Losing Israel (9 page)

Abu Omar greets my uncle and nods at me. Then he leans back in his chair and, without turning, shouts towards the open doorway of the house behind him. Out of sight, an older woman answers, and a little later a young woman comes out with a tray of drinks. She ducks her head and smiles at us shyly as we each take a glass. We wait, drinking sweet, ice-cold lemonade and batting away the flies, while Abu Omar and the teacher finish making their arrangements. The teacher has asked Abu Omar to come and talk to his class about how things used to be before the 1948 war for Israeli independence. ‘But listen,’ he says, smiling, as he gets up to leave, ‘remember – don’t make the Jews look too good.’

Abu Omar shrugs. ‘
Beseder
,’ he says. ‘OK,’ and he turns to us. We go into the house, into a living room hung with framed images – a white stallion, colour-saturated photographic portraits of young men, a shiny gold and blue rendition of the Dome of the Rock. Abu Omar sits on a couch and talks to my uncle. He doesn’t look at me as my uncle explains what I am interested in hearing.

I am fixed on his heavy jowled face, its dark clusters of moles and melanin marks. He wears a crisp white keffiyeh, and a faded suit jacket over his dishdasha. He is eighty, but his voice, when he begins his account of the past, is liquid and sing-song. It is a storyteller’s delivery; what he tells he’s told many times before. My uncle sits beside me, transfixed, but with my flattened, standardised, unidiomatic learner’s Hebrew, clumsy from disuse, I find it hard to understand. Abu Omar’s Hebrew is richly idiomatic and embellished, and his accent strong and unfamiliar.

Soon we are interrupted. Young men begin to drift into the house one by one. They stand against the wall, or crouch, waiting. Abu Omar looks through a capacious battered leather satchel that lies beside him on the couch, and pulls out packets of envelopes, strapped in large rubber bands. He leafs through these, and then, finding the right packet, removes the rubber band and hands over a sheaf of envelopes to the man who is crouching nearby. There is little talk. Then, when the young man has looked all the way through the sheaf he’s been given, he nods and says something and rises and leaves, and another takes his place.

My uncle leans towards me. ‘Abu Omar is the postman,’ he explains. ‘The trouble is, everyone is called Zoabi, so he has to know – he
does
know – everyone, everything.’ The naming convention always amuses my uncle. He’s explained to me before that Na’ura is a village of the Zoabi clan. I think of the common names of Wales – Jones, Williams, Hughes, Morgan – and the ways in which individuals are distinguished from one another by place of birth or residence: John Jones Y Bala, Dai Jones Tregaron, and, more locally, by farm or house name – Jane Morgan Aberdauddwr. That too causes amusement to outsiders. It is surely similar here. Not so far back my own family had Goldsteins on one side, Gelsteins on the other, like a Jewish joke. A diversity of names indicates a diversity of origins, I think, and a network of shared names is the signpost to a rootedness in one place – or, in the Jewish case, rootedness in one people. But of course Goldstein and Gelstein are invented names, replacements: further back, people were identified by their parents, by place, by their husbands. Surnames are a recent innovation, but clan names are not.

It is late afternoon, and the men are stopping by after they’ve finished work to collect the post for their families. Abu Omar’s oldest son comes in and sits quietly. He talks a little with some of the men who are waiting, and to my uncle. Then, as the last of the other men are leaving, Abu Omar’s grandson comes in. He shakes hands with my uncle and nods to me and sits down in a chair nearby. Abu Omar explains to him who I am, reminds him who Asaf is. He smiles at me and says ‘Welcome’ in English. But I am not paying attention to anything that’s being said as we are introduced, and later, afterwards, I cannot remember his name, and cannot ask: when I mention him, my uncle and aunt look at me, suspicious; the interest in my voice betrays me.

I am stricken the moment I see him. He is beautiful. He’s a little heavy-set, his hair very short, so short it makes him look somehow vulnerable around the ears and temples, and this arouses in me a sharp tenderness.
Coup de foudre
– it’s only happened to me once before, like this, like a blow. He is so beautiful I think I might not ever recover from it.

When the two women bring food to the living room door, a tray with bowls of
ful
in sauce, with rice, lamb, pita, and cucumber and yoghurt, he gets up and takes it from them, and puts it down on a low table in front of me and Asaf. Abu Omar pulls over a chair. He gestures to me to eat, but I don’t know how to proceed. I apologise that I don’t know the etiquette, and his grandson smiles at my discomfiture.

He has dimples.

‘There are no rules,’ he says. ‘You’re not going to offend anyone. Eat and enjoy. You won’t have food like this again.’

He doesn’t eat – he says he has already eaten. ‘There is no food like food from home,’ he says. ‘I’ve travelled, but I have never had food as good as the food here.’ His Hebrew is quite unlike his grandfather’s. His accent is that of a first-language speaker, and he is fluently bilingual. ‘When my grandfather talks, I always come and listen, because I always learn something new,’ he says.

There is something very still and collected about him, and he is so beautiful that I lose my appetite. I am afraid to make a mistake, afraid that I will eat clumsily. The lamb is tender, without any fat, and when I smile at him, I realise too late that shreds of meat are caught in my teeth. My heart starts to race with embarrassment; overheated, I can feel sweat gathering and beginning to trickle between my breasts. Physically full of discomfort, betrayed by my body – how inconveniently love or desire makes you victim of your body’s fluids.

Abu Omar asks my uncle, ‘Does she have a family? Is she married?’

‘Yes, she has a family,’ Asaf replies.

I want to correct him; I want to interject and say, ‘No, no – tell him I have two nearly grown-up daughters, and that I’m divorced.’

Earlier Abu Omar said, ‘We are all people of the Book. It’s only forbidden for Muslims to marry someone without a genuine faith, without a book.’ According to him, if a Jewish woman read the Qu’ran it would be enough – she would not have to convert; that was between her and God. Faith was an individual, private matter. ‘People without a real religion, a religion without a book – now that is a problem,’ he said.

‘What about the Druze?’ I asked.

Even the Druze were forbidden to Muslims, according to Abu Omar, because their religion was a secret faith – there was no holy text.

‘Tell him I’ve read the Qu’ran,’ I want to say to Asaf now, but instead I smile carefully, not showing my teeth, and nod and say nothing.

Abu Omar tells stories about a stolen tractor, about the British, about a donkey he had once owned that was shot. He was sixteen then, in 1948, and remembers it, but his stories are almost rote. He is not speaking with the live hesitations of remembering, but with the easy flow of recitation. The stories have clearly been told many times. Like any practised story teller, he wants to be the one to choose his material, and not be distracted from the narrative he’s following. It is awkward to interfere with that flow, and it is difficult to ask questions: with my limited vocabulary, I struggle to understand his colloquial Arabic Hebrew, and he doesn’t seem to understand me, and only with reluctance and quite evident discomfort addresses me directly if I speak. So I speak through my uncle. I ask why people left in 1948.

‘It was Qawuqji – it was Qawuqji and his men, making trouble, making people afraid. They were afraid! So they left,’ he says. He asks Asaf if I know who Qawuqji was – and so I answer Asaf when he turns to me, in a way that is becoming comical. Fawzi Qawuqji had been the commander of the Arab Liberation Army; he’d led Iraqi forces from Jordan. It is more or less right.

‘And why did some people here not leave, then?’ I ask.

Again Abu Omar looks at my uncle, not at me, when he answers. ‘We weren’t afraid. We knew it would be OK.’ He gives a complicated account of who had spoken to whom. They had received assurances from the kibbutzniks. ‘We had a good relationship,’ he says. He mentions Yosef Dagan, ‘the Jewish mukhtar’, as they had called him, a member of the kibbutz who had negotiated the land purchases.

It is clumsy of me to ask whether people ever came back at all to visit, and whether he has any contact now, or had in the past, with those who left. Only afterwards I realise how this question must have sounded. Under the circumstances, despite my uncle’s solid validating presence and credentials, my own background is completely unknown. For whom might I be gathering information? ‘No,’ Abu Omar says shortly. ‘No’ – and clearly that is a story he does not wish to tell. ‘Look,’ he explains, ‘I am an Israeli. Things are good. We are all right. Everything is all right. For this, some people would call me a traitor.’ He laughs. ‘But as far as the refugees are concerned, it’s difficult. For a lot of people, why would they come back? They have jobs, and houses – in Amman, in Beirut, in Europe. Why would they want to come back? What would they have here? But the people in camps – they have nothing. For them, it’s different. For them...’

What the teacher from Tel Yosef meant when he said ‘don’t make the Jews look too good,’ begins to make sense. In 1948 the Zoabi clan had stayed, several villages of the clan, and their relationship with the kibbutzim is good. Abu Omar’s view of the past, and of present relations, is one of accommodation and co-existence – or at least publicly it is. But that isn’t true for a younger generation of Arab Israelis, or Palestinian citizens of Israel. Hanin Zoabi, a Knesset Member, is more outspoken, for which, targeted by the right wing, she has been repeatedly censured, and suspended from the Knesset. For her, this old man and his desire for accommodation would no doubt embody the ‘good Arab’ which, in her political position, she repudiates. I wonder how things look to Abu Omar’s grandson, but with Abu Omar there it is impossible to ask him if he sees things the same way as his grandfather. How does the past look to his cousin who, before she married, had worked for my uncle as a business manager and bookkeeper in the kibbutz factory? How can I ask, how can I press any point, ask difficult questions, when we are there as guests, when the relationship between kibbutz and village, between families, is amicable? I don’t want to make trouble; I don’t want to disturb that relationship. If I were alone, perhaps I could ask about those who see things differently, could probe that question of accommodation, which some see as treachery and collaboration. But if I were alone I would not be talking to Abu Omar.

After the meal we have pastries, and sweet tea made from camomile and sage. Abu Omar collects the herbs every day on the hills. There are pans of flowers drying in the hallway where the two women sit talking and eating. The women have not been introduced. One of them is Abu Omar’s very young second wife, Asaf tells me later; he thinks perhaps the other woman is a daughter-in-law.

When we are leaving, Abu Omar says he’ll give me some of his dried tea mixture, but his grandson says, ‘No, you can’t do that! You’ll give her so much trouble when she gets to Britain – what will they think it is?’ He smiles at me, showing his dimples.

Later on, afterwards, I can’t remember anything much else about Abu Omar’s grandson – not his walk, his name. All I remember is that dimpled smile, and his kind, amused brown eyes. But he haunts me. Everywhere I go his beautiful face returns and expands, diffused into every Arab man I see. Back in Tel Aviv I watch each man who passes with an assessing, sexually predatory eye. Walking south to Jaffa, the look is returned, because I am looking. I am forty and unattached, my daughters nearly grown, the tug of duty and responsibility beginning to weaken, a heavy grief cutting loose – and some kind of adolescent lonely longing is alive in me again. I am in the grip of desire without object. I
want
... I don’t know what I want. Risk, fear, adventure: to feel the agitated pulse of my life.

The Israeli soldier was my fetish once. For his qualities, to which I signed up in my early teens – silent and suffering, wounded and heroic, dusty, army-booted, emotional but tough – I felt, always, an erotic, dark tenderness. I’ve lost that now. Israelis used to travel the year after they finished the army: they’d go to India or Latin America, get stoned for a while, and then go back to do
milu’im
, their few weeks’ annual army service. It has changed since then, since my adolescence. Doing military service in the Occupied Territories exacts a different sort of price; the soldiers of the protest groups Yesh Gvul and Breaking the Silence testify to it. Israelis still leave, afterwards, but those I knew when I lived in the US weren’t going to go back. They’d outstayed their visas and formally disappeared, working illegally on building sites and in restaurant kitchens. They were vulnerable, trying to erase a past; they were without a future, without a clear identity. It was a different kind of wound. I remember Nadav, who played the sitar and smoked too much weed – how could I fetishise gentle Nadav with his peering short-sightedness, his fine musician’s fingers, his gentleness and sensitivity?

The ache of desire is
sehnsucht, hiraeth, saudade
– a tearing loneliness of the soul, a longing to come home. Instead of carrying my homeland in a book, in my heart, it has transferred to beautiful men with luminous dark eyes – ‘the enemy’, ‘the other’, since I can no longer love my own. And by this reduction of each individual man to a representative, and by my expansion of each exchange, real or fantasy, into a universal exchange between me, Jew, and him, Arab, I know I am committing in my fevered imagination every sin of exotification and objectification, of orientalism and sexual imperialism. The critic, the academic in me watches how I reduce ‘the Arab’ to an object of desire – and at the same time I cannot stop myself from looking and desiring. How we neglect women as imperial savages, as though, being ourselves disenfranchised, or victims of men’s desires, we cannot ourselves be victimisers, colonisers – as though we cannot ourselves make others into some kind of object. And of course it’s only Arab
men
I am looking at this way, because women return me to myself, and I don’t want to look at myself. I want to be wanted, not challenged. I want to be sought after, desired. I want to say
yes
to everything, to follow every path that opens up before me, to feel alive, connected.