My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  In 1954 Barak graduated from high school with honors. Because he wanted to continue studying, he didn’t join a kibbutz but studied law at the Hebrew University. By 1956 there was a consensus among the Jerusalem faculty: Aharon Barak was a judiciary genius. When he married and set up house in 1957, many of his friends had no doubt that one day the young groom would be Israel’s chief justice.

  At Lydda airport Louise Aynachi discovered that half of the suitcases she sent from Baghdad were gone and the others had been broken into. The family had no clothes, no food, and the children were crying. From the airport she was taken to a cold room at the end of the terminal. A brusque nurse went through her hair, looking for lice. Although she didn’t find any, without giving notice, she sprayed Louise’s hair and body with DDT. Then she sprayed Louise’s husband, Naim, and then their children, Huda, Nabil, and Morris. Naim was shocked: “From whence have we come,” he asked, “and how far have we fallen?”

  After the Aynachi family filled out all sorts of bureaucratic forms, the Jewish Agency staff put the family on a truck. For three hours the truck rocked along in the dark, heading for an unknown destination. It arrived at what seemed to be a military camp: army tents surrounded by barbed wire. Louise tried to quell her fears so that her children would not be frightened. She took whatever belongings were left and piled them up in the corner of their assigned army tent. She did her best to put the children to bed on the straw pillow and under the straw blanket. The next morning, when Naim woke up, he was bursting with rage. “In Iraq we were distinguished guests at the king’s palace, and here we are nothing. We are not respected, we are not honored, we have no property. We are nothing but homeless refugees in a tent.”

  One blow followed another. Before the Aynachis had left Baghdad, the Iraqi government had confiscated their assets because they had chosen to immigrate to Israel. When they arrived in Israel it turned out that the small amount of money that Naim had managed to smuggle out via Iran had been stolen by the moneychanger he had put his faith in. On top of that was the DDT, the humiliation of life in a tent, the condescending attitude of veteran Israelis, the scornful attitude of the Ashkenazi immigrants. And the fact that in Israel, Jewish Baghdad was not perceived as the cradle of a great civilization but as the unknown territory of barbarians. Within one week, the Aynachi family experienced a sudden fall from paradise to humiliation and depravation.

  Louise held on. Even when it became clear that the money would not arrive, she didn’t crack. Even as she struggled in the chaos of the refugee camp, she stood firm as she confronted the insults and the degradation. She pretended that all was well for the children’s sake, that this was some sort of sandy summer camp and not the end of the world. Just a short detour on the way to a new adventure and to a new life in a new land that would eventually reveal to them its milk and honey.

  From the Atlit immigrant camp the Aynachi family was transported to a ma’abara near Netanya—from a tent to a tin hut, from dampness to heavy heat, from shock to depression. Yet after a few months Naim found an apartment in Holon, a southern suburb of Tel Aviv. He found work in Tel Aviv’s Atara coffeehouse. The apartment was nothing like the villa on the Tigris, and work in a coffeehouse was nothing like the work of a textile executive. But there was a home for the eight family members that Naim was taking care of (grandparents, aunt, wife, and children), and his job was not shameful. So after a year Louise felt that they were rising from the deep pit into which they had fallen. Unlike many other men who had emigrated from Iraq, Naim was not broken, he was only very sad. For his remaining days, Naim would remain sad.

  More bitter was the fate of Louise’s father. Less fortunate than his son-in-law, Eliyahu Yitzhak Baruch did not find a suitable job in Israel. His property, assets, and money were lost when he left Iraq. And when he and his wife left the immigrant camp, they had to settle for a shabby one-room apartment in Struma Square in Holon. Each morning Eliyahu Yitzhak Baruch left the one-room apartment for the Lodzia women’s undergarment factory; throughout the day, the former train company executive would stand by the gate of the factory with a peddler’s cart trying to sell gum, candy, and chocolate to the impoverished workers. And each evening when he returned to his small apartment in Struma Square, Eliyahu Yitzhak Baruch remembered the Tigris. His heart would cry as he remembered the Tigris, until it could no longer endure the pain and stopped beating.

  By the time I am born, in November 1957, the State of Israel is a triumph. The borders are quiet, the economy is booming, the population is approaching two million. The decisive victory in the 1948 war gave birth to the nation, and the decisive victory in the 1956 Sinai campaign has stabilized it. The superhuman endeavor to absorb nearly a million immigrants was a success. Twenty new cities, four hundred new villages, two hundred thousand new apartments, and a quarter million new jobs attest to an unprecedented historical achievement. By now Svern Sternhell has become Lieutenant Sternhell, who has left the IDF for the Hebrew University to study history and political science. Ervin Appelfeld has become Aharon Appelfeld, who is assembling his first collection of short stories. Erik Brik has become Aharon Barak, who is about to receive his law degree summa cum laude. Louise Aynachi is still struggling in a Holon immigrant quarter, but her three children have gradually adjusted to their new homeland. After a decade of war and frenzied state building, bordering in pace on the maniacal, the first signs of stability appear. The young state ceases to be a makeshift camp. It is no longer perceived as a crazy adventure but as a solid political fact. True, there is no peace. The Arab world still looks upon the Jewish state as an artifice, temporary and despicable. But there is no war, either. The victories of 1948 and 1956 are deterring the enemy. A new alliance with France equips the Israeli Air Force with the most modern fighter jets: Ouragans, Mystères, Super-Mystères. West Germany and Great Britain also assist the resolute state, which had proved just a year earlier that it was capable of reaching the Suez Canal. Relations with the United States are good, relations with the Soviet Union are reasonably good. The world watches the Jewish phoenix rise from the sand. Israeli orange groves, Israeli archaeology, and Israeli science raise international interest and admiration.

  The autumn I am born, Rehovot, the city I am born in, is getting ready to inaugurate a nuclear physics department. Niels Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer are about to come to the Weizmann Institute to pay tribute to the promising young physicists of the promising young state. At the very same time, Tel Aviv’s new performing arts center, the Frederic R. Mann Auditorium, is opened. Arthur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, and Leonard Bernstein come to nine-year-old Israel to celebrate with the fine musicians and the enthusiastic audience of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The national project of draining the swamps of Lake Hula in the Galilee is completed. The first supermarket is set to open in Tel Aviv.

  As the Russians launch their first Sputnik into space, Israeli newspapers stick closer to home, reporting a staggering rise in refrigerator and washing machine sales. The economic boom and German reparations awaken old appetites: dozens of delicatessens open in central Tel Aviv. As Israel gears up for its tenth birthday, there is a strong sense of achievement and even wonder. A First Decade Exhibition is planned, to be held in the summer of 1958 in Jerusalem, to highlight Israel’s success. The message will be that Israel is now the most stable and most advanced nation in the Middle East. It is the most remarkable melting pot of the twentieth century. The Jewish state is a man-made miracle.

  But the miracle is based on denial. The nation I am born into has erased Palestine from the face of the earth. Bulldozers razed Palestinian villages, warrants confiscated Palestinian land, laws revoked Palestinians’ citizenship and annulled their homeland. By the socialist kibbutz Ein Harod lie the ruins of Qumya. By the orange groves of Rehovot lie the remains of Zarnuga and Qubeibeh. In the middle of Israeli Lydda, the debris of Palestinian Lydda is all too apparent. And yet there seems to be no connection in people’s minds between these sites and the people who occupied
them only a decade earlier. Ten-year-old Israel has expunged Palestine from its memory and soul. When I am born, my grandparents, my parents, and their friends go about their lives as if the other people have never existed, as if they were never driven out. As if the other people aren’t languishing now in the refugee camps of Jericho, Balata, Deheisha, and Jabalia.

  Denial has its reasons. In the first decade, the unique endeavor of nation building consumes all of the young state’s physical and mental resources. There is no time and no place for guilt or compassion. The number of Jewish refugees that Israel absorbs surpasses the number of Palestinian refugees it expelled. And all the while, the vast Arab nation doesn’t lift a finger to help its Palestinian brothers and sisters. In 1957, most Palestinians don’t yet define themselves as a distinct people. They do not have a mature and recognized national movement. The world feels sorry for them, but the world denies them political rights and does not recognize them as a legitimate national entity. It is therefore not without reason that Israel chooses to see the Arab-Israeli conflict as a conflict between states, a conflict between the Israeli David and the Arab Goliath. It is a conflict that marginalizes the Palestinian tragedy, viewing it as some sort of unpleasant peripheral issue.

  And yet this denial is astonishing. The fact that seven hundred thousand human beings have lost their homes and their homeland is simply dismissed. Asdud becomes Ashdod, Aqir becomes Ekron, Bashit becomes Aseret, Danial becomes Daniel, Gimzu becomes Gamzu, Hadita becomes Hadid. The Arab city of Lydda is now the new immigrants’ city of Lydda. A dozen towns and hundreds of villages and thousands of sites receive new identities. An enormous refugee rehabilitation project is carried out in the homes and fields of others who are now refugees themselves.

  Yet the denial of the Palestinian disaster is not the only denial the Israeli miracle of the 1950s is based upon. Young Israel also denies the great Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century. True, the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem is being built in Jerusalem. Every April, Israel marks the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. And in wheeling and dealing with the international community, the tragedy of European Jewry is mentioned and used. But within Israel itself, the Holocaust is not given space. The survivors are expected not to tell their stories. A dozen years after the catastrophe, the catastrophe has no place in local media and art. The Holocaust is only the low point from which the Zionist revival rose. The Israeli continuum rejects trauma and defeat and pain and harrowing memories. Furthermore, the Israeli continuum does not have room for the individual. That’s also why the Holocaust remains abstract and separate. It’s not really about the people living among us. The message is clear: Quiet now, we are building a nation. Don’t ask unnecessary questions. Don’t indulge in self-pity. Don’t doubt, don’t lament, don’t be soft or sentimental, don’t dredge up dangerous ghosts. It’s not a time to remember, it is a time to forget. We must gather all our strength now and concentrate on the future.

  This denial, too, is not without reason. Although vibrant and confident, Israel is not strong enough to deal with the horror of the past. It is still a scrappy society fighting for its life and its future. The Jewish state is a frontier oasis surrounded by a desert of threat. It is not mature enough for self-analysis. It is not tranquil enough to see its own drama in perspective. There are far too many challenges. There is far too much pain. Without self-discipline and self-repression and a degree of cruelty, everything might disintegrate.

  But the price of denial is dear. Yes, Ze’ev Sternhell and Aharon Barak are too ambitious to notice the price. They enthusiastically embrace their new identities, wanting to run as far away as possible from the past. But the introspective Appelfeld looks on with dread at what is taking place around him. People replace a name with a name, a tongue with a tongue, an identity with an identity. To survive, they cleanse themselves of the past. To function, they flatten themselves. They turn into people of action whose personalities are rigid and deformed, whose souls are shallow. They lose the riches of Jewish culture as they are shaped by a new synthetic culture that lacks tradition and nuance and irony. They create a loud, externalized way of life that is eager to display a forced gaiety. They have lost the place they came from without knowing where they are heading.

  The two denials are actually four: the denial of the Palestinian past, the denial of the Palestinian disaster, the denial of the Jewish past, and the denial of the Jewish catastrophe. Four forces of amnesia are at work. Erased from memory are the land that was and the Diaspora that was, the injustice done to them and the genocide done to us. As they struggle to survive and cast a new identity, the Israelis of the 1950s bury both the fruit orchards of Palestine and the yeshivas of the shtetl, the absence of seven hundred thousand Palestinian refugees and the nihility of six million murdered Jews. What vanishes under Ben Gurion’s hasty development is the beauty of the land, the depth of the Diaspora, and the great historic cataclysms of the 1940s.

  It is highly likely that this multilevel denial was essential. Without it, it would have been impossible to function, to build, to live. An obstinate disregard was crucial for the success of Zionism in the first decades of the twentieth century, and a lack of awareness was crucial for the success of Israel in its first decade of existence. If Israel had acknowledged what had happened it would not have survived. If Israel had been kindly and compassionate, it would have collapsed. Denial was a life-or-death imperative for the nine-year-old nation into which I was born.

  To confirm this point I turn to the Spiegels, whom I have known for years and whose familial biography I find striking. The head of the family, Erno Spiegel, is no longer alive, but I manage to speak with his ninety-two-year-old wife, Anna, on her last days of lucidity. Their daughter Yehudit adds her own memories to the family’s life story. And as I leaf through the family’s records, photo albums, and documents, I find the Spiegel story to be yet another powerful example of the Jewish-Israeli story of the twentieth century.

  Anna was born in the Carpathian Russian town of Svalava in 1918. When the Germans invaded in the spring of 1944 she was a twenty-six-year-old beauty. A knock on the door, a yellow Jewish star, the herding of Jews into the local brick factory. Ten days later the Jews were marched through the streets to the train station. They spent three days in a sealed cattle car, then arrived at Auschwitz. Anna’s sister-in-law and four-month-old nephew were sent to the left. Lucky Anna was with the hundreds of women sent to the right: first to a crowded shower hall, then to have a total body shave, which led to a total loss of identity. She spent three days in the camp barracks as the flames of the crematorium danced in the windows. But because Anna was young and strong she was sent to a succession of work camps: an airplane factory, an airport, hard labor in the woods. She made the retreating march, with thousands of others, to the Elba River, where those who survived the trek were liberated. On the train to Prague many female survivors were raped by Russian soldiers. In Prague, she was reunited with her brothers and a sister. All returned from hell, though their parents and sister Sheyna would never return. In Prague, Anna met Erno Spiegel.

  Spiegel was born in Budapest in 1915 but raised in the Carpathian Russian town of Munkacz. Prior to the war, he served as an officer in the Czech army. In 1941, he was sent by pro-Nazi Hungarians to forced labor camps for two years, and in 1944 he was sent by the Germans to Auschwitz. A twin, Spiegel was taken from the Auschwitz platform to Dr. Mengele’s twin compound and appointed by Mengele to be the twins’ master. His job was to monitor and organize the twins subjected to Mengele’s experiments, including his sister. On several occasions, he saved lives, including his sister’s. At night he tried to ease the young twins’ loneliness and allay their fears. He promised them that their parents had not died and that when the war ended, he would reunite them with their families. At the end of January 1945, Spiegel left the just-liberated death camp with thirty-two children. Soon after, his surreal convoy of survivors wended its way through the ruins of Europe. After he brought the twins to
their hometowns, Spiegel went back to Munkacz and then moved to Carlsbad. He returned to his old vocation of bookkeeper. On a visit to the capital, Erno met Anna, and three months later they married in Prague’s ancient synagogue.

  In May 1948, the State of Israel was founded. In March 1949, Erno and Anna Spiegel and their two-year-old daughter entered the port of Haifa. Israeli soldiers boarded their ship and handed out oranges. Anna was beside herself. The Land of Israel, the State of Israel, Jewish soldiers, oranges. She felt it was a triumph over Hitler. Anna and Erno together were a triumph over Hitler. Two-year-old Yehudit was a triumph over Hitler. The State of Israel was an absolute triumph over Hitler.

  From Haifa the Spiegels were sent to the Be’er Ya’akov immigrant camp. The army tents were surrounded by barbed wire, and the March rain penetrated the tarps and turned the floor into a muddy puddle. All around the camp people shouted and complained. The jumble of immigrants from a jumble of countries spoke a jumble of languages. Baby Yehudit contracted acute dysentery, which endangered her life. In some tents, babies quickly succumbed to the disease and died. And yet Anna Spiegel was happy: our land, our state, a place of our own.

  While Anna struggled in the camp, Erno went to Tel Aviv to look for a job. He found work as a bookkeeper in a small accounting firm. The Spiegels saved every penny. Finally, nine months after arriving in Israel, they had enough to move to a one-and-a-half-room apartment in a housing estate on the eastern outskirts of Tel Aviv.

  The Spiegels arrived in Bizaron in December 1949. Between Bizaron Street and Victory Road were the long white housing estates that had been hastily erected on the sand. Pedestrian paths bordered small muddy yards. At the end of one of the paths, three concrete stairs led from the mud to a small covered entrance. On the right was the apartment of the engineer Dr. Fischer, on the left the apartment purchased by the senior bookkeeper, Mr. Spiegel. Thirty-four square meters—one room, one half room, a toilet, a kitchen—that made Anna Spiegel cry: at last they had a home.