I’m a very classical style thinker. In my mind, facts and opinions, history and myth are distinct. However, on this trip we’ve learned that it is impossible to separate these concepts.

“The Jews don’t have history; they have memory" is a phrase that Jeremy, our tour guide, has repeated often.

Throughout the day we were presented with identity not simply as facts and dates but how this history is assembled into the narrative of memory. Memory is not our life as it happened to us but what we choose to remember, and more importantly what we choose to forget.

At the Palmarch, a museum (though it’s really more of a multimedia experience) dedicated to the elite military group that was pivotal in securing Israel’s independence and statehood, I thought of the Israeli and Jewish memory we were being presented. I thought of how they chose to tell stories of heroism, friendship and sacrifice of the Jewish soldiers. The trauma of the Holocaust was also central to understanding the mood around Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s memorial day to fallen soldiers. This part of the Palmarch experience also gave new meaning to what Haim, a Holocaust survivor, said at Hillel’s shabbat dinner, “We’ve got to hold on to that Israel!”

There may be dominant narratives in this country, but there are also many more narratives, as numerous as they are diverse. Later in the day, on our graffiti tour in the hip Tel-Aviv neighborhood of Florentin, one of the images was marked over by vegan political activists with the text, “All are 269” and “Free 269.”  These slogans referred to the plight of the cows who are given a number before they are slaughtered for human consumption, just as the victims of the shoah were given a number and slaughtered.

At the end of the day the struggles and identities of Israel are a reflection of of our own identities and struggles. Just as the line of the Israeli national anthem “the 2000 year old hope - will not be lost: To be a free people in our land” does not include the Arabs and other non-Jews who were also there, the line of our own national anthem “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!” excludes the slaves and Native Americans to create our own patriotic memory. Israel challenges us to ask ourselves, how do we choose to remember?