Leaving Israel but not really.....

So I'm sitting in the lobby of Ben Gurion Airport waiting to check my bags and begin the long wait to the long flight back to LAX. Around 17 or 18 hours of flight time plus a few hours layover, just enough to go through customs in Atlanta. Hopefully the flight will be on time, because I am due to go to the Hollywood Bowl a few hours after arriving in LA.

I know on an intuitive level that I won't make sense of this trip to Israel, my first time here, for a long long time. Realizations are going to awaken me from a sound sleep, much as this trip has in all ways, and, truth be told, I resisted mightily. I'd thought I would cry my eyes out from arrival until departure, after all, this is my FIRST visit to the land I have heard so much about, especially this past decade.

You awaken to an Israeli consciousness whether you like it or not. For my entire photojournalist career, I avoided this place. I knew I would feel too much, photographing all that is Israel is something most pro-Israeli photographers don't like to do. Warts and all coverage doesn't cut it when you are a MOT. At least that is what I thought as I went to East Africa instead. I'm an American Jew, a Zionist by birth and belief.

But then coming here, the realization hits that this too is a media lie...a lie we tell to ourselves in the States. The thing about being HERE, whether it's in Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, is that it is precisely the warts and all coverage Israelis are most comfortable with, and what they crave from the world's media. For them, showing their lives and how they face their issues is way closer to their reality than our skewed obsession of either/or. "Either you are with us or against us", that is the rallying American Jewish cry. Actually, as conversations with Israelis who actually live here attest, we've got it all wrong. Israelis don't take criticism of their policies to be anti-Israel nearly as much as American Jews do.

So, as I wait to go through the first leg of security to check my bags for the flight, I am eagerly awaiting my epiphanies.

I did not cry much at all during this trip, but my right ear did go deaf for most of my time here in Israel, the worst of it in Jerusalem. According to metaphysical website analysis of what the right ear represents----processing of information especially language and the ability to make sense of sensory experiences, I guess I went into sensory overload.

I'm not surprised.