The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (2 page)

© 2012 by Alice Walker

There are few books on the Israel/Palestine issue that seem as hopeful to me as this one. First of all, we find ourselves in the hands of a formerly Zionist Israeli who honors his people, loves his homeland, respects and cherishes his parents, other family members and friends, and is, to boot, the son of a famous general whose activities during Israel’s wars against the Palestinian people helped cause much of their dislocation and suffering. Added to this, long after Miko Peled, the writer, has left the Special Forces of the Israeli army and moved to Southern California to teach karate, a beloved niece, his sister’s daughter, Smadar, a young citizen of Jerusalem, is killed by Palestinians in a suicide bombing. Right away we think: Goodness. How is he ever going to get anywhere sane with this history? He does.

I don’t remember when I heard Miko Peled talk about the Israeli/Palestinian “conflict” but I was moved by a story he was telling (probably on YouTube) about his mother. I am sensitive to mothers, who never, it seems to me, get enough credit for their impact on society and the world, and so I was eager to hear what this Israeli peace activist, karate master, and writer had to say about his. He was telling the story of the Nakba from his mother’s point of view. Nakba is Arabic for the “Catastrophe” that happened to Palestinians when the Israeli army, in lethal force, invaded their communities in 1947-48 and drove them, in their hundreds of thousands, out of their homes; frequently looting and/or blowing up homes, but if the houses were beautiful and/or well situated, taking them for themselves. As the invaders moved in, the coffee, Peled was informed, was sometimes still on the table, still hot, as the inhabitants were forced to flee. His mother, Zika, was offered one of these confiscated houses. She refused it. It was unbearable to her that she might be sitting sipping coffee in the home of another woman who was now, with her frightened or wounded family, sitting, hungry and miserable, in a refugee camp.

Miko Peled’s father, General Matti Peled, also rises to full and compassionate dignity in his son’s narrative, though somewhat later, and, one feels, with considerably more of a struggle than his wife. He was, after all, a staunch Zionist and a general in the Israeli army, richly praised for his acumen and courage in battle, both in Israel’s “War of Independence” in 1947–48 (the Palestinians’ “Catastrophe”) and in the 1967 war in which Israel pre-emptively attacked its neighbor, Egypt, and proceeded, illegally, to take huge parts of what was until then Palestine.

Although the generals knew that the Egyptian army was too weak at the time to pose a military threat to Israel, Peled and his fellow officers carried out their plan to attack and destroy Egypt as a military power. However, even before this event, Peled had begun experiencing a change of outlook. The aftermath of a massacre of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers made a deep impression on him, and caused him to believe that an army of occupation kept in place indefinitely would ultimately lead to the most hideous violence, and demoralization not only of the Palestinian oppressed but of the Israeli oppressors as well.

After many decades of service to his country, General Peled left the army to become a professor of Arabic Literature at Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities. He learned Arabic and spoke it fluently. He became, as well, a peace activist. He worked with and made friends among Palestinian peace activists and leaders, as his son Miko Peled would do decades later. One such friend was the controversial head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yassar Arafat.

What is the prevailing feeling, having read this moving book, given how determined our testosterone-driven world seems to be to make continuous, endless war, and, perhaps, to blow all of us up in one? Possibly soon. I feel immense relief, and gratitude. Someone(s) must take responsibility for being the grown-ups of our human Universe. There must be people, in all walks of life, who decide:
Enough’s enough; there are children here
. That even if, in your derangement and pain, or your greed, and covetousness, you do me grievous harm, even to the taking of the life of my child, I still choose to see you and your people as human; though perhaps distorted, warped and tortured almost beyond human recognition. I refuse to turn away from the effort to talk to you, frightened though I might be. Whenever possible, I will not refuse to make friends.

Miko Peled, at first terrified of reaching out to Palestinians because of the false reports he was, since childhood, given of them, realizes the insanity of remaining enemies of a people he has had no opportunity to truly know. What he discovers energizes and encourages him. He begins to understand the danger inherent in living in ignorance of the so-called “other” and begins to realize he would be a far different, a far less open and loving person, had he not, despite his fears, freed himself in this way. His freedom to be at ease with the very people he was taught to hate is, of course, a bonus for his own children and for the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians.

The extreme volatility of the Middle East, with Israel’s lengthy list of human rights abuses and contempt for international opinion and law at the center of everybody’s fear, is a threat to us all. It is senseless to believe anyone on the planet can afford to ignore or dismiss it.

Miko Peled is a credit to both his parents. As he tries to raise funds for and then to ship 1,280 wheelchairs to those maimed and made invalids in Palestine and Israel, I see his mother’s compassion for others who have lost what he still has; in his tireless teaching of Martial Arts to children, especially those in Palestine, I see
his father, the General, spreading the faith among the troops that being outnumbered and out-armed is no reason not to win.

A shared homeland, the dream of growing numbers of Israelis and Palestinians, in which each person feels free to be herself or himself, is, or might be, the prize of friendship. In fact, it is only by choosing friendship over enmity that winning makes any sense in a world as on the brink as the one we are living in, where being enemies and attempting to disappear each other has played out, leaving destruction, ugliness, cynicism, and fear. Not to mention a ruined planet, disease, and death.

We will share the earth, and care for it together, as friends of each other and to Her, or we will lose it. I look to the examples of “enemies” becoming friends everywhere in this book to help us continue to carefully choose our way.

The following poem was inspired by watching, on video, home demolitions and house grabbing by Israeli settlers in Palestine. It was a shock to witness the jubilation of the “conquerors” while installing the Israeli flag on the roof a house whose just evicted inhabitants huddled in the street below.

I dedicate it to Smadar, the Israeli, and to the two unknown Palestinian suicide bombers who died with her, perhaps also teenagers, as she was. I wish with all my heart that they might have been friends, playing together rather than dying together, to the grief of all of us who honor the young.

Hope

©2011 by Alice Walker

Hope never
to covet
the neighbors’ house
with the fragrant
garden
from which a family
has been
driven by your soldiers;
mother, father,
grandparents,
the toddler and
the dog
now homeless:
huddled, holding on
to each other,
stunned
and friendless
beneath you
in the street:
sitting on
cobblestones
as if on the sofas
inside
that you have decided
to clean, recover and
keep.

Hope never
to say yes
to their misery.

Hope never to gaze
down into their faces
from what used to be
their rooftop.

Hope never to believe
this robbery
will make you a better
citizen of your new
country
as you unfurl and wave
its recent
flag
that has been given
to assure you
of this impossibility.

On a quiet day in 1997, I sat watching the news from my home in southern California when the broadcast turned live to Jerusalem: Palestinian suicide bombers had struck the heart of the city once again. I caught a glimpse of a young woman’s body lying on a stretcher, but before I had time to call my family in Jerusalem and make sure everyone was OK, my phone rang. It was my mother, calling from Israel. “Miko,” she said, her voice tense, “there was a bombing on Ben Yehuda Street.” Smadar, my 13-year-old niece, was missing.

Smadar’s mother, my sister Nurit, is 12 years older than I am; my family always joked that I was her Bat Mitzvah present. As a child, I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, with beautiful chestnut hair, a habit of wearing large, shiny earrings, a perpetual tan, and a smile that lit up a room. She is the mother of three boys and a girl. She is honest, brave, forthright, and funny. The thought that she might have lost her only daughter was far too much to process on a peaceful day in southern California.

I had lived in Coronado with my wife and two children for nearly 10 years, (my daughter Tali was not yet born), but still considered Jerusalem, where I was born and raised, home. The two cities could not be more different. Coronado is a picturesque, California beach community—spotless, manicured, and more than a little selfconsciously glamorous. It is a place full of optimism and possibilities, a wonderful, safe place to raise children. My family and I lived a peaceful life in our newly purchased condo, within walking distance to beautiful beaches and just two miles from San Diego, across the gleaming Coronado Bay Bridge. I had established a successful karate studio in town, and the work kept me busy and happy in many respects.

But we were a long way from my home in one of the most ancient cities in the world. Coming from Jerusalem—a melting pot of ethnic backgrounds and religions,
a city where every newsstand offers papers in five different languages and people passionately discuss politics and daily news—Coronado had always struck me as culturally and politically isolated, and lacking in diversity.

I was born in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood, but spent most of my youth in Motza Ellit, where my parents built a house when I was four. Motza is a quiet, unassuming community hidden in the Judean Hills on the city’s western edge. It is surrounded by nature, but not far from the conflict and violence that have come to characterize the city. About five miles away is the walled Old City, sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is a city fiercely loved and just as fiercely disputed—it’s been captured and destroyed, rebuilt, captured and destroyed again, throughout history. I am a product of that troubled, painfully beautiful place. Its history, both ancient and modern, and the culture of the Jewish people are inseparable from my being.

The fact that I was living in Coronado did not change all of that. I spent hours on the phone with my family each week and stayed abreast of political and cultural developments back home; I even had subscriptions to Israeli newspapers. I faithfully searched TV channels for news about my homeland. And I always made sure to read the latest Hebrew novels and anything new that was published about the politics and history of the region, going as far back as King Herod and Jesus of Nazareth.

Many hours after the phone call from my mother, when it was close to midnight in Jerusalem, the police contacted Smadar’s parents. It was as if as if they wanted to allow Nurit and her husband Rami time to reach the inevitable conclusion on their own before escorting them to the morgue. When they returned from the morgue, my other sister, Ossi, called me right away.

“Miko….” I didn’t need to hear anything more. Her voice said it all. It was time to fly home. And so it became clear to me that the young woman I saw on the stretcher while watching the news was indeed my niece Smadar. She was dead, killed while shopping for schoolbooks on the streets of the city she called home.

This wrenching tragedy is the starting point of my personal journey, a journey that transformed my heart and ushered me into a life of activism and, some say, risk.

Dignitaries from Israel’s entire political spectrum attended the funeral of Matti Peled’s granddaughter. Matti Peled, my father, had died two years earlier. A man who had fought fiercely in Israel’s War for Independence, oversaw the capture of much of the land Israel now occupied, and then came to question his role as an overlord of the Palestinians, he was a general turned man of peace.

An urgent need to make sense of Smadar’s death gripped me. In Israel, war and the casualties of war were a part of life. As a child I had been to countless funerals
of young people who were killed in wars or “military operations,” and I knew of people who were maimed and crippled as a result of terrorist attacks. But Smadar was my sister’s child. For years, I had been frustrated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; I was deeply troubled by the lack of progress toward a peaceful solution. Still, the conflict had not become personal until my niece was murdered. Suddenly I needed to understand what brought those two young Palestinians to blow themselves up, taking her life just as it was beginning to blossom. Her death pushed me into a bold examination of my Zionist beliefs, my country’s history, and the political situation that fueled the suicide bombers who killed her.

I was born into a well-known Zionist family, which included my father, cabinet secretaries, judges, and even a president of the state of Israel. My maternal grandfather and namesake, Dr. Avraham Katznelson, was a Zionist leader. He signed Israel’s declaration of independence and later served as Israel’s first ambassador to Scandinavia. My father was 16 when he volunteered to serve in the Palmach, the strike force that fought for Israel’s independence. As a young officer, he commanded an infantry company that fought in the 1948 War, and by 1967 he was a general and a member of the Israeli army’s top brass. He was later elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

When I was a boy, military legends and dignitaries of all political persuasions passed through our home. But after Smadar’s death, I wanted to meet people on “the other side,” people who were considered my enemies.

I searched for Jewish-Palestinian dialogue groups in California and made plans to attend. My wife Gila, raised in an Israeli
kibbutz
¹
, was apprehensive; neither of us had ever been to the home of a Palestinian, and Gila feared for my life. “What if they do something to you? What if you don’t return?” she asked me as I prepared to leave for my first meeting with Palestinians. Although I was 39 and had grown up in the united city of Jerusalem, I never had any Arab friends. Now I faced Palestinians as equals for the first time in my life, and to my relief and amazement, I found common ground. As expatriates we shared both good and bad memories of our homeland.

However, Palestinians told a far different version of our history than I had been taught as a young boy in Jerusalem. The history I knew painted Israel as a defenseless David fighting an Arab Goliath, a story that had compelled me as a young patriot to volunteer for an elite commando unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Sitting across from Palestinians in California, I learned of mass expulsions, massacres, and grave injustices. We proudly called the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the War of Independence. Palestinians called it
Nakba
, the “Catastrophe.” I found that hard to accept.

When other Jews and Israelis stormed out of the dialogue meetings, I chose to stay and listen, even though it pained me beyond words to accept that I was not in
possession of the full truth. Coming from a family of political insiders, I thought I knew more than anyone.

I began traveling to the occupied Palestinian territories. Breaking the acceptable rules of my society, I ventured alone to meet with Palestinian peace activists in areas most Israelis consider dangerous. My sister Ossi was beside herself: “You mustn’t go,” she said. “It is dangerous and you are a father with responsibilities to your family and your children.” My mother, also sick with worry, said: “All it takes is one lunatic.”

During a trip to the West Bank, I confronted what emerged in my mind as the greatest obstacle to peace: fear of the “other,” a fear I had never realized I possessed. It was December 2005 when I drove from Jerusalem to the West Bank alone for the first time. I drove a rented car with Israeli license plates. As I passed the last Israeli checkpoint, left the wide, paved highway, I encountered the potholed streets and narrow winding roads that characterize the occupied territories. I was now in “enemy territory” and demons ran amok in my head. I imagined myself surrounded by hostile Arabs, waiting in ambush to kill me. As a child, I remembered, my father made sure we never traveled through the West Bank without a gun in the car, his AK-47 Kalashnikov.
Hadn’t people warned me not to do this exactly?

When I arrived, I was greeted by activists—freedom fighters who refused to engage in violence and were intent on resolving the conflict peacefully. I experienced no antagonism at all as I spent the entire day there and then returned home to Jerusalem. I felt relieved, hopeful, and discouraged all at the same time. I knew if ever there were to be peace, the fear that ran inside me like a virus had to be conquered. Through centuries of experience and conditioning, fear had become almost inseparable from my culture. It had to be overcome and replaced by trust. This was an enormous task.

Mine is the tale of an Israeli boy, a Zionist, who realized that his side of the story was not the only side and chose to cultivate hope in a situation most call impossible. I feel that my travels and the political insights I gained at my father’s side may offer a model for reconciliation not only in the Middle East, but anywhere people look at the “other” and experience fear rather than our common humanity.

1
An agricultural commune that maintains a strict socialist regimen.