I just got back from lunch with Rob at Zaytoon; the flavor of the salad dressing - oregano, fresh lemon juice, and pure, silky olive oil - still fills my nose.
Masoud Awartani, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Annah, sat with us while we ate. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: A Jew, a Muslim and a white guy go into a bar...
If only the state of Jewish/Arab relations these days merited joking. As Masoud told us about his kids (there's not much that I find more endearing than a man gushing about his kids), I couldn't help but think of unending aggression of the groups he and I would call "our people".
I was raised to believe that all Jews across space and time are one - I am no less one of the Hebrews enslaved in biblical Egypt than a modern, secular Jew in the United States. In that vein, I always felt as though I belonged to Israel and it belonged to me - an incredibly personal relationship with a country I've never been within 10,000 miles of. It is that loyalty that tugs me as I read the headlines and blogs - that loyalty and the knowledge that Israel became a state when no other country in the world would allow Holocaust survivors to settle there. Ships were literally turned away, as though having gone through the Holocaust wasn't bad enough.
Still, it hurts to watch Israel's attacks, with their far superior resources in money and weapons. I understand both that they had to respond to the kidnapping of the soldiers and that there is a lot more to this situation than I will ever know... I am by no means a pacifist because I can't look at the Holocaust and think those people weren't worth fighting for (even though their liberation was merely a side-effect of winning World War II) but it's got to be a damn good reason to fight.
Is it really worth fighting just because Jews follow the story line of Isaac while Muslims follow Ishmael?
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