Losing Israel (20 page)

The pale jays strut on the grass, moustached, black-crested. Unlike British jays, which head off lumpily into woodland at any hint of motion or noise, these are unafraid and loud – but they are the same species, that dark cinnamon-coloured crow and this light, creamy Middle Eastern variant. There is a smell of hot dust and resin and eucalyptus, and I am ten again, balancing on that wall outside the central dining room with my sister, noting
bulbul
and
sunbird
and
hoopoe
.

The sitar music swells as the door opens, and my neighbour comes down the stairs to greet me. He sits on the higher step, and offers me a joint. He’s wearing a loose purple cotton shirt and smells of patchouli – a soulful man who meditates and does yoga, a spiritual Israeli by way of India and California. He repudiates the stereotype of the macho, brusque, rude Israeli, the dark, tender, wounded Israeli man I made a fetish of when I was twelve and thirteen. His voice is gentle and quiet. He is stoned and laid back, and he reminds me of Nadav, one of the Israeli exiles I met in California, years ago, when I lived there – scarred, gentle sitar-playing Nadav, with thick glasses and delicate hands, who went AWOL, who outstayed his visa, who, like my mother, is never coming back to Israel.

During the night, berries fall continuously from the tree just outside the window, rustling in the dry leaves and undergrowth, and in the morning palm doves begin again softly, a moped speeds along the path by the dining room, car engines start near and far. It is the beginning of a work-day, but nothing like the old dawn noise of the kibbutz, when most of the people who lived here also worked here. I pick up my binoculars, camera, and a bottle of water and walk up through acacias and thick flowering bougainvillea, and the tall date palms that my grandfather planted some seventy years ago. In the 1930s, with characteristic chutzpah, he stole the saplings off the back of a Jordanian truck. For many years he was the kibbutz gardener, planting it with native species, and adding small signs with the Hebrew botanical names, educating the new community about the valley’s familiar but unidentified natural history. During long walks through the valley and the hills to the north of the kibbutz and on Gilboa he lifted bamboos and lilies, sometimes without the owners’ knowledge, and brought them back to plant in the kibbutz. Everywhere I look around the kibbutz there are stories of my grandfather. In 1972 he was injured by a drunken English volunteer, and his already poor eyesight was badly affected. After that he concentrated on transforming the cemetery, landscaping it and planting it, so that it has become a park.

I reach the dusty track that leads past the cemetery and the building site of the new neighbourhood, and out over the borderless cultivated fields towards what is left of Al Murassas, towards what is left of Yubla – a road that ends at the visible ruins of Belvoir, the invisible ruins of Kawkab al Hawa.

A pipe is being laid to the new residential neighbourhood of the kibbutz, and tractors and diggers have cut a quarry out of the slope. About half a kilometre’s walk from Beit Hashita the road splits. To the left it leads to the Arab villages of Taibe and Na’ura, to Abu Omar and his beautiful grandson. Straight on it leads, in the distance, to the cow pasture and sabra that mark the site of Al Murassas. At the split in the road there’s a lookout point, with signage and shade and benches. One sign, a panorama of the landscape, is so sun-bleached that its features are barely distinguishable, but its Hebrew place names, re-inked in permanent marker, stand out darkly:
Kochav haYarden, Tel Yosef, Gilboa
… Newer signs have been put up to mark the development of the Issachar hiking trail. Some are bilingual, with awkward English translation and spelling mistakes, and odd typographical errors: ‘Givat Hamore-Ramot Yissachar Scenic Trail begins on a ridge in the Givat Hamore peaks 517 meters in altitude and continus for 32 kilometers along the barren Ramot Yissachar creasts at an average height of 80 meters to the military industries park and Road. 90 in the Beit She’an Valley...’ Most of the area, it claims, is associated with famous biblical events. But then a neat eliding of the past leaps out from the densely packed text: it crosses seamlessly, painlessly, from the biblical era to the 1930s. In modern times the area was reforested ‘to redeem the land of Israel for Zionist settlement. Yehoshuah Hankin purchased significant tracts of land here for the Jewish National Fund on which settelments were built.’ Those non-Jews who shaped the land between biblical times and twentieth-century Jewish settlement are invisible: they do not exist; they did not ever exist.

To the south lies the bulging mass of Mount Gilboa; fishponds glimmer in the distance – the fishponds of Ein Harod or Tel Yosef, built on the lands of Qumiya, which was depopulated early in 1948. Nearer huddles the dense, low enclosure of Beit Hashita, built on land bought in 1931 in the purchase that depopulated Shatta. I can see the green of the kibbutz cemetery at its edge. Around me, and to the north and east, spread the dark-brown ploughed fields that used to belong to Yubla and Kafra, Al Bireh and Al Murassas, with the sand-pale track winding over them. The whole panorama lies before me, and there is nothing to indicate the Arab villages were ever here.

Salman Abu Sitta’s
Atlas of Palestine
shows a different landscape: the names of the villages that were depopulated in 1948, reproduced in Arabic, Hebrew and English; the names of the newer kibbutzim and other Jewish settlements, and the symbols marking the sites of mosques and wells, of important tombs and springs and schools. It was photocopies from that atlas which, rightly anxious, I crumpled and threw away in the toilet cubicle at Heathrow Airport.

A little further on, a second sign, in Hebrew, memorialises Yos and David, two kibbutzniks from Beit Hashita. They are described as a ‘peasant’ and a ‘metal worker’. From this lookout, dedicated to their memory, it is possible, the sign claims, to see the evidence of ‘a belief in the righteousness of the way and adherence to the Zionist ideology that brought about the creation of the beautiful valley’. The signboard’s reference is biblical: here lies Kibbutz Beit Hashita, whose name derives from the story of Gideon. And here is that same leap – backwards, this time – from the present to the ancient Jewish past, passing over the existence of Shatta, the village that had retained an Arabic form of the same biblical Hebrew name. And this word for ‘peasant’ –
felach
– so close to the Arabic
fellah
: did kibbutz Hebrew borrow and subvert the Arabic word, and rehabilitate it? Israeli-Jewish attitudes to the fellahin do not differ enormously from the colonial attitudes still present in the English word ‘fellah’. Again I am making half-guesses, feeling my way towards meanings, but when, further on, a signboard names another lookout point after the noble Jewish peasants, I realise it is no wonder that I absorbed a story of the kibbutznik as noble peasant. Here is that story written onto the landscape. And yet this is a vista of fields that have been emptied of workers of the land.

Of course it’s a truism to say that naming the landscape is an act of storytelling, and an act of dominion and ownership, but it’s written into our consciousness – Adam, the first human and the first naturalist, naming and claiming dominion. But even if it’s a truism to say that the one in a position to name is the one with power, there’s a danger in naming, too. The common folk belief that an individual has a true name which must remain hidden in order to cheat death – or the Other, or the fairies, or the underworld – is still powerfully resonant: naming has magical properties. And when the hero or heroine learns that name, or if the antagonist divulges his true name, the balance of power shifts. Rumpelstiltskin, his name unguessed, cackles and rubs his bony hands together, the image of a stereotyped scheming, chaos-inducing Jew because he is outside, he is
other
, he is mutable and unknowable, his affiliations and his knowledge secret and inaccessible. But naming him by his true name renders him impotent. And the resonance of those folk beliefs is surely connected to an uneasy consciousness of how naming a child has something of this dangerous control about it, too. A baby is part of the generality of babies, unmarked by the first definitions of gender or weight, or the length and nature of the labour, or whether he or she cried at birth. These are impersonal details: none of these is a designation, and your own consciousness of him or her is incomplete, formless. But when you name a child, you stamp down your own classification, your own story; you exclude the possibility of other stories.

My older daughter is named Jericha, a feminised form of the world’s most ancient city, Jericho. She was conceived in Jerusalem, but Jerusalem carries within it the consciousness of Jericho, to which it is connected by an ancient trade route, the Jericho Road. The old names, the old routes are still there – Jericho and Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Jaffa, Jerusalem and Nablus. You can orientate yourself in the one city by an awareness of the other. My daughter is named after that ancient city, an imagined city of the moon, her name an evocation of cityscape and palimpsest, of ancient library mazes and mosaic floors, founded on ritual deposits – white-clay masks with haunting shell eyes.

I was thirteen when I first heard about those archaeological finds of masks at Jericho, which, my history teacher Mr Davidson said, was in Jordan. It was 1981, and I had been to Jericho the previous year, had seen the mosaic floor of its recently excavated ancient synagogue.

I put up my hand. ‘Excuse me, Mr Davidson,’ I said, ‘but Jericho’s in Israel.’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘it’s in Jordan.’

‘But I’ve
been
to Jericho,’ I protested, puzzled. ‘We went last year, when we were in Israel.’

This was my first encounter with a different version of the past – not the Leon Uris version, not the Israeli one, not the Zionist one. But in that unfamiliar version, the West Bank was still understood, at the time, to be occupied Jordan, and Gaza to be occupied Egypt: the territories had not yet become Occupied Palestine in the popular imagination.

When people puzzle over the source of my daughter’s name, I have to explain – because of what Jericho means, what it can mean – that the choice was not a claim of cultural or geographic or historical dominion over ancient Jericho and therefore a political claim on modern Jericho, but an invocation of that imagined city of the moon, emblem of all cities. Naming isn’t about identifying; it’s about trying to sear a brand into the flesh of a thing, about trying to make something permanent out of the telling of a story, an attempt to reduce chaos, to impose order.

Did my daughter’s particular love of cities result from her being named after the world’s oldest city? Did we, her parents, unconsciously but not accidentally, write Jericho and Jerusalem into her, seeking to shape her origins in our shared story as much as seeking to determine her future? How you are named determines who you are in fundamental ways, but it is not immutable. If only we could still believe that truth is pure and unchanging, rather than contingent, that chaos is reducible to perfect order, that there are absolute names for things. But everywhere I look I see naming as an act of storytelling that conceals, a process of reshaping and erasing the past in order to determine the future.

On the crest of the hill some three kilometres away, I make out the stand of trees that marks what remains of Al Murassas. I have one small bottle of water, and I am wearing thin sandals that are coming apart, but I set off towards the site of its ruins. Once again the landscape has split into a shimmering multiplicity – the present-day panorama of fertile agricultural land; the remnants in it of another relationship, another past, and the overt signage, with its laboured, over-flowery co-options and omissions, which I did not see from the car when my uncle brought me here the first time to look at cattle and sabra and barbed wire.

Parts of the trail have only recently been landscaped, and here the information boards and boulders with white-lettered inscriptions still look new. The bank has been replanted with pomegranate and oleander, the saplings sheathed in protective plastic that has already been bleached by the sun into a pale discoloured pink.

A flock of larks rises over the bare earth. Perhaps they are early migrating skylarks from Europe. There are no fences here to separate out the crop fields, no boundary markers, just the change from freshly turned soil to crop, to fallow land. The pale track blends on either side into the edges of the field.

My feet begin to hurt. Dusty, sore and thirsty, labouring a little in the heat, I recognise the resonance of a kind of pilgrimage. This isn’t a religious pilgrimage, as in Jerusalem, where knots of devout tourists walk, chanting, between the stopping points of the Via Dolorosa, and their guides stand to one side, waiting, while they pay homage or pray; nevertheless, in its own way this is becoming a kind of homage – though I am not sure to what, or to whom.

Ahead of me, in the distance, the site of the destroyed village is marked out from the fields by a dark line of sabra. As I draw near, I see that the barbed wire is down and the cattle are gone: it is empty, and I can go in.

According to Walid Khalidi, in 1931 Al Murassas was a roughly circular settlement of eighty-nine adobe houses. His figures come from the British ‘Census of Palestine’ that year. Three hundred and eighty-one people lived here then. By 1945 the population was four hundred and sixty, and in 1948, this had risen to an estimated five hundred and thirty-four. When I read Khalidi’s description of Al Murassas to my mother, she said: ‘Of course that’s not how I remember it. I remember ruins, ruined buildings, bits of walls. Buildings, but not with roofs... We called it
khirbe
. That’s what it was.’
Khirbe
means ruins.

‘Stone?’ I asked. ‘Or adobe?’

‘Well, I remember stone, but I’m not sure. Maybe that was
beit ha-sheikh
. Or perhaps I’m remembering Kawkab…’

‘But you knew, right?’