Under This Blazing Light (8 page)

Consequendy, my Zionism may not be ‘whole’. For instance, I see nothing wrong with mixed marriage or with conversion, if it is successful. Only those Jews who choose to be Jews or who are compelled to be Jews belong, in my view, to this tribe. For them, and only for them, the State of Israel is a present possibility. I would like to make it an attractive and fascinating possibility.

I do not regard myself as a Jew by virtue of ‘race’ or as a ‘Hebrew’ because I was bom in the Land of Canaan. I choose to be Jew, that is, to participate in the collective experience of my ancestors and fellow Jews down the ages. Albeit a selective participation: I do not approve of everything they approved of, nor am I prepared to continue obediently living the kind of life that they lived. As a Jew, I do not want to live among strangers who see in me some kind of symbol or stereotype, but in a State ofjews. Such a State could only have come into being in the Land of Israel. That is as far as my Zionism goes.

Confronting the Jewish past

I do not live here in order to renew the days of old or to restore the glory of the past. I live here because it is my wish to live as a free Jew.

Admittedly, it would be foolish to deny the religious experience that lies at the root of Jewish independence. Even the first founders of the New Land of Israel, who broke out of the straitjacket of religion and revolted against it, brought to their Tolstoyan or Marxist or nationalist enthusiasm a religious temperament, whether Hasidic or messianic or reverential. ‘Restoring the glory of the past’, ‘renewing the days of old’, ‘bringing redemption to the Land’, - such common expressions testify to a powerful religious current flowing beneath the crust of the various secular Zionist ideologies. Actually, there is often an unpleasant deception at work in this masked ball of phrases arbitrarily plucked from their religious context to serve as faded garlands for an essentially national ideology. The false note becomes particularly disturbing when the State of Israel is adorned with messianic attributes and we are told that the coming of the Messiah is evident in every Jewish goat, every Jewish acre, every Jewish gun and every act of Jewish villainy. You can read some powerful words on this subject in the writings of Brenner.

But the experience that has taken shape and grown in the Land of Israel in the last two or three generations has already begun to develop a new appearance of its own: the main thing is neither the liberation of the ancestral heritage nor the restoration of old-time Judaism, but the liberation of the Jews.

The new Israel is not a reconstruction of the kingdom of David and Solomon or of the Second Jewish Commonwealth, or the shtetl borne to the hills of Canaan on the wings of Chagall. On the other hand, one cannot regard it as merely a synthetic Australian-type land of immigration on biblical soil. Neither chained nor unchained, neither continuation nor revolution, neither resurrection nor reincarnation, this State is in the curious and fascinating situation of being ‘over against’. The Law and the Prophets, the Talmud and the Midrash, the prayers and the hymns are all present and visible here, but we are neither entirely within them nor entirely outside them.

Over against: neither uninterrupted continuity, nor a new start, but a continual reference to the Jewish heritage and traditions. The Hebrew language, law and justice, table manners, old wives’ tales, lullabies, superstitions, literature - all refer continually to the Jewish past. We relate nostalgically, defiandy, sardonically, calculatingly, resentfully, penitently, desperately, savagely, in a thousand and one ways - but we relate. It is not merely a new interpretation of an ancient culture, as the disciples of Ahad Ha'am would have it, but nor is it a leap across the past to link up with ancient pre-Judaic Hebrew strata, as the school of Berdyczewski claims. It is a powerful yet complex love-hate relationship, burdened with conflicts and tensions, oscillating between revolt and nostalgia, between anger and shame. Perhaps this is what Brenner meant when he spoke of ‘a thorny existence’.

I, for one, am among those who believe that the conflicts and contradictions, the love-hate relationships with the Jewish heritage, are not a curse but contain a blessing: a prospect of profound fruitfulness, of that creative suffering and cultural flowering which is always and everywhere the outcome of souls divided against themselves. A great richness lies hidden in this experience of existing neither within Judaism nor outside it but incessantly and insolubly over against it.

Facing the Arab population

‘A people without land for a land without people’ - this formula offered those who propounded it a simple, smooth and comfortable Zionism. Their way is not my way.

It seems that the enchantment of ‘renewing the days of old’ is what gave Zionism its deep-seated hope of discovering a country without inhabitants. Any movement that has a melody of return, revival, reconstruction, tends to long for a symmetrical coordination between the past and the present. How pleasant and fitting it would have been for the Return to Zion to have taken the land from the Roman legions who subjugated our land and drove us into exile. How pleasant and fitting it would have been to come back to an empty land, with only the ruins of our towns and villages waiting for us to bring them back to life. From here it is only a short step to the kind of self-induced blindness which consists of disregarding the existence of the country’s Arab population or discounting their importance (on the dubious grounds that ‘they have created no cultural assets here and have not developed the Land’). Many of those who returned to Zion wanted to see the Arab inhabitants as a kind of mirage that would dissolve of its own accord, or as a colourful component of the biblical setting, or at best as natives who would drool with gratitude if we treated them kindly. (In time, Naomi Shemer was to express this state of mind with terrifying, transparent simplicity by describing East Jerusalem in terms of:

.. the market place is empty / And no one goes down to the Dead Sea / By way of Jericho ..Meaning, of course: the market place is empty of Jews, and no Jew goes down to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho. A revelation of a common and characteristic way of thinking.)

This is also what some of my teachers taught me when I was a child: after our Temple was destroyed and we were banished from our Land, the gentiles came into our heritage and defiled it. Wild desert Arabs laid the land waste, destroyed the terraces on the hillside that our ancestors had constructed and let their flocks ravage the vegetation. When our first pioneers came to the land to rebuild it and be rebuilt by it and to redeem it from its desolation, they found an abandoned wasteland. True, there were a few uncouth nomads roaming around in it, and here and there a filthy cluster of primitive hovels.

Some of our first arrivals thought the Ishmaelites ought to return to the desert from which they had crept into the Land, and if they refused - ‘Arise and claim your inheritance’, like those who ‘conquered Canaan in storm’ in the prophecy of Saul Tschernichowsky: ‘A melody of blood and fire
... I
Climb the mountain, crush the plain, All you see - inherit’ (Tschernichowsky, ‘I Have a Tune’).

Most of the first settlers, though, loathed blood and fire and kept faith with the Jewish heritage and the principles of Tolstoy, and therefore they sought ways of love and pleasantness, for ‘the Bedouin are people like us’ (!) So we brought light into the darkness of the tents of Kedar, we healed ringworm and trachoma, we paved roads, we built and improved and let the Arabs share in the benefits of prosperity and civilisation.

But they, being by nature bloodthirsty and ungrateful, listened willingly to the incitements of strangers, and they also envied us our possessions and our industry, and lusted after our houses and womenfolk, which is why they fell upon us and we were compelled to repel them with the revolt of the few against the many, again we held out our hand in peace, and again it was refused, they fell upon us again, and thus the war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness goes on unto this day. (It should be stressed that this primitive, simplistic depiction was not universal, though it was popular and current among the Zionist settlers. Many of the best minds inside and outside the Labour movement, from A.D. Gordon to Ben-Gurion and from Brenner and Martin Buber to Moshe Shertok, had a far more complex understanding of the situation.)

Moreover, the question of our attitude to the Arab population provided from the very beginning the meeting-point for two extreme and opposed trends of thought: revisionist nationalism and ‘Canaanism’ (which, incidentally, had grown up on the soil of Revisionism). Many years before the surprising and ironical meeting of Uri Zvi Greenberg and Aharon Amir in the ‘Committee for the Greater Land of Israel’, the ‘Canaanites’ and the nationalists had met in their common view of the Arabs as the reincarnation of the ancient Canaanites, Amorites, Ammonites, Amalekites, Jebusites and Girgashites. Both the romantics and the counter-romantics wanted to paint the present in the colours of the biblical period. Admittedly, their conclusions were opposed: the Revisionists dreamed of a holy war against the tribes of Canaan, the direct continuation of the wars of Joshua, David and Alexander Jannaeus, ‘revenging the spilt blood of Thy servants’; the ‘Canaanites’, on the other hand, dreamed of returning in order to be restored to the bosom of the Semitic ethnos and the magical oriental paganism from which we had been uprooted thousands of years ago by namby-pamby ‘phylactery Judaism’, fatally tainted by Yiddishkeit.

However, for all the romantic picture which the Jewish faithful and the Jewish apostates, each in his way, so fondly treasure, the people that returned to contemporary Zion found no Canaanite tribes, so it could neither return to their bosom nor ‘settle the ancestral blood-feud’ with them. The people that returned to Zion found itself facing an Arab population that could not be fitted conveniently into any biblical picture or any plan to ‘restore the days of old’, because it was not these Arabs who had expelled our ancestors from their country and robbed us of our heritage. For a thousand and one irrelevant reasons, but also because of the first beginnings of normal and natural national consciousness, this Arab population was not impressed by the spectacle of the Jews coming from the ends of the earth and settling all over this land. They began to suspect that if this became a Jewish land it would not be an Arab land. As simple as that. Hence they did not show us the traditional cordial oriental hospitality and did not spread out their arms in love to embrace the returning prodigal sons. Hence much violence and anger.

So the returning Jews confronted the Arab population in panic or resentment, fawning or closing their eyes, behaving arrogantly or unctuously, galloping around in desert robes or indignantly plucking the sleeve of the British, consoling themselves with memories of Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah, amusing themselves with exotic oriental gestures, occasionally sensing vaguely the existence of a tragic undertone, trumpeting a civilising missionary destiny, but generally alien, muddled and remote.

Right against right

I have tried to describe, perhaps a little too starkly, both the view that regards the dispute as a kind of western with the civilised good guys fighting the blood-thirsty natives, and also the romantic conceptions that endow it with the attributes of an ancient epic. As I see it, the confrontation between the Jews returning to Zion and the Arab inhabitants of the country is not like a western or an epic, but more like a Greek tragedy. It is a clash between right and right (although one must not seek a simplistic symmetry in it). And, as in all tragedies, there is no hope of a happy reconciliation based on a clever magical formula. The choice is between a bloodbath and a disappointing compromise, more like enforced acceptance than a sudden break-through of mutual understanding.

True, the dispute is not ‘symmetrical’. There is no symmetry between the constant, eager attempts of Zionism to establish a dialogue with the local Arabs and those of the neighbouring states, and the bitter and consistent hostility the Arabs, with all their different political regimes, have for decades shown us in return.

But it is a gross mistake, a common over-simplification, to believe that the dispute is based on a misunderstanding. It is based on full and complete understanding: we have repeatedly offered the Arabs goodwill, good neighbourliness and cooperation, but that was not what they wanted from us. They wanted us, according to the most moderate Arab formulation, to abandon the idea of establishing a free Jewish State in the Land of Israel, and that is a concession we can never make.

It is the height of naivety to believe that but for the intrigues of outsiders and the backwardness of fanatical regimes, the Arabs would realise the positive side of the Zionist enterprise and straightaway fall on our necks in brotherly love.

The Arabs did not oppose Zionism because they failed to understand it but because they understood it only too well. And that is the tragedy: the mutual understanding does exist. We want to exist as a nation, as a State of Jews. They do not want that state. This cannot be glossed over with high-sounding phrases, neither the noble aspirations to brotherliness of well-meaning Jews, nor the clever Arab tactics of ‘We will be content, at this stage, with the return of all refugees to their previous place of residence.’ Any search for a way out must start from a fundamental change of position preceded by the open-eyed realisation of the full extent of the struggle: a tragic conflict, tragic anguish.

We are here because this is the only place where we can exist as a free nation. The Arabs are here because Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinians, just as Iraq is the homeland of the Iraqis and Holland the homeland of the Dutch. The question of what cultural assets the Palestinians have created here or what care they have taken of the landscape or the agriculture is of no relevance to the need to discuss their right to their homeland. Needless to say, the Palestinian owes no deference to God’s promises to Abraham, to the longings of Yehuda Hallevi and Bialik, or the achievements of the early Zionist pioneers.