After Elik

We watch the news all day, me and my mother. We throw our phones down on the sofa with a thud, not caring if they ricochet onto the hardwood floor and break into a million pieces. Maybe then we’d be able to finally stop teetering between utter disbelief at the disastrous loss of life in Gaza and dismay at how the extreme left in the US depicts all Israelis as war hungry monsters––even those of us who’ve spent our lives demanding sovereignty for the Palestinians. 

     “I can’t do this anymore,” my mother says. “Can’t look at any more photos of a destroyed Gaza.” I nod in sympathy. I haven’t been able to stop reading accounts of the morning of October 7th, and lately I’ve been waking up before sunrise to make sure the hostages are handed over to the Red Cross. I don’t start my day before I see their vacant ghostly faces staring out the windows of the white vans carrying them to safety. This is the closest thing to being resurrected from the dead. I tap my phone to switch between news channels from all sides of the conversation, surprised at the common reporting. Some facts are simply facts: Dead bodies, destruction, hostages, the Israeli military’s force.

     My mother and I desperately grasp at the shattered oh so promised land of our ancestors as our feet dig into the blood-drenched Gazan soil, determined that together we can free both the Israeli hostages and the Palestinian people from Hamas. We do this from my sunny living room in San Francisco, where I have been living for the last 20 years. Where I have been steadily growing more Jewish than Israeli as it’s become harder to align myself with the state that was once the pride and joy of my ancestors, who immigrated in the early 1900s to flee persecution in Eastern Europe. To build a home for their people on the land they dreamed to one day step foot on: Next year in Jerusalem ringing in their ears every year around the Passover table––a longing that is recited by Jews all over the world, and has been, for thousands of years. 

     “Have you heard that people are taking down their mezuzahs here in the US so they’re not targeted?” my mother whispers, but my teenage son can hear everything. He comes in from the kitchen to show us photos his friends have posted on Instagram. “Look,” he says, pointing to a post of an Israeli flag hanging out a blue-framed Victorian Bay window. It’s splattered with red paint. Blood. Shaking our heads, we agree that––just to be safe––we will not place a Hanukkiah in our window this year.

     “We’re not that Jewish anyway,” he says. “I mean, we’re not observant.”

     It’s true––we are very much secular Israeli rebels, rejecting religion in all its expressions. For my grandparents, who were born in pre-Israel Palestine, Yom Kippur was a day not of fasting, but of feasting with friends, preferably with a juicy pork dish proudly served as the centerpiece of the meal. Passover sent me and my mother on expeditions to Arab stores in Jaffa in search of pita bread, our little act of defiance against the government, who would fine Israeli markets that didn’t hide away their leavened products for the 10 days of the Pesach holiday. Unwilling to be wedded by the religious authorities in Israel––the only legal way to get married there––I shared my vows in the mayor’s office in Cyprus along with other Israeli couples. Even circumcision was not a given to me as I deemed it a relic of a dark history that had no place in our secular lives.

     My mother was born in 1949, the year after the establishment of the State of Israel and the year after her uncle was killed by Arabs on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem leading a troupe of Jewish soldiers. Broad-shouldered and eager to fight for his people, my great uncle, Elik, was an Israeli symbol of the ideal new Jew: strong, determined, and in charge of his own destiny, the antithesis of those helpless skeletal survivors who came in boatloads from Europe. My mother was raised in the aftermath of that devastating loss: the death of a beloved family hero. The death of a dream, tainting the sweetness of independence, as is the case for every family in Israel since its establishment in 1948: nobody is spared the loss of loved ones to war. 

     Despite losing his brother in combat, my grandfather, who was an esteemed writer, held on to leftist political beliefs with which he raised my mother, but after the Six Day War in 1967, he resolved that the Arabs would forever want to drive all of Israel into the sea. He even went as far as creating an extreme right-wing party and was ostracized by Israeli Bohemia for his views. Some of my earliest memories are of heated arguments during family dinners, my grandfather’s fist slamming the table to end the yelling so we could get on with dessert. My mother, a fighter for peace and a two-state solution, clung to the ideals she was raised on. Being the first sign of life for a family deep in mourning, she stormed through the world with determination. She didn’t know her uncle but lived in his shadow, or rather, on his behalf. I, myself, only knew that he was violently killed by Arabs and that my grandfather had really loved him. Filled with curiosity and terror, I’d force myself to stare at his black and white photo, taking in his smile and bright eyes. Elik, Elik, Elik, Elik echoed in my head as I’d count to ten and run out of the room, chills running down my spine.

     The Six Day War was not only a turning point in my grandfather’s politics, but also marked a special victory for the nation: the liberation of the old city of Jerusalem. It was as if my grandfather had personally opened the gates to the city and kissed the Western Wall in his uniform after days of combat, when really, he was sitting at his typewriter, as Elik watched from the shelf. 

     After the war, the state encouraged artists and writers to move into the deserted homes of Palestinians who were forced into displacement. My grandparents moved into a bright, high-ceilinged home across from the Western Wall, where we’d watch the Orthodox Jews praying below, as if in a foreign film. At the time, Jerusalem was a place where we found ourselves more comfortable with our fellow Arabs: neighbors who’d sell us sesame bagels with the accompanying za’atar wrapped in newspaper scraps, and smile kindly to us on the street, or from behind rainbow mounds of spices in the markets. We pretended we were safe and welcome, breathing the same crisp, ancient holy air. We also pretended this could continue forever, if only we were deep enough in denial. 

     As I got older, the political arguments got louder. My mother was turning into a rebel in more ways than ever––coming out of the closet as the lesbian daughter of a famous writer, she was filled with more rage at her father’s extreme beliefs. I’d stand by my mother and join her in shooting question after question. I was unable to grasp the fear and hatred in my grandfather’s words when he spoke about the Palestinians. But sabba, I’d argue, raising my voice. They are just people trying to live like we are. To be free, to have a state like we do. He’d dig in his heels, and raise his voice louder, leaving my grandmother shaking her head and worried what the neighbors must be thinking. We cannot be naïve any longer! he’d insist, and I couldn’t help but think of Elik’s smiling eyes and wonder what they must’ve looked like when he was dead on the road to Jerusalem.

     But sabba, I’d beg and plead, what is the solution? A dead end. 

     My bittersweet grandfather, who tried with all his might to convince me that all the Arabs want is to destroy us, was like a father to me, a kind, gentle man who’d take breaks from his typewriter to patiently play any game I wanted. A man who would tenderly put me to bed with endless stories and take me to the beach in the morning after a storm to see what gifts the sea had left for us on shore, followed by hot cocoa in the kitchen together. Where was this hatred hiding? Was it in the lines at the corners of his mouth? Was it grief that made him heavy with every breath? Was it all because of my great uncle staring at me in black and white?

     “You know,” my mother says to me a few days after the attack on October 7th, “This was precisely your grandfather’s worst fear. That Palestinians would enter Israel by land and sea and slaughter us in our homes.” She looks at me with those sharp, fearful eyes, the ones we’ve all been born with and wear as a token of life after loss. After Elik.

     I told you so, my grandfather now whispers from his grave. It was just a matter of time. 

     No, sabba, I shake my head. It wasn’t just a matter of time. I wait for a response, for his raspy whisper from across oceans, from deep within the ground, where he’s been resting in the soil of his promised land for two decades. 

     And I am suddenly that little girl again, sitting next to him on the sofa, watching him place a round, blue tray on his lap and methodically peel clementine after clementine for us to share. We talk about the world, circling around the one topic we know will inevitably ruin our pleasant afternoon. But this time, he is silent. I break open the juicy fruit and arrange its delicate sections in a circle in the center of my palm and look up and into his eyes. 

     Sabba, can you hear me? I ask. He keeps peeling those clementines, not even trying to open his mouth, even though it’s been more than two decades since he died, since we sat in the living room together. I take his hand and lead him to his study and point at Elik, who is still smiling at us from the shelf. Saba, I plead, raising my voice in desperation. Don’t you know that all people want is to wake up and make breakfast for their kids, have a cup of coffee, see them off to school, and be there when they return? To tuck them into bed, and wake to another day? To look up and see a blue sky devoid of missiles and be able to play hide and seek without thinking of children holding their breath in attics and babies hidden in cabinets? I grab Elik off the shelf, no longer afraid of him. Of his death. Of his ghost.

     Saba, I beg, give us our quiet mornings. Give us that kiss on the forehead before bed. 

     I then pull Elik out of the frame, the yellowing edges of the photograph crumbling in my hands and floating to the ground. We stand there, me and my grandfather, ashes at our feet, seventy-six years since Elik’s death. Seventy-six years of a blood-stained statehood on this promised land.

     No, sabba, I cry, crumbling what is left of Elik in my hand. It was not just a matter of time. 

     There was always another way. There still is.