Posted on 13-4-2004
Inside the bubble
Late last year, the award-winning novelist Linda Grant moved
to Tel Aviv
for four months. How could people bear to live there, she wanted
to know,
amid daily reports of violence, corruption and despair? What
she
discovered was a society in a state of profound denial - and
the
horrifying possibility that there may be no solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Thursday April 8, 2004, The Guardian
In October last year I went to Tel Aviv and rented an apartment
on Ruppin
Street, a couple of blocks from the sea. It is a quiet road,
lined with
palm trees and ficus shading Bauhaus buildings erected in the
1930s to
house the influx of refugees from Europe. I was not there to
cover the
occupation; plenty of others are busy with that important work.
My purpose
was private, and literary - to write a novel set in an imaginary
city in
an imaginary country whose inhabitants all come from somewhere
else; to
contemplate some questions about identity, belonging, suffering,
and how
or if the legacy of personal pain can be eased by various kinds
of
pleasure. I wrote in the mornings and in the afternoons, on
the block of
Ben Yehuda Street round the corner, with its cafes, stationers,
toy shop,
fruit-and-veg shop, hairdressers, synagogue, supermarket, manicurist
and
taxi dispatch office. And in chance encounters I asked the same
question
over and over again: Where did your family come from?
"Baghdad. We came in 1950 when I was seven, but my father
didn't like it
here and in 1960 we left. And do you know where we went? No,
not America.
Tehran. Jews!" "I was born here but my parents are
from Salonika in
Greece. They survived the war by fighting with the communist
partisans and
this is why we always vote for the left." "My parents
came from southern
India. There was a whole Jewish village, and everyone moved
here and set
up a kibbutz in the Negev, near Eilat, an Indian kibbutz where
I grew up."
"From Poland. My father was a stage designer in the theatre
in Warsaw in
the 1930s. He survived by playing in the orchestra of the Red
Army while
my mother was a slave labourer for the Nazis. We left in the
1960s when I
was six, because there was a new wave of anti-semitism."
"I'm from the
Kurdish part of Iraq. My family had been there since the exile
of the Jews
in Babylon, and my mother's food was the same food they cooked
at the time
of the Temple." "I come from Vilnius in Lithuania.
My father was in
Auschwitz. I suffered horribly from anti-Semitism in school
and we came
here in 1973, when I was eight. The Russians thought the Arabs
were going
to wipe us out so that's why they let us leave." "I
was born in South
Africa. My parents owned vineyards in Stellenbosch but they
were idealists
who couldn't stand living under apartheid, so after the state
of Israel
was born they sold everything and moved to a kibbutz. How do
you think
they feel now?"
As a hobby you could spend your life playing with DIY
solve-the-Middle-East-conflict kits, based on international
laws and UN
resolutions, and you wouldn't come close to understanding why
they won't
work. Because no solutions are possible without reference to
the deep,
subjective experience of both peoples, Israeli and Palestinian.
To explain
why a person does not behave rationally in accordance with the
strictures
laid down by political discourse, why his history, fears, ambitions
and
illusions will always override what he reads in a newspaper
editorial -
this is the task of the writer, and this is why I spent four
months
listening to ordinary Israelis talk about themselves. I hope
someone else
will go to Ramallah, the Tel Aviv of Palestine, and give voice
to their
counterparts on the other side of the green line.
Every morning in Tel Aviv, I walked down the street, bought
my copy of
Ha'aretz from the Australian newsagent and marathon runner,
Paul Smith
("Doesn't sound very Jewish, does it?"), went into
a small cafe, was
served my cappuccino by Ma'or, the skinny-hipped surfer dude
whose mother
came from Turkey and whose father was from Spain, and I opened,
with
trepidation, my newspaper. It was an excruciating experience.
In story
after story Israel emerged as a society in which every institution
of the
state was in a dire condition, at best incompetent, at worst
corrupt, only
a few tattered scraps left of the early high ideals of Zionism.
Members of
the Knesset, ministers, party leaders, prime ministers and generals
were
routinely exposed as liars and crooks; the army were lying,
the police
were lying, the government was lying. Soldiers spoke to me of
a "mental
scratch" - a psychological scar as a result of serving
in the army of
occupation. A woman who did her army service during the first
intifada
told me how she was inducted with boys from high school, and
saw them
cross what Israelis call a "red line" - holding a
gun to the head of a
terrified child, humiliating a Palestinian teacher at a checkpoint,
killing an unarmed civilian. "When they came home the red
line stayed
crossed, they began to treat their girlfriends and wives that
way, then
their own children," she said. "And these were people
I thought I knew,
people I'd grown up with."
Last summer Vicky Knafo, a single mother, walked from her home
in the
Negev to Jerusalem with an Israeli flag draped round her shoulders,
and
sat on the pavement outside Netanyahu's office in a protest
against his
Thatcherite budget proposals. At the same time a tent city of
homeless
people, nicknamed Bread Square, appeared at the Kikar HaMedina,
Tel Aviv's
most exclusive shopping district. A report published at the
end of last
year revealed that 20% of Israeli children are living below
the poverty
line. Army social workers are increasingly dealing with soldiers
who have
nowhere to go on weekend leave because their parents are homeless.
As I sat in the cafe reading, I wondered how the others there,
drinking
espresso and eating pastries, could bear to live with this terrifying
collapse of the promise of Zionism, and I would try to listen
in on their
conversations. A few words would emerge and I turned to the
back page of
the paper to find out what they were talking about. "Eyal
Berkovic . . .
Kevin Keegan . . . Manchester City . . . Portsmouth."
At first I didn't get it. How could people be so immune to the
horror that
was all around them? But it gradually sank in that what Hamas
and Islamic
Jihad have achieved with their bombs is a depoliticisation of
Israeli
society. I learned the four most important words in the Hebrew
vocabulary:
pigua (suicide bomb), hamatzav (the "situation"),
balagan (a big mess),
and bu'ah (the bubble you live in to protect you from the random
violence
of the piguim ). From a distance, suicide bombs look like terrorism's
sole
contribution to democracy, striking whether you are young or
old, Likud or
Meretz, powerful or destitute, military or civilian. But their
most
successful targets are the weakest sectors of society: the ones
who can't
afford a car, or are too young to drive (schoolchildren), and
those who
live in the densely-populated, working-class neighbourhoods
in the south
of the city which produce a higher kill rate than the quiet,
affluent
suburbs to the north.
Suicide bombings create small, self-enclosed worlds consisting
of family,
a few friends, and a tiny geography. You go to this supermarket
which is
not in a busy mall, this cafe which has an armed guard, drive
your kids to
school along this side road which isn't a bus route - and to
hell with
anyone you don't know or trust. This is your own personal bu'ah,
your
bubble, and no one who is not in it is above suspicion. What
is happening
in Gaza or Nablus - the curfews, the checkpoints, the terrifying
incursions of troops, the targeted assassinations, the collapse
of the
social infrastructure, the malnutrition, the cages in which
Palestinians
are fenced off like zoo animals - could be happening in Bosnia
instead of
a 25-minute drive away, because no one goes there except your
son the
soldier or your husband the reservist, and he doesn't talk about
what he's
seen because he can't. He doesn't have the emotional language
to express
it, who among us does? He comes home and gratefully re-enters
his bu'ah.
If I were an Israeli businessman, I'd invest in escapism, the
bu'ah's
wallpaper: foreign travel, home decor, kitchen equipment, the
National
Geographic channel on TV for the rich; soap operas and Spanish
"telenovelas" for the poor.
It is as if the government is simply a caretaker, changing the
light
bulbs, vacuuming the floors. It no longer has any meaningful
connection to
the mass of the population. "How did you vote in the last
election?" I
asked. "I didn't." Or, "I voted last time but
I won't again. Who is there
to vote for?"
Suicide bombings built the fence. It exists as a metaphor in
the minds of
Israelis, a kind of prophylactic against the HIV of terrorism.
Only a few
political activists I met, and some soldiers, had even laid
eyes on it.
The fence that was built - seen, rightly, by the Palestinians
as a de
facto annexation of Palestinian land to create wretched reservations
with
no work, no schools, no water and no rights - is not the fence
that
Israelis know about. And even if they did, they no longer care
what damage
is inflicted on their enemy. The murder of Israeli civilians
is not
contextualised by them as resistance by the desperate against
an occupying
power bristling with an advanced military arsenal and backed
with a blank
cheque from the world's most powerful nation. History operates
inside
their heads differently. "Sixty-one years ago, my son Yuval's
grandparents
were murdered in Poland," Yossi Mendelevitch, the father
of a 13-year-old
boy killed in a bus bombing in Haifa told me, as we stood examining
the
holes in the lane divides caused by the ball-bearings that tore
his son's
arm from his body. "That was their holocaust, this is his."
But the holocaust ended nearly 60 years ago, and how long can
a nation
live on the memory of past victimisation when it is itself now
the
victimiser? In the past decade more than a million people have
arrived in
Israel who have had direct experience of persecution and state
sponsored
anti-semitism: the Ethiopians who underwent harrowing death
marches across
the Sudan, suffering rape and murder in refugee camps, and the
Russians
who were second-class citizens in the Soviet Union with restricted
rights
to jobs and education. It is very difficult to maintain two
world views
inside your head simultaneously: that your family survived 70
years of
Soviet murder, that your father, a party gynaecologist, barely
got through
the Doctor's Plot, that you didn't get a job, or were turned
down for a
university place because you were a Jew - and at the same time
that you
are also the agent of a western colonial adventure to subjugate
and
conquer Arab lands. Some people can do it, but not many.
In Britain we are still debating if there is a genuine increase
in
anti-semitism, or if it is just a propaganda device to silence
criticism
of Israel. In Israel there is no such debate, because the press
far more
comprehensively reports anti-semitic incidents than the European
media,
and the steady stream of new immigrants arriving from France
tells its own
story. To Israelis the world seems no safer now than it did
when the state
was born. Academic boycotts, threats of sanctions, UN resolutions
- all
reinforce their sense of Jews as a people outside the community
of
nations, the eternal scapegoat. Such measures do not move the
population
to the left, but to the right: to fear, anxiety and paranoia,
to what I
thought of as political hypochondria ("I have a pain in
my foot, it must
be cancer; Arafat said this, the Arabs are going to drive us
into the
sea."). It is just rhetoric, I would say, rhetoric which
is all you have
if you are powerless. But the Israelis have a motto: "If
someone says he
is going to kill you, never give him the benefit of the doubt."
And it is
the parties of the right - and above all Ariel Sharon, who understand
Jewish anxiety, and feeds and fattens and flatters it - who
say, "We know
what you fear, don't worry, we'll protect you. With us, you
are strong."
None the less, behind closed doors, away from what they see
as a hostile
and biased European media, some Israelis are prepared to express
their
deepest feelings about what their country has become. Many Israeli
officials - not politicians, but state employees who represent
their
government at home and abroad - hacked open their chests and
showed me
their beating hearts. They were appalled by their government
and its
policies, by their politicians' lack of accountability, by being
asked to
lie in the service of the state. Civil servants urged me to
publicise the
Geneva accords, the reservists' protests, to keep the Israeli
left alive
in the eyes of the Europeans.
Grassroots protests, particularly by pilots and paratroopers,
some of the
most elite and patriotic sectors of society, have led to an
important
debate about what exactly the Israeli Defence Force is defending
in Gaza
and the West Bank. Young conscripts and reservists understand
that it is
impossible to wage a war against an enemy embedded in a civilian
population without committing crimes against humanity, including
your own.
Shlomo Lahat, the former Likud mayor of Tel Aviv, wrote a groundbreaking
article in Ha'aretz in January in which he said that the checkpoints
had
no function except to harass the civilian population. The targeted
assassination of Sheikh Yassin provoked criticism from mainstream
tabloid
newspapers such as the rightwing Maariv.
Yet despite these signs of optimism, which you must cherish
as if they
were your children, I left Israel more profoundly troubled than
when I
arrived, for a thought had occurred to me which was unbearable:
that at
its heart, indeed because of what is in the hearts of its people,
not just
its leaders, this conflict could be insoluble. Israelis, I believe,
will
surrender the territories in exchange for a final status agreement,
but
not one which they suspect the Palestinians see as the first
phase of
their struggle to reclaim the whole of Mandate Palestine. "If
we give them
Netzarim, suppose they come next for Tel Aviv?" people
asked me. I asked
to meet Danny Rubinstein, the Ha'aretz Arab affairs correspondent
whose
detailed, precise, factual reports from the occupied territories
are
admired even by Arafat. We had coffee one evening in a bookshop
cafe in
the square where Rabin was murdered and discussed the mantra
that has
taken hold of the Israeli public: "We have no partner for
peace," as if
Sharon were the Dalai Llama, and the settlers monkish pacifists
who would
hand over the deeds to their houses the moment Arafat publicly
renounced
violence.
How it works, Rubinstein told me, is that the Israeli right
uses the
Palestinian right of return as a bogeyman to frighten people
into
believing that there are no moderate Palestinians. In fact there
are
plenty who recognise that if there is to be an end to the occupation,
it
has to depend on the recognition by Palestine of Israel as Jewish
state,
he said. And this must mean that the right of return will be
settled by
financial compensation, and a recognition of the role Israel
played in
making them refugees, not a return to the actual homes in Jerusalem
and
Jaffa from which they were driven in 1948. What will happen
if they won't
surrender the right of return? I asked. He shook his head. "Then
it's
hopeless."
But there exists in Israel a far left that agrees with those
on the right
that the centre left, people like Rubinstein, are indeed deluded,
that
they have failed to comprehend that the bedrock of the Palestinians'
claim
- the one that is enshrined in international law and which no
politician
can sign away on their behalf - is the right of return not just
to their
houses but to their land, their country. Once Israelis accept
it, then the
two-state solution becomes an interim stage on the way to the
true destiny
of the two peoples: a single state solution, one person, one
vote, an end
to ethnic dominance. I put this to Hillel Schenker, co-managing
editor of
the Palestine-Israel Journal, the only publication jointly edited
and run
by both Palestinians and Israelis.
"These views resonate abroad, particularly among radical
Palestinians
opposed to the PA [Palestinian Authority] and anti-Zionist leftists,"
he
said, "but there is absolutely no meaningful constituency
in Israel that
will respond to an international struggle for a single state.
And given
the level of mutual trauma that both people are experiencing,
I doubt
whether one can find such a constituency among the Palestinians
in the
West Bank and Gaza either. The PLO and PA are committed to a
two-state
solution, while Hamas and some angry desperate refugees want
a Muslim
one-state solution."
To Gershon Baskin, co-director of the Israel-Palestine centre
for research
and information, the one-state solution is not utopia, but a
recipe for
genocide, "a plan that will, in my view," he writes,
"lead to decades of
cross-communal conflict and bloodshed that will turn Israel
and Palestine
into Sarajevo. (In Israel/Palestine we have had some 3,200 deaths
in three
years, in Sarajevo the conflict cost some 250,000 casualties
before people
came to their senses.)" Already, there is "a new generation
of Palestinian
and Israeli young people living in fear and breeding hatred.
The
collective memories and stories of this new generation are being
filled
with anger and deep desire to see the other side suffer."
After four months in Israel, and hundreds of hours of conversations,
I
found not a scrap of evidence that Jewish Israelis will ever
agree to a
peace deal that will result in them becoming, within a generation
or two,
a minority dependent on the good-will of a Palestinian majority
in a
region without democracy or any real human rights. As the novelist
David
Grossman told me, "There is not enough reassurance in the
galaxy for
Israelis." In an interview with Ha'aretz in August 2000,
Edward Said was
asked what would happen to the Jews if they became a minority
in a single
state: "It worries me a great deal," he said. "The
question of what is
going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I
really don't
know. It worries me."
I also know what some Palestinian friends tell me, that the
right of
return is deeply embedded in the Palestinian soul and can never
be given
up, that no leader can sign an agreement on their behalf which
would
settle it with a cheque instead. What I know about Jewish Israelis,
they
know about Palestinians. If they are right, then we might have
to face the
nightmare that the war between the two peoples cannot be concluded,
there
is no deal that can ever be signed that will not give way, almost
at once,
to the resumption of the struggle. No US administration, however
even-handed, can settle the dispute, or even impose a settlement,
over
land that can neither be shared nor divided.
I left Israel burdened by a sense of horror. A 10-month-old
Israeli baby,
Netta, sat in her mother's arms on the other side of the aeroplane
aisle,
smiling and gurgling and oblivious to the heavy storm winds
we were
passing through as we attempted to land in London. I looked
at her and,
imagining her future, wondered if it would turn out that there
were no
solutions, only consequences, all of them tragedies. The most
important
word in Hebrew is balagan : Oy, a balagan ! What a mess.
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