Breaking the Silence in Chicago
A former Israeli soldier shares the truth about his army service
Last Friday night I attended shabbat services at Mishkan Chicago where local baker and friend Jacob Portman delivered a moving dvar torah about his time serving in the Israeli military. Jacob immigrated to Israel about a decade ago and served in the IDF from 2012 to 2014, deploying to several locations in the occupied West Bank as well as Gaza during the ground invasion. As you will hear in the drash, Jacob had some disturbing experiences in the course of his service that led him to question the “us vs. them” mentality that predominates in so many sectors of the American Jewish community.
Listen to the live recording of Jacob’s speech, as well as Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann’s introduction, on Mishkan’s Contact Chai podcast. You can also read the text of the drash here.
Hearing Jacob speak about forcibly taking over an innocent Palestinian family’s home brought up many painful memories from my time in Israel/Palestine earlier this year. Mine were memories from the opposite side of the conflict, not that of the occupying Israeli soldier, but the occupied Palestinians, with whom I was working in solidarity. Images of the night raid on Tuwani, when soldiers assaulted me and my friends after we refused to stop filming them, were back projected onto my retinas. Then, sitting there in the sanctuary, I was suddenly transported back to Susiya when an Israeli armored jeep emerged from the dark and rolled into the humble Palestinian hamlet. Soldiers hopped out, assault rifles slung across their chests, and they threatened to arrest human rights activist (my host) Nasser Nawaja—for no reason.
I felt like I was hearing every individual word that Jacob spoke, except I also felt like I was simultaneously thousands of miles away, in that land of impossible light which Jacob and I both called home, for a while.
But, as he went on, I heard Jacob narrate how, years after his army service, in the process of finally getting to know the people whom he had been commanded to rule over, Jacob returned in civilian clothing to the occupied West Bank. It turned out that Jacob visited Susiya too! And he broke bread with Nasser in Nasser’s home!
Listening to Jacob share these stories, standing at the center of Mishkan’s shabbas-in-the-round, encircled by his Chicago Jewish community, all these visions of the past swirling around my head, feeling unstuck in space & time, experiencing waves of pain, sadness, and shock, astonishment at the things that I’d seen and done this year in Palestine, and then admiration for my friend’s bravery in the present moment, speaking the rude truth about the occupation to an audience perhaps unaccustomed to hearing it, I just sat there and silently wept.
I hope that you will find his speech as moving as I did. And perhaps after you’re done listening, you will see a little bit clearer why this brutal occupation must immediately end—for the sake of the occupied Palestinian nation first and foremost, but also for the liberation of the Jewish people.
After listening or reading, if you are still feeling open-hearted, I encourage you to check out my friend Ali Awad’s new post on the Humans of Masafer Yatta blog profiling Ibrahim Awad, a resident of the southern West Bank village of Tuba who is facing immanent forced removal by the Israeli army.