by Paul Theroux
“What are you going to do in Israel?”
“Look around, then leave.”
“What do you have in your pockets?”
“You want to search me?”
A woman approached. She muttered impatiently in Hebrew, and it had to have been, “What’s going on here?” The men muttered back at her, and showed her my passport.
“Yes,” she said. “This ship is Turkish. The people are all Turkish. But you—why are you on board?”
“Because they sold me a ticket.”
“Where did you buy it?”
“Istanbul,” I said.
And at this point, faced by Israeli Security and having questions barked at me, I was on the verge of asking whether this was a traditional Israeli way of greeting strangers: sharp questions and even sharper gun-muzzles in my face.
“What are you doing here?” the woman was asking me, as she leafed through my passport, the sixty pages filled, as you know, with exotic stamps—China, India, Pakistan, Fiji, New Guinea, Rarotonga, Great Britain, Albania. She flipped to the first page.
“Are you the writer?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. “I have read your books.” She said something in Hebrew to the security men. “Now I know why you are on that ship.”
“Thank you. Does that mean I can go?”
“Okay. No problem,” she said, and wished me well.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Akdeniz, the Cimonoglu family and others were being divested of their passports. “Because we are young—we have the whole family, even children, with us,” the mother, Aysegul, told me later. “They think we want to stay in Israel and take jobs! But we have jobs in Turkey! I will write an angry letter to the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul.”
What are you doing here? was a question I usually felt too ignorant to answer. My answer had to be: Just looking.
Curiosity was my primary impulse—sniffing around. But I also wanted to see things as they are, especially the aspects of any country that were likely to change. The look and the feel of a place, the people—what I could grasp of their lives. Politics seldom interested me, because there were too many sides, too many versions, too much concern with power and not enough with justice.
Most of the time I felt like a flea. I could not pretend that I was part of a place, that I had entered the life of it. I was a spectator, certainly, but an active one. I was also passing the time, and there was nothing unworthy about that. Most people like to think they are in search of wisdom. That was not my motive. Perhaps it was all very simple, even simpler than curiosity and that, in all senses of the phrase, I was making connections.
I walked off the ship and around the harbor and looked for the Seabourne Spirit. It was due in Haifa the following week, I was told. That was a pity. I had thought I might see Jack Greenwald again. I continued walking into town to buy some envelopes so that I could send some accumulated books and maps back to myself.
Walking along, I kept seeing the same series of books, the repeated title, The Land of Jesus, Das Land Jesu, La Tierra de Jesus, La Terra di Gesù, La Terre de Jésus.
The woman at the stationery store said, “Nine shekels.”
It was a word I never got tired of. I found it a slushy and comical word, filled with meaning. Shekels was like a euphemism for money, but it had other similar-sounding words in it—shackles and sickles and Dr. Jekyll, all money-lenders’ meanings. It was impossible for me to hear the word and not think of someone demanding money. At this point, I had no shekels.
“You can change dollars into shekels at the bank, or on the street—the black market,” she said. “The rate is three shekels and twenty agorot.”
But when I asked on the street, fierce men—Russians, Moroccans, Poles—said, “Two shekels, ninety agorot! Take it! That is the best price!”
“I want three shekels,” I said, though I did not care. I liked saying the word shekels.
A man selling hard-core porno videos from a pushcart on the street shouted, “No one will give you three shekels! You change money with me!”
The way these Israelis spoke to me had more significance than what they were saying. It was as though they were always giving orders, never inquiring or being circumspect. Other Israelis I dealt with that first day in Haifa were the same, and I noted the tone of voice and the attitudes, because they did not change in the succeeding days.
They were gruff, on the defensive, rather bullying, graceless and aggrieved, with a kind of sour and gloating humor. They were sullen, somewhat covert, and laconic. They seemed assertive, watchful and yet incurious; alert to all my movements, and yet utterly uninterested in who I was. I did not take it personally, because from what I could see they treated each other no better.
This abrupt and truculent behavior surprised me, especially as I had become accustomed in my week on the Akdeniz to elaborate Turkish courtesy, the greetings, the gratitude, the rituals of politeness. Turks almost never raised their voices in polite company, and they had a number of expressions for taking the blame for a mistake rather than risk causing offense. Dealing with other people, Turks tended to seek permission. Casually bumping into someone they said, Kasura bakmayan, “Please don’t notice my mistake.”
Some Israelis were as elaborate and Semitic in these courtesies as Turks and Egyptians had been, but there were few of these. They were silent or else muttering Sephardis, Moroccans, Algerians, Spaniards, with dark expressive eyes, and these people could be very polite. The rest were familiar in a Western way—European, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian; urbanized, exasperated. They sweated, they complained, they peered with goose-eyes and raised their voices. They looked uncomfortable and overdressed; they looked hot.
An address I had to find in Haifa was on Tzionut Street—Zionism Street. About ten years ago it had been called United Nations Street, because at the time Israel had been befriended by the U.N. and this was one of the ways they showed their thanks, crowning a city street with the name of the helpful organization. But in 1981 a resolution was passed by some countries in the General Assembly, equating Zionism with racism. The Israelis were so annoyed, they changed the name of Haifa’s United Nations Street to the hated word Zionism.
I was looking for the writer Emile Habiby, but he was not in his studio in Tzionut Street. He might be out of the country, a neighbor told me. Or perhaps I should try his home in Nazareth.
Haifa had the look of a colony, which is also the look of a garrison. Its new buildings looked out of place—imported, like foreign artifacts—on the heights of the hills, among them Mount Carmel, that bordered its harbor and its sea-level town of merchants. There were of course soldiers everywhere, and many people—not just the obvious soldiers—carried sidearms. The city did not have an obvious religious atmosphere either, and its secularism was jarring after all the expressive pieties of the Islamic world I had recently seen. The most conspicuous place of worship in Haifa was the enormous Baha’i temple—jeered at by Onan as “a ridiculous religion—not even a religion.” (He had the same disdain for Sufism: “They take the Koran and just fly away with it!”)
Just as I was surprised by the offhandedness and the truculence, I was pleased by many other aspects in Haifa that I had not expected. The food, for example. It was the cleanest, the freshest, the most delicious I had found since Italy—but it was less meaty than Italian food, and lighter. It was salads and fish and fresh bread, hummus and ripe fruit, just-squeezed juice and pure olive oil. It was not expensive. Everyone ate well.
The public transport was another pleasant surprise. There was a train to Tel Aviv. There were buses. From the bus terminal in Haifa you could go anywhere, every half hour, and because this was Israel there was not a town or village in Israel that was not reachable in a few hours. Jerusalem was an hour and three quarters. The Dead Sea was two hours. Nazareth was an hour. Tel Aviv about an hour. A bus to Cairo took half a day, which was nothing. President Clinton had just visited the previous week to be present at the signing of the Israe
l-Jordan Peace Accord. So there were buses to Amman, too.
The intellectual life of Israel was visible in terms of public lectures and bookstores—I had not seen such well-stocked bookstores since leaving Italy. Croatia’s were pathetic, Greece’s stocked school textbooks and women’s magazines, Turkey’s were no use to me, nor were Egypt’s. Israelis sold every sort of book and magazine, in all the languages that Jews spoke, which was almost all the languages of the world. There were museums with rich collections, classical music on the radio and symphony concerts. I like going to concerts, listening to live music; I went to two good ones in Israel. I could have gone to many more if I had stayed longer. Israelis complained of the high cost of living, and the high inflation, but nothing in Israel struck me as being very expensive.
And there was a suburban atmosphere which also made it seem peaceable if not downright homely and dreary. This first impression was borne out by my travels to other towns and cities, for so much of Israel had the texture and pace of a retirement community, and—alone among Mediterranean countries I saw—the whole land was noisy with the persistent whine of air conditioners.
Strangest of all, I felt a sense of safety. Perhaps it arose from the colonial look of the city, and the orderliness of the stores and streets. I never felt at risk—or rather I felt that I was among millions of people who were taking the same risk.
But of course you only feel very safe in Israel if you are ignorant. I did not know it then—I learned it by degrees—but Israel was in a terrible period, one of its worst cycles of murder and retribution. What I took to be somnolence was suspense.
Another thing I learned about Israel: never question a date, because everyone took liberties. A person might allude in one sentence to something that happened last week, and in the next breath he would be in the Bronze Age, quoting the Torah and mentioning Egyptians at the time of Moses, making it all seem like it was yesterday. It was poetic license, but it was often the basis of Israeli political or military decisions. Egyptians claimed that on the walls of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was written “Greater Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile!” It was not merely a misquotation, but a misrepresentation of Genesis 15:18 in which God promises Abram and descendants all land, from the Euphrates to the river of Egypt, which is not the Nile but the Sea of Reeds. On the other hand, “God gave it to us” is not usually the equivalent of a Purchase and Sale Agreement.
The same doubtful history and wobbly logic made it normal for Israeli immigrant citizens from Morocco and New York City and Kiev to think of themselves as Israelites, and Israeli life today as a rehash of the Torah, in which the chosen people were taunted and held captive and laid siege to by idol-worshiping pagans. They never used the word “Palestinians”—always saying “Arab” instead, because it depicted an upstart horde and served to make Israelis seem the underdogs (there were so many more Arabs in the Middle East than there were Palestinians). Egyptians avoided the word Arab too. They were part of the same theater of self-dramatization. This was the land of the Pharaohs, they said; they were pharaonic. “We built the pyramids!”
So the Israelis were not alone in taking liberties, but it made life rather confusing for a traveler when Mediterranean peoples were so busy misrepresenting themselves. Most inhabitants of its shores took the most fanciful liberties with their ancestry. In fact, though no one ever said so, the Mediterranean was almost devoid of aborigines.
Anyway, I took the train down the coast from Haifa to Tel Aviv. Israeli Railways was celebrating its centenary. A hundred years ago Israeli Railways did not exist, of course; but who had built this line? Probably the British.
Something that bothered me greatly were the numerous people traveling armed with rifles, usually large and very lethal-looking ones, and pistols. Most of those people were soldiers and one of the characteristics of Israeli soldiers on trains and buses was their fatigue. They always looked sleepy, overworked, and no sooner were they on a seat than they were asleep, and I often found that their weapons bobbled in their arms were pointed directly at me.
This happened on my very first ride, as a soldier in the seat opposite made himself comfortable to sleep, put his feet up and propped his Uzi automatic rifle, so that it was horizontal in his lap, and it slipped as he dozed, and was soon pointing into my face.
I said, “Excuse me,” because I was afraid to tap his arm and risk startling him and the weapon discharging.
He did not wake, but after a while I raised my voice, and asked him to take his rifle out of my face.
Grumbling, without apology, he shifted in his seat and moved his rifle so that it was pointing at the woman across the aisle, who was so engrossed in reading a medical textbook, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease, that she did not notice the man’s weapon.
“Now it’s pointing at her,” I said.
He slapped and pushed the rifle, and though it was still not upright as it should have been, he grunted and went back to sleep.
Walking up and down the crowded coach, I counted the weapons: two in the next row, a frenzied man in a white shirt with a nickel-plated revolver, a soldier two rows back with a pistol and a rifle, ditto the soldier next to him, a woman in uniform lying across two seats with her big khaki buttocks in the air and a pistol on her belt, seven more armed passengers farther down. My feeling is that all weapons are magnetic—they exert a distinct and polarizing power, and nearly all attract violence. The gun carrier’s creed is: Never display a weapon unless you plan to use it; never use it unless you shoot to kill.
For the first time on my trip I suspected I was traveling in a danger zone. I had never seen so many weapons. And yet, as I said, I did not feel that I was personally threatened. That was one of the many paradoxes of Israel: it was a war zone and yet it was one of the most monotonous places imaginable.
We passed Carmel Beach, some condos going up, and a sign, “The Riviera of Israel.” It was rubble and rocks and, farther on, dunes. The coast had the look of a shoreline that had been leveled so that it could be defended. There were no obstructions, it was all visible, nowhere for a landing party to hide. In military jargon such a landing was called “an insertion”—a rapid on-shore penetration by stealth under the cover of darkness, men leaping out of small boats and hitting the beach. Many had been attempted, but few had succeeded. The very idea, though, that such military actions were contemplated here made this section of coast south of Haifa unlike its Riviera namesake.
At Binyamina and beyond was the reality of the country—that it was really very empty and underpopulated, that the garrison mentality is strong (people living in places they can defend) and that it was agricultural, intensively cultivated in many places, banana groves set out with precision and order, grape and vegetable fields beneath the green and rocky hills of Har Horshan.
The orchards and citrus groves I had expected to see in Israel were there on the coast near Netanya, with rows of eucalyptus, the gum trees that were used everywhere as giant quick-growing fences and windbreaks. Plenty of fruit trees, and canals, and craters and scrubby ditches; but where were the people? This coast was one of its most populous regions and yet it was thinly settled.
The settlement of Hertzliyya was celebrating fifty years of prosperity, and agriculture flourished there, too. But with such subsidies, so it should have. It seemed to me much more extraordinary that Mediterranean countries that did not receive three billion dollars a year in foreign aid were growing fruit and running schools and defending themselves.
Approaching Tel Aviv, I saw for the first (and last) time on the shore of the Mediterranean a drive-in theater. It was beside the tracks, and also beside the sea. It was advertising a double feature in Hebrew on the marquee.
That was appropriate enough, for no city in the entire Mediterranean looks more like an American concoction than Tel Aviv. It was wrong to compare it (as many people did) to Miami and its tangle of suburbs. Tel Aviv was both more sterile and less interesting, and it was strangely introverted; its st
reets were lifeless, its different cultures, and its tensions, masked.
So what was it? Tel Aviv had no Mediterranean look, nor anything of the Levant in its design; it was Israeli in the sense that Israeli architecture and city planning is an American derivative. Somewhere on the east coast of Florida there must be a city that Tel Aviv resembles, a medium-sized seaside settlement of ugly high-rise buildings and hotels, a shopping district, a promenade by the sea, not many trees; a white population watching gray flopping waves under a blue sky.
Did the appearance of it mean anything? I spoke to some people in Tel Aviv. I began to think that what was visible in Israel was less important than what was felt.
“You know about the bombing?” a man named Levescu said to me, utterly dismissing a question I had asked him about the look and the texture of Tel Aviv. He waved away what I had said with an irritable gesture. “Twenty-five people! On a bus! An Arab!”
“Yes, I read about it,” I said. “Terrible.”
“Terrible!”
This tragedy had put Tel Aviv in the news for having had one of the worst massacres in recent Israeli history: twenty-five dead, forty-eight people wounded. That had happened only a week before.
“It was revenge, wasn’t it?”
“Revenge—for what? It was murder!”
Some months before, in Hebron, a man named Baruch Goldstein had entered the Shrine of the Patriarchs (a mosque, but also a synagogue, where Abraham, Rebecca, Leah, Isaac and Jacob are entombed) during prayers, perhaps with the connivance of Israeli soldiers—after all, Goldstein was heavily armed—and howled, “No Arab should live in the biblical land of Israel!” He machine-gunned twenty-nine men to death, severely wounded over a hundred men, and was himself beaten to death.
The members of the Palestinian group Hamas (an Arabic acronym but also meaning enthusiasm or ardor or zeal) had vowed revenge. The Tel Aviv suicide bomb was their reply.
“There will be no dialogue with Hamas,” Prime Minister Rabin had said on Israeli television. “We will fight to the death!”