{"id":36986,"date":"2021-05-28T01:33:56","date_gmt":"2021-05-28T08:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=36986"},"modified":"2021-05-27T17:43:34","modified_gmt":"2021-05-28T00:43:34","slug":"love-note-across-the-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2021\/05\/28\/love-note-across-the-divide\/","title":{"rendered":"Love note across the divide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eighteen\u00a0years ago, when I lived in southern\u00a0Israel, the region that is getting hammered by rockets as I write this, my boyfriend\u00a0at the time\u00a0\u2013 Muhammed \u2013\u00a0was a Bedouin\u00a0Muslim,\u00a0also\u00a0living in the area. I went to visit my mother in\u00a0Berkeley,\u00a0Calif.,\u00a0for a month or so.\u00a0During my visit,\u00a0I was hanging out with a friend of mine, who had grown up a secular\u00a0Jew, then married a religious Moroccan\u00a0Muslim. She had been\u00a0inspired by her husband\u2019s religious devotion to explore her own religious tradition, starting to keep kosher, go to Orthodox synagogue, and so on.<\/p>\n

She and I\u00a0were driving through downtown\u00a0Berkeley, when we got stopped at a red light. As it so happened, to the right of us was an anti-Israel demonstration and to the left of us was a pro-Israel demonstration. The crowds were shouting slogans, slogans that flew across the street, over our heads in the car, the two of us, Jewish women in relationships with Arab Muslim men. We turned to each other, held our gaze for a minute, then burst out laughing hysterically. When the light turned green, we took off, leaving the Arabs and Jews\u00a0behind us,\u00a0yelling at one another.<\/p>\n

When we feel threatened, we can get into a defensive posture,\u00a0Us-Them thinking,\u00a0unproductive fact-flinging,\u00a0conversations from the brain instead of from the heart.\u00a0We\u00a0can\u00a0go around and around the same circle of thought\u00a0and narrative, as, meanwhile, people\u2019s lives are torn apart by trauma and tragedy. I believe that\u00a0the path to peace is\u00a0not through political conversations, but, rather, through\u00a0emotionally intimate relationships with individuals \u2013 getting to know and care about them,\u00a0listen to\u00a0their stories, understand the\u00a0complexities and nuances of their lives. So that there is no\u00a0Us and\u00a0Them, but rather, there is just\u00a0Us,\u00a0the human family.<\/p>\n

Prior to my relationship with Muhammed, I was a very political person. I did not just attend rallies;\u00a0I organized them. As an indigenous Middle Eastern Jew, the daughter of a refugee from Iraq,\u00a0I certainly had a lot to yell about: I am\u00a0a\u00a0direct\u00a0descendant of the people of ancient Israel,\u00a0which was destroyed 2,600 years ago by the Babylonians, who took my ancestors as captives to Babylon \u2013 the land of today\u2019s Iraq. My ancestors stayed on that land through the\u00a0Arab-Muslim conquest of the region 1,300 years ago and up through the modern day,\u00a0until\u00a0shortly after\u00a0the Farhud<\/em> \u2013 the pro-Nazi wave of genocidal violence against Jews in Baghdad\u00a0\u2013 following which, my family\u00a0fled to Israel.<\/p>\n

Despite the brutal violence, exile and traumatic uprooting my\u00a0family endured, along with the material loss \u2013 all Jewish personal and communal property was confiscated and nationalized by the Iraqi government \u2013 and, despite the\u00a0personal,\u00a0intergenerational trauma that carried forward through the years,\u00a0in Israel and the United States,\u00a0my family story was invisible in public discourse about Arabs and Jews, in both the Arab and Jewish narratives. This was the case despite the fact that indigenous Middle Eastern Jews made up the majority of Israel\u2019s Jewish population, and that there were 900,000 indigenous Middle Eastern Jewish refugees\u00a0worldwide\u00a0in the 20th century, with stories mirroring\u00a0those of my family.<\/p>\n

I spent 20 years of my young adult life devoted to getting these stories out there, with a mission of changing the way people think. I spoke at respected institutes, published in prestigious media, my work reaching the eyes and ears of tens of millions of people.\u00a0Then,\u00a0my thinking changed\u00a0\u2013\u00a0not about the history or politics, which remained the same\u00a0\u2013\u00a0but about what to do with the history and politics, how to interface with them.<\/p>\n

Because Muhammed and I were together amid a volatile environment of Arab-Jewish enmity, we kept things apolitical in our relationship. Paradoxically, this led to what was perhaps the most political act of all: Arab-Jewish love, visible for others to witness. My neighbours went from cautioning me against dating Muhammed to asking if I was still with Muhammed, to asking how Muhammed was doing. They feared him at first, but then got\u00a0to know him\u00a0and\u00a0care about him.\u00a0Experiencing that transformation, in turn, made me realize that the simple things in life, the connection we feel in someone\u2019s presence, can be more powerful and important than all the high-brow intellectual discourse in the world, the litany of things we may have to say, no matter how valid those things may be.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>
The author\u2019s forthcoming album, Iraqis in Pajamas, includes songs in response to the violence in the Middle East.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In addition, after getting diagnosed with cancer and choosing to heal from it naturally, I radically shifted my values and priorities \u2013 with joy, peace and ease shooting up to the top of my list. As part of my transformation, I returned to my lost love of music and started writing songs that were deeply personal, from the heart, and, as far as I knew, entirely apolitical \u2013 leaving me surprised when, after a performance, a man told me not only that he loved my music but that it was\u00a0very\u00a0political. My music disarms people, he and others have told me, specifically because I have no agenda, no interest in persuading anyone of anything; rather, I am just sharing \u2013 my story, my life, my journey. The simplicity and space of it all allows people to open their hearts, listen and, ironically, after all those years trying to change people\u2019s minds \u2013 transform the way people think.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know the solution to this conflict that has been raging on for decades, endangering the lives of my family and friends, Jews and Muslims alike. I do, however, know this: as individuals, we have the choice not to participate in divisive thinking,\u00a0to\u00a0instead\u00a0use conflict as an opportunity to reach out to people across the divide\u00a0and\u00a0get to know one another, in the most basic human ways, whether playing basketball\u00a0or playing music\u00a0or going for a walk and enjoying the sunset.\u00a0In our cynical world, putting love at the forefront of our consciousness may sound hokey or impractical. But, at the end of the day, I think it\u2019s the only thing with the hope to\u00a0effect\u00a0change.<\/p>\n

Loolwa Khazzoom<\/strong> (KHAZZOOM.com) is an Iraqi-American Jewish musician, writer and educator. Her work has been featured in top media, including\u00a0the <\/em>New York Times,\u00a0the <\/em>Washington Post\u00a0and\u00a0the <\/em>Boston Globe.\u00a0Her forthcoming album, I<\/em>raqis in Pajamas, with her band by the same name, includes songs in response to the violence in the Middle East.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eighteen\u00a0years ago, when I lived in southern\u00a0Israel, the region that is getting hammered by rockets as I write this, my boyfriend\u00a0at the time\u00a0\u2013 Muhammed \u2013\u00a0was a Bedouin\u00a0Muslim,\u00a0also\u00a0living in the area. I went to visit my mother in\u00a0Berkeley,\u00a0Calif.,\u00a0for a month or so.\u00a0During my visit,\u00a0I was hanging out with a friend of mine, who had grown up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[4242,5260,1342,4330,1673,1519,3036,3597,6277],"class_list":["post-36986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-history","tag-interfaith","tag-iraq","tag-israel","tag-israeli-palestinian-conflict","tag-love","tag-music","tag-politics","tag-relationships"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}