Losing Israel (4 page)

My father had done it before me, along with his twin brother, in 1956: he entered Israel as a new immigrant and joined the army. When he emigrated from England at the age of twenty-one, he had been galvanised by the story of Israeli independence, like so many Jews in the immediate aftermath of statehood, and he too had wanted to help ‘build up the land’. It was a mere eight years since the ‘miraculous’ war of independence, and the Jewish Agency, burdened with the task, after the war, of bringing Jews to Israel, ran language immersion programmes for new immigrants on many of the kibbutzim. These Hebrew ulpans consisted of six months’ intensive immersion in Hebrew, and induction into the Labour Zionist ethos of the kibbutz movement. Six days a week, the new immigrants studied for half the day, and for half the day they worked – in the dairy, the factory, the kitchens, the citrus groves, or the fields.

My mother was sixteen when my father turned up with his guitar and his handsome laughter, and she was shy. At the beginning the members of the kibbutz viewed him with suspicion as a dangerous Western capitalist influence, because of the guitar. Their romance was a kibbutz drama. Even now, when I meet old kibbutz members for the first time, it is that romance that they remark on when they learn who I am. My father worked in the
refet
, with the cows. Later, after he’d finished his three-year army service, he and my mother moved to the small frontier kibbutz of Gadot, up near the troubled, dangerous Syrian border.

That my mother left the kibbutz of her birth at all was a betrayal, an abandonment (she was a
bat-kibbutz
, a daughter of the kibbutz). That she then left the kibbutz movement for a city life was worse, but that she and my father finally left the country altogether, so that he could continue his studies in England, was, in that coercive society of personal and collective responsibility to the state, the worst form of national treachery. Now people come and go, but at the time the social sanction against leaving made it a taboo; it tore a hole in the fabric of the national myth.

In contrast to the heady term for immigration,
aliyah
, with its meanings of ascent, as to a holy place, to emigrate was to ‘go down’ – to descend into the pit of diaspora. My mother was a traitor, and she knew it. It lingered and festered like a curse. She had been afraid to go back. She had been afraid of censure, and it had taken fifteen years before she could face it. And then, when at last we had gone back, she had been embraced – everywhere we went she was embraced, and welcomed. All of us were; all of us were enjoined to return permanently, to be again part of the family.

When we returned to England that second time, my mother was pregnant. I had been the youngest of three, and the news about my imminent displacement made me anxious and then jealous and unhappy. In the autumn my mother spent long weeks in hospital with high blood pressure. I refused to visit her – the hospital was an hour’s drive away, in the small rural hospital in Cuckfield. I told my father that the drive would make me car-sick, but it was because I could not bear to make a fact of my mother’s absence by seeing her elsewhere. I could not bear it that she was pregnant either. I pretended nothing was happening, that nothing was changing, and when it did change, when my mother came home with my new baby sister, Rowena, I told my parents I wanted to leave them, to leave England, to go back to Israel, to the kibbutz, to live. By then, at the age of thirteen, I had completely absorbed my mother’s unreconstructed Labour Zionism, taking in the kibbutz ideology by which she was formed and making it into a romantic idealism. I was attached to it; I defined myself by it and I took refuge in it from this new unhappiness. But though my parents considered it, in the end they would not let me go. Although I accepted and then came to love my new sister, my mother remained inaccessible: at first she was taken up with my sister’s care, and then she fell ill. My adolescence became a dark tunnel, and four years later I dropped out of school and left for Israel after all.

I was seventeen, impressionable, and ripe for the Jewish Agency’s nationalist story in its most overtly propagandist form. Like most of the people on my kibbutz ulpan, I didn’t know if I was running away from something or towards something. The kibbutz where I was placed wasn’t very old; it had been established after 1948 on the site of a depopulated Arab village by Jewish immigrants from north Africa – but we knew nothing about that. It was 1986, and we knew almost nothing about Palestinians. The kibbutz was very poor, one of the poorest, and it was a highly dysfunctional community, riven by family feuds, and without a clear identity.

Because I was the daughter of a kibbutznik I was welcomed not as a possible new immigrant, a new recruit to the national body, but as a wayward kibbutz daughter returning to the fold. Through the medium of the ulpan, the Jewish Agency tried to persuade us degenerate, western, Diaspora Jews to
return
, and I, easy prey, understood that I could repair the breach, could heal the wound created by my mother’s abandonment: I could undo that betrayal by my permanent return. The national story was my own story; the collective was my collective. My roots were deep, deep and ancient, and the path from the Jewish past to the Israeli present was uncluttered and simple and linear.

We were taught that Jews, dispersed in Roman times, when the Temple was destroyed, had always longed to return to their ancestral home, intoning at every Passover ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ as a matter of course. Some, over the intervening two millennia, made the journey back. Now we could, too; in fact we had a moral duty to do so.

Leon Uris popularised this simple narrative in his immensely successful propagandist novels
Exodus
and
The Haj
, which I had read voraciously as a young teenager, caught up in their melodrama. There were tents in the sand, treachery, the flash of daggers, the gleam of teeth in the darkness, men who could move silently, women who were pure and lovely.
Exodus
was outrage, glory and Hollywood technicolour in the person of Paul Newman.
The Haj
was more complicated. Purporting to tell the ‘other story’, it was partly narrated by a village mukhtar’s son whose masculinity was questionable, a cleverly undermining conceit in the muscular, brash, frontier-novel tradition of Wilbur Smith, to whom Uris owed a great debt in style and attitude. I read Wilbur Smith’s novels too – South African adventure stories for white men, in which women were loose and dangerous and got what was coming to them, or pure and to be protected; modest and shy, desire had to be coaxed reluctantly out of them, and then they often died. Smith’s books always seemed to feature a tough, white, male hero and a noble, exceptional and impossibly divided chief who tried to rise above the limitations of his hopelessly primitive culture. So did Uris’s
The Haj
– in his case, a tough Jewish hero and a noble, exceptional mukhtar. The leaders of these bloodthirsty people – Zulus or Matabeles, in Smith’s books, Arab fellahin in Uris’s – were always doomed to fail.

The message of
Exodus
and
The Haj
was unambiguous: when the Jews began to arrive in Palestine, the Arabs, what few there were of them, were backward, ignorant and uncultured. They barely scraped a living from the land; they were variously nomads or peasants (but not like the enlightened, idealistic peasants of the kibbutz movement). Besides, most of them had arrived from other areas of the former Ottoman Empire only after the Jews had begun to create new economic opportunities in the wasteland that was Palestine. They identified, if they identified at all, as Arabs, in a pan-Arab collective, but they were tribal rather than national in their affiliations, and disunified and squabbling. The Arab was weak, exploitable, and subject to irrational passions. The Jew, by contrast, was righteous, developed, civilised and moral. And we Jews had a right, an ancestral right much older, deeper and more meaningful than that recent and tenuous connection claimed by Arabs in Palestine. The Arabs could go anywhere in the sprawling undifferentiated mass of ‘Arabia’, but Jews had nowhere to go but the Land of Israel.

The Haj
reinforced everything I had been learning, without words, about ‘the Arabs’. The mukhtar was rapacious, oversexed; the women were frightened and stupid; boys would go after their own sisters if they could. And they were responsible for their own catastrophe. The Arab uprising of 1936 was bloody and vicious and underhand, and all the Arabs of Palestine under the leadership of Al Husseini were in cahoots with Hitler. During the Second World War, the Arabs were about to sell out to the Axis powers, and then all the Jews would have been slaughtered; there would have been a double Holocaust. After the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in 1947, the Jews were nobly willing to accept far less than they needed or wanted, but ‘the Arabs’ in their folly and short-sightedness refused it. So when the British withdrew and Israeli statehood was declared (legally, it was always stressed – because of the UN Partition Plan), the new, vulnerable, tiny state (‘tiny’ was important: it was always David against Goliath) had to withstand the unprovoked attack by the armies of seven Arab countries, intent on its destruction, innumerable in their troops and much better equipped than the heroic, hastily formed Jewish people’s army with its few dusty guns. And tiny, embattled Israel prevailed, because it couldn’t afford not to. Because we had nowhere else to go.

On our kibbutz ulpan, the Jewish Agency gave us the same story, the same bracing and exciting message. We travelled in pairs to Jerusalem to participate in a history and Jewish identity workshop; we were taken on tours to Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum, and to Masada, site of heroic Jewish resistance to the Romans. We were courted, and encouraged to make the grand decision to
return
, to become Israeli.

Throughout it all, in what we heard and read and saw, the word Nakba was never spoken. What happened to the Arabs in Palestine from 1947 to 1949 was a footnote to the story, an unfortunate by-product, and their own fault; it was certainly never accorded the status of its own special term. According to the Zionist version of events, after the declaration of independence and in the course of the war (started by the Arabs) some of the Arabs fled; they were ordered to by the advancing Arab League and Transjordan’s Arab Legion, and they were promised they could return to the whole of Palestine cleared of Jews. They were afraid (of course they were afraid, we thought – they were Arabs), and they were gullible and misinformed. But the Jews never threatened, only defended; the Jews were civilised and moral soldiers. Everything that happened to the Arabs was a result of the Arabs’ own doing. They were betrayed by their own. And one could never trust their numbers; they were nothing but propaganda. 750,000, nearly 800,000 refugees? This was double the number who really left. And what about the Jewish refugees from Arab countries whom Israel absorbed and resettled? This cancelled things out, in a population transfer like that of India and Pakistan at Partition. At the same time, the Jews were nearly annihilated, nearly pushed into the sea – but so desperate, so lacking alternatives, so much love did they have for their land, that they risked all, and won. And then plucky little Israel for the next sixty years withstood enmity and the threat of annihilation, and redeemed the land – making the desert bloom, building cities and planting gardens, creating a new, just, democratic, independent state in which Jews could for the first time in two thousand years live as free citizens, proud of their Jewishness, taking their place in the world of nations.

In 1986 we were still a year from the start of the first Palestinian uprising, and it was still possible to believe and to claim that there had been no such thing as Palestinian nationalism before the 1950s. Sure, there had been Arab group
feeling
, but ‘Palestinian’ as an identity was an invent-ion, like the PLO, after the fact. Hadn’t the Jews themselves been Palestinians before Israeli statehood? The Palestinian refugees were an invention used by the Arab countries: never allowed citizenship or assimilation, always promised the imminent return of ‘their’ land, always used as tools and bargaining chips, they were forever being exploited. In 1986 it was also still possible to believe that those who had come under Israeli control after the Six Day War nearly twenty years earlier enjoyed much better conditions than those they had suffered under the Jordanian and Egyptian occupation which had preceded Israel’s control. Under Israeli rule of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians had local government, universities, schools, hospitals… What more could they want? Any real concern the Palestinians had could be dismissed as ingratitude. Conveniently, they were represented by the Palestine Liberation Organisation: its members were busy taking hostages and blowing up aeroplanes and generally reinforcing the idea that you could never trust an Arab.

But there was the beginning of an unease in 1986 – a demographic one. Palestinians in the Territories had been reproducing more quickly than Jews – even more quickly than the prolific reproductive systems of religious Jews. It was beginning to look as though with the West Bank and Gaza part of Israel, Jews would soon be outnumbered, and how then might Israel be a Jewish state?

Even after the start of the Intifada, most of this unambiguous, emotive national story that we were offered remained unchanged, retaining its grotesque exaggerations, convenient omissions and grandiose claims, its fragments and false emphases and downright lies. The package came complete with a flag, a powerful ancient symbol, a language reborn; it told a tale of heroism and idealism, and of courage in the face of adversity. Most stirringly, it came with a melancholy, sweet national anthem. And though the Jewish Agency made a great deal of the Holocaust, my family story was not a Holocaust story, and for me it was the socialist version of the Zionist narrative that resonated: my mother had been a worker, rooted in the land. Every May Day the kibbutz flew the red flag, and my mother in pigtails and kerchief had marched with her young comrades, singing the
Internationale
.