Cognitive Dissonance
I believe that most friends in Western Europe or North America do not consider the relationship between their friendship and politics, even if such a relationship may exist. In Israel, national politics are more in the foreground and may create heated discussions on divergent points of view, over which friendships could fall apart. Politics are inescapable when the friendship concerns an Israeli and a Palestinian, even if the national politics are not discussed within friendship, as in our case. This could already be learned from the story about the netstick, but it never became as clear as in the story I just described.
In recent years, in many parts in the center and north of Israel one may succeed to live one’s daily life relatively undisturbed –consciously – by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but when living in Jerusalem (or in the south of Israel, near Gaza) this conflict cannot be ignored. In the last years – since the building of the separation wall – things seem calmer, but even today the threat of death is always there. There were years that I feared driving behind buses, wary that they would explode by means of a suicide bomber. Once on my way to university, I had the scary experience of arriving at a bus stop at which a few hours before a bomb had exploded. Furthermore, I had friends and clients killed in terrorist attacks. In French Hill, the neighborhood I live in now, there were several terrorist attacks. From my home I can hear at nights loud noises from the adjacent Palestinian village, but I cannot always identify whether these are from fireworks at weddings or from shooting by soldiers to disperse a riot. In order to keep one’s peace of mind, one has to repress this kind of thing.
