Idyllwild to Palestine

From the Mountain to the Desert

It’s hard to imagine a place more geographically opposite of Palestine than Idyllwild, California. It’s a tiny town of three thousand people created smack in the middle of a densely populated forest on a mountain. Driving there requires a left at the desert/mountain split, and then upward you go for a half hour, forty minutes, a car winding back and forth endlessly like a snake on the mountain, until you finally the road curves inward, and a few cars emerge parked, a building, and then within minutes, the town centre. A giant tree stands in the middle, circled by a fence and small painted boards asking visitors to please not pass the fence, so that the old trees can continue to survive. In an extended circle around the tree are the town shops, including a very “Luke’s” coffee shop which often has a line out the door, a gemstones store, a shop of incense and witchy teas, a pink and white candy store that also serves handmade ice cream sandwiches, a realtor’s office, a store stuffed to the brim with themed backpacks and hoodies, stores of local art and creations, etc, and one densely populated thrift store with a small and amazing selection of books from 1900 upward. Oh, and the movie theatre, which only plays one show at a time, and was, at the time of our recent visit, surreally playing Joker 2. This seemed like too much of an artistic touch via the powers that be; a universally panned movie starring Lady Gaga that is actually a musical about a traumatized man that turns into an evil being, bringing death and destruction to all around him, playing in the middle of a tiny peaceful town on top a mountain. There’s something about Mozart creating Requiem for operatic voices to sing and wail about death and the terror of grief and trauma that is opposite of Todd Phillips creating The Joker 2 for pop culture voices to sing and wail about death and the terror of grief and trauma.

I’ve been visiting Idyllwild- a three hour drive from home, sometimes four- for a decade; before this year it had been at New Year’s Eve, when my ex’s side of the family rented a cluster of cabins and we all gathered for a long weekend. This year, I went in October, with only my youngest daughter and her best friend. I had rented a room with two big beds, hoping my daughter might come, or my mom, but no one could, so my daughter invited her friend, and off we went. I hadn’t been for two years, when I went and stayed for NYE with my cousin and her family in the cabin they bought with friends. Over the last few years they had fallen in love with Idyllwild and relocated from LA, first with the shared cabin, and then with an additional small cabin of their own, a gorgeous wooden home with a backyard of trees and water. However, their little home burned on the first floor after only living in it for months. Thank god, no one was hurt, but their home was unlivable, so they’ve been living in their shared cabin, and have no room for visitors. Thus, the lodge we stayed at, the girls and I, which was deeply charming and fronted by a young Lorelei Gilmore, brown-haired and vivacious, whose seven-year-old big eyed brunette daughter skirted in and out of the office as we checked in.

The girls and I checked in and did nothing but wander the property, eat snacks, and fall asleep to the sound of crickets and owls. The next day in the early afternoon, we set off to town, and then to visit with my cousin and her daughter- Ever’s cousin. I had determined to go to Idyllwild mainly because I love it, and also because I was ensuring that my separation and looming divorce didn’t take the tradition that had become so important to me- a yearly stay- and also, because I was hoping that a weekend stay in a place I loved with people I love, a place far removed from the teeming world, would bring me some… something. I’m not sure what, but an alteration, I suppose, just an alteration, a slight shake up, in how I was perceiving life or processing it. Like many of us who were profoundly altered by October 7th and all we learned and saw, continue to learn and see, I have been trying to learn how to not turn away, how to do the work, the important work, while remaining present in my life and my people, without having a nervous breakdown, which is both incredibly indulgent and human as a response to the bizarre and terrifying set of facts we find ourselves existing in the context of.

I have seen enough video of Palestine from before to know how some of it looked, the long lay of flat land, the undulating desert hills, the beautiful ocean and long gone cheerful and popular hotels snug against the ocean shore, the food stalls lining market corridors, the tall buildings full of people, the individually built homes, lovely in their detail and often surrounded by olive trees and open patios, the roads that lead to traumatizing checkpoints, an abundance of young faces everywhere, as more than half the entire population of Palestine are under 18. I read the novel Minor Detail by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli months ago, and her evocation of the horror of a checkpoint crossing still arises in my mind, that no matter how often a person endures enormous fear, it can well up again, immediately as potent and erosive as before.

I wore a teeshirt that simply says “Palestine” above three women in beautiful traditional Palestinian dresses, and three separate people stopped me to say, “I love your shirt.” This was new. In my own town, the few people who have stopped me to say this are people of color. In Idyllwild, it was three separate white-appearing people who said this to me. This was encouraging.

I have no problem staying off social media almost entirely when I’m doing almost anything, like at the gym, at work, on vacation, at my mom’s even- it’s a reflexive protective measure I put in place years ago when I finally conceded to a cell phone, after being perhaps the only person left in San Diego without one. I was just scared of what it would do to my writing- rightly so- and my parenting. So when I got a phone, I purposefully placed it in a compartment in my life: this phone is for nighttime when you are just hanging out, or for boring moments stuck somewhere waiting where you have no book, or occasionally, for drowning anxiety out, but it’s not for spending time on during the day in general. I am the same with television- I have such a built-in aversion to watching TV during the day at this point that I can’t really enjoy a home movie during the day even on a weekend. This is a disappointing part of my personality that I fall subject to in many areas of my life- that in order to achieve a goal, small or large, I must be extreme about it internally, even if not externally. I don’t trust myself, I suppose, to be disciplined until I’m fearsome about it. To be fair, I was the most undisciplined person you could ever meet for the first long stretch of my life, so my concerns are well-founded.

What I DO do with my phone though, is take photos and videos. I love taking photos of my kids especially, as expected. So in Idyllwild, I pulled out my phone and took photos and videos. And often when I did, I’d have a flash of a TikTok video I’d seen from Palestine, not the same one, just any one of the hundreds I’ve seen recently, where perhaps a child is screaming and missing half their face, or a young man is begging for ‘us’ to help his family get out of Gaza, or a young girl is teaching ‘us’ how to make a traditional Palestinian dish from a refugee camp. I began looking at my phone with the sensation that cell phones might possibly be the hinge on which an enormous world-wide change in structure takes place. One day, perhaps a book will be written on the role of the cell phone in the world’s consciousness of The Palestinian Question, and then the Palestinian genocide by Israel, funded by the U.S. And others, of course, but unquestionably, without the U.S., this could not be occurring the way it is occurring.

It is not only the mobilization of “hearts and minds” ( a cynical reference to our deeply embarrassing and rotten campaign during the Vietnam War ) which the cell phone has allowed, but the spreading of factual information that Western media had not allowed. By factual I am referring to past events as they are recorded by and agreed on by a variety of firsthand sources. This is the closest we can come to ‘facts’. By ‘spreading’ I refer to the source material often quoted and referenced by people in videos, the books and lectures and research and organizations. TikTok was how I was referred to Norman Finkelstein’s life work on Gaza and Israel, Ilan Peppe and Noam Chomsky’s On Palestine, the only Palestinian-run book publisher in the U.S., Interlink Publishing, and many, many more.

Let’s use myself as an example. Before October 7th, I had a lifetime of knowing and loving Jewish people and Jewish history. I have had many Jewish friends over my life, and some of my most beloved and influential writers since middle school are Jewish- this is no small thing for someone who’s life has revolved around literature and who’s values and perspective of the world were at least halfway shaped through books. I’ve read quite a bit about Jewish life during World War 2, both directly (Jewish memoirs, non-fiction accountings of the events, fictionalized versions of the events) and indirectly (biographies or fictions that touched on or partly occurred during the events of the war). I worked at an Orthodox Jewish preschool for two years, where I brought my daughter, four at the time, and we did weekly Shabbat- she was the Eema a few times in the prek reenactment and was beaming with pride at being able to lead the class with the Shabbat Shalom song- and bonded with the Orthodox staff, and after this, I worked at a Jewish owned preschool and became close with the large, Jewish family who owned it. We often talked about their times in Israel, the kibbutz, the land, the food, the meaning of the place for them. In all of these situations, literature and friendships and workplaces, the one word I never heard mentioned was Palestine. Palestinian.

I have thought over this many, many times since October 7th. It’s a large part of why I experienced such profound moral and intellectual shock when I began reading books about Palestine and Israel, and listening to lectures by historians, scholars, writers, humanitarians, and political people of all stripes, and began to see what had, factually, occurred. Many of these texts and lectures are by Israelis or Jewish people. The history that began when the small percentage of Jewish people who lived in Palestine/Israel were dramatically increased over a short period of time, the original land leases and selling, the American involvement in the British control of Palestine, WW2, onward.

When I spoke with my Jewish friends at the preschool, I had no idea they were Zionists, or exactly what that word meant. They never referred to themselves as such to me. What they did say was that ‘cowardly, disgusting’ people who lived next to the borders of Israel were constantly trying to kill them. I distinctly remember one conversation I had with a woman, where I asked her how she lived with constant suicide bombings there, and why was this happening? She said they were not afraid, they would be victorious in the end, and the people doing this just hated Jews.

This is as ridiculous, as non-factual, as America saying all these years that ‘those people’ in The Middle East enact violence on us because they ‘hate and fear freedom and the American way.’ I mean, my cheeks burn just thinking about trying to say that to someone with a straight face.

So someone like me, with the information I had, found the learning that I began after October 7th an absolute shock. My brain felt stunned. I consider myself a smart person and not an ignorant person, but my ignorance of this situation and the American involvement in it was staggering to me.

I could not recall a single Palestinian person I’d ever seen interviewed on television before October 7th.

My cell phone was the cracked door to this information, and it began and continues with the personal accounts and videos of Palestinians on TikTok. They take out their phones and they film the murder of their own families, friends, desperate for people to see and to act.

It’s impossible to imagine that someone will not come save you or help you if your children are being burnt alive. On an individual or societal scale, impossible to imagine. If my child was in a burning car on the road, and people drove by, I would fully expect them- without thought, a subconscious belief system- to stop their cars, get out, and do something. It’s impossible to imagine that you can imagine what finding that no one comes to help does to a mind or a heart. Only in small ways, perhaps. I know what I felt like as a child, traumatized and spending every day in a constant state of fight or flight, terrified of my dad, and seeing that no adult around me was going to ask what was happening to me or do anything about it if I told them. I thought the adult world was a joke, a fucking joke. Bunch of fake cowards and embarrassing hypocrites who would rather not know so that they didn’t have to take it in or do something to help or accept that they were the kind of person who would know and not do something about it. Now I have come full circle and often feel this way again.

In Idyllwild, I would look at my phone in my hand, and think, inside this phone are the expressions, the energies, of millions of people.

It’s incredible. Social media is ruining our lives in some ways, cracking it open in others. The videos of Palestinians from day one are why this time, when Israel invaded and began mass death in Palestine, the Western world did not just hear that Israel is a great democracy, the most moral army in the world, that their enemies are evil and barbaric and must be stopped killing Jews just for being Jewish, we also saw and heard the Isreali soldiers shooting kids precisely in the head one after the other day after day as documented by a survey of doctors and nurses at many different hospitals in many different areas of Gaza, children being burned alive in tent camps, Israeli soldiers wearing the lingerie and playing with the toys of children of Palestinians who were either killed or displaced, hospitals one after the other being bombed until they were all put out of business, entire areas of Palestinians told to move in a specific direction and once moving in that direction being bombed and shot at, aid being blocked to the point of mass hunger and famine, torture and rape being enacted on Palestinian prisoners by Israeli soldiers, teenagers in the West Bank being gunned down while running in front of their house, aid workers being murdered as they drive in clearly marked cars to the agreed on destination in Gaza, and on, and on, and on. I remembered all of this without a single glance at my notes, as they say. Every single thing I’ve said here, I could link to a story or documentation as occurring. So this phone in my hand, it gave me these stories, these nightmares, these horrors, and it gave me these people, their endurance, their beauty, their humanity, and it gave me a portal to activists ( my local activist groups such as Palestine Pals or larger orgs such as Jewish Voices For Peace, who I support and encourage you to with a small -auto-donation of less than $5 monthly ) who then gave me ideas on how to begin to do something about the way we’ve structured our world so largely through colonialism.

And yet day after day, as the Palestinian people speak through video and I listen and watch on my phone, I am overwhelmed with my smallness, my hopelessness. This was something I expected, because this is how life is- when a horror persist despite your every effort, hopelessness follows. What is the answer?

I went to Idyllwild and as I moved around the mountains and breathed the fresh air I had the gift of already learned, many years ago, not to feel guilty for my happinesses, or my reprieves, or what gives me ease. I spent most of my twenties in a constant state of low grade panic, as I had spent my childhood, and as some good things happened to me, such as my children, I began to have attacks of guilt that kept me up at night, made me feel sick. After wrestling with this for years, reading many books by philosophers and poets, I came across one true idea that I could keep returning to: what I want is peace and safety for all people, and if I cannot feel and sit with peace and safety when I am experiencing it, what am I fighting for? I realized that in order to love myself, I had to act as if I deserved peace and safety by experiencing it. And to keep fighting, I would have to let in peace and love when it was gifted to me, as deeply as I let in the suffering.

So in Idyllwild, I recognized the privilege of getting away, acknowledge it, and also experienced the peace and beauty. I let it in. When the images and voices of horror came to me, I let it in.

Climbing Strawberry Creek, I thought about my grandmother and grandfather. After a lifetime in the South, they moved to San Diego late in life and spent an enormous amount of time with us, the grandkids. The first time I ever saw my grandfather cry was on 9/11. Myself, my mother, and my grandparents were living together in a two story home in suburbia, and I came downstairs to eat before work. I found my grandparents sitting in front of the television, watching as Tower 1 steamed smoke and the lives of human beings. As a plane hit Tower 2, tears ran down my grandfather’s face. He turned to me and took my hand, and for a moment we stayed like that, holding hands and crying.

Holding hands. The simplest ideas, we get so far away from them that in returning, they feel new and important. They were always there, always important. Climbing a creek, sitting with nature, these things can and do matter. Holding hands, doing hard things together, this matters.

Al-Anon is a group for loved ones of alcoholics to meet with other loved ones of alcoholics and learn about how to continue loving this person with an addiction while also loving themselves. One of the tenets of the meetings is that we are not responsible to fix or cure the disease, but that we are responsible for our moment to moment behaviors and choices, such as collective support in Al-Anon meetings. In activism, this applies obviously: we are not individually going to stop a genocide or change our country. But over time, if enough people take responsibility together for their ongoing actions, all together, we might move the needle. In facing anything in life that causes great pain and cannot be quickly or easily resolved, that has no promise of resolution, we can move alongside suffering or despair as a collective. Even monks with vows of silence like to gather in the silence together.

I saw a TikTok recently where an activist asked, “If every person was taking the actions that you are taking to change this, would it change?” If the answer is yes, then you are doing enough, and you cannot do everyone else’s part as well as your own. Life-changing for me to think about it this way, and I realized that the hopelessness and grief had indeed reduced my former robust actions to weaker ones, and that this was causing a snowball effect where I felt more guilty, then more hopeless, then did even less, etc.

We cannot do everyone’s part. We cannot stop everyone’s suffering. What you need in crisis is someone who can both feel the sadness and fear, acknowledge it, and take responsibility for their part: the car accident with someone badly burnt? You pull over. You don’t drive by. You say, here I am, holding your hand and meeting your gaze, not running away, here I am calling the ambulance, here I am organizing money with other people for your hospital bills, here I am calling our Congressperson along with other people, demanding a new stoplight at this dangerous intersection where you were injured.

I already knew this, as many of us do, in our private lives, this is how parenting works in crisis, when it works. Collective grief and collective action, on small or enormous scales. A household of family, a village, a state, a continent. We watch through our cell phones and so then, maybe, a global collective?

It is the people who are on the edges of a certain suffering but still acting and caring who can be the workhorses if we build networks of support and even a small education of mental/emotional health in activism. I’m not in Palestine. No matter how much energy and voice I get from my cell phone, my body and soul is in Idyllwild, California for this weekend. I look at my phone in my hand and know that I am connected with or without my phone, but not with or without people. We need our people. I can be in Idyllwild and relax, and then bring back that power source to the work that needs doing. I can take responsibility for my part of the work, occasionally reassessing the question, if many were doing what I am doing, would it be enough to change this? Would it be enough to break a tiny hole in the dam?

I didn’t leave Idyllwild with any great realization or intellectual breakthrough, but I did leave stronger and with more reserve to draw from.