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.