Catch The Jew!

by Tenenbom, Tuvia

  I want to ask him if he, too, would give Rabbi Batsri 4,000 shekels but fast hold my tongue. I don’t even know his name and it would be totally unfair to accuse him of masturbation.

  What’s your dream?

  “Peace.”

  With whom?

  “Between us and the Arabs. There is no reason, believe me, that we will not have peace with them. The problem is this: Ashkenazi Jews, and they are the ones negotiating with the Palestinians, will never reach any peace with them. If Israel sent Sephardi Jews to negotiate with the Palestinians, there would have been peace here already a long time ago. Ashkenazi Jews don’t want us, the Sephardi Jews, to talk with the Arabs.

  “Listen to me: the Zionist movement, from the start, didn’t get it that in order to speak with other people you need to understand the others’ culture. If you want to make peace with the Palestinians you must first understand them, their culture, and the nuances of their culture, but the Ashkenazi Jews have not internalized this fact yet.”

  As I leave his office I check the name on the wall: MK Yitzhak Cohen.

  Who is he?

  This is the Knesset’s official info about him: head of the Knesset’s Ethics Committee, former Minister for Religious affairs, former Deputy Finance Minister, father of ten.

  ***

  Ten children may sound a bit crowded for some people, but not so for MK Meir Porush, in whose office I sit after I have done with MK Cohen. Meir is the father of twelve.

  Meir is a leading MK for the Ashkenazi equivalent of Shas, called Torah Judaism, and is dressed in traditional Haredi clothes, which include a long black coat that was initially designed for Siberia. The weather today is very, very hot, but that’s okay with Meir. He has his air conditioner set to freezer levels, making it very comfortable for him and his normal guests, not people like me.

  Talk to me. Tell me what you want, and I’ll tell the world what you are saying.

  “I don’t know if your readers want to know about us,” he replies.

  I tell him to go ahead, and he does.

  “We represent authentic Judaism, the culture that started three thousand years ago at Mount Sinai.”

  Sephardi MK Yitzhak was talking of thirty-five hundred years, but this Ashkenazi MK Meir is talking of three thousand. Maybe the Sephardi Jews are older, I don’t know.

  “Why is it important that we have preserved this old culture?” MK Meir asks, and immediately answers: “The Jewish nation is the oldest nation in the world.”

  Some people might dispute this account of history, but Meir is not impressed. “There is no other nation that is so ancient,” he emphasizes.

  And what is this Jewish culture? Well, there’s one thing that it is not, according to MK Meir: “If you like to buy Made in Israel goods and think this makes you a Jew, you’re wrong.”

  MKs, I see, like to talk philosophy, ideology, ethics, and history but I try to bring this MK to earth for a minute or two.

  The Knesset is convening today to discuss what it calls “equally sharing the burden.” Can you explain to me what this is?

  “Nobody knows!”

  This man’s funny, but he isn’t answering my question.

  The truth is, “equally sharing the burden” is an explosive issue in Israel at the moment. Haredi Israelis don’t serve in the army (don’t “share the burden”), but get government help when they need it like any other, and often even more. Half a century ago it was not a big problem, as there were not that many of them, but now their community is in the hundreds of thousands.

  I push him to give me a better answer than “nobody knows” and he responds that this “sharing the burden” is just a tool by secular Jews who have nothing better to do than to attack the Haredi people. “Why is it that male Druze serve in the Israeli army while female Druze don’t? Where is the equality?” Of course, having female Druze serve in the Israeli army is the last of MK Meir’s worries, but it’s a good method to get some people off his case.

  For my part, I ask him to be more precise in his reply and he obliges: “I don’t view it as ‘holy’ to have a Jewish government here. Of course it’s more comfortable if the government here is Jewish, but if this Jewish government is making it hard for us to observe our traditions, it is not my dream that Jews should govern the state.”

  Putting it simply, what MK Meir is saying is this: if having a Jewish state means that the Haredi community will have to serve in the army, he and his party would rather have an Islamic state. This is something I had never thought I’d hear, but “facts are facts.”

  ***

  After having left MK Meir’s office I encounter Minister Uri Orbach and ask him if he would like to be interviewed. He responds: “Why? Why should I spend my time doing Israeli PR clichés? No, thanks.”

  ***

  MK Dr. Aliza Lavie is a member of Israel’s newest party, Yesh Atid (There is a Future), created by journalist-turned-politician Yair Lapid. MK Aliza is one of the better known feminists of her country, a religious woman and a university lecturer, as well as an author of books. I ask her to tell me what “Israel” is.

  “The State of Israel for me means a home. A home is something you work on, a place you love, a place you repair, preserve, and a place you don’t run away from.”

  Are you proud to be an Israeli?

  “Sure. But even more than that, I’m grateful. I was born into a generation that has a home, and I’m very happy about it. My grandma is from Bucharest. She was a model when she was twenty, twenty-one years old. She had a fashion studio, she had everything, but one day they burned her place and everything she had. Some people cared for her, and she was brought here. Slowly, she built herself up again, in this land. I see it as my task to help every Jew anywhere in the world who wants to come here, and help them in whatever they need. This country is the home for Jews, and my job is to keep this place alive.”

  What is an Israeli?

  “A human who wants to live, to get ahead, to survive. The desire to live can be found in every part of the Israeli’s being. Why is Israeli high tech so advanced? It’s not just the ‘Jewish brain,’ it’s much more than that. It’s the desire to live to the fullest. Being Israeli means having a home. And despite all the differences between Jews, despite all the yelling at each other right here in this Knesset, Israelis have some kind of glue that unites them. We all share the same home. I cannot explain it. This togetherness, this unity, gives me the strength to sit with German media, to give this interview. It gives me strength, and I can forgive the past.”

  She’s talking about me; I am the German she needs special strength to talk to. Good.

  Can you give me an image of “this togetherness”?

  “If I fall on the street, I hope it happens here [in Israel], for here someone will help me up. I have no other land, no other home.”

  These are the present leaders of the country I was born in. This country is also blessed with a zillion cats, a few of which are in my garden. I go there.

  Gate Twenty-Seven

  What do humanist foreign journalists do when a halfdead Syrian civilian is lying next to them?

  I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE CATS ARE TODAY. MAYBE THEY WENT TO JORDAN for a KAS conference.

  Uncle Sam is threatening to intervene in Syria, where a man kills his neighbor for no reason and where a child goes starving until he no longer is. So far, well over 100,000 lives have been lost in Syria, according to published estimates, and the number of wounded is far greater.

  The Middle East being the Middle East, a place where loyalties can form and break at the sound of the wind, some of those wounded in Syria’s war have crossed the border to Israel, to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Syria is one of Israel’s most bitter enemies, but Israel is the one place that separates the wounded from death.

  I safely arrive in Tzfat (Safed), in the north of the country. One hundred forty war-wounded Syrians have somehow crossed into Israel by now, and a number of them have ended up right where I pr
esently am: Ziv Hospital.

  On a bed, barely alive, is Khalid: a finger gone, a hole in his torso, face connected to tubes and wires that keep him breathing. He has been here two weeks, and only Allah knows what his future will be. He can’t talk clearly, and he gestures with his face and hands.

  A bunch of journalists, mostly foreign and also a local Palestinian, are at the scene. Cameras, camera recorders keep on clicking. One asks him: How do you feel in Israel?

  He stares, as if saying “good.”

  Where are you from? I ask him.

  He looks at me, gestures that he wants to write his answer; he can do that.

  I ask the hospital staff if they could give him pen and paper.

  They do.

  He writes. It takes ages: Daraa.

  Where the war started, two years ago. There, in the center of hell.

  He points at his belly and he tries to talk to me, “Belly,” he says. May Allah give you health, I say to him. He touches me gently and gestures that he wants to write something else.

  A TV crew asks me to move as he starts writing. What’s the story? They want to take pictures of him with their reporter, no matter that this wounded man is making so much effort to communicate with me.

  To hell with them. I don’t move.

  Khalid shows me his fingers, five of them. Barely speaking, he says: five children.

  He is father to five children, if they are still alive.

  And what about your wife? I ask him.

  He is moved. He is not used to journalists having a real interest in him.

  He moves his wounded hand closer to me, takes my hand in his hand and slowly brings my hand to his lips, and he kisses it.

  I want to cry.

  I kiss him too.

  This simple human gesture has overwhelmed him. He motions to me to send the other journalists away, and then takes my hand again and kisses it again.

  This is heart-breaking.

  He takes my left hand in his right hand and holds it. I caress his left hand and his head. He can hardly breathe, very heavily he does, and holds on to me as tight as he can. This makes him feel better and again he gestures to the other journalists to leave. I wonder if he wants me to leave as well and I start moving, but he takes my hand again.

  I want to cry but instead I caress him.

  The staff asks that we all leave. I step back, but Khalid doesn’t want me to. I come again and he slowly moves the blanket off his body to show me his wound, a huge hole where a belly should have been.

  Will this man survive or am I staring at the cruel face of death?

  I want to hug him, to give him comfort. He looks at me, a man he has never met before, with two eyes packed with love.

  I will never forget Khalid, face of humanity in a landscape of mercenary journalists.

  Outside, at the entry to the hospital, where I now stand to vent my anger with the foreigners by smoking a cigarette, I see an ambulance with this writing on it: “In memory of the six million who perished in the Holocaust.”

  This ambulance was donated by one Victor Cohen of Boca Raton, Florida, USA.

  ***

  The mercenary journalists and I keep going north, closer to Syria. Higher and higher toward the Golan Heights, huge mountains welcome us. Am I in Tyrol?

  This country, owner of the lowest point on earth at the Dead Sea, here rises to heights one can hardly imagine ever reached in this short and small area. The geography of this land, from what I have seen so far, is as different in locations as it is in its people. Extreme in the belly of its soil as it is in the people living on it.

  The road continues up and we arrive in Majdal Shams, a Druze village on the Golan Heights. The Druze, Arabs who are not Muslim, live on both sides of the Israeli Syrian border. Sitting at a local restaurant, a Druze guy gives me his business card, in case I’d like to come again. His address, it reads, is Occupied Golan Heights.

  On the other side of the restaurant I get the chance to see and hear how European journalists do interviews geared to extract answers that will fit their worldview. It is fascinating and intriguing to watch.

  A British journalist and a Druze villager discuss the likelihood of war with Syria and the possibility of bombs containing chemical poison flying in the area. Here it goes:

  J: Do you have gas masks?

  D: No.

  J: Did the Israeli authorities supply you with gas masks?

  D: No.

  J: But in general, Israeli authorities supply Israeli citizens with gas masks, right?

  D: Yes, I think so.

  J: They give masks to their citizens but not to you. Right?

  D: I think that they do.

  J: The Jews get it but you don’t. Interesting.

  D: I don’t know.

  J: They didn’t offer you any mask, did they?

  D: No. I think they distribute masks only in the big cities, like Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.

  J: But do they or don’t they distribute them to the locals here, the other people, the Jews?

  D: Maybe. I don’t know.

  J: It is possible that they distribute masks to “them” but not to you.

  D: Could be.

  J: So they offer the masks to Jews but not to the Druze. Really interesting!

  At this point the villager is totally confused, lights up a cigarette, and talks to another villager sitting by him.

  As for the journalist, he watches me looking at him and his face turns angry. He gives me a spiteful look and moves away.

  God bless the Queen.

  ***

  Mount Bental is our next stop. Here you stand and you see Syria right in front of your eyes. Syria, where Khalid comes from, where his wife and five children are, if they are still alive.

  What a small country Israel! It took three hours, with stops for coffee, cigarette, and toilet, to get here from the center of Israel. And I take into account that this is not America, which means that often enough the ride goes through small, side streets. In other words, you can cross the length of Israel by car in about five hours, south to north. Crossing the width of Israel will take you a fraction of that time, between ten minutes and two hours, depending where you choose to cross.

  A teeny-tiny country, yet the world is so hugely interested in it. This has nothing to do with logic; could it be a “spiritual” thing? Perhaps I should find myself a spiritual leader and see if he or she has an explanation.

  Gate Twenty-Eight

  How do you become an international human rights rabbi? What does a Christian Zionist girl love more, man or grapes?

  A RABBI IS A SPIRITUAL LEADER, RIGHT?

  Rabbi Arik Ascherman, dressed fashionably and elegantly, with the coolest of sneakers, is the president and senior rabbi of Rabbis for Human Rights, and the man I’m going to see.

  Have you heard of the Rabbis for Human Rights? They are apolitical, Rabbi Arik tells me, and by their own by-laws cannot take any political side. Rabbi Arik tells me that he is apolitical to a fault, that he’ll never take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that he will never ever make any move that could be interpreted as taking sides.

  My kind of rabbi, and now all that’s left for me to do is have him tell me what he thinks in his heart and how he turns his thoughts into deeds. He is very glad that I ask him these questions and happily obliges. He believes, he tells me, the following:

  Israel is abusing Palestinians inside Israel and out.

  Israel practices racism against the Palestinians.

  Israel steals Palestinian lands.

  Israel imprisons Palestinians illegally.

  Israel constantly engages in discriminatory measures and actions against innocent Palestinians.

  All settlements are illegal.

  Israel regularly breaks international law.

  Israel is a brutal occupier.

  Israel’s army routinely helps and protects settlers’ criminal activities against Palestinian villagers.

  Israel acts an
d behaves like any other brutal dictatorship in history.

  Israeli archeologists routinely destroy any evidence that might support Palestinian claims to the land.

  And so on and so on, but I jot down only part of what this apolitical rabbi tells me. What’s amazing about this man, and I can’t explain how he pulls it off, is that he doesn’t himself break into laughter when he tells me he is apolitical.

  In an ever serious mode he moves on to tell me about the deeds part, what he and his associates do: (a) they challenge the Israeli government through the court system, filing one lawsuit after another against the state; (b) they travel to Palestinian villages to serve as human shields against murderous Jewish settlers and soldiers.

  None of the above, as has already been mentioned, is supposed to have anything to do with politics and nothing of what has been said so far could possibly be misconstrued as taking sides between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

  Rabbi Arik, a biblical scholar by profession, confidently assures me that the Bible prohibits wars of any kind. The fact that the Bible is full of wars, even ordered by the Lord, is unknown to him. Page after page of the Bible speaks of wars, but none of these pages is known to Rabbi Arik.

  I get a bit pissed off at him. I take the Bible, which is in his room, and tell him: Look, almost every page here is full of wars. Are you denying this? Start reading with me!

  He refuses.

  This rabbi is so righteous and scholarly, in addition to his being apolitical, that he has even lived with Palestinians for two years. As he shares this with me, his eyes glow. I saw a pair of eyes similar to his not long ago, I recall, and try to remember whose eyes they were. Oh, yeah, the British journalist. Is there another similarity between the two? Yeah, both are into human rights.

  ***

  Rabbi Arik, no matter what I think, views himself as a holy man. The Palestinians, His Holiness tells me, live in horrible conditions imposed on them by the Jews. They live in utter poverty in refugee camps and if not for the rabbis’ abundance of holy mercy, their fate would have been sealed with a one-way ticket to eternal Hell.