and even the permanent loss of much of his hearing because of his military service hadn’t deterred me. This was before the Israeli Army realized it needed to supply soldiers with ear plugs during target practice.

When I asked him why he didn’t wear hearing aids, he told me they didn’t help. They just increase the constant noise in my ears, he replied, like rushing water. So I learned how to read lips. It’s okay; I’m fine, he added with a reassuring smile.

All those years, I hadn’t even realized he was looking at my lips when I talked with him. All I knew was I wanted to marry him, so I wrote him a love poem, filled with heartfelt metaphors and similes freshly learned from the creative writing workshops I took with my beloved poetry professor, Nelson Bentley, at the University of Washington.

But Zehav didn’t love me back, explaining that he wanted to marry an Israeli woman this time, since his ex-wife had been American and he’d had enough. American women are too complicated for me, he told me, and that was that.

Zehav asked to read the love poem I’d told him I’d written but hadn’t yet given him. I told him he’d never see it because he didn’t deserve it. He understood.

Where All Hurt Vanishes

As Yoni and I stepped out of the kibbutz van, the darkness of the desert night surrounded me like a blanket. I wanted to walk around the kibbutz to see what I remembered and what had changed, but Yoni quickly led me down the path to his small concrete house, reserved for kibbutz members.

He introduced me to his girlfriend, Irit, who was waiting inside. Smiling warmly, Irit extended her hand to shake mine, as all Israelis do for introductions. Her long light-brown hair was loosely clipped up over her tall, slender body.

Yoni was somewhat shorter than her, with darker skin and eyes and black, wavy hair. His Sephardic heritage, due to his Iraqi parents, explained his looks. In contrast, Irit was Ashkenazi, with parents hailing from France and Russia. In Israel’s not-too-distant past, marriage between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews was frowned upon because of prejudice on both sides. Now, my friends told me, these mixed marriages had become quite common. One Sephardic Israeli friend explained that the recent Sephardic and Ashkenazi generations had been educated equally in Israel, so the differences between them weren’t as significant as before.

Irit told me to sit down on one of the neatly covered beds, since there wasn’t enough space for chairs, and asked if I wanted Nescafé or Turkish coffee. More of Yoni and Irit’s friends came streaming into the tiny room, including Zehav, who looked shocked but happy to see me. It turns out Yoni had told him to come over for a surprise without telling him more.

As Zehav asked questions about how long I’d been in Israel, what I planned to do, and so on, I felt my heart thumping against my chest, and I was grateful that I was not a blusher.

Karmela, Zehav’s wife, came in shortly after and warmly greeted me. She was a tall woman, taller than Zehav, with gentle eyes and short brown hair that looked like it had been cut at home. None of the women in the room had any makeup on, and everyone looked natural and comfortable in simple shorts, sleeveless shirts, and leather sandals.

Yoni and Irit quickly prepared dinner for everyone on a portable two-burner stove in their tiny kitchen. Only one person could fit in the kitchen at a time.

When I had been a volunteer on the same kibbutz, everyone ate in the khadar okhel, the communal dining room, where the whole kibbutz congregated for meals. I asked Yoni if other kibbutz members were eating in the dining room this evening. Yoni assured me that dinner was being served as usual, but that he and his friends preferred to eat in their own houses now.

"I hate eating in the khadar okhel, Irit declared. I’d much rather cook my own food."

She’s from the city, Yoni explained with a laugh.

It’s not just that I’m from the city. The food is horrible, Irit protested good-naturedly. The others joined in with jokes about kibbutz food.

As a volunteer on the kibbutz, I remembered that making fun of the kibbutz food just proved to the Israelis that we were spoiled Americans. We were expected to be appreciative and accept what was offered without complaint.

Plate after plate of wide, thin slices of fried white chicken meat, which everyone called schnitzel (schneeetzelll with their accents), along with vegetables and rice, started emerging from the tiny kitchen. Schnitzel, it turns out, is common Israeli fare and has been served to me often in Israeli homes. Borrowed from the Germans, it’s traditionally fried veal. But veal is expensive for Israelis, so they have adapted the same preparation for chicken and turkey.

There wasn’t enough space for all of us to sit down to eat, so Yoni and a couple of others sat on his raised bed in the small alcove above everyone else. A balmy breeze drifted in through the door. Although I tried to be a good sport, my Hebrew wasn’t fluent enough for me to understand their fast-paced conversations spiked with constant jokes. I finally told them I wanted to take a walk alone outside in the night desert air around the kibbutz. Karmela immediately said she would join me, though she may have expressed this to ease my unintentional faux pas. I knew that breaking away from the group to be alone is considered by many Israelis to be antisocial and a signal that something is not okay, instead of a simple desire to be alone.

In between tall date trees with their swaying fronds and the large outdoor swimming pool, Karmela and I sat on the soft, fragrant grass and talked about my family in Seattle, my friends in Los Angeles, and her family and friends in Israel. We talked about anything except that I used to be in love with her husband. I didn’t know what Zehav had told her about me, if anything. He’d probably described me as an old friend and left out the details about how we became lovers and how emotional I became with him. It was just as well. All of it was in the past now.

We sank onto our backs and continued to talk softly, staring into the black desert sky filled with glittering stars, where all hurt vanishes.

When I mentioned that I hadn’t yet found a place to rent, Karmela told me about a room in a Jerusalem house that was empty that I could probably sublet. Her best friend lived there, but she was moving out to live with her new boyfriend. But she didn’t want to give up her room completely yet, just in case. I could relate.

A couple days later, I was able to move into the room Karmela had arranged for me with her friend. It turned out to be a beautiful house in a moderate Orthodox—rather than ultra-Orthodox—Jewish neighborhood. Moderate meant they wouldn’t throw stones at me if I went out wearing shorts and a tank top.

Beautiful Arabic tiles patterned the floor. Tall, wide windows looked out to four-foot daisies staring in at me from the yard. Gabriel, the young Israeli man who lived in the other room and with whom I shared the bathroom and kitchen, told me it used to be a huge old Arabic house but had been divided into separate units at some point; he wasn’t sure when.

Old Katamon was the name of the neighborhood. My mother, concerned with the word old, kept writing that she was worried I might be living in a dangerous neighborhood. No amount of reassurance seemed to lessen her worry until I found out that Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s prime minister at the time, lived in the same neighborhood. One day, a cab driver told me Shamir’s house was behind the high, thick stone walls we were passing by spanning two streets and curving around a corner.

This information was enough to get my mother to stop writing me letters about where I was living. Not that my mom was so crazy about Shamir’s politics, but if it was safe enough for the prime minister, it was safe enough for her daughter.

Kiryat Moriah

After I settled into my room, I took a bus straight up to Kiryat Moriah, the neighborhood where I had lived for the first half of a one-year study program in 1973. I got off the bus on a high hill overlooking Jerusalem.

The tall iron gate to the school’s grounds loomed in front of me, just as I remembered it. The guard sitting in the little booth asked pleasantly why I was there. When I told him, he nodded but informed me that the grounds were empty, since the youth program hadn’t started yet for the year. That was fine with me, I told him. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone anyway. All I wanted to do was walk around, look, and remember.

As I passed through the gate and onto the walkway with wide lawns on both sides, I instantly felt the sense of sheltered security I had experienced as a teenager. Outside was the real Israel: dark-complexioned men with hairy chests and forearms; dusty, congested streets filled with cabs and crowded buses; people talking in Hebrew, Arabic, and heavily accented English; women carrying bulging plastic shopping bags; loud, haunting Arabic calls to prayer; Turkish coffee in hole-in-the-wall outdoor cafés; exotic wafts of cardamom and roasted nuts and seeds; and the Yom Kippur War. Here, inside the tall gate, my fellow students and I were shielded from all that.

With no one around, I walked up the stairs of the large building in front of me and wandered through the empty halls, searching for my old bedroom.

I opened a door on the second floor. Yes, this was it. Inside my old room were the same four wooden bed frames built into the walls, with the thin mattresses on top. I looked at my bed where I woke up exhausted each morning from not enough sleep to get ready for my first class—the bed where I rolled that guy from Montreal to the floor when he insisted on going all the way with me. And there was the spot on the floor where he rose up and whacked me hard across the side of my face.

The bed in the far left corner was where Leah, with her hairy armpits and declarations about women’s liberation, used to talk with her friend Sandy, who played the guitar across from her.

Sandy would sing Joni Mitchell or Cat Stevens songs while sitting cross-legged and topless on her bed.

Opening these doors opened my awareness to how I never really fit in with the other kids or with the program. Why gloss it over? But I had felt fine with my one close girlfriend, Clarissa; with Zev, my Israeli boyfriend; some of the Palestinian shopkeepers in the shuk, the outdoor Arab market; and the other Israeli friends I made on Kibbutz Ma’agan, where I volunteered later that year.

Memories of that tumultuous year came flooding back.

Leadership Training Program for Youths from Abroad 1973

I was eighteen and had just graduated from Chief Sealth High School in West Seattle. Before attending the University of Washington, I left to spend a year in Israel, studying, then working, on a kibbutz as part of a Jewish leadership training program called Makhon L’Madrikhai Khutz L’Aretz, which translates to Institute for Young Leaders from Outside of Israel.

At the time, I felt proud of the word leaders, assuming it meant a general quality all of us had who were chosen for the program, based on our past performance. Later, I realized the word madrikh from Madrikhai means a leader but, more commonly, a teacher or guide typically of Jewish youth groups, so the goal was for us to become Jewish youth group leaders or other advocates for Israel.

The only reason I was allowed to go so far away at the age of eighteen was because I had been brought up to feel connected to Israel as my Jewish homeland. But still, I was a teenager about to spend one year away from home for the first time, in a foreign country halfway across the world. And then the Yom Kippur War broke out within a few weeks of my arrival.

Our program was housed in a large U-shaped building with dormitory bedrooms on the second floor, along with a club room, a dining hall, and classrooms on the first floor and a courtyard in front. A guard let us in and out of the grounds by opening a tall, black iron gate.

I wanted to explore Jerusalem and get to know Israelis, but in between adventures, I had to go to classes.

Khana, it’s your turn, Ofrat, the Israeli Hebrew teacher, said in a loud voice, as if I were deaf.

I felt my heart pumping hard. I’d forgotten how to give the response in Hebrew, I am fine. How are you? Silence filled the classroom as everyone waited.

"Anee …" I began.

"Your voice is too soft. I can’t hear you. Louder, nu? Louder," Ofrat commanded me, as if she were a General in the army.

"Anee—"

"Lo! Not like this. Say ‘Tov todah. Ma nishmah.’ Repeat!"

"Tov, todah. Ma—nish, nish—mah?"

The girl sitting next to me swiftly answered in Hebrew, and then she seamlessly asked the classmate next to her in Hebrew, who quickly answered in Hebrew, and so on around the room. I was the only one who didn’t get it.

Why was I so slow and dense here? No one knew I had been on the honor roll throughout high school, that I was chosen to be one of the commencement speakers at my high school graduation, or that the University of Washington wanted me in their honors program. If I told them, they would probably think I was making it up.

But I didn’t really care much what the other students in the program thought about me. The only person I cared about was my one friend, Clarissa, or Clarrreeesa, as the Israelis called her. We’d started talking at New York’s Kennedy Airport as we stood with an overwhelmingly large crowd of teenagers from all over the United States and Canada, waiting to board a flight to Tel Aviv. We ended up sitting together on the plane, and by the time we landed in Israel, we were best friends.

Clarissa was from Milwaukee and talked with an enthusiastic wholesomeness, which instantly made me comfortable. She was athletic-looking, tall and large-boned, though she told me she felt uncoordinated. Straight light-brown hair brushed her wide high-boned cheeks. At five-foot-eight, she topped my height by two inches.

I envied her flat stomach, and she envied my soft skin. Hers was goosebumpy, she insisted. Throughout the entire year, we both felt horribly self-conscious about our looks. We were too young to appreciate our youth.

Soon after I started attending classes, I became bored and unhappy. Everyone was so gung ho about whichever Zionist or religious youth group they were assigned to, but I just couldn’t get into it and so remained mostly silent.

I had dipped in and out of many different types of Jewish youth groups and summer camps: National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY) United Synagogue Youth (USY) B’nai B’rith Youth Organization (BBYO), Hashomer Hatzair, Habonim, and more.

When I explained this to a program counselor, she told me I had to choose one to dedicate myself to for the entire year. When I couldn’t decide, she put me into the Labor Zionist group, Habonim, since it happened to be the last summer camp I had attended on Gabriola Island in Canada.

As my fellow students energetically debated about what their youth groups stood for, it all seemed silly to me. I had experienced pros and cons in all the youth groups they were assigned to. Besides, weren’t we all Jewish? I daydreamed and counted the minutes until class was over so I could explore Jerusalem.

My Habonim roommates, Leah, Sandy, and Tali, were hardcore Labor Zionists. They tried to pressure me into giving up all my spending money to the group kuppah, the shared community money pot, to go with the socialist values that Labor Zionism and the communal kibbutz lifestyle were based on. When I refused to do so to maintain my independence, all three of them eventually ignored me, and I them. It didn’t matter much to me, as long as I had one close girlfriend.

Outside the Program Gates 1973

Clarissa and I walked out of the program gates during whatever free time we had and headed down the gravel road. Palestinian women, dressed in long, dark dresses and hijabs covering their heads and necks, walked up and down the hilly street called Olei Hagardom, meaning those who went to the gallows. None of the locals I asked knew who had been hanged there.

Years later, I learned that the term Olei Hagardom referred to the armed Jewish underground organizations of Irgun and Lehi—Lehi was also known as the Stern Gang—who