{"id":111215,"date":"2024-03-02T18:05:37","date_gmt":"2024-03-02T16:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=111215"},"modified":"2024-03-02T12:33:37","modified_gmt":"2024-03-02T10:33:37","slug":"06-05-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=111215","title":{"rendered":"My Mother\u2019s Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>My Mother\u2019s Secret<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n


\nJUSTINE EL-KHAZEN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

COURTESY THE AUTHOR.<\/em><\/span>
\n.<\/p>\n

\n

My mother was a top Middle East analyst for the CIA. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. To find out why, I asked her former colleagues. I\u2019m still reeling from their answers.<\/strong><\/h4>\n

.<\/p>\n

\n

My mother died on Dec. 4 of last year. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. In life, she worked for the CIA, in the Near East Southern Asia Division, for six years as head of the Arab-Israeli Division. She was an expert on Syria and political Islam.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

We were watching footage of hostages being paraded around Gaza when she said it. \u201cI worry about them,\u201d she murmured, her eyes fixed on the TV. \u201cIt\u2019s too dangerous a religion,\u201d she told me. \u201cI don\u2019t want that target on their backs.\u201d I couldn\u2019t tell what she was asking of me: Did she want me to skip the few traditions my family has held onto? Hanukkah candles and meager Seders? Or was she saying I shouldn\u2019t tell my kids that they were Jewish at all? I didn\u2019t ask. I was too afraid of what she would say.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cI told Dad I didn\u2019t want to raise you Jewish,\u201d she said a few days later. The Gaza war had begun in earnest by then. Moonscapes of leveled buildings and dust: images of military prowess that colored her view and, until Oct. 7, my perception of Israel. \u201cHe wanted to, but I was afraid of what might happen to you if you identified that way.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I was stunned. I\u2019d always thought my secular upbringing had evolved organically, a combination of busy parents, a mixed marriage, and waning traditions. It wasn\u2019t so much that my mother, a 6-foot-tall blonde from the Midwest, was anxious about my dad\u2019s religion. No one felt strongly enough to carve out a space for their faith, so we embraced a smattering of rituals. Christmas trees and Hanukkah prayers, fasting on Yom Kippur and dyeing eggs on Easter. I thought it was a noncommittal melange, not an active choice.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

As a choice, it didn\u2019t exactly line up with my mother\u2019s perception of Jews. Sure my dad had had to contend with Jewish quotas back in the day. Come to think of it, there was an anti-Jewish covenant on the deed to our house; and I was only asked to join the big cotillion in D.C. after bad press forced it to invite Jewish and Black kids. But that was ancient history. Jews possessed power now, too much of it to be victimized as they once were, a view that basically worked for my dad, who had no interest in the poverty or bigotry of his youth.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Every intelligence officer I spoke with performed this sleight of hand. Yes, antisemitism exists, and is serious\u2014but only as a right-wing problem, and as a Western phenomenon.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

My father died not long before my mother\u2014like her, of a cancer that had spread to his lungs. Aligned almost perfectly in death, they mostly weren\u2019t in life, especially when it came to Israel. My dad flip-flopped: Had Israel mistreated the Palestinians, or was it the victim of their aggression? My mother hardened in her views as the prospects for peace dimmed. But the conversation always centered on power: Was Israel powerful beyond its size? Were Jews powerful beyond their numbers? Or were they vulnerable, exposed in a hostile world?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The deathbed scene was a cosmic insult: same hospice nurses, same case manager\u2014\u201cOh, I remember you!\u201d\u2014same oxygen machine, whirring cyclically in the background. Oct. 7 receded from view. How could I devote even an iota of brainpower to anything other than standing idly by while my mother slipped away?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

And then, after she died, I became obsessed: Had she really believed that antisemitism was so radioactive a force, not only in America, but in the Middle East, that my children\u2019s Jewishness should be hidden from them? After the Holocaust, the family my paternal grandmother left behind, the ones who survived, all moved to Gothenburg, Sweden, and converted to Lutheranism. Was America in 2023 really as bad as Europe in 1945?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

To understand where my mother came out on these questions, I spoke to her former CIA colleagues. Their answers only added to my shock. After enough of these interviews, I began to question everything I thought I knew about an institution I\u2019d been close to my whole life.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

My mother took her duty to remain impartial seriously. Her job was to analyze intelligence so lawmakers could make informed decisions. She once told Ronald Reagan she thought \u201cwe might lose Sadat,\u201d who was then a partner in negotiating peace with Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cLose him?\u201d Reagan asked, stunned. Not long after that, Anwar Sadat was assassinated.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In her words, she was \u201cpaid to intuit things.\u201d Passing along her biases would not only have been a violation of her professional ethics, it would\u2019ve been a poor way to go about her job, since assassins in Egypt don\u2019t care what analysts in Langley think. And yet, she always carried a strain of sympathy for the Palestinians. She told me once she was considered by her colleagues to be an \u201cArabist,\u201d someone who overly identified with the Arab players in the region and was, at some level, hostile to Israel. \u201cChecks out,\u201d I thought to myself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

At the funeral, her colleagues extolled her career: She could read the late Syrian dictator Hafez Assad\u2019s mind, she\u2019d been instrumental in the Madrid and Oslo peace talks. She always said that shedding light on the interests of the Arab players in the region was her contribution to the peace process. I spoke to John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, a few days after the funeral. When I asked him whether my mother was an Arabist, he quickly shot that idea down. He acknowledged there was a need for \u201cgreater evenhandedness towards the region among some in the CIA,\u201d but, he said, she was not among them. And anyway, that was more of an issue on the political side than it was with analysts, the lion\u2019s share of whom remained unbiased.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I asked Brennan about my mother\u2019s mentor, Bob Ames, who had an\u00a0infamously<\/a>\u00a0close relationship with Ali Hasan Salameh, the leader of the \u201cBlack September\u201d PLO terrorist command and architect of the Munich Olympics massacre. He laughed. Ames was, he admitted, \u201cvery close to the Palestinians\u201d and \u201cplayed it very close to the edge.\u201d But after his death in the Beirut embassy bombing of 1983, Brennan said, the culture within the CIA changed from being operationally driven to being driven by the analysts. Spies who cultivated terrorist assets no longer set the tone. The baton had passed to the wonks in Langley.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Bob Ames\u2019\u00a0biographer<\/a>, Kai Bird, had a different view of whether Bob Ames was an Arabist. Unequivocally, yes, he told me, but there were \u201ctrue reasons for it.\u201d As with journalists, Ames and his colleagues were \u201cmerely reporting what they saw.\u201d When I asked what he meant, he told me that Israel is the only reason for antisemitism in the Arab world. Before 1948, the antisemitism in Cairo and Beirut was \u201con a par with what you would see in New York and Los Angeles.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I didn\u2019t mention the\u00a0scores of pogroms<\/a>\u00a0across the Arab world before 1948, nor the absence of similar pogroms in New York and Los Angeles. Bird went on to say that antisemitism does exist \u201cglobally in its European and German forms,\u201d but that it has never played much of a role in the politics of the Middle East. He sees Oct. 7, as so many of the former intelligence officers I spoke to do, as nothing more than another round in a geopolitical tit for tat. The savagery Hamas showed that day came, in their view, from a political place rather than a cultural one.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

When I pressed him, Brennan pointed out that Hamas is a movement that encompasses a \u2018range of attitudes, and includes teachers, hospital workers, and other professionals.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I assumed that Bird would be the only person I spoke to with these views. He\u2019s not an intelligence officer, merely a biographer. He\u2019s free to hold whatever views he likes. But as it turned out, my faith in the impartiality of the CIA was misplaced.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When I spoke to my mother\u2019s former colleagues, I consistently encountered a tendency to attribute every event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the conflict itself. It\u2019s not that Palestinian textbooks have, since\u00a0the 1990s<\/a>, contained material that is \u201copenly antisemitic and encourages violence,\u00a0<\/em>jihad and martyrdom,\u201d or that \u201cpeace itself is not taught as preferable or even possible.\u201d Nor is it, as a 2019 review discovered, the \u201ccomplete removal of all pre-existing content discussing peace agreements, summits, negotiations, and proposals supporting a two-state solution, acknowledgment of historical Jewish presence in the land of Israel and labeling the name \u2018Israel\u2019 on a map\u201d from those textbooks. To retired intelligence officers with long and distinguished careers, these facts are incidental. If\u00a0children were actually set on fire<\/a>\u00a0on Oct. 7, that was a guerrilla tactic, not the result of a culture of murderous hatred. Some expressed these views with dispassion and others, with a disturbing degree of passion, but they all expressed them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When I asked Brennan about the most sordid details to come out of Oct. 7\u2014the terrorist who bragged on the phone to his parents about killing Jews, the head of an IDF soldier sold as a trophy in Gaza\u2014he told me that day reminded him of what he\u2019d seen with ISIS, \u201chow many of those individuals were high on drugs,\u201d making them that much more \u201cfrenzied and murderous.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The terrorists were on drugs, to be sure, and yet. It may be that facing the role that long-standing and unreasoning racial animus played on Oct. 7 is too much of a stretch for someone like John Brennan, who has spent his life immersed in the hard facts of power. Undercurrents of hatred percolate around dinner tables. They don\u2019t rise to the level of a presidential brief.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When I pressed him, Brennan pointed out that Hamas is a movement that encompasses a \u201crange of attitudes, and includes teachers, hospital workers and other professionals.\u201d I tried to imagine an American political movement with a covenant that advocated genocide. Would a call to murder be overlooked because the grievances the movement was pursuing were en vogue, or because it\u2019s simply \u201crhetoric?\u201d How about if they killed hundreds and then thousands of people, thereby demonstrating that the rhetoric is real? Does Hamas get a free pass because they\u2019re Palestinian, or because it\u2019s Jews specifically that they want to kill?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When I asked Brennan why he thinks my mother begged me not to raise my kids Jewish, he shifted the conversation northward: There\u2019s been a global uptick in right-wing extremism and white supremacy, he said. Orban, Putin, Modi. Anti-democratic forces are on the rise, making Jews a target.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Every intelligence officer I spoke with performed this sleight of hand. Yes, antisemitism exists, and is serious\u2014but only as a right-wing problem, and as a Western phenomenon. The Hamas-loving kids on American college campuses? Overblown, irrelevant. The Palestinian children being given military training by terrorists? Not the issue.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

If my mother worried about my safety as a Jew, it never came up on the trips we took to the Middle East. I tagged along while she worked and did tourist stuff. The pyramids. Masada. \u201cIf something happens,\u201d she said once, \u201cthrow away your bag and don\u2019t speak. And if they talk to you, make sounds like the Swedish chef. They won\u2019t know the difference, and you could be Swedish.\u201d Being American was a liability she prepared me for.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Being Jewish was not.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

We didn\u2019t know it then, but we were catching a last, halcyon glimpse of the Middle East my mother studied. The war on terror was about to transform the region\u2014though there were inklings of Islamist violence roiling beneath the surface. The\u00a0Luxor massacre<\/a>\u00a0followed one of our trips. On a visit in 1996, we changed our plans and left Cairo early, after Islamists shot up a hotel full of Greek tourists not far from where we were staying, at the Semiramis Hotel. My mother didn\u2019t say what had happened. When I woke, our bags were packed, and we were booked on an Air Sinai flight to Tel Aviv.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Not long after that, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst was\u00a0stabbed<\/a>\u00a0to death in the lobby of the Semiramis. Her attacker was said to be \u201cmentally ill.\u201d Two Americans and a Frenchman had been murdered at the Semiramis by a \u201cderanged assailant\u201d a few years earlier. \u201cThere are a lot of attacks by \u2018deranged\u2019 and \u2018mentally ill\u2019 people in Egypt these days,\u201d my mother observed in telling me about her colleague at the DIA.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The flavor of these attacks was anti-Western, not anti-Jewish, and they were about to get worse. My mother and I had dinner one night in April 1996 at the CIA station chief\u2019s house in Israel, north of Tel Aviv. There was some kind of minor war underway. Fighter jets kept skidding above us as we ate. The IDF and Hezbollah were trading fire again, which was not that remarkable in itself. This time, the IDF\u00a0bombed<\/a>\u00a0a U.N. compound, killing 106 civilians.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This event might not have made news here, but it rocked the Arab world. Mohamed Atta\u00a0committed<\/a>\u00a0his life to jihad that very day. Osama bin Laden was none too pleased, either. \u201cYou supported the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon,\u201d he\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0in his \u201cletter to America,\u201d which, since Oct. 7, has gone viral in the TikTok feeds of America\u2019s youth. Anti-Westernism has always been closely entwined with antisemitism in the Arab world; these days it\u2019s closely entwined here, too.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Al-Qaida wasn\u2019t the only one to take issue with the American-Israeli alliance. There was a feeling in the intelligence community in the 1990s that we\u2019d \u201csigned on as Israel\u2019s protector,\u201d as one of my mother\u2019s colleagues put it. The Arabists were just trying to compensate for what they felt was the overrepresentation of Israel\u2019s interests. To me it seems human, the type of accommodation a person might make with the ethics of their job out of a sense of correcting a wrong. It doesn\u2019t have the air of fanaticism about it that colors the intelligence community\u2019s\u00a0biases<\/a>\u00a0these days.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I asked one former intelligence officer, a veteran of the Near East Southern Asia Division, about the antisemitic protests on college campuses, the ones that had been making headlines for weeks. She deflected me with the familiar Karine Jean-Pierre\u00a0two-step<\/a>: \u201cI think both \u2018antis\u2019 are unseemly.\u201d And so it went every time I asked my mother\u2019s former colleagues whether antisemitism is a major cultural force at work here in America, and in Palestine too.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When I asked another former CIA analyst about the protests on campus, I was told there\u2019s been a \u201cmarked rise in antisemitism due to Israel\u2019s attack on Gazan civilians and the number of casualties,\u201d which is true. Then again, the number of antisemitic attacks in 2022 (the last year for which data is available) is double the number in 2017 and triple the number in 2016. The rate of increase has been exponential for some time.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

There was a ready response to that one, too: We\u2019ve seen an uptick in antisemitism \u201cwith the rise of the far right, including the antisemite of the whole world, Trump,\u201d a connection I found perplexing. The Abraham Accords seem nothing if not good for Israel. In response, I was told that Trump said that our blood is being \u201cpolluted\u201d by Jews and that the U.S. is a Christian country. I couldn\u2019t corroborate any of this, though when I tried, I discovered a\u00a0campaign speech<\/a>\u00a0in which Trump said: \u201cif you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don\u2019t like our religion, if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don\u2019t want you in our country.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

It was almost as if these veteran analysts, whose careers were devoted to impartiality and, above all, neutrality, were reading from a crib sheet supplied by the DNC.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIs antisemitism a problem in America?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Well, there\u2019s \u201calso a lot of anti-Islamic stuff\u201d and \u201cwhite nationalism stuff in Europe too.\u201d So many European countries are \u201ctilting right.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\u201cIs antisemitism a problem in the Middle East?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

There\u2019s a \u201cvariegated set of attitudes.\u201d It\u2019s \u201cnot antisemitism, just a lot of \u201canti-Israel feeling.\u201d 1,200 Jews died on Oct. 7 not because they were Jewish, but because they were Israeli.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I actually was not prepared for any of this. Even at the peak of her Arabist tendencies, I don\u2019t think my mother would have denied the well-documented existence of antisemitism in the Middle East. I found myself needing to seek out other perspectives, if only as at sanity check. After talking to all these intelligence analysts, my trust in an institution I\u2019ve been close to my whole life was shaken, and not just by the certainty with which my questions were shot down, but by the ferocity with which they were shot down. Do the people who slaughtered my people also \u2026 hate them? I felt I\u2019d committed a major political faux pas just by asking.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I asked someone who has come at these issues not from the political side of things, but from the academic side, and from the inside too. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour\u2019s brother became an imam whose aspiration it was to inspire young jihadists; Hussein has led a different life. He\u2019s\u00a0written<\/a>\u00a0about the one he left behind: \u201cas a teenager in Egypt, I recall nearly all the adults around me celebrating the murder of Israelis after news of a suicide bombing during the Second Intifada. Egypt\u2019s most prominent religious authorities declared the perpetrators to be martyrs and saints.\u201d Hussein hails from a banking family in Cairo; it\u2019s not as if he grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. So why would middle-class people in another country with a robust economy, firm borders, a different history and tradition, the pyramids protruding in the distance, not to mention a dialect so different that it\u2019s mutually unintelligible to the dialect that most Palestinians speak, cheer the death of Jews 300 miles away?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Because Jewish death is linked to the Arab concept of self-determination on a world stage. If Israel exists, the Arab states don\u2019t, not in their fullest expression.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIslamists articulate the fantasy of Jewish eradication in the language of jihad, framed in eschatological terms, and imbued with a sense of divine justice and cosmic warfare\u2014what Westerners would ordinarily recognize as a type of religious fascism,\u201d Hussein wrote. \u201cBut while the Islamist version of this idea is potent for the purposes of mobilizing the impoverished and uneducated masses, the \u2018left-wing\u2019 or secular version\u2014couched in the language of Fanon and Karl Marx, of human emancipation, equality, anti-capitalism, and social justice\u2014is the more effective means of mobilizing opinion among the Western intelligentsia. The point is that they are two sides of the same coin, the value of which is set in Jewish blood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The fantasy that Jews stand in the way of Arab self-realization touches atavistic nerves: It\u2019s the same death-as-salvation paradigm that led early Christians to martyr themselves, the same liberatory concept of class struggle that led 20th-century Russians to murder czarists. Blood sacrifice, a practice that humans have been engaging in since time immemorial.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But why would these crazy ideas take hold in America? Because Marxism has slowly but surely crept inward from the far left in this country, most recently in the form of the social justice movement, and Marxism is an elaborate form of Jew-hatred.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It used to be that Marxism\u2019s division of the universe into a dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed was common only on college campuses. The Marxists were such downers when I was in grad school, playing at solidarity, dumpster-diving, decrying things. But their ideas have percolated upwards via a grassroots osmosis such that now even the Biden administration traffics in them: Jews are bad, bad, bad, Netanyahu\u2019s an asshole, Israel\u2019s military actions are over the top, and the whole country is bent on a genocide of babies. There\u2019s no yin and yang here. It\u2019s ideology as theology: a matrix of good and evil that paints Jews as murderers and Palestinians as martyrs.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

We hear all the time in America about how bad whiteness is. The whites are fragile. They center themselves. They marginalize others. They think punctuality is good. But with Jews, it\u2019s a little more complicated: The activist set complains about how white they are, what brutal colonizers. Never mind that the majority of Israeli Jews are indigenous to the region, and that the rest were refugees. And please don\u2019t bring up the discrimination and violence that Mizrahi Jews experienced at the hands of their Muslim neighbors. Arguing over these facts is pointless because activist hatred of Israel is really just a dog whistle.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The problem with Jews is that they\u2019re Jews. Marx hated them, and his hatred of them is baked into his ideology. \u201cEmancipation from Judaism would be the emancipation of our time,\u201d he wrote in an essay he published 20 years before\u00a0Capital<\/em>. \u201cWhat is the secular basis of Judaism?\u00a0Practical<\/em>\u00a0need,\u00a0self-interest<\/em>. What is the worldly religion of the Jew?\u00a0Huckstering<\/em>. What is his worldly God?\u00a0Money<\/em>.\u201d Ilhan Omar was a lot more succinct. It\u2019s all about the Benjamins, baby, and always has been, though even she knows better than to call for the \u201cemancipation of mankind from\u00a0Judaism<\/em>.\u201d Inject a little racial ideology in there, and you\u2019re well on your way to genocide. Antisemitism lurks in the groundwater of the left. Any Jew who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

My mother may have seen these things. She predicted the\u00a0banlieues<\/em>, studying urban European demographics in the 1990s, seeing in them the tinder that would light the fires to come. Not a single European leader would listen to her.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Maybe for her, that was just about identifying the violent anti-Western strain that was simmering to a boil in those communities. Antisemitism was merely incidental. Her duty was to America, and she did it with pride. She was a second-generation CIA analyst with an aunt in the OSS and a long family tradition of public service. She was also the model for the blond bombshell analyst in the pulp thriller\u00a0The Fifth Horseman<\/em><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

And, as I found out at the end, she worried about antisemitism, too. It was a fact that she chose to keep to herself, at least until there was no point in hiding it any longer. She would have called that a \u201cneed to know,\u201d a thought that almost makes me laugh.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

My mother took one last trip to Israel the year before she died. It was her last trip anywhere. She didn\u2019t know she was dying,\u00a0though she was well on her way. The cold that\u00a0never\u00a0went away, the fatigue. We all chalked it up to stress,\u00a0grief. My father had just died,\u00a0so she made\u00a0this pilgrimage for him,\u00a0to the place she had devoted\u00a0her life to. Never mind that my father hated visiting Israel. The story he\u00a0told me\u00a0was that he\u2019d talked to a woman in a bar when he was there in his 20s, a \u201cworking girl.\u201d When he\u00a0found out she was Jewish, that was it. The dream of a Jewish homeland was done. He never wanted to go back, not that he wasn\u2019t an ardent Zionist, capable of alienating entire\u00a0dinner parties with his flourishes of fanaticism. \u201cAt least I can say of your\u00a0strategy that it\u2019s subnuclear,\u201d my mother\u2019s friend, a military strategist, said to my father once, during a heated discussion of the Second Intifada. She went to Israel, paradoxically, for him and to see Jerusalem one last time.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

When the undertakers come, one of them pulls me aside: \u201cwasn\u2019t I just here?\u201d \u201cYeah, for my dad,\u201d I tell him. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t seem fair,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

It\u2019s true. In the last two years I\u2019ve watched the only people who can answer any lingering questions I might have about myself be carried feet first down the staircase I\u2019ve been bounding up for years. \u201cWriting has not yet helped me to see what it means,\u201d Joan Didion wrote. It hasn\u2019t helped me much either.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

It\u2019s sunny on the day my mother makes her final journey. Heavy oblongs of light fall from the skylights. I know that this is the moment. The body leaves, and it\u2019s over. The person is gone. The conversation, the one you\u2019ve been having your entire life, is over. I still don\u2019t know why my mother left me with this burden: Don\u2019t raise your kids Jewish, don\u2019t honor the past, don\u2019t remember your great-grandparents, don\u2019t tell their stories, don\u2019t, don\u2019t, don\u2019t …<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

One thing I do know, as I watch her carried down on the stretcher, sunlight hitting her face: Now there\u2019s no way of knowing what she thought about Israel, about antisemitism, about us. I can interview every last colleague, every friend, and no one will have the answer, least of all me.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Justine el-Khazen<\/strong> is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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My Mother\u2019s Secret JUSTINE EL-KHAZEN COURTESY THE AUTHOR. . My mother was a top Middle East analyst for the CIA. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. To find out why, I asked her former colleagues. I\u2019m still reeling from their answers. . My mother died on Dec. 4 of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111215"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111215"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111239,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111215\/revisions\/111239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}