What Would I Do in Israel?

 The truth is that I have no desire to go back. I have a few friends and family worth seeing, but however much at 24 I romanticized being a journalist in the middle of an Israeli war, there's very little about experiencing a war that's worthwhile unless you get to pose like Camus for a black-and-white photo with sunglasses and a cigarette in your mouth. For the hoi polloi, there's just the general hell of enduring it, and however much it must be endured in Israel, one can only imagine what it means to endure it in Gaza, either as a Palestinian or an Israeli soldier.

The only reason to go back would be to write about it, and for whom would I be writing? The few friends who read me here? Does anybody actually read me here?

No, the real reason to go back would be for my continued grandiose delusion of Jewish history novels, because I want to experience what Jews act like under siege. I would imagine there are incredible situations: dramatic, tragic, comic, heroic situations, situations of cowardice, irony, love and hate so far past anything I could imagine or read about that to miss out on great material is the biggest regret for a mediocre artist looking to become good at what he does.

I have no desire to have the Israel experience again, but history is being made right now, and I'm missing it, almost 42 and with no overwhelmingly pressing responsibilities to keep me here.

There are probably dozens of Jewish ne'er do wells with exactly the same thought right now. It's a pseudo-intellectual's 'get rich quick' scheme: go to Israel, write about what you see, and somehow people will pay attention that never paid attention before.

But my real desire is not to write about this war, it's to write about war generally. It's to write about the long Jewish history of enduring sieges and mounting them, the long history of being victims and perpetrators, the long history of moral infamies and ambiguities that follow us everywhere we go, and the long history that whatever hell we pay to other peoples will be visited upon us seventy-seven fold.

That's why I want to go to Israel.

...I probably won't.