Love and fava beans

 

So what did I do today? Joined several groups of volunteers helping out on an Iranian-Israeli (Jewish) family farm in the heart of Israel sorting and shelling fresh ful (fava) beans with a friendly Iranian-Israeli woman who came to Israel from Yezd when she was a teenager more than 50 years ago.

As we worked conversation flowed, Pesah customs and recipes, like Persian green rice with fava beans, "traditional women's talk" that made us feel grounded and connected with our female ancestors from Jewish history, sitting in a circle, assorted Jewish women of different ages and backgrounds, preparing vegetables from the farm for the upcoming holiday.

The farmer's mother stopped by to say hello, chatting for a while in Farsi with my work companion. She also brought with her a still steaming dish of freshly cooked fresh green fava beans for us to taste, a seasonal delicacy, a sign of spring, for the fresh ful season is short. In some communities dishes like this are traditional for Pesah, in others we refrain from eating beans on Pesah, but either way, fresh green ful in the market stalls is a sign of spring in Israel.

And from time to time we got alerts of incoming Iranian missiles and work stopped while we all made our way to the big central shelter in the centre of the moshav village, Jews of all kinds, including those with Iranian roots, non-Jewish migrant workers, Arabs - we all get the Home Front Command alerts on our phones, everyone takes cover together, knowing that Iranian missiles target us all.

On the bus home I sat up front near our Arab driver. He worried about incoming missiles while we were on the road. Worried that I get off at a major junction that's out in the open without close shelter (I knew a friend was giving me a lift from the bus stop so I wouldn't be standing around waiting, not to worry).

The people sitting up front talked about cancelled Pesach plans and vacations, cancelled Eid ul Fitr (the Muslim holiday concluding Ramadan which just finished) plans and trips, life put on hold by the war, spur of the moment ad libbed plans to keep living within the strange new rubric of this war. Strangers, friends and acquaintances, but all with a deep genuine empathy for each other's experiences because we are all in this war together, we all get it, understand each other despite our different communities.

"Safe journey, quiet journey", "Good tidings", "peace" we call out to each other as people get off at their stops. They aren't just words, but blessings and wishes from the heart.

 I don't know whether to laugh or cry when people overseas decide to lecture me on 1) "just stop this mutual baseless hatred with Iran" and 2) "war is bad". 

Because someone in the West who has never experienced war or living with missiles being lobbed at them clearly needs to explain to the person who's lived through years of it what war is like. We here wouldn't have a clue otherwise. We'd think it was hunky dory fun and games and glory. Not like we live in a country where running for shelter from ballistic missiles is a fact of life or where there is a national draft and people spend the cream of their young years serving their country. 

Forgive the sarcasm, but it's really getting a bit much to be lectured on how to best to protect our lives by people on the other side of the world who's main concern is the price of petrol and whether war looks bad on tv, rather than whether an Iranian missile is going to hit their home or whether Iran will get to have the nukes they keep promising to use to wipe our country off the map. 

War is horrific, but sometimes not fighting a war has even more horrific consequences. 

Which brings me to #1. There is no "mutual hatred" of Iran from Israel or even from most Iranians I've ever met. There is a fanatical revolutionary regime in Iran though which for 40 years now has been teaching its schoolchildren every day to chant "Death to Israel", and who's leaders burn with a passionate ideological hatred for Israel, believing the existence of a non-Islamic, let alone non-Shia state in the Middle East to be an affront to their faith and an impediment to the coming of the Twelfth Imam, meaning Israel must be destroyed to hasten the coming of the Mahdi and their version of "end times". 

By contrast prior to Khomeini's revolution in 1979 Israel enjoyed diplomatic relations with Iran, the two countries had close ties, include direct flights, tourism and commerce. 

Jews have had ties with Iran going back to the ancient Persia of biblical times, whether it's the Persian court drama of the Purim story or the Cyrus proclamation that allowed the Jews exiled by the Babylonian empire to return home to Zion and rebuild Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple with the Persian king's blessing. 

There is a mutual respect and affection between Iranians and Jews, two ancient Middle Eastern people still clinging to ancient language and culture that predate the Arab Islamic colonisation of our region, our countries dotted with ruins testifying to millennia old civilisations, spoken Farsi and Hebrew stubbornly preserving languages spoken by our ancestors. I have seen so many messages about this from Iranian people, both living as emigres in the global Iranian diaspora and from within Iran. 

There are huge numbers of Farsi speaking Jews hailing from Iran, Afghanistan and central Asia, including a significant and influential community in Jerusalem dating back around 200 years, among the builders of the first neighbourhoods outside the walls of the Old City. 

There are many Israeli Jews who have Persian Jewish ancestry, including senior politicians, rabbis and military leaders, as well as beloved popstars like Rita and Liraz Cherkhi. Iran is not some vast unknown to many Israelis, but a living culture that is part of their lives too. 

So no, this is not a war about peoples hating each other, ignorance of other cultures or a need for everyone to just learn to love each other. There is a serious ideological motivation for the Khomeinist Iranian leadership to oppose Israel, just as there is a serious historical cultural connection and mutual appreciation between many Israelis and the Iranian people. 

The deepest hope of the peoples of Israel and Iran is that this murderous Khomeinist regime will fall or at least be weakened enough so that our countries can again openly and officially be friendly with each other, to the mutual benefit of all.

Thanks to all our friends and family overseas who have reached out to us and my apologies if I haven't responded to everyone, it's been rather hectric around here.

I'm not online a lot these days, I find I have less patience for it than I used to and there is a weird cognitive dissonance in reading people around the world theorising from the safety of their distant countries about whether I and my people have a right to self-defense or whether we should just politely capitulate to people who proudly say they want to wipe us out. Me? When a bunch of people with a uranium enrichment programme have a clock in the middle of their capital city counting down to my country's destruction, I choose to believe it isn't just talk and they actually mean what they are saying. Not because I like war, but because I'm all too familiar with just how terrible war is and understand that sometimes there is no choice but to choose a pre-emptive strike against an enemy who is pledging to destroy you than to wait for that enemy to strike once they are at full strength and capable of making good on that horrific promise to erase your country from existence. Please don't patronise us with condescending talk explaining to us that "everything has a diplomatic solution", "war is not the answer", "nothing is ever determined by military means". Unlike people in countries which aren't under attack and haven't been for decades, I and my people are very aware of what war means, how very terribly awful wars are. We have paid the all too terrible cost of fighting for survival, everyone of us in Israel has lost someone or knows someone who has. We have no illusions of Hollywood action films and glorious war novels. We know exactly how ugly and devastatingly painful war is because our people have been forced to live it again and again and again. Unlike the Europeans and Americans lecturing us to just allow Iran to make a deal, what's the worst that can happen, we know what's the worst that can happen.