email #55

[Leon Kraiem]

Hi friends,

I'm writing this before bed, because it's the sort of message that may be outdated by the morning. At that point, I may also have lost some memory of the conversation I had earlier today, with a classmate of mine from Macalester, the only one I keep up with who still lives in the Twin Cities. It was a lovely conversation, which wasn't prompted by, and wasn't overshadowed by, what's happening over there. But, of course, how could that not factor into everything.

After the last two years, this was a role reversal. The last time my buddy and I had talked, when this place was at war and Minnesota was at peace, I'd been the one laughing off the surrounding violence, and he'd been the one, with two feet on the ground, trying to gauge what things were like. My friend told me he's not out confronting the ICE officers himself, he's mostly just, in his words, "standing behind people and trying not to shit [his] pants" at peaceful protests. Still — I found myself wanting to say, 'Stay safe,' and it rang hollow the same way it did when people would say it to me.

‘Safe’ doesn’t mean ‘okay,’ it means ‘not at risk.’ And sometimes, people are just at risk. To tell me in Jerusalem, amid the war, “stay safe,” wasn’t wrong, but it was a little off. By contrast, when I’d begin to say those words to people going into combat, or (as happened fairly recently, some weeks after the onset of the ceasefire) to provide humanitarian aid in the apocalyptic landscape that combat left behind, it was just absurd. What I settled on for my friends in real danger was what my dad used to say to me as a kid, which was funny in that context but quite literal in this one: 'Please come back to me alive and in one piece.' 

When I slipped into that register on the phone today, my friend averred -- “I am safe, it’s other people who aren’t,” he told me; which, fair enough, but it was precisely the same aversion as when I’d tell people “my life is boring, Jerusalem is normal for a civilian like me.” But of course, scrambling to a bomb shelter every couple days isn’t normal, nor is it really safe, in the more-than-superficial sense of that word.

Nothing was normal, or safe in a deep sense, at any point between October 7, 2023 and October 12, 2025, when the last of the living hostages came home, and we settled into the lower-grade fighting that passes for a truce in this part of the world. Even though the violence wasn't happening 'right here,' it was always happening 'right now,' not all that far away. The Jerusalem that existed when my buddy's camp counselor was held hostage in a tunnel under Rafah, and my coworker’s little brother was in a tank invading Gaza City, is not the same Jerusalem in which I sit today. 

Nor is a Minneapolis in which my classmate's neighbors are getting abducted by federal shock troops, in which a woman got shot dead and then called a "fucking bitch" as the government declared her a domestic terrorist, the Minneapolis I lived in from 2016-2017. That Minneapolis (technically, Saint Paul) was unsettling to me precisely because it was so peaceful, because it was so normal, because its people felt at home in such a seemingly uncomplicated way. 

I might have stayed there for more than those eight months or so, had the election that year gone differently; but there was something uniquely uncanny about watching Trump's ascendancy from peaceful, neighborly Saint Paul. When I ran away to Israel, it was actually a relief to be amid open racism, naked discrimination, actual intergenerational trauma, where true-believing messianists are unwitting evidence that the world is not yet redeemed. For all the prophesying about wolves laying down with lambs, the king of earthly Jerusalem had more practical advice all those years ago:  "If you see extortion of the poor and the plunder of law and justice -- don't be surprised."  

The cognitive dissonance I felt in Trump 1 America didn’t exist in the haggard, same-shit-different-empire Old World; it felt like my natural habitat, and in a sense it really was — not only am I closer to Lithuania, and Russia, and all those dead Jews I’m related to through Mom; I’m also a stone’s throw from where my dad’s forebears grew up, in Lebanon, and Egypt, and the only country of which my grandfather was a citizen — Iran. 

The crimes against humanity that appear to have been unfolding in Iran, of course, being the (indirect) reason I have to get this email out now, in case I wake up to a siren in a couple hours and discover the country is at real, proper war again. 

That might not happen, in the end — Trump seems increasingly likely to pull an Obama, and if he does, then the murder of 12,000 protesters does not portend well for a successful counterrevolution, despite the reckless predictions from people who really ought to know better. If, on the other hand, Trump follows through with his threats, then it’s hard to imagine we in Israel won’t come under fire again — and it may be more effective this time, given how much of our resources we depleted fighting last round, when we were the ones initiating, and could do things according to plan. 

I don’t have anything original to say about the horrors in Iran, any more than I have something original to say about the desecration in Minnesota. To venture a hot take about either of them would be obscene. 

But I have to note — to get it off my chest, if nothing else — how fixated I’ve been on their structural similarity. Of course, it’s at a radically different scale. One person is not thousands of people, and a single confrontation is not a nationwide order handed down from above; also, there is more legitimacy to ICE than there is to the IRGC and the Basij; and immigration law, at least as a principle, makes more sense as a justification for violence than the protection of a terrorist theocracy — these things are not the same. Still, it looks like a (very large) difference of degree, rather than a (categorical) difference of kind, which is how I explain that strange, where’d-the-friction-go feeling of talking to my friend in Minneapolis today from my perch in the wartorn Middle East. 

The US is not Iran, and I’m not suggesting it is. I don’t think people should attack ICE officers, though not-violently obstructing their operations, recording everything they do, and taking every democratic step possible to defund and look into eventually prosecuting them all seem morally obligatory to me. Talk of local police arresting them, or of mobilizing the state national guard against the federal government, is essentially talk of civil war, and I don’t think unleashing that sort of nightmare is reasonable or necessary. There must be ways to shut this down without opening that Pandora’s Box.

But that’s now the sort of thinking I’m engaged in, when I think to myself about Minnesota: a masked, pro-government militia disappearing people from the streets; the ethics of getting into confrontations with them, and potentially getting shot in the process; on the other hand, faith in the democratic system to overrule the president, while keeping in mind he's already tried to steal an election. It’s a thought process that was unthinkable a decade ago, when I watched this snowball start rolling, from that very same neck of the woods. 

At the time, it was so out of place: Mideast politics, in a Midwest setting. Now, almost ten years later, I find myself in the most contested territory on Earth, asking my friend in Saint Paul ‘what’s it like out there? From Jerusalem, I can’t even imagine.’

As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.

I am praying for my loved ones in MN, and some loved ones’ loved ones in Iran.

The rest of you, stay safe out there,

Leon