Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 6, 2024

Not unlike prior forms of Jewish dark tourism, the trips I joined seemed intended to reassure participants that they could support Israel while retaining the moral clarity of the victim. For example, at the end of the Kfar Azza tour, Shpak, the kibbutz member, explained that the community had once been invested in peace and co-existence efforts, but everything was broken and trampled in our childrens blood. Shpak told our group that in the past, he had found it painful to witness the suffering of the other side. I admit and confess that not this time. I have no sympathy for whats happening on the other side, he said. Other leaders on the trips I witnessed frequently glorified the war effort. In one case, a groups Israeli driver boasted about having driven bulldozers bigger than our large bus into buildings in Khan Younis. Various guides echoed well-worn pro-Israel talking points arguing that Palestinians are not a people, or that the Nakbathe mass dispossession of Palestinians in 1948was not a case of ethnic cleansing. This messaging has clearly affected participants. There arent a lot of innocent Gazans, one member of a rabbinic trip wrote in a blog post. After hearing the stories from those who were there, I am truly sad to say that this is the reality. Greg Harris, a rabbi from Bethesda, Maryland, who led a trip for his congregation, told me that while, in the US, it is perceived that Israel is retaliating against the Palestinian people, in fact that is not what is happeninga truth that participants grasped just by being there in Israel.

The trips not only blur past and present Jewish trauma, but encourage visiting Americans to assume an Israeli identityand the sense of embattlement that comes with it. When one tour group arrived to help pick fruit in a Gaza Envelope orchard, their guide announced that they had come to show the farmer that were your brothers from another mother in America. A rabbi with another group I observed, after witnessing the devastation at Kfar Azza, told the local resident who had guided us, Your story has become our story, our memory, and our trauma. As the Israeli American who staffed multiple trips explained, participants are having their own moment of disorientation about whether they feel safe in America. And thats the lens through which they experience Israel: Were all part of the same struggle. A rabbi who went on a Hartman trip in November drove this idea home in a Shabbat morning speech upon his return. The Jew walking across a college campus to get to class, wondering if it is safe to be conspicuously Jewish in the 21st century in the USA ... is experiencing a phenomenon that is different from what the victims and the survivors of Oct. 7 confronted only in quantity and scope, not quality and category. They are the same. So we are all in that safe room.

Many Americans return from these trips ready to spread the word about what they have seen. A few participants told me that they hoped to draw on their experiences in particular, politically contested settings: One woman who worked with unions in the US said she thought the trip would help her more effectively advocate against organized workers supporting a ceasefire. Meanwhile, countless participants have given media interviews and presentations to their local congregations and JCCs, as well as to churches and public schools. For many, such results are proof that continued solidarity tourism is necessary: We need mega missions, one participant told me in an interview. Harris, the rabbi from Bethesda, told me that he now hoped to have his synagogue organize trips to Israel every two or three months, a rate that would have been unimaginable before October 7th.

Yet while Americans are clamoring to join such trips, Israeli survivors are exhibiting more ambivalence about their frequency and invasiveness. When I was there in February, Kfar Azza was often receiving between 30 and 40 groups a day, and in January, Gili Molcho, a spokesperson for Kibbutz Beeria town formerly of some 1,000 residents where nearly 100 civilians were killed and about 30 were taken hostageestimated that the community was receiving between 500 and 1,000 visitors daily. The feeling is of losing control, he explained to Ynet at the time. In another interview at the time, he told Haaretz: On the one hand, its unpleasant to refuse, and on the other hand, people say theyre starting to feel like theyre in a zoo. Kibbutz residents have described having strangers burst into their homes to photograph them or push past them to climb the stairs; others have spoken of opening their own front doors to find people taking selfies in the living room. Haaretz has reported that some tourists have taken items from peoples homes as souvenirs. In the past several months, Beeri and a few other kibbutzim in the area have largely stopped allowing tours. Multiple guides told me in interviews that it was becoming harder to find kibbutzim open to groups or survivors willing to speak. Theres a tension between people who are trying to return to their homes and rebuild their lives, versus all of these groups who keep walking around the kibbutz and reminding them that they live in a massacre site, the Israeli American trip staffer said.

See more here:

The Rise of October 7th Tourism - Jewish Currents

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