Learning in Israel

I stumbled upon Berlin artist collectives through a grapevine of like minded people and years later went back with a lover and companion, a nice Jewish boy with dual citizenship in the US and Israel who had for some reason listened to me when I told him it was a great idea to leave his comfortable Philadelphia lifestyle to hitchhike all over Europe with me.

Oddly, this isn't going to be about Berlin artist collectives and old squathouses that don't exist anymore, speaking to their ghosts isn't what I intended to do when I started writing this. But I needed to set the scene, and the scene was Berlin in November. It was cold, we were tired of hitchhiking in the rain and Berlin falls into it's beer fueled winter depression around then. Or maybe it was us who were depressed. Either way, we found that airfare was incredibly inexpensive from Munich to Tel Aviv.

Maybe some latent Nazi guilt, we mused while buying tickets to Israel, planning to visit his family outside of Jerusalem and also a pretty young college student who had taken a liking to my companion in an underground Berlin bar.

Israel was warm. It was The end of November into December; the sun was out, the pomegranates were ripe and we visited everyone we intended and more. We hitchhiked using a finger instead of a thumb, something I had never seen anywhere else.

We decided to visit a Palestinian town that held monthly protests against the Israeli apartheid wall, because we felt we should see the Israel/Palestine conflict for ourselves, in real life.

Of course we were teargassed. Of course we weren't really expecting it, but we kind of were. The Palestinians were gracious and kind. The Israeli soldiers had always been kind to us until then.

And we realized. This happens every week. Every week and sometimes every day Palestinians and Israeli's are facing off over this incredibly complicated conflict. Generations have never known what it's like to not grow up with violence.

And the food, it was amazing