Travels with a former Zionist in Israel and Palestine, part 2

 

In downtown Nablus, we got a cab and asked the driver if he could take us to the settlement of Ariel. He nodded, but ten minutes later as he came off the highway he seemed fearful. He couldn’t drive into the settlement, he dropped us 100 yards from the Ariel guardhouse.

There were two settlers with guns there, one a hippie-like guy with a wispy red beard and knit wool hat, the other a woman with dark hair and a short jacket.  They told us we were welcome to walk into the settlement or take a bus, but we couldn’t leave our bags at the guardhouse. As we stood there, the guards gave little nods, letting in cars. They seemed to know everyone by sight.

Bill and I walked away on the pretty brick sidewalk. Bill said, “That woman is tough.”

Just fifty meters away the brick sidewalk stopped and there were concrete barriers at the checkpoint entrance to Salfit, a Palestinian village. Ariel is right on top of Salfit, and the dual entrances offered a clear glimpse of the kind you sometimes get in the West Bank: this is apartheid. A Jewish world on one side, Palestinian on the other. The cars streaming into the settlement were sleek, small, modern, professionals’ cars, and there were Jews standing in the road hitchhiking rides to Tel Aviv like they were going from Brooklyn to Manhattan. A soldier. A hipster. A young woman in a long religious skirt. Everyone had that inside-the-Jewish family feeling.

And right next to it the concrete bunkers looking like a war zone, with a Palestinian van stopped by the soldiers, crammed with eight people going to the village.    

A soldier came over to us from the Salfit checkpoint. “I not shy,” he said with a smile, cradling his rifle. He was about 22 with a boyish face, high narrow cheekbones, a strong nose and high coloring, dark hair, friendly eyes.  The gun dangled at the side of his oversized coverall uniform, which was insulated and baggy, with a wool collar. 

Bill was silent as I argued with the soldier about the occupation. I said, “In America we would never let this happen, for two people to be so separate.”

The soldier shrugged and smiled. “There are two nations. We cannot get along. They are Arabs.”

“This looks like apartheid.”

“No no. We have our places, they have theirs.”

The kid lived on a nearby settlement and he was religious. The military presence was necessary—the sea was just 20 miles away, and Palestinians would want to push us into it.

“But shouldn’t you want a country where the Palestinians want to participate too. Where one of them could be president?”

“It is complicated,” he said with a smile.

We got a taxi into Tel Aviv, and Bill remarked on the soldier’s racism. 

I said, “I know, but I liked him.”

“You liked him? What was there to like?”

“He was sweet.”

“Well I’m sorry. I’m beyond that. I don’t care about it, it means nothing to me. He’s the physical embodiment of everything that I find so repellent about this place. And all the halfbaked things he was saying– ‘This is Jewish land. You know, in the bible. Why not?’” Bill imitated the soldier’s accent perfectly.

I said, “He’s just a product of his system. He doesn’t know better.”

“He has no agency of his own? There are people who refuse this type of service. It’s supremacism with a warm heart. It makes me hate this place.”

When the car got to the Green Line, we got pulled over. The soldiers wanted to go over our passports carefully. The temperature changed when a woman soldier leaned down on Bill’s side and began asking in Hebrew where we were from.  Bill responded in kind. I could hear him saying he had “mishpocheh”—family—near Tel Aviv. 

The woman let us go.

“I didn’t know you spoke Hebrew so well,” I said.

“Sometimes I surprise myself.”

“So are you going to visit your mishpocheh?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve lost touch with them.”

I said, “My mother’s best friend lives in West Jerusalem. I used to visit her when I first came out. Now I’m not going to visit her. We’d just get into a fight. But I feel bad about it.”

We met up with a friend in Tel Aviv and then made our way back to Jerusalem in cold rain. I was going to the institute I stay in in Jerusalem, for researchers. But Bill was checking into a hotel in West Jerusalem; he had stayed there twenty years ago and wanted to see how his memories of the place held up to his observations of the place.

I went with him as he checked in. There were signs all over the lobby for the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations meeting. And banners out front of the hotel for some kids coming from overseas for their bar mitzvahs. Their names were printed  on the banners, and photographs too.

 

That night we visited Ramallah again and had to come back through Qalandiya. Bill shot me a meaningful look as he held his passport up to the window. On the other side of the glass was a big fat soldier in a tight uniform chomping on a massive hamburger, like a guy in the funnies. And right on the glass someone had etched graffiti, “I Heart Israel.”

We went through and got on the 18 bus.

Bill said, “Did you see that guy at the checkpoint?”

“The guy eating the hamburger?”

“That upset me more than the guy the other night [from part 1, a soldier saying in falsetto to Palestinians in the chute, “Don’t you like Israel? Do you like my country? It is beautiful. It is nice country.”]

“If this was serious do you think he’d be allowed to do that? No fucking way. If this was really about security? You wouldn’t be allowed to do that. What if he choked? And it would be nice if the Israelis had some respect for what they’re doing. They’re making life very difficult for many people who come through here– it’s serious business whether one agrees with the policy or not.  They shouldn’t be fucking around on duty and certainly not in view of the people they ‘process’.

“But it just shows. It’s not about security. It’s about separating people racially. It’s about subjugation. It’s completely humiliating. The first time a soldier is singing about my beautiful country. The second time a soldier is eating his hamburger in front of us. The next time we go through I expect to see a soldier masturbating.”

 

That Friday was February 17, and the seventh anniversary of the Bil’in demonstration. Seven years ago the people had marched out of their tiny village in the northwestern edge of the West Bank to protest confiscation of their land for Israel’s so-called security wall. Now it was an international cause.

We decided to go. Bill wore a keffiyeh. It’s a reminder of Bill’s long personal journey. No one in his family was as Zionist as he’d been. During his third trip to Israel, at 15, he’d bought a small Israeli flag in Tel Aviv.  He put it up in his room when he got home and there it stayed for three or four years. But over time Bill’s feelings about Israel changed  and the flag went into a drawer. He wanted to save it as a memento and as a reminder to himself that he once was misguided. Then after the Israeli assault on the Gaza flotilla in 2010, Bill found the flag and threw it out in disgust. 

We got a cab to Bil’in, but the Israelis had shut down the main road. They were keeping Israelis and internationals from coming from Tel Aviv. Later we heard that they intercepted 150 Israelis. We took a roundabout way through the West Bank with another car of activists behind us. We ended up paying the cabdriver $60. He had to drive through farmlands to bring us to the demo. 

Getting out of the car, Bill said, “I’m worried. Could we get hurt? They shoot people, right?”

I said, “We could but it’s highly unlikely.” I explained the drill. There are roles people play, the stone throwers, the soldiers, the internationals, the popular committee people, the frontline challengers. I said, yes they could hurt you, but there will be lots of folks, and you have some control over how much you expose yourself to direct danger. 

We went down the dirt road toward the wall with a big surging clot of activists and got teargased, then retreated up the hill we’d just come down. We stood there watching an Israeli truck driving methodically along the wall with a hose over the top delivering skunkwater onto demonstrators. I could see that Bill was angry about getting teargassed. “They can’t even peacefully protest,” he muttered. I reflected that being a journalist means being kind of stupid. I have to get teargassed over and over in life to take the lesson. I’ve got the Marie Colvin, never-enough gene. But Bill got it on first impression and was done.

We crowded into a service back to Ramallah, and I said, “Have you done Myers Briggs?”

“No idea,” he said.

I said, “I’m P and you’re J. I’m a perceiver and you’re a judger. You reach judgments without having to take in too much information. I have to keep taking in information.”

He nodded impatiently. “Do you think maybe Jews should have learned not to gas people? Look I’m not saying its Zyklon B. But still– Maybe we shouldn’t be gassing people. The imagery is awful.”

This time going into the Qalandiya cattle-chute, he was openly taking photographs of the checkpoint.

 “I’m getting desensitized.”

We waited with a dignified older gentleman and his wife. The man wore a suit and carried a modern telescoping walking stick. He was obviously well off but was humiliated as the young soldiers made him and his wife go through the various motions. He kept looking at me and shaking his head. It felt good to me that he didn’t have to go through this alone.

On the bus, I sat down across the aisle from him and his wife. He said they had been to visit their son in Ramallah. His son is an excavator, but half his equipment is in East Jerusalem and half is in the West Bank and there’s endless rigmarole.

“All we want is our own state,” he said. “But look at all these settlers. We can’t have a real state.”

Then he said, “The Jews got reparations for their Nakba. Did you know that? They got money from the Germans. But we have never gotten money for the Nakba. It’s been 63 years, and we’ve never gotten anything.”

 

It was 5 o’clock and dark and raining and hailing. I went to the research institute. The translucent-skinned Finnish scholar had lit the fire. I changed out of my tear-gas clothes, then walked over to Bill’s hotel at 8 o’clock, and Bill and I walked up the hill to the King David. We looked at the historical photographs of Shamir and Rabin in the hallway, then went to the bar. I ordered Taybeh, the Palestinian beer. The bartender shook his head. “Not here.”  He was big and older, from Romania, and had a nameplate that said, “Schwartz.” I got a Beck’s.

Bill said, “So I wore my keffiyeh back to the hotel and the guy at the front door said, ‘Excuse me are you a guest here?’ Can you believe that?”

“Well, it is a symbol of resistance.”

He shrugged. “There is nothing normal about this place. Did you see the look on Schwartz’s face when you asked for Taybeh?”

“Yeah. He wasn’t too happy.”

Bill drank a Ketel one with lemon (they didn’t have lime), then ordered a half bottle of red. I got another beer then helped him with the wine. We were almost done with our trip, we were both going to get floored. Between drinks we looked at the signatures in the hallway floor tiles. Nelson Rockefeller and Moshe Dayan and Bill Clinton.

I told Bill what the old Palestinian guy on the bus said about Nakba reparations. I said, “But the Holocaust and the Nakba, they’re not really the same.”

“They are and they’re not,” Bill said. “Of course it’s not genocide, it’s not gas chambers. But it was an effort to destroy a people, to turn the cultural landscape of the place upside down. And there’s something else to what he’s saying. After El Al, the most flights in here are Lufthansa. And what’s the most popular cab in Israel? Mercedes. So Palestinians look at all that and they say, ‘They tried to wipe them out and now they have all this stuff from them, and they get along? What’s going on?’ It’s been 63 years and they have nothing.  Add anger and cynicism and it’s easy to see how all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories about the Holocaust and Zionism can resonate.”

A freshfaced waitress came up to the bar to get a bunch of drinks from Schwartz, and we made small talk with her. She had an American accent. She told us her parents were San Francisco hippies.

“I moved here to join the army.”

She carried her tray of drinks to a big raucous table of happy couples.

I said, “Thought experiment, Bill. Look at that group. Can’t you say to yourself, you’re just in a bar in the States? You’re at a beautiful old hotel in the States? And people would be no different there. Even if it was a bunch of Jews. Big deal.”

“I can’t do it. First, there are lots of people just a few kilometers from here that would like to share this space but they can’t because if they try to they will be shot. And then there’s the waitress. She’s a hippie, but even a fucking hippie comes here for the guns. They’re here for the Jewish sovereignty.

“I’m sorry, but the whole thing feels like a theme park. Did you see the banners for the bar mitzvahs on the hotel walls?”

“I see them every time I come here.”

“Well during the Ottoman period they used to have banners like that for the Sultan when he was coming to town. But now it’s for some kid from Miami.  And Schwartz. Isn’t that perfect? If you’re a Jew walking in here from America, the guy doesn’t even have a first name, and he doesn’t need to. Just Schwartz. They can say, Even the bartenders are Jewish! But don’t ask for Palestinian beer!” 

I didn’t think Schwartz could hear us. He was cleaning up the room. We closed the place.

When we walked out, hail was piled up in the streets, and the next day when I saw Bill, he said he had had fun. Our relationship had resolved itself. I was the energetic experience junkie. I’d gotten Bill back here after a 13 year absence, to bear witness. He knew the place better than I did, his soul was entwined here. Watching him agonize had been hugely instructive.

The next day Bill flew out and we had a farewell lunch at his hotel. Nearby a guy sat with a rifle in his lap eating fruit salad and talking to his buddy. Both had American accents. Bill had a pizza.

“Did it surprise you?” I said.

“Nothing this country does surprises me. I expected it all. Still–to see it in the flesh. They treat them like animals. They do. And the only thing that makes me feel good is the people who are trying to change this place. That’s the only thing that gives me hope.”

“Me too,” I said. “Though I keep having flashbacks to World War 2 movies.”

“I was thinking of another movie. Did you ever see The Exorcist? Do you remember the climactic scene?”

I shook my head.

“Well in the movie there’s the great old exorcist, Father Merrin, played by Max von Sydow, who tries to get the demon out of the young girl but he can’t and he dies trying. Then the younger priest takes over and at the end he manages to get it out of her. But then when he does it, he jumps out of a window and kills himself. Because the only way he can get it out of her is for the demon to go into him, and when he realizes that, he kills himself so he won’t hurt anyone else.”

“Alright,” I said. 

“Well that’s what I think of this place. It came about because of some of the worst things that have ever happened to any group, and I understand that. But at some point, the demon, so to speak, infected something of us. And now you have this place.”

 

Bill went to the airport and I went back to the research institute and watched the Finnish scholar make a fire using pine cones as kindling. I was exhausted. I was relieved to be done running around but I already missed Bill. I’d never been a Zionist. I’d lived the Zionist love affair and breakup through him, I felt I was seeing the next generation’s souring and fury before my eyes.

I turned on my computer and there was an email from my mother’s best friend in West Jerusalem.

Alright, good, I thought. I’ll visit her tomorrow. I really need to visit her again.

“Is your blog a desperate attempt to make your name known (a result of your failure to do so in literature)? Or is it a byproduct of your unresolved conflict with your father?”

It kicked me in the gut. I felt guilty and awful and defeated. I forwarded it to my wife, then to Bill. He  was at the airport, and got right back to me.

“Ad hominem attacks are desperate measures. We all have issues. What does that prove? I suppose if your dad was an anti- Zionist and your blog was right wing Zionist then that would be okay with Gloria.

“This isn’t my business but I know what I would say to this person if I were in your shoes.”

I started composing a strong response.