Ikea is the New Jerusalem

“Pikak” is the word for traffic jam in Hebrew. As you approach the exit for Netanya, intervals between cars and horn blasts shrink. The pikak lasts until you reach the blue corrugated walls of the Ikea warehouse that calls to travelers, to home-owners and permanent residents. Once inside, you can pace and pause and examine tableaus of possibilities for living rooms and kitchens, bathrooms and children’s bedrooms. The colorful products, shelving units, area rugs and stainless steel kitchen tools are imported mostly from Europe. Bins of plastic extension cords in electric orange and ice trays with star shaped molds. Votive candles, plasma television screens, swiveling desk chairs, framed mirrors. Ikea- The store for all things homey in the homeland.

I have a map of Jerusalem. It’s a 26 page atlas that outlines the neighborhoods, the streets, the museums and the post offices. On some pages, the details fade as your eyes move toward the right side. The area of the city known as East Jerusalem isn’t included in this record of my home city for the year.

Residents in mostly Arab East Jerusalem have the choice whether or not to pursue Israeli citizenship. If they are not citizens, they are permanent residents, though they may have been here before Israel was a state. According to the law, the Israeli government claims the right to demolish homes erected without permits. However, it has become increasingly difficult for residents of East Jerusalem to acquire building permits. Home demolitions have become more and more common in the past few years.

While the separation barrier has thwarted some terror attacks, especially in the area of Jerusalem, it has severed communities and cut people off from needed economic and cultural resources. Meanwhile, policies on the table propose a swelling of the borders of Jewish Jerusalem with a new settlement area known as E1 to boast thousands of homes and even hotels. Annexing this area between Jerusalem and Maalei Adumim (a West Bank settlement) can only further hinder the chance for relationship repair between Israelis and Palestinians.

I think what is most disturbing to me is that I would never know about any of this unless I wanted to hear about it. Who is at home in this city? What does it mean to be at home? What does it have to do with Ikea? In South Africa, I remember a piece of art called “Home Sweet Home,” which was made up of pillows embroidered, “Keep out,” and a welcome mat woven from barbed wire. Basically, it tore open the contradiction of a home that must be secured like a fortress. A militarized compound will never feel like home. Welcome to the Homeland.

But as Gili, the director of one of the organizations I visited remarked, “I can’t afford not to be an optimist.” So I am still running around meeting with different organizations trying to figure out what social justice means and how I want to be a part of it. For a long time, I have connected it to being heard. In South Africa, I studied language policy because I wanted to know what language had to do with access to resources and how marginalized languages could be considered resources. I wanted to know how people could make their voices heard.

Over Rosh Hashanah, we read the story of the akeda, Tomorrow, we will read about Avraham binding his son Isaac to a sacrificial altar. Knife in his hand, we read, a messenger of G-d instructs him not to follow through with the slaughter. He sacrifices a ram instead and learns he will be blessed. At this point, Avraham names the site where all of this transpired. We read: “Avraham called the name of that place: YHWH Sees. As the saying is today: On YHWH’s mountain (it) is seen.” (Genesis 22:14)

In my last blog entry, I wrote about people trembling when they saw Jerusalem, her towers and citadels rising in the distance. Perhaps, they had the experience of being seen. Among Jerusalem’s mythic identities, it has been called the site of Gan Eden. From an underbelly of chaos, the world’s structures swirled into being. Here, Adam and Eve first imagined themselves “seen.” Perhaps, holiness has to do with being seen.

Here in the cosmic navel of the world, people are struggling to be seen and to be heard, too often silencing and erasing the voices and visions of others. In a book about the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath, Phillip Gourevitch writes, “Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality.” Narratives are everything here. By adopting them, people possess the power to invalidate others.

One of the places where I hope to intern is called the Museum on the Seam. Its façade is scarred with bullet holes from the two decades it served as a military outpost (1948-1967). The museum touches West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem, the ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim and more secular neighborhoods, the Old City and the newer parts. The museum uses “the language of art” to promote dialogue and understanding across borders. A block away from the museum, I saw Hebrew letters spray-painted on a wall in blue calling for “Death to the Arabs!” Both times I visited the museum, groups of soldiers sat discussing the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the promise of equality and the reality on the ground. No weapons are allowed in the museum. When I climbed the winding staircase up to the roof I saw that the soldiers had abandoned their guns in a pile, high up in this in-between place.

Last night, the grocery store near my neighborhood was packed. Women in scarves and wigs and hijabs filled carts with liters of pepsi and tubs of humus and loaves of honey cake, stocking up for Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan. A baby gummed at a roll, perched in a shopping cart. A bottle of wine slid off a shelf and shattered. A worker quickly mopped it up, then loaded more liter juice bottles on to the rapidly emptying shelves. For Jews and Arabs, now is the time for family and faith and new beginnings.

For this New Year, I wish for all of us the courage to break down the boundaries in our lives to seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard.