A Land Twice Promised by Noa Baum

Author:Noa Baum [Baum, Noa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, Arab & Middle Eastern, Jewish, Women, Personal Memoirs, History, Middle East, Israel & Palestine
ISBN: 9781944822095
Google: KOG4DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2016-06-07T01:42:46+00:00

Hearing Muna’s stories convinced me that the stories from 1967 were not the only ones I needed to tell. It was not enough to hear Jumana’s story and for her to hear about my life on the other side of Jerusalem. We needed to go back into the past and include the voices we grew up with, because those stories were part of it; they were all threads in the same intricately woven fabric. The present was intertwined with the memories of the past and inseparable from the traumas that were carried through the generations. I needed to include the stories of our mothers from 1948 that echoed so much of the contradicting national narratives of our people.

Our stories and the stories of our families were the living examples of what I was starting to realize—that at the heart of this conflict were two narratives of victims: memories of pain passed on from generation to generation. For any chance of healing to begin, we needed to hear the stories of the recent past and also go further back in history. As the great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh said, “To reconcile conflicting parties, we must have the ability to understand the suffering of both sides.”

I started gathering those voices of my past—my mother’s stories about the battle of the Old City in 1948 that she was part of and the Yaakov myths that I had grown to resent and tried to forget—and wrote them down. I read them to Jumana. She was sitting on the couch nursing the baby, and I sat on the coffee table before her. When I was done, she was quiet for what seemed like forever.

Then she said apologetically, “I have a confession to make. When you said you wanted to read this today, I really didn’t want to hear your mother’s stories. I just feel like we have enough of our own suffering. I really didn’t want to hear anything about yours. But now that I did, I’m glad.

“You see, all my life, I only remember fear, bitterness, and resentment—major resentment. I felt like we were treated like nobodies. The Israelis have all the power, and we are considered less than dirt. This is our land; this is where we grew up, where our roots go back for thousands of years, and the Israelis came to uproot us and send us out. I grew up with cousins spread out all over the world whom I’m not even allowed to see.

“So, my view of Israelis was of people who are mean, who did us great injustice. I’m always trying to look at Israelis as humans, but it’s difficult growing up like that under Occupation. I didn’t see them as humans until I came here to America.

“Seeing the suffering of the Israeli people through stories like this is helping me; it’s touching. It’s making me look at Israelis as people. I feel like I understand something about your people I didn’t understand before. It’s different when you hear the individual stories.

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