My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (37 page)

When we line up for guard duty at one-thirty in the morning, I look at my fellow reservists—at their faces, their slouching bodies, their oversized trousers and disheveled appearances. Are we the soldiers of evil? Are we agents of cruelty? Are we the heartless gatekeepers of oppression? When it comes right down to it, we don’t want to be here, either. We don’t like this work. It’s not for us, this whole fucking business. Like most Israelis, we’d prefer our Israel to be a sort of California, but the trouble is that this California of ours is surrounded by ayatollahs. The trouble is that although we are solid citizens of a consumer-oriented, technological democracy, we find ourselves in deep shit. And when we stand in this weary semicircle—tired, desperate, and miserable, with our tattered belts and with lousy coats that don’t keep us warm enough—we, too, feel like victims.

But it’s not that simple. When the formation breaks up and I climb the ladder to tower number 6, I realize that what makes this camp tick is the division of labor. The division makes it possible for evil to take place apparently without evil people. This is how it works: The people who vote for Israel’s right-wing parties are not evil; they do not round up youngsters in the middle of the night. And the ministers who represent the right-wing voters in government are not evil; they don’t hit boys in the stomach with their own fists. And the army’s chief of staff is not evil; he carries out what a legitimate, elected government obliges him to carry out. And the commander of the internment facility is not evil—he is doing the best he can under impossible circumstances. And the interrogators—well, after all, they are doing their job. And it is, they are told, impossible to govern the occupied territories unless they do all this. As for the jailers, most of them are not evil, either. They only want to leave all this behind and get back home.

Yet in some mysterious way, all these nonevil people manage together to produce a result that is evil indeed. And evil is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than all who contribute to it and carry it out. Despite our unkempt exteriors, our clumsiness, our pathetic petit-bourgeois ways, we are evil in Gaza. But this evil of ours is a cunning evil. For it is an evil that happens, as it were, of its own accord, an evil for which the responsibility is no one’s. Evil without evildoers.

From watchtower number 6 I can see the sea, the camp, the city of Gaza. Gaza is a city with no hope, no cure. It is the city of the people whose houses and villages we took in 1948 and whose place of refuge we conquered in 1967. It is the city of those whom we exploited during the long decades of occupation, denying them human rights and civil rights and national rights. So in Gaza there are no excuses. Gaza is not even needed for our defense like some strategic heights in the West Bank; it is not even a historically charged terrain like some parts of Judea and Samaria. Gaza is clear and simple. It is the epitome of the absurdity of occupation. It is futile occupation. It is brutal occupation. It corrodes our very existence and it erodes the legitimacy of our existence.

I look down at the tents and fences and barbed wire. For the last time I try to comprehend the inner logic of the place, the necessity that, so to speak, created it. And I summon up all our just claims, all our mitigating circumstances: Aren’t we refugees, too? Aren’t we, too, victims of violence? And if we are to survive in the Middle East, we must be strong. When attacked, we must respond. The IDF and the Shin Bet are all that protect us from total chaos. Only the willingness to use force is what keeps us alive here.

But it doesn’t work here. In the Gaza Beach Detention Camp it cannot work. Because there are places and there are situations that are clear-cut. And this is such a place. This is such a situation. There are no complexities here, no mitigating circumstances. This is what the Palestinians have brought upon us by means of uprising: they deprived us of the illusion of bearable occupation. They have told us that if we are to occupy Gaza, we must have a Gaza Beach prison. And if we are to have such a prison, we must betray ourselves. We must betray everything we were to be and everything we are to be. So the question now is not land for peace. The question is land for our decency. Land for our humanity. Land for our very soul.

Twenty-two years have passed since I observed my Palestinian enemies and my Israeli commanders from watchtower number 6. The watchtower no longer exists. Two and a half years after I returned home from Gaza Beach, the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords were signed. In a rare moment of bliss, Israel’s decency overcame Israel’s brutality, and Palestinian realism overcame Palestinian extremism. Within months, the occupation of the city of Gaza was no more. By the spring of 1994, the Israeli detention facility was dismantled. But the Palestinian government never leased the coastal terrain to a Club Med entrepreneur. It handed it over to its own security forces—far more brutal than Israel’s. Later on, that secular Palestinian government was overthrown by the radical Islamists, Hamas. After a short lull, the conflict resumed. Once again Israelis and Palestinians were caught in their well-known vicious circle: violence, counterviolence, countercounterviolence. So the grand metaphor of Gaza Beach still applies: the intimacy of the jailers and the jailed; the complexity of the besieged laying siege to the siegers; the jailers imprisoned by their jailed. The fact that the actual reality we live in is surreal.

Perhaps this is the reason that even today, the sights I saw and the sounds I heard in the Gaza Beach facility still haunt me. I am haunted by the notion that we hold them by the balls and they hold us by the throat. We squeeze and they squeeze back. We are trapped by them and they are trapped by us. And every few years the conflict takes on a new form, ever more gruesome. Every few years, the mode of violence changes. The tragedy ends one chapter and begins another, but the tragedy never ends.

(
photo credit 10.1
)

L
IKE THE SETTLEMENTS, PEACE, TOO, WAS AN OUTCOME OF THE
1967
AND
1973 wars.

In the abstract, the desire for peace had always been a part of Zionism. It was there in the late 1920s when Herbert Bentwich’s son Norman realized that the Jews were not alone in Palestine and joined the Jerusalem intellectuals who formed Brit Shalom, the Jewish Peace Alliance. It was there in the early 1930s, when Yitzhak Tabenkin settled the Valley of Harod and Jewish radicals rose against Zionist colonization that led to the dispossession of Arab tenants. It was there in the late 1930s, when the Rehovot writer and orange grower Moshe Smilansky warned that we have partners in the land and that we must learn to live with them. It was there in the early 1940s, when Shmaryahu Gutman led his cadets to Masada and Jewish humanists denounced the militaristic chauvinism that was capturing the hearts of the young. It was there in the late 1940s, when Palmach battalions emptied the Arab villages and conquered Arab Lydda, and Smilansky’s nephew Yizhar wrote
Khirbet Khizeh
, a seminal novella about the savagery of expulsion. It was there when the young State of Israel was building and arming itself in the 1950s, and left-wing parties demanded a peace initiative that would deal justly with Palestinian refugees. And it was there in the early 1960s, when Ben Gurion built
the Dimona reactor and men of morals denounced the nuclearization of Israel and the Middle East.

For seventy years the yearning for peace existed on the fringes of Zionism, trying to restrain the baser instincts of the Jewish national movement. But after the Arab uprising of 1936, mainstream Zionism wanted more and more land, more and more power. It paid lip service to peace, but it was not willing to pay a real price for it. It saw immigration, settlement, and nation building as its main goals, and it did not consider peace to be an absolute value or a supreme cause.

The real, mainstream Zionist peace movement was born only after the wars of 1967 and 1973. Only the new horizon opened by the Six Day War and the trauma of the Yom Kippur War turned the battle for peace into a central struggle of Israel’s public arena. In those same years the Greater Israel idea and the demand to annex the occupied West Bank sprouted, too. The decade of the first settlements was also the decade of the first peace demonstrations. From the tectonic shifts of the late sixties and early seventies rose both the New Right and the New Left. Both rebelled against Labor’s intractable ways. Both rebelled against a stagnant reality. Both offered a radical solution and a recipe for instant utopia. As they wrestled against each other and defined each other and empowered each other, the peace movement and the land movement became the shaping forces of the new Israel.

This time I don’t have to travel far; Yossi Sarid lives just five miles from my home. From the corner window of his roomy apartment in north Tel Aviv, the Mediterranean Sea beckons, blue and placid. The man who was an icon of the Israeli Left welcomes me with a weak handshake. We’ve known each other for years. In one election campaign, I even volunteered to be his unofficial adviser. But over the years we’ve had our differences. This time Yossi knows I’ve come not to argue but to understand. Where did the peace movement come from, I ask. What was it all about? What did it get right and where did it go wrong? Why has it lost its way?

Sarid was born in Rehovot in 1940. Both his parents were raised in the bleak Polish town of Rafalowka and made
aliyah
in 1935. Several years later, the Nazis arrived in Rafalowka, led the Jews to the forest, instructed them to dig holes in the ground, and shot them into the holes
they had just dug. Yossi’s mother, Duba, lost her mother and father, sister and brother. She became clinically depressed. His father, Yaakov, lost his entire family but kept an optimistic, upbeat attitude toward life. In 1945, Yaakov seated his son Yossi on a kitchen stool and told him why he had decided to change their surname from Schneider to Sarid (remnant): because they were the last remnants. For Yossi, that moment in the kitchen was formative. Listening to his father, he was certain that they were all alone on this earth.

Yaakov Sarid did well. Within a few years the schoolteacher became school principal, then director general of all socialist schools, and then director general of Israel’s Ministry of Education. Yossi Sarid did well, too. He was a gifted child who excelled in every field, often surpassing his peers. But Duba Sarid remained sad all her life. On the nineteenth anniversary of the Rafalowka massacre she took her own life.

From an early age, Yossi was bound for great things. His mother wanted him to be a poet and professor, while his classmates were convinced he would become a great national leader. Wherever he went, Sarid stood out for his quick thinking, sharp tongue, and arrogance. As a boy and as a teenager he was brilliant, rebellious, and conceited. He never accepted authority. He was a sore loser. A stark combination of ambition, talent, and a provocative disposition pushed him from one achievement to the next. At sixteen he published poems in Israel’s most prestigious literary journal. At twenty-three he was a leading news editor at Israel’s state-run radio. At twenty-four he was the youngest spokesperson ever of the long-ruling Labor Party.

Sarid defines himself as one who was born of Labor’s womb. His parents were both active members of the Labor Movement. The neighborhood was Labor, school was Labor, and the youth movement was Labor. Labor was his only frame of reference. No wonder the young party spokesman quickly won the trust and affection of the party elders. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir, and Secretary General Golda Meir all treated him as a beloved son. The inarticulate, aging rulers groomed their eloquent spokesman and, in a sense, adopted him. They gave him the backing of an all-powerful establishment, while he gave them access to a young Israel and a news media they did not understand. By now it was clear that in due course Sarid could inherit Labor and become prime minister.

Immediately after the Six Day War, Sarid went to study in the United States. Liberal New York, where he spent his graduate school years, was absorbed in the struggle against the Vietnam War. The dynamic Israeli joined the struggle. He identified with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), took part in protest marches, and became part of the antiwar movement. When he returned to Israel in 1969, he was a different person. Now Israeli policy seemed to him combative, thoughtless, and outdated. Although he ran Labor’s election campaign, he was at odds with the government’s hawkish line. When he realized that Golda Meir was reluctant to give back the occupied territories for peace, he was outraged. The Meir-Sarid lovefest became an ugly mutual hate relationship.