Losing Israel

by Jasmine Donahaye

  The agent was watching me closely, and now she told me to wait. She disappeared through a back door with my passport in her hand. I wondered if I was being checked against a list, or being added to a list. The following year, when an assassination in Dubai revealed that Mossad had been harvesting British passports, I wondered if my passport details too might have been taken in just this way.

  My fellow passengers, passing, looked at me with hostility and suspicion as I stood, conspicuous, in my roped-off space. They whispered to each other, particularly the women in their wigs and hats, whom I hated, suddenly, for their certainties and simplicities. The children were the worst: they stared, hanging off a parent’s hand, or the luggage trolley. Belligerently I told myself I had nothing to hide – resentfully, sullenly, I thought I had as much right as they did to go to Israel, to get on the plane. Underneath was something else, and I could smell it coming up off me, a rancid smell – the beginning of fear.

  At last the security agent came back through the door and pointed me out to a third woman dressed in a dark suit. The dark-suited woman walked over, brisk and efficient, with my passport in her hand. It was not questions now, but instructions. ‘This is a random security measure,’ she said, and I almost laughed at the absurdity. What was random about this? ‘As part of this random security measure, we will need to take your hand-luggage and your suitcase.’

  ‘My hand-luggage?’ I said. I thought of what was in my bag, and with a little internal shock wondered what would happen if they saw the maps, the trilingual reproductions from Abu Sitta’s atlas showing the destroyed Palestinian villages in the Jezreel Valley. How would I account for them, and for the tape-recorder in my suitcase? What alternative, erroneous story of a security threat might they string together from such evidence? Or, indeed, what correct story might they deduce? Family history research, I could tell them; just family history…

  The security guard was frowning at me now, impatient.

  I knelt down and began to take what I most needed out of my bag.

  ‘Is that all you have?’ she asked, looking down and then away. She seemed embarrassed by the public display of my possessions on the floor. She hesitated a moment. ‘OK, well, if that’s all you have… Fine, take it with you, then, and we’ll check it at the gate.’

  I packed everything back into my bag, and she took my case away. All the passengers had gone and only one check-in desk was still open when at last I was free to go and pick up my boarding pass.

  When, after passport control, I walked through the metal detector at airport security and set it off, my paranoia leapt up several levels. I had nothing metal on me – nothing at all. Had they been alerted? Had I been targeted? Did the label that had been stuck on my bag tag me as a threat? A woman took me aside and searched me, intimately; another security agent took my bag off the X-ray machine and went through its contents carefully and thoroughly.

  Once through, I headed for the toilets, seeking a moment of privacy from what I had begun, panicked, to believe was surveillance. I locked myself in a cubicle and sat on the closed toilet seat. For the first time I wondered whether I might not be allowed onto the plane, whether I might not be allowed to return to Israel at all. What if, at the gate, when they searched my hand-luggage, as the woman told me they would do, they were to find the maps, the contact details? What if I had been watched, because of being in contact with Zochrot, and Palestinians, because of going to the West Bank; what if I were questioned more closely? Would I be kept so long that I would miss the flight? I didn’t know what to do about the maps, the contact details. Surely it was stupid to be concerned, I thought, trying to calm my racing heart. I was not important. I was not doing anything dangerous. I was not in contact with anyone dangerous. But how did I know that? How could I be sure? There was a simple, legitimate answer to any question about the maps if they were to find them, but it would lead to other questions. The questioning might go on, in different forms, for hours – or I might be left for hours, waiting, while they consulted, or forgot, or just for the hell of it, and I would miss my flight. Not because of the maps themselves, or the contacts – but because they would know I had been lying, that I was in fact hiding something, guilty; that I was, in both senses of the word, suspicious.

  Reluctantly, I crumpled up the maps and tore out the incriminating pages of my notebook and put them in the bin for sanitary towels. I would be able to retrieve everything I needed later, from email. I could get new maps where I’d got these ones, at Zochrot, in Tel Aviv.

  By now I had no desire to go to Israel. Part of me, perversely, wanted to be refused entry – so that my ambivalent, conflicted relationship with the place would be decided for me: so that I could be done with it.

  At the gate, the other passengers looked at me with coldness as we waited to board. When I got to the head of the queue, I was taken behind a screen, where another agent examined each item in my hand-luggage and scanned it for explosives. She opened and leafed through every page of my book, my notebook, my document wallet. She would have found the maps.

  At that moment I hated them, security agents and passengers alike. I resented their easy identity, their untroubled beings, their claim on Jewish legitimacy. The last time I had travelled to Israel, I could so easily have been recruited. I had been vulnerable. I had lost my sense of the past, my sense of place. I’d wanted to fall in love again with something, with someone – but it was only lonely cab drivers who offered themselves to me, and the moment had passed. How different it felt now, going back: not anticipation and excitement, but hostility, guilt and suspicion, mine and theirs. In my hurt, in my sense of rejection, I had never hated the ugly crudity of Israel more. It seemed so clumsy, what these security agents had done, and done so publicly: what better way to reinforce what you’re suspicious of and threatened by than such crude, isolating, demeaning mistrust? Yet was I not guilty of exactly such a mistrust myself? Mistrusted, watched, repeatedly questioned, I myself became hostile and detached, myself a watcher.

  The rabbis failed in their efforts, blowing their shofars at 30,000 feet, to keep swine flu out, and in Tel Aviv I succumbed. I had never felt so ill, so feeble. My aunt Myriam thought it might be swine flu, but I knew it was swine flu. In my fever, particularly at night, the prospect of travelling to Jordan took on obsessive, delirious nightmare qualities. I followed elaborate, anxious fantasies about the bus breaking down in the desert, about spending hours dehydrated at the border, getting lost in dangerous neighbourhoods where there were no women in the street; about not being allowed back in to Israel if I crossed from Jordan to the West Bank (there were rumours about border guards giving entry permission restricted to the West Bank). I dwelled, fearful, on what would happen if I inadvertently caused offence, if I got food poisoning... At its worst, when I woke rasping and dry from the air conditioning, or lay awake listening to a vindictive, invisible mosquito, my anxiety focused on the image of filthy, stinking squat toilets, and on the terrible possibility that I might be offered sheep’s eyes to eat, a Jordanian delicacy reserved for guests.

  But Malik didn’t call or write; there were no answers to my emails, or texts, or phone messages asking him when it would be convenient to meet. Lines from a Shalom Hanoch song in the 1980s echoed in my head in a feverish refrain – Mashiach lo ba; mashiach gam lo metalphen: ‘Messiah’s not coming; the Messiah’s not going to phone either.’

  At last the grip of flu receded. I could hear again, and talk, though my throat felt torn. Myriam thought Malik wouldn’t get in touch. She didn’t want me to go to Amman. ‘Maybe his future wife has objected,’ she said. ‘You don’t know. They’re different from us.’

  Still weak, slow, I walked long hours through Tel Aviv, visiting old neighbourhoods, getting lost. Seeing beggars, the abandoned hulk of the old central bus station, even the museum dedicated to the Irgun, one of the early Jewish terrorist groups, filled me with a renewed nostalgia for a simple past. I wondered what I really wanted from Malik anyway. What did I wa
nt to ask him, and why? Was it simply his living reality, the fact of his existence that might make the present clearer in some way, or was it in order to feel better about myself?

  I mistrusted my motives, mistrusted myself, and somehow I communicated this, because I was not trusted anywhere. When I flew south to Eilat, from the tiny domestic airport north of the Tel Aviv port, I was once again under surveillance. Again two different security agents interrogated me at length. Again my passport was taken away to be checked. When I asked why, the second agent said, ‘What, you’ve never travelled in Israel before? You’ve never been through security?’ Yes, I wanted to say, I have, but it’s never been anything like this. The repeat of the interrogation was suggestive and worrying. Why was I being targeted? Because of contact with a political cousin? Because I had published an anxiously critical article or two in a cultural magazine, or because I’d signed up, briefly, with a Jewish peace group? Was my name on some list?

  The interrogation over, I was allowed to board, and I sat shakily in the end-seat of the small plane, facing the rear. Opposite me sat a reddened American in his fifties who was travelling to Eilat in order to cross the border to Aqaba and from there travel to Petra to investigate the death of someone, perhaps a relative, in an accident. He and the Israeli with him discussed hotels and taxis and phone calls, and consulted papers and maps in loud voices.

  I unwound headphones, set my music player on shuffle, shutting the men’s intrusions out, and watched through the scratched window as the dense urban detail of Tel Aviv gave way below us to arid terraced hills, patches of plantations, and agricultural land. The aching voice of Yasmin Levy filled me with her version of the Gypsy lament: ‘No tengo lugar, no tengo paisaje, yo menos tengo patria’ – ‘I don’t have a place, I don’t have a landscape, I have a homeland least of all...’

  Jerusalem appeared, the Dome of the Rock tiny and gleaming, and then slipped behind us. We reached the below-sea-level chasm of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, and turned south along the migration route of the Rift Valley towards the Red Sea. As the land moved past slowly below us, exposed and indifferent, scratched with small roads, I leaned my face against the blurred convex window, cupping my hands round my eyes to keep the American from seeing that I was crying. It was only a thread of feeling, Romantic and absurd, that let me think exile, that let me think that Levy’s Gypsy song of longing was my song of longing. It was only a thread of feeling that tied me to the place through which I was once again intent on tramping in search of roots – with a spade on my shoulder, so that I could dig them up.

  The variegated kingfisher blue of the Dead Sea appeared, and Reem Kelani’s thrumming raw voice swelled over the harsh, wadi-cracked plateaus of the Jordan mountains rising on the far side from the salt-crusted desert edge: ‘The northern wind has changed course... our exile has been long... until we meet... fi Filasteena – in Palestine.’

  If we have such a yearning for homeland, how can we disparage or discount the same longing in others, I wondered – thinking that I recognised that strength of feeling. How could two thousand years of longing for a notional place in the world carry more meaning than the living memory of a real place?

  Down there, below us, Henry Baker Tristram had ridden around the salt marshes, mapping and cataloguing the landscape. There, for him, was the simple taxonomic present, into which he could fit bird specimens like the Dead Sea sparrow, which he ‘discovered’, and ‘obtained’ with his rifle – and down there, lined up and jostling on the ruined fortifications of Masada were the untidy grackles with their rusty wings, named in his honour. That seemed something to envy: a naming and an owning; not tenuous, contested, but singular and absolute – and the naivety to believe it innocent.

  Gilad Atzmon’s lamenting saxophone cut in, and I remembered the long, slow opening shot of the French film Mur over which this song now plays: heavy slot after heavy slot of the high concrete separation wall coming down, swaying slightly, tortuously slow, to cut off the vista of the West Bank village beyond it. I remembered interviewing Atzmon in his London flat, his intense blue eyes and maniacal laugh. I’d met him after he’d had a public spat with the Board of Deputies of British Jews over an alleged attempt to boycott a concert of his, because of his anti-Israel views. Seeing his familiar body language, his gestures, and hearing his accent, I thought – though didn’t say – how he was still an Israeli despite his repudiation of the very idea of Israel, his repudiation of all forms of Jewish identity beyond a religious one. I wondered if it was precisely because he had grown up in Israel, protected from the direct experience of antisemitism, that he could not understood the resonances of his most extreme statements. I could not in the end find a path through them; I could not find a way to frame and publish the interview.

  ‘Ma’am? Ma’am?’ the American said loudly, leaning over and touching my knee. I looked round, and removed my headphones. The flight attendant was offering drinks and snacks. I shook my head.

  The American asked, ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ I said, turning back to the window.

  He looked out of his. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Stunning,’ I replied.

  Enough to make you weep.

  Eilat is baked hard in unremitting late summer heat. The view from my aunt’s apartment is of the Red Sea gulf and the desert mountains, harsh and purple. They sharpen against the deepening orange of the hot evening horizon. After dark the heat continues unchanged as though the sun has not set, and in the morning, stepping out into sunlight is like walking into something solid.

  Still waiting to hear back from Malik, I take my binoculars and go out birdwatching, as I did here when I was a child. Once Malik gets in touch I can take a taxi to the border crossing, and then, on the other side, a bus from Aqaba to Amman.

  A little way down the street from the apartment building, three bicoloured crows are picking at something shrivelled and black at the base of a carob tree. The fallen pods rustle and crackle under their feet. This is the new alien resident. In Tel Aviv it is mynahs and ring-necked parakeets, but in Eilat it is the house crow, an Indian bird that stowed away on container ships and is spreading from the subcontinent to a widening scatter of ports. From the Red Sea it has begun to make its first appearances in Europe, establishing small breeding colonies in Holland and Portugal. An ‘invasive species’ – but unlike the parakeets and mynahs, and like the settling Jews here in the nineteenth century, the early years of the twentieth, not yet a problem, not yet claiming contested resources, not yet displacing others.

  The three dark birds are curious, and look up at me as I pass, with that inimitable crow knowingness. Unafraid, they step to the side at the last possible moment. There’s something very Jewish about the crow family – or, to be more precise, something about them that fits ancient stereotypes about Jews: adaptable, clever, good at languages, and they too accumulate wealth, collecting anything shiny; they too suffer from a love of glitz and kitsch. It’s so tempting, so easy, to see birds here in human terms. It’s impossible not to think about the language with which bird behaviour and belonging is described, and compare it to the truths and omissions in the description of variants of human belonging – ‘invasive’ or ‘indigenous’, ‘migrant’ or ‘resident’...

  Down on the seafront, past the last hotel and out where the drainage canal empties into the tip of the Red Sea by the Jordanian border, the beaches are reef gravel – small moulded bits of dead coral rounded and smoothed from its spiky hardness, mixed with sand and stone, and fragments of shell. Swimming, this close to the border, is forbidden, and away from the beach hotels there are no toilets or bars or music; there are no lounge chairs for hire for six shekels, or ice-cream, or espresso outlets. It’s just the bare expanse of the beach with a single outside shower unit, a van selling water, beer and snack food, and an open, palm-roofed structure providing a little shade.

  The paved road becomes a sandy track, and a rusted ye
llow sign warns, ‘Border area ahead: entry forbidden’. Where the canal drains into the sea, an egret is picking its way, dainty and careful, hesitating each step with one yellow foot raised, along the edge of the garish green-blue water. The canal is edged with dark weed and a scum of rubbish and plastic bottles; the water is piped under the track and spills into a holding pan before leaking out to the sea. It is part treated sewage, part fresh water, and a bird haven.

  It’s already eleven o’clock and 35 degrees, and I am not really prepared for birdwatching, because I’m wearing a loose, light-coloured dress that flaps in the desert wind – and as I cross to the other side of the track, a large heron shifts suddenly from its watch for fish into a tense alert watch of me. There are sentinel herons hunched all along the canal, spaced at intervals, five or six of them, and each of them stretches up suddenly, and takes one or two nervous steps away upstream. A spur-winged plover flies off, calling, with the same clipped wingbeats as a peewit. I remember the first time I saw one, at the edge of the Ruler Road, when we drove to the kibbutz in 1978, my sharp excitement over its instantly identifiable black and white patterning, which I knew from the birdbook. Something of that childhood excitement squeezes me, seeing it again now.