My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (38 page)

In the early 1970s, Sarid had already made up his mind: occupation was a disaster, the settlements were a fatal mistake, peace was essential. Israel must retreat to the 1967 border and negotiate with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Among the radical Left and liberal intelligentsia, some agreed with him. But in Labor he was an outcast, and his new political position—absolute heresy. Under Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, Israel was bewitched by the empire it had just won and would not listen to the sober warnings of an arrogant prince who had been indoctrinated by the American antiwar movement.

The Yom Kippur War shattered the imperial delusions of Meir and Dayan. It also gave birth to a new political culture based on protest. Sarid became its champion. He mastered the media and fought passionately against the establishment, the settlers, and corruption. The 1977 electoral upheaval that brought Menachem Begin and the right-wing Likud to power made Sarid even stronger. Labor was now in the opposition, and so were the elite associated with it. Many in academia, the media, the business sector, the judiciary, and the civil service felt alienated.

Opposition and alienation suited Sarid just fine. They were compatible with his defiant, haughty nature. Now he was the star. He stood up against Likud and against the settlers and against the rise of a nationalistic-religious Israel. More than any other Israeli he expressed the critical, bitter mindset of post 1973 and post 1977.

Sarid’s finest hour came in 1982. As Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon led Israel to a deceitful and outrageous war in Lebanon, Sarid
was the first Zionist member of the Knesset to oppose it. For a while he was public enemy number one: reviled, attacked, ostracized. But when it turned out that the war was indeed folly, Sarid was vindicated. For the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took part in antiwar demonstrations, Sarid was the undisputed hero of the Israeli peace movement. As the peace protest movement gathered steam, so did Sarid.

Two years later, Sarid quit Labor and joined the left-wing Meretz Party. Although he eventually became leader of the small party and even served for a while as education minister, he never regained the stature he had enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s. Breaking away from Labor led the promising maverick to a life of frustration and resentment on the fringes of Israeli politics. Although much respected, Sarid embodies a resounding missed opportunity. His is the road not taken.

Sarid’s face is heavily lined, etched by disappointment. He is slim, almost bald, and is dressed in a strikingly unfashionable manner. The coffee he drinks is milky and weak. The furnishings in his living room are functional. Although he is still a consummate storyteller, quick-witted and wry, he cannot mask his discontent. The hours I spend with him leave me bewildered and disheartened.

“I’m here not only because you are the icon of the Israeli peace movement,” I tell Sarid. “I am here because your biography is the biography of the Left. You were the pillar of the new peace movement that replaced the fading Labor Movement. But the transition from Labor to peace was not only political. It was a deep mental shift from building to protesting, from doing to talking, from leading to opposing. And you are the embodiment of that transition. You are the incarnation of the shift from the Labor culture of socialist-Zionist action to the peace culture of liberal-Israeli protest.”

Sarid doesn’t deny this. He sees the correlation between what happened to the Left and what happened to him. “What shaped me,” he says, “were the disappearance of my parents’ home in Rafalowka, the happiness I experienced in Rehovot, and the sanity of Israel in its first nineteen years. But the Six Day War undermined the order of things. And then America opened my eyes. The Yom Kippur War enraged me because it could have been prevented. So when I came of age, politically
speaking, I could not be the prince of continuity I was expected to be. I was the wayward son. Rather than walk in the footsteps of the elders, I wanted radical change. I wanted to topple and destroy the national leadership that had betrayed us.”

“Therein lies the problem,” I say. “Both you and the peace movement were always
against
. Against Meir, against Begin, against occupation. But though you were right to be angry, your failing was that you were always about negation. Protests. Demonstrations. Unlike the old Laborites, you never built anything. You never put up a home or planted a tree. And you never accepted the heavy responsibility of dealing with the complexity of Israeli reality. Emotionally, you remained stuck in the adolescent protest stage of the 1960s and 1970s. The naysaying character of the peace culture made it sterile and eventually unattractive. Politically and emotionally it was unproductive and barren, even corrosive. There was not enough love, not enough compassion. And there was too much judgment. That’s why you couldn’t fill the vacuum left by the fading Labor culture. After you performed the grand acts of patricide and matricide, you didn’t succeed in becoming fathers and mothers yourselves. You did not nurture, you did not inspire, you did not lead. You didn’t offer the nation a mature political choice. At the end of the day, your generation achieved only a fraction of what the founders had. It was on your watch, not theirs, that Israel became a rudderless nation, lost at sea with no captain and no compass and no sense of direction.”

Sarid has a reply at the ready. As he fiddles with his frameless glasses with his small, nail-bitten fingers, he begins shooting long salvos of sharp words.

“Focusing on occupation was the right thing to do,” he says. “Occupation is the father of all sins. Occupation is the mother of atrocity. When we occupied the West Bank and Gaza, we opened a door, and evil winds swept through it. All the depravity you see in today’s Israel is because of the occupation. The brutality. The deceit. The decay. Even the army is now rotting because it was forced to be an occupying army. Because of occupation we have been held captive by an insane gang of messianic zealots who may yet destroy us like their forefathers destroyed the Second Temple. Don’t you see it? I am afraid we are doomed. And I
saw it all coming. I saw it in advance. When I saw the first seeds of occupation, I knew they were the seeds of destruction.

“There is something else,” he continues. “You asked me what the real impetus of the peace movement was. Well, let me put it this way: The Israeli peace movement was actually a struggle for normalcy. What we wanted was normalization. The previous generation told us that war was our lot. This is the way things are. In this region and this country, war is normal. But we raised our heads and looked around and saw that in other parts of the world, perpetual conflict is not normal. This is not how others live. This is not how nations sort out their differences. Germany and France, for instance. Vietnam, China. Later the Soviet Union. So we rejected Moshe Dayan’s notorious statement, ‘The sword shall devour forever.’ We looked for a way that would guarantee that the sword shall
not
devour forever. It is not fair to say that we were all about protest and negation. We are the ones who brought a new hope of peace. We said that war upon war is not a decree. We said that peace is within reach. We said we want the normal life other people have, and we want to enjoy the peace other people enjoy.”

“That’s just it,” I challenge Sarid. “You discovered the world, but you ignored our own history. You forgot 1948 and the refugee problem that it created. You were blind to the chilling consequences of Zionism and the partial dispossession of another people that is at the core of the Zionist enterprise. You also failed to realize the gravity of the religious conflict and identity clash between the Western Jewish democratic Israel and the Arab world. You didn’t take into consideration the fact that given our history and our geography, peace is hardly likely.”

Sarid understands me, but he answers as if he doesn’t understand a thing.

“History is not a train station,” he says. “Because even if you’re stuck at the most remote train station, you can be certain that if you missed the train, another will come. It might take an hour, a day, a week—but the next train will come. Not so history. In history, if you missed the train you were supposed to get on, there is no certainty that there will be another. That’s why I am so angry now. And exasperated. And disillusioned. I have no doubt that had I been prime minister in the late 1980s, I would have reached a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Perhaps I would even have managed to save a few settlements. Perhaps an inch of east Jerusalem. But because the Israeli leadership of the day was cavalier and callous, time slipped by and opportunity slipped by and the train left the station. Now I don’t see another train coming. No train at all. And that only makes me more pessimistic and gloomy. I don’t love the land as I once did. I don’t feel I belong to the nation as I once belonged. In my nightmares I see millions of Palestinians marching to Jerusalem. I see millions of Arabs marching on Israel. I am well over seventy now. I have nothing to lose but the grave I will be buried in. But sometimes, when I look at my grandchildren, my eyes tear up. I am no longer certain that their fate will not be the fate of the children of Rafalowka.”

I meet with Yossi Beilin in his posh office in a Herzliya high-tech tower. His suit is light, his tie white, his hair silver-gray. Even though he is in his midsixties, the face of the peace statesman turned business adviser is the face of a boy, marked by only a few lines. Although eight years younger than Sarid, Beilin is far more mature. Throughout the years, he has been the responsible adult of peace: not a man of protests, but a man of deeds; not a man of overwhelming emotions, but a man of calculated action.

Beilin was born in Tel Aviv in the same summer as the State of Israel. His home was imbued with Jewish history and a commitment to Zionism. Years earlier, his grandfather had been a delegate to two of the first Zionist Congresses. His father was the well-read bookkeeper of Tel Aviv’s Journalist Union, his mother a teacher of Arabic, Bible, and archaeology, who contributed to the Labor daily
Davar
. Their home was the humble apartment of a family that had lost much of its fortune but not its pride or its passion for learning. On the walls hung photographs of the founders of Zionism and victims of pogroms and the Wailing Wall. Both of Beilin’s parents felt that they were privileged to live in the time of redemption, and they instilled this feeling in their young son Yosef.

Beilin was an ambitious boy. He had the resolute drive of the son of poor Ashkenazi Jews. In elementary school he was industrious, diligent, and eager, and he was accepted on scholarship to the prestigious Herzliya
Gymnasium. He never wasted time, never rebelled, never cut loose. In the afternoons he worked as a juvenile radio reporter. At eight he became observant; he put on tefillin and ate kosher. But his real God was flesh and blood: David Ben Gurion. On Fridays, the young Yossi would walk to Jewish National Fund Boulevard to watch the old man with the unruly white mane get out of his limousine and enter the simple two-story residence from which he led the Jewish people with infinite wisdom. When Ben Gurion retired, Beilin cried bitterly.

The Israel Beilin remembers from his youth was a future-bound country. The Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, the reactor in Dimona, the performing arts center in Tel Aviv, the National Water Carrier. Economic growth was faster than that of Singapore and South Korea, Beilin is amazed to recall. The borders were quiet, the Arabs were distant, the Palestinians were not an issue. There was a deep feeling of security and calm. The Jewish tragedy was at last behind us. Zionism had succeeded in turning the miracle of redemption into the modern and enlightened State of Israel.

In May 1967 there was a moment of fright. In the days leading up to war, people in Tel Aviv talked of digging mass graves in the city’s parks. Some feared a second Holocaust. But the resourceful and resolute IDF that Beilin served in was raring to fight. Beilin, too, was impatiently waiting for the war of his generation. When war did break out, the Israeli military machine worked like a Swiss clock. It crushed the Arab armies within days. The nineteen-year-old soldier was struck by the sight of the burned corpses of Egyptian soldiers lying in the sand, their eyes agape. When the transistor radio he was holding in his hand announced that Jerusalem had been liberated and that the Temple Mount was in our hands, Beilin cried like a child. He felt that justice had been done; what was not achieved in 1948 was achieved in 1967. The state that was as old as he was proved strong enough to defend itself and fulfill its rights.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Beilin studied at university (political science and literature), wrote for
Davar
, and was active in politics (Labor). He worked hard, studied hard, and married young. Although he was not a hawk, occupation never really troubled him. He even supported the establishment of some early settlements. He had absolute trust in Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and their Labor government. Once
again the borders were quiet, the Arabs were distant, and the Palestinians were not really an issue. Everything was just as it should be.

The sirens of October 6, 1973, caught Beilin at home, having just returned from Yom Kippur prayers to his young wife and their two-year-old son. He thought it must be a mistake. Could the Arabs really be foolish enough to attack after the humiliating defeat they had suffered in 1967? But hours later, the twenty-five-year-old reservist was in uniform, serving as a radio operator in the supreme command headquarters. With his own ears he heard the Israeli army collapse. The soldiers at the Suez Canal were crying for help. The generals were shouting at each other. There was no order, no discipline, no dignity. The communication networks were screaming in panic. The venerated Moshe Dayan walked the corridors like a defeated marshal. The face of the chief of staff was gray with horror. In the halls of Israel’s supreme command there was talk of the end of the Third Temple.

While war was still raging, Beilin turned his back on religion, stopped putting on tefillin and eating kosher. He drove and wrote on the Sabbath, and he never again walked into a synagogue to pray. Not only was his faith shattered, the world he trusted had crumbled. The gods he worshipped seemed now like nothing but deceitful idols. “It was like a religious revelation, but in reverse,” Beilin tells me. “There was terrible pain and a terrible void because of the sudden disappearance of the
shekhinah
, of divine presence. Nothing was valid anymore. Nothing was secure or trustworthy. There was no one up there who was wiser than myself and saw what I didn’t see. There was no God and there were no leaders, and there was no one to whom I could raise my eyes. I was all alone. I bore all the responsibility. I was personally obliged to make sure there was not another war or calamity, and that the Third Temple was not destroyed.”