My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (48 page)

At five o’clock in the morning the pilgrimage to Jerusalem begins. The capital’s early risers cannot believe their eyes: one by one, the cars arrive in the sleeping city, strange futuristic music blaring from their windows. The youngsters in the cars, asking for directions to Hauman
Street, are smiling and red-eyed and dressed like vampires or satanic demons carrying pitchforks, or just sailors, princesses, and pink fairies. Under the gray dawn skies, among the garages and workshops and cheap furniture outlets of this remote industrial zone, a great flow converges on the dark warehouse that is Hauman 17. A sea of revelers is drawn to the club as if it were exerting a magnetic force, beckoning them with an ominous rhythmic beat.

The Shirazi after-parties are only for those who are totally enthralled by the scene. If you are not in full costume, then your face is at least shining with glittery makeup and your clothes are phosphorescent. Nini is right: it’s the gays who are leading now. They set the tone, they are in command of the dance floor. But Shirazi is right, too: it’s not just the gays, it’s the mix. And the mix works. Something extremely poignant happens when all of these different sexual energies collide in one space, under one roof. Wiry boys with shaved heads hug each other by the stage. Gorgeous girls in diaphanous shirts dance by the bar. The strong smell of hashish fills the air. And every minute, some couple goes off to do it in the other room. Boy-girl. Boy-boy. Girl-girl.

It’s all upside down: it’s Tel Aviv in Jerusalem, night in the daytime, a bacchanal on one of Judaism’s holiest days—Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. Thousands are crowded in the cavernous hall of Jerusalem’s leading club, proving they can celebrate ten or twelve or fourteen hours of house music without becoming aggressive, impatient, or rough. Proving that anyone who thinks the new Israel is a fundamentalist theocracy doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about.

Without the drugs it wouldn’t have worked, but the drugs can’t explain it all. Many factors are at work here. Israel is an immigrant society that has no deeply rooted, nonreligious conservatism. Israeli society is a survivor society that is hungry for life. Israel is a nation on the edge. Here, at Hauman 17, the outcome is a burst of energy unlike anything seen in London, Paris, or New York. So although this Shirazi after-party is an end-of-the-spectrum phenomenon, it says a lot about the spectrum itself. It says a lot about the cultural and emotional landscape of young Israel at the beginning of the new millennium. For what one hears on the dance floor of Jerusalem’s Hauman 17 is the liberating roar of secularism. What one sees is the revolt of twenty-first-century
youngsters against the demands and decrees and constraints imposed upon them by the Zionist project. No more, they say. Let us live. Let us seize the day.

Onstage a performance begins that only a few years ago would have been considered outrageous: an ex-boy gets down on his knees to worship the enormous erection of a boy who is still very much a boy. Outside, it’s noon, the high noon of a high holiday in Jerusalem. But no one in the roaring hall seems much bothered about the lewd worship ritual taking place onstage. For this is not what matters. What matters are the other things these young people worship: liberation, freedom, the breaking of every taboo. Leaving behind their inhibitions. Crossing every boundary. Living to the extreme. Waving their hands in the air, these sweaty, half-naked boys worship at the altar of personal pleasure. Waving their hands in the air, these slim, provocative girls worship at the altar of deafening delight. And everyone in the hall is trying desperately to fashion a nation from all this. Trying to fashion an alternative nation, an alternative reality, an alternative meaning. Rising up against Israel’s past. Rising up against Israel’s fate. Rising up against the Israeli condition.

(
photo credit 13.1
)

M
OHAMMED
’
S LIGHT BROWN EYES LOOK INTO MY EYES AS HE SAYS
, “You must understand it won’t work. Your Jewish mind came up with this Jewish-democratic invention, this intellectual conceit. But the invention won’t work. The conceit is untenable. So instead of talking throughout this long trip we’re going to take together, what we should do is sit down quietly and cobble together a new compact. Because you have no other ally. I am your only ally. Instead of going to the ultra-Orthodox Jews, you should come to me. Instead of trying to scare up half-Jews and quarter-Jews and eighth-Jews from every corner of the world and bringing them here to Israel, you should talk to me. Because I am here, in your backyard. I am here and I am not going anywhere. I am here for good.

“Talk to me,” the Palestinian-Israeli attorney Mohammed Dahla says. “Talk to
me
, give
me
your hand, make
me
your partner. Because, like it or not, you are a minority in the Middle East. And though your nation takes part in the Eurovision song contest and plays basketball in the European league, if you open an atlas and look at the map you will see three hundred fifty million Arabs all around you, and a billion and a half Muslims all around you. So do you really think that you can go on hiding in this artificial construct of a Jewish state? Do you really think
you can protect yourself with this contradiction of a Jewish democracy? To insist upon the Jewish character of the State of Israel is to live by the sword. And over time, you will no longer be able to do so. The world will change, the balance of power will change, demography will change. In fact, demography is already changing. Your only way to survive in the Arab-Muslim world is to strike an alliance with me. I am your only hope. If you don’t do it now, tomorrow may be too late. When you turn into a minority, you will come looking for me, but I won’t be here. By that time I will not be interested in whatever you’ll want to offer. It will be too late, my friend.”

Early in the morning, we set out on our journey from Jerusalem to the north. Driving from Gedera to Hadera, my friend and foe Mohammed Dahla says to me, “Look at this architecture, so foreign, so alien to the land. It’s as though some kind of invading force emerged from the sea and landed on the beach. There is no sensitivity to the terrain, no understanding of its features. The immigrants who arrived here from far away didn’t have a feel for the country and its history. They built with dizzying speed. They built tall and arrogant. But the buildings seem barely glued to the ground. They don’t rise from it, they don’t belong to it. That’s what makes them so incongruous. They are aggressive urban edifices with an unpleasant concrete face.

“And look at the road signs,” Mohammed says. “Most of them are in Hebrew and English, not Arabic. Because what you want is for tourists to travel around the country and believe that there really is a Jewish state here. But I am in your way, along with another 1.6 million Arabs. That’s why you find us so difficult. To keep your nice little fiction of a European-Jewish state, you try to hide our existence. You try to eradicate our landscape and our history and our identity.”

“Is the idea of a Jewish state totally unfounded?” I ask Dahla. “Don’t the Jewish people have the right to self-determination? Aren’t Jews allowed to have their own nation-state within the 1967 boundaries?” Dahla tells me that the Jewish people now living in the country have the right to self-determination. But one can understand why the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. And one must understand that there is no parity of rights here. “There is no balance between my right and your right,” he says. “At the outset, the Jews had no legal, historical,
or religious right to the land. The only right they had was the right born of persecution, but that right cannot justify taking 78 percent of a land that is not theirs. It cannot justify the fact that the guests went on to become the masters. At the end of the day, the ones with the superior right to the land are the natives, not the immigrants—the ones who have lived here for hundreds of years and have become part of the land just as the land has become a part of them. We are not like you. We are not strangers or wanderers or emigrants. For centuries we have lived upon this land and we multiplied. No one can uproot us. No one can separate us from the land. Not even you.”

Dahla was born in 1968 in the Galilee village of Turan. He studied hard and worked hard and made his way by himself. After excelling at the Hebrew University’s School of Law, he became the first Arab law clerk in Israel’s Supreme Court. In 1993 he opened what would become a flourishing law practice in Jerusalem, and in 1995 he was the co-founder of the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights (Adalah). In 2000, Dahla married Suhad, a lawyer and television presenter. Their first son, Omar, was born in 2002.

For two intense years, in the mid-1990s, Mohammed and I were co-chairs of the board of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). So as we travel north in his blue Mercedes, we conduct a conversation founded in a universe of shared values and concepts: human rights, minority rights, liberal democracy. But unlike previous conversations we have had, this time each of us brings with him his national history and perspective. And also his existential anxiety. This time Mohammed surprises me by unfurling for me his full worldview—and he tells me why he no longer believes in the partition of the land, in a two-state solution.

Growing up in a village, his identity was local, he tells me, the identity of a dutiful village son. Only at the university did he acquire a national Palestinian identity, and already then, the two-state solution seemed to him artificial and insufficient. It did not solve the problem of the Arabs of 1948 (the ones who remained in or returned to Israel after the war). Nor did it address the calamity of the Arabs expelled by the war. But when the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, he was temporarily persuaded that the only viable solution was the two-state solution.
Then in 2000 he realized it was hopeless. The peace process was actually a process of subjugating the Palestinian people to Israeli will and preserving occupation. Israelis were not ripe for a historic conciliation. They were not willing to give Palestinians their elementary rights. So there was no way but struggle. Israeli society had to be shaken, disrupted. And eventually the solution would be a binational solution, one democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: a state that would have a Jewish law of return and a Palestinian right of return. One political entity that would leave the settlers of Hebron where they are, as it would allow the refugees of the Palestinian villages destroyed after 1948 to return to their homes.

This is our second journey to the Galilee. In the first week of October 2000, Palestinian Israelis rioted throughout the north. What began as sympathy protests for the Palestinian cause after the failure of the Camp David talks quickly turned violent. Israeli police came under attack, and in response they shot dead thirteen Palestinian Israelis. On the last day of that brutal week, Mohammed took me in his Mercedes to see the fighting for myself. We visited a Jewish community that objected to Palestinians buying property within its limit. We visited the smoke-filled city of Umm el-Fahem just as the flames were dying down. We dropped in on Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the extremist Islamic movement. The bright-eyed sheikh talked about the abandoned mosques of ruined villages throughout the country and about the danger looming over the Al-Aqsa mosque, and he declared that the Jews had no historical rights to the Temple Mount and that their Temple Mount story was pure fiction. Then we went to a tent of mourning for a young
shaheed
—a martyr for the cause. In the village of Kana, the bereaved father who had just lost his seventeen-year-old son told us proudly that every day his boy came back from the demonstrations sorry that he had come back alive, until one day he did not come back alive. Then we walked around the empty streets and deserted restaurants of Nazareth. Everywhere we went, what struck us most was the silence, the mute silence of fear. It felt as if both the Israeli Jews and the Israeli Palestinians were terrified of what they had just done. As though both sides had taken refuge within their homes in a kind of voluntary curfew, while they waited anxiously for the future to unfold.

Now, though, two and a half years later, there are crowds everywhere,
of Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians. The Wadi Ara region is bustling with Jewish visitors. There is not a seat to be found in Nazareth’s restaurants. Hebrew speakers and Arabic speakers are scooping up hummus with pita side by side. Grilled meats are being ordered in loud Hebrew and loud Arabic. It’s as if peace has been restored and the wounds of October 2000 have healed. As if the riots never happened.

So when Mohammed and I walk once again through the doors of Sheikh Salah’s modest office, we are in for a surprise. The sheikh’s eyes are not as bright as they were, and his brow is furrowed. In reasonable Hebrew he tells me that Israel will soon attempt to expel the Arabs from this land. Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to make Umm el-Fahem part of the future Palestinian state is an elegant means of population transfer, he says. Now the feeling in the Arab villages is that history is repeating itself, that 1948 is about to happen again.