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What I Found
I arrived in Temecula. It is beautiful. You can buy five acres of hillside here with 2 houses and 100s of highly productive avocado, orange, lemon, tangerine, grapefruit and more trees, hundreds!, for less than a bucket of sand on the beach in Orleans. You do not have to worry about sharks. You do worry about water availability and water’s price, especially water enough to quench a growing avocado’s liquid needs.
CALIFORNIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
The U.S. Army – Day One, 1960
I leave from the Port Authority building in New York City by bus to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where I’ll begin my two months of Army basic training. I’m just shy of my twentieth birthday. The Port Authority is like Grand Central Station where I was sent unwillingly to camp at age four. This is different, a decision I have made. And although there is a claustrophobic feeling of doors closing and choices made which cannot be changed, there is also the sense of adventure and maturity that is concomitant with actions taken by men.
Almost everyone on the bus is an inductee from New York City. The Jersey countryside, a dune-like succession of sandy low hills and chicken farms, rolls by until we arrive at Fort Dix, which is surrounded by barbed wire. At the entrance to Fort Dix stands a tremendous statue of “The Infantryman,” the ultimate fighting machine I am about to become.
We are herded into a huge building, formed into lines, and begin our transformation and processing from civilians into army troops, first swearing loyalty and fealty to the United States and then being given shockingly short, dare I say bald, army haircuts. We put our civilian clothes into bags. We are marched into line after line where we are inspected, questioned, sorted, and given a series of injections in both arms with air-powered guns. We move down a lengthy counter where we declare our chest, waist, weight, height, and shoe sizes and are given shirts, pants, belts, underwear, shoes, and socks, more or less consistent with our size declarations.
At the end of the counter we flow onto another line and approach a sergeant seated at a table filling out forms with the information necessary to issue each man his dog tags. When I reach the table the sergeant finds my name and military identification number on a card and asks me my religion. I’m not sure why, but I am just not able to answer him. I don’t think it’s that I am afraid of anti-Semitism, or ashamed of being Jewish, quite the opposite, I am rather proud of being Jewish and eager to stand up to anti-Semites. It is much more that I don’t really believe in religion and I’m sort of stunned and offended because I don’t think my religious beliefs are anyone’s business, especially in this context, I mean this is the United States Army is it not, and we were all equals right, brothers in arms. I mean what does my religion matter? It seems almost unpatriotic to make such a separatist declaration.
“What’s your religion?” the sergeant asks me again in a Southern drawl as I continue to stand there, in spite of my wish to answer him, quite mute, embarrassed, and dumb.
“What’s wrong with you, son” the peeved sergeant asks, “what’s your religion?”
And I just stare at him, unable to answer, unable to form the words, unable to fully understand what is going on with me. Maybe I’ll say, “no preference, sir” but I can’t make up my mind and don’t really like that answer either. So I just continue standing there, struggling with myself about these matters of personal and philosophical significance, as the sergeant grows more and more exasperated, and rightly so, thinking I’m a moron or something, and rightly so again.
“I said, ‘what‘s your religion, boy?'” he says slowly, very slowly. And I just stare at him … frozen.
“Jesus H Christ,” he growls almost menacingly, “Who are your people, boy? “
People? The word “people” startles me. Who are “my People?” Shit, I know that answer. People? “Why the Hebrews, sir,” I say.
“Hebrew,” he repeats, and writes it down. “Next,” he says, and smiles.
I receive my dog tags two days later. They read just that, “Hebrew.” I still have them, of course. I don’t imagine there are many other Hebrews in the U.S. Army, but the Hebrews are definitely my “people.” And were there ever to come a time to identify my scarred and unrecognizable mortal remains left on some desolate field of battle I think I would be far more comfortable buried as an ethnic American, dare I say tribal, Hebrew (for all that would matter) than I would be hypocritically declared a “religious” Jew.
MEMOIRS
Jews / Hebrews
Further explorations of the world as it is and the world as we wish it to be
HEBREWS!?
…one of the unique things about the jewish people is that historically – at least for nearly two millennia – they were not a state/nation per se altho they were and are an ethnically identifiable “people,” independent of their religion … albeit a stateless people … a little like gypsies … members/citizens of many diverse nation states in the middle and far east, in africa, asia, europe, and the western hemisphere – while simultaneously maintaining their jewish identity, but not as a nation with a state/territory as such. the advent of zionism, the notion there should be an ethnically identified jewish state (designed initially as a nationalist movement primarily to protect jews from centuries of abuse), changed all that.
i personally never much favored the idea of there being a state for jews, especially on ethnically cleansed conquered lands, even as I celebrated the pre-1967 triumphs of Israel. it is my naïve utopian hope that israel and palestine will merge as one state for all its people – a far better outcome in my view than a jewish national state living side by side in peace with a safe, just, and equitable state for the palestinian people – and equally unlikely an outcome as there being one just and equitable state for all the people of Palestine. as Gideon Levy says, “the two-state solution is dead (it was never born); the Palestinian state will not arise; international law does not apply to Israel; the occupation will continue to crawl quickly to annexation, annexation will continue to crawl quickly toward an apartheid state; “Jewish” supersedes “democracy”, nationalism and racism will get the stamp of government approval, but they’re already here and have been for a long time.” in light of that reality i’m left believing israel and palestine are one state already, albeit an apartheid state w a major civil rights problem.” and there is no palestinian state, regardless of the best intentions of the pope.
So how did David turn into Goliath?
MISCELLANEOUS
Musab
I am Musab, six years old
Two days ago Israeli soldiers surrounded our house at 2 A.M. shooting
Helicopter gunships illuminating the night
Their rotors like giant fans hung from the sky
The whine of their rockets like angry birds
Here four bullet holes through the door of the room where my brother sleeps
Here the shattered windows
“Take your clothes off, all of you, even the women” the Israeli soldiers yelled
Then father was handcuffed
Taken as a human shield to the apartment of uncle Hussan
Where their bullets pierced his door
and the chest of the old man opening it
Who bleeds to death for want of an ambulance.
After his body is removed
The soldiers withdraw
But brother is still crying
My city, Nablus, is still occupied
The old man remains dead
And I am Musab, six years old.
POETRY
Stand off at Gate 927
It is a beautiful sunny morning
At apartheid gate 927
The Israeli soldiers are listening to rock music
They are in their 20s
They have automatic weapons
Uniforms, walkie-talkies
Humvies, tanks
F16 fighter jets, a nuclear arsenal.
We are Palestinian farmers
With donkeys and tractors
With seed, fertilizer, and lunch in plastic bags
We are four Americans over fifty
With cameras, cell phones, and bottled water
We are Bedouin with sheep and goats and identity cards
We dismount from our donkeys and tractors
And wait
Wait long enough to see the falcon hunting,
To see the wild dog with the stolen chicken,
Wait to be admitted through the small gate
To the turnstile
Then into the concrete bunker
To wait at the counter, to show our passes,
To be released into a holding area
To go back through a sliding gate
To get back on our donkeys and tractors
To pass through the big gate
Opened only certain hours
On certain arbitrary days
To get onto our land – our own land –
On the other side of this abominable fence
That separates us from our fields
From our trees and fruit
From our grass, our rocks, and our graves
On the other side of this fence
That separates us from our brothers and sisters
We stand in the sun waiting two hours
On the side of this fence
That separates us from our livelihoods
On the side of the fence
That separates us
© brtaub – 02/08
POEMS FOR PALESTINE