The Pomegranate Republic

It was early morning on the banks of the Sea of Galilee - that enchanting oval mass of crystal blue water in the North, perched just above the staircase down to the Jordan valley, and just inside the imposing shadow of the Golan Heights. I had just woken up from a night of good beer, good fire-roasted kebab, and good friends from Tel Aviv. The summer sun's early light had managed to convince me to leave the strangely comfortable confines of the rainfly of my tent that I had, for reasons not immediately clear to me at the time, chosen to sleep in for the night. This day, or maybe our hangover, was christened almost immediately by my Kazakh friend, Valentine, a self-proclaimed Russian, with a beer - a custom, I assume of any self-respecting Russian man, after a night of drinking. We split it and as we were basking in the glow of the flittering light that the palm trees allowed in to our Garden of Eden - a small slice of paradise that, if there was indeed a real Garden of Eden, was on the very banks of the very lake where it probably existed, I started to notice that there was a leafy tree about 30 meters away with small, bright red dots hanging from it. These dots must be some sort of fruit in this Garden, I thought to myself.

Lazily meandering over toward this leafy tree, these small red dots started to take the distinct shape of pomegranates, though not yet fully ripe. It was all a big coincidence, not only because it was fruit in The Garden, but because right before I had left for this weekend getaway, I had learned that the word for "pomegranate" - "רימון" - was also the word for "grenade" in Hebrew. Holding a pomegranate in my hand that I had just pulled from a branch of that tree, I couldn’t help but be reminded of what my roommate Ofer, an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, had nervously told me a few days earlier:

“There will be a war this summer with Hizballah. I mean, a big one, man. Pack your grenades.”

This was a frightening prospect, even if it is what every Israeli claims every year roughly between the months of May and July. The last time I was in Israel, in 2006, I flew out of Tel Aviv back to the States the day that Lebanon 2 had started, thankfully. But the missile attacks both in Israel and in Lebanon reverberated and rippled across the world and onto the New York Times that I was reading the morning that I had returned to America. That morning I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why or how a political entity could be built up over a period of 30 years, be blindly supported by millions of people, or be unsatisfied by a complete, unilateral, UN-certified pull out of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, and still declare that their one and only impetus for existing is built completely on one thing: resistance.

A resistance to a state, of which a portion of its 20% Arab minority find the idea of succession of land that they live on to a future sovereign Palestinian state to be a much bigger "Nakba" - or catastrophe - than the first one, because they would lose the privileges that a democracy offers: free speech, religious freedom and economic freedom. A resistance to a state that grants asylum to sudanese refugees from Darfur and other Africans who have felt the sting of the biting, sand sweeping political winds that their native war-torn countries had blown in their faces. A resistance to a state which 300,000 Filipinos have made their home due to the economic and political chaos of their own troubled country.

Valentine and I, after having witnessed first hand the amalgam of different cultures and peoples that now make up this country, had come to the conclusion that Israel, in its intrinsic and modern state, is not only the Jewish state and a place of refuge for Jews, but the de-facto shelter state of the Middle East, Africa and even many parts of Southeastern Asia. It's oasis of democracy and economic prosperity is enjoyed by a wide variety of people coming from a wide variety of sort of banana republics strewn out all over the world. These people come here for an important reason: to be protected under a more stable state. Unfortunately, when stability is rocked in Israel, the pomegranates must be used from time to time to ensure that a shelter state keeps on existing not only for Jews, but for other persecuted peoples who reside within its borders.

It is certainly a sour taste in anyone's mouth and a load to bear at times, but, Israel must be The Pomegranate Republic, even if it falls from grace to maintain its status as the Shelter State.