Losing Israel (16 page)

Oral histories of the Palyam have been published on the website
palyam.org
, and it gives a vibrant picture of their activities in the mid-1940s, but it was in my grandfather’s
yiskor
book, which I brought home with me from the archive, that I found an answer to the question that had first sparked my search: he’d written an account of being attacked and hospitalised in 1944.

He had travelled back from the coast to Beit Hashita that week to be at home for my mother’s third birthday, on the 5th of July. That Saturday morning the commander of the kibbutz guards arrived with the urgent news that villagers from Yubla were attacking kibbutzniks out in the ‘Yubla fields’. That’s how, many decades after the event, my grandfather still described the place – as the ‘Yubla fields’. The guards commander gathered together seven or eight men to fight them off, and my grandfather, with the others, grabbed some clubs, clambered into a van and drove out of the kibbutz and up to the fields. The kibbutzniks were outnumbered by villagers, and more men from the village were arriving. My grandfather was the first to reach them, and he hit a man with a club. He was surrounded and was himself clubbed over the head and lost consciousness, though he continued to be beaten after he fell. In that fight another kibbutznik, Shabo, was stabbed in the back, and they were both taken to the hospital in Afula.

My grandfather, along with Shabo, was charged – their hospitalisation was evidence that they had participated in the attack. The man from Yubla whom my grandfather had attacked had made a claim for compensation. My grand-father and Shabo stood trial before an English magistrate, who asked both defendants and accuser to show the evidence of their injuries. The man from Yubla rolled up his sleeve to show his broken arm; my grandfather took off his hat to show his head injury, and Shabo pulled up his shirt to show his knife wound. The magistrate, unable to clearly attribute blame, ruled that the injuries were equal, that it was tit for tat, and ordered them all to leave his courtroom.

Despite its terrible details, my grandfather’s telling of the story is light-hearted and matter of fact. What first struck me about his account was not his violence. Instead, what sang out like a melancholy minor chord was the unstated fact of my mother alone on her third birthday. Behind it lay the incomparable loneliness of all those children, at three years old, at two, as babies, going to bed and waking up without their parents, brusquely seen to by inexperienced, tough young women who had numerous children under their care, women who were often reluctantly separated from their own children, and couldn’t help but resent those for whom they were responsible. For my mother it was even worse: her own mother had left, her father was stationed away at the coast, and she was painfully shy among the other frightened children in that harsh, dangerous world of extreme poverty, violence, hard labour and strict ideology.

I had reconstituted my mother and my grandfather as some kind of noble Jewish peasants – but that, in its entirety, was a myth. As I found out from his
yiskor
book and the other archive papers, my grandfather had no peasant roots: he’d rebelled against his parents, who were well-educated members of the petit bourgeoisie, small-time capitalists, and he’d joined the kibbutz movement, committing himself through Labour Zionist ideology to its egalitarian hardships. And that’s what the kibbutz movement was: an invented way of life, an invented tradition of working the land, driven, at its best, by idealism, and at its worst by a harsh ideology that could not admit its wrongs. Nor was there anything particularly gentle or noble about my grandfather – he had been assaulted, yes, and seriously injured, but he had initiated the attack. He had done so in defence of land he believed his community had a right to own, but I was not sure it had any right to it at all.

It was difficult to accept that the kibbutz movement was no peasant movement and never had been, and a shock to discover that my personal story, my family story, was a concoction, another lie. The kibbutz movement had at its heart a hypocrisy and contradiction, and all my hazy notions of its noble endeavour, and of my grandfather’s noble peasant endeavour, burned away. The true peasants in Palestine were not the kibbutzniks like my grandfather, but the Arab fellahin, those tenant farmers whom the kibbutzniks had so casually and so easily displaced by capital in the 1920s and 1930s, and then by war in 1948.

Nevertheless, even then, after reading about Shatta in Stein’s blue-covered, fact-stuffed book in that musty, humid bookshop in New York’s East Village, even after the last romantic vestiges of my story of Israel and what it meant to me were torn up like that, I still could not quite let the story go, not entirely. The knowledge of where you come from holds you, like a parent. Grappling with it is part of the process of individuation. You might reinvent it, but you still circle back to it; you might reject it, cut yourself off from it, repudiate it – but that very rejection is part of what forms you. Even if identity is an elective story about the past and about place rather than an immutable, essentialist biological fact, on a day-to-day basis we still order one another and ourselves in relation to those stories of past and place as though they are not tenuous and contingent. ‘Where are you from?’ we ask, and, if we don’t get a clear answer, or if we don’t get one that answers the real question we’re asking, we add: ‘Where are your parents from? Where is your family from?’ I know where my family is from, but now I am ashamed of that place, ashamed of the crime and the destruction on which it was built.

As if to reinforce my doubts, the next time I went back, a year and a half later, Israel started to express doubts about me.

At the El Al check-in line at Heathrow I failed to navigate the security agent’s usual questions –
Did you pack your bags yourself? Did anyone give you anything to carry?
– and the more specific, personal ones I’ve come to expect:
Where is this name from? This isn’t a Jewish name...
Although my sense of identity is internally coherent, on approaching and on leaving Israel it looks stitched together, and I never quite feel able to establish legitimacy.

It was August 2009, and swine flu had at last displaced the aftermath of the war on Gaza in the news. Israel was in a panic over swine flu, perhaps more than other countries because of its unkosher provenance, because it carried the cultural taint of living at close quarters with unclean pigs. A religious group sent a party of rabbis up in an aeroplane to blow shofars and say prayers over Israeli airspace, in an attempt to keep swine flu out.

The agent wasn’t satisfied with my answers. She asked me again for the family story, perhaps seeing if I would tell a different version. She asked me again what I meant by ‘secular’. She asked me again why my mother had left, and why I had learned Hebrew, why I kept coming back.

The rest of the line was moving fast. Almost all the passengers were Israelis returning home after the summer. The agent left me standing by the airline’s X-ray machine while she went to consult with a colleague. They glanced at me and turned away again, whispering, in a close huddle, as the queues beyond me shortened.

Waiting in a little cordoned-off isolation area, I was marked as dubious and suspect. Perhaps I had somehow violated the unstated agreement, the obedience demanded of you to pretend that you’re hearing the security questions for the first time. Now a second agent was coming over. She stared at me a long time, and then back at my British passport, and then at my face again. She asked me the same questions. She asked me the second round of questions. She asked me new questions – about whether I marked the Jewish holidays, about synagogue attendance, about membership in any Jewish groups. Every answer
No... No... No...
made me feel less and less a Jew, more and more suspect. ‘Since when was being a secular Jew a problem?’ I wanted to ask. ‘Israel isn’t full of secular Jews?’ People were staring. I suppressed my questions, my irritation, my rising paranoia.

‘Tell me again,’ she said, ‘why you are going to Israel,’ and when I lied, saying I was visiting family, she knew it. Though I was planning to see them, my main purpose was to go back to the village sites – and to go on to Amman, in Jordan, to meet Malik.

Malik was the grandson of a man who’d fled from Al Murassas, one of the approximately 10,000 people from the greater Beisan area who’d headed east across the Jordan river in 1948 and could not return. Malik was thirty, plump, and going bald. He listened to Julio Iglesias, and was getting married in the autumn. ‘If you are doing some justified research, I am happy to help your good self,’ he’d written. He’d agreed to see me in Amman if I could make it there, or to talk by phone.

Someone at Zochrot had put me in touch with Malik. Sooner or later, almost everyone who is beginning to doubt the Zionist version of the past ends up making contact with Zochrot. It’s an NGO on the far left, and the people who work there are radical anti-Zionist progressives committed to social justice for Palestinians inside and outside Israel. Their funding comes from abroad, but this has not protected them from the increasingly intrusive efforts, through legislation and personal and media harassment, to restrict or stop their work. Zochrot also serves informally as a kind of clearing house for events, information and other groups to do with the Nakba, with the more general Arab history of Palestine – both that of Arab citizens of Israel, and Palestinians forced to leave – and with Israeli protests against occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Staff members at Zochrot had provided me with maps showing the sites of the destroyed villages in the area around Beit Hashita, and promised to try to make contact with people whose families had come originally from Yubla and Al Murassas. After some enquiries they’d sent me Malik’s contact details, and Malik and I had exchanged emails and become friends on Facebook in the spring of 2009, in the long aftermath of the winter war on Gaza. The ferocious brutality of the war shifted public opinion definitively in the UK, and, close to home, in particular ways in Wales. Wales, itself disenfranchised, likes to ally itself with the disenfranchised elsewhere; not so many decades before, it had sympathised strongly with the national aspirations of disenfranchised and embattled Jews. That had been the subject matter of my doctoral dissertation. After the war on Gaza, the appalled dismay at Israel’s actions and towards all Israelis became, for a period of time, intemperate, and spilled over messily into indiscriminate hostility, as would recur again and again in the years to come. Everyone was jumpy and defensive, and Israel’s representatives abroad – politicians and paid propagandists, self-styled supporters and security agents – guarded the tightly controlled perimeter of Israel’s borders, both physical and rhetorical, with extremes and absolutes.

The agent was watching me closely, and now she told me to wait. She disappeared through a back door with my passport in her hand. I wondered if I was being checked against a list, or being added to a list. The following year, when an assassination in Dubai revealed that Mossad had been harvesting British passports, I wondered if my passport details too might have been taken in just this way.

My fellow passengers, passing, looked at me with hostility and suspicion as I stood, conspicuous, in my roped-off space. They whispered to each other, particularly the women in their wigs and hats, whom I hated, suddenly, for their certainties and simplicities. The children were the worst: they stared, hanging off a parent’s hand, or the luggage trolley. Belligerently I told myself I had nothing to hide – resentfully, sullenly, I thought I had as much right as they did to go to Israel, to get on the plane. Underneath was something else, and I could smell it coming up off me, a rancid smell – the beginning of fear.

At last the security agent came back through the door and pointed me out to a third woman dressed in a dark suit. The dark-suited woman walked over, brisk and efficient, with my passport in her hand. It was not questions now, but instructions. ‘This is a random security measure,’ she said, and I almost laughed at the absurdity. What was random about this? ‘As part of this random security measure, we will need to take your hand-luggage and your suitcase.’

‘My
hand
-luggage?’ I said. I thought of what was in my bag, and with a little internal shock wondered what would happen if they saw the maps, the trilingual reproductions from Abu Sitta’s atlas showing the destroyed Palestinian villages in the Jezreel Valley. How would I account for them, and for the tape-recorder in my suitcase? What alternative, erroneous story of a security threat might they string together from such evidence? Or, indeed, what correct story might they deduce?
Family history research
, I could tell them;
just family history…

The security guard was frowning at me now, impatient.

I knelt down and began to take what I most needed out of my bag.

‘Is that all you have?’ she asked, looking down and then away. She seemed embarrassed by the public display of my possessions on the floor. She hesitated a moment. ‘OK, well, if that’s all you have… Fine, take it with you, then, and we’ll check it at the gate.’

I packed everything back into my bag, and she took my case away. All the passengers had gone and only one check-in desk was still open when at last I was free to go and pick up my boarding pass.

When, after passport control, I walked through the metal detector at airport security and set it off, my paranoia leapt up several levels. I had nothing metal on me – nothing at all. Had they been alerted? Had I been targeted? Did the label that had been stuck on my bag tag me as a threat? A woman took me aside and searched me, intimately; another security agent took my bag off the X-ray machine and went through its contents carefully and thoroughly.

Once through, I headed for the toilets, seeking a moment of privacy from what I had begun, panicked, to believe was surveillance. I locked myself in a cubicle and sat on the closed toilet seat. For the first time I wondered whether I might not be allowed onto the plane, whether I might not be allowed to return to Israel at all. What if, at the gate, when they searched my hand-luggage, as the woman told me they would do, they were to find the maps, the contact details? What if I had been watched, because of being in contact with Zochrot, and Palestinians, because of going to the West Bank; what if I were questioned more closely? Would I be kept so long that I would miss the flight? I didn’t know what to do about the maps, the contact details. Surely it was stupid to be concerned, I thought, trying to calm my racing heart. I was not important. I was not doing anything dangerous. I was not in contact with anyone dangerous. But how did I know that? How could I be sure? There was a simple, legitimate answer to any question about the maps if they were to find them, but it would lead to other questions. The questioning might go on, in different forms, for hours – or I might be left for hours, waiting, while they consulted, or forgot, or just for the hell of it, and I would miss my flight. Not because of the maps themselves, or the contacts – but because they would know I had been lying, that I was in fact hiding something, guilty; that I was, in both senses of the word, suspicious.