How My Divorce Was Like The Middle East Conflict

I was married to a handsome, brilliant, generous man with a huge heart who swept me off my feet, just like in the movies.  He was larger than life, charismatic and could sell sand in the desert, for a profit.   He was a PHD, a teacher, a biochemist working under a Nobel Laureate.  I was an uneducated, naïve Hasidic girl who yearned to break free from the patriarchy I was born to.  I was too young and not strong enough to rebel on my own, because I loved the Torah and my parents, even more.  He was my ticket out.  He turned out to be a round-trip ticket with many arduous and hellish stopovers in countries you’d never want to visit.  I’m safe now and at peace, with my past and my ex, but I write this, because I want, in my limited way, to explain the situation in Israel that people just don’t seem to understand.  Maybe I can simplify it for some who think it is complicated, because it, really, is not.

When I was young, I thought things were exactly what they appeared to be.  If someone looked, dressed or spoke a certain way, I believed them, no matter what my gut might have told me.    When someone seems too good to be true, they generally are.  That is why con men are so successful.  It’s how Ponzi schemes succeed and young girls fall into traps and abusive relationships.  I don’t blame anyone and I have long ago realized that all the challenges I went through have defined me and made me, and my children, the loving, evolved people that we are.  I am grateful to this man who gifted me these shining lights and regardless of what we went through, I know that anyone who has faced hell and survived can relate to the fact that when you finally get through the dark cesspool, you praise the demons.  Whereas, In the past you were frightened of them, they are now frightened of you.  

So, when I finally gathered the courage to get a divorce, I knew it would be unbearable, I just didn’t realize how much so.  This troubled, yet loving man, who I had helped get through many unfathomable circumstances and who lied, cheated, stole and put us in danger, but always professed to be this devoted father and husband that he sometimes was, decided to punish all three of us.  He took us to court, abandoned and terrorized us, left us financially destitute, while he established foundations, ironically in his kids’ names, to assist others and fought me for custody, even from jail. (Yeh, amazing how corrupt the system is.) He fought me for 13 years, costing me money and time that I didn’t have.  I couldn’t hold down a job, since I was the sole parent and the courts don’t care that I needed to work, since I wasn’t getting child support or any other income.  You MUST show up and they don’t accommodate any job you may have.  But most of all, my kids suffered and it became so hard not to feel, at times, like the perpetrator myself. Every day was a struggle that I, sometimes took minute by minute, because if I didn’t, I might have driven off a bridge to relieve the pain, but I loved my children and G-d, more than I loved myself, always.

Always a peaceful even passive person, I fought.  It killed me, but I had to, because it was a fight for the existence of innocent souls that I had put in this position.  I had no choice, but still I didn’t maliciously go after him.  I knew that if I did, I was no better than he was.

 During all this, I would cry out for help to people, because I was scared.  I thought that when I finally divorced him, people would gather around me and support me, because of his blatant psychological, emotional and criminal issues that caused me to isolate.  Quite the opposite, frequently, occurred.  People would say.  “Oh, in a divorce, there are three sides to the issue.  His, Hers and the truth”.  Even the elementary school did not get involved, because they still thought they would get tuition from my ex’s family, which they never did.  I will never forget going to PTA with my soon to be ex-husband during the divorce, where he denied that we were even getting divorced, while I was informing a teacher about what my kids were going through.  She would call me every night, because she was scared that we were in danger. During that, specific, time, a father of a student murdered his wife in cold blood in front of their children and then the same forensic psychiatrist on my case ordered the kids to visit their father in jail. That’s right, the man whom they had seen kill their mother.  The courts had never protected her, nor her children, but protected a soon-to –be murderer who had a history of instability, even after he committed the most heinous crime, imaginable. This poor teacher felt something was wrong and didn’t alert anyone and carried around tremendous guilt, because of it.

So here are the two sides. He was a felon who had served a lot of time.  I didn’t have a speeding ticket.  He was the skeleton in my closet.  I wanted to help him, to make the marriage work, but even when he had to go to court mandated therapy (prior to the divorce) for his criminal behavior, the therapists would tell me to leave him, because he never took accountability for his actions.  We had no financial assets. We were evicted out of our home and then in rentals for years, because he knew our marriage was precarious and didn’t want to have to give me any financial security or any money to support myself and the kids if we got divorced. I was lucky that during the marriage, we didn’t have joint accounts and I was given very little money.  I was clueless to our finances, because he lied and controlled everything.  It turned out to be a blessing, because if we had, I probably would have been prosecuted criminally, as well. 

When I left, all I had were my two “assets”. The most important ones of all.  I would start from scratch and do what I needed to raise healthy kids, but the divorce was not the end.  It was the beginning of a relentless and ghastly ordeal.  The worst being the so called “justice system” of the matrimonial courts. Divorce is not what destroys people.  It’s the acrimony and war that is, unbelievably, ENCOURAGED by the courts.

 You see the courts must perpetuate their business.  The lawyers must drive Porsches, the forensic psychologists must bill by the hour and everyone benefits from prolonged nasty divorces, other than the people involved, especially the children.  Believe me (no I’m not related to Trump) I have only touched the surface of the idiocy, destruction and corruption of our system.  You would think a predicate felon would not be allowed to fight for sole custody, but the courts didn’t care and when I got no child support and he didn’t want to see the kids, but rather, just destroy me, I realized that his hatred of me blinded his love for his children. He manipulated the system to eviscerate me …and here is where the analogy with Israel applies.

Because he had the “right” attorneys, at first, everything went his way.  They said the right things i.e..the kids didn’t really remember his two year jail sentence, when they were babies.  He lied about me, saying I was never home and that I had mental problems.  He even called a psychologist that I had gone to just to cope to try to coerce her to write a letter that I was mentally ill and unstable, but it backfired when she came to court to support me along with an Assistant District Attorney who had prosecuted him for grand larceny, but most didn’t want to get involved.

 So, he ramped it up. He sued me for stealing furniture, he stalked one of my kids. Still, I tried to come to some sort of peace and each time we tried to mediate a settlement, he used excuse after excuse not settle.  I tried to speak and reason with him.  He wouldn’t talk to me.  I told his lawyers, that I would take whatever money he thought was fair for child support. I agreed to a pittance. Anything to make it stop.  I wanted my kids to have their father in their lives, troubles and all.  I wanted an open dialogue.  I wanted peace.  I will never forget one judge finally admonishing him and his lawyer’s response was “An elephant doesn’t marry a giraffe’, insinuating that we had the same moral equivalency.  I think you get the picture.  He lived for the fight, because when the fight was nearing the end after 13 years and he was finally forced to sit down with the kids at a therapist and they began to have a semblance of something of a “relationship”, he passed away, suddenly and it was worse than any of the torture we had withstood.  It was the most heart-breaking day of my life and my kids buried him and sat “shiva” for him and the loving relationship they never remembered with their father and never would.

So after this long-winded essay, you ask “How does this self-indulgent, self-righteous woman, compare her divorce to the eternal conflict in the Middle East”.  Well, here’s how.

Regardless of who you think is right or wrong in this eternal conflict, there is only one-side that has shown that they want co-existence and peace.  There is only one side that does not want war.  There is only one side that wants compromise to make death stop.  There is only one side that celebrates lives and goes out of their way NOT to harm civilians, while one side’s goal is to kill as many civilians as they can.  There is only one side that is a democracy.   There is only one side that doesn’t go into homes to stab women, children, babies in cold blood and then call those murderers “heroes” and incite violence daily.  There is only one side that loves their children more than they hate the people that kill them and that is Israel. Yet, they are punished for it, just as I was punished by the courts, while my ex barely was, because the courts “expected” me to be better than he was.  Israel is consistently vilified by the United Nations (which used to be the universal mediator and is now the biggest advocate of countries that endorse terror and violate human rights)

I am not dehumanizing those who disagree with me.  I am not dehumanizing Palestinians, Muslims nor any other individuals who long for peace along with me, just as I never tried to dehumanize the father of my children.  I am not, G-d forbid, comparing my ex to a suicide bomber, but I am comparing a government that does not want compromise, but complete annihilation.  I am comparing having so much hate in your heart that you will destroy yourself and your loved ones for that cause. 

I know that so many long for peace on both sides, but to have peace we must acknowledge the right to exist in peace.  Just as the court, consistently ignored the continuous, gross violations of my divorce agreement by my ex-husband and called me out on the smallest infraction on my part, the United Nations, along with much of the media and world opinion, does the same with Israel.   I am not perfect and neither is the State of Israel, but, as long as hate rules and is encouraged by the ruling parties of our neighbors on the other side of the conflict, we must do everything we can to protect our people from being eviscerated from our tiny homeland.

I am no longer naïve, nor young, but I will never allow hope to die in my life, no matter what.  Hate will ultimately destroy you, regardless if you are fighting a physical or spiritual war.   I have seen it first-hand.  I, also, know that the true testament of a person’s character is when they are suffering.  If they still maintain mercy, even when forced to fight, they are the ones we should be siding with.  It takes one side to incite a war, but two sides to make peace.  The most current history of the Jewish people taught us that when someone demonizes you by calling you monkeys, vermin and pigs and threatens to annihilate you, they mean it.  Don’t YOU be naïve.