{"id":11217,"date":"2007-11-21T11:49:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-21T11:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/production.ou.org\/life\/other\/one_treadmill_two_refugees_one_college\/"},"modified":"2015-10-27T15:07:12","modified_gmt":"2015-10-27T20:07:12","slug":"one_treadmill_two_refugees_one_college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/israel\/one_treadmill_two_refugees_one_college\/","title":{"rendered":"One Treadmill, Two Refugees, One College"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"image\"<\/div>\n

We start with two stories.<\/p>\n

The first story, eight years ago<\/span>: We’d just moved into our apartment in Jerusalem. After almost two years of living in three different rentals, we were more than anxious to settle down, to have our own furniture once again, to unpack our books, and to make a \u201creal\u201d home. We also wanted a treadmill, which we\u2019d put off buying as long as we kept moving around.<\/p>\n

So shortly after we moved in, I went out to \u201cMegaSport\u201d (Eliezer Ben-Yehudah must be spinning in his grave) with a very close friend, Levi, who\u2019d already been here for years. Having narrowed matters down to a few choices, I called my wife on my cell and asked her which one she wanted. We chatted for a few minutes and made a decision. I paid, arranged for delivery, and we went back to the car. As he was backing out of his space, Levi turned to me and said, \u201cYou know, when I moved here, I certainly didn\u2019t call my wife on my cell to ask her what model treadmill I should buy.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve no doubt that by the time we exited the parking lot, Levi had already forgotten that comment. But I never have. I can still picture our location, what the storefront window looked like through the windshield. The image is frozen in my mind. Because though Levi may or may not have meant it, what I understood him to be saying was that we\u2019d gotten here too late. \u201cYou\u2019ve moved to a ready-made country,\u201d he essentially said. \u201cATM\u2019s. Cell phones. A decent opera company. Museums and string quartets. Six universities. A good job in a stable economy. But you came too late to actually build something. You\u2019re too old for the army. The Hula swamps have been drained. Other people did all that, and now, you arrive.\u201d<\/p>\n

OK. Maybe he didn’t exactly mean that, but that\u2019s how it felt. True, he didn’t sing that old Zionist ditty Anu Ba\u2019nu Artza, \u201cWe came to the land, to build it and to be built in it,\u201d but he might as well have. His point was clear. What\u2019s the point of living here if you don’t actually build something?<\/p>\n

So I’ve often wondered, \u201cDid we really come too late to build something, to make a real contribution to what this country can become?\u201d I\u2019ve tried to assuage my discomfort by telling myself that raising decent, thoughtful and committed kids here is its own kind of contribution. Or that my place of work was doing very important things for Israeli leadership. But still, that comment in the parking lot about cell phones and treadmills has never quite stopped nagging at me.<\/p>\n

The second story, this past summer<\/span>: Together with my son, Avi, and a friend visiting from Los Angeles, I drive up north to visit two Sudanese refugees recently released from Israeli jail, just as the Darfur story is starting to become headline news here. By the time we make it to the moshav where they’re living, working as day laborers on a farm, it\u2019s getting a bit dark. We sit outside the converted shipping container in which they\u2019re living (it\u2019s only a metal shipping container, but I notice that it has an air conditioner and a satellite dish on the \u201croof\u201d), and they begin to tell us their story.<\/p>\n

One, whose English is a bit better (and whom we’ll call Ibrahim for our purposes), does most of the talking. He\u2019d had four-hundred head of cattle in Sudan, which I assume made him a wealthy man. He’d also been a teacher, and had a library of some consequence in his home. He didn’t tell his story in anything resembling a chronological account, but we cobbled it together. He was one of eleven siblings, from a respected family. But his wealth and his position did him no good. The Janjaweed attacked his village, killing most of his siblings, forcing him to flee into the wilds with his father. His father eventually died, and he himself was later captured.<\/p>\n

His captors, he told us, would burn one or two of the captives alive each night in front of the others, allegedly to get them to reveal \u201cinformation.\u201d On the eve of the night when he was to be burned alive, his captors ran out of wood. So the captives, under the watchful eyes of their armed guards, were dispatched into the thickets to bring back more wood. Ibrahim knew what would happen if he returned to camp. So he and another man, working in the shoulder-high brush, plotted their escape. The details are complex, but suffice it to say that they evaded their captors, and walked for three days with leg chains until they could find someone to help them saw the chains off.<\/p>\n

Eventually, \u201cIbrahim\u201d made his way to Egypt. There, he met and married another Darfur refugee. A few months later, she was pregnant, and they applied for refugee status from the United Nations. In December 2005, though, they attended a large rally outside the UN headquarters in Cairo, pressing the UN to process them more quickly. But the Egyptian army broke up the demonstration using water canons with ice cold water (in December). In the confusion, Ibrahim was separated from his wife, and as he was pushed onto a bus, he saw her being shoved into a police car.<\/p>\n

After several days in an Egyptian prison cell with sixty other inmates (the space was only large enough for thirty to sleep at any one time, so thirty would sleep on the cement floor for a few hours, while the rest stood and then they would switch), Ibrahim was released from prison, and went looking for his wife. At first, there was no sign of her. Eventually, after searching all over the city, he found her name on a list of the dead, affixed to a Church door.<\/p>\n

Now, Ibrahim could barely speak. Neither could we, of course. For it was a story we\u2019d heard before, only before, it had been about us. Families, secure and respected, suddenly torn asunder and murdered. Husbands separated from wives. Cruelty that defies description. Entire communities scattered and murdered.<\/p>\n

Ibrahim continued. \u201cI knew I must go to Israel. I have read in the Bible that the Jews are good to strangers. Israel will take care of me, I know.\u201d<\/p>\n

He paused, and suddenly, I was unable to look at my son I wished that I hadn’t brought him. Because I knew what was coming. Ibrahim was going to tell us that the Bible says that the Jews are good to strangers, but look what we actually do. We throw them in jail, don’t we? I found myself gripping the arms of the plastic chair on which I was sitting, listening to Ibrahim, but staring straight into the ground.<\/p>\n

He described how he and another refugee (the quiet man now sitting next to him) had slowly made their way across the Sinai desert, without flashlights or candles. In the day they would sleep and stay still so as not to be detected, and at night they would inch their way forward, trying not to head too far west (and end up in Gaza) or too far east and thus (in their understanding of the geography) end up in Jordan. Eventually, after weeks of wandering at night, they came to a barbed wire fence. They knew it was a border, but they weren\u2019t sure which border it was. They crawled through it with no trouble, he said, and stood up, surveying the new country in which they\u2019d arrived.<\/p>\n

Within seconds, Ibrahim told us, army jeeps streamed towards them, spotlights flooding the area with glaring white. Soldiers jumped out, their guns at the ready. It must have been terrifying, I imagined. But Ibrahim said, calmly, pointing at the spot on his shirt above his breast pocket, \u201cI see on the soldiers writing I do not recognize. And I know this is Israel. I know I am OK.\u201d<\/p>\n

I almost laughed. He sees Hebrew, so he thinks he\u2019s safe. But I knew that Ibrahim had been arrested, and I just knew that there was going to be a nasty story about these soldiers. I glanced at Avi, and his eye caught mine. Just having graduated high school, he\u2019s not far from getting drafted himself, and I felt for him. They were going to tell us about the army he\u2019s soon to join, and it wasn\u2019t going to be pretty.<\/p>\n

Ibrahim continued. The soldiers, having no idea what to do with these men (this was before the flood of refugees began), put them in their jeep, and took them to base. There, they told Ibrahim and his friend, \u201cWe’ll figure this out in the morning.\u201d In the meantime, they gave them dinner, made them some beds, and let them go to sleep.<\/p>\n

Now, that wasn’t what I’d expected to hear.<\/p>\n

The rest of the story is complicated. Because he’d entered the country illegally (and as a Sudanese citizen, he\u2019s a citizen of a country formally at war with Israel), Ibrahim was eventually arrested. When our friend from Los Angeles asked him how it was in Israeli prison, he smiled and said, \u201cYes, very good.\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d our friend said, assuming he hadn’t understood the question. \u201cIn prison. How was it in prison?\u201d \u201cYes,\u201d Ibrahim insisted. \u201cGood. They give us food. The guards are kind.\u201d At last, I allowed myself a brief glance at Avi.<\/p>\n

Eventually, a judge let him out of prison, and he was permitted to work on this moshav, which had taken in a number of refugees. In a few weeks, he told us, there would be no limits on his freedom. He would head to Tel Aviv, he said, to try to find a job, and to start his life anew.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you think you’ll be allowed to stay in Israel?\u201d my friend asked him. Ibrahim\u2019s smile disappeared. \u201cI must,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is wonderful country. People here are very kind. I rather die in Israel than go back to Egypt or Sudan. They will kill me there.\u201d He\u2019s seen them do it, we should recall.<\/p>\n

We took some pictures, exchanged cell phone numbers. Ibrahim had forgotten my son\u2019s name, and asked him what it was. \u201cAvi,\u201d Avi said. Ibrahim looked at his friend, and they smiled. He turned to us and said, \u201cAvi was the name of a guard in prison. He was very nice man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Driving home along the coast, we talked about what we’d heard. How do some Israelis not see that we simply have to let the Darfur refugees in? Does the story about crossing the desert from Egypt to a promised land not speak to us any longer? Why don\u2019t we get the UN to beef up its forces at the border with experts who can tell the real refugees from genocide from those simply seeking a better life (the latter being probably too numerous for Israel to accommodate)? Why doesn\u2019t the Foreign Ministry get stories like this into the press, instead of succumbing to using absurdly scantily-clad women to allegedly improve Israel\u2019s image abroad?<\/p>\n

But something else was bothering me. It wasn\u2019t the government\u2019s pathetic non-policy regarding these refugees, or even the Foreign Ministry\u2019s desperation. It was me. Why had I been so certain that Ibrahim was going to tell us how misanthropic Israelis were, how abusive the soldiers had been? Why did I assume the soldiers had done something wrong, when in fact, they\u2019d been extraordinarily kind? Why was I so positive that here, too, Israel had failed? The Israel that Ibrahim knows is a kind, decent place. If he was so certain, why was I so unsure?<\/p>\n

Cynicism is a dangerous disease, a cancer of the soul. Often, we don\u2019t know we have it, until it\u2019s too late, until part of us has died. It\u2019s also contagious. And this country has stage-three cynicism. By cynicism, I don’t mean the occasional snide joke at a cocktail party. I mean a low-grade but constant self-loathing among many of the people I know at the elite of Israel\u2019s intellectual and academic circles, for whom discussion of the Jewish State is more than pass\u00e9 it\u2019s absurd. If you say something about the values inherent in Zionism, you sound odd. If you insist that the Jews have something unique to say and that having a State is our platform on which we can begin to articulate that \u201csomething,\u201d they look at you as if you’re \u201ccute.\u201d As if you’d referred to a young dating couple as \u201ccourting,\u201d or as if you\u2019d just called a pair of jeans \u201cdungarees.\u201d You’re an anachronism, and no one \u201cin the know\u201d will take you, or your ideas, very seriously.<\/p>\n

This self-loathing manifests itself in a relentless discussion of the occupation, with no reference to why the occupation began or to the fact that Israel doesn’t exactly have many sane choices that might end it. You see it when people insist Israel should \u201cjust sign a peace agreement already,\u201d with no consideration of what\u2019s unfolding in Gaza, in complete denial of the obvious fact that there\u2019s no way that Abu Mazen can deliver on anything he promises before or during Annapolis. It\u2019s the culture in which post-nationalism is taken as an obvious truth, with no recognition of the fact that it\u2019s only when discussing the state of the Jews that people insist that the nation-state should be dismantled. It\u2019s the conversational style in which every mention of an Israeli soldier has to be followed by an account of some act of barbarity, lest you appear overly nationalistic.<\/p>\n

You see it here, too: in the past few years, more than one colleague has told me, with a wink and a smile, about his\/her able-bodied son who figured out a way out of military service. \u201cIt\u2019s not for him,\u201d they say. He wants to work on his music, his art, his athletic prowess. Because it\u2019s not as if defending the first homeland that the Jews have had in two thousand years is actually a value, is it? But the saxophone? Now, there\u2019s a value.<\/p>\n

They’ve gotten to me, I realized as we turned inland from the Mediterranean and started the long climb up to Jerusalem. That night, listening to Ibrahim, I just knew that we\u2019d wronged him \u2013even when we hadn\u2019t. Of course I was appalled by those draft-evasion stories, and yes, I knew which friends and colleagues to avoid after a bombing so I could spare myself the comments about how \u201cthe evils of the occupation\u201d justify blowing women and children to smithereens in a cafe. But other than avoiding those people, I asked myself, what was I doing about it? Nothing.<\/p>\n

In the quiet of the car, I wondered about this country, and how you cure a society that no longer engages in any serious discourse about why its existence matters. And I thought about that treadmill, and about Levi\u2019s question \u2013 \u201cIsn’t building something the reason you’re here?\u201d<\/p>\n

And then, unbelievably, the phone rang (more truthfully, an e-mail made its way into my inbox). It was the Shalem Center (www.shalem.org.il<\/a>), a Jerusalem-based research and education institute that engages in research, education, and publications on Jewish moral and political thought, Zionist history and ideas, democratic theory and practice, strategic studies, and more. \u201cHow about coming over for a visit?\u201d they suggested. Having read their journals and books with great admiration for years, I hastened to accept.<\/p>\n

One conversation led to another, and relatively quickly, I was shown one of the most exciting documents I’d read in a long time: a proposal for a College. A four-year liberal-arts college (a model which does not yet exist in Israel), with a core curriculum that will include history, philosophy, the philosophy of science, Greek thought, Jewish thought, Jewish history, Zionist history and thought, religion and morality, and more. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty amazing,\u201d I told them. \u201cIt could change the country.\u201d \u201cSo how about coming on board and helping us build it?\u201d they proposed.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019d done with the treadmill, I asked my wife what to do. \u201cWhat, I should just drop everything out of the blue, and leave a great job at a superb foundation, with fabulous people who’ve become good friends, walk away from it all? Who in their right mind would do such a thing?\u201d I asked her. \u201cYou would,\u201d she said. \u201cYou should. What are you even wondering about? Remember when you used to say that the main thing you regretted about leaving America was that our kids wouldn\u2019t get the kind of liberal arts education that we did? What if this project could change that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if,\u201d indeed. What if we could produce generations of university students who didn\u2019t succumb to cynicism, who did believe that the Jews\u2019 greatest contribution to the world has been in the realm of ideas, and who wanted to study and discuss those ideas? What if we could produce students who were profoundly prepared to be citizens of the Jewish State, of the Jewish people, and of the world, who could speak intelligently about nations and states, and political philosophy, and religion and morality, and who eventually rose to become Israel\u2019s political leadership, its great jurists, academics and social entrepreneurs? Could that possibly be less of a contribution than the work of previous generations?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what most parents do in situations like this, but we included our kids in our musings about what to do. They\u2019re old enough, I thought, to learn about how you think about these sorts of decisions. We talked about careers and salaries, job security and the ongoing need for challenges. And most importantly, we talked, again, about why we\u2019d moved here in the first place.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an important anniversary coming up here in a few months. And I thought that this would be a good opportunity to remind them that even though, at their age, sixty years might seem like a long time, for a country that\u2019s just a bare beginning. Which is a blessing, when you think about it. Because it means that even if the country appears to be already built, that\u2019s just an illusion. In reality, everything\u2019s still forming. And if you really believe in this place, I wanted them to understand, and you really believe that the future of the Jewish people depends on this still forming State, then some of life\u2019s big decisions are actually relatively simple. You pick a project you believe can make a huge difference, perhaps even change everything. And then you just roll up your sleeves and get to work.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t that, after all, precisely why we\u2019re here?<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a9 Daniel Gordis, reprinted with permission of the author. Daniel Gordis is Senior Vice-President and Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center (www.shalem.org.il<\/a>) in Jerusalem, and the author, most recently, of Coming Together, Coming Apart: A Memoir of Heartbreak and Promise in Israel <\/a>(John Wiley & Sons, 2006). Visit his website at www.danielgordis.org<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An arrested refugee alerts one Jew to his undetected self-hate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":42622,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-israel"],"yoast_head":"\nOne Treadmill, Two Refugees, One College<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"If Ibrahim was so certain, that Israel is a kind, decent place, why was I so unsure? Cynicism is a dangerous disease. 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