The War In Our Mind Is To Wake Up To Our Liberty.

There is no easy way to start a story that either begins or ends in the slow gaze down the barrel of a gun to the sight at the end, to gently bring into the focus the eyes just beyond it staring back and wonder if hate will win today.

Living directly under a flight path to an international airport the sound of airplanes flying overhead is not unusual. They drown out casual conversation on a sunny day in the garden, sometimes I watch them wondering where the people are going, most days I barely notice them.

One morning — when I lived somewhere else entirely — I was returning home from an errand when planes went overhead. I paused to watch them.

When I got back into our apartment with the shopping I turned on the television, and saw in the news that 14 women and children had been killed and injured, in an unsanctioned airstrike across the Good Fence into Lebanon.

The year was 1991 and I was living in Israel.

On my very first weekend in Israel, my then fiancé taught me to strip, clean and reassemble our handgun. I was taken out to a scrubby patch of land to shoot it, at a hand-drawn outline of a head on a piece of torn cardboard.

We did this before I learned where the supermarket was.

The thing that shook me the most about that experience wasn’t that I was handling a gun as a priority, it was that I got six out of seven bullets in “the head”. Whether that was beginner’s luck or not, I was left with the certainty that I could actually take someone’s life.

The supermarket turned out to be in the shopping mall across the road, and I didn’t have to carry the gun with me there as it has armed security. I did have to carry it on days out to the beach, even though we only went to areas under armed protection. I did have to take it on outings, which we only did in groups, and I did have to take it in the glove compartment when I drove anywhere. I got used to putting my arm around my fiancé’s waist and feeling it tucked into the back of his jeans under his shirt.

It was also taped under the table I taught English at in our home. Two of my students were Arabs, and nobody in our building would let me teach them unless I had that gun taped under the table between us.

Teaching English freelance was the option I was left with, as I couldn’t clear top-level security for any job I applied for because as I am a Gentile.

Being a Gentile was not something I was aware I was until I lived in Israel, where an accident of birth distorted work and opportunities, dictated people’s opinions and changed relationships.

As soon as I got my Israeli citizenship I was able to attend free Hebrew classes every week, until the teacher found out I was a Gentile. That day we were learning new and useful vocabulary; the teacher pointed out a portrait of then Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, hanging high on the wall at the back of the class, and wrote the words “intelligent”, “generous”, “firm”, “fair”, and “trustworthy” on the board. We got to put them in a sentence for context: “The prime minister is intelligent,” we all intoned.

Somehow my status came out and the teacher turned to the rest of the class and told them that under no circumstances were they to trust me. She ended the lesson abruptly and asked me to stay back for five minutes; face-to-face she suggested that I was not welcome back.

This was at the time when a wave of Russians and Yugoslavians emigrated, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the war breaking out in the former Yugoslavia. My fellow students were European. As I left they were standing outside smoking cigarettes against the school wall, they were resigned even as they called out to me that some of their neighbours back home had been gentiles, and friends too. I didn’t see any of them again.

My father-in-law loved to tell a joke with the punchline; “who cares, she is Gentile.” Underneath it all, being Gentile is defined by not being something; you are “not Jewish”.

You couldn’t tell I was a Gentile just by looking at me, and in the context of Israel I was assumed to be Jewish; after all, I was always asked, why would I come to live in Israel otherwise?

Love is a suspicious reason, for being simply inadequate.

It was the drift of opportunity that took me there the first time I was in Israel, rather than idealism. I had simply taken a bus across Europe, ended up in Greece, and boarded the boat to Israel because it was a place to go if you wanted to escape Athens in winter. It left from the port of Piraeus and after two nights sleeping on the deck, and a stop in Limassol, Cyrus, you disembarked in Haifa.

A two-hour bus ride, and a hitchhike the rest of the way, into the north of the Negev got you to Kibbutz Ruhama; founded in 1911, it was the first modern Jewish settlement in the desert. For room and board and nominal pay, I walked behind the potato plough, and cleaned the communal dining room and, between the night shift in the toothbrush factory and days in the hen houses, I learnt the ways of a whole new kind of society first hand.

Immersed in the liberal and tolerant ethos of equality, social justice and shared ownership, I was officially adopted by a kibbutz family and drafted in to work in the children’s houses.

Kibbutzim children were brought up in communal homes from six months old at that time, cared for by those who work there; being a volunteer in the houses was a huge privilege. It meant longer hours, but when your basic needs are taken care of you can flourish at what you love. I wrote and drew and took pictures (when I could afford a film for the camera), and became conversant in Hebrew one step ahead of the toddlers so I could point to the ceiling and teach them the word “????” (or) for “light”.

My fiancé claimed he fell in love the first time he saw me, dancing barefoot around the Moadon (the clubhouse) of that kibbutz learning Israeli folk dances. Back then, I was young and aspirational and I didn’t think love was a good enough reason to stay either, and waved my thanks for the experience as I headed back to England to go to college and begin a ‘glorious’ career. Then the Gulf War broke out; the first scud missile launched at Israel landed 500 yards from that man’s new flat in Haifa, and it turned out that love was compelling.

Interfaith marriages in Israel were (are?) not legally possible, although they are recognised if performed abroad; and that’s how we did it. But, on Christmas Eve of that same year, the Military Police Corps came and took my new husband for questioning — because he married a Gentile.

For want of connection to something familiar, I watched Christmas mass in Bethlehem on the television by myself; and I had no idea when, or if, I would see my husband again.

He came home three days later, demoted from an Officer in the Intelligence Corps to Private on the ground at the Gaza strip when his next month in Reserve Service came around. Fed up with it all, he had rebelliously put a copy of the New Testament in his kit bag knowing they were going to search it, and that’s all that was needed.

Our every day was lived with our apartment windows sealed with tape against possible chemical attack, the television was always on because that’s how the national security announcements got out.

Ordinary busses got blown up, Palestinian cars required to carry Israeli plates were burned in protest. I had stones thrown at me by Arab children, outside the Damascus Gate of Old Jerusalem during a shopkeepers strike. We carried guns. People put their fatigues on and left regularly. One or two didn’t come home. We waited eternally for a ‘tzav shemoneh’, the call-up code for the reserves in the event of a national emergency.

Living in a conflict zone is truly harrowing for everyone, no matter what their ethos is. Conflict pervades the darkest corners of your mind, inescapably.

Without physical security, no other ordinary human struggle is easy. Living in a country at war with its neighbours and the world, and within itself, means the prevalent threat is so overpowering it colours everything. It is absolutely impossible to plan anything, or even think of anything, beyond the present moment.

The war in your mind is real; you don’t plan a future because there is no certainty, you cannot afford casual dissent because everyone relies on unity, you are suspicious because your survival depends on it.

The first time I was in Israel I was 18 and it was at the tail end of a visionary dream, I got engaged during the Gulf War, and was 26 when I went to live there at the tail end of the First Palestinian Intifada. That first time it was a backpacker’s dream destination, in 8 short years all I remember as I returned is the floor of the airport littered with gas masks left behind by those with a flight out.

This can happen in a way that seems so inexorable. Where bending with the wind blurs the lines that get crossed every day.

Not long before I finally left Israel we went with a group of friends into the countryside for a picnic; we always travelled in a group for safety. Under a barrage of conversation in another language, depleted from living under threat, longing for one moment of serenity, I wanted to be alone. I wanted to hear the heartbeat of the earth and breathe in fresh air and tranquility. I wanted to walk alone.

No one would let me go without the gun, so I took it to keep the peace.

I walked through the small forest and up a hill into a clearing, to sit looking out over the beautiful land stretched in front of me. From that perspective you cannot see imaginary lines between peoples, or their differences, you just see the one planet we all live on.

In that silence I heard men approaching from behind. They were quite far away, but by the time I had stood up and turned they had knives out. I believe that if I did not take the gun out and show it I would be beaten, and raped, and maybe worse — not because I was a woman but because I was the enemy.

This was the moment of that slow gaze down the barrel of a gun to the sight at the end, to gently bring into the focus the eyes beyond it, and wonder if hate would win that day.

I took the safety off and said very simply; “I am not Jewish.” and watched them blink and turn away.

This is the haunting story of living life where people don’t spend time getting to know who you are — simply what you are makes you the enemy.

What do I think about jumping to deny this?

It is an observable fact that sometimes the possibility of being someone’s mother, someone’s brother, someone’s child, can end in a moment of hate that doesn’t even belong to you!

We rely on each others forbearance far more than we realise.

Imagine if every first impression is dominated by the need to evaluate whether a person is friend or foe. Imagine never feeling safe even in a self-imposed ghetto, with armed security. Imagine living with a gun in arm’s reach because the threat to your life is a daily anxiety. Imagine living with people who do not want you to exist.

Also imagine being against those people who live with a singular desire to survive that threat, and all that being true for you too. Imagine waking up every day with war on your mind, having to ask who is really your enemy, how can you change your world so no one dies today. Imagine asking every morning; “will I survive this day?”

Imagine living in a society that is polarised, where common ground is eroded and propaganda a part of every day?

Imagine that!

It is important to ask where our beliefs come from, just where these individual templates are formed. They are not hardwired like height or shoe size, they are influenced by the culture, language, what we allow in without thinking.

It is cumulatively exhausting to live normally in increasingly abnormal conditions, but everyone tried. People just wanted to get degrees, work, flirt, get married, have kids, have barbecues and white goods and a good night’s sleep. My husband and I lived together in his ordinary flat, in a small tower, in a complex in the Krayot suburbs north of Haifa.

I endured; sometimes I was a Gentile and I took my neighbour’s flour from her during Passover, as leavened produce is forbidden under Kosher law. Otherwise I lived like my neighbours; I hung my washing out of my kitchen window like them, I loosely observed the rituals of a different normal, and shopped at the mall, and went to the cinema at the mall, and bought books in the mall, and had a coffee at the mall, and went home.

I may have left Israel, but not without being changed; that intensity of conflict sears an emotional brand on your psyche that you carry with you always.

I think about those toddlers in my care back on the kibbutz and wonder at the real meaning of the word “light”, to be or become light.

We are attracted to shiny objects, but we are changed by what illuminates.

We have a phenomenal capacity to understand our most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning in our experiences is a matter of absolute personal, intentional, choice.

Unless we unthinkingly, unconsciously, let someone else do it for us, and there are plenty of those who wish to persuade our orientation.

Arab, Israeli, Jew, Gentile, were differences used to maintain circles of trust I was outside and left me with a wariness, a weariness, of casual superficiality.

The war in our mind is to wake up to our liberty. One of our more glorious abilities is a total freedom of choice, or rather the capacity to choose what to think about.

It is difficult to stay alert and attentive in the hypnotic noise of the monologue inside our own heads, but, if we can exercise this kind of choice, the ability to think critically — and map our own thinking — it is the freedom we truly seek.

Life is a brief shot at something extraordinary.

It is crucial to live stories worth telling, be fully responsible for our decisions, to have just a little critical awareness about our natural hard-wired default setting to be deeply self-centered, make our time here conscious; to make our story matter

Every time I hear the commercial planes overhead these days I am reminded there are different normals and I have a choice over what I think, and I don’t complain about the noise.

• Critical Thinking
• Choices
• Self Improvement
• Self-awareness
• Storytelling