Losing Israel

by Jasmine Donahaye

  The herons watch me, poised, and the only movement is my dress whipping against my legs and a distant jeep creeping silently along the border road beyond the canal. Then three spur-winged plovers shift out of their freeze, and begin again to make repeated little anxious calls, dipping and shivering slightly each time; the herons relax from their stretched posture, and hunch back into their watch for fish. There are a lot of fish; they keep roiling and breaking the surface of the water.

  When it rains, in the winter, the sandy desert soil clumps into a sticky lumpy mud, which dries into a crust. My feet break through the hardened surface as I walk off the track and along the canal. I scare a brilliant turquoise Eurasian kingfisher, which flashes upstream. Behind a pile of newly dug soil, someone has left jeans and a shirt, tyre tracks and hoof-prints. Beyond the canal lie the fences and detritus and dilapidated buildings and boats of the border. The crossing itself lies a few kilometres to the north, and here there are only weathered military watchtowers and tattered flags. Someone has crossed here, or swum ashore at night, and has been met.

  I look at the herons through binoculars, hoping for a smaller, scarcer purple heron among the common familiar greys, and then, birdwatching providing cover for a more suspect act, I turn to look across the border at Aqaba, a resort town like Eilat – but not like Eilat.

  This is the point where you can see four states: Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – or at least you can imagine you see Saudi Arabia in the southern haze. The proximity with Jordan sends a prickling little thrill of adrenaline through me. As a child and a teenager, all the borders seemed absolute – this long eastern one; the southern border with Egypt, at that time much further south in the Sinai Desert; and the northern borders with Lebanon and Syria. There was no possibility of crossing them then: their barbed wire, minefields and warning signs marked the dangerous boundary of the forbidden. It gives me a kind of illicit pleasure: here it begins, difference; here this territory instead of that; here this is permitted instead of that; here this language ends and that one begins. I am drawn to the border, to all borders: to watchtowers and barbed wire and machine guns; to arbitrary certainties – here and no further.

  The pleasure of identifying birds is something similar, I think – not so much the impetus to name and own (or to shoot and name and own, like Tristram), but to distinguish what is known from what is not known, to experience crisp, sharp certainty. But it’s also the pleasure of looking, of watching and observing – a voyeurism we don’t permit ourselves elsewhere. And how we watch! With binoculars and telescopes and twenty-four-hour webcams – with all the paraphernalia of surveillance. This particular species in its snowy plumage, for example, with its slim red bill, paddling pretty coral-coloured feet in the poisonous green water? It’s a slender-billed gull. The egret is a little egret. I put up the herons – suddenly they take off, first one, then all, in a rising progression along the canal. In that light, as they heave their heavy wings, heading over me towards the lagoon, they seem huge, like vultures.

  I look over at Aqaba, on the far side of the border, its ridiculous enormous flagpole with the oversized Jordanian flag flying against the bare mountains. I could go to Amman without waiting to hear from Malik. I could take a cab to the border crossing, and then a cab to Aqaba, and there get on the bus to Amman. Once in Amman I could call Malik to ask if we could meet and talk over coffee. It would be easy enough. I could go at a moment’s notice, even though Ramadan is about to begin. But I don’t go. I wait for Malik, and he doesn’t phone, or write.

  That evening, I walk up the hill to go in search of sandgrouse, which come in from the desert at dusk each day and stop to drink at the pumping station just beyond the edge of the city. The sun, dropping behind the Eilat mountains, still blazes opposite on the Jordanian mountains, on the far side of the rift in which the Red Sea trickles to its end. Down in the dark flatlands, Eilat and Aqaba spring into a gleam of strung lights around the bay, but the tops of the mountains, harsh, bare and cracked, are lit purple in the last of the sun above the dark valley. The desert light tears at me. I think people might go mad with a wild love for this place, living here.

  High up, at the edge of the city, you walk past the last building and suddenly you’re in the desert. There’s only the road that circles to the west of Eilat and off through the Negev towards Gaza. The boundary between city and desert is unexpected, and final. It is an extreme place – not extreme like the heaving, angry human density of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but an extreme environment: the city is there on sufferance. Seen from beyond its border, it looks like a presumptuousness, a human delusion of permanence bounded by an implacable landscape.

  Now that the sun is lower and I am high up, it is not as hot, though the wind still blows like an open fan oven. I cross the last road, raising dust clouds from the sandy pink soil, and walk up the track into wilderness. The low scrubby trees, some kind of tangled tarabinth, seem almost dead, but I can imagine what will happen when the rain eventually comes. I can’t identify the scattered, low ground-cover. If my uncle David were alive, I would call him up and ask him; I would bring him samples. If I were to ask my mother, she would say, self-deprecating, ‘Well I’m not sure what the real name is, but we always called it...’ That’s what I want: to know the names of plants through growing up with them, among them, as I did in England; to know them instantly as I know beech or birch or oak, broom and gorse, cowslips and harebells. I want to have been enculturated, like her, by my grandfather, who travelled all over Palestine collecting plants for the garden he made out of the kibbutz. In this cross-roads of three deserts – the Negev, the Arava and the Sinai – the low wind-blown desert shrubs are particular, perhaps occurring only here, but I have no idea what they are. I have that sense everywhere in Israel, now – that I am always missing something, some information or knowledge, no matter how carefully I look.

  Beyond the curve of rock, out of sight of city and road, I am suddenly alone in the desert, and there is only the wind sounding among the rocks and through the wadi, and the electrical jarring of the pumping station, supplying water to the city.

  When my father heard I was going to Eilat, he remembered that there had been a leaking tap near my aunt’s apartment, where namaqua doves came down at night to drink. ‘I don’t suppose... Well, I shouldn’t think it would still be there,’ he said on the phone. There is no longer a tap leaking under the apartment building: water is a valuable commodity, and neglecting its conservation is a social taboo. Wasting water is dangerous in a country depending on diminishing rivers, depleted aquifers and brief rain-fall. All of it is reused. The Jordan river is drying up, much of it diverted for agriculture and other human use, and the level of the Dead Sea, which it feeds, drops metre by metre. There are controversial plans to open a channel from its southern point to the Red Sea, plans to feed desalinated water from the Red Sea back into this landlocked salt lake.

  In the West Bank, water is trucked in to Palestinian villages; it is poor quality, inadequately treated and inadequately stored, and in some areas there are reports of endemic diarrhoea among children. The Jewish settlements, refreshed by blue, chlorinated swimming pools, discharge untreated sewage that contaminates land and seasonal waterways.

  Some believe that it will not in the end be land, or borders, or holy places and settlements, but water that will decide things here. With diminishing water resources, what will Israel trade for it, in the end? What might Israel be compelled to trade for water in the end?

  A few moments after I sit down on a rock near the pumping station, the birds that have been keeping still, and watching, reappear. A pearl-grey blackstart springs up and away and lands, cocking its dark tail. Palm doves are lining up to roost. A pair of southern grey shrikes settles, too. Among a tangle of dense, fine branches, two small birds begin to chase one another, closer and closer to me, flying from scrubby tree to scrubby tree. They are sunbirds. These are the only sunbirds I have seen in all the time I’ve been here: this visit, the p
revious visit. It has been twenty years since I’ve seen the green iridescence of the Palestine sunbird, which, when I was a child, we called the orange-tufted sunbird.

  I wait until dark but the sandgrouse don’t come. When I walk back down the track, the cities spread out around the bay are brilliant and glowing, and in the harsh desert landscape all that human effort seem just a little scratch of temporary light.

  Birdwatching is a strange pastime. This place is one of the world’s most important bird migration corridors. More than five hundred species follow this flight path between Africa and Europe and in total some half a million birds pass through Eilat twice a year. Though autumn migratory birds have started to arrive, it’s still too early in the season for the mass of birdwatching tourists with their surveillance equipment, and I’m glad to be able to go birdwatching alone. I don’t like birdwatchers, not the dedicated ones. I cringe away from their pointing expertise, their specialist equipment and clothes, their beards and life-lists and pockets, and fussy vocabulary of the ‘tick’ and the ‘drop’. Birdwatchers are predominantly male, and they can be competitive and obsessive. Many of them, in camouflage and kit, are playing at soldiers. If they could, some of them would still be using guns rather than binoculars to collect new specimens for their lists. For others there is a distasteful element of ownership and desire for control in their birdwatching – and of ownership and control of the drab wives who trail along beside them. The women are told where to look, are informed about what they are seeing; their hesitant suggestions of identification are dismissed. Even my father, a gentle, careful man, becomes authoritarian with a pair of binoculars in his hands.

  It’s also not yet far enough into the migration season for the bird-ringing station north of Eilat to be open, and so I have the place to myself when my aunt drops me there the next day on her way to work. A group of squacco herons takes off in a noisy flapping panic from the treetops at my approach, and from the hide overlooking a small lake I see grey herons, egrets, black-winged stilts. Some birds I know instantly – the plovers, and the black-winged stilts that I saw first as a child at the edge of the kibbutz’s shallow sewage ponds, where the effluent was treated by sunlight and reused for irrigation. There’s a long-dormant bird know-ledge waking up in me, and an almost physical pleasure in this instant identification. Perhaps after all my delight in birds is not so different from that of the ‘real’ birdwatcher – this desire to watch and know, this naming and owning.

  The look-out place over the salt evaporation ponds has bird identification boards, and a memorial to soldiers who died in the war in Gaza. Among the distant waders at the edge of the ponds, I make out a redshank and a ringed plover. Far off beyond the salt works and the palm groves, the beach-front hotels waver in the growing heat. I think it might be a couple of miles away, and I decide to walk it rather than catch a cab back to the city from the border crossing.

  As I come out in the open under the hot sky, a bee-eater takes off and flies up towards the sun. It hangs there, spread and displayed as though it were a small soaring hawk, its green and blue plumage and gold, red and black markings sharply defined in the morning light. I stop every few moments to look. The scrub, and then the palm grove, and then the open bit of desert is alive with birds along a seep of water towards the Red Sea. Under the palms it is red-backed and lesser grey shrikes, masked like small film-noir gangsters. Along the margins of the water slick there are wheatears: common wheatears, desert wheatears, and Isabelline wheatears – they are there all the time as a slight flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. The bee-eater keeps company above me, its pointed wings spread in brilliant colour. And suddenly, with a jarring interruption of that quiet stillness, my phone rings.

  It is my mother, calling from Australia to ask where I am, what I’m doing. As always when I come back to Israel, my uncle and aunts have enquired about her, have given me messages for her, have wanted to know when she is coming to visit; they regret that she doesn’t call, that she rarely writes. I want to tempt her back. I want to hear that it hurts her, this place, just a little. But no enquiries after her, no message of love from her sisters or brother, no family story will tempt my mother to come back – she has moved too far away in feeling and in time, so instead I tell her about the bee-eater above me, about the shrikes, the wheatears and spur-winged plovers, and about the spread of house crows. The birds of her past pull at her: I can hear that slightly tender, falling note of nostalgia in her voice after I describe them.

  More than anything, I want what I have been pursuing, digging around in matters that are private and past, to break through to her, to break in to her locked-up private space of emotion. But apart from that first time I spoke to her in Hebrew, the note of nostalgia is all she ever allows me to see of what was once a powerful homesickness. Perhaps it is all she can allow herself, or perhaps she does not feel it anymore. Maybe it is only my imagination or need that makes me think she ever did.

  Beyond the palm plantation, the muezzin broadcasts the call to prayer, just the other side of the border – that border I have feared crossing, and which now, it seems, hearing nothing from Malik, I will not cross. I walk for two hours, and by the time I come out of the desert at the edge of the city, I am light-headed with heat and hunger and the shimmering landscape, and my legs are white up to the knee with dust.

  At the boundary of the city, before I cross the bridge over the spit of the lagoon to the first hotel, a young man on a moped speeds towards me along the empty road and stops. He asks me, in Hebrew, what time it is. I check and tell him, and hearing my accent he switches to English. ‘Where you have come from?’ he says. ‘Did you just come from Jordan? From the border?’

  I remember seeing an army jeep moving along the track on the far side of the canal, both this time and the day before. There are almost no soldiers visible in Eilat, almost no border guards or police. It is a holiday resort, after all, a place where Israeli Jews come to forget, to escape the constant reminders of insecurity, and where tourists manage to stay in ignorance of any threat. But the soldiers and border guards are there, out of sight, and I have been under surveillance: I’ve been observed, and tracked, and reported.

  ‘I’ve come from the bird place,’ I say.

  ‘The beard place?’ he repeats, puzzled.

  ‘Tziporim,’ I explain.

  ‘Ah, birds!’ he says, and turns round and drives back over the bridge into the city. My odd behaviour has fallen into a recognisable, tolerated pattern. Birdwatching accounts for the direction I’ve walked, the dust, the staggering dehydration and the expression of slight desperation. And it is true in another more personal way too, perhaps. Perhaps, after all, birdwatching explains a great deal about me, about why I am here, and why I keep coming back.

  At airport security in Eilat, heading north, I am interrogated again and disbelieved, and I become sick of it all – sick of waiting to hear from Malik, of paying attention, and above all sickened by Israel and its brutality, and now its sustained mistrust. I am not going to meet Malik; I am not going to be transformed by his story into some kind of clarity, or certainty. I am not sure I even care about him or his story anymore.

  This time when I reach the Jezreel Valley, everything is familiar, tugging at me, and yet everything has changed. The bus passes boys selling watermelons by the road, skirts Mount Gilboa, and settles into the straight stretch past the fishponds. Then it slows to a stop beyond the mass of Shatta prison. The prison and the landscape are no longer trembling with my uncertainty, suggesting the presence all the time underneath of another untold or unknown history. It isn’t duality or contradiction now, so much as complexity, and I am tired of that complexity. I want it to be simple again. I want to be finished with the past, and with its stories. I want to go back to where I started, at the age of ten. But of course it wasn’t simple when I was a child, either; then it was my mother who became complex, and I hated Israel too.

  Now the trilingual green metal sign to the kibbutz pul
ls at me, with its arrow straight on to Beit She’an, and its left arrow to Beit Hashita. I get off the bus and cross the road to walk up to the kibbutz. Everywhere, there are birds. Now that I am looking once again, they have come back into focus, sharply into focus against that heavy, complex landscape. Under the avenue of eucalyptus trees enclosing the road up to the gate, two striped hoopoes are digging in the ground with their beaks open, crests cocked. They swagger like crows. Hoopoes are dirty birds, somehow: they are unkosher, perhaps because they foul their nests, or are omnivores. Even so, they took precedence over the problematically named Palestine sunbird as the representative bird of Israel in the sixty-year anniversary celebrations of 2008. They are cocky and vulgar, rejecting bourgeois manners and embracing peasant earthiness, like my old idea of kibbutzniks.

  It is near midday, and here too there is a hot wind, but when a kibbutznik slows to offer me a lift, I shake my head. I don’t want to say who or what I am; I don’t want to explain about my mother, to carry greetings to her from a distant schoolfriend, to explain where she is living, and why she doesn’t come back.

  A little further on there is a rustle in the brittle blades of fallen eucalyptus leaves by the side of the road, and a long grey-brown animal with a whiskered face a little like an otter slips across an open patch of ground. It’s a porcupine, the first porcupine I have ever seen. Despite my breathlessness in the hot and dusty wind, I am glad I walked.

  Asaf’s wife Chaya is between shifts when I arrive at their house. She is unchanged, and laughs when I tell her so. Later, when Asaf gets home from the factory, he asks, ‘So, what do you want to do while you’re here?’

  Last time he took me to meet Abu Omar, and we drove past the site of Al Murassas. I think about the ruined villages, and I think about migrating birds. ‘I want to see birds,’ I tell him. ‘I’d like to go birdwatching. Might you be interested in going up to the Huleh valley?’