Catch The Jew!

by Tenenbom, Tuvia

  The Committee now starts its session. MK Miri Regev chairs the committee and Benny Begin sits to her left. MKs sit in an inner circle of tables and non-MKs, NGO-looking faces, in the outer circle. Which of these circles have more power? Given that this is Israel, it’s the NGO circle.

  “The story of the Arabs after the Nakba attack in 1948,” are the opening words, uttered by an Arab-Israeli MK. Nakba, as I have mentioned, means “catastrophe,” which is what the Arabs call the establishment of the State of Israel. This MK accuses the Israeli government of destroying Arab villages while, at the same time, it keeps on building Jewish settlements. The method, as he sees it, by which the Jews operate is this: They have conquered the land in 1948 by the power of the gun and now they’ll conquer additionally by the power of the law.

  Once he’s done, an Israeli NGO man takes his turn to speak. He demands that Israeli citizens be treated equally, including Arabs, and asserts that the Plan at hand does not do that. The third speaker says basically the same. So does the fourth speaker, an Israeli Jewish lady, member of one NGO or the other.

  To my left an Amnesty International lady is sitting, busy with her smartphone, and she seems quite bored with the proceedings.

  Personally I entertain the thought of taking a cigarette leave, but just when I start moving I see Rabbi Arik, the human rights rabbi, enter. I don’t want to miss a blessing by a rabbi and I stay seated.

  The fifth speaker gets his chance to talk and says more or less the same thing as the earlier speakers: Israel is racist, he says.

  The sixth speaker: Ditto.

  The seventh speaker: Ditto.

  The eighth speaker, a Bedouin who says he’s from al-Araqeeb, gets his chance to speak. It would have been nice if he had started with the “No, no, we shall not be moved” song but, sadly, he just screams.

  The ninth speaker, a Jewish MK with a skullcap, Zvulun Kalfa of the far-right Jewish Home party, gets his turn. He says that he is surprised to see so many NGOs around and wonders why no NGO showed up when he was about to be expelled from his home in Gaza, prior to Israel’s Gaza Withdrawal.

  A barrage of shouts interrupts him.

  When the shouts quiet down, he says that the law now being considered doesn’t really matter because Israel is always afraid to enforce its laws on the Bedouin community, citing as an example the multiple women that Bedouin men marry. Polygamy is against Israeli law, he says, and another barrage of shouts interrupts him. Between you and me, it’s really funny to watch feminists defend polygamy with so much passion.

  The tenth person speaks, repeating what was said eight times before, more or less.

  The eleventh speaker, a religious Jewish MK of the Right, speaks. She can hardly be heard. Shouts interrupt her, then more shouts and more shouts.

  There is a pattern here that I can see: When a leftist speaks, he or she just does. When a rightist speaks, his or her words cannot be heard.

  The shouting MKs here may remind you of the turbulent British MPs, but there are two glaring differences: (a) in Britain both sides shout; (b) the Brits have a sense of humor.

  I go out to have a smoke. And then I need coffee and I go to the MKs’ dining room, where I see MK Ahmad Tibi sitting lonely and in need of company.

  Gate Fifty-Three

  The legal system 2: Is an MK allowed to respond to your question by breaking your iPhone?

  MK AHMAD TIBI, A FORMER GYNECOLOGIST, IS ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS OF MKs. He is an Arab parliamentarian who is admired by the liberals and deeply hated by the conservatives, and his name pops up every so often. I love gynecologists and I sit next to him for a little chat, a chat between a doctor and a German.

  I ask MK Tibi to explain to me what I have just seen and heard: right-wing people barraged by shouts from the Left. I want to know why he and his friends acted so aggressively.

  “We are on the side of the victims whose land has been stolen, and they are on the side of the robbers who stole the land of the Palestinians and Arabs. Second: one of them called the Arab MKs ‘animals.’ It is a very un-parliamentary word and he was to be deported from the committee but he didn’t even get any remark.”

  You could have responded to it, say, for example: “Hallo!” But why, instead, the barrage of –

  “This is parliament.”

  When you talk about the land that has been robbed, are you talking about the land of 1948?

  Instead of answering my question about the land that has been robbed, in general, MK Tibi chooses to talk about the committee’s exchanges: “When I talked to MK Kalfa, I talked about Gaza. It was stolen and occupied in 1967.”

  In general, when you say, “We are on the side of the victims whose land had been stolen,” are you talking about 1967 or about 1948?

  “Here I talk about 1967 but as a victim inside Israel, yes, the Arab minority who are indigenous people suffer from confiscation of land from the very beginning of 1948, the construction of Israel, and these lands were confiscated from Arabs and delivered to Jews. It’s racism.”

  Do you think the Jews robbed the Arabs of their land before 1967? Do you also call 1948 a robbery?

  “It was confiscation of land from owners, original owners, from Arab owners. At least five hundred villages were destroyed and dismantled.”

  Do you think that the land of Israel before 1967 is legal, or do you view it as a confiscated land?

  “If I am a member of the Israeli Knesset I recognize the State of Israel, but I totally object and oppose the occupation of 1967 and the racist ways of dealing with non-Jews in Israel. Israel is a racist country!”

  I try to get from MK Tibi a clear answer, which he is avoiding, and so I ask more specifically.

  My question is this: Do you think that Israel should give the Arabs of Jaffa, Akko, and all those cities (from 1948) –

  Tibi is now getting violent. He hits my iPhone, which I’m using to record this interview, as if he were about to throw it in the air, and angrily says: “You are asking the same question from the very beginning. I’m answering you but you are insisting – This is not journalism! You are asking for the fourth time the same question. Is it narrow-minding or what? You are trying to push me to say something that I don’t want to say!”

  The man has lost it. He is not used to being challenged by the media, and he was not prepared for a German like me to insist on getting answers from an Arab like him.

  Well, somebody should have told him that not all Germans are the same.

  Luckily for me, by the way, that ol’ Steve Jobs made his phones sturdy enough to withstand angry Arabs.

  * * *

  A few steps from me I spot MK Moshe Feiglin, the flag bearer of the far right, and a man hated by most media.

  These two MKs, MK Ahmad Tibi and MK Moshe Feiglin, are at the two extreme poles of the political map, and to be chatting with both of them on the same day may result in an emergency visit to the nearest psychiatrist. But, to me, having both of them back to back is a dream come true.

  I pose the same question to Moshe I asked Ahmad. MK Moshe, Deputy Knesset Speaker and leader of the Jewish Leadership faction within the Likud, starts by schmoozing about Jews, the sort of Jews who won’t let him talk.

  “Jews have a problem.”

  What is it?

  “They are told: We will burn you in Auschwitz if you get on the train, and they still get on the train. Jews run from the truth.”

  I hold tight to my iPhone, just in case MK Moshe is going to finish the job MK Ahmad started, but MK Moshe is not in the mood to break anything. He invites me to visit him at his office, and I accept the offer.

  Welcome to Moshe Feiglin’s kingdom.

  Behind his throne is the flag of the State of Israel. To its right is a painting of Jerusalem’s Old City, where al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock are replaced by the Jewish Temple. The Palestinians don’t believe the Jews were ever here; Moshe doesn’t believe they are here now.

  I try to imagine Ahmad Tibi walking into here and se
eing this. What he did to my iPhone is peanuts compared with what he would be doing to this room. It would be lovely if I could come up with a way to tempt him into this place, but nothing brilliant comes to my mind.

  There are things better imagined than seen.

  I look at MK Moshe. He looks like the average white intellectual, only with a skullcap over his head. He looks intently at me but speaks softly, though in a determined way. The man known to every Israeli news media consumer as disgusting, ugly, and repelling is in reality anything but that.

  What does he stand for, and how come he has so many enemies? It is time to find out.

  First, I ask him to explain to me what I saw earlier in the day at the Knesset Committee: the bunch of left-leaning NGOs all around and their shouts every time a right-leaning person opened his or her mouth. Is this normal?

  “This is normal for the Israeli parliament. The leftists who speak loudly for democracy, a culture of discussion and fair debate, always prove themselves to act exactly the opposite. You could see it today, as it was very clear: whenever the Arabs and the Left talked, silence prevailed on the other side. It was very respectful. I did not find it easy to listen to what they were saying, but I respected their right to say what they thought. But when we started talking, when our turn came, you saw what happened. By the way, in comparison to other days, it was actually not so bad today.”

  Wait. How do you explain this? The liberal world, the intellectual world, is supposed to cherish debate –

  “Come on. ‘Liberalism’ is just a camouflage. It is just a word that has no real meaning. The left doesn’t represent either liberalism or communism. On the contrary: the Left, I discovered long ago, is an entity that justifies violence. They are open-minded only if you agree with them. If you want to see people who sit together and argue opposite views, where everybody has the same chance and freedom to speak, you have to go to a Haredi yeshiva.”

  Are you serious? Do you really think that you can discuss everything with the Haredi people? Don’t you know that they –

  “I’m talking about those Haredi people with a head on their shoulders. Try it. You can discuss anything with them, even the question of whether God exists or not. On the other hand, try talking with a leftist about the idea that the Temple Mount should be given back to the Jews. Try arguing with him that the Oslo Accords have proved to have failed. Would you be able to even finish your sentence? No.”

  How come almost all NGOs today were of the Left? Where are the right-wing NGOs in this country?

  “The reason is simple: money. For NGOs to exist you need money, and the ones who support and maintain the Israeli NGOs are foreigners, mostly Europeans, and they support only the Left. The rightist NGO that you saw, Regavim, is only being financed by Israelis, not Europeans. This is not what happens with leftist NGOs, who get their support not merely from foreigners but also from foreign governments, including Germany. This is a direct involvement of the foreign governments in the internal affairs of Israel. In the USA this kind of involvement is forbidden but, inappropriately, not forbidden here.”

  Why is the world interested in this tiny little place?

  “You are getting into metaphysics here, and I don’t know if you really want to get into it.”

  I do.

  “Look: in Israel there are more foreign correspondents than in any other country by ratio to the number of people living in the country. There’s an immense interest worldwide in what’s happening here, which is not in proportion to the size of this land.”

  Why so?

  “Humanity is breaking down morally and ethically and, as a result, it is waiting and wishing for direction from Israel, from the Jews.”

  I have no clue what he is talking about, but his is a different point of view and I want to hear it.

  It is at this point that his assistant enters the room with two portions of yogurt. Moshe hasn’t had anything to eat and he is starving.

  ***

  MK Moshe Feiglin looks at me as he is eating. “You want me to give you intelligent answers, I assume, but no intelligent answers can come out of a man with an empty stomach.”

  He eats slowly, and as he joyfully licks his yogurt he talks about Ahmad Tibi, the love of his life, which I’ll leave out of these pages. When he’s done with his yogurt I ask him to explain to me why foreigners are interested in this land.

  “You cannot understand what is happening in this land unless you view the landscape here with a lens of faith.”

  Talk to me.

  “Look: you are not sitting here opposite a human being. The one you are facing is a dinosaur. Imagine yourself in the morning after having had breakfast, when you go to drop the trash outside. You are walking down the steps and suddenly you see a cute dinosaur, dressed with a nice tie. It would be strange, wouldn’t it? This dinosaur is not supposed to exist anymore, but guess what? He exists, right in front of your eyes, and he’s talking to you, the dinosaur is talking to you, a dinosaur who has lived with the Assyrians and the Philistines, and many others that you know only from the ancient history books. None of those tribes are here anymore but I, the Jew, am. Isn’t it strange?”

  I don’t know if this MK Moshe has ever been to a museum and seen people looking at a dinosaur. If he had, he’d have seen them looking at the creature with love, not hatred. Is he suggesting that the West loves Israel?

  “Talking about the West, take America for example. Many Americans, those who have built America, had a strong connection with Israel.”

  Forty, fifty years ago America was quite anti-Semitic and many a club had “No Blacks, No Jews” signs at their entrance doors.

  “There are mixed feelings in the world about the Jews. Take England. Historically there existed what I call biblical romanticism. The Balfour Declaration, for example, could never have come out of Germany.”

  MK Moshe refers to British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild in November 1917, which in part reads as follows: “I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet: His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” It is this declaration that eventually made for the establishment of Israel in 1948.

  MK Moshe then goes on to tell me that the West, motivated by its Christian heritage, has helped create Israel in order to make “a balance between body and spirit” of the nations, in the hope that the “Holy Book would be written again,” and that the very existence of Israel would serve to “redeem the rest of the world.” The West, according to MK Moshe, thought that Israel would serve as a bridge between “Christianity that believed in refraining from the sexual and Islam that glorified sexuality, such as the Islamic heaven with its virgin brides.” But Israel has disappointed them. “If we had responded positively to the hope the world had in us, the world would have supported us.”

  He reminds me of Arieh King, the real estate broker. Arieh claims that peace would come to this land if the Third Temple were to be built. MK Moshe has similar ideas, but he prefers to align himself with leftists, of all people. If Israel is just another Western state, he tells me, then populating this land with Jews at the expense of the Arabs is “colonization.” If Israel chooses to deflect from its obligation toward this land, which are “grounded in the future and not in the past, Israel will lose its right to exist.”

  While almost any rightist would talk about the Jewish right to this land based on the Jewish history here, MK Moshe emphatically speaks of the future, not the past. To him, what gives the Jews the right to be in this land is rooted in the future, not in its history.

  MK Moshe adds: “At some level I even understand the anti-Semites. Not that I am ready to give them any slack, especially not the Germans. And the truth is, it is not easy for me to give this interview for the German reader. I will never fly t
o Germany. I don’t use, ever, any German product. Don’t get me wrong. I will never go to Poland either. And no, I don’t close my eyes to the anti-Semitism in the world.

  “But I do say: humanity as a whole is not totally anti-Semitic. There is a love-hate relationship between Jews and non-Jews and it is our obligation to make love win. This is up to us to do. If we stand our ground, giving away no territory – and remember that most of the biblical stories took place in the West Bank – we will increase the love of the world for us. What is Israel without the Temple Mount, without Jerusalem, without Hebron?”

  Asked to explain his feelings about Poland and Germany, he says: “The Pole sucks anti-Semitism from the breast of his mother, and his anti-Semitism is of the most vulgar kind, but with the German the story is different, and much more dangerous. The German’s anti-Semitism is the essence of his culture. The German is of an extremely high spiritual level, and in this the German is very similar to the Jew – only the opposite.”

  If there’s anti-Semitism in the world at large, it’s the Jew’s fault: “When Israel, in the 1967 War, kills tens of thousands of Egyptian soldiers and conquers the Golan Heights and the West Bank, what happens? Huge love for Israel in Europe! Check what I just said to you. It’s amazing! When the Jews come back to their land and behave like the owners of the land, anti-Semitism goes away. But when the Jews are willing to give away the heart of their land to the Arabs, anti-Semitism rises. The Oslo Accords brought with them the Islamic suicide bombers. And if not for the handshake between Rabin and Arafat, the Twin Towers would still be standing today. Do you hear what I am saying to you?”

  ***

  I do, and I drive to Tel Aviv to see Yitzhak Rabin’s daughter, former MK Dalia Rabin, and hear what she has to say. I ask her a general question, to define “Israel” for me, and she gladly obliges.