Losing Israel (19 page)

At airport security in Eilat, heading north, I am interrogated again and disbelieved, and I become sick of it all – sick of waiting to hear from Malik, of paying attention, and above all sickened by Israel and its brutality, and now its sustained mistrust. I am not going to meet Malik; I am not going to be transformed by his story into some kind of clarity, or certainty. I am not sure I even care about him or his story anymore.

This time when I reach the Jezreel Valley, everything is familiar, tugging at me, and yet everything has changed. The bus passes boys selling watermelons by the road, skirts Mount Gilboa, and settles into the straight stretch past the fishponds. Then it slows to a stop beyond the mass of Shatta prison. The prison and the landscape are no longer trembling with my uncertainty, suggesting the presence all the time underneath of another untold or unknown history. It isn’t duality or contradiction now, so much as complexity, and I am tired of that complexity. I want it to be simple again. I want to be finished with the past, and with its stories. I want to go back to where I started, at the age of ten. But of course it wasn’t simple when I was a child, either; then it was my mother who became complex, and I hated Israel too.

Now the trilingual green metal sign to the kibbutz pulls at me, with its arrow straight on to Beit She’an, and its left arrow to Beit Hashita. I get off the bus and cross the road to walk up to the kibbutz. Everywhere, there are birds. Now that I am looking once again, they have come back into focus, sharply into focus against that heavy, complex landscape. Under the avenue of eucalyptus trees enclosing the road up to the gate, two striped hoopoes are digging in the ground with their beaks open, crests cocked. They swagger like crows. Hoopoes are dirty birds, somehow: they are unkosher, perhaps because they foul their nests, or are omnivores. Even so, they took precedence over the problematically named Palestine sunbird as the representative bird of Israel in the sixty-year anniversary celebrations of 2008. They are cocky and vulgar, rejecting bourgeois manners and embracing peasant earthiness, like my old idea of kibbutzniks.

It is near midday, and here too there is a hot wind, but when a kibbutznik slows to offer me a lift, I shake my head. I don’t want to say who or what I am; I don’t want to explain about my mother, to carry greetings to her from a distant schoolfriend, to explain where she is living, and why she doesn’t come back.

A little further on there is a rustle in the brittle blades of fallen eucalyptus leaves by the side of the road, and a long grey-brown animal with a whiskered face a little like an otter slips across an open patch of ground. It’s a porcupine, the first porcupine I have ever seen. Despite my breathlessness in the hot and dusty wind, I am glad I walked.

Asaf’s wife Chaya is between shifts when I arrive at their house. She is unchanged, and laughs when I tell her so. Later, when Asaf gets home from the factory, he asks, ‘So, what do you want to do while you’re here?’

Last time he took me to meet Abu Omar, and we drove past the site of Al Murassas. I think about the ruined villages, and I think about migrating birds. ‘I want to see birds,’ I tell him. ‘I’d like to go birdwatching. Might you be interested in going up to the Huleh valley?’

‘Of course, we can do that,’ he says. There is a pause. ‘That’s all?’

‘That’s all.’

He looks puzzled, uncertain, and then a little relieved.

The next day we drive north-east towards the Galilee and then north towards the Golan. The Huleh valley was once a swamp, and is now fertile agricultural land, but there’s a network of protected ponds and canals, where, as at Eilat, migrant birds stop and rest in their thousands. Once we leave the information centre, everywhere we look there are clouds of large orange butterflies, their wingtips barred with white and black. They cluster in fluttering masses. It is a butterfly migration, like the monarch migration you can sometimes see in California, only these are African monarchs on their way south for the winter.

Overhead, far above, floats a skein of large birds. The Huleh is famous for its crane migration, and I look at them in hope, but it is too early for the cranes. These are storks. The white egrets, lined up on the long field irrigators with their necks hunched back into their shoulders, look sullen and irritated as around them and around us, in ones and twos, the storks begin to descend, circling round and down into the field, their red legs dangling.

At the bird hide we run into Itzik: he is the half-brother of my half-aunt-in-law’s sister’s husband. This makes him family. He works as a warden of the bird reserve. ‘How are you? What are you up to these days?’ he says, as though we have known one another for a long time. Last time we met, years before, we talked a little about birds, a lot about family.

‘All she has in her head is birds,’ says Asaf, looking delighted. ‘
Nothing
in her head but birds.’

‘Excellent!’ says Itzik. ‘That’s all she
should
have in her head.’

He points across the open water before us, naming what is visible that morning: to the right, a group of spoonbills, black-tailed godwits and ruffs. A cluster of glossy ibises are keeping themselves separate. There are grey herons everywhere – migrating herons, Itzik says, and to the left, a small flock of white pelicans.

‘Herons migrate?’ I say. ‘I had no idea.’ I think of the herons along the irrigation canal in Eilat, and of the herons I see hunched by the river and in the fields at home in Wales.

‘Yes, yes – they migrate,’ Itzik says. ‘And they roost together, in big groups, in the trees. Not like the pelicans. Pelicans roost together and feed together, but herons roost together and then they separate to feed.’

‘Very sensible,’ I say.

‘I prefer the pelicans’ way,’ he says, ‘eating together, too – but then, I’m still a socialist, a real kibbutznik.’ He looks at Asaf and they both laugh.

Itzik’s kibbutz is still a traditional socialist collective, but a century on from the earliest communist foundations of the movement, many kibbutzim have changed course. Beit Hashita is no longer under the illusion that it’s self-sufficient. It no longer even owns its own land. In the aftermath of the Israeli financial crisis of the mid-1980s, when the currency was devalued and the manageable debts that most kibbutzim carried became suddenly crippling, Beit Hashita also suffered, and Ossem, an Israeli company, bought the canning factory; in turn Ossem was bought by Nestlé. Asaf has lived all his life in a community that operated on the socialist principle of each giving what he could, and each having what he needed, and until the kibbutz sold off its assets he was a worker in a factory owned by workers. Now as the factory logistics manager, he’s the employee of a global multinational.

Caught out, a little ashamed, I want to agree with Itzik, to say that yes, he is of course right about the pelicans’ socialism. I hadn’t thought about bird behaviour in those terms. Here in Itzik is the unreconstructed kibbutznik, the idealist, and a little flame of rekindled kibbutz romanticism leaps up in me, despite what I know now about the kibbutz movement’s contradictions and hypocrisies and denials, despite what I know about Shatta – and about all the other Shattas, before and after 1948. A longing for innocence closes over me, and I turn to look out at the pelicans to cover up my reaction.

Itzik asks what I’ve seen in Eilat, what we’ve seen so far in the Huleh, and briskly I become a twitcher, ticking, for Eilat,
redshank, little plover, squacco heron, slender-billed gull, Caspian tern, sunbird, redbacked shrike, southern grey shrike, bee-eater, common wheatear, desert wheatear, Isabelline wheatear, blackstart...
and for the Huleh valley,
roller, hoopoe, Smyrna kingfisher, little egret, cattle egret, marsh harrier, purple heron, white stork, avocet, red-rumped swallow...

But when Asaf and I get back to the information centre and car park, there’s one more to add: a masked shrike sitting on a telephone line, like a little final gift. Further along, at safe distance, swallows are sitting in a huddle, watching him uneasily. I know him in the instant of seeing him, though I’ve never seen a masked shrike before – that odd immediate bird certainty that feels like a deep and absolute knowledge rather than identification arrived at by some process of comparison and exclusion.

Perhaps such simple certainty was what birdwatching offered to my parents when we visited Israel in 1978 and 1980, when I was ten, and twelve; perhaps this was their way of dealing with all that my mother must have felt leaping up in her, coming home. Everything that pulled at her after fifteen years – her family, her language, her country – must have been evident to my father, too. How could either of them have been able to articulate it, that emotional charge, with all the threat to their settled quiet life in England that it carried? Birds for them might have been a way of coping with complexity, rather than a way of avoiding it.

It’s not what I am doing, returning in this way to birds. It’s more the case that I’m sick of complexity, exhausted by how it implicates me – and exhausted, too, by the way this routine, impersonal and dehumanising surveillance is accusing me when I have committed no wrong. But it’s not just the suspicious authorities, for whom the questioning of the past undermines the state’s legitimacy, to whom I feel I have to protest that I am innocent – it’s the mistrustful others, too: those for whom my questioning and acknowledgement of guilt doesn’t go far enough.

Mistrust and suspicion undermines you; it reduces you. It leaves you scrabbling at the feet of those who have judged you and found you untrustworthy. The more you seek to assure them of your trustworthiness, the more you reinforce their right to judge you. The mistrust of others creates an unease about yourself that you can never quite eradicate – and I want, terribly, to be exonerated, to be free of it. I want to feel again the innocence I had when I was not yet under surveillance, when I had not yet experienced being mistrusted, when I could still look with curiosity at everything, free of the fear that looking made me a voyeur. I want to be ten years old again, back when borders were simple and dangerous, airport security provided safeguards against the PLO, and I had nothing in my head but birds.

Back at the kibbutz, I lie in the shuttered cool of my cousin’s vacant apartment, listening to the fan turn from side to side. Here I am in walking distance of the ruined village that Malik’s family is from: Al Murassas and Yubla are just a few kilometres away. Outside, a dove is calling drowsily from a tall palm. Occasionally mopeds sputter along the paths, but much of the noise of tractors and voices is stilled during these hottest hours. It is siesta time, but though I have not slept properly for weeks I cannot settle, I cannot sleep. Itzik, watching the socialist pelicans, has rekindled the old longing in me. This
hiraeth
, this
sehnsucht
– though I’m here in the place I love I cannot bear this love. ‘I shall lock the door to my heart and throw the key into the sea,’ wrote Rahel, one of the poets of early modern Hebrew. It’s a wild and damaged love I have for this place. How can I
not
want this feeling of connection?

I give up the attempt to sleep and make coffee and take it outside. Sitting on the step, I watch a pair of jays on the dry grass, catch a fleeting metallic glint of a sunbird. Two bulbuls are fluttering in the dusty shrubs, and there’s a smell of eucalyptus and sap. Over it all a scent of incense wafts down from the upstairs flat, where a neighbour, an older man, is listening to sitar music, which floats over the deep thrum and rattle of air-conditioning from the nearby central dining room.

The central dining room, the huge building with cavernous kitchens that dominates every kibbutz, is no longer the communal heart it was when I was a child. Meetings, events, plays, festivals – people still gather for these, but the communal meals are long since gone. Years earlier, when families began to eat alone at home, when children started to spend the night with their parents, those who resisted change warned that this was the beginning of the end. Long after individual homes had ceased to be single bare rooms and became instead self-contained apartments and houses, an adult’s home was still euphemistically referred to as a ‘room’. Even the earliest changes – personal possessions, a kettle in the ‘room’ – were seen as a serious threat to the shared communal ethos of the kibbutz, and the advent of private showers was believed by some to be a bourgeois indulgence that would destroy the community.

Everyone now eats at home. Young people used to leave for army service and then go on to found new kibbutzim or to support and reinforce struggling border settlements. Now in the absence of a bond made from necessity and survival, of hardship and unity against attack, an ideal (if not always an actuality) of labour in service of the collective, the children, untempered by those rigid communal structures, grow up without a collective ideology. Without gravity pulling them in, they spin off, out of orbit, and don’t come back. When my mother abandoned kibbutz life altogether in the 1960s it was an anomaly, but now it is common. My mother’s sister left Beit Hashita, too; two of Asaf’s children also moved away when they reached adulthood, though all of them have continued to live on other kibbutzim. Young people go away for the army, for university, and keep moving. The high school closed, and the kindergarten shrank. Of my family, only Asaf remains, with his wife Chaya, and my cousin Amit. Asaf and Chaya had their doubts too, their crisis, but they have stayed. It’s changing again, now. A new neighbourhood is being built, and a new kindergarten has opened, but the people who move to the kibbutz do not become members; now it is more like a village than a kibbutz.

Behind me, through the open door, I can hear the old fridge rattling. Asaf or Chaya stocked it for me; they’ve left cheese, bread, jam and cake, and juice and bottled water. On the counter stands a jar of sugar and the new tin of Elite instant coffee that I have just opened. It makes me ridiculously nostalgic. The first coffee I ever drank was iced coffee made with powdered Elite by my step-grandmother, when I was thirteen and staying on the kibbutz without my parents for the first time. I thought it was a terribly grown-up thing to drink coffee. In everything that I did and saw at the time lay the coiled excitement of being on the edge of something, on the edge of change – everything was sharpened by the vibrant hot, live beginning of adolescence, when you feel things in extremes, and fall in love for the first time, passionately and absolutely, with a person, or an idea, or a place.