His sister, he tells me as he steers the ship, emigrated from Israel and is living in Munich. Their family roots are in Berlin, and she went back to her roots.
The waters are too rough today to “go wet,” the Sayeret commander informs us, and we are to continue “dry.”
About six hours into my bee ride, as we are about to reach the shore, I look at the dry land around me. Here is Haifa. Here is Kiryat Shmonah. Here is Akko. And there is Lebanon.
A few months ago, I had a meal at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, and a receptionist said to me: “Our Palestine is small. Very small.” He was talking about the “historic Palestine,” from the River (Jordan) to the Sea (the Mediterranean). And as I stand on the bee in mid-waters looking out, I can vouch for it. Palestine, all of it, is indeed small, very small.
Gate Forty-Four
Jews are barbarians.
TO GET A BETTER PICTURE OF THE SIZE OF THIS LAND, I GO TO EILAT, ISRAEL’S southernmost city.
Welcome to Le Meridien Eilat, part of David Fattal’s Fattal Hotels chain in Israel. David Fattal, who started his career in the hotel business as a reception clerk, today has thirty-one hotels in Israel, forty-five in Germany and a few others here and there.
I like this Le Meridien. It’s not one of the most glorious hotels that I’ve been to, but it has a certain look that makes you think you’re at a friend’s home and not in a hotel. I have a big balcony, facing Jordan, right across the waters (Gulf of Aqaba/Gulf of Eilat), which obviously adds to the charm of the room. On the Jordanian side is an object that catches my eye: a giant Arab flag. I wonder why the Jordanians feel the need to fly such a huge flag. Is it for the same reason that the Palestinians fly their giant flag in Rawabi, to stick it the Jews? I don’t know.
***
To get a better feel of my surroundings I leave the room and go down to the hotel’s café. I order caffe hafukh (café latte), and the waitress, a young Israeli girl whose parents immigrated from Russia when she was a baby, takes the time to chat with me. I look like a classic European to her, and she would like to live where I live. “I’m not a Zionist,” she proudly explains to me, and she would rather not live here. Why she feels the need to tell this to me is beyond my capacity to understand.
I look at the tourists around me. I remember when I was a teenager, Eilat was packed with European tourists, all speaking foreign languages. The tourists I see here now are almost all Israelis. The international language here is Hebrew.
I go for a walk on the streets of Eilat. As in the hotel, the tourists outside are also Israelis.
When I was a teenager the Europeans I saw in Israel were lying naked on the beach sucking the sun into their pale skins. The Europeans I see these days in Israel, though not in Eilat, are fully dressed and they run around in an obsessive search for a bad Jew.
Has Europe changed? Have the Jews changed?
I meet some locals, Jews, and they explain Eilat to me: a city sandwiched between Jordan on the one side and Egypt on the other. It is just a few minutes’ ride from each border, five minutes to Egypt driving this way and five minutes to Jordan driving the other way. On a clear day, when I look right across, they tell me, I will even see Saudi Arabia.
I don’t see Saudi Arabia now, but I see Zoltan. Zoltan is a street comedian who makes his living by betting twenty shekels to a hundred that you will not be able to beat him and his bike. Zoltan rides his bike effortlessly in front of you and dares you to do the same. The deal is this: you hand Zoltan twenty shekels, you get the bike and you have to ride it for four meters the way he rides the bike. How does he ride it? Simple: he sits, he puts both his hands on the steering rod and both his feet on the pedals. Piece of cake, isn’t it? Well, if you can do this he’ll give you one hundred shekels; if you cannot, say goodbye to your twenty.
There’s one little trick here, of course: Zoltan has built this bike with an opposite steering rod. If you turn the rod to the right the bike will go left, and if you turn it to the left the bike will go right. Passersby, especially machos walking with their girlfriends, are certain they can beat this Zoltan and make a quick buck. They mount the bike, sporting a big smile on their faces, only the moment they start riding they lose their balance and their smiles evaporate. Not one person avoids making the mistake of turning the rod in the wrong direction, even though all were told in advance how this bike works. It is an amazing experiment that proves beyond doubt the power of habit over logic.
For me, it took this Zoltan to make me understand why the Europeans are not coming to Israel for its beaches anymore. It’s much more exciting to catch a Jew than to catch the sun. It’s called habit. You can pause your hatred because of an uncomfortable Auschwitz moment, as the Europeans did a few decades ago, but to completely erase the habit of hatred is a much harder task.
Zoltan tells me that it has taken him months to get used to riding this bike, and that if he adds one tiny task to his newly acquired habit, such as holding a cigarette in his fingers while riding, he immediately loses control of the bike. Wow.
I go back to the hotel, sit by the pool, sip coffee, and smoke.
***
Yehudah, with his sixteen-year-old daughter, Leah, and his thirteenyear-old son, Avi, join me at my table. Leah tells me that she’s moving to Germany soon, and Avi tells me that he would like to do the same.
Leah, who has recently acquired a German passport, is presently studying German at her high school in Eilat. She tells me: “Israelis don’t respect other people. Israelis are also rude. Like, toward waiters. Israelis never say ‘thank you.’ When a waiter comes to serve them, they all say: ‘This is not what I ordered!’ They are never satisfied. But Germans are different. Germans always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ they are always patient and they are always nice.”
Yehudah: “Israelis are barbarians. After the summer, the hotels in Eilat have to fix broken doors, windows, and everything else because Israeli tourists break everything. In the old days, when the Europeans were the tourists, there were no problems, but now it’s the Israelis who are the tourists and they have no respect.”
I have a strong urge, right now, to divorce myself from these self-hating creatures. I go out, get into a cab and in minutes I’m in Aqaba, Jordan.
Welcome to Jordan, says a sign above my head. Welcome to Aqaba, says another.
I stand in Aqaba, facing Israel, and I stare at the landscape across from me on the other side of the Gulf. I feel my heart beating fast. There, on the other side, is Israel. I have, by now, spent months in Israel, spoken to hundreds if not thousands of its people, and all of them are now so far away.
From afar, looking at Israel, now just a tiny spot, I entertain the thought that I could fit the whole of Israel into the palm of my hand. What would I do, I ask myself, if Israel indeed landed in the palm of my right hand. Would I keep it close to my heart or would I throw it into the water in disgust?
So small, my Palestine, so small, my Israel!
I stare at the tiny country in my hand and I want to talk to it, but my lips don’t move. Only my eyes speak to it, my wet eyes. I move away from the Gulf.
And after exactly two hours I’m back in Israel. There are loose ends I haven’t tied up yet, pieces of a puzzle I haven’t finished putting into place, and there are answers I haven’t yet found.
My time in Israel is not over. Not yet.
Gate Forty-Five
A professor finds the real Jews: the Arabs.
PROFESSOR SHLOMO SAND OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY, WHOSE MOST RECENT book, When and How I Stopped Being a Jew, came out earlier this year, is facing me at a Tel Aviv café, the natural think tank of people like him.
Shlomo likes big statements.
“Chances are that the real descendants of the original Jews are the Palestinians living here today. A Palestinian living in Hebron is more likely to be a direct descendant of the ancient Jews than Tuvia.”
Shlomo has harsh words up his sleeve with respect to Israel: “Israel
will not finish before making a big Auschwitz in the Middle East.”
What is it that makes Israel so cruel, so stupid?
“You, the Germans, are responsible for this.”
I totally forgot that I’m German, especially since he knows me by the name of Tuvia. Good that he reminded me.
In any case: We, the Germans, introduced “Jewish” as a race, and then some strange people started calling themselves “Jews,” and the real Jews, the Palestinians, are now getting killed by the “Jews.”
I love Shlomo’s one-liners. Here’s one: Jews and Arabs live in Jerusalem, Israelis live in Tel Aviv.
A few feet away from us is the Zavta hall, where the former MK Uri Avnery is about to start celebrating his ninetieth birthday party. The theme of the evening, composed by Uri, is this: “Will Israel exist ninety years from now?”
Shlomo and I go to the party.
I walk over to Uri and wish him another ninety years, “to finish the job.”
“I hope it will not take that long,” he says.
I take my seat in the theater hall of Zavta, sitting in one of the front rows. On my left is Dr. Angelika Timm, the director of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and in front of me is Gideon Levy. I ask Gideon what has happened to his promise to take me along me with him on one of his forays through the Palestinian world. “It hasn’t been possible yet,” he answers.
What’s the big deal, I ask him? Just call me before you go and I’ll come over. “I will do it,” he says.
The stage is empty except for a slide with Uri and others lying on the ground in the Arab village of Bil’in, evidently protecting themselves against an IDF tear gas attack.
People here love this image: an image of Jewish brutality and cruelty.
Am I in a Jewish self-hating factory or is this a Palestinian cultural event starring two wayward Jews and three hundred self-loving Arabs?
I look around at the audience and see one Arab lady. Among the speakers tonight: no Arab. In other words: with one exception, everybody here is Jewish.
The evening proceeds slowly, as intellectual events usually do, and at one point Shlomo gets pissed off and screams that it is a shame that no Arab has been invited to speak. A person three rows behind me tries to calm Shlomo down: “We have invited them, but they didn’t want to come.”
But psychologically, Shlomo cannot allow himself to even entertain the idea that the Arabs have simply refused to show up for a Jew’s birthday, and he totally ignores the caller.
The “Jewish” Professor Asma, from Al-Quds University, whom I met in my first week in Israel, was right: it is the Germans who are passionate about the Palestinians, not the Israelis. The intellectual Israeli leftists don’t accept the Palestinians one bit, despite their lofty declarations of “I love the Palestinians.” With the exception of the one Arab lady, no one here loves a Palestinian.
How could they? If you are a self-hater, if you have no capacity to love even yourself, how can you love anybody else? There ain’t no room for love in your heart, man, and you had better start living with it.
As I sit here and watch these self-haters, I hear a voice within me asking: Is there anybody out there who is brainwashing these Jews to hate themselves?
Good question.
I leave the Jews of Zavta in search of the possible manipulators of the Jew.
Gate Forty-Six
Take a guess: Which country invests the most funds on anti-Israel campaigns?
I STICK AROUND IN TEL AVIV AND GO TO MEET DAVID LIPKIND OF THE ISRAEL Film Fund, an organization that is engaged primarily with feature (fiction) films. David should be able to show me a graph of the money flowing into the production of Israeli self-hate films, of which there are many. Artists, sorry to say this, are a bunch of selfish, egocentric kids who will sell their souls to the highest bidder. If a filmmaker knows that you are a rich “anti-wood” person who will generously fund his or her next project provided it delivers a strong anti-wood message, he and she will be more than glad to turn your wish into a film.
I hope that today I will find the funders hiding behind the films. The Israeli Film Fund, the largest of Israeli film sponsors with millions and millions of shekels at its disposal, is often making Israeli films happen with the help of generous foreign investors.
We talk, David and I. In the last ten years, David informs me, there have been at least twenty-five coproductions between Germany and Israel.
How many of the twenty-five have had to do with politics?
“I think something like 60 percent.”
Are there any right-leaning coproduction movies?
“No.”
In other words, Germany is working hard on influencing the minds of the Israelis, not to mention the minds of foreign viewers. Germany. Again.
There is still another missing link in my film puzzle: non-feature, documentary films. I’ll have to find the organization in charge of them and its people.
But until I find them, I want to know who stands behind the nonfilm anti-Israel activities? In other words: Who is funding the various NGOs operating here?
***
I leave Tel Aviv and go to Herzeliya Pituakh, the high-tech capital of Israel. Nope, I don’t plan to visit Google or Microsoft; I have them aplenty in the States. I have other plans. I’m going to have coffee with an Israeli army officer at a seaside café, who happens to be in Herzeliya Pituakh today. This meeting was arranged by the IDF Spokesman’s office, at my request, and two soldiers from that office are attending.
Lieutenant Colonel S., whose area of expertise is “communication between the international community and Palestinian areas,” shares this with me:
“The international community has 600 million euro investments in Area C (area under full Israeli control, where about 5 percent of Palestinians live).”
Are you speaking of all the money that has been invested here since 1967 till today?
“No. Right now, on the table.”
How much money from 1967?
“Billions.”
What countries have invested the most?
“The two of the greatest influence: the USA and Germany. And, of course, the UN, via various agencies.”
Why are these two countries investing so much?
“This is a very sensitive question.”
S. has a theory about this, but asks that it may be kept off record.
Once we’re back on record, I ask him: How many NGOs are operating on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
“Three hundred. This estimate is for the West Bank only, excluding Gaza.”
How many in Gaza?
“One hundred.”
Talking about the effect of individual NGOs, he adds: “The Red Cross, in humanitarian issues, is the most influential of the NGOs.”
How come they’re the most influential?
“Because they are not running to the press.”
The way it works is this: They don’t “run to the press” because they use the press as a threat. They contact the Israelis and demand certain things, and if the Israelis don’t do their bidding, the ICRC will go to the press and accuse Israel.
Which reminds me: ICRC and I have agreed that I join them in one of their operations. I write a reminder for myself and resume talking to the man facing me.
In terms of government investments it is the USA first and Germany second. Who are the biggest NGO players?
“In the NGO world it is also the USA first and Germany second.”
Many of the American NGOs are citizen-funded, meaning rich citizens pour tons of money into their little pet projects. George Soros, a far-left Jewish billionaire, is an example, as is the far-right tycoon Irving Moskowitz. But in Germany it’s a different story. For the most part, German NGOs are funded by political parties – don’t ask me to explain this strange phenomenon – or by Church-related organizations that are funded by the government, which means that German NGOs are funded by the taxpayer, millions of taxpayers.
; Why is it that the average German prefers to spend his own money on an endless chase of a Jew instead of on an enjoyable weekend in Florida or in Bad Gastein? Ask him. All I know is this: if he or she didn’t want their money to be spent in this manner, they would be in the street demonstrating. Germans, after all, are famous for their love of demonstrating. And if they don’t like to demonstrate – let’s say it’s too cold outside, or there are too many other demonstrations taking place at that very time – why don’t they raise their resentment in huge Internet campaigns and online petitions?
Lieutenant Colonel S. shares with me a very interesting item: “Per capita, a Palestinian gets more financial support than any citizen of any country anywhere in the world.”
What is the underlying reason for such help, is it anti-Semitism? Is it –
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
What is the number of Israeli NGOs operating in Palestinian areas?
“About a dozen.”
Who is financing them?
“Mostly from abroad.”
***
German involvement here has not started today. Various Germans have been interested in this part of the world long before there was a Palestinian issue. The German Templars (Tempelgesellschaft), for example, were around here in the nineteenth century. My present home in Jerusalem is a Templar house, which my cats are enjoying tremendously. Not far from here, in central Tel Aviv, those German Templars also founded a colony by the name of Sarona. They are no longer there, deported by the Brits as were other Templars in the land, and Sarona has since changed to HaKirya, where the brain and nerve center of the Israeli army and security is located.
History is more imaginative than fiction.
My next stop is old Sarona, which is probably the most secured real estate in the world. Under its military base, rumor goes, there is a huge city in the belly of the earth; floors above floors and roads above roads. Is it true? I ask a soldier, once I enter the base, “very few know what’s under our feet,” she replies.
Catch The Jew! Page 35