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Americans Living in Israel

(Jerusalem Post) - Yossi Klein Halevi In a contest between one society where murderers are celebrated as martyrs, and another where real martyrs are mourned without hatred or rage, I have no doubt which side will prevail. Still, this wasn't supposed to happen to our post-Holocaust generation of American Jews. We were meant to be exempt from the curse of Jewish history. Our parents' generation was the most traumatized; we were the most privileged. Like the myth of the end of history invoked after the collapse of communism, we were implicitly raised on the notion that Jewish history was moving on a one-way trajectory, from destruction to rebirth. But for those of us who opted to leave America for Israel, the past three years have confronted us with the enormity of our decision to enter the heart of the Jewish story. The encounter with a frenetic Hebrew culture that sanctifies the mundane and mocks the sacred has admitted me into the greatest Jewish adventure since biblical times. The dilemmas of Jewish statehood in the Middle East have forced me to abandon idealistic formulations and test my moral mettle against unbearable reality. And the encounter with Jewish sovereignty and power has helped free me from a post-Holocaust identity of victim and allowed me to become a "normal" human being, just as Zionism intended. To experience the ordinary courage of Israelis in this time is to glimpse something of the qualities that have made the Jews an eternal people. We've gotten what we came for.
2003-09-26 00:00:00
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