Catch The Jew!

by Tenenbom, Tuvia

  Peres speaks, in Hebrew. “This house is also yours,” he says. He is cute, this ninety-year-old man, I think to myself. Never tiring, always smiling.

  And then he talks of the peace talks:

  “I know there are people who say nothing will come out of it, but I say it will. The terrorists who want to hurt us, hurt themselves. I want to praise the two leaders who decided to renew talks. My friend Mahmoud Abbas . . . and the prime minister of Israel.”

  Interesting that he uses the “friend” term only for the Palestinian.

  “We are all adults here, and I know that there will be times of hardships . . . but we have no other alternative to peace.”

  Not adults; commanders!

  “All of us were created in the image of Elokim [sic].” Interestingly, Peres is using the Orthodox way of referring to God. The mention of God to them is forbidden. Whereas God in Hebrew is Elohim, the Orthodox change the H to K. Why? God knows.

  Peres keeps on talking. Here’s one of his great lines: “There is no other truth than the truth of peace.”

  ***

  People all around me are eating. This is a presidential meal, after all. I talk to the big shots sitting at my table. To my left, I find out, is a doctor in the security jail of Megido. Next to him is a “mayor” of a small village. The others are pretty much the same and, with one exception, everybody at this table is Circassian, not Arab. The one Arab here, a man dressed in civilian clothes, is a computer security specialist.

  I exchange a few words with him. Are Arabs and Jews getting along in this country?

  “No way.”

  He must be kidding. There are “leading Muslim figures” here, though not at this table, and if Arabs and Jews don’t get along, why are they here?

  Shamefully enough, I can’t recognize the important leaders here and I ask people to point out to me the leading Muslims and the ambassadors. They can’t. If there are any leading Muslim figures here, I soon conclude, they are the Circassians at my table.

  The people at this gathering, many of whom know each other, lead communities the size of Tziporah’s house at the cemetery. And even with such a community size, not all the tables here are taken.

  I mingle with the crowd. There must be more to what my eyes see, I say to myself. I approach a young man wearing a suit and start talking to him.

  What’s your name?

  “Obama.”

  Excuse me?

  “I came to make peace,” he admonishes me, “but got stopped at a checkpoint.”

  Who is President Peres inviting to his party? This guy must be either a self-deluding man or a stand-up comedian, though he might be both. When asked, he tells me he is “the only Arab comedian” there is.

  Back at my table, I again talk to the Arab.

  Is life really so bad here?

  “I don’t want to talk, but yes.”

  Would you like to leave this country?

  “No way! They [the Jews] want to force me out, but I won’t leave!”

  And if they wanted you to stay?

  “I’d leave on the first plane going out!”

  He tells me he wants to have freedom, like the Europeans have, and move from country to country just like the Europeans do. I ask him if he studied history, and if he remembers how many rivers of blood have been flowing there just in the last century.

  I tell him: If you, people in this area, had spilled as much blood as Europe so recently has, not one human being would exist in the Middle East by now. He looks at me, in huge amazement, as the other Muslims all stare at me. Do you remember, I ask him, that just before 1989 civilians could not cross from one side of Berlin to the other?

  There’s silence at the table.

  After seeming hesitation, the computer specialist breaks the silence.

  “I never thought of this, but you’re right.”

  I walk up to Shimon Peres to shake hands with him and tell him he spoke well. What else could I say?

  “How did you get such good Hebrew?” he asks me.

  As I start making my way out, I think: even during this particular week, with peace talks taking place, not even this internationally admired Jew could get bigger Arab leaders than “Obama” to attend his dinner.

  In the president’s garden there is a fragment of decorated stone from the “southern entrance to the Temple Mount” on display, dated “first century BCE.”

  Dr. Hanan is not here to see it, neither is Ehab or Khaled. Only Obama.

  What happened to this country while I was away? Even its president is a deluded man.

  I have an idea: collect bones from the tables for the stray cats. I walk back to check for bones, but the tables have been cleaned.

  Gate Seven

  Little white Jew doesn’t want to marry little black Jew. German teenagers wouldn’t mind watching Jews being stoned. A soldier drives nine hours to meet his dead comrade.

  NOW THAT I GOT A LITTLE TASTE OF ISRAELI POLITICS, I MOVE NORTHWARD, TO Haifa and vicinity. I first stop at a youth village for orphans, Yemin Orde, near Haifa. They must be less deluded than the Israeli president, I hope.

  First off, I meet Chaim Peri, the president and founder of Yemin Orde Educational Initiative. Chaim’s father and mother were German Jews, “Yekkes.” His mother was picking apples in the fields of Palestine during WWII, in 1941, and only after Chaim was born did she become aware of what was happening to her family in Germany. This caused her a mental breakdown, from which she never recovered.

  If you wonder what a Yekke is, here’s an example: “My grandmother, on my father’s side, who was from Berlin and was called ‘die blonde schikse mit die lange fiss,’ used German to remember Hebrew words. For example, toda rabba, which is Hebrew for ‘thank you,’ my grandmother memorized as toter Araber.” Toter Araber means “dead Arabs.”

  Yemin Orde is a non-traditional boarding school; it looks more like a village than a school, but it is a boarding school. They don’t call it boarding school, he says, as that name that implies a closed world. It emulates real life, non-institutionalized life, where one part is the school and the other is the home. Kids study at the school and then they go “home” like kids with parents do, and at home they can talk about school, even complain about the school. For the most part, the kids here are Ethiopian and Russian, Israel’s newest immigrant communities.

  Chaim is a religious person, but as you might expect from a son of Yekkes, he has his own ways of looking at things. According to him, “The most God-fearing people are the atheists.” Go figure.

  This village is a great idea, I tell him. Question to you: if you were not a Yekkes’ son, would you have the same great ideas and frame of mind that you have today?

  “Let me say this: Anything that started in this society, started with German Jews.”

  Rakheli, a young Ethiopian who is part of the staff here, is a vivacious and smart young woman who loves to talk dugri (straight). Asked if there’s racism in Israeli society, she says: “Yes, there is. It is not the same racism as the one America has been dealing with – no blacks are being killed here – but racism definitely exists in our society.”

  How do you deal with this?

  “I tell my students: Our black color will not change. Their white color will not change. Physically we look different. No matter what you do to cause a change in society, the colors will not change. Live with it.”

  This little speech helps?

  “I say to my students: There are twenty-four hours in a day. Nobody will give you more hours in a day, and nobody will take any of them away from you. These twenty-four hours belong to you, do with them what you can. If you want to spend them complaining, you will pay the price. You can make anything you want out of yourself, but you have to do it.”

  I meet a young kid, a grandson to one of the white volunteers here, and I play with him. We get to like each other, and joke together. Then, after a while, I ask him some stupid questions. One of them is this: When you grow older, would you like
to marry an Ethiopian woman? I could arrange one for you, would you like me to do it?

  “No.”

  Why not?

  “No.”

  Why?

  “Because.”

  What do you think, black people are good?

  “No.”

  What makes them bad?

  The child catches sight of his older brother who is gesturing him to shut up and he does.

  It always amazes me how hard it is for one people not to discriminate another.

  ***

  Time to move on, to Haifa. The Gardener film, a PC film, as PC as you’ll ever get, plays to the same discriminating concept as I have just encountered: white and black. There you have the softy white woman and the roughish black man, in a film shot by an Iranian lover of Israel. The Gardener was shot in the Bahá’í Gardens in Haifa, which is my first stop in the city.

  Bahá’í Gardens.

  I walk through the enchanting gardens and make my way up the steps leading to the shrine. It is closed at the moment, and four young people are seated on the steps by its gate. They are Mo, Selina, Birte, and Marvin. Two of them have just finished high school, two have graduated from college, and all are German.

  They are on a two-week trip to Israel, have been to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and are now in Haifa. In Jerusalem they saw Arabs throwing stones at Jews in the Old City for about two hours, they recall, and then Israeli police came “with guns and horses.” This is a brutal behavior of the Israelis, they say, because the police should have “talked with them” instead of coming in with force. Interestingly, they don’t have a single word of criticism against the stone throwers.

  Did any of you change his or her mind about Israel, now that you are here?

  Mo tells me that he saw “more aggressiveness on the Jewish side” than he had thought.

  What do you mean?

  “Jewish soldiers with guns in worship places!”

  What would have happened to the Jews if no police had shown up with guns?

  “I don’t know.”

  No matter what could have happened to the Jews, getting hurt or killed, he says, the Jews should accept the stones.

  At least he’s honest.

  Selina used to think that the conflict between Arabs and Jews was easier to solve, it was black and white for her, but being here she realizes it’s not that simple.

  Birte thinks that “you can’t just come into a country and throw the people out,” which is what the Jews did, and she felt it while here. I guess she’s talking about 1948, when the Jewish state was founded, long before she was born, and most likely before her parents were born. How does she manage to “feel” it?

  “I had a good teacher at school and she taught us all about it.”

  I came to see black and white and I got Germans.

  ***

  Haifa University is a cab ride away, and I go there.

  Fania Oz-Salzberger, the daughter of the famous Israeli author Amos Oz, is a professor of history at the Haifa University School of Law.

  Fania, a lady of proper manners, orders cold drinks for her guest at the university’s cafeteria, and as soon as we both light up and inhale the smoke into our lungs, we start discussing extremely important issues. For example: Who’s a Jew?

  Israeli lawmakers have been trying to solve this question for decades but still have no clue. Fania has.

  “Ours, meaning the Jews, is not a blood line but a text line.”

  Is this the most important definition of being Jewish?

  “Yes.”

  How do the Palestinians figure in this equation? I have no idea why I’m asking this question. The word Palestinian has been hammered into my brain so many times since I’ve arrived here that I must release it on somebody. Surprisingly, Fania answers my question as if it were the most logical in existence.

  “They don’t, they are like any other nation.”

  Fania is proud of her people and her culture. “Israel is the greatest exporter of meaning in the world, and we have done this since the time of Jesus. This land proves that size doesn’t matter.”

  Fania doesn’t stop here, she keeps on: “This place works like a magnet and is also radioactive, spreading out. Call it mystical. I don’t know what it is. Think of the Crusaders: why did knights mount horses and come here? Why did prophet Muhammad come here to fly to heaven from Jerusalem? Why did the Jews come here again? There are forces at work here, call them magnetism and radioactivity. This place draws energy in and it spreads it out.”

  Fania has a fresh voice, whether you agree with her or not, and I listen. “This place is the densest in the world in terms of words. Ten kilometers from here is Armageddon. Every place in this country has an in-built library. This crowdedness of textuality is the meaning of this place.

  “Jews and Arabs are killing one another. Arabs and Arabs are killing one another. But Jews and Jews don’t kill each other, they scream at each other. This is because Jews are made of words, words that are in books and have been in books for twenty-five hundred years.”

  This is not exactly true. Former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin died by a bullet of a Jewish assassin. The Zionist leader Haim Arlozorov was most likely killed at the hands of Jewish assassins. The journalist Rabbi Jacob Israël de Haan was murdered by the Haganah (a pre-state paramilitary Jewish organization that eventually became the IDF), probably by order of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. And of course there’s the Altalena Affair, in which nineteen Jews were killed by other Jews.

  Yet, these numbers are minute in comparison to other nations.

  And Fania keeps charting her course.

  “I like some Greek books, from the ancient era, more than most Jewish books. But no other nation, except the Jews, ‘forced its children to go to school at the age of three.’

  I never thought of this, though I should have. When Fania says it, she magically brings me back to my baby years. I started studying Judaism at the tender age of three.

  I leave Fania, one of the few intellectuals I met who actually made me think, and walk the streets of Haifa, a city peacefully populated by both Arabs and Jews. Haifa impresses me as a laid-back city, a nice and calm city, but way too hot. I miss Jerusalem weather. No, not miss; need. I board a bus to the capital, of the Jews or of the Arabs, and sit down on the single seat available, next to a soldier with a submachine gun.

  ***

  I introduce myself to him as a man named Tuvia. He likes the name and he opens up.

  He was allowed to leave his base for a day and a half and is now on his way home to Jerusalem, where his mama and papa can’t wait to see him and spoil him. He’s stationed on the Lebanese border and has been on the road for some time now. To be exact: nine hours. His day and a half, if you deduct his rides back and forth and add sleeping time, is in reality just a few hours.

  Before coming to the Lebanese border he was stationed in Hebron.

  I ask him if any of his political views were changed after being in Hebron or on the Lebanese border.

  “Yes. I’ve become more of a rightist. Standing at a checkpoint is not easy. You don’t know what will happen next. Every day, almost every day, they [Palestinians] push their ten-year-old children, sometimes even younger, to come near the checkpoint and throw stones at us. What can you do to a child? You can’t fight children. The parents teach their children – and sometimes I could hear the lessons in the nearby school – to hate Jews. It’s not the children’s fault, but it’s the children who throw the stones. I heard and I saw, and now I’ve moved to the right. When you stand at a checkpoint, sooner or later you’ll change your views, if you were a leftist. You experience the hate and you know there’s no chance for peace.”

  I assume you are a proud Zionist –

  “I’m not a Zionist. When I finish my army service, I think of leaving Israel and going to Brooklyn. I have family in America.”

  Why then are you serving in the army?

  “When I was a
kid growing up in Israel, someone out there protected me. Now it’s my turn to protect the kids.”

  How’s life on the border?

  “Boring. Dangerous.”

  Do you sleep in tents?

  “Tents?? If we lived in tents we would be dead.”

  Describe your living conditions –

  “We live in a fortress, with no windows anywhere. It is hot. Hot. Hot. I have three fans running, just to have a little air.”

  What do you do when you’re not in the fortress?

  “I don’t know if I’m allowed to speak to you.”

  Yes, you are allowed!

  He pauses. He thinks. I smile to him and he goes on:

  “At the border. We look at them, they look at us, and nothing happens. Sometimes I miss Hebron, because there something was happening, always, even if it wasn’t a nice experience. The Arab kids with the stones, or the adult leftists. They come too, and they curse the soldiers. Some are Jews and some are not. But at least we didn’t hide in the dark, like on the Lebanese border, not knowing what will happen and if anything will happen.

  “Yes, true; this is also an experience. People from all walks of life share the same fortress, and the same rooms. I made friends in the army that I wouldn’t have made otherwise. Ethiopians, Russians, everybody. Rich and poor, educated and not. We learn to know each other in very difficult circumstances and we become brothers. Being in the army teaches us that we are all the same. For this I’m very happy.”

  How much money do you earn in the army?

  “I’m in a combat unit, and we make more than others.”

  He earns, all told, €150 a month.

  This “more than others” huge pay he spends on cigarettes and alcohol. “When I get a day off, I go out and I drink. Just to clear my head. It’s very difficult otherwise.”

  As the bus reaches Jerusalem I hear him on his cellphone, speaking to a friend or a family member: “I’ll be in the cemetery in the morning.” When he gets off the phone I ask him who died. A fellow soldier from his unit, he answers. He pauses for a minute, takes a straight look at me, and says: “I don’t really know if I’ll leave this country. I don’t think I will.”