Once a summer for the last few years I’ve gone to lectures at the Church of the Messiah in Cape Cod in a series sponsored by the Ad Hoc Committee for Peace and Justice in the Middle East. Most of the speeches have hada pro-Arab tilt. But Sunday night was different. An appealing Jewish couple in their 70s named the Coopers, Alice and Robert, who had lived in Jerusalem for 36 years till 2008, told their story, both slender teachers, he a sociologist of language, she a teacher of English. It was a bittersweet tale but was not in the end very satisfying intellectually.
The Coopers moved over in 1972. Robert was going to do a year at Hebrew University. "We had no Zionist background, no Zionist aspiration," he said, but by the time of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 the Zionism had developed in them, and they stayed on. Robert had always felt "slightly alienated" from non-Jews in the U.S. He fell in love with the Jewish sense of belonging and the "rhythms of Jewish life." Alice, a Brearley-Radcliffe graduate, felt a strong communitarian impulse after the Yom Kippur war. Both their kids served in the IDF.
The Coopers’ story had three emotional turns.
The first was Robert’s description of his service as a reservist in occupied Hebron, protecting the Cave of the Patriarchs, which of course is also a Moslem holy site, the Ibrahim mosque. The Jews were much more trouble than the Palestinians, Robert said, using all type of "shenanigans" to get into the site when they weren’t supposed to be there. He described the "hateful" presence of Jewish soldiers in the mosque during Muslim prayer; they were protecting the Israeli Arabic translators, who were there to monitor the imam’s comments. And he told about ordering a very respectable lady to open her purse. There was a handkerchief in there, that was all.
"She gave me a look of such withering hatred. And who can blame her?"
In time, the Coopers took part in protests of the occupation, which threatened the very idea of Jewish democracy, as Robert said. Alice was as disturbed. She joined the women in black and held up signs that said, End the occupation.
The second emotional turn was the Coopers’ description of the Second Intifada. At first they tried to deny that the violence was changing their lives in Jerusalem, but ultimately it got to them. They watched one another walk away from the door as if it might be the last time they were together. They took taxis and turned on the radio when they heard the bomb blasts, 10 in one month in June 2003 alone. They got cell phones.
This time the sense of betrayal was aimed at the Arabs. There were thousands of rockets from Gaza and Hamas was committed to Israel’s "abolition," Alice said, and she was not sure if she was for a Palestinian state any more.
The last emotional moment was when Alice thanked us for allowing her to tell her story. Her heart is still in Jerusalem, though she has been back for two years. You see, the Cooper children both live here. The children didn’t want to stay in Israel, and their daughter announced that she wouldn’t come over to Jerusalem to take care of them in their old age. The Coopers live in Brooklyn. Alice is still grieving her move.
I was frequently stirred by the talk, by its directness and simplicity, and the perfect structure, of responsive readings, but politically I felt it was too simple. Many thoughts went through my mind. I thought, this story is out of date, Zionism is out of date, do these people have any understanding of their privilege, to be able to go from one society to another and then back to their native society, while Palestinians have no such freedom? Is it really surprising that some Palestinians are firing rockets and blowing themselves up as you decide whether you feel they should have a state or not?
Robert obviously has a clue about Israel’s self-inflicted loss of legitimacy, but the dwelling on the Second Intifada reminded me of the dead end of the Israeli left. The terror seemed to justify everything that has followed, including Lieberman and Netanyahu, about whom the Coopers had little comment.
There is a bubble in Israel and these people spoke from inside the bubble. They talked about all the Arab violence but did not talk about the Nakba. During the Q-and-A they acknowledged that they had little contact with Palestinians; the two societies are utterly separated. Is that any reflection on Jewish democracy?
I wondered whether their children had become anti-Zionists. The Coopers had not completely assimilated in Israeli society. Robert said they were called "Anglo-Saxon," the Israeli word for English and Americans. Anglo-Saxon has a colonial ring to me, and there was a resonance in the Coopers’ story of another time, the era of colonial power. They are people whose lives in the end were back in their real homeland; their children were happier here. Over there was tough and a little fake too, surrounded by hostile Arab nations, as they repeated– and connected by an umbilical to the imperial power.
The Coopers said the conflict is about competing claims to the land, but are theclaims comparable? Not really, when two citizens have grown up here and graduated from Radcliffe and Harvard. The Anglo-Saxon privileged come and go, while many of the natives have no real freedom to move, let alone to send their children to universities in the U.S.
I was with my parents, who are of the Coopers’ world; and I wanted to like the talk, to be supportive of a Jewish experience. But the Coopers’ dream seems faded. It is hard for me to understand how Israel can be reconstituted, can gain legitimacy, until it is accepted by the lady whose handbag Cooper inspected. The spiritual and political work all lie in that direction.
