Losing Israel (23 page)

It is a wet place where I live and I have been fighting it, resisting it, saying it is not my place, that I cannot bear any longer its wringing rain. But the world lives in the flow of water; we live in the flow of blood and lymph, saliva and semen and silvery secretions. We are mostly water. The lanes near here are returning to local care: the council no longer grits them in winter; the council no longer clears their ditches and culverts and drains. The civilisation we pay for is in retreat. The drains become clogged with leaves and mud from tractors churning into and out of sodden fields, ploughing or spreading muck in a near-hopeless attempt to grow something, anything, in this wet. I keep it at bay as best I can. The field above the house is turning to bog, is turning back to wild – a place that snipe come to feed; perhaps in the future curlews and lapwings will return. We are all going back to wild wet wasteland.

Three years ago, something in my body stopped and I became ill. Of course the obvious clichés had some truth, as they usually do when your body alarms you with its warning signs – about stepping back and taking stock, changing priorities, reducing stress, living a more balanced healthy life. A blood clot is a serious business, particularly a blood clot that has no clear cause. Failing to uncover its physical origins, it became a metaphor: something in me was blocked; something in me would not move on.

When I walked along the lanes here in the winter, I took a stick and redirected the blocked flow of every drain I passed, shifting the accumulated barrier of mud and grass and leaves, so that the slow water, relieved of its blockage, could flow freely again. It was not a socially responsible thing – I did it because of the fear of the blockage in me. With the blockage the flow is slowed, stopped; it spreads out and sinks; everything around it becomes waterlogged, sullen, thickly mud – and so I watched the water take up its old and proper path, beginning to flow freely, to clean the edges and surfaces, as I wished my blood to flow, cleaning the pathways of my body of its sediments, taking away loose particles, smoothing its channel as it went – towards a road-edge, a gulley, a drain; towards a stream, the river, the sea.

In the late spring, the following year, when I was better, I saw my mother again: she came to Wales to stay with me for a little while. Every woodland and garden bird was a bird my mother revelled in, as a return to something half forgotten. It had been eight years since she’d heard them – the misty early morning sound of a mistle thrush, the ticking alarm of a robin, the shrill indignation of a wren when a buzzard alighted, wet and bedraggled, in the tall sycamore. We counted off the spring migrants by sight and sound: the gently falling indeterminate song of a willow warbler, the shrieking swifts with their razor wings.

It was two weeks of birdwatching and labour, retrieving my land from wilderness that had grown through the years of neglect when my heart had been elsewhere. Together we dug and cut, weeded and planted, chose what to leave wild, what to contain – and took binoculars and went birdwatching on the coast, and along the old railway line, and in the bird reserves. But most of our birdwatching was close to home, in the garden and in the woodland, where we went walking, silent and easy together as we had been when I was a young child, in those years of innocence before we went to Israel, before Israel separated her from me.

Late in the previous year I’d asked a friend to fell eight trees that blocked all southern and western sun, and in the spring there was light throughout the day, light inside the house, and a lifting of a dark weight that had been lying on me. In the light and space that the felling of the trees created, new birds came to visit, and to stay. Just inside the margin of the wood, loud with rain dripping off the leaves, and the fluid unbroken song of a garden warbler who seemed, from earliest light, never to stop for breath, we saw pied flycatchers. It was my mother who pointed out the female, pied brown and white with her beak full of moss, near the nest-hole high in the stem of a slender ash sapling. We stood there, very still, whispering to one another, watching them for a long time.

After the singularity of childhood, birds become more than themselves. They can never be entirely free of the stories we attach to them, the feelings and experiences we associate with them, even if we believe they give us respite from human experience, even if we believe they give back to us, for a moment, a kind of wild purity. In May, after my mother left, a pair of swallows came to visit; whenever the back door was open, they swooped around my living room: its cool interior and oak beams no doubt felt like a barn to them. Every time the door was open they came in and I had to shoo them out. One, confused, fluttered at the window and then became still, and I picked it up, holding its deep blue wings to its body. Feeling its stiff silky feathered smallness trembling, I never wanted to let it go. When I took it outside and opened my hands it launched itself from me and disappeared. But they came back, again and again, so that for a long few days I considered leaving the small window open, covering the furniture and turning the quarry-tiled room over to them for the nesting season. I didn’t, in the end, but I wish I had. I hope they found somewhere else to nest; I hope they come back to my house in the spring. If they do, I’ll let them in.

I watched the pied flycatchers through that summer, until they disappeared sometime in late July – watched the parents come out in the early evening to the edge of the wood and snap insects in mid-air in a flash of white, and the pair of spotted flycatchers that arrived a little later, and raised two broods. They stayed on longer, but at the end of the summer they left too. Maybe they will return – maybe they, like the swallows, will leave and return for the rest of their lives, making a home here in my home for part of the year.

Since I left Israel that last time, there has been change and no change. Terrible things have occurred: the breaking of the maritime blockade by activists; the Arab Spring followed by its long, bleak winter; the Israeli summer protests; anti-migrant violence in Tel Aviv; another war between Israel and Hamas; another election, another peace process begun and stalled; the terrible long fifty days of war in Gaza in the summer of 2014, and another election that revealed dark truths about the Prime Minister’s intentions and attitudes to Israel’s Arab citizens and to the right to self-determination of Palestinians. There’s been the UN upgrading of Palestine’s formal status, too, so that even if its borders are not clear, even if its representatives are not representatives of all Palestinians, the name Palestine becomes more clearly and singularly defined. Things change and don’t change.

Usually during an upsurge in that violence, I call and email friends of mine, and members of my family – a man from Gaza City whose family I once met in Cardiff, Eitan in Be’er Sheva, my aunts and uncle. But recently I’ve done that less and less. I have been back, in the quiet after Operation Protective Edge, to research another book, and I know I’ll go back again – maybe this year, maybe next. Each time I’m afraid of what will happen when I do: I’m afraid of reawakening that intensity, all that feeling – more feeling than I want, and the uncertainty it brings. But it’s where my mother’s from, it’s where my grandparents and great-grandparents are buried, and so the place won’t ever let me be, not entirely.

The Welsh philosopher J.R. Jones described, hauntingly, ‘the experience of knowing, not that you are leaving your country, but that your country is leaving you, is ceasing to exist under your very feet, is being sucked away from you, as if by an insatiable, consuming wind’. He was lamenting the loss of a unique way of life and shared experience which was being strangled out of existence, grieving for a language that was being depleted and silenced. His was a call for ‘the struggle of the conquered for their very existence, the struggle to save their identity from being trampled into oblivion’.
12

My country Israel is leaving me too, but not ‘into the hands and possession of another country and another civilization’, as J.R. Jones saw the predicament of Wales, and as is the predicament of Palestine. My country is leaving me because its story is ceasing to exist, and because of what it has strangled out of existence. I grieve the loss, I grieve its departure from me, but it’s a grief coloured darkly by shame.

This is the longest I’ve been in one place since I left home at seventeen and went to Israel. Is this how it happens, settling down – without you really noticing? You believe it is a displacement of another love; you believe it is love on the rebound, but it settles into something new; you love despite yourself. ‘One is trying to make a shape out of the very things of which one is oneself made’, the poet and artist David Jones observed in his careful, distancing description of his work – himself making out of an imagined Palestine and a lived experience as a soldier in 1917 a new Welsh and Catholic mythos; but he might also have said that one makes a new self, too, out of those things one has made.
13

When it rains hard, the stream they put under the field will try again to find its old way. It won’t stay, and the field won’t take it, so it will burst out of the pipes and pour down the wadi it has made out of the rock, a gulley too narrow and shallow to hold it. This is the way it wants to flow, and perhaps I can let it – perhaps I can stop resisting, and make a place for this water, just as perhaps I can stop resisting, and accept that I have made a place here for myself. Perhaps I will name the stream and put it on the map. All the lanes and roads in Wales lead in the end to what were once secret and illicit chapels named after Hebron and Jerusalem and Pisgah, after Zion; around the chapels grew hamlets of the same name, and then villages. Perhaps I will name it not Nant y Moch, Pig Stream, though it runs past an old ruined pig house, but a Hebrew name, according to the tradition of this place: Nant Gilboa, where the black irises grow above the Jezreel Valley, overlooking Beit Hashita, where my heart has been.

Love of a person, of a place – the more you know, the more complicated it is. The knowledge that the person is wounded, that the place is stained doesn’t diminish your love. The person and the place matter less, perhaps, than your need to love, and your need to love is a longing to feel whole, knowing you cannot be whole – a longing to be home, though you will never be at home in one place, not fully.

1
. Yehuda Amichai, ‘Jerusalem is full of used Jews’,
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
, trans. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), p. 135.

2
. Tsfarir Corcia, ‘War of Words on the streets of Tel Aviv’,
www.ynetnews.com
, 8 August 2006.

3
. Bayard Taylor,
The Lands of the Saracen
(1855); John Mills,
Palestina
(1858); Mark Twain,
The Innocents Abroad
(American Publishing Company, 1869), p. 520.

4
. H.B. Tristram,
The Land of Israel: a Journal of Travel with Reference to its Physical History
(1865), p. 500.

5
. H.B. Tristram,
Bible Places or, The Topography of the Holy Land
(1875), p. 239.

6
. Amia Lieblich,
Kibbutz Makom
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1982), p. 23. The following quotes by Saul are from pp. 18-23.

7
. Emile Habiby,
The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptomist
(Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2003), p. 127.

8
. Karl Sabbagh,
Palestine, a Personal Story
(New York: Grove Press, 2007), p. 79.

9
. Walid Khalidi (ed.),
All That Remains: the Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
(Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1996), p. 55.

10
. Rahel, ‘With my own hands’. There’s a slightly different translation in
Flowers of Perhaps: Selected Poems of Ra’hel,
trans. Robert Friend (London: The Menard Press, 1994), p. 51.

11
. H.B. Tristram,
The Land of Israel
(1876), p. 199.

12
. J.R. Jones,
Gwaedd yng Nghymru
(1970), published in translation in Meic Stephens (ed.),
A Book of Wales
(London: J. M. Dent, 1987), p. 157.

13
. David Jones, Preface to
The Anathemata
, in
Selected
Works of David Jones
, ed. John Matthias (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), p.116.

On the contested nature of what happened between 1947 and 1949, the two poles of the ‘new history’ are Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris. Avi Shlaim’s many publications, and publications by Walid Khalidi and others also help illustrate the difficulty of interpreting the evidence. Benny Morris’s views before and after 2000 have been the subject of much discussion. See, for example, Ari Shavit’s interview with him, ‘Survival of the Fittest? An interview with Benny Morris’, in
Ha’aretz
on 8 January 2004.

For Joan Peters’s unreconstructed Zionist view of the history, see her volume
From Time Immemorial
, and Alan Dershowitz’s use of her findings, for which Norman Finkelstein attacked him in a notorious exchange that raked over the dubious reportage of Mark Twain and other nineteenth-century Western travellers. See for example Norman Finkelstein,
Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), and extensive material on his website,
www.normanfinkelstein.com
.