Tinfoil Yarmulke

TIN·foyl YAH·muh·kuh (n.): A protective head-covering worn by non-devout Jews to deflect the propaganda beams of Birthright Israel.  
Note: this blog was written in 2011-2012

A new mission statement

When I began this blog in February, my mission statement was solely to chronicle my experience on Birthright.  If I got brainwashed, then by gum I’d take you all with me.  But in the months since I returned home from the Middle East, I’ve developed a new personal mission statement: to blithely ignore taboo.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is a taboo on talking about Israel in America.  You might not have noticed it, because it is a more thorough taboo than any other I’ve experienced.  It comes in two entangled strands:

1) The Conflict-Avoider

Some people dodge politics altogether, for fear of argument or being forced to defend their beliefs.  They are dull nitwits, and we need not concern ourselves with them, except to hope that they stay home on election day.

The relevant Conflict-Avoider is the guy who is happy to engage in a spirited debate on health care reform or charter schools.  “Hey Bob!” you say.  “What’s the deal with teachers’ unions?”

“Well!” our guy replies, “They’re ruining our schools through having too much power and/or not enough power!”

And even though a third of the people at the party did TFA or whatever, so long as it’s clear that everyone respects hard-working teachers and the value of education, Bob is free to criticize educational policy to his heart’s content, and hooray America still works.

Now try replacing education policy with Israeli policy.  “Hey Bob!  What’s the deal with the West Bank settlements?”

And Bob might be thinking “settlers are the ruin of the peace process” or “settlers need to be protected at all costs,” but Bob is going to keep his damn mouth shut because he can’t remember if Sarah has any Israeli relatives and Mike is pretty sensitive about minorities and Anna’s really involved with a liberal church and where the hell do they fall on this stuff and Andrew studied abroad in Damascus and fuck it let’s just drink our PBR and talk about Ikea.

So Bob says “I don’t really know enough about it to have an opinion one way or the other,” and everyone nods, and the party moves on to safer topics like, you know, abortion.

2) The Uninformed

Which brings us to the other strand of the taboo, the one which is more salient for my sort of people.

Folks have an admirable reluctance to take a position on an issue they know little about.  Well done, keep it up.  But at some point along the line, everyone - or at least, everyone in my age bracket - decided that Israel was too damn complicated to even begin to understand.  It’s an itsy bitsy country with a super short history, but it’s so jam packed with wars and treaties and peoples that it just feels too late to try to catch up.  We throw up our hands, cuz that shit’s crazy complicated and we ain’t gonna touch it.

I don’t travel in circles where ignorance is cool, mind you.  When my friends don’t know about something, they look it up.  But Israel defies looking up.  Because it is a mess, and any individual news story is pretty incomprehensible if terms like “1967 borders” are meaningless to you, which makes it rather hard to just sort of dive in whenever there’s stuff in the news. 

And so smart, otherwise well-informed people say things like “I don’t really know enough about it to have an opinion one way or the other,” when they wouldn’t dream of saying the same thing about, say, gay marriage.  Israel’s sheer complication has given everyone carte blanche to ignore it and hope for the best.

I totally understand.  A year ago, I was the same way. 

So, getting back to the point, this has been my new mission statement: taboo breaking.  When people ask about my travels, I don’t talk about the Dead Sea and the hummus.  I talk politics.  Not aggressively, not trying to convince anyone of anything (major exception: convincing future Birthright participants to extend their trip and visit the West Bank).  Just starting small to create some dialogue.

I know full well that many people who read this blog know no more about Israel than what I’ve told them.  Well, that’s stupid, and you guys should go get some better sources.  But I’m honored, and will try to use my role responsibly.

All this has been by way of introduction.  For the next week, I’m going to be posting a bit more about some stuff that’s going down right now.  Stay tuned.

  1. tinfoilyarmulke posted this