Conflict, by Dario Sulzman

CONFLICT an essay

DARIO SULZMAN

CONFLICT an essay

Dario Sulzman

Editor-in-Chief

Leslie Jill Patterson Assistant Editor

Katie Cortese Nonfiction Editor

Dennis Covington Poetry Editor

Carrie Jerrell Fiction Editor

Katie Cortese Nonfiction Trifecta

June 2015

Managing Editors

Joseph Dornich Michael Palmer

Associate Editors Chad Abushanab, Kathleen Blackburn, Margaret Emma Brandl, Chase Dearinger, Allison Donohue, Nimi Finnigan, Mag Gabbert, Jo Anna Gaona, Micah Heatwole, Caleb Humphreys, Mark L. Keats, Brian Larsen, Rhonda Lott, Beth McKinney, Scott Morris, Brent Newsom, Katrina Prow, MacKenzie Regier, Jerry Staley, Robby Taylor, and Sarah Viren.

Copyright © 2015 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is published six times a year at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.

CONFLICT

1. Leaving In 2009 I signed up for Birthright, a program that tries to get young Jews more in touch with their religious heritage by taking them on paid, ten day group trips to Israel.

Before we boarded the plane, each of us met with an El-Al security official. My official was short and stocky, with a beard that made his head look square. He questioned me about everything from how I got to the airport, to where I went to Hebrew school as a kid. The Israelis are serious about security. They want to press your story, because if you’re not who you say you are, it will show.

“Who was the teacher you studied with in Hebrew school?” my interrogator asked.

He asked me what Jewish holidays I celebrated, what my favorite holiday was. I told him Passover. How many cups of wine did I drink on Passover? I gave him the standard response: four cups of wine.

“Four?” he smirked. “You drink more than four.”

I lied to the security official about one thing. The day before, on a bus from Ithaca (where I’d grown up) to New York City, I’d gotten off to call my father when the bus stopped in Monticello. When I tried to get back on the bus, the driver was different. I showed him my stub. “That was the other bus to New York,” he said. “It left.” I felt something drain out of me. My duffel bag was in under-storage. It held several sets of clothes, my toiletries and some books. But I’d also left my backpack on my seat. It contained among other things: my laptop, backup flash drives, and my passport. All of it unattended, on a bus, heading to Port Authority.

When El-Al’s security official asked me if my bags had been out of my possession for any extended period in the last 24 hours, I told him they hadn’t. But for two hours, riding a second bus to Manhattan close behind the one I’d previously been on, I prepared myself for the worst case scenario: that, aside from losing every story I’d written since I was 20 and not even being able to go to Israel because I’d lost my passport the day before the trip, I would have to live with the knowledge that I had been stupid enough to pack my life into a backpack and then lose it on a bus. It was the kind of thing that happened to me frequently in high school, where my missteps tended to snowball, feed upon each other like symptoms of a strange disease.

The reason I had called my father was this: The day before, I had been at his house, playing with Asher, my adopted brother (then four years old). One minute I was reading to Asher, and then in the next minute I found myself shouting curses in my father’s face for the first time in almost five years. He told me to leave, and before I did I added something I’d never said before, not just to him but to anyone: I told him that I hated my stepmother, a woman he’d been married to for six years, since I was 20. After leaving my father’s house I returned to my mother, who tried to comfort me, and I tried to make her as miserable as I was.

When I called my father, I had the vague idea of patching things up with him before I left the country. That did not happen. I paced alongside the terminal, phone to my ear, keeping an eye on the bus, or so I thought. Our conversation left me with the kind of feeling you get debating someone who possesses a radically different ideology than your own, an exasperated bewilderment at their obstinance, a growing sense of futility as you come to realize how far apart your fundamental assumptions are from each other.

The previous several years, after I’d become financially independent, my relationships with both parents had improved significantly. Certainly, visiting home was always a bit precarious. But even the diplomatic dance of balancing time between houses had become manageable. It was my own personal high-wire act, and each time I concluded a visit home without incident I felt mature and in control.

Now, as I sat on a bus bound for New York City, tense with uncertainty, I felt myself moving backward, toward a place I’d wanted to believe that I had left behind.

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2. X vs. Y Suppose X and Y are two countries with X and Y people. Consider these two (non-sequential) statements: X killed one Y. Y killed five X. Now if you had to choose using only these two statements, which country do you think is more at fault? You probably said Y. Y killed more people than X. Now instead, suppose I had written: X killed one Y. In response, Y killed five X. Now which country is more at fault? What about these statements: X killed one Y civilian.

In response, Y killed five X, including two civilians.

Or these: Y killed one X who Y claimed was plotting to kill civilians (and may well have been).

In response, X killed one Y civilian.

In response to that, Y killed five X, including two civilians.

When any conflict is described to me, my reflex is to pick a side. I look at the sequence of action and, like a juror listening to a trial, try to decide which party deserves the burden of guilt. I don’t think that I’m alone here. The previous statements represent, more or less, how we process stories about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presented to us by news organizations acutely sensitive to how their language might be construed to favor one side over the other. And indeed, the conflict is about more than bombs or missiles or death or even land. It is a fight over characterization: Who is civilized and who is savage? Who is the aggressor and who is the victim? Which party is the prosecutor and which party the defendant? Who gets to be David and who must be Goliath? Conflict, in this sense, plays itself out in every single description of it. Change a verb and the Israelis seem to be responding in self-defense. Add a clarification and the Palestinians become helpless victims.

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We may reject the premise, of course. Why does one side have to be more right than the other? There is a third option: that both parties bear responsibility, that both have wronged the other, and that the conflict is so dense and long and complicated that using phrases like “burden of guilt” or “more at fault” seem not only beyond any one individual’s knowledge, but also inappropriate to the conflict’s immense complexity.

“It’s just totally fucked,” is a common sentiment I’ve heard about the conflict—a statement that acknowledges one’s unfitness to definitively judge such a difficult issue, but can also be used to cut the discussion short. It’s easy to remain detached when you don’t get into particulars. But the more we talk about conflict, the harder it is to remain uncommitted, the stronger our impulse becomes to cast the conflicting parties in a basic narrative. Strong and weak. Victim, oppressor. David and Goliath.

I like to think that the particular nature of my parents’ divorce gives me a unique perspective into how we perceive conflict, not as one of the engaged parties but as a bystander.

One thing I do believe is that the closer we become to conflict, the more difficult it is for us not to choose a side. Which is to say, the tendency to pick a side holds true even if, through our growing knowledge of a conflict, neither side distinguishes its guilt or innocence above the other.

I would love to say that I was only a bystander to my parents’ conflicts. But when they divorced and I was ten, I chose sides with a vengeance, in full fury and righteous indignation. (I have a vague memory, at eleven, of my mother telling me something that my father did—I don’t remember what—and then instantly calling him and screaming, “I’ll kill you!” into the phone.) Maybe I would feel less sheepish about choosing sides if I had simply picked one side and stuck with it.

But that’s not what I did. Instead, from the first year of the divorce, I embraced one parent’s view with fundamentalist conviction only to radically alter my allegiance the following year, furiously blaming the same parent I’d sided with the year before. In the first four years of my parents’ separation, a curious pattern developed. Each year, in late March—always, strangely, within three weeks of the anniversary of my parents’ divorce—I would make the switch, a two-to-three week transformation that I could almost feel take place beneath my

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skin, a new color seeping across my thoughts that I didn’t fully understand, but whose logical conclusion I dimly sensed.

The first year I favored my father and couldn’t stand my mother. The second year I sympathized with my mother and demonized my father. The third and fourth years were recycled variations of these themes. The entire time I had been shuttling back and forth, spending one week with one parent, one week with the other.

I decided to change the equation. I was fourteen when I moved in full-time with my mother. I told my father that I didn’t know how often I wanted to see him.

My logic was, in one sense, selfish. Here I was, pushing my father away, simply because I wanted a clearer narrative about which parent to believe and which side to distrust. Yet, in retrospect, moving in full-time with one parent was absolutely necessary. Switching houses each week meant not just a change in location—my mother’s the same home from my parents’ marriage and a two-minute walk to school; my father’s a tiny apartment twenty minutes out of town (for two years until he moved downtown)—and not just a transition between lifestyles—my mother’s cleaner and more organized, my father’s sloppier and lastminute. To change houses each Sunday was to exchange histories, to cross a vast chasm between two radically divergent and mutually irreconcilable versions of the previous sixteen years (two of which I hadn’t even been alive for).

In my mother’s house, my mother was a traumatized heroine and my father a heartless abuser. In my father’s house, my father was a good—if imperfect—man, and my mother— although my father wouldn’t say this to me outright—was a spiteful bitch.

As an adult, you come to see your parents for what adults actually are: imperfect, compromised, experts at white-washing and massaging the small moments in your life where you look bad while simultaneously highlighting the ones that present you in the best light possible (that one fundamental and seemingly necessary skill of adulthood). But when I was fourteen, such seemingly unresolvable contradictions about my parents came close to driving me nuts.

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3. The Judgment of King Saul I had my own memories and experiences to judge from as well. I knew, for example, that my father had cheated on my mother in the final years of their marriage with a woman my father met in New York City during a weekend trip he took there to settle some plumbing business. However, at the time—and for a long time afterward—I did not see my father’s infidelity as particularly important to the conflict’s larger context. I had known my parents’ marriage was over several years before my father moved out. In the final two years a warm moment between them was rare and my father often slept in the third bedroom of our house, which he also used as an office. I saw my father’s indiscretion as roughly equivalent to looting an abandoned house: a deed by itself immoral but against a thing that had already been judged valueless.

I would often play a game with myself, where I would try to weigh different aspects of my parents against each other. One particular version of this game was to compare the Worst Thing my parents had done to each other. My father had a temper. I didn’t have any memories of him actually striking my mother (which seemed to slightly undermine her characterization of him as a stone-cold abuser), but I did have memories of him chasing her, pushing her a few times, and one time spitting in her face. This was the Worst Thing my father had done to my mother, I felt. Spitting in a person’s face was pretty bad.

On the other hand, my mother had a temper herself. The Worst Thing my mother had ever done was to use my wooden chess board as a projectile against my father while he was reading in bed. There was a hinge on the underside of the board and magnetic lips so that you could fold it up and keep the pieces inside. When it was folded up it had heft, and when one of its sharp corners hit my father’s shin it opened up a deep red triangular gash about the size of a hotel soap bar. I was in the room when this happened, and I thought this was pretty bad too.

But trying to judge which was worse was like trying to judge whether the 1992 New York Mets (72-90) were worse than the 1994 New York Jets (6-10). Furthermore, neither of my parents had done anything that qualified as 1962 New York Mets-bad (40-120), although my mother had told me that my father hit her when she was pregnant with me, something I preferred not to think about.

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The other way I tried to judge who was more at fault was to compare what you might call my parents’ chronic claims against each other, the central flaw that each parent had that drove the other up the wall. My mother’s claim against my father was straightforward: he was selfish and oblivious to other people’s needs, particularly those closest to him. He was constantly arriving late, canceling plans at the last minute, prioritizing things like his Communist party meetings (yes, the CPUSA still existed in the late 1980s. Trust me, you missed nothing) over commitments to his family. A sure time for fights to break out between my parents was right before we would leave town for a trip or vacation. My father would become overwhelmed and make mistakes, my mother would criticize him, and then my father would start yelling and threaten to refuse to go at all.

He could also, at times, be remarkably insensitive. One event I thought was crucial in dooming my parents’ relationship happened when my mother got pregnant and then miscarried three months later. I was five. Her uterus became infected and we had to rush her to the emergency room in the middle of the night. She spent two days in the hospital, and on the day she came home my father told her that he was busy with work, but could pick her up if she couldn’t get home herself. My mother ended up taking the bus from the hospital and then walking home half-drugged on painkillers. Not picking her up from the hospital competed with the spitting-in-the-face incident, for the Worst Thing my father had ever done.

My father’s critique of my mother was more subtle. He essentially conceded that he could be thoughtless at times when it came to family-building. He admitted to feeling less confident as a parent than my mother, but claimed he had made an honest effort, and rather than support him she treated him like a bad father. He had some credibility here. Following the divorce my father went into therapy. He became religious, more introspective, more prone to apologizing when he’d done something wrong. Furthermore, although I felt his hostility toward my mother, my father made a legitimate effort to not badmouth her in my presence to “keep me out of the middle,” as he put it.

There was also a critique of my mother that my father barely even had to make, because I felt it viscerally living with her myself, particularly as I entered adolescence. She could just be flat out overbearing. I’d leave my room to go downstairs and she’d ask me where I was going. I’d open the refrigerator and—from upstairs!—she would ask me what I was eating.

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Most maddening was her insistence on ascribing my anger and sadness (emotions that engulfed me as a teenager) entirely to my father’s influence. If, as my mother claimed, being married to my father was like living with a crazy person, I could also see how living with my mother could make you crazy.

And yet her love for me was unquestionable. It was an intensely single-minded force, an unwavering belief in my wonderfulness that placed me at the center of her world. My father, while not un-affectionate, could also be distant, disappearing at night without telling me where he was going, or other times telling me he was leaving and returning hours after he’d promised. While still in middle school, these incidents frightened me.

As I grew older, however, my father’s looser parenting style became more appealing. After almost two exasperating years living with my mother full-time, I switched houses just before my 16th birthday and lived with my father for two years until I left for college.

Still, I have always felt slightly closer to my mother than my father, and I think I know why. When your parents separate but neither moves out of town, when both continue to play major roles in your upbringing but whose feelings for each other remain bitter and poisonous, as a child you sense that this arrangement is unsustainable—the most natural solution for both parents is to get as far away from each other as possible. More importantly, you understand, however unconsciously, that the primary reason they haven’t achieved this distance is because of you. And so growing up you are on the alert, intensely sensitive to signs from either parent that their commitment to you might splinter.

While I was in Israel, we hiked over mountains in the Negev desert, including one mountain called Mt. Schlomo, named after King Saul. As we rested on its peak our Israeli guide, Yoni, retold the story of Saul’s famous judgment, in which two mothers bring him a baby that they both claim is theirs. Saul suggests they resolve the dispute by splitting the baby in two and each taking half. One woman agrees to the idea. The other is horrified and tells Saul to give the baby to the other woman if it means not harming the child. Hearing this, Saul knows that the second woman is the true mother. Growing up, I knew which character my mother was in that story. My father, I wasn’t as sure.

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Photo by Michael Szymanski / Shutterstock.com

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4. A Fair Fight What is a fair fight? One of the first things I was ever told about fighting is that there is no such thing; if you are about to fight and your mind is focused on the fight’s fairness, you probably will get your ass kicked. But, to me, the question of fighting fair is interesting because it suggests that a fight’s meaning is determined not only through basic notions of victory and defeat, but also categories of perception; how it is judged.

For those of us observing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a liberal lens, one thing we immediately observe—and perhaps use as our primary category for judgement more than we would like to admit—is that the conflict does not seem like a fair fight.

This was particularly true during Operation Cast Lead, in January 2009 (ten months before I traveled to Israel), when in response to daily rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel— which had killed about 30 Israelis in the previous three years—the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched an air attack and then a ground invasion on Gaza that Amnesty International concludes killed around 1,400 Palestinians of which about 700 were civilians. These numbers are sharply contested, particularly because the boundary between fighter and civilian in Gaza is not always clear. The IDF, for example, counts Gazan Police forces as noncivilians, when their role in any fighting is far from definitive. On the other hand, Hamas fighters—understanding that the battle they had a chance to win was perceptual—often went into combat in civilian clothing to create the impression that a larger number of civilians were killed. The IDF’s own figures list 1,166 Palestinians killed of which about 300 were civilians.

To enter this three-year-old debate over casualties is to slip down a rabbit hole of methodology and criteria, categories and clarifications. Sifting through the data and drawing one’s own conclusions is probably not something most of us will do in our free time. However, even 300 civilians is ten times the number of Israeli citizens killed in several years’ time from Gazan rocket attacks. During Operation Cast Lead a number of pro-Israel commentators in the United States grew disturbed by the sight of a vastly more powerful military force pummeling a much weaker society. “[Y]es, I was moved by what I saw in Gaza,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, “[which] I came to see as a grotesquely disproportionate response by a regional super-power . . . to the war crimes of Hamas.”

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On the last day I was in Israel, we listened to a former Israeli counter-terrorism expert give a talk and answer questions about the conflict. He was tall, with a sharp triangular haircut. The skin around his eyes crinkled as he stared out at us with a narrow gaze. There were several hundred Birthright participants in the room, and those who spoke mostly expressed liberal critiques of Israel’s policies. At one point he said, “It is hypocritical to criticize Israel for defending itself.”

“I don’t think most people are disturbed by Israel defending itself,” I said. “I think that what disturbs people about Operation Cast Lead is the question of proportionality.”

“Proportionality is a legal question,” he said. “Were the weapons that you used in your own defense proportional to those you were attacked with? If you try to stab me and I shoot you with a bazooka, that’s not proportional. But if you try to stab me and I shoot you with a gun, that is proportional. Also, it is a question of trying to avoid killing innocent people.

This is war. Israel makes every effort to avoid killing civilians; Hamas makes no such efforts.” I felt stymied. I hadn’t meant proportionality in a legal sense. What I’d meant is that it didn’t look like a fair fight.

But let me pose an ethical question: If there is a conflict between two parties and one party is stronger than the other, is the stronger party also obligated to a higher moral standard than the weaker party in order to retain legitimacy? Israel does many things that Hamas does not do. During Cast Lead, Israel dropped leaflets warning civilians to leave an area and various other methods of evacuation before it bombed. The military attempts (or at least claims an effort) to avoid civilian casualties, and the government conducts external investigations of its own military following conflicts. But, in a sense, Israel’s investments in these measures are similar to those Hamas makes in juking the number of civilian casualties—attempts to manipulate how the conflict is perceived. Israel engages in these moral gestures because it can, it has more resources, greater flexibility, and (because it is the stronger party) gains less from radical change and more from preserving the status quo—making sure it protects itself, while avoiding being pigeon-holed as a belligerent bully. When it punches, Israel wants the world to know, it is only because the other guy has punched first.

This equation of stronger/weaker, more moral/less moral is one I’ve often thought about, and sometimes used, trying to sort out my relationships with both parents. Was my father really more principled than my mother for not speaking ill of her around me, or was he just doing what was in his best interest? Does it matter? After all, he was trying to move

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on, it didn’t benefit him to get caught up on my mother’s flaws, much less talk about them to me. Obversely, my mother, who couldn’t move beyond the past, said and did things that could be considered “out of bounds.” Aside from compulsively railing against my father to me, she also possessed a fearless knack for flying into a kamikaze rage when she saw my father in public, humiliating him, her (and me, if I was around). Once, she kicked in a glass pane on my father’s front door. I know my mother did these things because she felt helpless. The power of weakness comes from the belief that one has nothing to lose. But my mother did have things to lose. She lost me for two years of my life before I left for college because I found her anxiety and bitterness so unbearably suffocating. She was not a dispossessed Palestinian (despite sometimes melodramatically comparing herself to one) and it’s hard for me, even now, to not believe that she could have done better, could have been stronger, could have focused more on finding someone new, as my father did, and leaving the past behind.

But the truthful answer is that I don’t know. The older I get the less I trust the ethics of self-reliance as anything more than a script recited to drive oneself from darkness, to judge and distance ourselves from all others, even those we love, who fall behind.

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5. Separation When I think about conflict, I think about closeness. The word is Latin, originally meaning “struck together.” After 9/11, many American commentators said, “We are all Israelis now,” as in, we now understand what it is like to see conflict violently enter our lives. But despite the traumatic devastation wrought by Al-Qaeda’s airplane hijackers, and the two wars we waged in response, most Americans haven’t really experienced conflict, as I see it. As George W. Bush said, “We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here.” Even the abstract terminology we use to describe our conflict—a War on Terror— reveals our ignorance of who we are actually fighting. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict fascinates me (an interest I held long before I visited Israel) because it is also a relationship, a twisted intimacy between two parties with diametrically opposed goals but who still have to live with each other on a day to day basis.

On our second day in Israel, we visited the Gaza border. It had only recently become safe enough for civilians to approach it. We had a special guide for this trip, (whose name, strangely, was also Dario). He spoke about Operation Cast Lead with statements both reasonable-sounding (“most Palestinians want to live in peace”) and draconian (“we can’t let them have fertilizer to grow their crops because they’ll build bombs with it”). But he also described the Operation as part of a larger interaction that took place—and had taken place—across the Israeli/Gaza border.

Prior to the first Intifada in 1987, around 40% of the Palestinian workforce from the territories was employed in Israel: farming, construction, and in the service sector. Up until 2000, Palestinians contributed to the Israeli economy much in the same way that undocumented Mexican immigrants contribute to California’s; as a cheap source of expendable labor. There’s nothing altruistic about this exchange. One goal of the Oslo Accords in 1993 was to build up the Palestinian economy in the territories so as to gradually reduce the exploitative relationship between Israeli employers and Palestinian workers. But that does not negate the fact that for many Israeli citizens, up until the previous decade, the enemy was someone you saw, with whom you regularly conducted simple, but civil, interactions. The guy who theoretically wanted to take your land and throw you into the sea was also the guy who washed your car, bagged your groceries or attended University with you.

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Such was the case for S (her full name escapes me), a teacher who experienced daily rocket attacks from Gaza while living in S’derot (an Israeli town close to the border) for several years following Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. When discussing Operation Cast Lead, she mentioned, sympathetically, that she knew Palestinians at her university who had family in Gaza during Cast Lead, but also fully endorsed the Operation. “This might sound cynical,” she said, “but I really saw it as a ‘cleanout’ [she curled her fingers in quotes] that needed to happen.”

Yarom, one of the young Israeli soldiers who traveled with us for several days (not to protect us but so we could get to know Israelis our own age), also claimed to have Palestinian friends. “My parents have friends who have been killed by Israeli soldiers,” he told me.

Yarom was part of the Israeli air force. His job during Operation Cast Lead was to drop leaflets on Palestinian villages warning them to evacuate because a bombing raid was imminent. Yarom described his politics as “slightly to the right.” He was positive that if Ahmedinijad acquired a nuclear weapon that he would find some way to use it against Israel. But when we spoke about the conflict, about the Palestinians, he did not talk like a participant.

He spoke like someone watching something terrible happen who didn’t know what to do.

If Israel is to be David, Birthright understands that most younger American Jews do not find the Palestinians a plausible Goliath. This was starkly illustrated when we had an open discussion of our views on the conflict and the vast majority of participants who spoke were either torn in their views toward Israel or, in a few cases, felt that the idea of a Jewish state was exclusionary and wrong altogether. The more plausible Goliath (at least physically) was the entire Arab world, an idea repeatedly invoked by references to Israel’s smallness, in relation to the vast sea of hostility that surrounds it.

But mostly, Birthright does not try to cast the conflict into a David and Goliath narrative at all. Instead, they simply show you how most Israelis experience it in their everyday lives. And it’s effective. They don’t give you a Palestinian perspective, and while their reason why (“we can’t go to that side of the border”) is bullshit (1.4 million Palestinians live in Israel as citizens), it’s both remarkable and depressing how little resonance an imagined absent voice has when set against a real and live one right in front of you.

The fence built around the West Bank in 2004 (which turns an average 15-minute commute for Palestinians traveling to Israel into three hours, and has caused Palestinians to die

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Photo by Ryan Rodrick Beiler / Shutterstock.com

trying to make it to a hospital) also reduced suicide bombings in Israel by over 90%, which had spiked sharply in the years prior to the fence, killing as many as 400 Israelis in 2003, and shuttering large sections of Jerusalem because people were afraid to leave their homes. In S’derot prior to Operation Cast Lead, as many as 15 rockets a day might fall in or around the town. They didn’t kill many people, but what they caused was fear, steady everyday gnawing fear that you could die in a second and be helpless to stop it. After Operation Cast Lead, and the ensuing blockade that followed, things became quiet. Walking through S’derot reminded me of small, quiet towns I’d visited in upstate New York.

It was easier for me, in Israel, to appreciate the brutal logic of such policies, even if I disagreed with them. It was easier for me to overlook the fact that all Israelis who I pressed on settlement construction were largely indifferent to its continued development throughout East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It was easier for me, surrounded by Israelis who told colorful stories and hilarious jokes, to see Zionism as ultimately coherent with humanitarian values and not, as Edward Said has argued, a social vision founded on ethnic exclusivity and therefore inescapably committed to dehumanizing its non-Jewish citizens. It was easier for me to see separation between Israelis and Palestinians as a necessary step to Palestinian selfdetermination and not remember my own country’s history of racial segregation, struck down in the conclusion that “separate but equal . . . is inherently unequal.”

In college, my father and I argued about money. A bill would come and we, my mother, father, and myself, had to figure out how to split it. My mother’s salary didn’t go far above the poverty line. She had an Alexander Technique practice (a kind of physical therapy) but never brought in enough clients to work full time. My father thought she was lazy and should get a second job. My father was also self-employed. He ran his own plumbing company, which was not particularly successful or unsuccessful. His salary, I would guess, ranged between $40 and $50K. He had also inherited a substantial sum of money from his father, my Grandpa Sy, who died when I was twelve. I had seen the amount written on the FAFSA form for my financial aid. The number was not that much, certainly by American standards of wealth, but the length of its sequence stuck out from the other numbers in the column like a stubby finger. There were six numbers in total (not including the cents). I only remember the first three: 216.

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In my sophomore year of college, my father announced a new policy: he would only pay as much as my mother contributed. When I asked him the reason for his decision, his answer was short: “Because it’s my money,” he said. This was true, I realized. It was his money, and there wasn’t much sense in me having an opinion about what he did with it. But my mother had an opinion about it.

“Do you know what I would do for you if I had even half of what he has, even a fraction?” she would say.

“If you’re so concerned about it, why don’t you get another job?” I’d snap back at her, but then she would grow indignant or cry, and I would feel bad because I knew that regardless of what my father might say, my mother wasn’t going to get another job; I was only hurting her by saying that she should. And despite my desire not to think about my father’s money, I agreed with her. Because my mother was listed as the custodial parent on my FAFSA all of my tuition and most of my living expenses were paid for with grants and student loans. It seemed to me that my father, by deciding to only give what my mother gave, was actually using my college finances to prove to my mother, once and for all, that she couldn’t manipulate him. I began to grow suspicious of his claim that my mother put me in the middle more. It seemed to me that there were two kinds of middles I could be put in: one with words and the other with actions. The one with words was more obvious, harder to defend. But the one with actions was more forceful and seemed more insidious precisely because there was no way to prove intent; my father could simply assert that his actions had nothing to do with my mother. He was merely acting in his own self-interest.

He remarried that same year. Her name was Meira, a litigator from Florida who my father met on a Jewish singles retreat. When Meira moved to live with him in Ithaca, my father remodeled his entire house. Their wedding plans were elaborate. Meira and my father wanted to have children, but she had trouble getting pregnant, so they tried in vitro several times before giving up (a procedure that runs about $10K a pop). After that didn’t work, they began looking at adoption.

Although he never said it, I knew that my father wasn’t contributing more money to my education because he was simultaneously building a new life for himself. Once Meira moved into my father’s house, she began to insert herself into our arguments, insisting that I speak to him with more respect. She was the youngest of six children and her parents hadn’t given

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her any money for college. To her, I was spoiled and ungrateful. To me, she was an echo chamber for my father’s increasing selfishness.

My anger at my father’s stinginess also contained a deeper pain: that he was really and truly moving on, cutting his final ties to the conflict that had bound me, my mother, and him close together even after their marriage ended. And although I understood this desire, I don’t think I ever quite saw my parents as separate. Despite the anger and bitterness that continued between my parents after they divorced, in some strange, ingrown way I felt that it kept us together. When I saw my father shifting his priorities, I knew that what the three of us had was gone.

Dario Sulzman

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6. Peace If you believe Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall—a stunningly coherent and definitive history of Israel as a nation aggressively postured since its inception, broken only by brief flashes of moderation—the election of Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, and the several years that followed before his assassination, was truly a breakthrough moment in Israeli history. Prior to the Oslo Accords there had been plenty of opportunities for peace treaties between Israel and the surrounding nations, most of which had failed. But the Oslo Accords, beyond outlining a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians, also transformed Israel’s image in the eyes of the Arab world. Shlaim writes: “A number of Arab states . . . started seriously thinking about the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel. And the Arab League began discussions on the lifting of the economic boycott that had been in force since Israel’s creation. . . . The rules of the game in the entire Middle East had radically changed.” For a brief moment in history it seemed as though Israel might not only be able to exist in peace with the Arab world but possibly even have warm diplomatic relations.

What set the peace process back was not, by itself, the assassination of Rabin but a series of suicide bombings in Israel by Hamas, in 1997, which swung public opinion sharply against Shimon Peres (who shared Rabin’s vision) and elected Benjamin Netanyahu Prime Minister (also Israel’s Prime Minister today), who had a long history of intrinsic opposition to a Palestinian state. And here’s the part that makes you ache: The suicide bombings were triggered by an assassination that Peres ordered of Yahya Ayyah, a Hamas leader who had been behind several suicide bombings in 1994 that had been a response to Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Palestinians in Hebron. Ayyah had been dormant for over a year and under watch by Palestinian Preventive Security Services, who told Israeli security forces he would not plan further attacks. Peres ordered him assassinated anyway. A month and a half later three separate suicide bombings killed a total of 60 Israelis in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, and Ashkelon. The delicate atmosphere of peace between Israel and the territories was shattered.

Yet it’s also just as easy, when viewed against the last thirteen years, to see such characterizations of the peace process as naive. Even during Rabin’s time in office, Israeli settlement building continued throughout East Jerusalem. In The Much Too Promised Land, Middle-East diplomat Aaron David Miller argues that whatever tiny possibility for peace that did exist in the 1990s was damaged, ironically, by over-optimism. “We were too enamored of the

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process,” Miller writes, “and not enough focused on the flaws. . . . I don’t recall a single tough, honest conversation where we said to the Israelis, Look, settlements may not violate the letter of Oslo, but they’re wreaking havoc with its spirit.”

Peace is more than documents and land swaps. It is an atmosphere that has to be built and re-affirmed each day, growing stronger as time passes, until the memory of conflict seems distant and foreign and strange. And even then it’s fragile. Because conflict can return in the blink of an eye, familiar as ever, and leave you wondering how peace ever prevailed.

After graduating college, I entered a period where the conflict between my parents had, for all intents and purposes, ended. In my final year of school my father decided that he would no longer communicate with my mother, so I began to manage my finances. If I had a disagreement with my father, I tried to deal with it separately from my mother. I still fought with both of them, but also found it easier to appreciate them individually without feeling like I was betraying the other parent for doing so.

My family had also expanded. I now had a baby brother named Asher, who my father and stepmother had adopted in 2006 from Guatemala. Right before they planned to pick Asher up, my father had to have his gall bladder removed. With less than a week’s advance notice, I flew down to Guatemala with my stepmother, where I spent five days with my new fivemonth-old brother, who was sick and coughing when we got him. The experience made me close to Asher. I loved coming home to see him, and both my father and stepmother told me that he trusted me more than any other person besides the two of them.

It’s tempting for me to idealize this period in my life. The smoothly-managed trips home to Mom and Dad, the growing sense that I liked both of my parents, and the instinctive trust that Asher seemed to have in me all contributed toward a vision of myself as a mature, responsible adult. But any accurate rendering of those years before the fight would have to include the numerous arguments that me and my father continued to have over money. It would have to include the fact that although I tolerated Meira, I didn’t trust her and felt that she encouraged my father when he wanted to screw me over. And finally, it would have to include the guilty confession that when I felt frustrated with my father and Meira about all of these things, the person that I took my complaints to was often my mother—the voice of my own embittered sense of victimhood.

Dario Sulzman

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7.

“Yes, [it] moves above and beyond us, a ghost haunting the past, and here we sit pretending to forget, but straining our ear for the slightest sound. . . . ” —Long Day’s Journey Into Night One of the strange paradoxes about gaining distance on my parents’ conflict was that its vivid tangle of details and complexity, which had made me hesitate before judging it in absolute moral terms, gradually faded. What I was left with instead, looking at the aftermath, was the conflict’s most basic equation: My father was stronger than my mother. He had more money and more will. And it had allowed him to move on, re-marry, brush off the ashes of our failed family and begin anew. My mother, in a sense, never moved on. Not strong enough to release her anger, she had never stopped looking back, expecting some kind of redemption, reparations, revenge. She stayed single, never dated, struggled to stay afloat financially, and my father refused it to treat it as his problem. Why would he have? He wasn’t married to her. But I was still her son, and, as a result, I had borne the burden of her suffering that he refused to share. When I stayed with her on vacations, in her apartment with its tiny kitchen that she would always complain about, I would make the trek to my father’s newly-renovated house and hear my stepmother talk about vacations and new jobs and adopting another child, and I would swallow down a sense of injustice that wasn’t my problem, but that I also couldn’t let go of.

I was going to Israel right in the middle of my winter break, just after visiting my family.

During past visits, I devoted the bulk of my energy to diplomatically managing my time between both homes. But this time I arrived in Ithaca with a ton of school work still unfinished and only five days to see both parents. My delicate dance between houses felt ridiculous, something I didn’t have time for. When I began to slip up, making plans with my father on the fly, my mother began to protest.

“It’s always what he wants, what’s good for his schedule,” she said, “and I just have to take whatever’s left.” We bickered about it for a bit, and eventually I told her that we’d have dinner together the following night. Later, I went to my father’s house and the two of us stayed up after Asher and my stepmother went to bed. We talked for several hours, about politics,

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Judaism, writing, sports. I told him about a memory I had, from when I was 11, of Game 5 in the Knicks-Bulls 1994 Semi-Conference Finals. I had been listening to the game on the radio, when my dad had made me turn it off and go to bed. I fell asleep, but on the final play with the Knicks down by one, he woke me and the two of us listened in the darkness as Hubert Davis got fouled on a three-pointer and made both free throws to win.

“Wow, I’d completely forgotten that,” he said. I could tell it made him happy.

Just before I left for the night, he asked me if I wanted to come over the following evening. Feeling pinched, knowing I had made plans with my mother, I said, “Maybe, we’ll see.” I thought that I could thread the needle, spend a little time at my father’s early the following evening, then get back to my mother’s in time for dinner, maybe start it a little later.

But the next day when I told her my plan, my mother became irate.

“You just do whatever he asks,” she said. “You don’t think about me, I’m always expendable, my schedule is always flexible.” I was trying to write a paper at my desk when she said this, and as she was walking away I yelled, “You know what? I don’t need this crap [I hit the desk, bam, with my palm] every [bam] time [bam] I come here.” My mother began to cry. I apologized, told her that I would call my father and tell him I had already made plans with her and forgot to mention it.

“Fine,” he said tersely. I apologized again—this time to my father—and told him that I’d be over first thing the following morning, which I was. Asher was there and happy to see me as usual. We played for several hours, rolling his Tonka trucks along the floor and reading stories together on the couch. My stepmother came downstairs, mumbled a greeting to me and left to run errands. When she was gone, my father came into the living room. Asher sat in my lap.

“You know Meira’s really upset with you,” my father said. “Asher was asking all day where you were, because you told him you were coming over and then you didn’t.”

“I don’t remember telling him anything,” I said.

“Well, he was asking all day about you, ‘Where’s Dario? Where’s Dario?’ you can’t do that to a little child. Meira has had clients who have lost visitation rights over stuff like that.”

When he said this, something inside me snapped. It could have been because my father chose to lecture me with Meira’s words instead of telling me how he felt himself, or because Meira’s comparison of me to a neglectful divorced parent hit a nerve from my own childhood, that I might be just as obliviously self-absorbed as my father had been with me. But

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either way my reaction was immediate. “Fuck her!” I yelled. Asher was still in my lap. My father’s eyes widened and when he opened his mouth to say something, I yelled it again.

“You need to leave,” he said.

“Yeah, I need to leave.” I stood up and began putting on my coat. “Who the fuck is she to say something like that?”

Asher had started saying, “You’re swearing. Stop it. You’re being bad.”

“She’s saying that it’s serious.”

“Oh fuck her. I hate her, Dad, I hate her.” The words left my mouth in a flash.

“Yeah, you’ve never accepted her as a part of your family.”

“That’s not true. I’ve tried. I’ve seen the writing on the wall about my place in this family for a long time.”

“So bow out,” he said. “Just bow out.”

There was something about our exchange that sounded almost prepared, as though we had both imagined this very moment and had been rehearsing these words in the darkness of our minds, without either of us realizing it, for many years.

I felt something strike my thigh. “You’re being bad. You go in time out. You’re bad.” It was Asher, grabbing my leg and reaching up, hitting me with his small fist. My father pulled him away and took him upstairs in a fit.

I walked back to my mother’s, empty and in shock.

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8. Burying the Dead “Experts have argued,” Aaron David Miller writes, “that the real problem in the Arab-Israeli conflict is that the sides really don’t know each other. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to understand that at least part of the problem is that they know each other too well. This fatal embrace locks them into a lethal struggle over the basic elements of life . . . makes them different from each other and even more different from us.”

I can’t really speak to this based on my time in Israel. After all, I was not introduced to any Palestinians, I was not shown the West Bank, and all of Gaza that I saw was a high-reaching chain-link fence stretching across a barren desert. I do know that I felt more empathy toward Israelis during those ten days that I visited than I do now. Up close, it is hard to not feel empathy for how people live, whoever they may be. The human desire for survival, to live free of fear, does not require much fuel to be felt and expressed sincerely. The conflict is indeed “complex” as many Israelis would have you believe, because human beings are complex. But Israelis also know how much easier it is for their “complexity” to sway and move a human audience when Palestinian life and voices are invisible. When they are spoken for and not allowed to speak.

The real reason that I find Miller’s comments compelling is because of how much they resonate with my own life. Well into adulthood I found myself still articulating my needs to one parent using language from the other, looking at my father through my mother’s gaze and vice-versa. And the reason this happened wasn’t that I was too passive to form my own perspective, or that I lacked an ability to see my own interests: it was that my father and mother, whose arguments I heard for years and internalized, had such a deep knowledge of each other’s weaknesses. They couldn’t empathize with each other’s struggle, but they knew just where to cut, where to poke, how to describe each other in ways that were both so true, yet so damning. Even now, and probably for the rest of my life, part of me will exist that cannot help but see each parent through the other’s eyes, the other’s words.

When my father and I reconciled, five months later, we didn’t change our opinions about each other. We didn’t reconcile through the series of long-winded email exchanges immediately prior to our actual reconciliation, where in the guise of reasonableness and logic we continued performing for the pride-audiences inside us, cloaking insults in catchy rhetoric

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and psychoanalytic terminology. We reconciled because we were both tired of the silence, and because I was coming to Ithaca in several weeks to visit my mother anyway. It was a mostly superficial reconciliation: He reached out to me first (which I wanted), I agreed to apologize to Meira for saying I hated her (which he wanted), promised never to lose my temper in his house again (which we both wanted), and he admitted that his choice of words to reprimand me that triggered my explosion had been unproductive and confusing (which I wanted). And yet, had only these concessions been present, I doubt that it would have felt like a reconciliation.

It was on the phone that we reconciled. For the first time since our fight we heard each other’s voices, voices that contained resonances of warmth and love, able to wash away the hardened aggressive images we’d built up of each other over the previous months.

Such memories and associations are scarce resources for most Israelis and Palestinians and continue to grow even scarcer by the day. S from S’derot might speak compassionately about her Palestinian colleagues at University, Yarom might talk about having Palestinian friends, but ultimately these connections seemed more perfunctory than visceral, more rhetorical set-pieces to maintain a self-image (for others, for themselves) as compassionate and nonvengeful, rather than emotions that might actually help them maintain a belief in peace as an urgent necessity.

On our second-to-last day in Israel we visited Herzl Memorial Park, a graveyard for Israeli soldiers. Every single Israeli who accompanied us had friends who were buried there.

They told us touching stories about their fallen comrades, some funny, others sad, their eulogies articulate and polished, perfected with repeated recitation.

“When it’s the anniversary of a friend who died, the parents will have a big party at their house with lots of food,” Yoni told us. “On those nights I know only two things: one, that I’m going to see lots of old friends who I haven’t seen in a while, and two, that I’m going to get very very drunk.” We all laughed, but I felt a bit queasy, as though Yoni had just told me that he slept with a corpse. “The mothers don’t always participate,” he added with a rueful smile. As Israelis often remind us, there is far more to their society than what countries

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Photo by Aron Brand / Shutterstock.com

or peoples they fight. But what also must be acknowledged is that conflict for Israelis is about more than just survival. It is a condition built into the most intimate rituals of Israeli life.

I only had one conversation with Yoni about the peace process. After we visited Rabin’s Memorial, I told him how much it moved me, the opportunity for peace that Rabin seemed to represent.

“Do you think that kind of environment is possible again?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Yoni said.

“Why not?”

Yoni smiled. “Because I know who I’m dealing with.”

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AUTHOR’S NOTE Dario Sulzman received his MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among other places, Potomac Review, Gulfstream, Florida Review, and the Massachusetts Review. He currently attends the University of Cincinnati, where he is at work on a novel and working towards a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature with a specialization in Creative Writing (Fiction).

About his essay, “Conflict,” Sulzman writes, “Initially, I tried to write an essay about Israel that was more detached. What did my family troubles have to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The problem was that writing about my recent experiences in Israel felt completely false; they were far too saturated by the emotional upheaval that occurred just before my trip between myself and my father. About a week before I had to turn in a draft for workshop, I started writing my friend these strange, hypothetical scenarios of conflict involving ‘X’ and ‘Y’ parties. I started thinking about an essay which intermingled my experiences dealing with my parents’ conflict and my knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to meditate on the discourse of conflict itself – its performativity, the struggle for narrative control, its assumptions about morality, about how we characterize strength and weakness.

On the surface, the comparison of my parent’s relationship to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed grandiose, but I’m also attracted to grandiose premises – the challenge to show a reader how what initially appears crazy is actually very real and human. I also had this line in my head: “I lied to the El-Al official about one thing.” I couldn’t stop saying this line to myself. It just seemed like a great entry point to take the reader down a rabbit hole. I wrote the first draft (41 pages!) in less than a week. It’s one of my only writing experiences where the full draft seemed to come out of me whole. The irony is that actually revising the essay took several years. I needed to cut it down, and I couldn’t make myself do it. Revision requires ruthlessness and the experience of writing that first draft felt too sacred to disrupt. I had to get a lot of distance from it before I was able to see its flaws clearly, and accept that removing them wouldn’t send the entire edifice of the essay crashing down. I’m very glad that it has finally found a good home.”

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