Losing Israel (5 page)

How could I resist, at seventeen, the power of the claim to such a past and such a present? How could I resist the power of that welcome, that embrace? My past was the admirable, kibbutz-peasant past. I knew who and what I was; I knew where I was from – and it all led back to my ever-present, ever-absent mother.

The first time I spoke to my mother in Hebrew, there was a look on her face, in the hesitation before she answered, of nakedness. It felt like a transgression, this entry into who she was that was not possible except in her first language. It shocked her. It shocked me too. For one unguarded moment her deep past, her buried childhood rushed up in her and responded, and I witnessed it; for a brief moment, before she once again guarded herself, there was an intimacy I had never before known. And then it was gone. Now, if we speak in Hebrew, she laughs away her own rusty vocabulary and old-fashioned grammar. She has been out of Israel more than twice as long as she lived there. She is happy, and settled, and in her seventies, but I am still driven by this sense that part of her is absent and inaccessible, stolen by the kibbutz when she was very young; and that part of her could never be expressed, because she was always an immigrant, and never in her first language. Her sadness, alone in the children’s house, and her unhappy homesickness all through my childhood and adolescence, has made me and shaped me. It has attached me to her, and, through her, to Israel in ways I can’t seem to undo.

The kibbutz experience is a damaging one. It is only recently that people have begun to acknowledge the effect on children of the communal experiment. Studies have examined kibbutz children’s psychological attachments, their ego formation, but in published oral histories, kibbutzniks who were raised collectively reveal the fear, the sadness and the loneliness they experienced in the children’s houses. They remember crying in the darkness; they remember wetting the bed because of their terror of going to the bathroom in the night, and they recount the false promises of the
metapelet
that their parents would come, though their parents never came. For many parents, too, it was traumatic to be separated from their children when they were so young, but at the time, within the kibbutz movement, to question a fundamental social organising principle like the collective raising of children was to risk being labelled a bourgeois reactionary.

My mother, raised by a
metapelet
, became one as an adult, working in the children’s house in Kibbutz Gadot up on the Syrian border, where she and my father had gone after he finished his military service. Later she fed my brother and sisters and me in the strict four-hour intervals that she’d learned then; we all cried ourselves to sleep, and eventually stopped crying. That’s how I fed my first daughter, too. I, too, let her cry herself to sleep, though it troubled me to do it: it’s what I learned from my mother.

I didn’t know about my parents’ first child, stillborn when my mother was eighteen, until I was a teenager; I didn’t know until long afterwards about my mother’s sense of failure, the requirement to carry on as though nothing had happened. The harsh discipline of stoic toughness started at birth.

My sister, unnamed, unmarked, made the sixth generation of my family to be buried in that dusty corner of the former Ottoman Empire. It is an odd, disorientating reversal to realise that my other sisters and I are the first members of the family to be born and to live elsewhere in many generations, to see us suddenly as an anomaly in more than a century of settled community. The hole my mother tore by leaving Israel is not a notional one. Nor is it a matter of fantasy to say my family are Palestinian Jews. They have lived for more than a hundred and thirty years in that place – the first on my grandmother’s side arriving in Ottoman Palestine in the 1880s, and on my grandfather’s side in 1914.

Is where you’re from where generations of your family are buried? I no longer know, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. The graves of your ancestors don’t bestow belonging, or moral rights – but they do engender feeling. This is where my mother is from, though she left. Israel, and more particularly Kibbutz Beit Hashita, is where my grandfather is buried, and my great-grandparents beside him. It’s the only place I know of in the world that generations of my family lie buried; it is the only place I want to be buried, too.

As with any national narrative, in order to legitimise itself, the modern Israeli one is grafted, like a new fruiting variant, onto an old gnarled trunk with deep historical roots. The claim of deep history happens at the national level and at the level of community and settlement and family, and at the level of the individual, too, but the scar of the grafting remains – and the scar makes denial about the past impossible. Of course I have lost faith in the simple Zionist story, however much it used to give me a sense of place in the world. What thinking person cannot be suspicious of a simple national past? There is no simple, singular national past – only an imagined one, composed of embell-ished facts and fantastical narratives, of retroactive hopes and deliberate omissions and reductions.

My family is implicated in that place with its wounds and scars and stories, both visible and invisible, and therefore so am I. Whatever our putative deep roots, I can never return to the romantic fantasy about the past that I had when I was a child and teenager and a young adult, a comforting fantasy of innocent belonging, but it still calls to me, that folktale; those archetypes still resonate. I can reject it, this grafted story, because of the moral wrong that it entails, and call myself a Palestinian Jew instead, but it doesn’t change how I feel towards my mother’s land.

My mother won’t go back, but I wonder if I’ll ever stop going back, in search of her, in search of myself. The cheaper flights arrive in Ben Gurion Airport at four or five in the morning. Each time I wait in the warm dark humidity of the train station for dawn, for the first train into the city. I absorb the new-old language around me, in the voices, and the announcements. There’s always gum on the platform, and a warm smell of garbage, of acid and decomposition, and something spicy and sharp – a flowering tree, or its sap. My body’s stance begins to adjust, to incorporate the gesture of the place, to take in the feel of its language again: to sense its way back to what is familiar, but also made new each time.

And always, every time, I want to kiss the dirty ground as those men did at the foot of the aeroplane steps some thirty years ago, my first time here, and
HaTikva
’s melancholy returns to mingle with my melancholy. Israel’s national anthem is in minor chords, saturated with longing for a redemption that cannot be, a hope that cannot be fulfilled, because who can ever be fully at home in the world when that home rests on the homelessness of others? I could not be at home there – but I wonder if I can ever fully be at home anywhere else.

In the year before Tel Aviv’s centenary, large parts of the city are loud with construction. The first modern Jewish city, Tel Aviv was founded in 1909, but the neighbouring port city, Jaffa, now coerced into uneasy cohabitation, is, by comparison, ancient. Parts of Jaffa too are being redesigned in the lead-up to the centenary celebrations. In the old quarter it is spotless, the mottled pale stone pavings rubbed smooth by centuries of footsteps, the densely packed, small, stone buildings and narrow alleys and archways a network of boutiques, art galleries and jewellery showcases. But all the time in the background rage the saws and shouts and crash of construction.

It is thirty years since I first encountered this place, its noisy chaotic shuk, blind beggars rattling a coin in a tin can, all part of the story that told me where I was from. Now, at the age of forty, I have lost most of this story of the past, and – though I know it’s a cliché – I have come back, as lost Jews often do, to try to figure out who and what I am.

My young cousin Klil has offered me a place to stay, a base without obligation or expectation – he neither feeds me, nor calls me for an account, nor rearranges his life for me, and in turn expects nothing from me. His apartment building in Jaffa has been condemned; outside, the street has been torn up for the new light railway, but he’s not been evicted yet.

Each morning I go out into the heat and traffic of Sderot Yerushalayim where it runs past Old Jaffa, and walk through the market to Abulafia’s for a pastry, and on up to the square for coffee. I pass the enclosed courtyard of an empty house that rustles with an endlessly agitated colony of fruit bats, wondering each time who it belongs to and why it is uninhabited. The tourists don’t arrive until midday, and in the mornings the square is deserted except for one man setting out napkin dispensers and salt shakers on the cafe tables, where I sit with coffee, wondering how I have come to be here again.

I know the risks: reverently touching the ancient stones of Jerusalem’s Old City, or visiting the Western Wall, or seeing the outrage of the Qalandia checkpoint – epiphanies of Messianic fervour are two a penny here, but even so, to return again seems a compulsion, something I can’t resist.

Any crisis can serve as an excuse for a Jew to head off to Israel – the end of a relationship, loneliness, middle-age angst, grown children leaving home, a health scare, a death, or the confrontation with Palestinian trauma. Any one of these alone can act as a trigger, and I have had versions of all of them in quick succession.

My story of the past has been sloughing away for years. Though I resisted for a long time, I am no longer in denial about the ‘other’ story, about the cost of Israeli statehood and what it was based upon. For years I took refuge, first in California, where Jewish identity is uncomplicated and my sense of Israel remained largely unchallenged, and then in PhD research in Wales, where the country’s past use of Israel as a model, its romantic nationalism, and the predicament of its endangered but resilient language all were resonantly familiar and exciting. Moving to Wales and engaging with its troubles was a form of Zionism displaced, a love of Wales-as-Israel. But Israel was changing, had already changed, had never been what I’d thought it was, and therefore that was true also of Wales. The story I was telling myself and telling others about the past, about my place in it, could no longer fit. All that I learned about Israel, and about the Palestinian experience, all that Israel’s behaviour at home and in the world forced me to confront, left me confused and unsure of myself. I amended and adjusted, but nothing fitted together anymore; everything I might say was qualified, defensive. Then I discovered my own family’s culpability in the displacement of Palestinians in 1948, and, profoundly disorientated, my sense of who I was came undone.

Disorientated
, we say, meaning unsure where we are in the world, and, without a sense of where the east lies, unable to work out how to get where we wish to go. I have always had a dangerously poor sense of direction: it means I am always getting lost, sometimes with dramatic consequences. When I was nineteen I got lost in Jerusalem, by chance ran into the friend I’d been looking for, but in a different part of the city, and, driven in part by the apparent fatedness of our meeting like that, married him, had children and moved with him to the US. I was just nineteen when that began. I know how dangerously off-kilter Israel can make me; I know it’s a risk to come here at forty, disorientated, at a point of crisis. Long since divorced, my daughters nearly grown, my sense of self in question, without much reason to be in one place or another, I want something momentous to take me over: all of who I am is up for grabs.

It was my grandfather’s wound that changed everything – or, rather, a story about his wound, his scar. I was sitting in the late summer sunlight on the doorstep of my cottage, talking on the phone to my mother in Australia. My older sister had moved to Queensland years before, and after my father retired, my parents followed her, along with my younger sister, in 1999. In the background to my mother’s voice I could hear raucous unidentified bird-life; in the background to my voice she could hear a soporific wood-pigeon, an indignant wren alerting everyone to the presence of a cat. Like this we had sat and talked in horror through the vicious wars of the previous summer – the Gaza war and then the Lebanon war of 2006. A year later I’d taken my younger daughter to Israel for a month, and now back home in Wales I was passing on to my mother messages of love from her sisters and her brother, telling her the family news, and anecdotes about our trip.

I’d visited my grandfather’s grave in the cemetery at Kibbutz Beit Hashita, and my aunt had told me a story about how, when he was attacked and was recovering in the hospital in Afula, Shlomite, my mother’s
metapelet
, had gone to see him to let him know how my mother was. At the time, everything the kibbutzniks possessed was owned collectively – they neither had their own clothes or shoes or furniture; they did not claim a bed or a room as theirs, but my grandfather kept a few personal items in a tin under whichever bed he slept in, and he asked Shlomite to keep it for him. This was how he and Shlomite got to know each other. Not much later, they married.

This story was new to my mother – that it was she as a very young child who had brought her father and his second wife together. It was a strange moment, sitting in the sun in Wales in the late summer of 2007, talking to my mother in the noise of Queensland’s subtropical rainforest, about her father’s hospitalisation in 1944 which she could not remember. I had never known who had attacked him, or why, and when I asked her, I realised how odd it was that it had never occurred to me to ask before. Uncomfortably, though not fully acknowledged, I knew the reason: it was ‘Arabs’ who had attacked him, and that had explained everything sufficiently. Carefully liberal elsewhere, where Arabs were concerned I was deeply and unconsciously illiberal: ‘Arabs’ in Israel had been to me an undifferentiated mass of hostility and danger, all actual or potential perpetrators of violence. I hadn’t thought about individuals, about individual stories; I had always understood the assault on my grandfather as part of a common and generally expected Arab disposition towards Jews. That realisation was disturbing: it made me squirm with shame.