Losing Israel

by Jasmine Donahaye

  ‘Of course, we can do that,’ he says. There is a pause. ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  He looks puzzled, uncertain, and then a little relieved.

  The next day we drive north-east towards the Galilee and then north towards the Golan. The Huleh valley was once a swamp, and is now fertile agricultural land, but there’s a network of protected ponds and canals, where, as at Eilat, migrant birds stop and rest in their thousands. Once we leave the information centre, everywhere we look there are clouds of large orange butterflies, their wingtips barred with white and black. They cluster in fluttering masses. It is a butterfly migration, like the monarch migration you can sometimes see in California, only these are African monarchs on their way south for the winter.

  Overhead, far above, floats a skein of large birds. The Huleh is famous for its crane migration, and I look at them in hope, but it is too early for the cranes. These are storks. The white egrets, lined up on the long field irrigators with their necks hunched back into their shoulders, look sullen and irritated as around them and around us, in ones and twos, the storks begin to descend, circling round and down into the field, their red legs dangling.

  At the bird hide we run into Itzik: he is the half-brother of my half-aunt-in-law’s sister’s husband. This makes him family. He works as a warden of the bird reserve. ‘How are you? What are you up to these days?’ he says, as though we have known one another for a long time. Last time we met, years before, we talked a little about birds, a lot about family.

  ‘All she has in her head is birds,’ says Asaf, looking delighted. ‘Nothing in her head but birds.’

  ‘Excellent!’ says Itzik. ‘That’s all she should have in her head.’

  He points across the open water before us, naming what is visible that morning: to the right, a group of spoonbills, black-tailed godwits and ruffs. A cluster of glossy ibises are keeping themselves separate. There are grey herons everywhere – migrating herons, Itzik says, and to the left, a small flock of white pelicans.

  ‘Herons migrate?’ I say. ‘I had no idea.’ I think of the herons along the irrigation canal in Eilat, and of the herons I see hunched by the river and in the fields at home in Wales.

  ‘Yes, yes – they migrate,’ Itzik says. ‘And they roost together, in big groups, in the trees. Not like the pelicans. Pelicans roost together and feed together, but herons roost together and then they separate to feed.’

  ‘Very sensible,’ I say.

  ‘I prefer the pelicans’ way,’ he says, ‘eating together, too – but then, I’m still a socialist, a real kibbutznik.’ He looks at Asaf and they both laugh.

  Itzik’s kibbutz is still a traditional socialist collective, but a century on from the earliest communist foundations of the movement, many kibbutzim have changed course. Beit Hashita is no longer under the illusion that it’s self-sufficient. It no longer even owns its own land. In the aftermath of the Israeli financial crisis of the mid-1980s, when the currency was devalued and the manageable debts that most kibbutzim carried became suddenly crippling, Beit Hashita also suffered, and Ossem, an Israeli company, bought the canning factory; in turn Ossem was bought by Nestlé. Asaf has lived all his life in a community that operated on the socialist principle of each giving what he could, and each having what he needed, and until the kibbutz sold off its assets he was a worker in a factory owned by workers. Now as the factory logistics manager, he’s the employee of a global multinational.

  Caught out, a little ashamed, I want to agree with Itzik, to say that yes, he is of course right about the pelicans’ socialism. I hadn’t thought about bird behaviour in those terms. Here in Itzik is the unreconstructed kibbutznik, the idealist, and a little flame of rekindled kibbutz romanticism leaps up in me, despite what I know now about the kibbutz movement’s contradictions and hypocrisies and denials, despite what I know about Shatta – and about all the other Shattas, before and after 1948. A longing for innocence closes over me, and I turn to look out at the pelicans to cover up my reaction.

  Itzik asks what I’ve seen in Eilat, what we’ve seen so far in the Huleh, and briskly I become a twitcher, ticking, for Eilat, redshank, little plover, squacco heron, slender-billed gull, Caspian tern, sunbird, redbacked shrike, southern grey shrike, bee-eater, common wheatear, desert wheatear, Isabelline wheatear, blackstart... and for the Huleh valley, roller, hoopoe, Smyrna kingfisher, little egret, cattle egret, marsh harrier, purple heron, white stork, avocet, red-rumped swallow...

  But when Asaf and I get back to the information centre and car park, there’s one more to add: a masked shrike sitting on a telephone line, like a little final gift. Further along, at safe distance, swallows are sitting in a huddle, watching him uneasily. I know him in the instant of seeing him, though I’ve never seen a masked shrike before – that odd immediate bird certainty that feels like a deep and absolute knowledge rather than identification arrived at by some process of comparison and exclusion.

  Perhaps such simple certainty was what birdwatching offered to my parents when we visited Israel in 1978 and 1980, when I was ten, and twelve; perhaps this was their way of dealing with all that my mother must have felt leaping up in her, coming home. Everything that pulled at her after fifteen years – her family, her language, her country – must have been evident to my father, too. How could either of them have been able to articulate it, that emotional charge, with all the threat to their settled quiet life in England that it carried? Birds for them might have been a way of coping with complexity, rather than a way of avoiding it.

  It’s not what I am doing, returning in this way to birds. It’s more the case that I’m sick of complexity, exhausted by how it implicates me – and exhausted, too, by the way this routine, impersonal and dehumanising surveillance is accusing me when I have committed no wrong. But it’s not just the suspicious authorities, for whom the questioning of the past undermines the state’s legitimacy, to whom I feel I have to protest that I am innocent – it’s the mistrustful others, too: those for whom my questioning and acknowledgement of guilt doesn’t go far enough.

  Mistrust and suspicion undermines you; it reduces you. It leaves you scrabbling at the feet of those who have judged you and found you untrustworthy. The more you seek to assure them of your trustworthiness, the more you reinforce their right to judge you. The mistrust of others creates an unease about yourself that you can never quite eradicate – and I want, terribly, to be exonerated, to be free of it. I want to feel again the innocence I had when I was not yet under surveillance, when I had not yet experienced being mistrusted, when I could still look with curiosity at everything, free of the fear that looking made me a voyeur. I want to be ten years old again, back when borders were simple and dangerous, airport security provided safeguards against the PLO, and I had nothing in my head but birds.

  6 – Claiming dominion

  Back at the kibbutz, I lie in the shuttered cool of my cousin’s vacant apartment, listening to the fan turn from side to side. Here I am in walking distance of the ruined village that Malik’s family is from: Al Murassas and Yubla are just a few kilometres away. Outside, a dove is calling drowsily from a tall palm. Occasionally mopeds sputter along the paths, but much of the noise of tractors and voices is stilled during these hottest hours. It is siesta time, but though I have not slept properly for weeks I cannot settle, I cannot sleep. Itzik, watching the socialist pelicans, has rekindled the old longing in me. This hiraeth, this sehnsucht – though I’m here in the place I love I cannot bear this love. ‘I shall lock the door to my heart and throw the key into the sea,’ wrote Rahel, one of the poets of early modern Hebrew. It’s a wild and damaged love I have for this place. How can I not want this feeling of connection?

  I give up the attempt to sleep and make coffee and take it outside. Sitting on the step, I watch a pair of jays on the dry grass, catch a fleeting metallic glint of a sunbird. Two bulbuls are fluttering in the dusty shrubs, and there’s a smell of eucalyptus and sap. Over it all a scent of in
cense wafts down from the upstairs flat, where a neighbour, an older man, is listening to sitar music, which floats over the deep thrum and rattle of air-conditioning from the nearby central dining room.

  The central dining room, the huge building with cavernous kitchens that dominates every kibbutz, is no longer the communal heart it was when I was a child. Meetings, events, plays, festivals – people still gather for these, but the communal meals are long since gone. Years earlier, when families began to eat alone at home, when children started to spend the night with their parents, those who resisted change warned that this was the beginning of the end. Long after individual homes had ceased to be single bare rooms and became instead self-contained apartments and houses, an adult’s home was still euphemistically referred to as a ‘room’. Even the earliest changes – personal possessions, a kettle in the ‘room’ – were seen as a serious threat to the shared communal ethos of the kibbutz, and the advent of private showers was believed by some to be a bourgeois indulgence that would destroy the community.

  Everyone now eats at home. Young people used to leave for army service and then go on to found new kibbutzim or to support and reinforce struggling border settlements. Now in the absence of a bond made from necessity and survival, of hardship and unity against attack, an ideal (if not always an actuality) of labour in service of the collective, the children, untempered by those rigid communal structures, grow up without a collective ideology. Without gravity pulling them in, they spin off, out of orbit, and don’t come back. When my mother abandoned kibbutz life altogether in the 1960s it was an anomaly, but now it is common. My mother’s sister left Beit Hashita, too; two of Asaf’s children also moved away when they reached adulthood, though all of them have continued to live on other kibbutzim. Young people go away for the army, for university, and keep moving. The high school closed, and the kindergarten shrank. Of my family, only Asaf remains, with his wife Chaya, and my cousin Amit. Asaf and Chaya had their doubts too, their crisis, but they have stayed. It’s changing again, now. A new neighbourhood is being built, and a new kindergarten has opened, but the people who move to the kibbutz do not become members; now it is more like a village than a kibbutz.

  Behind me, through the open door, I can hear the old fridge rattling. Asaf or Chaya stocked it for me; they’ve left cheese, bread, jam and cake, and juice and bottled water. On the counter stands a jar of sugar and the new tin of Elite instant coffee that I have just opened. It makes me ridiculously nostalgic. The first coffee I ever drank was iced coffee made with powdered Elite by my step-grandmother, when I was thirteen and staying on the kibbutz without my parents for the first time. I thought it was a terribly grown-up thing to drink coffee. In everything that I did and saw at the time lay the coiled excitement of being on the edge of something, on the edge of change – everything was sharpened by the vibrant hot, live beginning of adolescence, when you feel things in extremes, and fall in love for the first time, passionately and absolutely, with a person, or an idea, or a place.

  The pale jays strut on the grass, moustached, black-crested. Unlike British jays, which head off lumpily into woodland at any hint of motion or noise, these are unafraid and loud – but they are the same species, that dark cinnamon-coloured crow and this light, creamy Middle Eastern variant. There is a smell of hot dust and resin and eucalyptus, and I am ten again, balancing on that wall outside the central dining room with my sister, noting bulbul and sunbird and hoopoe.

  The sitar music swells as the door opens, and my neighbour comes down the stairs to greet me. He sits on the higher step, and offers me a joint. He’s wearing a loose purple cotton shirt and smells of patchouli – a soulful man who meditates and does yoga, a spiritual Israeli by way of India and California. He repudiates the stereotype of the macho, brusque, rude Israeli, the dark, tender, wounded Israeli man I made a fetish of when I was twelve and thirteen. His voice is gentle and quiet. He is stoned and laid back, and he reminds me of Nadav, one of the Israeli exiles I met in California, years ago, when I lived there – scarred, gentle sitar-playing Nadav, with thick glasses and delicate hands, who went AWOL, who outstayed his visa, who, like my mother, is never coming back to Israel.

  During the night, berries fall continuously from the tree just outside the window, rustling in the dry leaves and undergrowth, and in the morning palm doves begin again softly, a moped speeds along the path by the dining room, car engines start near and far. It is the beginning of a work-day, but nothing like the old dawn noise of the kibbutz, when most of the people who lived here also worked here. I pick up my binoculars, camera, and a bottle of water and walk up through acacias and thick flowering bougainvillea, and the tall date palms that my grandfather planted some seventy years ago. In the 1930s, with characteristic chutzpah, he stole the saplings off the back of a Jordanian truck. For many years he was the kibbutz gardener, planting it with native species, and adding small signs with the Hebrew botanical names, educating the new community about the valley’s familiar but unidentified natural history. During long walks through the valley and the hills to the north of the kibbutz and on Gilboa he lifted bamboos and lilies, sometimes without the owners’ knowledge, and brought them back to plant in the kibbutz. Everywhere I look around the kibbutz there are stories of my grandfather. In 1972 he was injured by a drunken English volunteer, and his already poor eyesight was badly affected. After that he concentrated on transforming the cemetery, landscaping it and planting it, so that it has become a park.

  I reach the dusty track that leads past the cemetery and the building site of the new neighbourhood, and out over the borderless cultivated fields towards what is left of Al Murassas, towards what is left of Yubla – a road that ends at the visible ruins of Belvoir, the invisible ruins of Kawkab al Hawa.

  A pipe is being laid to the new residential neighbourhood of the kibbutz, and tractors and diggers have cut a quarry out of the slope. About half a kilometre’s walk from Beit Hashita the road splits. To the left it leads to the Arab villages of Taibe and Na’ura, to Abu Omar and his beautiful grandson. Straight on it leads, in the distance, to the cow pasture and sabra that mark the site of Al Murassas. At the split in the road there’s a lookout point, with signage and shade and benches. One sign, a panorama of the landscape, is so sun-bleached that its features are barely distinguishable, but its Hebrew place names, re-inked in permanent marker, stand out darkly: Kochav haYarden, Tel Yosef, Gilboa… Newer signs have been put up to mark the development of the Issachar hiking trail. Some are bilingual, with awkward English translation and spelling mistakes, and odd typographical errors: ‘Givat Hamore-Ramot Yissachar Scenic Trail begins on a ridge in the Givat Hamore peaks 517 meters in altitude and continus for 32 kilometers along the barren Ramot Yissachar creasts at an average height of 80 meters to the military industries park and Road. 90 in the Beit She’an Valley...’ Most of the area, it claims, is associated with famous biblical events. But then a neat eliding of the past leaps out from the densely packed text: it crosses seamlessly, painlessly, from the biblical era to the 1930s. In modern times the area was reforested ‘to redeem the land of Israel for Zionist settlement. Yehoshuah Hankin purchased significant tracts of land here for the Jewish National Fund on which settelments were built.’ Those non-Jews who shaped the land between biblical times and twentieth-century Jewish settlement are invisible: they do not exist; they did not ever exist.

  To the south lies the bulging mass of Mount Gilboa; fishponds glimmer in the distance – the fishponds of Ein Harod or Tel Yosef, built on the lands of Qumiya, which was depopulated early in 1948. Nearer huddles the dense, low enclosure of Beit Hashita, built on land bought in 1931 in the purchase that depopulated Shatta. I can see the green of the kibbutz cemetery at its edge. Around me, and to the north and east, spread the dark-brown ploughed fields that used to belong to Yubla and Kafra, Al Bireh and Al Murassas, with the sand-pale track winding over them. The whole panorama lies before me, and there is nothing to indicate the Arab villages were ever here.

 
; Salman Abu Sitta’s Atlas of Palestine shows a different landscape: the names of the villages that were depopulated in 1948, reproduced in Arabic, Hebrew and English; the names of the newer kibbutzim and other Jewish settlements, and the symbols marking the sites of mosques and wells, of important tombs and springs and schools. It was photocopies from that atlas which, rightly anxious, I crumpled and threw away in the toilet cubicle at Heathrow Airport.

  A little further on, a second sign, in Hebrew, memorialises Yos and David, two kibbutzniks from Beit Hashita. They are described as a ‘peasant’ and a ‘metal worker’. From this lookout, dedicated to their memory, it is possible, the sign claims, to see the evidence of ‘a belief in the righteousness of the way and adherence to the Zionist ideology that brought about the creation of the beautiful valley’. The signboard’s reference is biblical: here lies Kibbutz Beit Hashita, whose name derives from the story of Gideon. And here is that same leap – backwards, this time – from the present to the ancient Jewish past, passing over the existence of Shatta, the village that had retained an Arabic form of the same biblical Hebrew name. And this word for ‘peasant’ – felach – so close to the Arabic fellah: did kibbutz Hebrew borrow and subvert the Arabic word, and rehabilitate it? Israeli-Jewish attitudes to the fellahin do not differ enormously from the colonial attitudes still present in the English word ‘fellah’. Again I am making half-guesses, feeling my way towards meanings, but when, further on, a signboard names another lookout point after the noble Jewish peasants, I realise it is no wonder that I absorbed a story of the kibbutznik as noble peasant. Here is that story written onto the landscape. And yet this is a vista of fields that have been emptied of workers of the land.