Losing Israel (6 page)

My mother hesitated before answering. ‘It was Arabs,’ she said, eventually. ‘One of the skirmishes. You know – there were always skirmishes.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘But who? Where were they from? I mean, were they workers? Or from the prison?’ Sometimes the kibbutz had hired Arab day labourers to work in the fields; sometimes inmates from the nearby prison had worked there, too.

‘Well, I suppose people from the villages,’ she said.

There are no villages near the kibbutz. The Ruler Road leads past the fishponds, with their ospreys and kingfishers, past crop fields and citrus groves, and cotton fields. Near the entrance to the kibbutz the shallow sewage treatment ponds spread out, waded by black-winged stilts and avocets. Further down the road there is the prison in its razor wire and watchtowers, and beyond it, on the other side of the road, lie other kibbutzim – Ein Harod and its sister kibbutz, which split off during the Communist schism of the fifties. Beyond them, to the west, towards Afula and north-west towards Nazareth there are some Arab villages and towns, and others further off in Wadi Ara, but I could not think of any Arab villages near the kibbutz.

‘Which villages?’ I asked. ‘Do you mean near Afula, or Wadi Ara?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Yubla, probably, or Al Murassas.’

‘Where are they?’ I asked. I could not recall having seen Yubla or Al Murassas.

‘Well, they’re gone,’ she answered.

‘What do you mean they’re
gone
?’

‘I mean they’re just rubble. You can’t see anything now. Everyone left.’

‘They left?’ I said. ‘
When
did they leave?’ But already, creeping in on me, was the certain knowledge of her answer.

‘Oh, you know... In 1947, 1948. It was near the graveyard – beyond the graveyard. We used to go walking there, I remember. But the houses were already ruins. Or at least there were no roofs. Everyone left.’

What I knew about the Nakba I knew in a broad, general sense. Even though I had learned a little bit about this other history, about people fleeing their homes in fear, I knew and didn’t know, just as many Jews, many Israelis, deliberately or otherwise, know and don’t know. The details of
who
and
how
and
where
are passed over or sidelined in the ongoing argument about
why
people left, about what created the Palestinian refugee ‘problem’. There are exceptions, like the massacre at Deir Yassin, although I had never heard of Deir Yassin as a child or a teenager. In many ways it is the argument over such extreme cases that has allowed the particular stories elsewhere to be lost in the broad generality of the term ‘Nakba’ or the ‘War of Independence’.

There is no sign of those villages on a modern map of Israel. There are no signs naming the ruins and remnants of those villages in the landscape, either. You would have no reason to know they had ever been there. They have been erased from the land, and wiped off the map.

Now, hearing my mother name these two villages, Yubla and Al Murassas, it seemed obvious that there would have been villages near the kibbutz that were depopulated in 1948, and it shocked me that it hadn’t before occurred to me. Nobody I knew or had met had ever referred to them before, yet here was my mother casually identifying two villages not as notional places, but as part of her childhood landscape, her childhood world. And it wasn’t just Yubla and Al Murassas, as I was to find out later. A whole network of interconnected villages that had once spread out through that valley was now gone.

‘Where did they go, then, the people from these villages?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The West Bank, probably. Or Jordan. I don’t know.’

When, earlier, I had learned in a general sense about Palestinian Arabs fleeing the threat of war and then fleeing war, about villages being destroyed to prevent their return, and to erase their memory, I had been outraged, and am still outraged. Nevertheless, there was always something detached about my reaction; it was always an outrage that had happened somewhere else. But here it was close to home, not in the abstract: here it was near Beit Hashita, in the place my mother came from. What had happened there? How had it happened – and how was it that I could not have known? All the many times I’d visited the kibbutz, all the long weeks and months I’d spent there, nobody had ever mentioned the villages. I’d never heard them spoken about, never heard the story told – and hearing nothing, knowing nothing, I’d never had a reason to ask. And now that I’d asked, now that the question had been asked, it could not go unanswered. After that revelation, everything realigned, and I could no longer maintain my last vestiges of denial and self-protection, believing (because I had wanted to believe) that all that was wrong with Israel had somehow happened elsewhere, had been perpetrated by other people. But it hadn’t been. My family, my grandfather – my gentle, idealised, socialist kibbutznik grandfather – was implicated.

In Jaffa, sitting in the morning heat over coffee, the smell of bleach still lingering on the newly wiped tables, I wonder what, precisely, I’m now after. Shortly after the confusion caused by my mother’s revelation about the kibbutz past, and the implications of that revelation, came new shocks and losses: my older sister, suddenly dead of cancer I had known nothing about; my uncle dead soon after; one of my daughters suffering an emergency lockdown at her high school in California, because of a gunman on campus. A mad love affair with an exquisite man ended; another connection with a damaged man left me empty and full of mistrust. I too had a cancer scare, though it turned out to be nothing at all, but it left me mistrustful of my body.

In Australia for my sister’s funeral, I saw the birds I’d heard in the background of phone conversations with her and with my mother and father. The birds’ raucous noise began at four in the morning and it was cacophonous: lorikeets and cockatoos and more garish overgrown things I had not heard or dreamed of. My parents and younger sister took me walking in lush wilderness – down a steep track to the rammed-earth house my older sister and her fiancé had just finished building, surrounded by untouched rainforest. There were fever-carrying ticks, and down at the waterhole we put up a king snake – it came whipping across the water towards us, intent. In the rainforest catbirds mewled like lost children, and wherever we went we could hear the sound of the whipbirds, the tense rising whistle of an imminent strike, and then the crack of the whip, two birds in a call and response of one violent whipcrack.

There were harsh confessional moments that only shock and sharp grief could allow to surface – about family silence, about lies told for good intention or ill, about omissions. The night before I left Australia to go home to Wales, my parents gave me the family photographs – the blue album my father’s mother had put together in 1950; the small black-and-white photographs from the kibbutz; the glossy, square, garishly coloured Kodak prints from our visits to Israel in the seventies. They dug out birth certificates and marriage certificates, and my mother gave me my great-grandmother’s gold brooch, which spelled out her name, Yafa, in Hebrew.

When I got home I pinned my parents’ marriage certificate to the wall. Its paper is off-white, with a blue leaf-pattern border. Below the grand header of the Israeli Ministry of Religion, the Hebrew lettering is rounded, old-fashioned, the figures of the dates and the identity numbers carefully formed. In her black-and-white passport photo, with its scalloped white border, my mother is wearing a sleeveless dotted dress. Smiling, smooth-skinned, her face looks open and naked. She’s not squinting, but without her glasses I know she can only see a blur. My father’s photo is smaller, face-on; there is a hint of a suppressed smile. He’s wearing an open-necked white shirt, and his hair is untidy. The date is 6 October, 1959 and my mother is eighteen years old.

Though my parents never registered my birth with the Israeli embassy in London, my mother’s identification number confers on me Israeli citizenship. Any Jew, and anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, can apply for citizenship, but this number is all I need if I want to get an Israeli passport: I am already a citizen. Or that’s what the embassy told me, when I rang to enquire. They sent me forms, and I have them still. I have never filled them in.

My sister died in late September. After a week in the wildness of raw family shock, and the brash loudness of Queensland, the cool mistiness of rural Wales was disorientating and hauntingly melancholy. It was darkening, and the summer birds had left. Each day I drove along a back road to my job in the nearby town, through flocks of finches rising off the crumbling, ice-damaged tarmac, where they gathered to peck at the fine gravel. The hawthorn was dark with berries the colour of old wounds. The sheep had been taken down off the upland fields for the tupping season, and were kept in for lambing. In their place, the uplands were full of redwings and fieldfares, feeding on the fields and on the hawthorn and bright rowan. A buzzard huddled on a telegraph pole every mile. I always drove the back way, meeting no traffic, crying.

My sister dying, my uncle’s death shortly after, my daughters far from me and vulnerable – the cumulative shocks made me a little crazy and raw. I began to think about giving up my safe civil service job at the Welsh Books Council, of moving on, of leaving altogether. The place I thought I’d made for myself in Wales felt tenuous, temporary – I wondered if there was any more reason to be there than in Sussex where I’d grown up, or California, where I used to live. Everything about my life felt in question. The shock of my sister’s sudden death lasted; six months on it began to turn into a dragging sense that nothing would be worth doing again, that I was alone in a chilly, empty world.

Now that I am back in Israel, I am not sure which shock has driven me here – the search for some new sense of place in the world, or wanting to find out about Al Murassas and Yubla. I wonder if I am complicit in something deeply wrong, whether I have been complicit by loving a country whose government does wrong, whose very existence is based on a wrong. I think I might find out and perhaps try to tell the story of people who lived there in the Jezreel Valley near the kibbutz before they were displaced or driven out by the kibbutzniks. If I succeed in finding out, I hope I might do something good or right – but I know, really, that I am doing something entirely self-interested, perhaps as all good intentions are, because I am lost. Being back in Israel has disorientated me further. Everything I understand about it is in suspense – it does not offer me a sense of place, or a sense of direction, or a way to navigate: instead it shimmers with duality, and falseness, with things not said.

Harus
, the map says – destroyed. Again and again, printed over in purple Hebrew –
destroyed... destroyed... destroyed.
.. Al Murassas:
harus
. Yubla:
harus
. Kafra:
harus
. Wadi El Bireh:
harus
. Al Hamidiya:
harus
. Jabbul:
harus
. Kawkab al Hawa:
harus
. It’s a composite map, printed by the Israeli government in 1955, the landscape of that year superimposed on a trilingual British Mandate map from 1945, showing clearly what happened in the seven years following the start of the Arab-Israeli war in 1947. I was given a copy of it by Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that seeks to uncover, publicise and memorialise the full scale of the Palestinian Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948. It’s a palimpsest, a deep map, showing the location of features and resources important to British Mandate control in 1945, overprinted by what is important to the young Israeli government in 1955: the aftermath of depopulation and destruction.

The Jezreel Valley section of the map details the network of spidery unpaved paths and roads that used to connect the villages. It records the oil-pipe, the overhead cables, the railway, water-courses and springs, and the paths along which people rode horses or donkeys, or walked carrying water and grain and children. These paths used to link all the villages in the valley near my mother’s kibbutz, Beit Hashita: Al Murassas, Kafra and Yubla, Wadi El Bireh, Al Hamidiya, Jabbul, and Kawkab al Hawa, and in turn connected them to the towns of Beisan and Haifa, Afula and Nazareth. Now these villages are all gone. Above or below the name of each of them
harus
is stamped in purple Hebrew letters. The population was expelled or fled, their houses and holy places and schools were knocked down or blown up, and their wells were blocked with rubble, but the signs of the villages are still there on the map, as is the record of their destruction.

Once you know about it the landscape is transformed. Nothing you thought you knew can be trusted; everything is a sign for something that is missing, or a lie, or a story that you can’t quite read.

My reassuring picture of the innocent kibbutz, the safe ground of my family roots, that place of birds and dust – the spruce-shaded cemetery which my grandfather landscaped and where he and his parents lie buried; the painful memory of my mother transformed and strange in the brutalist concrete central dining room with its clatter of trays, its swallows skimming in through its wide open windows, and sparrows hopping along the tables – all of it was some kind of centre for me, a place in the world by which I navigated. Now, learning about what has not been said, about what is not acknowledged, all that I have felt about the place is suddenly suspect. What I thought I knew has been turned inside out. And this place will never look the same again: it will always shimmer, everywhere, disorientating and confusing, with duality, and with the duplicity of its past.

I finish my coffee and wander down to the seafront. Here an earlier redesign that Jaffa underwent is evident in the potted history of its tourist information board. In the Israeli version of events, the town was ‘liberated’ in 1947. At Ben Gurion Airport, a plaque on the wall honours those who died there in the ‘liberation’ of Lod in 1948. I never before noticed the word ‘liberation’, but now the word and its strange jarring new duality seems to be everywhere, though it was always here – East Jerusalem, above all, ‘liberated’ in 1967.