I intended for my first visit to be as a tourist. Shachar, an Israeli friend from Oxford, invited Janyce and I to stay with him in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2006. Then war erupted between Israel and Hezbollah, followed by an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. Both were in full swing when we approached passport control at Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv. The female official at the counter was wearing an olive-green uniform and looked to be about eighteen. She glanced at Janyce and her passport and waved her through. Flipping through mine took a little longer.
“Where’s this visa from?” she asked.
“Iran.”
“And this one?”
“Lebanon.”
The girl lifted her eyes from my passport. “Have you been to any other Arab countries?”
Iranians aren’t Arabs, I thought, but bit my tongue. “I think there’s a visa from Syria in there, too.”
“Wait here.”
She walked away to speak with an older woman in civilian clothes. Janyce, waiting on the other side of passport control, saw all this and came back. “You two are together?” the older woman asked when she returned to the counter.
Janyce considered the question. “Yes,” she said finally, with what sounded like regret.
The woman said she was with security but didn’t specify which branch. She asked me a lot of questions, especially about my relationship with Shachar, whose mobile number I fortunately had kept handy. She took this and then directed us to a room full of Arabs who looked drawn and tired, as if they had been stuck there a long time. Several wore sports jackets worn thin at the elbows. One continuously fiddled with a cigarette pack — pulling out a cigarette, tapping it twice against the arm of his chair, and replacing it.
After three hours, the woman returned and I was officially allowed into Israel. Shachar met us on the other side of customs with a bemused grin and hugged us both. “You’re lucky you weren’t strip-searched,” he said.
My job with Maclean’s, and the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, meant I ended up working during the planned vacation. But even during downtime, the wars were hard to avoid. Black Hawk helicopters buzzed the beach at Tel Aviv as they flew north to Lebanon. We went out for dinner with a reservist friend who had packed his army bag earlier in the day and was waiting to rejoin his unit. When we visited Shachar’s parents north of Tel Aviv, a Hezbollah rocket hit near the hometown of some of his relatives. Shachar’s mother, while cooking dinner for at least eight of us, held a lit cigarette aloft with one hand, tucked a phone under her ear with a shrugged shoulder, and called family to make sure everyone was safe. Shachar’s grandmother, who had fled Germany in the 1930s and was well into her eighties, was cheerfully philosophical. “You can’t pick your neighbours,” she said.
Two years later, I was back, sitting in the cool and shaded office of David Rubinger’s home in the German Colony of Jerusalem. Rubinger’s adult life has encompassed the length of Israel as a modern state. He was born in Vienna and was a young student there when the Nazis occupied Austria. In gym class one day, the principal came in and told all the Jewish kids to get dressed and go home. A few weeks later, his father was deported to the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. “He came home a skeleton, crying,” Rubinger said. His father got an exit visa to go to Britain. Rubinger and his mother did not. He escaped to Palestine. She perished in the Holocaust.
In Palestine, Rubinger joined the British army’s Jewish Brigade. Later, on leave in Paris, he met a French girl, Claudette, in a bar while he was waiting to go to an opera with a friend. “We didn’t go to the opera that night,” he told me with a meaningful look. “We had better things to do.” Claudette later walked him to the train station to begin his trip back to Palestine. Before they parted, she gave him a camera and launched the career of Israel’s most iconic photographer.
When I met Rubinger, then eighty-three, he sported a goatee and still had a thick, muscular frame. White chest hair spilled out of his shirt. He had an open and somewhat wry manner of speaking. “My office is a mess,” he said, nodding at my notebook. “Make sure you describe it.”
His office was a mess — papers strewn everywhere. But it was also soothing. The harsh sun outside was blocked by the trees and cascading flowers in his yard. On the walls were prints of his photographs. Rubinger had got to know most of Israel’s prime ministers, and many of their images hung in his office. One, of Ariel Sharon, was signed and addressed to “My friend, who will never vote for me.” Elsewhere hung the photograph for which Rubinger is most known, reproduced on posters and cards and sold all over Israel. It depicts a moment during the 1967 Six-Day War shortly after Israeli forces captured the Western Wall — all that remains of the Jewish Second Temple in Jerusalem. Three paratroopers pause beneath the wall, one with his helmet in his hands, another with his arms around his comrade’s shoulders. For many who see it, it captures a moment when anything and everything seemed possible. A tiny country had stared down death and was now poised for great things.
“I was crying when I took that picture,” Rubinger said. “I didn’t cry because the Western Wall is holy. I couldn’t care less about those stones. It was the relief. Suddenly, you’re not doomed any longer. Three weeks before, we were living in a feeling of total doom. We were sure that we were facing another Holocaust. The stadium in Tel Aviv was planned as a burial ground for 40,000 people. Now, if they put you up on the gallows, put the rope around your neck, just when they’re about to let it drop you’re not in a very good mood. You’re scared. You’re probably shitting your pants. And then somebody comes up, takes off the rope and says, no, no, you’re pardoned. And not only are you pardoned, you’re rich, and a millionaire, and a king. You’ll go nuts.”
This, according to Rubinger, is what segments of Israeli society did when they rushed to settle Israel’s newly captured territory. “Many people who were even slightly religious felt that a victory like this couldn’t be man-made. It was divine. That was the moment when the messianic movement was born, the settlers. ‘God has given it to us, and we’re not allowed to reject it. Because it’s God’s gift.’ I cried because of relief. But for many religious people, this was a religious experience. ‘God saved us. We were doomed, and God gave us a sign that all of Israel is ours. We’ll settle the land, and to hell with the Arabs. And the word occupation doesn’t exist, because God has given it to us.’”
Victory in the Six-Day War was, Rubinger said, the greatest disaster that could have befallen the country. “If you quote me only on that, I’ll kill you,” he added. “Because there could have been one greater disaster — not to win.”
Anything short of victory in the 1967 war would have been a disaster for Israel, and the Jewish people. But the consequences of victory — namely the settlement of occupied territories — have fundamentally weakened Israel, because they undermined its foundation as a Jewish and democratic state. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has put it in control of millions of Muslim and Christian Arabs who don’t enjoy the rights of citizens and therefore have no say over the government that has ultimate control over their territory. Within a generation or two, these Arabs will outnumber Jews in all the land that Israel controls. When that happens, if there is still no Palestinian state (and in the absence of large-scale ethnic cleansing), Israelis will be forced to choose between two futures. Their country will either be Jewish, but not demographic — in other words, a Jewish minority will control a land mostly inhabited by Palestinians — or Israel will be democratic, but not Jewish, because Arabs will form the majority in what will become a bi-national state.
Demographers differ over population predictions, but it is indisputable that the Palestinian population is increasing faster than the Jewish one. Sooner or later, they will reach parity. Analysts can argue over when this will happen, but it seems irrelevant to me whether Israeli Jews make up forty or sixty per cent of the population in all the land Israel controls fifty years from now. Israel’s founders imagined a Jew
ish and democratic state. Most Israelis want the same thing. And a state cannot claim to be democratic when so many of its residents aren’t citizens. Pragmatic Israeli politicians have long recognized the threat occupation poses to Israel. “I’m telling you plainly that we don’t need the West Bank,” the Zionist leader and politician Zalman Aran said following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. “It will do us more harm than good. We will choke on it.” More recently, in 2007, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would be “finished” if a two-state solution collapsed and Palestinians instead campaigned for equal rights in a bi-national state. Israel, he warned in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, would then “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens the state of Israel is finished…. The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”
For Rubinger, the photographer, the harm Israel inflicts on itself through occupation is less tangible but more profound. “The occupier always gets morally weaker, while the occupied gets stronger,” he said. “If you’re the underdog, your morality, your moral strength, is much stronger. So it eats into our social makeup. We were much better before 1967 — more social justice, more moderate. Our leaders didn’t smoke fat cigars. Ben Gurion used to apologize when he came in with a tie and say, ‘Excuse my working clothes.’ He used to brag that his driver had a greater salary than he did, because his driver had eight children. That was the spirit we had of egalitarianism and idealism. That was all gone after 1967. Our whole social structure has been weakened. That’s what I mean when I say occupation hurts us more than the Arabs. People call us leftists Arab lovers. I’m a leftist because I’m a Jew lover. I think we are going with our eyes open toward catastrophe by insisting that everything can be done by force.”
As the Second World War drew to a close, members of the British army’s Jewish Brigade, in which David Rubinger served, turned their efforts toward smuggling Jewish survivors of the Holocaust into Palestine. Despite opposition from the British, more than 200,000 European Jews successfully reached Palestine. Among them was Margalit Zisman, barely twenty when the war ended, who survived the Holocaust hiding in Belgium. Jewish Brigade soldiers told her about Gush Etzion, a group of Jewish settlements on the northern slopes of Mount Hebron, south of Jerusalem. The weather was good, they said, and the landscape beautiful. Her parents didn’t want her to emigrate alone, so she married another Zionist, Akiba Galandaver. It was a difficult journey. They slept under tables on the boat that took them to Palestine and settled in Kfar Etzion, one of the village kibbutzim that made up the Gush Etzion settlement block.
For a while, Zisman said, life was happy there. She said residents of the Jewish villages in Gush Etzion worked with local Arabs, and the two communities invited each other to their weddings. This changed on November 29, 1947, when the United Nations approved a plan to divide Palestine into two provisional states — one Jewish and one Arab. The Arabs rejected the plan, and civil war commenced in Palestine. Gush Etzion fell within the area that was to be allotted to the Arabs. It was deep inside what is now the West Bank and was soon besieged by Arab irregulars and the Jordanian Arab Legion. The Haganah, the main Jewish paramilitary force, nevertheless decided not to evacuate the block, with the exception of women and children, who were pulled out in January 1948 with British assistance.
Kfar Etzion was overrun in May. Its surviving residents, soldiers, and civilians, including Zisman’s husband, Akiba Galandaver, were massacred, with the exception of three men and one woman. Zisman had left before the assault with her young son, Shilo, and survived. “For a year and a half we couldn’t get the bodies, the bones still there,” Zisman said when I interviewed her at her kitchen table. She offered cookies and spoke in the French of her Belgian childhood. “We were asking for the bones all this time. But they wouldn’t give them to us. They were cruel, very cruel. When we did get the bones, they were all jumbled together. We couldn’t separate them person by person, so we buried everybody together.”
Israel recaptured Gush Etzion in the 1967 war and resettled the area. “My father gave his life for this place,” Shilo said. “My brother and I were the first to come back.” Zisman waited until 2003 to return, moving into a village she had last lived in more than fifty years earlier. “It had strong emotions for me,” she said. For Zisman, victory in the Six-Day War and the settlement of captured territories was not the disaster described by Rubinger. It was justice. She wasn’t worried about an eventual Jewish minority governing a land increasingly inhabited by Arabs should Israel retain control of the West Bank. “To keep a democracy, sometimes you need to do non-democratic things,” she said. “If Israel wants to commit suicide, then it can make democracy sacred.”
“We believe that this land was promised to our forefathers during biblical times,” Shilo added. “It is impossible to explain the history from a rational point of view. There is a hand directing both the Shoah (Holocaust) and the creation of Israel.”
Zisman is one of some 280,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Another 200,000 or so live in the eastern suburbs of Jerusalem. Some live there for economic reasons. Others, more vocal and politically influential, believe the West Bank — or Judeau and Samaria, as they prefer to call it — is an unassailable part of Israel, which they, as Jews, have a duty to settle.
Nadia Matar is one of the latter, a very public face of the right-wing settler movement and co-chair of the pro-settlement group, Women for Israel’s Tomorrow. Animated and energetic, Matar was born in Belgium, but her accent, when she speaks English, reflects the American origins of her husband. “I understood that if I wanted to be part of Jewish history and make Jewish history, I had to come and live here in Israel,” she told me.
Matar lived in Efrat, a West Bank settlement located, as she put it, between the holy cities of Jerusalem and Hebron. She described herself as “modern Orthodox” and wore jeans and a baseball cap. When I visited her house, orange ribbons adorned the front lawn, showing her solidarity with Jewish settlers who had been forcibly evacuated from Gaza a few years before. A large wall hanging dominated one of the walls in her living room. “For Jerusalem’s sake, we will not be silent,” it read, paraphrasing a verse from the Book of Isaiah.
Matar explained her activism by saying that she wanted to show that it was not only Israeli extremists who were opposed to giving away Jewish land. She had a presentation prepared for me and delivered it rapid-fire, complete with brightly-coloured laminated maps. One compared the size of Israel to Lake Winnipeg. Another showed that historic Israel included the West Bank and Gaza, and also Jordan. She paused briefly. “But Jordan is another country, so what can we do?”
At one point, I mentioned the obvious — that none of the maps she revealed depicted any sort of Palestinian territory.
“There is no Palestinian state,” she said. “There are twenty-two Arab states here, and they have the gall to demand that I give away half my country that is the size of Lake Winnipeg. It would be like Bush, after September 11, saying that we need to compromise for peace and give up Manhattan.”
Her presentation had the feel of a pitch designed for young teenagers, and indeed Matar said she often speaks at local schools. It ended with a photograph of her extended family, all of whom were all murdered at Auschwitz. That, she concluded, is why Israel cannot give up land in Judea and Samaria.
“The new Nazism today is Islam. And they want to do it to me first, and you next,” she said. “This isn’t a war about borders. This is a war against the Judeo-Christian world. Muslims see us as a cancer on the body of the Middle East. Israel is only the hors d’oeuvre. First Israel, then Europe, where they have hundreds of thousands of Muslims just waiting to start the intifada, then North America, Canada. We have to do to them what the Americans did to the Nazis. Kill all their lea
ders. Kill all the collaborators. Then we’ll find those willing to make peace.”
Matar said Israel must annex the West Bank and Gaza. When asked how Israel could continue to exist as a Jewish state were Palestinians to form the majority, she seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “I’m not going to give them voting rights,” she said. “I will give them the basics of basics and do everything to make them want to leave. If there’s a democracy, they’ll use my democracy to succeed in what they wanted to do by terror. Democracy isn’t something holy. What worries me is that you worry about their rights. What about the rights of Jews to live?”
But, Matar said, the status of Arabs in an expanded Israeli state is problem for the future. “I wish we could reach that stage where we need to decide where to put them. First we need to have a government that destroys the entire terrorist structure that Shimon Peres brought in here,” she said, referring to the Israeli president and former prime minister whose negotiations with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization led to the signing of the Oslo Accords, for which he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
“I’m in favour of having a system in which any major decision for this country is taken by a Jewish majority. If that means giving less rights to the Israel Arabs, then yes. Everyone knows that there is another war coming, and in the war we’ll have to do what we have to do to make it clear to them that this is a Jewish state, whether that means expelling them or buying their land or telling them to go to Canada.”
Matar’s willingness to consider expelling Israeli Arabs exists on the outskirts of Israeli society. But even its minority acceptance is worrying to the approximately twenty per cent of Israelis who are Muslim or Christian Arabs. Most are the descendants of those who fled or were driven out of Palestine during the wars of 1947 and 1948. Fathi Furani’s family home was in Safed, a once predominantly Arab city in Galilee where some twenty Jews were massacred in 1929. Jewish forces drove out most Arab residents of the town in 1948. It is now almost entirely Jewish. Furani, who was six years old at the time, went to visit his family’s former house about a dozen years ago.
Is This Your First War? Page 17