Not my country

The words “Do Not Push” have no meaning here. The little babushkas in the marketplace grab by the shoulders and move anyone in their way. Bus stops degenerate into mob scenes when the doors open, a soldier knocking a woman with the M16 on his shoulder, an elderly man using his cane to slash a path to the door. Nobody blinks at the thousands of women with strollers, most half hidden by wigs or headscarves. They are a part of the tableau, the six year olds carrying the newborns, the teenagers carrying the toddlers, obstructing the narrow alleys that wind between ancient stone buildings. They are blunt, and straightforward, and bracing, prickly as their cactus namesake. An entire people revels in the heady freedom of taking up space, speaking loudly, pushing and being pushed back without fear. And yet. The solidarity that carried them through a thousand years, the imposed and internalized otherness, the angry fire that survived concentration camps has no one to fight now. It swings wildly, the defensive spines grown poisonous, self defense morphed into blinkered xenophobia. The troublemakers are “put on a diet,” walled in, denied permits to build or schools to learn or space to grow. For those who have awakened in their beds to the sounds of bombs for centuries, for whom everything they can do has often not been enough, it seems alien not to fight with everything they have. Sixty years has yet to erase the scars on the collective psyche, like an abused child who grows up to be an abusive parent. So others grow up ghettoized, made other, poor and angry. Those who have learned too well from history are sometimes doomed to repeat it.