Pnei Kedem, a group of large trailers centered on a gravel road and enclosed by an electrical fence, sits atop a lush Judean hill twenty minutes outside Gush Etzion in the West Bank. On the way there my cousin Yoni stopped the car and picked fresh plums off a tree near the highway. We could see into Jordan.
Shabbat in Pnei Kedem was a simultaneous exercise, for me, in avoiding political discussion and in appreciating this place that I hoped Israel would give up in the coming round of negotiations. Whenever I was able to forget the political implications of where I was, I enjoyed it.
I’d already been against the occupation for years when I went to Pnei Kedem. As my college years progressed my political views moved left during policy arguments I had in the library and at Hillel with other American Jews who, like me, thought they had the answers. My views on the situation became a series of talking points, a complete ideology.
Pnei Kedem didn’t change my views but it did shift my focus. My conversations with my cousins weren’t in a library or a Hillel, nor did they touch on any of my views regarding the conflict. We talked about life, about each other, about their home and their friends.
I realized then that my ideology was missing something. In our obsession with rhetoric we forget the people. We need to understand that when we talk about borders, walls and armies there are children in Gaza and children in the settlements. There are men and women trying to live out their hopes and their dreams.
The life of my cousins in Pnei Kedem is no less real or important than the life of an oppressed family in Gaza. Neither can be dismissed and neither should be sacrificed for the other.
For too long the politics of rhetoric have held a monopoly on the Israeli-Palestinian debate and underneath that rhetoric is a world where people are dying. And we shouldn’t be surprised: when we conduct a discussion that talks too much about citizenship and not enough about citizens, too much about The Jewish People but not enough about Jewish people, those people become irrelevant.
What we need is not a new solution but a new problem. We need to discard the politics of rhetoric and introduce the politics of compassion. People need to stop theorizing and begin looking around them, begin talking about—and talking to—the people with whom they share their lives and their land.
That discussion starts at New Voices. Go to our Web site to read about confused Jewish protesters in America, musicians trying to make it in New York City and a Floridian Jewish mother who writes about pirate sex.
Or check back over the next couple of weeks and find Jeremy Siegman’s piece on the resurrection of the binational idea, Carly Silver on the Pilgrims’ Jewish streak and Elke Weiss on a gender-bending God.
So let’s start talking. And when we talk about the issues, let’s make sure we’re talking to each other.
Ben Sales
Editor, New Voices
