In Jaffa, sitting in the morning heat over coffee, the smell of bleach still lingering on the newly wiped tables, I wonder what, precisely, I’m now after. Shortly after the confusion caused by my mother’s revelation about the kibbutz past, and the implications of that revelation, came new shocks and losses: my older sister, suddenly dead of cancer I had known nothing about; my uncle dead soon after; one of my daughters suffering an emergency lockdown at her high school in California, because of a gunman on campus. A mad love affair with an exquisite man ended; another connection with a damaged man left me empty and full of mistrust. I too had a cancer scare, though it turned out to be nothing at all, but it left me mistrustful of my body.
In Australia for my sister’s funeral, I saw the birds I’d heard in the background of phone conversations with her and with my mother and father. The birds’ raucous noise began at four in the morning and it was cacophonous: lorikeets and cockatoos and more garish overgrown things I had not heard or dreamed of. My parents and younger sister took me walking in lush wilderness – down a steep track to the rammed-earth house my older sister and her fiancé had just finished building, surrounded by untouched rainforest. There were fever-carrying ticks, and down at the waterhole we put up a king snake – it came whipping across the water towards us, intent. In the rainforest catbirds mewled like lost children, and wherever we went we could hear the sound of the whipbirds, the tense rising whistle of an imminent strike, and then the crack of the whip, two birds in a call and response of one violent whipcrack.
There were harsh confessional moments that only shock and sharp grief could allow to surface – about family silence, about lies told for good intention or ill, about omissions. The night before I left Australia to go home to Wales, my parents gave me the family photographs – the blue album my father’s mother had put together in 1950; the small black-and-white photographs from the kibbutz; the glossy, square, garishly coloured Kodak prints from our visits to Israel in the seventies. They dug out birth certificates and marriage certificates, and my mother gave me my great-grandmother’s gold brooch, which spelled out her name, Yafa, in Hebrew.
When I got home I pinned my parents’ marriage certificate to the wall. Its paper is off-white, with a blue leaf-pattern border. Below the grand header of the Israeli Ministry of Religion, the Hebrew lettering is rounded, old-fashioned, the figures of the dates and the identity numbers carefully formed. In her black-and-white passport photo, with its scalloped white border, my mother is wearing a sleeveless dotted dress. Smiling, smooth-skinned, her face looks open and naked. She’s not squinting, but without her glasses I know she can only see a blur. My father’s photo is smaller, face-on; there is a hint of a suppressed smile. He’s wearing an open-necked white shirt, and his hair is untidy. The date is 6 October, 1959 and my mother is eighteen years old.
Though my parents never registered my birth with the Israeli embassy in London, my mother’s identification number confers on me Israeli citizenship. Any Jew, and anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, can apply for citizenship, but this number is all I need if I want to get an Israeli passport: I am already a citizen. Or that’s what the embassy told me, when I rang to enquire. They sent me forms, and I have them still. I have never filled them in.
My sister died in late September. After a week in the wildness of raw family shock, and the brash loudness of Queensland, the cool mistiness of rural Wales was disorientating and hauntingly melancholy. It was darkening, and the summer birds had left. Each day I drove along a back road to my job in the nearby town, through flocks of finches rising off the crumbling, ice-damaged tarmac, where they gathered to peck at the fine gravel. The hawthorn was dark with berries the colour of old wounds. The sheep had been taken down off the upland fields for the tupping season, and were kept in for lambing. In their place, the uplands were full of redwings and fieldfares, feeding on the fields and on the hawthorn and bright rowan. A buzzard huddled on a telegraph pole every mile. I always drove the back way, meeting no traffic, crying.
My sister dying, my uncle’s death shortly after, my daughters far from me and vulnerable – the cumulative shocks made me a little crazy and raw. I began to think about giving up my safe civil service job at the Welsh Books Council, of moving on, of leaving altogether. The place I thought I’d made for myself in Wales felt tenuous, temporary – I wondered if there was any more reason to be there than in Sussex where I’d grown up, or California, where I used to live. Everything about my life felt in question. The shock of my sister’s sudden death lasted; six months on it began to turn into a dragging sense that nothing would be worth doing again, that I was alone in a chilly, empty world.
Now that I am back in Israel, I am not sure which shock has driven me here – the search for some new sense of place in the world, or wanting to find out about Al Murassas and Yubla. I wonder if I am complicit in something deeply wrong, whether I have been complicit by loving a country whose government does wrong, whose very existence is based on a wrong. I think I might find out and perhaps try to tell the story of people who lived there in the Jezreel Valley near the kibbutz before they were displaced or driven out by the kibbutzniks. If I succeed in finding out, I hope I might do something good or right – but I know, really, that I am doing something entirely self-interested, perhaps as all good intentions are, because I am lost. Being back in Israel has disorientated me further. Everything I understand about it is in suspense – it does not offer me a sense of place, or a sense of direction, or a way to navigate: instead it shimmers with duality, and falseness, with things not said.
Harus, the map says – destroyed. Again and again, printed over in purple Hebrew – destroyed... destroyed... destroyed... Al Murassas: harus. Yubla: harus. Kafra: harus. Wadi El Bireh: harus. Al Hamidiya: harus. Jabbul: harus. Kawkab al Hawa: harus. It’s a composite map, printed by the Israeli government in 1955, the landscape of that year superimposed on a trilingual British Mandate map from 1945, showing clearly what happened in the seven years following the start of the Arab-Israeli war in 1947. I was given a copy of it by Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that seeks to uncover, publicise and memorialise the full scale of the Palestinian Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948. It’s a palimpsest, a deep map, showing the location of features and resources important to British Mandate control in 1945, overprinted by what is important to the young Israeli government in 1955: the aftermath of depopulation and destruction.
The Jezreel Valley section of the map details the network of spidery unpaved paths and roads that used to connect the villages. It records the oil-pipe, the overhead cables, the railway, water-courses and springs, and the paths along which people rode horses or donkeys, or walked carrying water and grain and children. These paths used to link all the villages in the valley near my mother’s kibbutz, Beit Hashita: Al Murassas, Kafra and Yubla, Wadi El Bireh, Al Hamidiya, Jabbul, and Kawkab al Hawa, and in turn connected them to the towns of Beisan and Haifa, Afula and Nazareth. Now these villages are all gone. Above or below the name of each of them harus is stamped in purple Hebrew letters. The population was expelled or fled, their houses and holy places and schools were knocked down or blown up, and their wells were blocked with rubble, but the signs of the villages are still there on the map, as is the record of their destruction.
Once you know about it the landscape is transformed. Nothing you thought you knew can be trusted; everything is a sign for something that is missing, or a lie, or a story that you can’t quite read.
My reassuring picture of the innocent kibbutz, the safe ground of my family roots, that place of birds and dust – the spruce-shaded cemetery which my grandfather landscaped and where he and his parents lie buried; the painful memory of my mother transformed and strange in the brutalist concrete central dining room with its clatter of trays, its swallows skimming in through its wide open windows, and sparrows hopping along the tables – all of it was some kind of centre for me, a place in the world by which I navigated. Now, learning about what has not been said, about what
is not acknowledged, all that I have felt about the place is suddenly suspect. What I thought I knew has been turned inside out. And this place will never look the same again: it will always shimmer, everywhere, disorientating and confusing, with duality, and with the duplicity of its past.
I finish my coffee and wander down to the seafront. Here an earlier redesign that Jaffa underwent is evident in the potted history of its tourist information board. In the Israeli version of events, the town was ‘liberated’ in 1947. At Ben Gurion Airport, a plaque on the wall honours those who died there in the ‘liberation’ of Lod in 1948. I never before noticed the word ‘liberation’, but now the word and its strange jarring new duality seems to be everywhere, though it was always here – East Jerusalem, above all, ‘liberated’ in 1967.
Once you start looking, you can’t not see it – you can’t not look. Once you start asking, it is only by a huge effort of denial, a decision not to pursue it, that you can stop, that you can return to the safe knowledge of your old story, in which you have a place, by which you can make sense of the world and its events: a secure position from which everything may be tested for its bias or sympathy against the certainty of a historical truth.
A friend of mine, Ghaith, who was studying at Cardiff University, once told me how, before the second Intifada, he and his mother and grandfather had sometimes taken the trip from Ramallah to Jaffa to look at their house, which his grandfather had been forced to leave in 1947. One time they knocked at the door, and explained who they were; the Jewish residents reacted coldly. Now I want to ask Ghaith where his grandfather’s house is – but then what would I do? Knock on the door myself, and ask to see inside, so I can feel acutely, personally, this outrage on his behalf? What kind of presumptuousness is this fantasy? It is a despicable misery tourism, a melodramatic over-involvement.
In all the cities, Jewish refugees arriving from European detention camps, and survivors of extermination camps – and later, Jews fleeing from the Arab countries, living in the new Israeli state in tent cities – took over empty apartments left by Arab residents who had fled the conflict in 1947 and 1948. Owning nothing, they sometimes kept everything that had belonged to the former inhabitants – the cutlery and crockery, even the framed family photographs. It is both poignant and suspect, that common story, one tragedy erasing or ameliorating or replacing the other. And yet of course, there were ancient and more recent Jewish communities depopulated and destroyed in that war too – in East Jerusalem, and elsewhere.
Walking the streets of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the evidence is relentless and unavoidable. The duality of the language shimmers, telling one story and erasing another. It lays claim to place in the street names, some of which have imported and imposed European Jewish history and erased the Arab past; it tries to lay claim to what it does not yet own. The naming of the streets in Tel Aviv, this one-hundred-year-old city, everywhere reflects a conscious, deliberate construction: the co-option of the medieval Spanish Hebrew poets, like Ibn Gabirol with his suppurating skin, or the lionisation of Jabotinsky and his expansionist Greater Israel movement – Jabotinsky, whose Jewish Legion formed part of the British army during the First World War, who proposed that an ‘iron wall’ would be needed to separate Arabs and Jews.
In Holon, near my uncle David’s house, there is a cluster of dilapidated buildings on a piece of undeveloped land at the end of Tel Giborim Park, the ‘hill of heroes’ (every high point, it seems, is a hill of heroes). It is known as the ‘Arab village’, but my uncle was always evasive and never gave me a clear explanation about it, and now he’s dead, and I can’t get the story from him at all. I take the bus from Tel Aviv to visit Myriam, his widow, and where the bus stops, at that corner by the ‘Arab village’, a printed banner is draped over the end wall, declaring ‘Na, Nach, Nacham, Nachman me’uman’, the religious mantra of the Bratslavers: some of the fervent chanting followers of Rabbi Nachman must be living here. This sign, too, is a claim to what belongs to someone else. And while street names are officially bilingual or trilingual, I notice for the first time now that this is only true on the main roads and the highways. Arabic disappears at the local level. Arabic, in much of Tel Aviv, is virtually invisible. I have never noticed its absence before; now its absence stands exposed like a kind of scar.
On the route between Holon and Tel Aviv, which I travelled countless times as a teenager, the bus passes a Muslim graveyard, marked by its distinctive two-ended graves. Dry, dusty, bounded by the motorway and a highway, it looks like a leftover, abandoned – but it is still in use. All the times that I followed that bus route I never saw it; now I wonder how I could never have seen it. You see what you expect to see; you impose meaning on what you don’t understand, and get it wrong, because you draw on the wrong information, because you draw on what you’re told you see.
Throughout the city, and throughout the country, someone, or some group, has been spray-painting a blue Star of David on white walls, above the slogan Am Israel Chai – ‘the nation of Israel lives’. I see it everywhere I go. Sometimes others have amended the Hebrew graffiti delicately. An article on Ynetnews.com gathers images of its variations: in one place it reads ‘the nation of Israel lives – by the sword.’ In another it is amended to read ‘the nation of Israel lives – on American money.’ In a third, someone has added an illustration and four letters to the word ‘Chai’ so that it reads ‘the nation of Israel is a snail’.2 Signs, everywhere, have become signs for something else, signposts to what is not said, to what is concealed, to what is visible but goes unseen. It doesn’t require a physical act to render it invisible. A change of language, a change of name, and a continued silence has done a kind of violence to a whole people, and the heroic Hebrew names of Tel Aviv’s familiar streets and wide boulevards whisper to me false, false, in little sibilant voices.
Eating a shwarma at a window-counter overlooking the intersection of Allenby and Melech King George, trickling tehina over my fingers, watching the street jostle with soldiers and teenagers and middle-aged women in wigs and knee-length skirts, a painful, lonely nostalgia ambushes me. I have loved Israel, and I still love the smell of her, the dust, the sense of wild longing. A secret, shameful part of me still wants to lie down and die in her, but now I am afraid I have lost the right or ability to love even the idea of her. The nostalgia is not only for what I have loved, but for the love itself, infatuated and unambiguous. All this vibrant life, all the argument and provocation of the Israeli Jewish psyche, its in-your-face bluster, its militant, angry, belligerent energy – even if I am losing the ability to love it in simple and absolute ways, because of what it now represents, what it elides or denies, I nevertheless know it, I know it in my kishkes: it is part of me. How can I excise that? How can I not long for it, and, at the same time, repudiate it?
Along the coast, travelling north from Tel Aviv, everything trembles with this duality – the parched fields, the flocks of goats, ruined houses, new high-rises shimmering in the heat, religious posters plastered on walls and billboards and buses. Always, everywhere, the place-names and road-signs are a cover-up. Over all of it, over its visible existence, there hovers a kind of glamour of another, secret story: not hidden, not quite visible, but implicit. Hard, physical realities, physical facts, they are not quite lies, but they are omissions and half-truths. It is like talking in two languages at once, meanings approaching and approximating each other, sliding in and out of different forms of feeling, of body language and sense. The landscape is alive with a kind of cognitive violence. Though I cannot quite understand what I am seeing, it is impossible not to feel it as a kind of assault.
It’s dangerous, this reversal of orientation. Without context you can so easily misconstrue what you’re looking at, what you think you might be seeing, and what you’re told. Is there any landscape, marked by humans, that isn’t made into a geographical palimpsest in this way, layered by waves of conflict and language-change, by migration and settlement? Yet in a landscape that is familiar and loved
, one that is navigated by memories and associations and a sharp, poignant sense of affiliation, to become aware of the very different meanings and associations that it might have for other people perhaps does not require any other context.
The bus turns inland at the power station near Hadera, round the bulge of the West Bank towards the Jezreel Valley, where the kibbutz pulls me in. Away from the coastal developments, architecture begins to separate the two communities into Arab town, Jewish town; Arab region, Jewish region. In the city, the boundaries between neighbourhoods, ethnicities and nationalities of origin have blurred and shifted, though socially and politically they still exist, starkly; but once out of the city, the landscape, the architecture, cars, signs, shops all shift back into Arab, Jewish, Arab, Jewish. It is not only in the architecture, one with Ottoman references in its minarets, curves, embellishments and colonnades, the other brutalist, modernist, often red-tiled and European; it is also in the way the geography is used. One form of architecture seems built into the land’s contours, the other built onto them, but I am seeing what I now expect to see, a new political awareness undermining what I thought I knew, and for the first time making me look for – and romanticise – the evidence of a long connection in that place.
Losing Israel Page 5