Losing Israel (7 page)

Once you start looking, you can’t not see it – you can’t not look. Once you start asking, it is only by a huge effort of denial, a decision not to pursue it, that you can stop, that you can return to the safe knowledge of your old story, in which you have a place, by which you can make sense of the world and its events: a secure position from which everything may be tested for its bias or sympathy against the certainty of a historical truth.

A friend of mine, Ghaith, who was studying at Cardiff University, once told me how, before the second Intifada, he and his mother and grandfather had sometimes taken the trip from Ramallah to Jaffa to look at their house, which his grandfather had been forced to leave in 1947. One time they knocked at the door, and explained who they were; the Jewish residents reacted coldly. Now I want to ask Ghaith where his grandfather’s house is – but then what would I do? Knock on the door myself, and ask to see inside, so I can feel acutely, personally, this outrage on his behalf? What kind of presumptuousness is this fantasy? It is a despicable misery tourism, a melodramatic over-involvement.

In all the cities, Jewish refugees arriving from European detention camps, and survivors of extermination camps – and later, Jews fleeing from the Arab countries, living in the new Israeli state in tent cities – took over empty apartments left by Arab residents who had fled the conflict in 1947 and 1948. Owning nothing, they sometimes kept everything that had belonged to the former inhabitants – the cutlery and crockery, even the framed family photographs. It is both poignant and suspect, that common story, one tragedy erasing or ameliorating or replacing the other. And yet of course, there were ancient and more recent Jewish communities depopulated and destroyed in that war too – in East Jerusalem, and elsewhere.

Walking the streets of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the evidence is relentless and unavoidable. The duality of the language shimmers, telling one story and erasing another. It lays claim to place in the street names, some of which have imported and imposed European Jewish history and erased the Arab past; it tries to lay claim to what it does not yet own. The naming of the streets in Tel Aviv, this one-hundred-year-old city, everywhere reflects a conscious, deliberate construction: the co-option of the medieval Spanish Hebrew poets, like Ibn Gabirol with his suppurating skin, or the lionisation of Jabotinsky and his expansionist Greater Israel movement – Jabotinsky, whose Jewish Legion formed part of the British army during the First World War, who proposed that an ‘iron wall’ would be needed to separate Arabs and Jews.

In Holon, near my uncle David’s house, there is a cluster of dilapidated buildings on a piece of undeveloped land at the end of Tel Giborim Park, the ‘hill of heroes’ (every high point, it seems, is a hill of heroes). It is known as the ‘Arab village’, but my uncle was always evasive and never gave me a clear explanation about it, and now he’s dead, and I can’t get the story from him at all. I take the bus from Tel Aviv to visit Myriam, his widow, and where the bus stops, at that corner by the ‘Arab village’, a printed banner is draped over the end wall, declaring ‘Na, Nach, Nacham, Nachman me’uman’, the religious mantra of the Bratslavers: some of the fervent chanting followers of Rabbi Nachman must be living here. This sign, too, is a claim to what belongs to someone else. And while street names are officially bilingual or trilingual, I notice for the first time now that this is only true on the main roads and the highways. Arabic disappears at the local level. Arabic, in much of Tel Aviv, is virtually invisible. I have never noticed its absence before; now its absence stands exposed like a kind of scar.

On the route between Holon and Tel Aviv, which I travelled countless times as a teenager, the bus passes a Muslim graveyard, marked by its distinctive two-ended graves. Dry, dusty, bounded by the motorway and a highway, it looks like a leftover, abandoned – but it is still in use. All the times that I followed that bus route I never saw it; now I wonder how I could never have seen it. You see what you expect to see; you impose meaning on what you don’t understand, and get it wrong, because you draw on the wrong information, because you draw on what you’re told you see.

Throughout the city, and throughout the country, someone, or some group, has been spray-painting a blue Star of David on white walls, above the slogan
Am Israel Chai
– ‘the nation of Israel lives’. I see it everywhere I go. Sometimes others have amended the Hebrew graffiti delicately. An article on
Ynetnews.com
gathers images of its variations: in one place it reads ‘the nation of Israel lives – by the sword.’ In another it is amended to read ‘the nation of Israel lives – on American money.’ In a third, someone has added an illustration and four letters to the word ‘Chai’ so that it reads ‘the nation of Israel is a snail’.
2
Signs, everywhere, have become signs for something else, signposts to what is not said, to what is concealed, to what is visible but goes unseen. It doesn’t require a physical act to render it invisible. A change of language, a change of name, and a continued silence has done a kind of violence to a whole people, and the heroic Hebrew names of Tel Aviv’s familiar streets and wide boulevards whisper to me
false, false
, in little sibilant voices.

Eating a shwarma at a window-counter overlooking the intersection of Allenby and Melech King George, trickling tehina over my fingers, watching the street jostle with soldiers and teenagers and middle-aged women in wigs and knee-length skirts, a painful, lonely nostalgia ambushes me. I have loved Israel, and I still love the smell of her, the dust, the sense of wild longing. A secret, shameful part of me still wants to lie down and die in her, but now I am afraid I have lost the right or ability to love even the idea of her. The nostalgia is not only for what I have loved, but for the love itself, infatuated and unambiguous. All this vibrant life, all the argument and provocation of the Israeli Jewish psyche, its in-your-face bluster, its militant, angry, belligerent energy – even if I am losing the ability to love it in simple and absolute ways, because of what it now represents, what it elides or denies, I nevertheless
know
it, I know it in my
kishkes
: it is part of me. How can I excise that? How can I not long for it, and, at the same time, repudiate it?

Along the coast, travelling north from Tel Aviv, everything trembles with this duality – the parched fields, the flocks of goats, ruined houses, new high-rises shimmering in the heat, religious posters plastered on walls and billboards and buses. Always, everywhere, the place-names and road-signs are a cover-up. Over all of it, over its visible existence, there hovers a kind of glamour of another, secret story: not hidden, not quite visible, but implicit. Hard, physical realities, physical facts, they are not quite lies, but they are omissions and half-truths. It is like talking in two languages at once, meanings approaching and approximating each other, sliding in and out of different forms of feeling, of body language and sense. The landscape is alive with a kind of cognitive violence. Though I cannot quite understand what I am seeing, it is impossible not to feel it as a kind of assault.

It’s dangerous, this reversal of orientation. Without context you can so easily misconstrue what you’re looking at, what you think you might be seeing, and what you’re told. Is there any landscape, marked by humans, that isn’t made into a geographical palimpsest in this way, layered by waves of conflict and language-change, by migration and settlement? Yet in a landscape that is familiar and loved, one that is navigated by memories and associations and a sharp, poignant sense of affiliation, to become aware of the very different meanings and associations that it might have for other people perhaps does not require any other context.

The bus turns inland at the power station near Hadera, round the bulge of the West Bank towards the Jezreel Valley, where the kibbutz pulls me in. Away from the coastal developments, architecture begins to separate the two communities into Arab town, Jewish town; Arab region, Jewish region. In the city, the boundaries between neighbourhoods, ethnicities and nationalities of origin have blurred and shifted, though socially and politically they still exist, starkly; but once out of the city, the landscape, the architecture, cars, signs, shops all shift back into
Arab, Jewish, Arab, Jewish
. It is not only in the architecture, one with Ottoman references in its minarets, curves, embellishments and colonnades, the other brutalist, modernist, often red-tiled and European; it is also in the way the geography is used. One form of architecture seems built into the land’s contours, the other built onto them, but I am seeing what I now expect to see, a new political awareness undermining what I thought I knew, and for the first time making me look for – and romanticise – the evidence of a long connection in that place.

I think the differences are that obvious, and that unmistakable, but of course it is not so simple. Arab town architecture expresses discriminatory planning constraints, not a more organic relationship to the land. Buildings in Arab areas expand outward and upward, storey built on storey to accommodate new generations of a growing family.

As the bus passes through Wadi Ara, I can see the recent changes in the Arab towns: the skeletons of elaborate, prominent new bright villas and houses showing a distinctive inflection of balconies and rooftops and domes, beginning to form whole new neighbourhoods, many built in defiance of planning laws. They differ utterly from the massive white high-rise Jewish neighbourhoods of Herzliya, the tiled structures of the West Bank settlements, and the new pale neighbourhoods of Afula. Afula is transformed. It is no longer the dusty town I knew as a child and teenager by its bus station, a mere transit point: now it also contains within it another past – as Al Fuleh, an Arab village.

Arriving by bus, I find the station itself as I remember it from adolescence, the last time I came by bus to visit the kibbutz. That was twenty-one years ago, for my grand-father’s funeral. The station is decrepit and choked with diesel fumes, and the metal benches of the bus bays are crowded with lounging or sleeping soldiers. Raddled, deeply tanned men play chess at the cafe table, and at the entrance to the broken toilets sits the same ancient, silent woman attendant who has been sitting there since the toilets were built. She presides, receiving a shekel for five sheets of toilet paper, like the guardian, the door Porter to the medieval Celtic Otherworld – the one who determines who has earned the right to pass.

Toilets take on a meaning that is almost holy when you’re travelling. Your feelings, particularly if you’re a woman, are reverent: you approach the promise of a toilet with something like devotion. The women who preside over them, seated at the entrance on a plastic chair, with a little basket for your tribute, speak an ancient pidgin, an archaic Hebrew that is no longer spoken anywhere else. Toilet attendants are indifferent to your needs. You might be at your lowest: your period might have just started, or you may have bled heavily during a long bus-ride and you might be cramped and overfull; you might be suffering from a reaction to the water, or something you ate, incautiously, unwashed – and they observe you, unmoved, unspeaking, waiting for their shekel when you go in, and their tip when you come back out, relieved but vulnerably exposed. They are the embodiment of disinterest, and they make you cringe and scrabble when you are already at your weakest. They see everything and they see right through you; they know you immediately and completely.

The toilet is the only enclosed public space you can enter, in Israel, without being searched, the only public place without a conveyor belt and X-ray machine at the entrance, or a soldier rifling through your papers and dirty underwear, running an explosives detector up and down your body while the impatient queue waits and watches. You retain a kind of public privacy, but that is because they know, those bathroom attendants: they can read you, desperate and reduced to basic need, in an instant. And what is my basic need, now? To know where I belong? To try to do
good
at a time when being Jewish, having a connection to Israel, is seen, increasingly, as something dubious, something that has to be accounted for? Or is the universal estrangement that James Joyce saw in the representative Jew a true estrangement – is exile from yourself a kind of essential Jewish belonging? Perhaps my alienation, at forty, at last has made me into this real kind of Jew. I wonder if these are our only choices – to carry our homeland in a book; to carry our homeland in our heart; to carry no homeland at all. But the toilet attendant in the Afula bus station is not the Oracle at Delphi. Impassive, unmoved, she accepts my tribute. She’s seen it all before; she’s seen every species of need and abasement. Impassive, unmoved, she watches me move out again into the noise of the world, lost and confused and full of longing.

My mother’s brother Asaf meets me outside the bus station, and drives me to the kibbutz. He laughs at my eulogy of the toilet attendant, my nostalgia for the Israel of my childhood when nothing worked and everyone was poor, when Jews were good and Arabs were dangerous and I didn’t doubt anything. We turn onto the Ruler Road and drive past the fishponds, now obscured by tall rushes, past a spur-winged plover bobbing at the edge of the dusty tarmac, past the familiar prison, unchanged. Ahead of us the green trilingual road sign points left for Kibbutz Beit Hashita, straight on for the town of Beit She’an, and Asaf begins to slow for the turning. Over the years I have picked up a few Arabic swearwords and exclamations, but it is only recently that I have learned to read the alphabet. Slowly, the meaning of the road sign emerges for the first time: the word in Arabic does not spell
Beisan
, the Arabic name for the town that lies straight on, near the border with Jordan, but
Beit She’an
, its Hebrew name. I notice the same thing, later, on the way to Jerusalem: the Arabic on the road sign does not give
Al Quds
, but the Hebrew name for Jerusalem,
Yerushala’im
.