My Sweet Israel, My Lovely Palestine

When I was a wee person, we moved from Northern Westchester County, just outside of Peekskill, to Spring Valley NY.   When I went to school, we had the usual things like---felt, crayons, the alphabet. And eventually show and tell.

I think it was the Third Grade, so I was 8? And this girl, Jackie, with lots of freckles, got up and did a little report or something…on the wars in Israel.

I was blown away. The 1948 stuff. The 1967 big to-do. The Yom Kippur nasties. All of it. At 8, I sat there and I thought a few things:

1. Jackie, you are so sweet and shy, why are you up there in front of the class talking about war?

2. Jackie, your parents must have told you all about this.

3. Jackie, you are only 8. Why are you identifying with this little country so far away where you don’t even live?

4. Jackie, you seem excited about knowing all about these wars. Proud even. And this scares me. I didn’t know there were all these wars going on. Let’s wrap this up.

And since then, besides having a recurring dream that Jackie is in our beige family station wagon and she takes off her pants and for some reason she has a penis that she’s sort of proud of even though it’s rather vestigial and flops there useless obscuring her girl genitalia, I often think of Jackie whenever I see something in the newspaper about a war or skirmish going on in Israel.

I haven’t been 8 in a long time.

Not to be a glib bitch who’s pretending to be funny, but I’ve had enough hearing about these wars and I want them to end.

I was a kid during Vietnam and I was terrified of growing up and having to go to war. Everyone hates war (except those who don’t). No more war. Please.

I still can’t believe all those facts Jackie had at her fingertips. I was so overburdened by it then that ever since, I never read more than the first line of any news item about war in the Middle East. It’s too repetitive.