My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  He wears a light suit, a golden tie. He is of average height and build, energetic, with a dark complexion. He is proud of the fact that his skin color is the color of this soil. For he is mixed with this soil, he says. As we park the car, Dahla points to some skeletal prickly pear bushes in the Tzipori National Park and at some remnants of stone terraces nearby. He tells me that the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 was not exactly like the Holocaust, but that he is not willing to accept the Jewish monopoly on the term “Holocaust.” “It’s true that here, there were no concentration camps,” Dahla says. “But on the other hand, unlike the Holocaust, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 is still going on. And while the Holocaust was the holocaust of man, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 was a holocaust of man and land. The destruction of our people,” he says, “was also the destruction of our homeland.”

  Tzipori’s houses are nice and neat, white-walled and red-roofed. In one of the front yards, a beautiful young mother opens her arms as her one-year-old takes his first steps toward her. But Mohammed says he doesn’t know how people can live here. “In theory, the countryside is pastoral and inviting, but in reality it is a graveyard. In theory, you are walking in your garden, but really you are walking on corpses. It’s not human,” Mohammed says. It’s like the movie he saw once about an American suburb built on a Native American cemetery whose ghosts haunted the families who chose to live on top of their graves. “I am not into mysticism,” Mohammed says, “but I feel the spirits here, and I know they will not stop haunting you.”

  The religious kibbutz of Beit Rimon sits at the summit of the rocky ridge of Turan, overlooking the village where Mohammed was born and his father was born and his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather. “For hundreds of years we were here,” says Mohammed. “From time immemorial. Tens of thousands of dunams on this ridge were designated by the British high commissioner for the benefit of the villagers of Turan, until the government of Israel seized these ten thousand dunams in order to plant Beit Rimon Aleph and Beit Rimon Beth and Beit Rimon Gimmel at the top of the ridge. So here, like everywhere else, the Jews rule over the Palestinians from above. The Jewish masters live up above, while the Palestinian servants live down below.”

  After we climb the mountain road to the kibbutz and find a way around its locked iron gate, Mohammed’s mobile phone rings: the family of a terrorist who tried to blow up butane gas cylinders outside the kitchen of a Jerusalem pub is asking Dahla to represent the freedom warrior. Mohammed agrees on the spot and calls the Russian compound police station in central Jerusalem to inquire about the whereabouts of the detainee. When he is done, I ask him if he considers Beit Rimon a settlement. Does he think what will ultimately happen to the settlements in the occupied territories should happen to Beit Rimon? “The logic is the same logic,” answers Mohammed. “The mind-set is the same mind-set. There is even a physical resemblance—the same planning, the same architecture. It’s alien. It’s an alien force coming from above and imposing itself on the landscape.” It is early afternoon, and the air is clear, with good visibility. “Look at that Jewish community there, and that Jewish community there,” Mohammed says, pointing first to the right and then to the left. “They are so orderly, so regimented, so European. They are totally different from our villages, which grow from the bottom of the wadi up the hill like a climbing plant. It is so clear that they invaded my Galilee. That’s why they were established. To separate village from village. To prevent the Galilee from being an Arab land. So the Arab Galilee cannot demand territorial autonomy and cannot demand to secede from Israel and to join the State of Palestine.”

  “Do you seriously consider demanding a Galilee autonomy?” I ask. Dahla answers, “For me, the preferred solution is a one-state democracy for both peoples. But if there is no movement toward a binational state, we cannot settle for a shrunken and fragmented Palestinian state that doesn’t even have its own airspace. That will not be a state, it will be a joke. So if you continue to insist on a two-state solution, the issue of the autonomy of the Galilee will have to be raised. And this autonomy cannot be only cultural, it must be territorial, with policing authority and effective control of the land and of natural resources. We will need three such autonomies: the Galilee autonomy in the north, the Arab Triangle autonomy in the center, and the Bedouin Negev autonomy in the south. And Palestinians living in Jaffa or Ramleh or Lydda must have personal autonomy linked to one of the three Palestinian cantons within Israel.”

  We pass by Mohammed’s village of Turan, but for Mohammed it is more important to show me the ruins of the neighboring village of Lubia than to stop at home. He does tell me that his village is totally surrounded. Here is Beit Rimon, where he cannot live. Here is the Tzipori industrial park, where he cannot build a factory. Here is the base of an army that is not his army. Here is the monument for the Golani Brigade, which commemorates a memory he is not a part of. “So if I think I was saved,” Mohammed says, “if I think my family managed to escape the catastrophe of 1948 because we went into exile in Lebanon for only a few months, here I am constantly reminded that I am not welcome. That I am on perpetual parole. That I have no rights here. For the monument that towers over the Golani junction, our Maskana junction, celebrates the victorious and omits the defeated. With its McDonald’s restaurant and its Israeli armored vehicles and its blue-and-white flags, what the Golani junction says to me is loud and clear: We vanquished you. And because we vanquished you, our power allows us to celebrate ourselves within your territory. In the heart of hearts of your Land of Galilee.”

  Dahla’s blue Mercedes descends the road to the South Africa Forest of the Jewish National Fund, then climbs up the gravel path among the pines and conifers. “It’s not an innocent forest,” says my friend Mohammed. “It’s a forest of denial. By planting this forest you misled yourselves into thinking that you can deny your crime.” Then he tells me when it first hit him. In the late 1990s, he participated in back-channel talks between senior Palestinians and Israeli peaceniks in Scandinavia. In one of the conversations, the Palestinians demanded reparations for their suffering and asked that these reparations be paid by Israel to the future Palestinian state so it would be able to utilize them just as the reparations paid by Germany to Israel were utilized for national projects. That’s all they demanded. But the peaceniks went berserk. Because of this one request, the talks collapsed. Dahla and his colleagues returned home empty-handed, with no recognition of the historic justice they were seeking.

  A short time later, he came to this forest with his mother’s relative Mahmoud, a son of the village of Lubia. He walked with Mahmoud up this forest path, and when they reached this spot, Mahmoud recognized the ruins of his home. And he wept. “Gone is our homeland,” he cried. “Gone is our life.” And the successful Israeli attorney Mohammed Dahla stood by his side and wept with him.

  “So what are you saying?” I ask Mohammed. “That the injustice done to Palestinians is an injustice not to be forgiven,” he answers. “Because at this very moment, as Israelis lay out picnic lunches under the trees of the South Africa Forest, the refugees of the village of Lubia rot in the Yarmuch refugee camp in Syria. And the refugees of Saffuriyya rot in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon. So justice demands that we have the right to return. At least those rotting in the refugee camps should be allowed to return.

  “I don’t know how many there will be,” Mohammed says. “Not millions, but perhaps hundreds of thousands. But I see them returning. Just as my family returned from Lebanon, coming down the slopes of the rocky ridge of Turan with their donkeys and belongings after months of exile, so will the others return. In a long convoy they will all return.”

  Azmi Bishara welcomes us to his private office in Nazareth. The Galilee-born philosopher had established a secular radical-nationalist Arab party in the mid-1990s and was a controversial but effective member of the Knesset ever since. There is no banner on the building that houses the headquarters of the leader of the Balad Party,
no nameplate on the door, but his office is airy and comfortable. On the wall hangs a framed embroidered map of Palestine—all of Palestine: Jaffa but not Tel Aviv; Lydda but not Rehovot; Nazareth but not Migdal HaEmek. A photograph of Gamal Abdel Nasser is hanging there, too, of course. The Egyptian president and Pan Arab leader of the 1960s is Bishara’s hero, and as we sit on the sofa, he looks down on us from a large black-and-white photograph, in a gray suit and black tie, grinning mirthfully under his narrow mustache.

  An outspoken Knesset member since 1996, Bishara is now very cautious. As he awaits a Supreme Court decision that will determine his political future, he looks more like a well-fed cat than a dangerous tiger. Friendly, warm, and obliging, he pours me strong black coffee and asks how I managed to lose so much weight and how my love life is. He tells me about an essay he has just written and a novel he has just completed. He looks wary, as if he is perhaps suffering from political fatigue. But he emphasizes how important it is for him not to be disqualified politically by the Court. If the Court doesn’t let him run in the coming elections—because he refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state—its decision will be perceived as a historic pronouncement. It will be viewed as an attempt to send Palestinian Israelis back to where they were in the 1960s. Even the appearance of formal democracy will dissolve.

  “Will riots break out again as they did in October 2000? Will Israel be torn to pieces by the conflict between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians?” I ask him. Bishara acknowledges that he is in no position to make any threats right now. But Dahla raises his head and says what Bishara is careful not to say: if the Palestinians’ rights are not respected and the Palestinians’ equality is not guaranteed, that will lead to the beginning of the countdown to the outbreak of Palestinian riots within Israel.

  As we leave Nazareth, Mohammed tells me, “Bishara is my other identity anchor. He symbolizes our modern Palestinian pride. He is the icon of the modern generation, a generation that did not experience defeat and expulsion, a generation that does not fear Israel precisely because it knows Israel. This generation has learned from Israeli chutzpah, impudence, cheekiness, and therefore it does not beg but demands. It does not defend but attacks. It doesn’t think like a minority and doesn’t feel like a minority because it realizes it’s not really a minority. The future is ours,” Mohammed Dahla concludes. “No matter what tricks you try, you will not be able to maintain a Western state with a Jewish character here. All you will accomplish is to bring about a role reversal. We will be masters, and you will be our servants.”

  Some weeks later, the Supreme Court will allow Bishara to run for parliament once again. But four years later, in 2007, Bishara will flee Israel after being questioned by police on suspicion of passing information to the Shiite militia Hezbollah on strategic sites for rocket strikes during the 2006 Lebanon War. Dahla’s secular hero Bishara will go into exile and become a star on the Pan Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera, while most Israelis will regard him as a traitor. Dahla’s Islamist hero Sheikh Raed Salah will go into jail and out of jail, but he will remain the most influential subversive Palestinian leader within Israel. Right now night begins to fall and Mohammed is very tired.

  But all that is in the future. He asks me to take his place at the wheel. As I drive back south in the dark while he sleeps beside me, I think about him and about myself. What are our chances, I wonder. Will we survive this horrific history?

  I love Mohammed. He is smart and engaged and full of life. He is direct, warm, and devilishly talented. Had he wished to, by now he would have been a judge or a member of parliament or a mayor or one of the leaders of Israel’s Palestinian community. He is as Israeli as any Israeli I know. He is one of the sharpest friends I have. We share a city, a state, a homeland. We hold common values and beliefs. And yet there is a terrible schism between us. What will become of us, Mohammed? I wonder in the dark. What will become of my daughter Tamara, your son Omar? What will happen to my Land, your Land?

  (photo credit 14.1)

  FOURTEEN

  Reality Shock, 2006

  WHAT WENT WRONG?

  The obvious answer is occupation, but it’s not only occupation. If today’s Israel were as clearheaded, determined, and focused as it was in its early years, it would have dealt with occupation by now. Sooner or later, common sense would have prevailed. After making some initial errors of judgment, a reasonable national leadership of a reasonable republic would have taken action. One way or another it would have ended occupation. But though occupation is wrong, futile, and malevolent, it is not the source of all evil. Something else happened to Israel that is much more far-reaching, pervasive, and complex—something most observers of Israeli affairs have surprisingly overlooked.

  In less than thirty years, Israel has experienced seven different internal revolts: the settlers’ revolt, the peace revolt, the liberal-judicial revolt, the Oriental revolt, the ultra-Orthodox revolt, the hedonist-individualistic revolt, and the Palestinian Israelis’ revolt. In a sense, each and every one of these upheavals was justified: they sought justice for an oppressed minority and addressed latent but vital needs. They all brought to center stage forces that were previously willfully ignored or marginalized. But the outcome of these seven revolts was the disintegration of the Israeli republic. What was fought for during the fifty years prior to statehood and cultivated in the first twenty-five years of statehood was very much eroded in the four decades years following the 1973 war. So while most of the upheavals were just and necessary, their cumulative effect was destructive. They did not advance Israel as a functioning liberal democracy. They did not reconfigure Israel as a strong, pluralistic federation of its different tribes. Instead, they turned the nation into a stimulating, exciting, diversified, colorful, energetic, pathetic, and amusing political circus. Rather than a mature and solid state body that could safely navigate the dangerous waters of the Middle East, it became an extravagant bazaar.

  The settlers rose against political discipline and restraint. The peaceniks rose against historical and geostrategic reality. The liberals rose against the all-too-powerful state. The Orientals rose against Occidental domination. The ultra-Orthodox rose against secularism. The hedonists rose against the suffocating conformism of Zionist collectivism. The Palestinian Israelis rose against Jewish nationalism. Yet all these rebellions had one thing in common: they bucked against Ben Gurion’s state of the 1950s and 1960s that had built the housing estates and erected Dimona and stabilized the young modern Jewish state. After being conscripted and regimented and mobilized for over a generation, Israelis had had enough. The Israeli individual wanted something of his or her very own, and every Israeli tribe wanted something of its very own. Every scorned and slighted human sentiment wanted to burst out and be free to express itself. But all these different individuals and tribes and sentiments never found a way to coexist. They never worked out a new political framework that would allow Israel to represent them properly while acting as a cohesive whole. The outcome was a fascinating, vibrant society—and a booming economy—but a dysfunctional system of government, an Israeli republic that was not quite there.

  Up to a point, all the revolts were necessary. They were part of a crucial process of growing up and opening up. But from a certain point on, they became petty and dangerous. And they could not be stopped, even though, by now, Israel’s problem was not Ben Gurion’s monolithic statism. By now the problem was the lack of leadership and lack of direction and lack of governability created by the revolts themselves. A nation that was once too forceful was now too feeble. Israel had become a state in chaos and a state of chaos.

  Conventional wisdom has it that 1967 was the pivotal year in Israel’s history. True and not true. Actually, there were three pivotal years: 1967, 1973, and 1977. Within one decade, Israel experienced an extraordinary victory, a distressing defeat, and a monumental political upheaval—when after nearly thirty years of Labor’s leadership, the right-wing Likud Party won the elections. The
three dramatic events shook the nation to its core. They brought about occupation and then institutionalized it. But in hindsight, it seems that the most decisive of the three defining years was 1973. The trauma of the Yom Kippur War terminated the reign of Israel’s ancien régime. It promulgated a deep distrust of the state, its government, and its leadership. It empowered the individual and weakened the collective. It crushed Ben Gurion’s legacy and his concrete state.

  As a result, the state was in flux. Old grievances resurfaced, old wounds were reopened. There were no longer any real shepherds or masters. No one had moral authority anymore. No one had the capacity to lead or to educate or instruct. Hierarchy broke down. The sense of purpose was gone. The common set of core values disintegrated. In the heat of revolt, the melting pot itself melted away. After being forced to be one, the different tribes of Israel began going their different ways. And it was the same with Israeli individuals. After being overorganized and overmobilized and overdisciplined for half a century, they were not willing to take orders from anyone. They trusted no one. They became unknowing anarchists.

  The mass Russian immigration of 1989–1991 added to the chaos. The one million immigrants who arrived in Israel within three years invigorated its economy and shared its Jewish majority but added to the lack of cohesion. By the time they arrived in Israel, the old Zionist melting pot was no longer functioning. The well-educated newcomers felt they were superior to the ones absorbing them. Hence, they did not shed their old identity and endorse an Israeli identity as previous immigrants had done. They maintained their Russian values and their Russian way of life and they largely lived in Russian enclaves. While contributing to Israel’s science, technology, arts, and military power, they intensified the process of turning Israeli society into a loose confederation of tribes not quite connecting to one another and not sharing one binding national code.