The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (15 page)

A great deal has been written about the massacres that took place in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila west of Beirut. It was September 1982, Sharon had a plan to “clean up” the Palestinian presence in Beirut and allow the pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian militia, the Phalangists, to take control. The Israeli army sealed the two camps and allowed the Phalangists to enter, illuminating the dark night with flares that lit up the sky. They killed indiscriminately for hours in full view and with the logistical support of the IDF top command. Later on it became clear that young Israeli soldiers and officers who realized what was going on and tried to alert the chain of command were reassured that everything was under control. Arabs were killing Arabs, and it was not our problem.

Sharon’s involvement in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila was his downfall. Massive protests in Israel and around the world resulted in a formal inquiry that found Sharon to bear personal responsibility for the carnage. He was forced to resign and was barred from ever heading the defense ministry. For the next 18 years, he was a political pariah.

Back on our base, the militant macho types were chomping at the bit to be sent to Lebanon. Armed with the brown shoes they got from the supply guys (some of which were probably once mine), they were full of combat spirit. The ones that were sent there returned with all sorts of memorabilia, mostly loot. As for me, my willingness to serve was being stretched to the limit, and under no circumstances would I agree to cross the border into Lebanon as a soldier, or the West Bank for that matter. Luckily I didn’t need to.

This was the final year of my service, and it was becoming increasingly intolerable. The war, politics, and my convictions were constantly at odds, and many of my friends, who were supposed to be discharged before me, had their service extended because of the war. I was terrified mine would be extended as well. I became tense and angry as the months went by, and it reflected on my work and my relationships with my superiors.

“Miko is an antithesis to a soldier,” one of them said. I and my left-leaning friends on base were all branded “gay lefties,
homoim smolanim.”
Those of us who were critical of Israel did not hide it and since in the army being gay and being an “Arab-loving lefty” are equally unacceptable, we were all lumped together. Once, during a trip with the entire unit, I got into a seemingly friendly exchange with my commanding officer while on the bus. He was a lieutenant colonel who adored the army and hated people like me and my friends, people who were critical of Israel and the IDF’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza. At one point, I decided to lay a trap for him. “Moshe,” I said (we were all on first name basis), “it’s really too bad you don’t live on a settlement in the West Bank.”

“Really, why?”
It was too good to be true
. He fell for it.

“Because when they finally return the West Bank to the Palestinians, they’ll return you as well.” The entire bus burst out laughing. Moshe was silent for the remainder of the ride, but friends told me that he swore to make me pay as soon
as we returned to base. His frustration with me grew to the point where he once actually picked up a chair and threw it at me.

The one good thing I took with me when my army service ended was Gila. The army base where I served was coed and so there were plenty of opportunities to meet girls. During my final year, Gila became a student in the Women’s Medic’s course. Her instructors liked her and she had all the makings of a good instructor so she was recommended to stay as one. One of my best friends on the base, someone I am still in touch with, was Shlomo Amir. He retired many years later as deputy surgeon general with the rank of full colonel. At the time, he was a major. He did not care for the army’s pomp and circumstance, so we got along great. Amir was charged with interviewing instructor candidates and determining who would ultimately be accepted to the instructor’s course. I remember hanging around by his office when Gila’s turn came to be interviewed. I didn’t know her well, but I thought she was charming. She had black curls down to her shoulders and warm dark eyes that always seemed to smile at you.

Gila began her instructor’s training, but it wasn’t until it ended and she began teaching that we started seeing each other. By that time I was in my last months of service and she still had another year to go. I approached her for the first time as she taught a class. She was more than a little embarrassed when I came by and the girls she taught, all 25 of them, giggled as she came out to speak to me. We decided to go to the movies. After she agreed to go out with me, I ran to Amir’s office to tell him. I think he was even more excited than I.

Being with Gila was a godsend during those last few months of my service. We had a lot of fun together on and off base. She’d been born and raised on a beautiful little kibbutz on the coast, and we spent lots of time on the beach and at the pool there.

Thankfully, my service was not extended and it came to an end in December 1983—after two years, 10 months, and 14 days. For the first time in my life I was free. I was done with school, and I was done with the army, two very conservative institutions with which I was not comfortable. At last I could do what I wanted. It was one of the happiest days of my life.

Ironically, before I was discharged, I received the pin that was awarded to all who served in the military during the Lebanon campaign. The war was named “Operation Peace in the Galilee.” As we were presented with the pins, several friends and I let them fall to the ground and we buried them in the dirt with our boots.

1
In contravention of international law, Israel had been building settlements on the lands occupied in 1967—the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza—and populating them with civilians. The reasons for this are numerous—from Messianic to security-related to the fact that it was a profitable enterprise for many businesses.

Gila was one of very few people on base who knew about and appreciated my love for karate. I had loved karate since the day I began practicing it in 1977, while I was still in high school.

The karate school, or
dojo
, was at a large school gym in the neighborhood of Ma’alot Dafna in Jerusalem. The intensity of the classes was in many ways similar to what I had later experienced in the army. I became fascinated by the severe demands of both karate and military combat training. But as I found out, contrary to the military, karate possesses a strong, uncompromising moral foundation.

On cold and rainy Jerusalem nights, our instructor, Sensei Dan, would take us on long runs, barefoot. Along the way we would stop to do pushups in the deep puddles of cold water and by the time we returned to the dojo we were soaking wet—but warm under our skin and energized. I would often stay for two classes, which meant that I was at the dojo from four in the afternoon till nine in the evening. I remember sitting on the late night bus on the way home and thinking about the dinner my mother had waiting for me.

Unlike military training, where the aim is to break you down and then turn you into a killer, Sensei Dan wanted to build us up and develop us as confident and compassionate people. Okinawan and Japanese martial arts traditions are established on firm moral principles. The martial arts student is taught to never misuse or abuse his power. Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karate-Do
¹
, the art that I practice, is no different. While popular culture often confuses karate with violence, the truth is that karate, like all traditional martial arts, espouses a philosophy of compassion and non-violence.

My instructor, Dan Russell, whom we called Sensei Dan, was a Brit who decided to live several years in Jerusalem. He was a student of Tibetan Buddhist meditation before it was fashionable. His meditation teacher was Chogyam Trungpa, the renowned master of Tibetan Buddhism, who pioneered the study of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. Dan knew Trungpa well and spoke a great deal about
him and his unique approach to meditation and life. Sensei Dan, originally from Newcastle, had a master’s degree from Cambridge University. A fellow meditation student introduced him to karate and, as he put it, he was “struck by the tremendous mental and spiritual potential that exists within karate practice.”

As soon as I began my karate training, I was captivated by this art’s combination of grace, beauty, and intensity. I could endlessly watch the students who were higher belts execute their forms. This was the time when Chinese martial arts movies began to debut in the West, and I would go to see them all. Dan was a harsh teacher, and even though the classes were physically demanding they were always packed with students eager to train and learn. He had a few assistant instructors, some of whom were not much older than I, who knew how to emulate his intensity. It was clearly sink or swim for me in the beginning, and I was not going to sink.

I understand now that I found karate at a time in my life when it was a perfect fit. I had participated in school sports—mostly track and field—for several years, but I had grown unsatisfied and bored, and I saw little point in working so hard only to beat someone else at a competition. I was looking for something that offered meaning as well as a physical challenge. Karate has a deep philosophy that touches on all the issues that interested me then, and still do to this day. These include ideas like understanding violence and the difficulty in defining non-violence, overcoming an opponent that is seemingly impossible to defeat, spirituality, mind and body connection, longevity, and health.

Traditional martial arts recognize that we change both physically and emotionally as we mature, which allows us to practice and improve our skills even as we get older. I was particularly attracted by the fact that in karate practice the challenge was never to overcome the other but to overcome my own preconceived notions of what I could or couldn’t accomplish. This was something that came to my aid later, during the very difficult parts of my training in the army. In basic training, it often seemed as though we were asked to do the impossible, but the notion that there is no such thing as impossible was ingrained in me by then, and it helped me to persevere.

At the dojo, I quickly went from practicing two days a week to six, and soon I knew that for me it was not merely a hobby. Sensei Dan would often travel back to Britain, and in his absence the assistants would teach the classes. It wasn’t long before I was one of those instructors, and I discovered that I loved to teach karate.

“I have a surprise for you,” Sensei Dan told me one day before class began, and he introduced me to his friend and karate instructor, Sensei George Andrews. Sensei George is a proud Englishman who’d lived his entire life in the rough neighborhoods of London’s East End. His accent was textbook Cockney, and he liked his English cup of tea as much as he liked his beer. He had to learn karate as a way to survive the rough streets of his childhood, or as he put it, “Oy hyte runnin’ so
oy ad t’learn ‘ow to foyt, dit’n oy?” Karate eventually became a spiritual path for George, and he became a remarkable teacher.

When Sensei George met Dan Russell, Dan encouraged him to leave his environment, where drinking and fighting were a way of life, to teach karate in Israel for a few months. George fell in love with Israel, and it became his vacation spot as well as a place to teach bright-eyed young disciples like me. I met him for the first time in 1979. We were told that we were going to the Sea of Galilee for a weeklong retreat—
gasshuku
, in Japanese. One of the students owned property right on the lake, and we all spent the week there as his guests. We trained, ate, slept, and then trained some more, outside on the banks of the
Kinneret
.
²
We learned a tremendous amount, and George became a hero and a great role model for me. When I was drafted into the military, I decided that upon my discharge I would go to London and train at his dojo, and whenever things got tough, this thought kept me going.

When my military service was done, I found a few friends from the old dojo and we would train together at someone’s house or outdoors at one of Jerusalem’s parks. At the time I was also feeling motivated to get involved in peace activism. This was in the aftermath of the Lebanon War, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the conclusions of the Kahan Committee
³
inquiry, which investigated the massacre and found Defense Minster Ariel Sharon personally responsible. Sharon’s negligence in protecting the civilian population of Beirut, which had come under Israeli control, amounted to a non-fulfillment of a duty, and it was recommended that Sharon be dismissed as defense minister. Prime Minister Menachem Begin refused to fire him and Sharon refused to resign. On February 10, 1983, a nongovernmental Israeli organization called Peace Now had organized a march in Jerusalem to demand that the cabinet, led by Begin, accept the recommendations of the Kahan Committee and fire Sharon. The mood was tense and there was a lot of opposition to the march from Israel’s extreme right wing.

I had karate practice that evening, and I had to make a decision whether I should go to practice or participate in the march. This was much more than a schedule conflict—it was a very difficult choice for me, a choice between two different career paths, and I was torn for several days. After giving it a great deal of thought, I decided that I could contribute more to this world as a karate teacher than as a political activist. So I went to practice. That night, while the protesters were gathered in front of the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, a member of one of Israel’s Jewish right-wing terrorist organizations threw a grenade into the crowd. Emil Grunzweig, a peace activist, was killed and nine other Israeli peace
activists were injured. Who knows where I would have stood and what might have happened had I been there.

For me this was a watershed moment. I felt I had made the right decision in attending karate practice that night. It was not until many years later that I found my way back to activism.

In the summer of that year, I finally traveled to England to train with Sensei George. Gila’s grandparents lived in London, and they graciously allowed me to stay with them. Their home was in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Mill Hill in North London. I trained with Sensei George for about a month, and then I traveled to see Sensei Dan, who by that time had returned to the United Kingdom and was living on the Scottish-English border. I had intended to stay longer, but I missed Gila terribly and so I cut the trip short.

“Don’t fly back, it’s boring,” Dan’s said. “Hitchhike, you will be surprised how many nice people you will meet.” His instructions were to avoid France and go through Germany instead. So rather than flying straight to Israel, I took the ferry from Dover to Holland, hitchhiked across Europe to Italy, and from there I flew back to Israel.

By the end of the year Gila had completed her military service, and in February 1984, we decided to travel to England together. I wanted to continue training with Sensei George, and she was excited to get out and see the world. It was a dream come true for me to live and train in London. I admired Sensei George, and I wanted to live in a place where I could participate in a full-time dojo.

Gila and I took a bus from Tel Aviv to Cairo and spent a couple weeks in Egypt. Then we flew to Greece, traveled by ferry to Italy, and from there by train to London. Even though going to London was an adventure with no clear ending, my intention was always to return to Jerusalem to teach karate.

We stayed in London for two years, during which we both worked and I trained as much as I could. London was cold and wet and unwelcoming, and we had no money. For the first few months we lived in a tiny flat that was used as storage space under the dojo. But then, once we both got steady work, we moved to an apartment in Brixton Hill and our life settled into a routine.

Sensei George’s dojo was in a rough part of town and that meant that the crowd was rough too. The dojo was housed in an old historic building on Camberwell Road called The Marble Factory, about a mile from the well known Elephant and Castle tube station. There was no glass on the windows and no heating or cooling system so the winters were freezing cold and the summers were unbearably hot.

George had a great sense of humor and no regard for laziness. He didn’t care who you were—if you didn’t sweat happily, he made sure you perspired through
suffering. By then I had the training at the Jerusalem dojo and the military training behind me, so I was prepared for Sensei George and his physically demanding classes. Still I could see without doubt that his intentions were aligned with the principles of karate, and he sought to build up his students and help them become better people.

By the end of two years in London, two important things had happened to me: First, Gila and I got married in a modest ceremony in the London borough of Southwark. Gila’s grandmother Rose and Aunt Nunnie came, as did our friends Charlie Ramble and his wife Frances. My sister Ossi and her husband Haim came to London to visit us for the occasion and after that the four of us traveled by car to Wales. The second thing that happened was that I fulfilled my dream and received my black belt in Okinawa Goju-Ryu karate from Sensei George.

Having received my black belt, I realized I wanted to learn more. I knew that Goju-Ryu karate, the Okinawan discipline that I had been practicing, offered a great deal of depth, and I did not want to miss any of it. I spoke with Sensei George, and he suggested that I travel to Japan to train with
the
master of Goju-Ryu karate, Morio Higaonna.

“I can do that?” I asked, astonished. “I’m just a first-degree black belt. Will he take me?” George said he would speak to Sensei Higaonna himself. Since Gila and I had wanted to travel to Asia anyway, we decided to go to Japan.

I was completely taken by karate at this point, and all I wanted to do was train and learn more so this was one of the easiest decisions I ever made. I was in no hurry to return to Israel—I assumed that once I was done with my training, I would go back to Jerusalem to teach. I had by then decided that my goal was to reach third-degree black belt, which is considered the appropriate rank to become an instructor.

I was extremely excited by the possibility of going to Japan, and I can safely say that all my preconceived ideas and expectations were shattered when I landed in Tokyo in October 1985. I am not sure why, but I was expecting an ultra-modern society where everyone spoke English and everything moved quickly and efficiently. What I found was that English was spoken by precious few. People I met went out of their way to be friendly and polite, yet I always felt that Japanese people kept a safe distance from me because I was a
gaijin
, or “foreigner.” The metropolitan centers in Tokyo were fast and bustling, but as I went into neighborhoods where people lived, I saw that life moved at a different pace, one that conformed to age-old Japanese traditions.