Independence Day

Happy Birthday Israel. On Tuesday night and Wednesday of this week was Israeli Independence Day, or Yom Ha’atzmaut. It’s a day that is celebrated in most of Israel with a wild night of partying in the streets, copious amounts of alcohol and people running through the streets spraying each other with silly string. For many Palestinians, it is a day of mourning for what they call Nakba, or “the disaster”, which they say resulted in the exile of thousands of Palestinians.

My mother and brother are visiting me here in Israel for ten days, and we were all invited to join my aunt, uncle and five of their seven kids on a trip to Ashkelon, where the eldest daughter of the family, Neherah, lives with her husband, Guy, and their adorable 8-month old son. Neherah and Guy are settlers who were evacuated from their home in August 2005, along with roughly 8,000 others, when the Israeli government decided to dismantle the Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza Strip. Neherah was 8 months pregnant at the time, and the experience was a very emotional one. Since the evacuation, Neherah and her family have been relocated to Ashkelon, a growing Israeli city on the Mediterranean coast, about 8 km north of the Gaza Strip. All of the families of Kfar Darom (the settlement that Neherah and Guy lived in) were placed in the same apartment building in Ashkelon, keeping the close-knit community relatively intact. With the memories of the state forcefully removing them from their homes still fresh in their minds, this Independence Day was a complicated one for this community.

We arrived in Ashkelon in a mini-bus and went up to the spacious apartment that Neherah and Guy are living in now. As the whole family was catching up and playing with Nehera’s son, I told her that her apartment was beautiful and I asked her how she liked it in Ashkelon. Her answer was short and simple. “This is not my home. I would rather be in Kfar Darom.”

At around 7:00pm, we all went down to the parking lot, where the building’s residents had put together their own Independence Day ceremony. At one end of the parking lot, the residents had set up a podium and two flag poles (one with the Israeli flag, and one with the flag of Kfar Darom). At the beginning of the ceremony, the Kfar Darom flag was raised, and the Israeli flag was left down. This represented the feeling of these people that the state had turned against them. After one community leader’s speech, in which he urged his listeners to maintain hope, to be thankful for the state of Israel (despite its imperfections) and to remember that we are on the path to the coming of the Messiah, he signaled, and the Israeli flag was finally raised as well.

After the outdoor ceremony, I joined the men as they went down to the basement of the building, which had been converted into a synagogue. We then had a special evening prayer service for Independence Day. As I was leaving the synagogue, one of my cousins pointed out a plaque next to the door of the synagogue that had a set of keys attached to it. Under the keys was inscribed, “One day, we shall return.” The parallelism struck me – there are thousands of Palestinians who wear old keys around their necks, dreaming of returning to homes that were left behind (abandoned or confiscated – depending on whom you ask) when Israel was declared a state in 1948.

After dinner, we stepped out onto the balcony to enjoy the spectacular fireworks presentation. The kids loved it, but I could see that Neherah was visibly shaken. When I asked her why, she said that the fireworks made the same sound as the Qassam rockets that used to rain onto Gush Katif. Guy told me that there were over 6000 Qassam rockets fired onto the settlement bloc of Gush Katif, and that it was a miracle there weren’t more casualties from them. Even in Ashkelon, the occasional Qassam rocket reaches the outskirts of the city, fired from the northern edge of the Gaza Strip.

As we piled into the van and headed back to Jerusalem, I couldn’t help thinking about a conversation I had last week with soldier on a day off whom I had met in a bar. Yishai, a medic who works around Gaza, and was stationed in Gaza before, during, and after the disengagement, gave me an interesting perspective. He told me that he felt that the disengagement was “the smartest thing the government could have done.” He felt that the costs incurred to protect these 8,000 settlers in a territory of half a million Palestinians were simply too high to justify, both in economic terms and in human lives. I told him the story of Yusuf, a former Seed of Peace from Gaza, who was accidentally shot in the back when the IDF occupied his family home. Yishai got very serious, took a quiet sip from his beer and he told me that he had heard of other stories like this one. He also said that Gaza was a “terrible place” and that most soldiers were just doing the best they could. With that, he looked me in the eye, raised his glass and said, “Enough politics, tell me about Canada!”

This was an Independence Day I won’t soon forget.