Losing Israel (12 page)

To say nothing to Myriam might be an acquiescence to attitudes that appal me, but to object is a pointless provocation, and, I know privately, grossly hypocritical. I am capable of hostility, too, whatever my liberal intentions; I have been inculcated in the same way, and have some of the same responses. My prejudices and fears are not so very different from hers, even if I handle mine in other ways.

There is a simplistic anti-racist dogma that demands you confront prejudice wherever you encounter it, but encountering it in yourself requires something else. Perhaps it’s a life-long struggle that you can’t ever win, but you go on doing battle anyway. And perhaps you get tired of the battle, you become exhausted, you can no longer be bothered – or the circle of your care shrinks and shrinks. You cannot simply undo the deep fear you learned as a child – it rises up uncontrolled when you feel threatened or at bay. You respond instantly, unwittingly, to the patterns that burned into you, patterns you are hardly aware of because you were exposed to them so young, like the wasp’s warning colours and dreadful mask. I was stung when I was three or four years old, several times; there is a good, learned reason for my fear of wasps. That man tried to assault me when I was ten, so perhaps there would be good reason for a mistrust of men – and for an extreme aversion to Y-fronts. But he was Arab; I knew that without being told. I had already learned my apprehension of ‘Arabs’ from others, before that event – from a hand tightening on mine, from my grand-father’s scar, from bullet casings and razor wire on the beach, and from half-heard news stories about the PLO. I don’t blame my parents. Their fear was learned in childhood too, cumulative and unconscious, and reinforced in adulthood, and during their army service. Their learned apprehension is something they too have struggled against.

You can come to know how it operates in you, and why, to make conscious what lies dangerous and barely suppressed just below the surface. That’s a defence, also, against imagining into being its opposite, too – the kind of sexual or political or cultural fetish I made, in an instant, out of Abu Omar’s grandson. In that Romanticised, exoticised moment of desire, I endowed him with extraordinary properties, and dehumanised him utterly.

Perhaps this is why I could not afterwards remember his name. He could have no name, because he was a product of my need. He will always be beautiful in my memory, because he is other, because he is not-me, and because he represents my unconscious fears and desires, a dangerous terrain that I am afraid to know too well.

What can I say to Myriam? I know that if I were to describe the hospitality I received from Abu Omar, from Randa and Ghaith, she would surely say, as she said about the man who changed my tyre the previous year, ‘Nu, so there are some good Arabs.’ It would not affect her feelings about the undifferentiated mass of ‘the Arabs’. What I am doing and where I have been travelling is a provocation to her – and it is therefore harder, and it costs more for her to offer me hospitality than for me to accept it. She welcomes me into her home despite what she herself is appalled by in me, despite what I am doing, which to her is treacherous and dangerous. She must be raw with aggravation, but she does not tell me to go and never come back – I am family. She welcomes me because hospitality is, to her, something unbreakable. Also, I realise, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, that she loves me. I watch her, sitting exhausted and shrunk in the huge chair, with her tired, angry face, and she looks up at me and gives me her ironic, lopsided smile and that ineffable Israeli shrug, and the breach, the gulf, is sealed up, and none of it matters, because I love her too.

My mother’s younger sister, Hamutal, lives in Eilat, a resort city at the northernmost tip of the Red Sea. She’s a scientist, a researcher in plant senescence. When I travel south to visit her, she gives me a tour of the labs and the experimental date palm plantations where she works just north of the city. I understand her explanation of senescence in an approximate way, as a metaphor for my own questions – what makes a thing die? It’s not so much a question of what process kicks in so that it stops regenerating, as what process ceases, and why. What about love – what makes it end? What makes it slow down and stop? Or what process stops, making it impossible to go on – a habit of denial, a loss of will? In her fifth-floor apartment she has dates in the fridge that are still fresh and edible long after they should have begun to deteriorate. I hesitate, uneasy, when she offers them to me to eat.

The last time I stayed with Hamutal I was eighteen. It was late August, and I was heading back to England after eight months in Israel, but I wanted to go back with a tan, so for four days I burned myself in the desert sun, which at midday reached 50 degrees. Now, more than twenty years on, down on the beach, as if nothing has changed, the Heineken Bar is still blasting ‘Mama mia, here I go again, Ah, Ah, how can I resist you...’

I buy an iced coffee at the beach bar, and find an isolated bit of sand, away from the hotel crowds, to spread out a towel. A few minutes later, coming ashore after a brief swim, I stand up without first looking where to put my feet, and tread on a sea-urchin. Caught in the thrum of its deep, throbbing pain, something goes still and quiet inside me. For a moment, I know exactly what James Wright meant when, in his poem ‘A Blessing’, he wrote that if he stepped out of his body he would break into blossom.

At the hospital gate, the security guard checks my bag. ‘You cut your foot?’ he says, seeing that I am limping.

‘Sea urchin,’ I explain. He shakes his head, not understanding, and stands back for me to pass.

The triage nurse asks what is wrong, and I show her my foot.

‘What are you doing here?’ she says. ‘Go home and put your foot in a bowl of water. Twenty minutes – soak it in fresh water for twenty minutes; it’s all you need.’

As I limp back past the barrier, the security guard says, ‘Finished so quick?
What
did you do?’ I slip off my sandal and show him the purple-black lines of broken-off spines in my foot. ‘Why you didn’t tell me?’ he says. ‘What you need is lemon.’

The other guard comes over. ‘What she did do?’ he asks in English. He too looks at my sandy, purple-barbed foot. ‘No,’ he says. ‘What you need is to piss on it.’

I catch a cab back up the hill, to the tall apartment building where my aunt lives. When I was a child, this building stood on the boundary between the town and the desert. Now the city has grown well beyond it.

The cab driver pulls up to let me out. He is from France, and has been delighted I know some French. ‘Tell me your name,’ he says, as I take out my wallet.

Not again, I think – another marriage proposal. It is getting a little predictable. Earlier, in Tel Aviv, a Greek cab driver looked at me with bulging eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘What are you doing just visiting?’ he said in English. ‘You should come here to live with me.’ When I told him why I was in Israel, he exclaimed, gesturing, both hands off the wheel, ‘Israel must-to-be-strong; Israel must-to-be-a-Jewish-state.’ Some of his best friends were Arabs, he said, but, in case I had not understood, he repeated ‘Israel
must-to-be-strong
.’

Another cabdriver, mournful, pointed to the picture of his dead wife hanging from his rear-view mirror. ‘She was a good woman,’ he said me. Then, turning his head to look at me, he asked, ‘What are you doing here? You should come here to live. You should marry me and stay – that’s what you should do.’ He’d just avoided a stalled truck by driving half on the pavement.
Please watch the road
, I wanted to say.

Two days later, it had been an Iranian cab driver, about fifty. ‘You’re a beautiful woman,’ he said. ‘Why are you single? You should not be single. Will you marry me and take me back with you to Wales?’

Cab drivers are always watching. They are truth tellers, messengers, Mercury figures: they know things about their new homeland, a few days after they arrive, that people born and raised there will never have an inkling of. Watching you, they know all your secrets. I hand this one my fare of fifteen shekels, and open the door. The heat blasts into the air-conditioned interior.

‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Listen, I’m a fortune teller. Tell me your name, and your birthday, and I’ll tell you your fortune.’

I pull the door shut again. ‘Why do you need my name?’ I ask.

‘For the
gematria
,’ he says. ‘You understand?
Numérologie
.’

‘OK,’ I say. I give him the Hebrew version of my name, Yasmín, and my date of birth. ‘But that’s no good,’ I add. ‘I don’t know my birthday in the Jewish calendar.’

He waves his hand dismissively. ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘I can translate it. Just a moment...’ and he tilts his head and closes one eye. I wait, as his lips move. Then he opens his eye and turns back to me. ‘You have had some difficulty with your father?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not particularly.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ignoring my answer. ‘It will be better. Everything will be better. Within the year you’ll have money. And by your birthday you’ll have love, a man.’

‘Which year?’ I say. ‘The Jewish year?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘By March.’

Up in the flat, I fill a basin and take it into the spare room. I sit down at the computer, with my foot in the water, to look up what should be done about a sea-urchin sting. I am not convinced by the triage nurse’s quick dismissal, but the information I find online is alarming and contradictory: urine, fresh water, salt water, surgery, the necessity of removing all spines or risking nerve damage... Panicked, I stop reading. I look at my foot. As soon as it’s out of the water, it begins to throb with pain. The sole is speckled now with black dots like seeds of a sabra fruit.

It hurts terribly, but when I submerge it again, the throbbing pain recedes, and I sit like that all afternoon. Forced to stop, completely, for the first time in days of travel and enquiry and observation, suddenly I am sick of it all. I am tired of everything: of trying to explain myself, of anxiety, of the constant duality, of being careful what I say. I am tired of struggling in my clumsy, childlike Hebrew, of making mistakes, of the brash aggressive noise of Israel, full of beautiful forbidden young men and lonely immigrant cabdrivers, and above all I am tired of my own loneliness and need.

The fortune the cabdriver has offered me is a painful one. He watched me; he recognised what I was. So did the others. And was it so evident? He asked if I had some difficulty with my father, and I said, ‘No, not particularly,’ but that was a lie. I do have some difficulty with my father. It was because of him that my mother left – I am certain of it. It was because of him that I was born in England, not Israel, because of him that I keep returning and leaving, unable to stay, unable to stay away. One moment down there on the beach, stung, startled, I thought I might break apart with love, and the next moment all light descends into doom and dark endings. Suddenly I can’t wait to leave.

As soon as I leave, I am homesick; I want to go back. It always happens, every time. This time, however, I have brought home with me stories, photographs, papers and memorial books from the kibbutz archive, and when I piece the history together, when I find out almost by accident how the kibbutz was founded, I am not sure I ever want to go back again. My grandfather, it emerges, was not what I had thought him, and nor was the kibbutz. Though its members would no doubt vigorously deny it, the kibbutz was complicit in the displacement of hundreds of people from the Jezreel Valley – not during the war; not during the lead-up to the war, but a decade and a half earlier.

At home again, away from it all, I read voraciously – everything I could find about that place and what had happened there. So many Western travellers have written accounts of that small part of the world, the Jezreel Valley with its biblical past, that I was spoiled for choice – but all of them, every one, was unreliable: I could trust nothing that I read.

In the nineteenth century, dozens of European and American Christian Bible tourists went travelling nervously along the route from Jerusalem to Nazareth, passing through Nablus and Jenin, and stopping in the Jezreel Valley at Nain and Mount Tabor on the way. These Western traveller accounts provide evidence, if read selectively (the bare open plains, without a village in sight), for the popular and inaccurate Zionist claim that Palestine was mostly empty before Jews began to arrive in larger numbers in the 1880s, and that the new arrivals created opportunities for work and profit, which attracted immigrants from surrounding Arab areas.

The land between Ein Harod and Beit She’an was marshy and malarial; tension between Bedouin tribes and the Arab tenant farmers was high, and nomads often raided the small agricultural settlements. In 1855, Bayard Taylor described the Jezreel Valley, in
The Lands of the Saracen
, as one of the richest areas in the world, a green sea of wheat and barley and grazing tracts with numerous sheep and goats. The Reverend John Mills, writing home to the Calvinistic Methodists in Welsh in 1858, described the abundance of Indian corn, and the beautiful peace and silence of the valley, despite recent depredations by roaming Bedouin raiders. Mark Twain saw it rather differently: he rode along the pilgrim route in 1867 and mocked the view of the Plain of Esdraelon, a chessboard of fields with white villages at its edges, as ‘almost beautiful’.
3
Satirising picturesque steel-engraving depictions of the Middle East, he found particularly noteworthy the flies, rags, and everywhere the weeping sore eyes of endemic trachoma.

It was Tristram, however – that naturalist-clergyman whose
Fauna and Flora of Palestine
had first seduced me – who proved most reliable. Unlike most of the nineteenth-century religious sightseers, Tristram travelled off the regular pilgrim and holy sites routes in search of geology, fauna and flora, and, above all, birds. Like other Western travellers in Palestine in the 1870s, he mentions the marauders, but also usefully observes that settlements in the Jezreel Valley were built for protection at the edges of plains and in the crevices of mountains, rather than exposed and vulnerable to attack in the open. His account shows very clearly that it was far from empty.