by Roger Cohen
The trauma was my mother’s disappearance in 1958 into a redbrick Victorian sanatorium. The trauma was the electricity through her brain three days before my third birthday and again the day before it and again, I know not how many times, in the weeks after it. The trauma was the ensuing silence. Punishing her for that has involved my own disappearances from loved ones, an insatiable quest for consoling vitality (seen as insurance against death-depression and abandonment), and the periodic reenactment of the internal division with which I first protected myself and sought the physical love I had lost.
The only way back to mindfulness and wholeness has been writing down the world as I see it. Words alone bring me to a single voice, a unified being, and an inner peace. Voiceless at the time of the trauma, I have been terrified of the power of words even as I was drawn to them. Words, and through them understanding, were what I did not have as an infant. What was left was repetitive enactment.
I always wanted to tell stories, which involves giving yourself to the moment. Time must weigh on you, its lulls, accelerations, and silences, as I first experienced them in South Africa’s Kruger Park. The life within, the deeper story, does not yield itself with ease. War zones give you time. Most of war is sitting around. In Beirut, I watched children on the sidewalks, facades of buildings blown away behind them, constructing elaborate castles of cigarette cartons, flimsy creations that defied shelling as the spirit defies measurement. In Sarajevo, besieged for more than three years, I watched women burn books to heat stoves to cook the rabbits they raised in cages in their bedrooms. Always the smash of a shell, the flat boom of rending and fracture in that narrow valley, took my breath away. Exhaustion followed.
At the Central Bank, in Beirut, I met a young woman. I was waiting. Her name was Sana. Later she took me to her family’s shuttered apartment. All but she had fled to Europe. There were heavy drapes over the ornate furniture, and the airless, opulent rooms spoke of a rich life eclipsed. That abandoned apartment taught me something essential about Beirut’s cosmopolitan soul, a truth deeper than all the labels of the war’s militias, Christian, Shia, Druze, and the rest. Sana taught me about the proud defiance of loss. I felt like a trespasser on family secrets, gazing at formal portraits. Storytellers are trespassers. There can be something indecent about what we do, plunderers of others’ lives. The faster we move on, the more indecent it is. I’ve been the chronicler of too many tears. In the end, I came to my own.
My great-grandfather’s struggle is of a different kind, yet it resonates. In the face of injustice and enigma, he pursues an ordering principle:
From the very first day that man is old enough to think for himself he starts collecting materials and building blocks to establish his fort on strong foundations, to be able to rest in it securely in days to come. Working himself continuously, eventually he falls under the burden—just as stones piled incorrectly may tumble down.
While assured in himself, declares he thus: “I am supreme above all creatures,” imposing himself over others. Similarly, nations boast, “You have chosen us from all others,” only leading to acts of hostility against their fellow nations.
Oh, if only awareness came unto man and he truly knew that all of creation—from the sand granule to the shining star—is connected like one chain. That all are equal and summoned to fulfill their role; that the force of life springs from one source, that it is He who sustains all the children of life. All are intertwined.
All are intertwined in a single chain: over the century since my great-grandfather wrote, the connections linking humanity have increased exponentially, and a conflagration on the scale of World War I, which Shmuel experienced from afar, seems almost impossible. The world is networked. In virtual space, borders have vanished. At the same time, personal isolation has grown. Physical community has weakened as virtual community has spread. More families are scattered or split. Western societies are full of device-absorbed lonely people whose dark secret is the antidepressants they take. They fail to see the single chain.
You can live somewhere for decades, and still in your heart it is no more than an encampment, a place for the night, detached from community. Across the world today millions are bivouacked, dreaming of return, beset by twinges of longing. The inverse is also true: home can sink its roots in little time. But that is rarer than lingering exile.
One day, banking over New York City on the approach to LaGuardia, watching the serried towers of midtown, a single word welled up from deep inside me: home. I had left England a quarter century earlier, not through a conscious decision to emigrate but because the life of a foreign correspondent beckoned. I had written about what I saw, what I found below the surface. Often the stories were about lives swept away in the gale of history: the children of Beirut in 1983 who could not sleep without the familiar and so reassuring sound of gunfire; a Polish priest who discovered in middle age he was a Jew, entrusted by his Nazi-murdered parents to a Catholic family; mixed families broken asunder by the Bosnian war as boozy killers injected the virus of sectarian hatred into multiethnic cities like Sarajevo; a German woman unable to contemplate her beautiful blue eyes because they reminded her of a former Nazi concentration camp commander, her father; the difficult mental journey of a prominent Israeli politician from her family’s hard-line dismissal of Palestinians to belief in territorial compromise. Often I was drawn to stories of repressed memory and buried truths and Jewish identity. I wandered far and wide, privileged to be the outsider looking in but unsure where I belonged, until I reached New York. There I belonged in a city of “incomers,” like my grandparents’ nascent Johannesburg; and there I realized I had, after all, left Britain for a reason. I had to put a distance between myself and the locus of the trauma.
The city embraced me. As Robert Frost put it, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” It is “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” My mother’s unconscious whisper in talking about Jews as she cut her spaghetti was replaced by full-throated bawdiness about the Jewish condition. American citizenship—the miraculous, ever-renewed gathering-in of strangers made equal before the law—conjured away strains of contrived identity. The difference between those who came first and those who came last in the United States seemed negligible beside the intricate matter of British ancestry.
The awkwardness, neither awful nor negligible, was gone: what the poet and author James Lasdun called “that throttling knot of annulled speech gathering in my throat.” Lasdun, another English Jew grappling with the murmuring disquiet of that condition, wrote in the same poem of his family in England as “anglophone Russian-German apostate Jews mouthing Anglican hymns at church till we renounced that too.” As for self-knowledge, it was “knowledge of not being this or this or this.”
Lasdun was a contemporary of mine at Westminster. He moved to New York in 1986 and experienced the same immediate sense of homecoming. Before Westminster, he had been sent to an Anglican boarding school. His Jewish parents had joined the Church of England. They then lapsed into a state of “being not quite English without being unimpeachably Jewish either.” At the school, as he relates in Give Me Everything You Have, a memoir woven around the trauma of being stalked, he joined the choir and wore a “white surplice with modest pride.” Lasdun signed up for confirmation classes, but unease gripped him, intensifying into dread a few weeks before the Bishop of Chichester was to perform the ceremony. The feeling was similar to that of Jonathan Katz, the future head of College at Westminster, before his confirmation. Unlike Katz, Lasdun pulled out. He writes, “Sometimes, looking back, I have been tempted to see this episode as the sign of some authentic core of Jewishness in my soul, recoiling from the act of apostasy.” But he sees the decision more “as a kind of surging veto, unaccompanied by any more positive sense of who or what I might be if I was not this.” Overall, his feeling throughout his English schooling in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that being Jewish was a form of “mild disability.”
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sp; I meet Lasdun, whom I have not seen since school days, at a restaurant in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We go through the long-time-no-see adjustment of linking the physiognomy of adolescence to that of the graying man, a fast-forward detection of unchanging patterns in a changed surface. Lasdun’s father, Denys, was an eminent architect whose buildings—from the Royal College of Physicians in Regent’s Park to the National Theatre on the South Bank—form part of the texture of London. Yet Lasdun now feels only thinly connected to England. When he was growing up, his father would tell him they were Jewish and not English. They were Jewish by race and Christian by faith and British (perhaps)—until the Christianity lapsed, as Katz’s had at Oxford. Assimilation and conversion produced a strange hybrid.
In Sussex, where the family had a weekend house, Lasdun felt his otherness most keenly. Villagers would ask his mother what her “background” was. They would wonder what a woman so olive-skinned was doing in their little church. The message was subtle, a not-quite-anti-Semitic thing that put you not quite at ease. “And so that feeling for me in America of being comfortable in the Jewish part of my identity was novel and unexpected,” Lasdun says. “I just felt more at home, that creaturely sense of being among people for whom it is not an embarrassing, awkward, or negative thing.”
Our American discovery, or deliverance, is a shared thing. It came late. A sense of home is typically absorbed in childhood. It is the landscape of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years. My mother’s illness came between me and that place.
And what of Israel, offering its open invitation to any Jew? The Jewish question, far from settled by Israel’s establishment and success, keeps morphing into new puzzles. I admire and love the country but, South Africa inside me, cannot live with the knowledge of its trampling on “the stranger,” the Palestinian whose right to the land and love of the land is equal to the Jews’.
Over many journeys through Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, I have grown into a liberal Zionist, that dwindling breed. I am critical of the West Bank occupation, convinced that it is incompatible with a Jewish and democratic Israel, and supportive of a two-state outcome. Such criticism is anathema to major American Jewish organizations, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose policy is one of unconditional support for the Jewish state. Unbridled debate about Israel in the United States, in the Congress, and beyond has been curtailed for too long by the orchestrated opprobrium that any public critic of Israel incurs. The president’s room for maneuver has also been limited. Support for Israel, it often seems, is not enough unless it is blanket support, however self-defeating the occupation of the West Bank is for the Jewish state.
Across the Atlantic, it is a different story. I am a Zionist because of what I learned of Jewish history on the ground in Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Hungary, France, and other countries. It’s not that I fail to see the injury and loss Zionism caused in its triumph; it’s that I see no alternative for the Jews, and a Jew is what I am, and there are six million reasons why Jews must mean it when they say “Never Again.” Millennia of persecution demonstrated the need for a Jewish liberation movement and a homeland where nobody could tell the Jews they do not belong. Such feelings are visceral more than logical; they are also powerful.
This conviction brings the wrath of the many European intellectuals, Jews among them, who now equate Zionism with occupation, the West Bank with Algeria, and Israel with imperialist expansionism. Tom Paulin, an Oxford professor and poet, writes of the “Zionist SS,” a calumny that passes muster among some of Europe’s bien-pensants. The apartheid analogy, inexact as it is, spreads, not without reason. It gains purchase because the “apartheid wall,” “apartheid roads,” house demolitions, and land confiscation in the West Bank—as well as the relentless expansion there of the settlements—tell an irrefutable story of the oppression and humiliation of one people by another.
I knew apartheid. I saw how its implacable persecution was applied and codified. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians does not constitute apartheid reborn in the Holy Land. Israel’s Arab citizens, 20 percent of the population, enjoy rights unthinkable in apartheid South Africa (and rare for minorities in the Middle East), even if discrimination, both blunt and subtle, exists. Disappearances and judicial hangings were commonplace under apartheid. They are not the stuff of the West Bank treatment of the Palestinians. But as my cousin Pauline discovered long ago as she watched the relentless construction around Jerusalem from French Hill, the apartheid echoes are there for anyone with South African roots. Jews, having suffered for most of their history as a minority, cannot, as a majority now in their homeland, keep their boots on the heads of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
It would be gratifying if there were perfect justice, if Israelis and Palestinians could learn overnight to live together as equal citizens in some United States of the Holy Land, a binational and democratic secular state that resolves their differences and assures their intertwined futures. But it is an illusion to think this could ever happen. The onestate idea is a pipe dream. The fault lines are too deep. A single state cannot mark its Day of Independence and Day of Catastrophe on the same date. Even where sectarian divisions are less combustible, the regional example of multiethnic states is conclusive: they do not function.
Two states, as set out by the original United Nations Security Council Resolution of 1947, are needed, living side by side in peace and security: the nation-states of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples. The compromises required will be painful for both sides, but the alternative is conflict without end. The messianic idea of Greater Israel, occupying all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, must die. Palestinians can overcome the crippling divisions within their national movement and accept the permanence of the State of Israel. Competitive victimhood can cede to collaborative viability. The South African truth that my father’s classmate Sydney Kentridge intuited long ago, at Nelson Mandela’s 1956 treason trial, is also an Israeli-Palestinian truth: neither side can win, neither is going away.
One state, however conceived, equals the end of Israel as a Jewish state, the core of the Zionist idea. Jews will not allow this to happen. They have tried trusting their neighbors and discovered the trust was misplaced. The so-called right of return of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven out in the 1948 war (whose descendants now number in the millions) cannot be exercised, any more than the Jews of Baghdad and Cairo, the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Turks of Greece, or the ethnic Germans of Poland and Hungary have deeds to return home. There can, and should be, agreed compensation for the dispossessed, but there cannot be a reversal of history. The “right” is in fact a claim. As the Israeli novelist Amos Oz once told me, “The right of return is a euphemism for the liquidation of Israel. If exercised there will be two Palestinian states, and not one for Jews.” When Oz’s father was a young man in Lithuania, walls in Europe said, “Jews go home to Palestine.” Now the graffiti screams, “Jews get out of Palestine.” Enough said.
One problem is that anti-Zionism easily becomes an alibi for anti-Semitism. The effect of the growing Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is to put pressure on Israel to end the occupation and settlement construction. This, in theory, is positive. When the largest Dutch pension fund and the largest Danish bank withdraw investments from, or cease business with, Israeli banks because of their operations in the settlements, they send a signal Israel cannot ignore.
Yet these developments make me uneasy because I do not trust the BDS movement. Its stated aims are to end the occupation, to recognize the rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, and to fight for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees. The first objective is essential to Israel’s future. The second is laudable. The third, combined
with the second, equals the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This is the hidden agenda of BDS, its unacceptable subterfuge. The anti-apartheid movement did not have to deal with any such ambiguity. Those who urged divestment from South Africa had no agenda other than the liberation and enfranchisement of an oppressed black majority. BDS can too easily be commandeered by anti-Semites posing as anti-Zionists who channel the quest for peace in a direction that ultimately dooms Israel as a national home for Jews. As Lasdun has written, “There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.”
The Jewish national home is needed. It must now be reinvented. For that, the corrosive occupation has to end, and with it the settlement industry. Israel can be a state of laws again only when the lawless enterprise beyond the Green Line ends. As my cousin Rena knew, Israel requires borders. My great-grandfather Shmuel wrote:
Were nature to outline borders for humans, as if to say “no trespassing,” we would be able to enjoy every delight in the world. But as it is, without borders, we move from one delight to another, finding ourselves, overdoing it, finally in a murky valley.
I have followed the chain back. The search began at the Punta Spartivento in Bellagio, where World War II ended for my uncle, Capt. Bert Cohen of the Sixth South African Armored Division. Now, more than two years later, I find myself paging once more through his war diary.
It is April 9, 1944. Bert is sleeping in a tent in Helwan, Egypt, drinking Egyptian whiskey that “smells like a drain,” gazing at the dim, distant lights of Alexandria. He is worried that his Rome family—my grandmother’s sisters, the Žagarė-born revolutionaries Assja and Zera and their families—have been murdered by the Jew-hunting Nazis who have occupied Italy. He writes: “My hopes are largely centered upon the thought that I will find Auntie Assja in Italy. That would be a shining hour. Hell, if only I can.”