by Roger Cohen
The West Bank occupation was almost a quarter century old when my cousin was put to work in its service. It is now close to a half century old. At its outset, the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel tried to rule another people, “the corruption characteristic of every colonial regime will also prevail in the State of Israel.” No democracy can be immune to running an undemocratic system of oppression in territory under its control. To have citizens on one side of an invisible line and subjects without rights on the other side of that line does not work. A democracy needs borders. Since 1967 Israel’s has slithered into military rule for Palestinians in occupied areas where state-subsidized Jewish settlers have the right to vote as if within Israel. The problem is evident.
The nationalist-religious credo that the West Bank was land promised to Abraham’s descendants has intensified over the past half century. Settlers see their work as the culmination of the Zionist idea of settlement. The opposite is true. Israel has undermined its Zionist founders’ commitment to a democratic state governed by laws. Gershom Gorenberg puts the issue with great clarity in The Unmaking of Israel: “If Israel really believed that the territorial division created by the 1949 armistice was null and void, it could have asserted its sovereignty in all of former Palestine—and granted the vote and other democratic rights to all inhabitants.” It chose not to. The reason was evident: the size of the Palestinian population—1.1 million in the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, 4.4 million today—would have meant the end of the Jewish state. And so Israel “behaved as if the territories were part of Israel for the purpose of settlement, and under military occupation for the purpose of ruling the Palestinians.”
Humiliation of the occupied becomes a way of life. In Hebron, I once crossed the lines, after talking to settlers who described every Palestinian as a murderer, and found myself in conversation with Feryal Abu Haikal, the headmistress of a girls’ school. Israeli soldiers had burst into her home twice the previous year, shot up the refrigerator, shot up the bathroom, destroyed a fax machine. Her husband, a contractor, was having difficulty maintaining his business because the barriers to travel across the West Bank had become so intricate. As we talked, her cell phone rang; her daughter was calling from China, where she was on a business trip. Other local children were studying at colleges in Turkey and Cairo. Palestinians, like Jews, put a high value on their children’s education; incitement is not the whole story.
“If there is hope or no hope, we are here,” the headmistress told me. “Not to make anyone happy. Not to make anyone angry. But we are here. Can you imagine that you would leave your home for any reason?”
The temptation to exclude, subjugate, and exploit “the other” is always there—whether the shtetl Jew, the black “kaffir,” or the oppressed Palestinian—and justifications will be found. The family journey from Lithuania to South Africa and beyond had demonstrated that. But no people has more ethical reason to resist the inebriation of domination than the Jews, most of whose history has involved exclusion imposed by the powerful.
The Talmud portrays humanity as beginning from a single person and declares on this basis: “Whoever destroys one life, it is as if he destroyed an entire world, and whoever sustains one life, it is as if he sustained an entire world.” The Talmud also says: “Hold too much, and you will hold nothing.”
Israel, surrounded by Arab hostility, facing movements like Hamas that call for its destruction, in thrall to fears that no amount of power allays, has succumbed to the very temptation of unrestrained rule over others that the Jewish experience most decries. Such dominion can endure only at an unacceptable price. Israel cannot be a Jewish democratic state and at the same time control the lives of millions of Palestinians. It was this conviction—that the cost to Israel of policing another people was unbearable over time—that persuaded Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to seek a land-for-peace deal with his enemy, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, was an admirer of Baruch Goldstein, the mass killer of Hebron. Like Gandhi, assassinated by a fanatical Hindu convinced the mahatma was giving too much away to India’s Muslims, Rabin was murdered by one of his own, a fellow Jew convinced the Israeli prime minister and war hero was ceding too much to Palestinians. Jew killed Jew over the political issue that divided Meyer and Pauline: whether the modern state of Israel, born out of a UN resolution that divided the territory of Mandate Palestine, had a right to all the biblical Land of Israel or should seek territorial compromise in the quest for peace.
The entitlement view was put forth with eminent straightforwardness by Israel’s former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir: “Eretz Yisrael is ours. Why? Because, without any justification or explanations, it is.”
Few assassinations have proved as effective as Rabin’s. Gandhi’s put a brake on India’s communal slaughter, but Rabin’s accelerated Israeli-Palestinian estrangement. The ascendancy of religious-nationalist ideology was assured. The painful concessions needed from both sides for peace were shelved. Yet the loss of Rabin and the continued expansion of settlements only accentuated Israel’s dilemma. The country prospered, becoming a miracle of rapid development. It was perched still on the brittle foundation of coercion of another people.
“The aggression in Israel is a reflection of the corrupting force of the occupation,” Yaakov tells me. “Generations of kids, myself included, served in the West Bank and treated the Palestinians the way we did. I had to get out of Hebron. I had to tell my commanders the situation was driving me crazy, I could not take it. You lord it over these people, and then you come back home, and you bring these attitudes with you. We know where the border of Israel is. There is even a wall now to give us a general idea. So we have to look at our consciences and act. Do we want to remain a Jewish state? Do we want to remain a decent people?”
Rena began her military service in 1992. In some ways, it was a relief. After her parents’ separation, she broke up with Aron, her high school sweetheart. Meyer was often busy at the hospital; Pauline had developed a career as an English teacher and a guide at the Israel Museum. Rena felt a void inside. “In order to have self-expression,” she wrote, “we must first have a self to express.”
Who was she? Rena wanted to give to people but was not sure how. She was gentle. Perhaps she needed to be more assertive. She felt spiritual, not religious, in need of some framework now that the family was shattered. She believed in God. No, she believed in a God. No, she believed in the existence of the divine. But that did not help her. It was not an organizing principle for her life. She noted a line of Dostoyevsky’s: “Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.” To overcome fear, that was her issue, and to gain self-esteem. Her mother had been so glamorous, so beautiful, and so cosmopolitan journeying around Europe. She felt she was none of these things.
After high school, after the First Intifada, she fantasized about escape, reinventing herself, perhaps in France or the United States or even India. In one moment of particular anguish, while Pauline was away in Cairo at a conference, she ran a sharp knife across her wrist and called a family friend. It was a cry for help.
In the army, after basic training, she did social work, traveling to the homes of conscripts from difficult backgrounds. The assignment took her all over Israel for the first time—to Haifa, Ashdod, Beersheba, Petah Tikva, Eilat. She was moved by the diversity of the country. The stoicism of its women struck her—widows whose only sons were serving in the West Bank or in Gaza, mothers who had already lost a child. To carry on in the knowledge that your life could never be whole again after the loss of a child seemed the most remarkable form of courage.
Her military service ended in 1994. She enrolled in Hebrew University to do a degree in art history and education. Seeking to continue her social work, she took a job in a home for people with mild forms of mental illness, lost souls who would have ended up in the streets. She had a series of photographs taken of her with the residents, her arm around them, smilin
g. Meyer was struck by how she had chosen to sit with them rather than photograph them herself.
The Oslo peace accords and Rabin’s handshake with Arafat on the White House lawn raised for the first time in Rena’s life the possibility of an end to the conflict. Approaching her twenty-first birthday, she allowed herself to believe for a moment that Israel could resolve its existential dilemma and find its place in an angry neighborhood. It would be good for her country to settle on its contours.
She traveled to Europe, as her mother had at the same age, and sent her a photograph from Italy similar to one she had seen of Pauline in her youth. Rena is seated at a window, in profile against a backdrop of the Mediterranean coast with her hand on her chin, a faraway look in her eyes. She is wearing a black shirt and earrings with a black pendant. Despite the beauty of her surroundings, my cousin appears to be looking in rather than out, consumed like my mother by her inner demons, my mother who in Italy had stayed at the Gritti Palace in Venice and thought only of death by drowning in the Grand Canal.
“It was such a strange thing,” Pauline says. “I sometimes asked myself: Is she trying to relive my life?”
Rena wanted to reconcile the beings in her. When Rabin was killed, she thought her country had gone mad. She twice traveled to India looking for peace and truth, doing Vipassana meditation to pacify her mind. In a journal she wrote, “The guru teaches you about your own strength, capacity, power, love—and draws out your goodness.” She urged herself on: “It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.” She quoted a Chinese proverb: “Life moves in a positive direction. Get out of the way.” She wanted to paint, she wanted to write, to be creative and to give—but that only brought her back to the elusive quest for an identifiable “self.”
Rena took up with a fellow college student called Andrei, a recent immigrant from Russia. He was kind and sensitive. He grappled still with Hebrew as her parents had. His funny accent made her laugh. They had different political views—the Russian mind could not begin to grasp the notion of voluntarily giving up conquered land. (Had Russia given up the Kuril Islands?) But that did not seem to matter as they hiked in the Galilee or strolled along the Tel Aviv seafront. It was good to feel less alone even if the relationship was, she felt, not quite serious.
Everyone gathered for Yaakov’s wedding in 1999. Already deep in therapy and trying to fathom what had happened in her parents’ marriage, Rena felt distant. She had little sympathy for her brother’s wife, Maya, whom he had met during his military service. Not for the first time, Rena felt she had to get away. She was drawn to the idea of practicing as an art therapist, putting her creative impulse to use to understand and help people, as she already had in her social work. When the University of Vancouver offered a place to do a master’s, she did not hesitate.
She was lonely. The city was beautiful but left her cold. Canada left her cold. Fellow students had opinions on Israel, often critical ones, but it seemed to Rena they had no feeling for it, no sympathy with it, no gift of empathy that might open a path to understanding a fundamental Israeli condition—fear; the fear, however irrational, of the country’s annihilation that was part of the national condition. What did they know of the widows and bereaved mothers of Ashdod? What did they know of the miracle of Hebrew apiaries and dairies rising from the barren land?
Zionism had succeeded against the odds. But it had not overcome Jewish fear after all. It had recast it in a different guise.
Rena could not sleep, racked by intractable thoughts swirling in circles. Intense bursts of energy during which she painted all night—large, colorful abstract paintings with great splashes of purple—alternated with spells of inertia. She lay in the bath and let the water run out. She gazed at the gossamer moon at first light. Days succeeded each other like tour groups filing into a museum, gloomy and hangdog. Nobody understood her. Nobody understood Israel.
She was lonely. Fulfillment with men had often eluded her. They pursued their own pleasure, they failed to understand hers, she could not feel them, and sometimes she was left with a dim anger. She wondered about her sexuality. She wondered about everything. She was unsettled. She did not want to cause a commotion.
At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
Israel was convulsed on Rena’s return from Canada in the fall of 2001. Buses went up in balls of fire. Nights pivoted on the dull blast of an explosion. There was always a silence, an absolute stillness, afterward. Then the sirens and yelling and screaming started. Sometimes a second explosion was timed to hit the people converging to help. Nobody wanted to go near a bus or into a shopping mall. TV images were of one horror after another: the Ben Yehuda Street bombing (11 dead) on December 1, 2001; the Haifa bus bombing (15 dead) on December 2, 2001; the Yeshivat Beit Yisrael bombing (11 dead) on March 2, 2002; the Café Moment bombing (11 dead) on March 9, 2002; the Passover massacre (30 dead) on March 27, 2002; the Matza Restaurant bombing (16 dead) on March 31, 2002; the Rishon LeZion bombing (16 dead) on May 7, 2002. Rena tried to avert her gaze. She moved from confusion to ephemeral conviction and back again to confusion.
The Oslo peace process was in tatters, and President Bill Clinton’s last-gasp efforts to reach an agreement were buried in a welter of mutual recrimination. Rabin’s conviction—that quiet in the absence of peace could only be temporary and that therefore a compromise with the Palestinians had to be made—was vindicated. Suicide bombs became the Palestinian weapon of choice, martyrdom the brutal refuge of the weak as the Second Intifada raged. Palestinian recognition of Israel had not stopped relentless incitement to destroy it or violence toward that end. Israel’s engagement in a peace process had not stopped the steady settlement construction that undercut a Palestinian state and underwrote the Jewish claim to all the land that had been evident in its acts and half-hidden by its words since 1967. Humiliating domination met murderous resistance. Victimhood fed victimhood. Violence was always the stranger knocking at the door of Israel’s unfinished house.
Rena was diagnosed as bipolar and put on medication. She felt dulled by it. Her life energy drained out of her. She felt lost, unsure about what work to pursue. Pauline disliked her daughter’s psychiatrist, a colleague of Meyer’s in Jerusalem. He had a good reputation but lacked empathy. The medication did not seem right. Under the pressure of violence, everyone’s nerves frayed.
At the National Lottery, Rena found a job in marketing, but she hated the cold calls and sales pitches. It was not in her to be false, and it took a lot out of her to generate enthusiasm. She rented the apartment on Shlomo Hamelech in Tel Aviv, beginning her daily meanders through the neighborhood. She sat at Shine Café (the cafés were emptier now) and watched the rain. Popular wisdom had it that when the rain fell straight down rather than at an angle, it was the last of the year.
Afterward the blue of the sky was more perfect and luminous than she could bear. Hagar, her closest friend, would sit with her at Shine. In a soft, calm voice, Rena would describe her troubles, her quest for the spiritual, for a connection beyond the material, and she spoke of her feelings of weakness, and Hagar would insist on her amazing courage in being able to smile in the face of agony and confusion. (Later Hagar would reflect on the café’s name and Rena’s smile that shone from the inside.)
At the corner of Spinoza and Gordon, there was a wooden bench with a canopy. Rena liked to sit there. She imagined herself under a chuppah. Would she ever stand under one to be wed? Could happiness ever be simple or shared? Aron had loved her. Andrei, too, in his way; they had seen each other for a while after her return, but like all the moving parts in her life, she and he did not quite mesh.
In her journal she wrote:
Yesterday was a very important day. Andrei and I said goodbye to each other. It was sad then but today with the sadness I feel relief and a certain sense of freedom. We reached a stage where it could either be all or nothing. He started mentioning things like marriage and family and how h
e thinks I am ready for that because it is such a noble thing—to raise kids, have a family and all. It is the hardest thing there is, he says, and he is not able to handle it, he thinks poorly of himself in this regard. I told him I’m not ready now. I still need some time. Not that he proposed to me or anything. He is very precious and unique. I had no expectations of him in Vancouver but when I got back we got close again and expectations follow like a tail to make things tricky. This is a responsible decision and I am thankful that he is doing his best to make it less hard for both of us. I trust him completely as a friend but former lovers cannot be friends. It is simply impossible.
Depending on the day, she could be quiet or feverish. When Yaakov was with Pauline at her Jerusalem apartment, Rena arrived carrying a chair she had bought at the flea market. It was heavy, but she was so manic, she did not know how far she had walked with it. She picked up the one-year-old Uri. A shadow fell across her face. “I can feel he’s suffering,” she said. “I can feel he’s unquiet.”
Yaakov was spooked. Rena’s illness was frightening. She had no boundaries. The suffering of others, real or imagined, compounded hers. It was hard to talk about it or confront her. He did not want to make her uncomfortable. At the same time he felt he should do something. She was alone in a dark place peopled by demons. On January 5, 2003, two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Tel Aviv bus station, killing twenty-three people. The city was nervy, on edge all the time. A little over a month later, on February 16, it was Yaakov’s birthday. “Rena was so low,” he recalled. “She came with my dad. It was like she was dragging herself on the floor. She was slumped on the couch. There was this tension between us. I can’t help feeling we could have been there for her in a different way. We wanted to do the right thing but all we came up with was awkwardness.”