by Roger Cohen
One branch of the family, Rena’s, descendants of Max Levin, made the Zionist choice for Israel. They went there from South Africa out of idealism, to be part of something bigger than themselves, beyond the solipsism of the modern world. They were convinced of the need for a Jewish state for the simple reason that that was the only state in which Jews without question belonged. They wanted to forge a noble thing. Hebrew scripture contains scant allusion to the afterlife. The society in God’s image was to be built on earth. Tikkun olam was the Jewish watchword: “Repair the world, be a light unto nations.” Understand the stranger, for was not Abraham himself one, and was not the insecurity of otherness the essence of Jewish experience?
The Founding Charter of 1948 declared that Israel would be based “on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.”
But Israel stiffened under attack. Annihilation angst devoured ecumenical velleity. Unable to resist the maximalist territorial temptation, Israel stumbled over time into controlling the lives of millions of Palestinians, a task that required administering a daily dose of the very humiliation that Jews had suffered as outsiders over centuries and that Max Levin’s Zionism had sought to redress.
As Vikram Seth has observed, “The great advantage of being a chosen people is that one can choose to decide who is unchosen, and withdraw sympathy and equity from them.” Palestinians became the unchosen of the Holy Land.
From Vancouver, shortly after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Levin’s great-granddaughter Rena sent her brother Yaakov (not his real name) a Halloween message: “I do not feel like going out and dressing up. If I did, I guess it would be as a peace dove. I wish things were calmer. I wish I could make things easier.”
Like many Israelis, my cousin felt dueling emotions: anger at Palestinian violence and disquiet at her country’s rule over the Arab “stranger” in the occupied West Bank, a place to which she never went.
Every year Rena’s family would return to South Africa. Yaakov described a familiar scene in Johannesburg: “It felt like the garden in Houghton never ended. There was a tree house and a swimming pool. Ponies were brought in for our birthday parties. Nobody seemed to be working too hard. We always had chocolate cake with peanuts sprinkled on top. It was paradise. But there was a shadow. I never really felt comfortable with the black servants. I’d walk into the kitchen and want a frying pan to make an egg, and Johanna, the cook, would say Quick quick quick, be sure Granny does not see you!
“I couldn’t believe how my South African cousins would scream at the nannies if the water in the baths they drew was not hot enough. I could see the servants’ quarters behind the house, the little concrete-floored room, and every once in a while their children would visit, and I could sense this sadness of separated families. At dinner, Sam would dress up in his suit and white gloves. He would serve drinks beforehand on the red-tiled veranda. I can see him taking the gleaming glasses from their cabinets. Grandpa always had his White Horse whiskey on the rocks. We would sit down. Granny would ring the bell. Sam would appear. Coming from Israel, where I would come home from school at the age of seven and make myself lunch, it just did not seem quite right.”
Yaakov’s grandparents lived a few blocks from Isaac Michel’s old Houghton mansion. This was my mother’s pampered South African world. It was also that of Rena’s mom. I will call her Pauline, a granddaughter, like my mother, of Michel, the smous-turned-patriarch. Pauline was a beauty. Chestnut hair framed her delicate pale features, and she had in abundance the bubbly Michel charm. She was quick and funny, and if you had asked her in Johannesburg if she would consider a future in Israel, she would have laughed. Zionism did not enter the picture.
Her pale brown eyes sparkled with life but could also smolder in anger, as if enveloped in a black cloud. Like my mother, Pauline went to Barnato Park School for girls—the last two years there were principally devoted to her first love affair—before going on to the University of Cape Town, where she studied art history and political science. She sojourned in Europe. Men were always hovering. They included princes and swindlers, amusing men who whisked her off to palatial abodes where they made promises she seldom believed and they never kept.
Meyer Levin, when he came along in 1969, was the antithesis of such heady glamour. He was neither suave nor rich. He was a doctor—rational, steady, quiet, and introverted. A big man, attractive if not classically handsome, heavy-limbed, he moved and spoke with measured intent. He was intense, given to clenching his hands when he talked about the critical importance of control.
She was volcanic, he a rock: their temperaments could scarcely have been more different, a source of violent attraction and persistent tension. Meyer, like his grandfather, was also a convinced Zionist who wanted to whisk her off somewhere altogether different, to Jerusalem. He wanted, he told her, “to make a contribution, however modest, to the new state. I need a meaningful challenge.” She admired his idealism, his sense of purpose; she was reassured by his devotion.
They had met on a blind date in South Africa, seen each other again in London, gone different ways with other partners, and come together once more. Pauline, turning thirty, sought my mother’s advice: Should she go away to a strange land with a driven doctor? June, whose own immense difficulty in adapting to the strange land of England with another driven doctor was never aired, much less her breakdown, had no hesitation: Of course she should go!
They were married in London and left soon after, arriving in Israel on December 28, 1972, to make aliyah. Pauline was seven and a half months pregnant; Yaakov was born in Jerusalem on February 16, 1973. They settled in the upscale West Jerusalem district of Rehavia in a fourth-floor walk-up owned by the Hadassah hospital, where Meyer went to work. Within eight months the Yom Kippur War had broken out.
“I remember the sirens and the shutters coming down with a bang and the blackouts at night and buying stocks of food—there was less bread and less milk, and I had the baby, and Meyer had to be at the hospital a lot,” Pauline tells me. “It was hard to understand the news. There was the initial shock, the Egyptian army rolling over the canal and the Syrians advancing across the Golan Heights into the Galilee, and all the terrible uncertainty before the tide turned. Yet I don’t recall being afraid. I guess I have this ability to cope, somehow. I was living for the moment. The hospital had emptied with everyone going off to army units, and Meyer, as a recent arrival, was almost alone. Colleagues of his were killed—it was harrowing.”
Pauline gazes out of her window. Geraniums bloom in abundance on her balcony. Her Jerusalem apartment is small in a country of limited space, unlike the African land of two-acre plots in which she was raised. The sun, a white glare, beats down on limestone. She smiles at me and sighs: “But from the beginning, it was easier than London in many ways. People were open and warm, and I felt more identified. I felt the vibrancy. It was good to be among Jews. In fact, for the first time in my life I could forget I was a Jew.”
Explaining how life differed in Israel was not easy. That phrase of Meyer’s in London—“a meaningful challenge”—came back to Pauline because it communicated the sense, absent elsewhere, of building something beyond oneself. A relative, a prominent member of the Cleveland Jewish community, visited from the United States and was shocked to see Yaakov running around without booties. What, he asked, can I get you? Pauline was unsure what to say—not booties, anyway. They went to South Africa in early 1974, a relief from the tension of war. The old country seemed unreal in its sunlit vastness, the harsh oppression of apartheid held at a distance. By the time she returned to Jerusalem, Pauline was pregnant again with Rena, her postwar baby.
The family needed more space. Friends told them of a new development on French Hill in annexed East Jerusalem. It was far from the center but
cheaper for that reason. Still, Pauline felt uneasy. She was a liberal who could not help seeing the West Bank occupation in South African terms—one people dominating another, controlling them, disenfranchising them, and denying them their rights. Of course, it was not a perfect analogy, but the echoes were hard to ignore. Jews knew all about such exclusion. Israel, it seemed, had entered a permanent state of emergency. There was no rule of law in the occupied territories that she could discern. Certainly there was no consent of the governed.
Pauline would sit on the balcony gazing eastward. On a clear day, you could see all the way down to the Dead Sea. Everywhere there was construction, new cities, fortresses really it seemed to her, being built around Jerusalem—Gilo, Ramot, Pisgat Ze’ev. This, she thought, was conquest. It was not temporary. Official obfuscation overlaid relentless construction. Schoolchildren could not see on maps where the occupied territory began. The Green Line, the old border, was gone, swept away by religious-nationalist fever. Israeli intent was written in bricks and mortar. The mountains of the Land of Israel were beckoning the Jewish zealots of the State of Israel, summoning a tide of religious Zionism that would swamp the secular Zionism that had led to Israel’s foundation. She listened to the haunting call to prayer of the muezzin drifting up from Palestinians villages. It was a reminder. Thoughts stirred of South Africa, where you could pretend the stranger was not there until you caught a glimpse of his ill-fitting shoes or the defiance in his eye.
Meyer had a different view. Israel was not the aggressor. It had been attacked by Arab armies in 1948 because they refused to accept the will of the United Nations—what Benny Morris has called “an international warrant for a small piece of earth.” They had attacked again and again since. This was the consequence. We won—get over it. They fought and lost. What nation ever handed back the spoils of war to an enemy bent on its destruction? The problem with liberals is their bleeding hearts. When you’ve got someone by the balls, hearts and minds will follow.
Jerusalem was one and indivisible, the home of all Jews once again after the long dispersal. It would never be split again. French Hill would always be Israeli. The pre-1967 borders were indefensible. Had Abba Eban not called them the “Auschwitz borders”? What they gazed across was Jewish land, indeed the quintessence of Jewish land, the Judean Hills, birthplace of Patriarchs and of the millennial Jewish story, home of the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people. Everything would shake out somehow if Israel stood its ground, did not bend. The new Jew of Zionist pedigree was through with the diaspora pliability that had proved a death trap.
Rena was born on November 10, 1974, in a house with a beautiful view over land with a disputed name. For much of the world—including her mother—and under international law, it was the occupied West Bank that receded into the shimmering haze beneath the balcony on French Hill. For many Israelis, including her father, it was Judea and Samaria, their dun-colored, inalienable biblical birthright, recovered after almost two millennia. She came into being in an Israel at the fulcrum of its shift from brave upstart to colonialist power, at the very moment when the messianic push to settle the West Bank shifted religious Zionism from a marginal phenomenon to the heart of Israel’s internal struggle, and when the nation’s culture began its steady journey from a communal to an individualistic culture. Down below French Hill, in the mountains leading to the river, the settlements began to grow, at first with official acquiescence, then with official support. The few thousand Jewish settlers at Rena’s birth would grow to several hundred thousand.
Rena-Renata was born into a confusion of names, a land where the very choice of words betokened an ethos. Confusion would pursue her, the conundrum of who she was.
It was a wager on belonging that the Jews of continental Europe lost to Hitler. Michael Adler, the rabbi, had agonized over the acceptance of British Jews during World War I. They turned out to be the lucky ones. German Jews believed they were German citizens in the fullest sense. Had they not, in the service of the fatherland, won Iron Crosses, just as Levin had fought in the Russian army with distinction? They were to discover that they were in fact mere Jews in Germany. The same was true of French Jews, Dutch Jews, and all the rest. Near acceptance into Christian society turned out to be more treacherous than nonacceptance. The Jews, ascendant, became threatening, then disposable.
None had been more patriotic than German Jews. To the last, Jewish authorities, gathered in the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, cooperated with Hitler’s Reich, much as Jewish Councils would in occupied Poland and Lithuania—deluded, like the Gens brothers in Šiauliai and Vilnius, into the belief that servility might save them. This Jewish cooperation in the Nazi organization of Jewish slaughter was the ultimate expression of diaspora submission.
Zionism, by contrast, placed no faith in others’ goodwill. It sought, rather, to usher Jews to the full realization of their nationhood and so, in a sense, to normalize them—make them patriotic about something that was their own. It was anti-messianic in the sense that it demanded of Jews an act of political and physical will rather than the passive expectation of deliverance to the Promised Land through prayer, ritual, and contemplation of sacred texts. Scrawny scholars would become vigorous tillers of the soil in the Valley of Harod. Orange groves would blossom from the parched earth of Palestine.
My family story, like that of millions of other Jews, leads inexorably to Zionism. By the early twentieth century, no alternative offered a plausible chance of Jewish survival and belonging. As Joseph Roth once wrote, “If there is one nation that is justified in seeing the ‘national question’ as essential to its survival, then surely it is the Jews who are forced to become a ‘nation’ by the nationalism of others.” Zionism was a necessary break with past, pogrom, and persecution. Yet Zionism sought the recovery of the Jews’ historical homeland, terrain that overflowed with the past. It was a secular movement, initially scorned by the Talmudists, bent on the recovery of land steeped in religious symbolism. Moreover, it sought a state on land that was not empty. Zionist resolution of the Jewish question could only give birth to an Arab question. Inherent contradictions and inevitable tensions abounded.
As early as 1907, Yitzhak Epstein, a Zionist, wrote an article called “A Hidden Question” in which he observed: “We pay close attention to the affairs of our land, we discuss and debate everything, we praise and curse everything, but we forget one small detail: That there is in our beloved land an entire people that have been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it.” The Arab, Epstein noted, “is, like any person, strongly attached to his homeland.” Zionism, he predicted, would struggle with this core problem.
The warning was prescient. The Jews’ “War of Liberation” in 1948 was also the Palestinians’ al-Nakba, or catastrophe. Several hundred thousand Palestinians were driven from their homes in a war started by Arab states unwilling to accept UN Resolution 181 of 1947—that a Jewish state be constituted in the Holy Land. The first war fed the current of Zionist thought that had never been inclined to accept the UN-mandated division of the land into Jewish and Palestinian states, but for the first decades of Israel’s existence such absolutism was contained.
After the lightning victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 and the trauma followed by triumph in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, messianic Jewish thinking made a vigorous comeback. If Israel now held all Jerusalem and the West Bank, how, in the minds of religious nationalists, could this recovery of Eretz Yisrael—a biblical term widely used to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River—not be an expression of divine will?
Religious Zionism was the malignant offspring of secular Zionism, whose immense political achievement was to persuade the world, in the form of the United Nations, of the justice of a Jewish claim to about half of British Mandate Palestine. The cornerstone of Israel’s UN-backed legality was territorial compromise. Rejected first by the Arabs, this division of the land was then progressively undermined fr
om the 1970s onward by the settlers of Gush Emunim. They claimed Zionism’s mantle. They mimicked its attachment to the soil. But they were not delivering the persecuted Jews of Europe to a new life. They were ushering Jews from within Israel to the West Bank, from the laws of Israeli democracy into lawless defiance of the very foundations of the state. God’s covenant in the mountains of Judea and Samaria blinded the settlement movement to the Palestinians in their midst. Arabs in turn became disposable, and Israel, through overreach, placed itself in a morally indefensible noose.
Words were a sea of vagueness. Meyer and Pauline spoke only English together. The children, as their schooling progressed, spoke Hebrew. The result was domestic “Hebrish,” a source of embarrassment to Yaakov and Rena when they brought friends home. They grew up between worlds, with what Yaakov called “a feeling of being neither here nor there.”
Meyer and Pauline could not help with homework in Hebrew. The children cringed at their parents’ inability to master the language. Pauline understood one advertisement to mean: What are you doing with your free Arabs? Which free Arabs would that be exactly? Aravim, in Hebrew, can mean “Arabs” or “evenings.”
The children would go down into the wadi below the house. They played with the donkeys and collected fossils and picked succulent figs split by ripeness as stray dogs poked around in the dust. Stones and rocks lay everywhere, smooth on one surface, rough as nutmeg graters on the other. They fascinated Rena.