A Land Twice Promised

An Israeli Woman's Quest for Peace

Noa Baum

• Publisher: Familius
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781942934493
• eBook ISBN: 9781944822095
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

An Israeli woman writes about growing up amid war and ancestral trauma and later building a friendship with a Palestinian woman in America.
Israeli storyteller Noa Baum grew up in Jerusalem in the shadow of the ancestral traumas of the holocaust and ongoing wars. Stories of the past and fear of annihilation in the wars of the '60s, '70s, and '80s shaped her perceptions and identity. In America, she met a Palestinian woman who had grown up under Israeli Occupation, and as they shared memories of war years in Jerusalem, an unlikely friendship blossomed.
A Land Twice Promised delves into the heart of one of the world's most enduring and complex conflicts. Baum's deeply personal memoir recounts her journey from girlhood in post-Holocaust Israel to her adult encounter with "the other." With honesty, compassion, and humor, she captures the drama of a nation at war and her discovery of humanity in the enemy.  
Winner of the 2017 Anne Izard Storytellers' Choice Award, among others, this compelling memoir demonstrates the transformative power of art and challenges each reader to take the first step toward peace.
Praise for A Land Twice Promised
"A penetrating, introspective memoir that mines the depths of the chasm between the Israeli and Palestinian experiences, the torment of family loss and conflict, and the therapy of storytelling as a cleansing art. You will not think in the same way at the end of this captivating book as you did at the beginning." —David K. Shipler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of  Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land

Chapter 17

On Despair and Hope

My dream is the realistic imaginary and the son of will:

We are able

to alter

the inevitability of the abyss!

[. . .] Would I be able to talk about war and peace

between the victims and the victims

of victims without interruption? Would they

say to me: There’s no place for two dreams in one bed?

—Mahmoud Darwish, from “Counterpoint: For Edward Said”
translated by Fady Joudah

For me, performing these stories over the years continues to be a gift, but sadly, for Jumana, the stories of “A Land Twice Promised” are not a source of comfort. They seem to only intensify the pain of loss, reminding her of everything she left behind and what her family and her people can no longer return to. With the laws prohibiting Palestinians from returning to Jerusalem if they’re away for more than two years and the increasing hardships of life under Occupation, Jumana and her siblings are no longer able to live there. After Jumana’s father passed away, Muna, her mother, could no longer stay alone in Jerusalem with none of her four children close by. So Jumana brought her mother to live with her in America. For Muna, this forced exile becomes harder every day as she is aging, and the memory of each morning fades in misty sepias next to the vivid colors of the more distant memories of childhood and her homeland.

“I think the worst thing for me, related to our stories, is the emotional toll,” Jumana tells me on the phone. “Bringing up those memories only adds stress and sadness. My mom blames me repeatedly for having left the country. She is very unhappy about being here and constantly talks about going back to her house, her garden, her neighbors, her friends. I think she felt this way all along but had hidden it for my sake. Now, with dementia creeping in, she is more vocal. Seeing her fade away and become more and more dependent on me and more and more unhappy is frightening, but I have to deal with it.”

My heart aches with her pain. I wish I could fix it, change it, heal it, and make it all better. But of course, I can’t, and sadly, not much healing is going on in the Middle East.

“I just don’t know how you can continue. It is all too depressing,” she said recently. “I admire you for going on, but honestly, I don’t know how you can go on still believing in peace.”

How do I go on? Is there an answer to Jumana’s question at all?

I can feel her despair. It looms so high for me, too, and dark and all invasive, every day.

What can I tell her? My naïve little flutter of hope, that notion of peace that will soon be upon us—after that momentous handshake on the White House lawn in 1993—seems almost farcical now. If only I could laugh.

Since the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, the number of settlers in the West Bank has more than tripled to 350,000—not including those in East Jerusalem—making any practical dividing of the land or prospects for peace more remote than ever.

The Middle East is a scary place these days, ever more violent and unstable. The threats are very real—Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the civil war in neighboring Syria with hundreds of thousands of civilians slaughtered, and in particular, the rise to power of the Islamic State known as ISIS: the brutal theocratic crew that has established a “caliphate” in parts of Syria and Iraq. The security of the region is at risk, and the complex realities are often too hard to follow or understand. All this has plunged the Israeli public deeper into reactive fear, resulting in the 2015 election of the most extreme, hard-line, right-wing government in the history of the state. At this moment in time—which, in the Middle East, changes in a blink of an eye—I am witness to a government led by representatives of the most fundamental ultranationalist factions of settlers, empowered by Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. His government stokes fears and offers no vision or long-term solution other than more revenge, retribution, and wars.

The Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely has stated that because God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, there is no problem with settlements on the West Bank. The Minister of Education, now in charge of the schooling of millions of Jewish and Arab Israeli youth—what books will be read and what history will be taught—is Naftali Bennett, the head of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party that does not support any solution that includes a state for the Palestinian people. The Minister of Justice with direct influence over the country’s court system is a thirty-nine-year-old woman, Ayelet Shaked, who now spearheads the fight to curb the legislative power of the Israeli Supreme Court, because its rulings often uphold the rights of Palestinians. She openly posts on Facebook wisdom morsels such as this: “This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them; they started.”

In this climate, the unchecked rise of anti-democratic and racist Jewish groups in Israel that began decades ago with the assassination of Emil Grunzweig has reached an all-time high, with escalating violence by extremist Jewish groups. Journalists, NGO directors, peace activists, and even authors and artists receive death threats. Settler groups that have been uprooting hundreds of olive trees over the years, the same groups who used to shoot randomly into homes and vandalize property when Jumana was a child, are now burning mosques and throwing fire bombs into homes.

The Occupation of the Palestinians has become a fact of life for new generations of Palestinians and Israelis. The young eighteen-year-old children of my friends and cousins stand at checkpoints barricaded behind steel and concrete, risking their lives every time they have to come out to check cars or men and women who might be loaded with explosives or, more commonly, children who throw stones. They have to live with the humiliation and terrors they are inflicting on other humans as they are faced with impossible situations to enforce a brutal Occupation on millions of Palestinians. They carry the unspoken traumas of not only wars but also the blood of many civilians on their hands. “Nu, ma laasot? What can you do? There’s no choice” is still the prevailing mindset.

For Palestinians, house demolitions, land confiscations, and water shortages are everyday realities. Simply providing for their families, commuting to work, or getting to the next village or to Jerusalem to worship is next to impossible with the system of roadblocks, walls, and fences. The death and imprisonment of children is almost a normal occurrence. In Gaza, millions are living under inhumane conditions among the rubble and destruction of the last war. The wars and trauma continue breeding new generations of fighters who have nothing to live for and everything to die for. For them, sovereignty, dignity, and living the normal life that all humans are entitled to is a constant daily struggle.

But most Israelis still live in complete isolation from the daily hardships and reality of the Palestinians. They are tuned into their own survival anxieties, magnified by rhetoric from Tehran such as “Israel should be annihilated, and this is our ultimate slogan.”1

I’ve met Israeli teens who, without a trace of irony, raised their eyebrows: “What occupation?” and American Jewish college students who insist there is no such thing as “Occupied Territories,” only Judea and Samaria, which are a historic part of Israel.

In the last decade since Jumana and I started to talk, the never-ending Occupation, continuous rocket attacks from Gaza, and soldier kidnappings from both Gaza and Lebanon brought another war in Lebanon and three more wars in Gaza. They all have titles, these “operations” that are never called wars: “Operation Defensive Shield” (March–May 2002); “Operation Just Reward” (Lebanon, July–August 2006), “Operation C...

Table of contents

• Author’s Note
• Beginnings
• What I Know about THEM
• Names on the Wall
• Army Days
• I’m Not into Politics
• My Brother’s Keeper
• Detours
• Uncharted Territory
• The Meeting
• Starting to Talk
• A Decision Unfolds
• Putting the Pieces Together
• Life Gets in the Way
• A Work in Progress
• Stories from the Road
• My Mother’s Candle
• On Despair and Hope
• Acknowledgments
• A Land Twice Promised